“Well, I was woken up this morning by a desperate American trying to get me to gang up on some very serious Japanese criminals. After breakfast I got picked up by the organitskaya and threatened with not one, but two guns. Then I got kissed by the daughter of the Japanese crime boss right in front of all her bodyguards. To be fair, I haven’t died today, but it’s not even lunchtime yet.”

“I can’t get from the quantum to the classical,” she said.

The gears in Petrovich’s mind spun up to speed. “It didn’t bother Maxwell.”

“Maxwell was a genius standing on the shoulders of other genii. He made a priori assumptions that happened to turn out to be right.”

“He didn’t predict wave-particle duality, or quantum effects.”

“But we can’t ignore them. Can we?” A note of doubt crept into Pif’s voice.

“Yeah. We can. Look at the gravitomagnetic equations. They do just that. And frame dragging works.”

“But… what about chromodynamics?”

Petrovitch reached forward and took one of the sheets of paper from her desk. “You’re doing this ass-backward. You’re trying to mash the electrostrong into gravity and it just won’t work. Well, it might, but remember: it’s supposed to be beautiful, not ugly. This,” he said, shaking the paper, “is ugly. I never liked it. It’s inelegant. What you cooked up yesterday is poetry.”

“Start at the beginning. Ignore everything else. Gravity might not even be part of a theory of everything.”

“It is,” she said, spraying crumbs. “I feel it in my soul.”

“So did Einstein and he took two decades at the end of his life to get precisely nowhere.”

“You said it was poetry.” Pif looked at him reproachfully.

“Ass-backward poetry.” Petrovitch stood in front of the whiteboard with his coffee.

Pif started to say something, and he held up his hand.

She waited and chewed and drank.

“Can you,” he said, his voice no more than a whisper, “derive all the other forces from this equation? If we expand this to be multi-dimensional,” and he swallowed, “we can find out just how many dimensions reality has.”

She looked, and rubbed her eyes. “I… don’t know. I’m too tired to think straight anymore.”

Petrovitch shook his head. “Look, this is your baby. And your math is way better than mine. Go and get your head down: this will still be here when you get back.”

She groaned. “I don’t want to leave it. We’re so close.”

“It’ll be fine. I don’t want to come in here tomorrow and have to pry the finished proof out of your cold, dead hand. I’ll try and do some of the easy stuff—if I can manage that. That still leaves the really hard sums and most of the credit for you.”

“Don’t break the symmetry,” she warned.

“I thought I was supposed to.”

“Try without.”