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[voice] (cw: suicide, gore)
[The idea of truly seeing things from another person’s perspective has lost its novelty. L is tired, now, of living the lives and feeling the pain of people who have found themselves in bad situations. The fact that it gives him information is the upside, and with no one around to confirm that these newest insights are accurate, he’s not even sure it counts as that.
But he remembers that River Tam had been aware of the existence of the journals in the guards’ cabin before anyone had found them. Had something like this happened to her before it happened to anyone else?]
I’ve had another of those experiences that seem to involve members of the former crew of the Tranquility. To begin with, I’d be interested in knowing if anyone else saw the same thing, and if not, what they saw.
In terms of point of view, it was a man named Stephen who worked in the science department and was romantically interested in a woman named Arunima Biswas. They worked late nights together, and they sometimes had ethical debates about the work they were doing. She was troubled by it, while he wasn’t, and he thought that her behavior had been a little weird lately.
On the night this happened, she released some experimental subjects from a laboratory. She said that she had taken her job to participate in colonization, and she wouldn’t see the subjects--numbers, they called them, but they were human--tortured any longer.
They called them "number fours," but they were what we know as manticores.
Biswas seemed to understand that she probably wouldn’t survive the release. Stephen saw her smile before she was attacked, and he believed that the test subjects were eating her. He had shot a few, but he wasn’t able to kill all of them. In the end, he tried to get out, but he was also attacked, and shot himself.
[He pauses here. The sensation of pain when Stephen was attacked had been vivid, and if he's right in his suspicions, at least a few other people have also experienced all of it.]
It’s interesting: everything related the crew seems to involve somebody's violent death. One common thread, apart from the obvious, the location, was that both involved the idea of oil under the facial tissue, jaws that were unreasonably wide.
The journals we found several months ago included a reference to “numbers”--”numbers go out, numbers come back”--and the idea that it was “fucked up.” The room that those people seemed to be guarding had beds equipped with restraints, blood-stained blankets… someone had carved “Please end it” on the wall. It's been established that those were probably our experimental subjects.
Matine had seen bodies that had been eaten--if I were going to make a guess, I’d say that Arunima and Stephen might have been some of the bodies that she saw, and this might have been where it started. But it’s hard to determine the exact sequence without more information, and so much of it seemed to conflict last time… a matter of perspective.
Did anyone else experience this? Have I left out anything important?
It's hard to say how it ties in with anything else past what we know, but it's worth keeping as accurate a record as possible.
[EDITED @ 3:30 AM EST ON 11/22 TO ADD: Since this was posted, the mods have sent out a confirmation that the creatures Stephen saw were indeed manticores. The writeup of Stephen's memory was a little more ambiguous about what they were. L's narrative has been updated to reflect this. Any "but what about the manticores?" in threads up to that point is moot.]
But he remembers that River Tam had been aware of the existence of the journals in the guards’ cabin before anyone had found them. Had something like this happened to her before it happened to anyone else?]
I’ve had another of those experiences that seem to involve members of the former crew of the Tranquility. To begin with, I’d be interested in knowing if anyone else saw the same thing, and if not, what they saw.
In terms of point of view, it was a man named Stephen who worked in the science department and was romantically interested in a woman named Arunima Biswas. They worked late nights together, and they sometimes had ethical debates about the work they were doing. She was troubled by it, while he wasn’t, and he thought that her behavior had been a little weird lately.
On the night this happened, she released some experimental subjects from a laboratory. She said that she had taken her job to participate in colonization, and she wouldn’t see the subjects--numbers, they called them, but they were human--tortured any longer.
They called them "number fours," but they were what we know as manticores.
Biswas seemed to understand that she probably wouldn’t survive the release. Stephen saw her smile before she was attacked, and he believed that the test subjects were eating her. He had shot a few, but he wasn’t able to kill all of them. In the end, he tried to get out, but he was also attacked, and shot himself.
[He pauses here. The sensation of pain when Stephen was attacked had been vivid, and if he's right in his suspicions, at least a few other people have also experienced all of it.]
It’s interesting: everything related the crew seems to involve somebody's violent death. One common thread, apart from the obvious, the location, was that both involved the idea of oil under the facial tissue, jaws that were unreasonably wide.
The journals we found several months ago included a reference to “numbers”--”numbers go out, numbers come back”--and the idea that it was “fucked up.” The room that those people seemed to be guarding had beds equipped with restraints, blood-stained blankets… someone had carved “Please end it” on the wall. It's been established that those were probably our experimental subjects.
Matine had seen bodies that had been eaten--if I were going to make a guess, I’d say that Arunima and Stephen might have been some of the bodies that she saw, and this might have been where it started. But it’s hard to determine the exact sequence without more information, and so much of it seemed to conflict last time… a matter of perspective.
Did anyone else experience this? Have I left out anything important?
It's hard to say how it ties in with anything else past what we know, but it's worth keeping as accurate a record as possible.
[EDITED @ 3:30 AM EST ON 11/22 TO ADD: Since this was posted, the mods have sent out a confirmation that the creatures Stephen saw were indeed manticores. The writeup of Stephen's memory was a little more ambiguous about what they were. L's narrative has been updated to reflect this. Any "but what about the manticores?" in threads up to that point is moot.]
voice;
[voice forever!]
[The pain is gone now... there won't even be a mark that corresponds with it. But he still feels shaken, as if he's woken up from a vivid nightmare.]
Was there any indication of what particular pressure they were under?
[voice forever!]
[ It would take Nathan to fixate on the political side of it. ]
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[A pause, and then he comes back with,]
... Betelgeuse?
[...? Something frightening, he supposes.]
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[ Oh right. ]
Not the star. The guy, you know? Tim Burton. Beetlejuice, beetlejuice, beetlejuice. You can invoke him just by saying his name out loud. It brought the temperature in the place down a few degrees.
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[He saw about half an hour of it once, falling asleep exhausted in a hotel room when he was fourteen. It had been loud, colorful--irritating. But also the work of thirty seconds to find out about it if he needed to, at home.]
We could be. We don't know enough about her, or about the therapist, for that matter. If anyone has figured out yet who she killed, or why, I haven't noticed it.
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They were in a hurry, though. That's clear.
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[The sarcasm dips into his voice with those three words.]
They might intensify, or become more frequent, or someone might experience the point of view of one of the "numbers." I can't shake the idea that this is all useful to know, although past the similarities with the manticores and the obvious question of location, I'm not sure how it ties in with our current situation. If you believed in that kind of thing, it's like we're being haunted.
[But he doesn't believe in that kind of thing.]
What made it clear that they were in a hurry? Only the idea of political pressure?
[Unethical science was bad enough, but a rush job could easily make things much worse.]
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[ It's clear from his tone he'd rather they were done. He's tired of being in other people's heads. ]
Da Costa said they couldn't afford to waste time, and if they did, that they'd have to find some way to pay back the prime minister. Thus the--yeah. Make sense?
no subject
Da Costa... Stephen thought that DaCosta was his competition for Arunima's attentions. Was what you saw from his [a brief pause; there was nothing to indicate that Da Costa was a man so far] or her point of view?
no subject
There wasn't much flirting going on in my memory, that said.
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What else happened? The more we can document these narratives in a concrete, detailed way, the more useful the information will be in the future. Any further detail about the "oil under the skin," for example?
[He hesitates there.]
I'd rather not lead you with questions, I'd rather just let you talk.
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I didn't see anything weird with anyone's skin. They had the...subjects tied down. The doctors had shared that process themselves. On gurneys. They were talking about how they'd had problems with twos and threes, and fours seemed to be holding. Couldn't help but be reminded about our twos and threes, come to think of it.
I remember Stephen kicked the gurney and set the thing off screaming. And they talked about it being a beast squad, so the idea of this being a warship - of sorts - doesn't seem unreasonable, as far as guesses go. The pirates said as much.
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What you're saying fits with what I saw--Stephen had a specific disinterest in the ethical issues involved in that kind of work. He was attracted to Arunima, but that aspect of her personality seemed to annoy him.
What worries me about their numbers and our numbers are the nanites, as we discussed before. What Ilona Matine saw almost seemed to be an echo of what Stephen saw... but that can't be possible. There was no indication that she had seen video of the incident, but she had seen bodies that had been eaten, and a group... maybe the guard group, maybe the number fours... had disappeared. Still, the concept of there being oil between the skin and bones remained consistent.
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I guess what Matine saw had at least some basis in fact. I mean, we knew they were around, but...
[ But this confirms what some of them thought from the get-go. ]
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[He sounds serious; maybe slightly disgusted.]
You've been here longer than I have... do you know anything about van Rijn?
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If you're thinking "corrupt government asshole", you're probably right.
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[Ordinarily, he'd be a little bit more amused by her phrasing. "Criminal" also comes to mind... this is criminal on a grand scale. There are ways it's acceptable to use a prisoner in an experiment, but van Rijn's ways aren't among them.
Haste could lead to expedience, but why so much haste?]
I'll see if I can get in touch with Joe, or find his references to van Rijn.
What do you know about the rumors of doppelgangers, an illness among the crew? What was saw of what happened to Corporal Matine suggested that the release of the experimental subjects might quickly have become a larger problem on the ship itself.
The lack of a reliable timeline for all of this is frustrating.
no subject
[ This one, in case L needs it. ]
If Gallagher was still around, then it was before his last transmission.
[ Carolyn mulls over this for a moment. ]
The prisoners got out and were probably insane from the experiments. I wouldn't doubt that they were deprived food and the animal part of their DNA pointed them right toward everyone else on the ship. Keep to populated areas because you're less likely to be picked off. If anyone's acting strangely, call security in case they're not fully human anymore and are about to try to eat you. But it shouldn't affect the entire crew, something like that wouldn't spread like an illness...
But Matine was seeing things, and other people probably were too. Mass hysteria? Or something else?
[ Somewhere in the shuttle bay, she's pacing. ]
"But if anyone finds this, somehow, you've got to know that it wasn't our fault."
no subject
We also don't know whether or not the stasis fluid was contaminated--whether or not it still is, or whether it's exactly what it was intended to be from the beginning, whatever that means.
All of that aside, we can safely call what Matine saw an "impostor." There was no way her mother could have been there.
If not their fault, whose? Just "one of those things that happen?"
[Sarcasm, there. Things like this don't just happen; they're the result of a series of choices.]
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["Our" isn't right; Strela was before his time, and he had chosen not to visit the Cyllene. Yet elements of each event still bother him. And sometimes he feels adrift in this new reality: it requires that he admit theories that would be otherwise implausible, close to magical.
He wonders if they'll ever stop at another station again.]
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All three places were once government-owned and government-run. I wouldn't call that coincidental. That sounds more like a pattern.