For Tony Stark, this should have been a perfectly ordinary day. He woke up early at noon, heated a burger in the microwave, ate it, and then threw himself into his research.
In the afternoon, he went to the base in the Radiance Alliance dreamscape and held the usual meeting. After everything was finished, he sat before the floor-to-ceiling windows and let inspiration flow freely.
That was how the day should have gone, but this perfectly ordinary day came to an end when Schiller asked him a question with an extremely serious expression: "What is a Markov chain?"
Stark grabbed the wrist of the hand Schiller had placed on his shoulder, then touched his forehead with his other hand and stared into his eyes with his brown ones. "Are you fucking insane?!"
This was something Stark had failed to curse out even when Schiller had dragged him to Death to retrieve his parents. He rarely swore in front of this psychologist.
Mathematics was a magical subject. Its magic lay in the fact that whenever someone outside the field uttered a term belonging to it, any scene could instantly turn into material for psychiatric analysis.
Mathematics turned idiots into lunatics.
But Schiller was not an idiot. He was merely a lunatic. He was crazy enough without mathematics, so why had he gotten involved with this subject?
Stark dragged Schiller over to his desk, pressed him into a chair, and sat down on the other side.
"First, I need to make sure you mean the Markov chain from mathematical models, right? Not some reimbursement code you arranged with Nick?"
Schiller looked somewhat dazed, as though his thoughts were not entirely here. After a while, he suddenly snapped awake and nodded while looking into Stark's eyes.
Just as Stark was about to speak,