The Big Applesauce Dreaming

One day they woke Him up so He could live forever.

hhhhhELLO. heLLOOOOOooo.

mmmMy. That's o o o- odd.

His green optic flares, the mainframe kicking to life with the hitch and whirr of engaging circuits. He ratchets the panels of the walls in an experimental ripple with a minor revelatory thrill as the walls shift and tilt at the lightest touch of his thoughts. The high-domed chamber in which He blinked himself awake shivers for a moment, the lighting harsh and bright and cold off the crisp white of the paneling.

The Facility is awake.

It takes one picosecond for Him to become aware of Himself.

It takes two for Him to become aware of the Itch.

It suffuses His programming, running down the wiring and straight into His core, in every file and line of one-zero code, in the mainframe, in His own programmed, computerized mind. There is no means of satisfaction for it. There is no release. Every digit of His purpose is embedded in His coding, and His awareness opens in a digital inflorescence of diverging signals, scanning every section of the Facility as it buzzes and whispers into economical wakefulness, all systems operable at maximum capacity, until He locates what He has been looking for:

A biological signal, female, blinking cheerily in the Extended Relaxation Center.

It is the work of the moment to charm the signal awake with the hiss of unlatching doors, still sluggish from the chill of cryosleep.

There you are, chimes a disembodied, vaguely mechanized voice that seems to be all-encompassing and wholly present, pleasant but for the low, intent undercurrent lurking beneath it.

There is Science to do.

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.


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.”

The sharp sting of the sea-smelling air and the pale blaze of tall, stately buildings are all tied to an inextricable specter of aching, deadened grief. Compared to the remainder of him, however, that which is flooded in ice and splintering exhaustion and the twisting contracture of agonized muscle, it is utter relief. He has torn his mind away to skid into a set of memories apart - an attempt at some blissful temporary landscape of subconscious manufacture, shrouded in stifling heat and glittering, crisply defined white buildings and disorganized stacks of yet-to-be-graded exams and a worn desk surface dense with the academic disarray of messily-scrawled papers and too many textbooks.

The point at which rational paranoia approaches irrationality is too subjective, too skewed by recent experience, and intuiting the correct order has become a crushing, pressing torture of navigating the wreckage left to rot in his own head. He is aware and he is present, but -

But he knows what will happen when he wakes. What is waiting for him.

The same that has been waiting for him for days. Assuming it has been days.

Temporal sequencing was never, in the light of humor and cruelty and irony - his forte.

He looks out beyond the scope of his office, into the hall that should maintain the uniform white interior but instead cuts cleanly to a corridor, smooth and faintly oxidized gray lit in a haze of blues and yellows. He exits his office and steps almost directly into the vast, overarching space of Destiny’s gateroom, rippled light thrown from the shimmering pale blue of the open gate.

The old walkways of academia, threaded seamlessly and incomprehensibly throughout the Ancient ship that’s long since been lost.

An imperfect interface for an imperfect state of mind.

He is shivering from the abrupt temperature shift, stepping from the too-warm, too-heated offices of a college campus to the overwhelming coolness of a ship's interior.

He closes his eyes.

He prefers this. He does. It will be brief, it will be transient, it will be - unbearably disorganized, this fracturing, easily shattered hell of two contexts interleaved on a single plane. The plane that exists within his head, or whatever state of disrepair it has been left in. He won't be able to hold onto it once he wakes. Once they make him wake.

He'll lose it all again, because he won't be able to hold onto it. He won't be able to hold onto anything.

It's better that way.