Nicholas Rush (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lottawork) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
bigapplesauce2014-12-05 12:07 am
lottawork) wrote in bigapplesauce2014-12-05 12:07 am
Entry tags:
p=np [open]
He is going to stand on the observation deck and watch it happen. Up close.
He can see it from here: the sweeping, uninterpretable crackle of anomalous energy spiking over Destiny’s massive hull, the focal point of an ages-old cosmic microwave background radioactive construct, something vast and interminable and full of a knowledge lost to the frustratingly, conventionally human brain of Nicholas Rush. Here is the structure buried in the spread and flow and ripple of the universe’s fabric, the yielding, collapsing, purely theoretical fold of one reality against another, and he is completely incapable of understanding it. Even if he had years and not mere minutes, he would never understand it. Time is relative. And there is never enough of it.
The man is not at peace, all appearances to the contrary. His chest is a tight morass of anxiety, his legs fragile, his breathing shallow and rapid. This stillness, this anticipation - is fucking intolerable. Waiting is intolerable. Even for the inevitable, arcane brink Destiny hums toward while its engines thunder on hollowly, waiting is intolerable. It is intolerable. But Rush can only stand, uselessly, hands limp and unwandering at his sides as he watches the hull of an Ancient ship prepare to ram itself into the edge of the universe.
(Highly inaccurate phrasing due to the universe not actually having an edge as the universe is endless and ever-expanding and far-reaching, but it’s something vaguely and impressively and pretentiously poetic and it is, for all intents and purposes, the End of something - Rush’s life, specifically. Flawed terminology aside, Rush decides it is an acceptable panegyric pre-funerary farewell to himself, very philosophical and ostentatious to the point of unintelligiblity, striving to find meaning where there is absolutely none. Fair fucking appropriate for a eulogy. And no one on the crew will give him one, probably. The ungrateful shits.)
The edge of this universe then, this brane, passing out of the conceivable and into the conceptual, some hyperspace void Rush will have no way of comprehending. He wonders if the impact of Destiny upon this brane will affect those surrounding it on some cosmological level. The force of gravity drags at its exterior, unforgiving as ever. He appreciates that on a distant and existential level, the recognizable presence of unrelenting gravitational pressure, present even here on an unstable plane in an unstable part of an unstable universe. Ruthless. Implacable. About to tear Destiny apart and with it everything on it.
If Rush is about to die, he will ensure that he dies in such a way that makes proper fucking sense.
Young had insisted that he come back to Earth with the rest of them, but no one believed it would happen, the colonel included. Rush cannot go back to that after experiencing this, the universe, possibly a glimpse of the multiverse, and all their grand and terrifying intricacies. There is nothing to go back to.
Fuck Young, anyway. And fuck the rest of them. He’s going to watch his world end.
The first pointed end of the ship skims into the brightness, the intersected chiral matter of his brane skidded against another, the unfamiliar energy tearing across the hull and the ship plunges further in a roar of gravitational force and the limits of electromagnetism, subsumed by the abstract. And following in line with the laws that dictate the linear slide of time, the rest follows, unknowable matter shrieking into space, disintegrating substance excoriated from the ship’s solidity, shorn into a void, knowledge lost, knowledge gained, the approaching end, and Rush is not ready.
He closes his eyes and waits to be slingshotted into nothing.
He feels it initially, the sickening, shuddering jolt to his abdomen that accompanies a shift into FTL, the smear of electrostatic interference and disruption of molecular basis as he and Destiny are no longer localized on their own brane before he is -
Torn.
And then he is not.
He opens his eyes to find himself sprawled bonelessly across a startlingly green expanse of grass with a brightness of a different sort (sunlight, annoying) streaming everywhere, the sound of people (also annoying) talking filtering in, a disturbingly Earthlike (even worse, American) settlement arranged around him, and it is also absurdly fucking hot.
What happened.
Rush jerks, scrambling to his feet to stare at his surroundings in unmitigated shock, a systematic controlled panic, and swivels around in a tight revolution of disbelief and frustration and fury and ragged defeat.
This is not the theorized outcome. This is not anywhere near the theorized outcome.
What is this. What happened.
“Fuck," breathes Rush.
He can see it from here: the sweeping, uninterpretable crackle of anomalous energy spiking over Destiny’s massive hull, the focal point of an ages-old cosmic microwave background radioactive construct, something vast and interminable and full of a knowledge lost to the frustratingly, conventionally human brain of Nicholas Rush. Here is the structure buried in the spread and flow and ripple of the universe’s fabric, the yielding, collapsing, purely theoretical fold of one reality against another, and he is completely incapable of understanding it. Even if he had years and not mere minutes, he would never understand it. Time is relative. And there is never enough of it.
The man is not at peace, all appearances to the contrary. His chest is a tight morass of anxiety, his legs fragile, his breathing shallow and rapid. This stillness, this anticipation - is fucking intolerable. Waiting is intolerable. Even for the inevitable, arcane brink Destiny hums toward while its engines thunder on hollowly, waiting is intolerable. It is intolerable. But Rush can only stand, uselessly, hands limp and unwandering at his sides as he watches the hull of an Ancient ship prepare to ram itself into the edge of the universe.
(Highly inaccurate phrasing due to the universe not actually having an edge as the universe is endless and ever-expanding and far-reaching, but it’s something vaguely and impressively and pretentiously poetic and it is, for all intents and purposes, the End of something - Rush’s life, specifically. Flawed terminology aside, Rush decides it is an acceptable panegyric pre-funerary farewell to himself, very philosophical and ostentatious to the point of unintelligiblity, striving to find meaning where there is absolutely none. Fair fucking appropriate for a eulogy. And no one on the crew will give him one, probably. The ungrateful shits.)
The edge of this universe then, this brane, passing out of the conceivable and into the conceptual, some hyperspace void Rush will have no way of comprehending. He wonders if the impact of Destiny upon this brane will affect those surrounding it on some cosmological level. The force of gravity drags at its exterior, unforgiving as ever. He appreciates that on a distant and existential level, the recognizable presence of unrelenting gravitational pressure, present even here on an unstable plane in an unstable part of an unstable universe. Ruthless. Implacable. About to tear Destiny apart and with it everything on it.
If Rush is about to die, he will ensure that he dies in such a way that makes proper fucking sense.
Young had insisted that he come back to Earth with the rest of them, but no one believed it would happen, the colonel included. Rush cannot go back to that after experiencing this, the universe, possibly a glimpse of the multiverse, and all their grand and terrifying intricacies. There is nothing to go back to.
Fuck Young, anyway. And fuck the rest of them. He’s going to watch his world end.
The first pointed end of the ship skims into the brightness, the intersected chiral matter of his brane skidded against another, the unfamiliar energy tearing across the hull and the ship plunges further in a roar of gravitational force and the limits of electromagnetism, subsumed by the abstract. And following in line with the laws that dictate the linear slide of time, the rest follows, unknowable matter shrieking into space, disintegrating substance excoriated from the ship’s solidity, shorn into a void, knowledge lost, knowledge gained, the approaching end, and Rush is not ready.
He closes his eyes and waits to be slingshotted into nothing.
He feels it initially, the sickening, shuddering jolt to his abdomen that accompanies a shift into FTL, the smear of electrostatic interference and disruption of molecular basis as he and Destiny are no longer localized on their own brane before he is -
Torn.
And then he is not.
He opens his eyes to find himself sprawled bonelessly across a startlingly green expanse of grass with a brightness of a different sort (sunlight, annoying) streaming everywhere, the sound of people (also annoying) talking filtering in, a disturbingly Earthlike (even worse, American) settlement arranged around him, and it is also absurdly fucking hot.
What happened.
Rush jerks, scrambling to his feet to stare at his surroundings in unmitigated shock, a systematic controlled panic, and swivels around in a tight revolution of disbelief and frustration and fury and ragged defeat.
This is not the theorized outcome. This is not anywhere near the theorized outcome.
What is this. What happened.
“Fuck," breathes Rush.