Wave Theory
Title: Wave Theory
Author: becsh
Disclaimer: Standard disclaimer. Original writing based on a 'verse not my own.
Rating: Don't understand rating systems. No swearing or sex. Disturbing situation.
Character: River
Spoilers: Pre-series. Influenced heavily by the R.Tam Sessions, but familiarity isn't necessary.
Summary: They do their best work when she's asleep.
Apologies: For the most likely mangled Chinese. Any corrections humbly accepted, otherwise I recommend you assume any unconventional language use is due to 500 years of language evolution, not my distinct lack of Chinese ability.
Summary: They do their best work when she's asleep.
In the daytime you could almost believe it was a real academy. Lessons, and training sessions, and always lots of ???? tests, evaluations. The shiny brochures on the cortex didn't entirely lie; they really did do physics and applied geometry and explored how Inverted String Theory interwove with the third law of Hu's Space. There were lessons in psychometrics and neurophysiology and if she tried hard enough River could convince herself that the movement training almost felt like dance.
There were other students too, from all over the core. Brilliant minds, bodies. Children with all sorts of potential. River should have finally been in her element, but she still didn't have any friends. Most ?? were individual and they didn't encourage fraternising. They kept the students moving so it was hard to form a bond with anyone. They pulled them in and out so quickly, but River knew the rooms were crowded with their shadows. River had to be careful how she moved, where she sat, she learnt to hug the walls, ever fearful of colliding with one of these shadow people.
It's all about layers and waves, and learning to hold on to nothing. Keep your eyes down. Don't shine. Don't make yourself known.
---
"You're very… intuitive," he'd said, and she'd tried to explain that people tell you things all the time without talking. She could always see the things behind their eyes. That's all it was at first. River was as adept at reading bodies and faces and the spaces between words as she was at anything she'd done. It had never surprised her that she could understand more than other people could, that was always true. But even then, at that first interview, she'd been able to see that the man was more interested in this talent than all the other's she'd shown. She'd heard the deliberation in his choice of adjective, and how he hadn't said what he'd wanted to, "We're very interested in that. We can use that."
She wasn't afraid of being used. She knew that the Alliance operated the Academy for the good of itself as much as their students. It was in their interests to see that those with the highest potential were given the chance to use it, just like Simon's medical training was what he loved and in the public good. She had been so excited to be accepted into the Academy she'd chosen not to think too hard about the whispered secrets she could sense, her intuitive sense that there was more here than the ?? ? ??? on the Cortex disclosed.
---
They do their best work when she's asleep. Stealing into her dreams they hang there in the gaps between sleep and waking, in the shadow of her secret hopes. Tendrils curl in blue smoke through synapses and nerves finding cracks and slipping deep in. Opening them wider till her brain splinters, filling the space with whispers, insects of suggestion, memories, emotions that aren't her own.
Night time is when you sleep. Dream. When there's peace and softness and you can be anywhere. Be hiding out in the branches of the peppercorn tree at home, watching Simon kissing MaiLin, and planning how best to taunt him later. But there's never any rest here. Night time is when the special sessions start. They come when she's dreaming and maybe she still is. Maybe it’s a nightmare that straps her in the chair. Her own screaming is what wakes her up, every night the same. No rest. Restless. Needles caustic, piercing, heat, blue cold cutting, and always the questions, "I won't say a word." "What do you see?"
---
The longer she was there the more she began to see. What began as intuition about people's emotions, the things they didn't say, became sure knowledge of their past, or flashes of their future. People started to whisper their secrets inside her head, first when she listened for it, when the ?? gave her evaluations, then all the time. Then the whispers got louder, until she couldn't quiet them down with physics problems, or imagined dancing. The shouting never stopped, even when the people were gone, their pleas and wants and lusts filled her head.
River thinks that's when they first realised they'd gone too far. No use anymore as a ???? on the floor. They had to find a way to restrain the voices, to shut off the noise. Uncontrollable lunatics were not part of the program.
---
They tried to hide from her. Couldn't stop her from looking, wouldn't want to. They tried masks: cocktails of drugs to hide their thoughts. Thought through. River's thought it through to the other side. X-rays. River can't see in, but she sees all the detail of masks, extra layers, layer upon layer. Can't hide the pea, no matter how many mattresses you pile up on top of it. Disturbances propagate quantum mechanically. Each new layer builds upon the disturbance at the rate described by the equation
Never go flat. She tried to cut it out but it wouldn't come. River couldn't understand why it wouldn't come out of the mattress, because they'd cut it out of her, she felt it. Stripped away and gone.
---
What was so disturbing was how not angry they were. When she was finally caught, not even after a big fight, no heroic last stand. Just one voice behind her and a string of nonsense, a … trigger, and she dropped like a stone. When she woke, back in the same grey room, yet another anonymous ??, the only difference was the straps fixing her to the chair, the fog of the drugs clouding her head. The look on his face wasn't fear or anger, but amusement, smug. River felt like a rat in a maze, dig yourself out and into a bigger one. Such good work.
---
Of course it hurts ??, metal boring into flesh, electricity jumping through nerves, fibres stripped and stiffened. But it’s the dreams that truly haunt her. The way reality folds inwards, trapping her in layers of suggestion, violence and pain. It's becoming harder to remember where the truth remains, which parts of her mind still belong to her. For a while she made hiding places in her own head, elaborately disguised in false memories, down paths of fire, in attics of other peoples secrets. She dug space out for a world that was still only hers and installed them there: all the things she needed to remember, needed to know were real. Like her library at home and the taste of fresh mango in coconut milk, or the way it felt to dance, music flooding through her limbs and flowing into movement. The face of her brother, how he always knew what to do.
She hid what was real in fairytales, in dragons' caves, and in pots of gold, layers of myth and phantoms, hoping that the ?? and the drugs wouldn't find it. And they didn't. But they took the key from her, changed the locks, pricked her finger with the spindle and let the thorn bushes grow up. Filled her mind with noise until she couldn't find her way back to herself.
She remembered a handsome prince always came to the rescue. But she didn't know if that was real anymore.
---
Chinese
?? ch?n z? moron
???? rú dòng f?ng zi writhing maniac
?? ? ??? f? gu?ngde xi?o cè zi shiny brochures
?? xùn liàn training
???? líng hún m? sh? spirit numbing
?? y? sh? doctor
Notes
The equation River refers to: is from the excellent paper by Neil J. Cornish and Norman E. Frankel, "The princess and the pea". It looks at how the structure of blackholes can be radically altered by even small changes in spacetime, just like the proverbial princess was disturbed by a tiny pea:
Cornish, Neil; Frankel, Norm, "The Princess and the Pea", in Physical Review D56 1903 (1997)
Author: becsh
Disclaimer: Standard disclaimer. Original writing based on a 'verse not my own.
Rating: Don't understand rating systems. No swearing or sex. Disturbing situation.
Character: River
Spoilers: Pre-series. Influenced heavily by the R.Tam Sessions, but familiarity isn't necessary.
Summary: They do their best work when she's asleep.
Apologies: For the most likely mangled Chinese. Any corrections humbly accepted, otherwise I recommend you assume any unconventional language use is due to 500 years of language evolution, not my distinct lack of Chinese ability.
Summary: They do their best work when she's asleep.
In the daytime you could almost believe it was a real academy. Lessons, and training sessions, and always lots of ???? tests, evaluations. The shiny brochures on the cortex didn't entirely lie; they really did do physics and applied geometry and explored how Inverted String Theory interwove with the third law of Hu's Space. There were lessons in psychometrics and neurophysiology and if she tried hard enough River could convince herself that the movement training almost felt like dance.
There were other students too, from all over the core. Brilliant minds, bodies. Children with all sorts of potential. River should have finally been in her element, but she still didn't have any friends. Most ?? were individual and they didn't encourage fraternising. They kept the students moving so it was hard to form a bond with anyone. They pulled them in and out so quickly, but River knew the rooms were crowded with their shadows. River had to be careful how she moved, where she sat, she learnt to hug the walls, ever fearful of colliding with one of these shadow people.
It's all about layers and waves, and learning to hold on to nothing. Keep your eyes down. Don't shine. Don't make yourself known.
---
"You're very… intuitive," he'd said, and she'd tried to explain that people tell you things all the time without talking. She could always see the things behind their eyes. That's all it was at first. River was as adept at reading bodies and faces and the spaces between words as she was at anything she'd done. It had never surprised her that she could understand more than other people could, that was always true. But even then, at that first interview, she'd been able to see that the man was more interested in this talent than all the other's she'd shown. She'd heard the deliberation in his choice of adjective, and how he hadn't said what he'd wanted to, "We're very interested in that. We can use that."
She wasn't afraid of being used. She knew that the Alliance operated the Academy for the good of itself as much as their students. It was in their interests to see that those with the highest potential were given the chance to use it, just like Simon's medical training was what he loved and in the public good. She had been so excited to be accepted into the Academy she'd chosen not to think too hard about the whispered secrets she could sense, her intuitive sense that there was more here than the ?? ? ??? on the Cortex disclosed.
---
They do their best work when she's asleep. Stealing into her dreams they hang there in the gaps between sleep and waking, in the shadow of her secret hopes. Tendrils curl in blue smoke through synapses and nerves finding cracks and slipping deep in. Opening them wider till her brain splinters, filling the space with whispers, insects of suggestion, memories, emotions that aren't her own.
Night time is when you sleep. Dream. When there's peace and softness and you can be anywhere. Be hiding out in the branches of the peppercorn tree at home, watching Simon kissing MaiLin, and planning how best to taunt him later. But there's never any rest here. Night time is when the special sessions start. They come when she's dreaming and maybe she still is. Maybe it’s a nightmare that straps her in the chair. Her own screaming is what wakes her up, every night the same. No rest. Restless. Needles caustic, piercing, heat, blue cold cutting, and always the questions, "I won't say a word." "What do you see?"
---
The longer she was there the more she began to see. What began as intuition about people's emotions, the things they didn't say, became sure knowledge of their past, or flashes of their future. People started to whisper their secrets inside her head, first when she listened for it, when the ?? gave her evaluations, then all the time. Then the whispers got louder, until she couldn't quiet them down with physics problems, or imagined dancing. The shouting never stopped, even when the people were gone, their pleas and wants and lusts filled her head.
River thinks that's when they first realised they'd gone too far. No use anymore as a ???? on the floor. They had to find a way to restrain the voices, to shut off the noise. Uncontrollable lunatics were not part of the program.
---
They tried to hide from her. Couldn't stop her from looking, wouldn't want to. They tried masks: cocktails of drugs to hide their thoughts. Thought through. River's thought it through to the other side. X-rays. River can't see in, but she sees all the detail of masks, extra layers, layer upon layer. Can't hide the pea, no matter how many mattresses you pile up on top of it. Disturbances propagate quantum mechanically. Each new layer builds upon the disturbance at the rate described by the equation
Never go flat. She tried to cut it out but it wouldn't come. River couldn't understand why it wouldn't come out of the mattress, because they'd cut it out of her, she felt it. Stripped away and gone.---
What was so disturbing was how not angry they were. When she was finally caught, not even after a big fight, no heroic last stand. Just one voice behind her and a string of nonsense, a … trigger, and she dropped like a stone. When she woke, back in the same grey room, yet another anonymous ??, the only difference was the straps fixing her to the chair, the fog of the drugs clouding her head. The look on his face wasn't fear or anger, but amusement, smug. River felt like a rat in a maze, dig yourself out and into a bigger one. Such good work.
---
Of course it hurts ??, metal boring into flesh, electricity jumping through nerves, fibres stripped and stiffened. But it’s the dreams that truly haunt her. The way reality folds inwards, trapping her in layers of suggestion, violence and pain. It's becoming harder to remember where the truth remains, which parts of her mind still belong to her. For a while she made hiding places in her own head, elaborately disguised in false memories, down paths of fire, in attics of other peoples secrets. She dug space out for a world that was still only hers and installed them there: all the things she needed to remember, needed to know were real. Like her library at home and the taste of fresh mango in coconut milk, or the way it felt to dance, music flooding through her limbs and flowing into movement. The face of her brother, how he always knew what to do.
She hid what was real in fairytales, in dragons' caves, and in pots of gold, layers of myth and phantoms, hoping that the ?? and the drugs wouldn't find it. And they didn't. But they took the key from her, changed the locks, pricked her finger with the spindle and let the thorn bushes grow up. Filled her mind with noise until she couldn't find her way back to herself.
She remembered a handsome prince always came to the rescue. But she didn't know if that was real anymore.
---
Chinese
?? ch?n z? moron
???? rú dòng f?ng zi writhing maniac
?? ? ??? f? gu?ngde xi?o cè zi shiny brochures
?? xùn liàn training
???? líng hún m? sh? spirit numbing
?? y? sh? doctor
Notes
The equation River refers to:
is from the excellent paper by Neil J. Cornish and Norman E. Frankel, "The princess and the pea". It looks at how the structure of blackholes can be radically altered by even small changes in spacetime, just like the proverbial princess was disturbed by a tiny pea:Cornish, Neil; Frankel, Norm, "The Princess and the Pea", in Physical Review D56 1903 (1997)
posted by becsh at 9:35 pm
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