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I haven't determined why yet [a neutral area? the psychological presentation of a personal power base?], but Shepard seems intent on using her own area for this comm work, so you'll have to do without me for a few days. Between you and Organa and Robin, I doubt you'll have problems, but I'll drop in from time to time to see if anything is outstanding. I should be around more after they lose their connections.

[That's bound to happen, right? He continues in a resigned tone,]

In the meantime, you'll hear from me if anything interesting happens.

Edited 2014-06-16 07:42 (UTC)

I think both of us have a fair idea as to why. That said of all the lunatics to want to wander off out there I trust Shepard most. Yes, she's too engaged to linear reality, as proven by her inability to grasp the concept of corridors being able to move around and maps being useless, and yes, no amount of telling her that wandering about in the hallways is what it wants has slowed her down. But I like that she's willing to take the risk. We need that. I just wish she'd see cautionary tales for what they are rather than just another challenge to her ability to solve this place. We know what we're talking about; we can help if she lets us.

[HEY, Nathan, he is also engaged to linear reality! Mostly. But their linear reality now includes mobile corridors and useless maps.]

Engaged to a concept of reality that isn't very useful here. Well, either she'll learn from the evidence, or if things change, we'll learn something new.

I'm not sure about how much we can really help. The assumption that we can't -- that's excessive egoism. But I have the impression that we run into walls until someone decides it's time for us to be summoned to learn something new.

[Somewhere in all of this is that he doesn't mind people taking the risk; it's that he would rather they were doing it under his direction. But they might as well be -- his access to information is more or less the same, his own risk is almost nonexistent, and someone on a team out in the corridors is probably better placed to make their own decisions on the ground than someone in a centralized command station would be.]

Well see, that's exactly it. I really like the people who you can tell 'The walls will rearrange themselves' and they don't put their necks on the line to prove it themselves. The answers always seem to come to us anyway.

But people don't like to sit still, I get that. Maybe in that way it's helping--giving those people the diversions they need just to get by up here. God knows when we went to bridge I was feeling the same way.

I don't know, Ryuzaki. I'm with it but I'm not. The ship doesn't seem to want them to die, otherwise it'd be easy for it to keep them out there, but...

[ But he can't shake the feeling that something's going to go wrong, block off their escape, shut a door in their face, traumatize and torture them, like it did when they tried to take the bridge. ]

Or, whatever intelligence organizes all of this, letting them die that way would be a waste. If that happens, it doesn't achieve its goal.

So what's its goal? That always seems to be the primary question. Are we clear on what it really wants? It doesn't necessarily want to keep everyone alive -- [he doesn't mention Shale or Chase here] -- but does it want the deaths that occur to happen via specific means?

Is it running tests?

[And how many people have reached a moment when they're willing to go a little bit further for answers -- willing to put themselves on the line more than they have in the past, or in a while? From that point of view, maybe Shepard had arrived in that state: bored, stagnating, sick of being toyed with. L had been in that mood when Nathan had tried to seize the Bridge, but not enough to want to go with him.]

Edited 2014-06-20 09:30 (UTC)

That could be it. I considered the possibility that we just aren't ready yet, aren't working out the way it wants. Stark's reboot set me off in that direction. You remember what Smiley said before? We're not there yet--and now we're there, we've been there all along? Doesn't make a whole lot of sense, does it, apart from maybe in the context of testing.

[ But he pauses, considering. ] I also think that it's possible the people who died knew too much; knew something they shouldn't have. That's another reason why mysterious entities might make people dead. The Pirates, Hotspur, Chase, the demons--and that's only the ones we know about.

So their dying wasn't the point. Hunting for answers--is that the point? Or is it our suffering?

Answers to what? What does it want to know?

[That's a hypothetical question.]

We still haven't figured out -- why us? Is that an accident, or were we selected? Not everyone is suffering, not always, but it's not as if we haven't had opportunities to be miserable.

The timelines that we were taken from are interesting, but they ultimately seem to be irrelevant. If our hypothetical motivating factor wanted to learn from history, this is an unnecessarily complicated way of doing it. That can't be the reason.

How many people from the lists are left, without a... "reboot"? You, Robb Stark... Riddick?... anyone else? We still don't know who T is.

No--we're the ones looking for answers, as you said. It already knows. But you pose very good questions as always: why us? And you're right, if misery or insanity were the answer, it's had its opportunities to finish its experiment already. There must be something else.

There's something we haven't done yet. Maybe it's kill Ward. Maybe we have to go mad enough to destroy the Jump drive ourselves. Maybe someone has to become Captain, like Ward did before. The ship didn't accept him, but it might accept someone else. We still have options, things that we haven't tried yet.

Should we talk in terms of the ship not "accepting" him, or is it that Smiley had some kind of specific personal resentment for him? I don't think it's insignificant that Ward was carrying on with Gallagher's wife.

[That kind of thing is never insignificant, Nathan.]

Or that we were shown it. I don't think that was insignificant at all. People have suggested Gallagher being Smiley before; what we have to decide is if there's anything Gallagher wouldn't have shown us in all that we saw, and if we're indeed dealing with just one entity playing both sides to achieve the same goal, or two entities resisting against each other, wresting for control.

Or two manifestations of the same thing.

We need to see more of Gallagher. When we're "allowed" to [his sarcasm is very obvious there, breaking through his more typical flat statements], and presuming that any of what we've seen is true. Different versions of some of it have gone out.

Two manifestations, that's an unsettling thought. At war against itself...? If the ship somehow assimilated Gallagher, he may not have been the only one.

It would explain a lot of things. A schizophrenic time bending ship altering omnipotent being with a boner on to make our lives difficult. I mean, we're considering all the options, right? Can't rule out anything.

Or it can have assimilated all of us, and living out these lives is some sort of horrible ghost-in-the-machine thing we got going. But like I always say, I could theorize forever, and call all the options 'based in reality.' What's real, though? Whole other question.

It's a little too philosophical to be useful. I've been starting with the premise that I'm real -- what I can experience. [He sounds like he's talking around a bite of something, because he is.] It's subjective, not empirical, but it's the best I can do for now.

That said, if we never leave the gravcouches, or something like them, it's a moot point. Free will would be more of an illusion than it already is; if those are the real circumstances, the things that happen to us seem to matter because we seem to experience them, and their consequences, but we're not really doing anything except existing.

That's all a little too ontological for me. On top of that... [Ah, listen, Nathan, he's swallowed whatever he was chewing!]... if we made decisions on that assumption and then turned out to be wrong, we'd be screwed. Logically, there's no point to assuming we're dreaming our lives away in a sophisticated bathtub, or not really here at all. Even if it turns out to be true.

[Cheery early-morning conversations with L.]

Edited 2014-07-30 07:41 (UTC)

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[voice] (morning of the 15th)

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