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.

[warning: this dream deals with claustrophobia, hydrophobia/drowning, suicide ideation, mental invasion, alien abduction, and related medical squicks.]

where is the ship

Immediately Rush knows where he is, and the thought fills him with indescribable horror.

He would struggle but he can only drift without purchase, resist without means for resistance. He has no cognitive self-defense. His mind is flayed and open - they have stripped his neurological architecture bare and reassembled it with fascinated laziness, they have analyzed everything he is biologically, fundamentally, psychologically, they know his blood type and the sensation of a hammer slamming over his fingers in the steel mills of Glasgow and the disordered burst of sympathetic nervous overload that generates panic. They've shredded into his head, they've come shrieking into his silence; nothing can be kept in isolation as they eviscerate his subconscious, invade each molecule, unmake his construction, unbury his core, shear into what he cannot hide from them, intimately, with sleek, strategic tendrils of thought that are alien, malformed, wrong.

He is floating in a tank of ionized water in a spectrum of blue-silver-grays. He's kept nothing from them, save what they want to know most.

where is the ship

There is the weight of water pressing down and all around him, the dull tingle of cold against the bare skin of his neck, head, arms. The thing keeping him alive is wrapped around his face and rammed partially down his throat, a silver breathing apparatus clamped over his mouth, silencing him, muzzling him. He is floating in a tank of ionized water and wishing he could breathe the water, fill his lungs with blissful icy fluid and end the endless sequence of prolonged neural attacks. That language, their language, is high-pitched and chittering and utterly unintelligible, an irradiating aural torment that sluices into the layers of his brain tissue and strangles his dread into utter numbness, they will never allow him death, they will never allow him death, they will never allow him death.

He is floating in a tank of ionized water, freezing and alone and psychically paralyzed. One hand slams against the vitreous walls of the tank in frenzied, fruitless desperation, the distressingly impenetrable surface spread beneath his fingers. He hammers at his prison and wishes he could drown.

where is the ship

The water is ionized. The water is conductive. The water is transparent, and so is the glass. A silvered flare of bubbles flutters upward, darting between the tubes trailing out from the subcutaneous entry points beneath his clavicle. Every movement is hopelessly inhibited by the thickness of water resistance, pulling at his clothes and his hair as they fan out in slow drifts. He remembers breaking out. He remembers his prison shattering under application of blunt force and pressure, and he remembers tearing away the mess of tubing and the breathing mechanism and the telepathic entry point stapled to his head, and he remembers wriggling free, getting on a ship, getting out. He remembers this. He remembers it. He remembers Manhattan. It must have happened. It must have. So much has elapsed since then, that cannot all have possibly been manufactured. Unless he has simply never left, and they courteously let him believe otherwise. They could have distorted his perception of that. They're capable of it.

He breathes through a breathing apparatus in a tank of ionized water and his only defense is his hatred of his captors.

where is the ship

They leave him in aching silence. Time drags. It's impossible to tell its passing, until Rush can finally reconstruct his bearings, his physical position, his own name. He is floating in a tank of ionized water, and this time he has no escape. If he were allowed an open mouth, he would howl. If he could thrash at his confinement, he would slam himself into the clear walls with claustrophobic ferocity. All he can do, now, is knock an open hand feebly against the glass and wait for dissolution.

[ooc: this is a recurring nightmare for Rush, so just pick a date if you tag in for dream-y funtimes. For context: Rush has been kept on an alien ship for some time and he sure would like to get off that wild ride. The aliens that took him look like this - cw for unnaturally tall or skinny things - and he's being held in a thingy that looks like this - cw for people jars.]

The shuttle's base plating is proving particularly difficult. Rush redoubles his efforts to pry it loose and throws all his weight on the crowbar, or the Ancient equivalent of a crowbar, until with a satisfying, groaning metallic clunk, it disengages. He levers it off, tosses it aside, and within seconds is elbow-deep in the innards of the shuttle. Assorted chunks of aged machinery come clanging out as Rush removes piece after piece of the shuttle's internal architecture, regards each with distaste, and flings them over his shoulder to join their fellows.

Destiny is falling apart. When isn't it? But now life support isn't responding, and the rest of the ship isn't responding, it's pitch-dark and dropping in temperature and oxygen levels and the steady creep of hypoxic terror has begun to settle around his ears and in the delicate parts of his chest cavity, but the shuttles run on an auxiliary system that operates separately from Destiny's central network so Rush can cannibalize the shuttles and interface their systems with Destiny's and grit his teeth and hope that will be enough of a stopgap measure until he can rig something better. An inelegant solution to an inelegant problem. As flawed as the fucking Dirac sea Destiny theoretically floats in.

Rush emerges triumphant, desired machinery part in hand, and cuts an unsteady path out of the shuttle and into the unfriendly darkness of the ship itself, shadows steel-edged and sharply cut into graceful swell and curves of its walls. His own destination (at this he smirks transparently, an uninspired pun fed into a neurologically empty space without enthusiasm) is the control interface room, the aphotic nucleus of the ship's function, where he may optimistically begin repairs. Optimistically. Realistically, Rush expects he will die here. One man, even an exceptionally brilliant cryptographer slash scientist, cannot hope to perform the work required of ten, but Rush isn't about to let the discovery of a fucking lifetime wink out of a painfully long existence simply by virtue of not having the right parts. The injustice to that is fucking absurd.

The central column of the interface room is dead when he reaches it, an acharacteristically dim pillar that, last Rush saw it, had been lit in a spectrum of whites and blues. The striae comprising its wired core are cool and lifeless when he rests one palm against them.

He gives his head a small, firm shake in an effort to dislodge the mental detritus of protracted wakefulness. It has been hours, or it feels like hours. Finite resources have not been kind to him; he's been operating without stimulant unless one counts adrenaline, which Rush does not because running on adrenaline is practically his baseline.

The dull ring of footsteps successfully derails any irrelevant trains of thought. Rush half-turns before deciding whichever unlucky crewmember has been sent to ask useless things of him isn't worth devoting the neural space to. They never are.

[ooc: Welcome to Manhattan, Rush. This is his first night so the Rift has decided to pitch him in head first. He's going to be dashing around trying to fix Destiny, the super-cool old ship he's been stranded on for the past four to five years. Feel free to run into him!]