Kevin watched the computer screen and after a moment, sighed. It was exactly the same. No change. For a moment, he thought about calling it quits for the night and then looked outside. Dawn was still hours off.

Kevin changed the expansion parameters once again, checked his changes and then set the program in motion. The program was calculating an asymptotic expansion of a Riemann integral, with complex-conjugate indices, over a rigidly defined subset. Such mathematical expansions were tricky from a number of points of view, but this particular one had an added twist that made the expansion even more difficult.

It fixed the domain of the expansion in the complex-conjugate plane as one normally would expect, but had the added twist of invoking rather sophisticated magical constraints as well. Kevin’s interest was in determining how he could prevent Pam’s death and hopefully, his own. So far, nothing had worked — the expansion had blown up, time and time again.

This one blew up even faster than the last one. Kevin muttered an oath and sat back for a moment. He knew the problem. He just didn’t particularly care for the solution. He hadn’t, up until now, been willing to accept his own death.

Kevin got up and made another pot of coffee while he adjusted himself to the idea. As a magician, he supposed he ought to be more willing to accept dying. He knew his soul existed and knew it would survive his own physical death. What that survival actually meant was still unknown so it wasn’t a slam-dunk decision. Except, perhaps, in this case.

Kev waited for the coffee to drip through, poured himself a cup and went back to the computer. “All right, let’s see what we can find.”

It took a total of fifty-six keystrokes to change the expansion parameters to include his own death. The last ten would also insure that Pam lived and forced her own death far into the future. At least ten years. He set the program in motion.

The screen flared with patterns, a fractal butterfly of sorts, scan line after scan line mapped to the screen. Kevin hadn’t actually programmed that part of the program. He’d taken some of the Stone Soup Group’s Fractint program and modified it for the expansion he wanted. Why program something himself when the guts of what he wanted had already done so elegantly?

So he’d left the imaging aspects alone, which gave him the dual benefit of something interesting to watch while lengthy calculations went on, as well as a clear indicator of success or failure. If it blew up, the interior of the fractal image would go to a deep blue, with no detail. The smaller the blue sea, the better. Or rather, now, after accepting and adding the constraint of his own death, the color would be blood red.

The blood-red sea exploded into view once again.

Kev examined the image more closely and after a bit of thought, changed the parameters again, this time pushing the expansion in one particular direction — extending the length of time Pam would be guaranteed. Normally he wouldn’t have tried that, but there seemed to be a peculiar, almost foggy aspect to the image in that quadrant of the screen. He set it in motion.

It too, blew up, but noticeably slower. He refined the parameters and tried again. Again the explosion, noticeably slower. But it still blew up. An hour later he had finished the coffee, convinced that it was the best he could do. But it wasn’t a very good trade off. Pam’s life would be extended, that was given. He’d die, that was a given.

But her life would be ... nothing. Everything pointed to a life that would drive Pam insane, or change her so much that Kevin would never have recognized her, had he no inkling of who she was. If anything, it resembled a living death.

“God forsaken butterflies,” he muttered as he shut the computer down. “Never the answer that you want.”

He went to the French doors and before closing them, stared out toward the northeast. After several seconds, he shook his head, closed the doors and headed for the bedroom. He just hoped Pam didn’t wake up when he got in bed. He really didn’t want to lie to her about anything and this was one event she was going to miss.