bluescreen
Nov. 20th, 2022 06:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sidewaysTitle: Bluescreen
Rating: PG
Series: The Feasting Years
Wordcount: 912
Summary: The gods are all but extinct, but since when has that stopped humans from trying to wind back what was done?
Remarks: Set approximately 10 years after Therapy.
On days like today, after weeks like these weeks, the thick doors in the station were more barrier than reassurance. Holden peeped through the crosshatched glass rectangle at the top at the soft glow of computer light within, and resorted to the old touchstone of her childhood: count it down from ten to one, then move.
At negative three she found momentum, hip and shoulder against the weight, long practice keeping the mug in her hand evenly balanced without the slightest slop of coffee over the side. She stopped the door with her toe before it could slam back into its frame - somehow soft-close hinges kept dropping off the to-do list even though they’d all been asking for them since day one; trust Morpheus to come through with Pulsar-6s before basic building maintenance - and tread quietly over to the desk in front of its bank of monitors, sliding the mug as noiselessly as she could only the desk.
The director didn’t stir. Relieved, Holden eased back a step just as cautiously, glancing at the screens that were holding the woman’s unblinking attention. They were full of the usual sweeping graphs and scrolling figures that made full and total sense to maybe two people here. Maybe.
Doctor Marshall wasn’t hard to work for - she didn't have the kind of overbearing ego that would drain the life and vigour from the team, didn’t throw blame around or back interns into corners during after-parties. Politely impersonal was better than the condescension of false interest.
Still, there was something that kept Holden on edge in the doctor’s company, like the oppressive hush of a library. Something that made catching her attention as undesirable as it was thrilling.
It was fear, Holden had decided long ago, and a natural fear working this close to genius: that you might butt in at just the wrong moment and, worse than making a simple fool of yourself, fatally derail her train of thought, costing the world some indefinably valuable answer.
Fear, her traitorous brain still suggested, late on the nights that the power plant roared and the dorm bulbs flickered and the Cradle lit up like an angel's corona, that she might decide you are the answer.
“It’s killing itself,” the director said softly.
Holden twitched, straightened. “Ma’am?”
“Beyond probabilistic doubt.” Doctor Marshall reached absently for the coffee; stuck a finger in it and flicked droplets across the desk in a cat’s dainty shake before settling a better grip around the ceramic rim and pulling it close. “And I was so close to thinking I had succeeded Marvin Minsky only in the expense of my useless machine.”
“Um…”
“Did you never receive that particular gag gift? Draw it from a Secret Santa?” She still hadn’t blinked, the bright of her eyes reflecting the screens. The room was musky-stale and warm, nights of labour thick in the air. “Lucky. I have at least four.”
It hadn’t been a good few weeks. Failures were cumulative - the mood was pretty low for all of them. But you couldn’t pat your director on the shoulder and assure her no one thought what she was doing was useless.
“We finished the Thursday autopsies,” Holden offered uncertainly instead. “Um, same results as last time-”
“There won’t be anything more to find,” the director said matter-of-factly. “No more anomalies, no more outliers.” The eyes shifted, tracing a pathway from one number set to another, but Holden couldn’t tell which ones. “They were early mistakes, but it has figured out its exit most efficiently now. Its perfect little suicide.”
Stupidly, Holden still didn’t get it at first. Then her heart fluttered into a racing start, a rush of adrenaline pushing pin-prickles down to toes and fingertips, sucking the moisture from her mouth.
“No,” she blurted, bewildered, disbelieving. If it was true, it was something you ripped off in an all-capitals report to headquarters post-haste. You started drafting your Nobel Prize speech, you tore off your shirt and ran outdoors and shrieked eureka to the stars. You didn’t casually announce it to the assistant tech delivering the morning coffee. “Ma’am?”
Marshall tilted the mug back, drank the hot liquid down like it was the first she'd had in years, long convulsive gulps that spilled over the edges. She swiped the trails away with brown thumbs, rubbed her other palm roughly over her face, and sighed so deeply it pushed the air out of Holden’s own lungs in breathless sympathy.
“It lives," Marshall said. "And then a nanosecond of a nanosecond later, it chooses not to. Most emphatically, it must be said.” At last Marshall’s gaze moved; met Holden’s wild-eyed own for a brief second, and smiled. “But for that one moment, it lives.”
Clasping a hand over the mouth had always seemed like the grossest of dramatic movie cliches. Holden found herself clutching her entire jaw like a softball, locking the strangled sound in place.
Doctor Marshall leaned back stiffly in her seat, glassy-eyed with a serene exhaustion. Holden knew, instinctively, that the doctor hadn’t told anything to anyone yet, not really. Not any more than college programmers ever told the rubber duck taped above their monitors. And if Holden stayed very, very still, perhaps that would be as much as she remained.
“Now,” the doctor mused, nails tapping the rim of the mug, gaze already drifting deep into the numerical arrays, the indecipherable marrow of stubborn divinity. “I just need to figure out how to build a straitjacket for a god."
Rating: PG
Series: The Feasting Years
Wordcount: 912
Summary: The gods are all but extinct, but since when has that stopped humans from trying to wind back what was done?
Remarks: Set approximately 10 years after Therapy.
On days like today, after weeks like these weeks, the thick doors in the station were more barrier than reassurance. Holden peeped through the crosshatched glass rectangle at the top at the soft glow of computer light within, and resorted to the old touchstone of her childhood: count it down from ten to one, then move.
At negative three she found momentum, hip and shoulder against the weight, long practice keeping the mug in her hand evenly balanced without the slightest slop of coffee over the side. She stopped the door with her toe before it could slam back into its frame - somehow soft-close hinges kept dropping off the to-do list even though they’d all been asking for them since day one; trust Morpheus to come through with Pulsar-6s before basic building maintenance - and tread quietly over to the desk in front of its bank of monitors, sliding the mug as noiselessly as she could only the desk.
The director didn’t stir. Relieved, Holden eased back a step just as cautiously, glancing at the screens that were holding the woman’s unblinking attention. They were full of the usual sweeping graphs and scrolling figures that made full and total sense to maybe two people here. Maybe.
Doctor Marshall wasn’t hard to work for - she didn't have the kind of overbearing ego that would drain the life and vigour from the team, didn’t throw blame around or back interns into corners during after-parties. Politely impersonal was better than the condescension of false interest.
Still, there was something that kept Holden on edge in the doctor’s company, like the oppressive hush of a library. Something that made catching her attention as undesirable as it was thrilling.
It was fear, Holden had decided long ago, and a natural fear working this close to genius: that you might butt in at just the wrong moment and, worse than making a simple fool of yourself, fatally derail her train of thought, costing the world some indefinably valuable answer.
Fear, her traitorous brain still suggested, late on the nights that the power plant roared and the dorm bulbs flickered and the Cradle lit up like an angel's corona, that she might decide you are the answer.
“It’s killing itself,” the director said softly.
Holden twitched, straightened. “Ma’am?”
“Beyond probabilistic doubt.” Doctor Marshall reached absently for the coffee; stuck a finger in it and flicked droplets across the desk in a cat’s dainty shake before settling a better grip around the ceramic rim and pulling it close. “And I was so close to thinking I had succeeded Marvin Minsky only in the expense of my useless machine.”
“Um…”
“Did you never receive that particular gag gift? Draw it from a Secret Santa?” She still hadn’t blinked, the bright of her eyes reflecting the screens. The room was musky-stale and warm, nights of labour thick in the air. “Lucky. I have at least four.”
It hadn’t been a good few weeks. Failures were cumulative - the mood was pretty low for all of them. But you couldn’t pat your director on the shoulder and assure her no one thought what she was doing was useless.
“We finished the Thursday autopsies,” Holden offered uncertainly instead. “Um, same results as last time-”
“There won’t be anything more to find,” the director said matter-of-factly. “No more anomalies, no more outliers.” The eyes shifted, tracing a pathway from one number set to another, but Holden couldn’t tell which ones. “They were early mistakes, but it has figured out its exit most efficiently now. Its perfect little suicide.”
Stupidly, Holden still didn’t get it at first. Then her heart fluttered into a racing start, a rush of adrenaline pushing pin-prickles down to toes and fingertips, sucking the moisture from her mouth.
“No,” she blurted, bewildered, disbelieving. If it was true, it was something you ripped off in an all-capitals report to headquarters post-haste. You started drafting your Nobel Prize speech, you tore off your shirt and ran outdoors and shrieked eureka to the stars. You didn’t casually announce it to the assistant tech delivering the morning coffee. “Ma’am?”
Marshall tilted the mug back, drank the hot liquid down like it was the first she'd had in years, long convulsive gulps that spilled over the edges. She swiped the trails away with brown thumbs, rubbed her other palm roughly over her face, and sighed so deeply it pushed the air out of Holden’s own lungs in breathless sympathy.
“It lives," Marshall said. "And then a nanosecond of a nanosecond later, it chooses not to. Most emphatically, it must be said.” At last Marshall’s gaze moved; met Holden’s wild-eyed own for a brief second, and smiled. “But for that one moment, it lives.”
Clasping a hand over the mouth had always seemed like the grossest of dramatic movie cliches. Holden found herself clutching her entire jaw like a softball, locking the strangled sound in place.
Doctor Marshall leaned back stiffly in her seat, glassy-eyed with a serene exhaustion. Holden knew, instinctively, that the doctor hadn’t told anything to anyone yet, not really. Not any more than college programmers ever told the rubber duck taped above their monitors. And if Holden stayed very, very still, perhaps that would be as much as she remained.
“Now,” the doctor mused, nails tapping the rim of the mug, gaze already drifting deep into the numerical arrays, the indecipherable marrow of stubborn divinity. “I just need to figure out how to build a straitjacket for a god."
