His mouth tried to find a smile that wasn't hollow. "Tell him to send me a recording," he said. "I can't play to save my life."
"Really?" Her eyes widened. "I thought you could do everything."
He laughed, and it startled him. "I can break coffee machines with my mind."
A producer leaned in. "Sir, the Prime Minister's team.."
"Two minutes," Adrian said, lifting a hand without looking.
He pointed to the badge on Aditi's lanyard. "What are you working on?"
"Low-cost graphene filtration for arsenic contamination," she said in a single breath. "Old wells in Bihar, Bangladesh bioaccumulation is destroying..."
"Your vector," he said, nodding. "Disease, poverty, violence..it all flows along water. Send me your proposal. We'll find you a grant slot."
Her composure cracked just enough to show the girl under the armor. "Thank you."
After she left, his assistant slid a bottle of water onto the table. "Drink."
"You know I won't."
"That's why I'm telling you."
He drank. L
It hit his stomach like a stone.
"Your inbox has grown another head," she said.
"It's hydra season," he muttered.
A phone buzzed.
He glanced a text from his mother asking if he had eaten.
He typed, Yes, mom, and lied to the only person he avoided lying to.
The rest of the day was a carousel, motorcade, handshake, rooftop photo with two presidents and the kind of wind that makes everyone look heroic.
Questions from journalists who wanted certainty dressed as answers.
A lab tour where donors tried to appear curious instead of hungry.
A private argument with a senator who had the smile of a crocodile and the handshake of wet laundry.
"You're moving too fast," the senator said, voice low, outside the elevator where a camera could not catch it.
"People are… unsettled."
"Progress isn't a piece of furniture you can move back when company comes," Adrian said.
"We can slow your funding."
"You can try."
The doors closed.
Later he went to his lab.
His lab occupied two floors that smelled of ozone and coffee and the faint, medicinal ghost of ethanol.
The students who weren't supposed to be here were here, shoulders hunched, muttering into terminals, their screens glowing equations like prayer wheels.
"Go home," he said, walking past them. "Go fall in love with something that is not a dataset."
"Soon," said Maya, not looking up from a simulation where a lattice shook itself apart and reassembled. "You promise you'll check the results?"
"I promise to be a hypocrite," he said. "Send them to me."
His office was a small universe contained with a door.
Books climbed walls in untidy spines.
A whiteboard bore a sequence of numbers that frightened even him when he stared too long.
On his desk, a burr of metal one of the first successful micro-reactor cores caught the lamplight like a fossil star.
He dropped into his chair and the cushion exhaled somebody else's fatigue.
He opened his laptop, and it immediately became a battlefield.
Messages swarmed: URGENT multiplied; Congratulations metastasized; five different governments requested five versions of the same assurance in five languages.
A journalist had sent a profile to fact-check with a headline that made him sound like a prophet gone corporate.
A biotech firm offered to name a wing after him if he joined their board.
A small charity asked if he could record a message for a child with leukemia.
He did not hesitate over that one; he opened the phone, recorded the video, kept it short and honest, tried to not make promises he could not keep, then hit send.
"Professor?" Maya stood in the doorway, holding a mug. "You turned your light on."
"It's night," he said.
"That's when lights are useful."
She came in, placed the mug on the coaster he always forgot to use, and looked at him over the rim like a doctor with news. "You should sleep."
"I've tried it," he said. "It's overrated."
"You said once that being tired is a form of stupidity."
"I did."
"Then don't be stupid."
He smiled without teeth. "How did I end up raising children when I never had any?"
"You collected strays," she said. "We fed and stayed."
"Go home," he said again, but softer.
She stood a second longer, then left, closing the door halfway so it wouldn't latch.
The lab noise lowered by a register.
Alone, Adrian let his posture collapse.
The chair held him like a tired friend.
He closed his eyes and saw not darkness but circles of light stages, camera rigs, operating rooms, the soft blue of monitors, the harsh white of a hospital corridor the night his father died.
It returned sometimes like a bruise you forget until you bump into a table.
He opened his eyes and reached for the old German notebook on the corner of the desk.
He kept it as an anchor.
The paper was thick; the cover, leathered with years.
On the first page, his hand at twenty had written.
Questions I cannot stop asking.
He flipped past pages where the ink had gone from black to brown to something that looked like the memory of a river.
He stopped at a fresh page and wrote, very small
What is the thing behind the things?
He sat there, pen hovering, and felt how very tired he was.
The door clicked once and then a head poked in again.
Not Maya.
A journalist.
He recognized the hair before the face.
Sasha, the only one who still brought him questions instead of conclusions.
"You're impossible to catch in daylight," she said, slipping inside without waiting for permission.
"I'm not a bat," he said.
"Debatable." She sank into the chair opposite, crossed one leg over the other, took in the chaos.
"Good show today. The 'worthy' bit will be clipped into sermons by morning."
"That wasn't the intention."
"Nothing is," she said. "Intention is a god we invented to make causality feel polite."
He rubbed his eyes. "Why are you here?"
She tilted her head. "Off the record?"
"I won't remember the difference."