"Should you ever come up against a hyperspace gateway address cyphered in an algebraically decimal alien locking grid, you can let me know," Rush counters in a marginally less caustic tone than usual.
Never mind that it took him two years to crack the last cyphered address he encountered and he'd more or less had to mentally torture himself to do it and the solution they'd implemented hadn't even been his because he was not good enough, would never be good enough, would fail at that endeavor like he had and would so many others.
He stops petting the panther because it feels too fucking bizarre to continue doing it, instead hooks both hands around the back of his neck and occupies himself examining the asymmetrical arrangement of the trees, the quantum subdivisions of dream particles that comprise the air, the leaves, the dirt, and wonders if it would be possible to observe their structure on a molecular scale, then almost immediately dismisses the idea. What would that accomplish?
His mind is locked in distant stasis, trapped in cryogenic stagnation, billions upon billions of light years away from any feasible solution to this problem, and his consciousness has been displaced to here, an entirely unrelated anonymous forest with an equally anonymous man and his rabbit that have no empirical grasp of the space in which they occupy and, apparently, no intellectual drive to examine it. Rush finds that grating. Immensely so.
"Who're you?" he snaps with perhaps more rough diction than is strictly necessary, an attempt to maintain conversational norms that he has a purely basic grasp of. He only recalls the fundaments of interpersonal dialogue, one of which is that when the opposite party directs a question in relation to the subject's person, the subject must respond with a question of equal association and magnitude.
no subject
Never mind that it took him two years to crack the last cyphered address he encountered and he'd more or less had to mentally torture himself to do it and the solution they'd implemented hadn't even been his because he was not good enough, would never be good enough, would fail at that endeavor like he had and would so many others.
He stops petting the panther because it feels too fucking bizarre to continue doing it, instead hooks both hands around the back of his neck and occupies himself examining the asymmetrical arrangement of the trees, the quantum subdivisions of dream particles that comprise the air, the leaves, the dirt, and wonders if it would be possible to observe their structure on a molecular scale, then almost immediately dismisses the idea. What would that accomplish?
His mind is locked in distant stasis, trapped in cryogenic stagnation, billions upon billions of light years away from any feasible solution to this problem, and his consciousness has been displaced to here, an entirely unrelated anonymous forest with an equally anonymous man and his rabbit that have no empirical grasp of the space in which they occupy and, apparently, no intellectual drive to examine it. Rush finds that grating. Immensely so.
"Who're you?" he snaps with perhaps more rough diction than is strictly necessary, an attempt to maintain conversational norms that he has a purely basic grasp of. He only recalls the fundaments of interpersonal dialogue, one of which is that when the opposite party directs a question in relation to the subject's person, the subject must respond with a question of equal association and magnitude.