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[Murphy isn't completely nonobservant. He's seen the network posts and he has a feeling that this Matine he just saw isn't a current -- living -- passenger on this ship. Which is why he makes sure to jot down the memory the best he can before he clicks the network on.]

"For those of you who weren't there, a few months back our communicators went haywire. Some kinda lockdown alert from the previous captain, Gallagher. I wrote down a transcript of the message in case it ever came into play later. He talked 'bout imposters on the ship.

"Now I think I know what he meant. I've seen it, Matine and Schue..."

[Christ, that face is still burned into his brain.]

"Dunno what the cause of it is, but I have a few ideas. One is that it could've been some kind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers that infected some of the previous crew. That would be the obvious choice.

"The other... This is a long shot, but how safe do we know the stasis pods are? How the jumps themselves might be changin' us, for that matter...? So far we've had mass sickness, hallucinations, and comas -- and now this... whatever the hell this is that's gettin' in our heads?

"Or maybe it's all of the above, includin' the Body Snatchers. Hate to sound paranoid, but maybe somebody's tryin' to warn us."

[About what, he's not sure yet. History trying to repeat itself, maybe -- and that's what bothers him the most.]

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I was thinking along similar lines. But there are people who had memories of Matine shooting them, and they thought she was the crazy one.

Maybe they were all crazy.

Maybe they were. Matine didn't think along the lines like a sane person, either. I remember seein' her go after her mother after she shot Shue down -- except that her mother was home, dead and buried.

Sound familiar?

[The masks definitely come to mind.]

She dropped her gun, too. [ WHO DROPS THEIR GUN ]

Yeah, it does.

Not somethin' I'd do in the middle of a hostile takeover, honestly.

[CRAZY PEOPLE ONLY DROP THEIR GUN unless you're Murphy and you need to pick up another weapon then you drop your gun- shut up, it's Silent Hill logic.]

And that was 'bout a year ago...

Exactly. Especially if I've been trained how to respond in hostile situations.

[ Ugh this all makes her head hurt. ]

So what d'you make of it? Everybody just... went crazy?

["Are we next?" were going to be his next words, but Murphy pipes up.]

I don't know. Something happened. Gallagher seemed to think it was related to the jump.

I wanna say that I agree with him, but there's still shit 'bout this place we don't know...

Make that a lot of shit.

Well, we know that if you don't make a jump -- you're screwed. You do make a jump -- there's a possibility that you're still screwed.

Doesn't leave us with a lot of options, does it?

No maps, not enough fuel to get anywhere in a shuttle even if we had maps, no way of altering the course of the Tranquility itself, and all the places and people we do run into are fucked up.

I guess we're stuck playing detective.

The only places we have ever stopped at hadn't been better alternatives, either.

So... yeah, guess we are. Not a very good detective, though.

Yeah, me neither. But maybe we'll pull something out of our asses.

Now that's somethin' I'm pretty good at.

No matter what anyone says, that's all we're doing right now anyway.

Well... [He scoffs.] Can't offer any more great Pearls of Wisdom than that.

[ She snorts. ] You're welcome, I guess.

There is almost indubitably some sort of mental alteration that has occurred to all of us; we are all, after all, speaking the same language. Inducing madness in us is hardly outside of the realm of possibility.

[He sounds pretty...calm about that.]

Shit, that kinda thing's already happened with the masks awhile back. Who knows if some of us are still affected by that?

Quite so. It's thoroughly possible.

Well. It does at least eliminate the possibility of the...body snatchers.

Mn, think I'm more partial to the it's-all-in-your-head theory right now than anything else -- not... that I like it any better.

[Coolly:]

No. It's quite thoroughly unpleasant, particularly when we follow the line of thought to its conclusion.

What, that we're all gonna go crazy and start killin' each other, you mean?

Quite so.

Well, now that we're aware of it, maybe it'll be easier to know what to expect. If I start seein' people turn into bird monsters and eatin' each other, I know I'm the one goin' crazy.

[Assuming he'll be in his right mind to know that he's losing it.]

We don't know that the pods are safe to use. They're certainly a common factor, aside from the ship itself. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that there's some way things can be controlled from the outside [--this has been an element of his going theory for months; too many parts of the ship are aggressively inaccessible--], but then it becomes a question of who's controlling them, and why.

I saw the same thing you and Carolyn Fry saw.

Better question would be where they're bein' controlled, if that's a thing. You die if you don't make it to the pods before it's jump time, so unless there's some safe place...

...

That might explain why that red smile guy is alive and messin' with us... not to mention the other creatures we've found on the ship.

[He pauses.] What d'you make of it?

There might be multiple safe places. We've never had any guarantee that the pods we use are the only pods on the ship. How many bathtubs are there in London or or Paris or Tokyo?

There's certainly room for more here than we've ever been able to discover. Other parts of the ship tend to be defended from us, until they aren't.

[He remembers the way the manticore kept its distance, how it was almost--almost--deferential in contrast to what he had been told was its typical behavior.]

It was obvious that Matine was already frightened, under stress. That in itself, without other pressures, can cause erratic behavior... not usually as erratic as that, though. And it's clear that there were other pressures.

Edited 2013-11-12 01:39 (UTC)

Problem is whether somebody's willin' to gamble on whether that place is gonna be safe by jump time... or whether they're gonna make it through okay. [He remembers Jaye, who hasn't been the same since she had spent a year in complete isolation. Went completely mad from it. Not that Murphy can blame her.]

Rooms like the science department, you mean? Wish there'd a place that could at least shed some light on some things.

[Even during his search through the old crew's journals in the prison area, he still didn't find that many answers.]

Could've been 'cause she was exposed to somethin' that the other guy wasn't. Makes me think of the masks from... a year ago, I think?

I'm starting to feel like it was all a bunch of mass hysteria caused by hallucinations... I mean, I saw through the Schue guy's eyes, judging by what everyone else says. He was pretty human — heard his thoughts and everything, y'know?

Mn, so did I... but with this Matine...

[In retrospect, her whole thought process WAS a little off.]

So everybody went crazy. Now to figure out what caused it so we don't end up goin' that way ourselves.

Edited 2013-11-12 06:39 (UTC)

Guess so. Maybe Matine was hit with it, too. The guy in the memory seemed alright, but I can't say for sure...

Anything that stuck out about her? The way she was acting?

Hard to think that anybody was "alright" after all that.

Other than everything from her seein' dead people to shootin' some guy that she thought looked like a monster...? [He snorts.] I wouldn't know.

The pods themselves are safer than the alternative.

Not unless we find out that there's a safe place somewhere else.

Do you truly think there exists aboard this ship a safe place?

After the shit I've seen, I'm willin' to believe that anything's possible.

[it's just a quick, short message. They've already discussed the memories in person when they received them, and they'll see each other soon. But she still knows he should hear it.]

Murphy...

We're going to be okay.

That's not somethin' you can guarantee in this place.

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