Work Text:
A Little Healthy Competition
by Irena Adler
Grumbling to himself, Marshall shuffled through the papers on Eppsie's desk. The man's desk was as messy as his brain. Marshall found murder statistics, baseball box scores, and something that looked like an attempt to balance his checkbook.
Nothing that Marshall could use.
Dammit, where does he keep the good stuff?
Marshall was desperate-motivated to find some of the cognitive emergence work that had set the math world buzzing. He'd made a career of contradicting everything Eppsie published, but the annoying man was now wandering off into an area that Marshall had no skill-no interest in. Vague attacks were only interim, he needed to completely discredit this cognitive emergence stuff and get Eppsie back into set theory where he belonged.
It was convenient that Eppsie was one of the few important people working in his new field. Can't take competition, never could. Marshall smirked to himself. Eppsie was always shocked when anyone didn't fall over and worship his brilliance. That Marshall actually dared to question his work put Eppsie into a gratifying tizzy.
Now at a side table, Marshall examined an interesting page of scrawls until he realized it was some sort of Sudoku solve-all. Tossing it aside, he dug deeper.
And what was the latest on Eppsie? That he'd gone gay? Marshall sneered. Couldn't take competition in that arena either. It could hardly be coincidence that Charlie had `discovered' his new sexual orientation after Marshall had stolen his girlfriend, Amita.
He picked up something on cellular automata. Now this looks promising ... Then a few pages below that he hit the jackpot - a sketching of ideas about how cognitive emergence research might be related to fields of study normally considered `paranormal'. Marshall couldn't help a triumphant crow. Oh, I can ruin him with this ...
"Freeze, FBI!"
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