applesaucedream | x t+1 = kx t (1-x t) [closed]

“- you know, lead scientist of the Icarus Project?”
“Dr. Rush?”
“Yeah. You ever notice how he pretty much runs on a schedule that’s like, five minutes ahead of everyone else? And that’s why he’s so pissy all the goddamn time?”
“Pretty sure that's just - you know, man's got an ego. With the whole ninth chevron thing - ”

He would prefer it if there were a more expedient method of transferring caffeine from its cheap paper cup to his bloodstream, but he is confined by the typical human inefficiencies of snatching fleeting, scalding sips as he navigates homogenous gray halls with an angrily humming phone in hand, an untidy stack of files trapped precariously between elbow and hip, endeavoring to devote his concentration to responding to fucking Base-wide text alerts while caffeinating systematically and not allowing his files to come apart at the fucking seams and performing all three tasks flawlessly and contemporaneously.

The various Base personnel glide along in a streamlined blur as he weaves between them with crisp, purposeful strides, pinning his phone with a harried, impatient glower.

Senator Armstrong arrival ETA 0800

Rush snorts and pockets the undesirable thing and with a series of brief, economical movements, transfers his mass of files from their unsteady position to his free hand as he enters the gateroom and, with a viciously satisfying slap of paper against metal, slams the disorganized bundle of files onto his desk.

A brief scan of the suitably startled personnel is considerably less satisfying. He scowls.

“Asadi,” he says shortly, “is where, exactly?”

“Um,” coughs Volker. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but - we’re here.”

Rush looks at him, subtly arching a brow.

Volker presses valiantly on with the rising intonation of unspoken expectation. “Like, your science team? Hand-picked from Earth's most qualified?”

“Thank you, Dr. Volker,” says Rush, still relentlessly scanning the room, breaking off the words with an icy precision. “And should I require incompetence I shall request it. But my question,” his tone hardens incrementally, his eyes flicking briefly to the hapless astrophysicist and away again in a manner that somehow approximates a nameless threat, “was regarding Asadi.”

“Right,” says Volker faintly. “She’s, um. She’s not here.”

“Yes, you’ve been very helpful,” he hisses, brushing past him to study the dark scrawl of dense calculations printed over the whiteboard, pushed back beside a colony of monitors. “So someone find her.”

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Shit-!" She lurches at another shipwide shudder and scrambles forward, dropping quickly to her knees beside him. "Rush!"

Things are getting worse, fast. Everything going wrong all around them at once, doesn't seem probable, doesn't seem like it should be happening, but maybe that's just it, maybe this is their way of waking up.

Rush is bleeding bad, his hands burned, a faint smell of scorched flesh in the air. No matter how much chaos bursts around them, none of it seems to touch her; she feels distant, like the whole thing is fading more and more into the background, leaving only Rush in focus. He blinks up at her, she's not sure if he can ever talk.

As angry as she still is it slides away in that moment, too familiar, too much like when she pulled him out of Gus' cell, when he - when he let it slip that he wanted her there. He's dying, abrupt, unceremonious, and painful, and he still thinks this is all real.

"It's okay," she says softly, and he might not like it but she can't just sit there, she reaches out and lifts him up partway, trying to cradle his head as best she can, ignoring the blood that'll be gone when she wakes. "It's okay. It's just a dream."

Another spray of sparks flares out behind her and she barely even feels it.

"You're okay," she says again, trying to get a fix on his eyes. "You'll be okay."

He blinks, protracted and slow, and attempts to marshal his thoughts into what may be deemed an appropriate response between the heaviness of his own limbs, the stench of ozone, the hot trickle coating the back of his neck. His hands are thick and utterly nonresponsive so he must attempt movement in another respect and so he rotates his head on its spinal axis and when he does things move and there are no joints in the skull nor are their any parts of it that should be disconnected or untethered or floating in the softened mess of their own fluid deconstruction this is incorrect and impractical for a number of reasons.

The sensation of fingers around the darkened mat that is his hair is not altogether one he finds he can react to he is overly preoccupied with the grating and shifting of ordinarily solid bone and so he has no response to it nor does he have a rebuttal for the insistence of an optimal outcome the outcome has already proven to be staunchly not optimal and it will continue to be as he is not a terribly enthusiastic supporter of outcomes in which he is dead and this should be readily apparent for obvious reasons.

His jaw feels fused shut. Perhaps that is an ancillary effect. He should not concern himself with it unnecessarily.

Events have established a clear direction and it is not the preferred direction but he finds he has little choice in the matter and prolonging his own awareness is at this point a detriment not a benefit and so he surrenders to the direction things seem to be heading toward much like one would surrender to gravity that inevitable pull to the molten center of the earth they are so far away from.

x t+1 = kx t (1-x t) [closed]

tw: blood, burning references

tw: gore, description of body-horror type stuff, DEATH