paradoxlol | .009

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.009 | Voice.

[Warden Filter]
As I understand it, the recent attack on [There's a SLIGHT pause, and Arthur's voice goes completely deadpan.] Victor Frankenstein [And back to normal!] was perpetrated through the use of a... "burning machine," as the victim called it.

[Wryly:] Given the lack of retail options on the Barge, I'm going to assume the device was made with found objects. [A beat.] Has anybody taken it apart and figured out where each piece of the machine came from? If they even came from the Barge at all. It could help us figure out where to beef up security.

[He starts to say something else, then stops. Nope, Arthur's not touching all of the recent drama and grumbling with a ten foot pole.]

[Private to Capa]
If you're ready, I have the sample.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[And so Capa was there, waiting. When he was given the sample, he inspected it as best he could, but he could find nothing out of the ordinary. It was certainly effective, but it wouldn't kill her.]

It looks fine to me. [He turned on the water of the sink.]

[And he's watching doop doop, then, when it's all finished:]

Good. I'm glad it passed the inspection. [He pockets the now-empty vial that had contained the small sample of Somnacin.] Is there anything else, Dr. Capa? Any questions?

Edited 2010-10-24 05:07 (UTC)

Capa's fine. You don't have to put the Dr. in front of it. [He really didn't like it. It didn't make him feel important. It just made him feel like he was living up to something he didn't deserve.]

But yes. I have plenty of questions. First...why are you doing this for her? You don't strike me as the type for any kind of "guided meditation."

[He shrugs.] Sorry, some people prefer it.

[He arches an eyebrow.] Why don't I seem the type? [He moves over to some equipment and looks at it, curiously. He hadn't spent much time in the lab before.] I know how important memories are to people. [And what happens when they become obsessed with them.] Hayley asked me for advice, and I pointed her to every book I could before offering this solution. It may sound a little new age, but it's an effective method.

[The physicist highly doubted that. He sat back at his desk, leaning back against it so he could watch Arthur.]

Would you mind walking me through the process?

It's simple. [And Arthur's not going to tell you the whole truth unless he trusts you.] She's administered the sedative and enters into a state of dreaming. I guide her through a scenario that's been designed to help trigger the memories. [He turns to look at Capa, his expression betraying nothing.] You know, "you see a building, go into it," that kind of thing. Her subconscious supplies the rest. The drug should help her achieve greater recall upon waking up.

[This is pretty much the truth-- the only thing Arthur's leaving out is "and I go into the dream with her," because he doesn't know if he can trust Capa not to tell her, and the second Hayley knows, this thing's pretty much blown. She would be too guarded if she knew the reality of extraction.]

[Capa nodded. It still sounded new age, but he wasn't going to judge. The man genuinely believed that what he was going to do was going to work. And it didn't sound malicious in any way.]

That makes sense. So...what is my role in all of this?

I need somebody to monitor the process-- particularly, the sedative doses-- and to keep an eye on things once we get started. I'll be too busy working through the dream with her to be of much use. So, any potential setbacks will need to be handled by a third party.

[He pauses, then goes for a question of his own.]

And speaking of potential setbacks... What's Hayley's relationship with Crane? [He's not 100% sure what it is yet, and he wants to make sure that whatever happens, none of the "mad scientists" on the Barge hears about it.]

Edited 2010-10-24 15:38 (UTC)

[Capa nodded. He could handle that much. He was just about to turn around again when Arthur asked that question.]

Crane? I never understood it. She doesn't trust him, I know that. Most of the time they met, she wanted me present. [He tilted his head to the side.]

Why do you ask? [People are so weird.]

Because I don't trust him. And if they're close, then I want to be sure that he doesn't find out about this. [He fixes Capa with a serious look.] I haven't had any personal dealings with him, but I've read about his, shall we say... inventiveness, when it comes to chemicals.

[Oh Capa could understand that.] Well, I'm his temporary warden now. I've already taken a vial of...something off of him. And you can be sure that I'll be keeping a close eye on him. I don't trust him, either.

[He hesitated for a moment and ran his fingers through his hair.]

But I trust Hayley to know when and how to keep secrets.

[Arthur nods.] Good. [After a slight pause, he decides to follow up with another question. He knows he'll have to explain to Capa that he'll be entering the dream with Hayley, eventually (and he'd rather do it sooner rather than the day of the extraction), and he wants to get a better feel for the man before he does.] What do you really think about all of this? The... memory work she's doing. The guided meditation. [It takes some willpower not to say that last part sardonically. Shared dreaming is so far from meditation.]

[Capa spreads his arms out a bit.]

I'm a physicist. I work with numbers, with stars and hard facts. I'm not exactly the right guy to be asking about that. [He wasn't going to lie to him, after all.]

I didn't believe that Crane could do anything and I don't believe you can. But I also believe you're less harmful.

I appreciate the honesty. [And it's true; he does. Had Capa lied to him with niceties, Arthur would feel less inclined to open up to him with the true details of the extraction process later.] So why don't you try to talk her out of it?

[Capa actually laughed at that.] She is still a kid. If I tell her not to do something, she'll just go and do it again, usually without telling me. I'd rather be there to help her, than find out later that she went to do something reckless on her own.

Right. [Arthur laughed a little, himself, and rubbed the back of his neck.] I don't know if you've noticed, Capa, but I'm not really good with kids.

[MINDY WAS A TESTAMENT TO THAT.]

How did the two of you become friends? [A little more insight, after all, would help him gauge what he could and couldn't tell Capa about the extraction.]

I have...heard. [He didn't want to say what he had heard, because it was only what one could find with a superficial glance over the networks and what could be heard in the hallways. His knowledge wasn't as extensive as it should be...but it would do.]

Hayley offered to show me around when I first arrived. She expressed an interest in my work and so, when I started working in the lab, she requested to be my assistant. I agreed. [Friendships were like business agreements to him. Mostly because he didn't know how to form an emotional attachment to that person.]

[Good, Arthur didn't want anybody dwelling on that. So, moving right along.]

Nice and straightforward. [And not too different from how he became acquainted with her. Now, time for the real subject:] Why don't you believe I can help her? Because it's so unscientific?

[Capa thought about how best to answer that and it took him a good ten seconds to get the words right in his mind before he said them.]

I believe there's science behind it. But there's no hard science to back that up. [Again, he shrugged.] Where's the math in it all? [Because obviously math had to be involved in any kind of science that was done.]

[Arthur smiled in a private sort of way.] There's math involved. [Timing the dream, figuring out how to coordinate the kicks, getting the musical cues just right. Miscalculate even by a second, and you could miss the kick, be stuck in a dream level until the sedative wore off.] The entire process was developed by scientists, originally. The simplified summary just makes the entire thing easier to comprehend.

I'm not really a stranger to complicated explanations. [He was assuming that Arthur would tell him more, as now he had the scientist's full attention.]

But...um...now I'm interested.

It's not really meditation. Where I'm from... [He glanced at the door quickly, then back to Capa as he reached into his jacket to pull something from one of his pockets.] the technology was developed to allow people to enter into each other's dreams. With the drug that you tested, administered through this. [And he pulls out a SMALL BOOKLET, which he offered to Capa.] You'll want to familiarize yourself with the instructions. [Especially because Arthur won't leave the book around for him.]

So, what's the point of shared dreaming? When you're asleep, your defenses are lowered-- mentally, I mean. [Physically, it went without saying.] Not only that, but the absence of any external distractions helps your mind process information faster. [He gave Capa a pointed look.] Have you ever woken up from a dream that seemed to stretch for days?

[After a pause.] There's this... almost seamless integration of conscious and unconscious thought. You know that dreams are strange, impossible, but when you're asleep, it feels real. And when you share a dream, that reality becomes more... vivid. And an experienced Dreamer-- the intruder, as it were-- can use that to create buildings, cities, worlds in somebody else's mind. Meanwhile, the Subject fills that world with the details from their subconscious. People, information... memories.

Originally, the military pushed the development of this technology. It became a training tool for soldiers. Wartime scenarios, conducted in dreams, to get them to kill each other. After all, [He shrugged.] when you die in a dream, you wake up. No risk, no mess.

[It was a little frustrating, having to explain this to what felt like so many people. Without any other extractors on board, he had to rely on the abilities of his shipmates and hope that they weren't the type to spread the word around if he wanted to get anything done with dreams.]

Edited 2010-10-26 04:40 (UTC)

[After taking the booklet, Capa held it close, waiting for this explanation of shared dreaming. The rhetorical question stayed just as it was- unanswered- as the answer itself wouldn't have done anything for what Arthur was trying to prove. Capa rarely slept and, when he did, he dreamed of the surface of the sun and woke up in a screaming fit. So no, he couldn't remember the last time he had a dream that seemed to go for days.]

And so you want to get in Hayley's mind, using this method of...[he searched for the phrase Arthur used] shared dreaming and use her subconscious to take out those memories she's repressed?

Sorry...that sounds...dangerous. And the military doesn't exactly have the best reputation for making things that are safely applicable to civilian settings.

Basically. The process I outlined to her is true-- I only left out the part where I'll be in the dream with her. I'm telling you because, well. It would've been obvious the second I put the IV in myself. Better to get the explanation out of the way now than later.

[Arthur shook his head.] Dream sharing's long been out of the hands of the military. Mostly, its uses are academic these days. [And criminal, but he wasn't going to get into that.] It's safe, it's been tested, and it gets results. The only dangers are if Hayley doesn't like what she sees-- but that's a risk I assume she's willing to take-- or if her subconscious keys into my presence and decides to eject me from the dream-- violently. It's not exactly subtle when it senses an intruder.

Even then, the only danger is that I die in the dream. [He made a slightly amused face, his mouth quirking at its corners.] Not a... pleasant end, but I'll get over it. [He didn't outright say it, but it was pretty obvious he'd been killed in dreams before. It was troublesome at first, and it was always a little irksome when it happened, but Arthur was a professional. It was part of the job.] But her subconscious won't go after her, even if she's with me.

[He paused a little, for that to sink in, then continued.]

And if she thinks of me as just another projection of her subconscious, her subconscious is more likely to accept me. And less likely to tear me to pieces. [HENCE, the lying about meditation, but he trusted Capa to be intelligent enough to put that together.]

[Capa was grasping this little by little. He didn't exactly like what he was hearing, but there seemed to be a science behind it, which he could respect. But the one thing that seemed to ease his mind the most was the fact that Arthur spoke of it like he had done it many, many times before. He was professional, concise and that kind of experience he was giving off was reassuring. So, which Capa might not understand it all, he trusted that Arthur did. And that was very important.]

I'm assuming you're telling me this now, rather than before, so that I won't tell Hayley about it? Because she can't know? [He didn't yet quite get that Hayley had to be ignorant for it to work, but he was starting to figure that if Arthur had lied to her about it, or at least kept part of it quiet, that Capa should follow that example.]

.009 | Voice.

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