p=np [open]

[lottawork]

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.

Comments

[apidae]

She chances another glance at him as he walks along with her, neither hurt nor startled by his snap. She wishes she could convey she knows what this feels like, or knew, once upon a time maybe, before she'd been diagnosed and learned to be verbal. But to do so without explicit invitation would be quite rude.

"Good," she says instead. She hesitates again, her fingers fiddling unconsciously with her skirt, twisting her hands together. "I'm going to take you to the edge of the park and tell you how to get to the ROMAC offices, or I could take you there."

She chews her lip momentarily, then adds, "We don't have to keep talking if you don't want."

[lottawork]

"Yes," says Rush before fully realizing that there were three courses of action embedded in those statements and some were contradictory so he can't possibly be agreeing to all of them.

He drives the base of his palm into one eye and drops it down to rub at the patchy beard that has long since stopped growing. It didn't have the biology after a certain point.

"No. I just need a point of reference. Assuming this is Earth." He glances at her semi-suspiciously. "And assuming temporally synchronous translocation." He doesn't know what day he'd been in when Destiny had brushed against a Rift in space-time, but he never knows what day he's in. He remembers the year, however. Probably.

[apidae]

"Oh!" She covers her mouth briefly, embarrassed at having forgotten those rather important introductory details. "Right, sorry. Um. This is Earth. New York City. Central Park." She gestures around them as though that's helpful. She's feeling flustered now at having forgotten something, but she tries to stay level. "It's 2013. Today is August, um, 6th. Tuesday." She looks up at him nervously. That might be another shock to his system, and he doesn't really need that right now. Should have said it outright. Next time.

[lottawork]

"Hmm." He doesn't remember the date and time Destiny entered the ridge of cosmic radiation that would bring him here. He never knows the date. Knowing the date feels mildly superfluous due to its constant fluctuating nature. "I don't believe we were temporally synchronized."

Is the date significant? Would the Rift have sent him to this specific date regardless of when he entered that timestream? Perhaps it is synchronous to his universe, simply moving at an irregularly correlative rate.

Time is relative. And largely irrelevant.

Rush makes a weary noise in the back of his throat that sounds vaguely like, "America," but he doesn't elaborate. The Rift and, by extension, Destiny, has decided he should belong on Earth, in this timeframe, in this city despite the obvious point of difference between where he was positioned in his old universe and this one. Disorienting, but workable.

[apidae]

Bee nods, not so much in agreement as in acknowledgment. Dr. Rush is barely holding himself together, she thinks, his current thought processes flooding his senses. She can't read those thoughts, but their presence spikes in her awareness nonetheless, tied down to so much of his past. Is it easier to read because it's so familiar? Her various atypicalities haven't manifested in such a volatile fashion, but she recognizes them at their sources nonetheless.

She says nothing, leaving the conversation ball in his proverbial court, leading him at a moderately brisk pace to the east edge of the park.

[lottawork]

There's a concerning amount of deviating factors here, none of which Rush is entirely sure he's in the mental state to examine at the moment. He has achieved mental-physical exhaustion, he has achieved sufficient sleep deprivation that his mind should be operating at apical productivity, but the overwhelming stimulus of being transplanted from a cold ship overlooking lacunar space to the sun and grass of Earth has severely damaged his internal workaround time.

And. The Rift. The undefined thing that lent him transport. He has no idea where one would set about determining its nature. Does it operate algorithmically? Rush imagines it must. Certain laws are invariant. The illusion of randomness is easily surmountable. There will be form and function and he will need to evaluate its structure, physical or nonphysical, determine its wavelength and to what extent it operates solely in this brane compared to the others it apparently -

Rush blinks, recrystallizes his awareness, and comes to the slow realization that they have stopped. The area that Rush is approximating to be Central Park appears to end here.

His seeming guide is still beside him and he looks at her. Has she already explained their direction? She seems to be awaiting a response of some kind, but Rush has not been actively awaiting any verbal cues.

[apidae]

Bee smiles patiently and says, "ROMAC's offices are in the Citigroup Tower at Lexington and 53rd. We're at 5th and 69th." She points straight ahead. "That's three blocks over - Madison, Park, Lexington - and sixteen down. So you'll take a right on Lexington. Reception will tell you what floor, and then you just explain that you're new and they'll get you settled."

She looks up at him. "Do you need some money? Or a metrocard? Or are you okay to walk?"

[lottawork]

Those are awful lot of words Rush has zero percent context for but the streets are an array of right-angled geometry so that should be more or less workable. The numerical data 53 5 69 3 16 is easily translatable to a directional vector. Thank fuck for sensible building configuration.

"Walking," he says, applying pressure to the bridge of his nose with two fingers, "should be sufficient."

He will track his progress best under those conditions.

[apidae]

Bee nods again. She isn't too concerned about his ability to navigate, what with the grid system, but still, she repeats, "Three blocks ahead and sixteen that way," pointing south. She reaches out but doesn't quite touch him, holding herself back on informed instinct.

"Wait," she says. "Um. Let me just..." She reaches into her little purse and pulls out a small notepad, scratching out her number and name. She tears out the page and offers it to him.

"If you need to contact me again," she says. "That's my number. They'll give you a phone. I know I can't really help, but... I'm always willing to try."

She gives him her best smile. She doesn't know if it'll win him over - a large part of her doubts it - but she can't just let him walk away.

[lottawork]

Rush accepts the slip of paper delicately, contemplates it for a moment without fully understanding what she means for him to do with it. He can't imagine what she would be able to help him with. Though between that and the pointless repetition of numerical direction, it may be she's assumed he has navigational shortcomings.

"Yes, yes," he replies. The hand slides away from his face to drop at his side.

There's something else. Expected. Anticipated. What is it. He pauses.

"Thank you." The statement hovers, undetermined, before Rush decides that statement is adequate as far as farewells go. He has an appointment.

The electrical discharge fades as he moves in the opposite direction from his contact. The pressure at his temples fades, the line of his shoulders eases marginally, and he no longer needs to devote his focus as a compensatory measure. Navigation won't be a problem.