ArchivedLogs:Not Okay

Not Okay
Dramatis Personae Bruce, Hive, Hulk
In Absentia	2015-12-23 << {What do any of us want?} >>
Location <NYC> Bruce's Lab - Stark Tower - Midtown East
This capacious room contains gleaming expanses of lab bench framed with a backdrop of work stations, fume hoods, spectrometers, centrifuges, and other, more arcane research equipment. Also, an extremely advanced coffee machine that the unobservant might easily mistake for research equipment. Holographic interfaces hover over some of the computer terminals, displaying charts and spreadsheets and diagrams. A reinforced isolation chamber occupies one corner, its softly lit interior--visible through a window that stretches across one entire wall--contains a folding cot. The isolation chamber has for some time housed a bloated, zombie, its decomposition significantly slowed by refrigeration. Just this week, it has gained a much less waterlogged roommate. Neither has made any use of the admittedly limited amenities in the chamber. They just mill around, eyes and hands searching the control panels (locked down for now) and the window into the rest of the lab. Bruce sits at a workstation, slurping coffee from a glass mug. He wears a gray button-up shirt and black trousers under a rumpled white lab coat. The holographic display wrapped around him shows several charts visualizing neurotransmitter levels over time, but he does not appear to be looking at any of them right now. His glasses lie on the table before him, his free hand tangled in his wavy black hair as if he would just as soon rip some of it out for sheer frustration. << {What does that tell you? About (them/us)?} >> The voice that enters Bruce's mind does so in a rasp, a rattle, a creaking dissonance of many voices groaning over each other in an oddly /dead/ Quebecois French. The pronoun is ambiguous, a sense of /self/ in the identification even as there is a feeling of /that/, the zombies in the isolation chamber briefly surfacing in Bruce's thoughts. << {Does it tell you? How (they/we) feel?} >> Bruce sits bolt upright, his eyes wide and searching the displays before him as though they would tell him whence the voices come. Fear lances through him, quick and bright, a tightening in his chest. Something stirs in a still place deep within his mind, a place he can never see himself, though he knows who dwells there. << No. We're okay. You don't need to...we're okay, >> he tells the Hulk this, though well he knows his alter ego cannot hear the thoughts. Through all of this he never completely stops processing the information from the charts. << ...utterly novel neurochemistry. >> This thought spins through a dizzy whirl of complex molecular models. << Sample size inadequate to establish developmental curve. Current extrapolations speculative. >> Replacing his glasses with shaking hands, Bruce swallows once, hard. << Hive, >> he thinks this quite deliberately, in contrast to the soft background murmur of his internal monologue. << {It tells me their capacity of cognition grows.} >> His French, inwardly as outwardly, also carries a Canadian accent. << {It does not tell me how they think or feel. Only that they can. I am at a loss to actually communicate with them.} >> << {/You're/ okay.} >> This comes simultaneously with a secondary sense of acknowledgment; it's wordless, formless, but it flutters against that identified name, brushes up against it, accepts it as their own. << {But (they/we)...} >> Hive trails off, a soft mental touch drifting through Bruce's thoughts, jostled against the whirl of models and rapid flow of data. << {If you could communicate with (us/them). What would you say?} >> Bruce rises and walks up to the window that looks in on the isolation chamber. He stares at the zombies inside, his own revulsion at their appearance a distant and undramatic footnote to the immense amount of information he has accumulated on them. << {It would depend on their capacity for abstract thought.} >> Somewhere behind all the data and beyond all his fears and misgivings, a nagging suspicion that the minds of the undead may resemble those of the living so little as to make actual cooperation difficult. He lifts both hands to massage the tight knots of muscle at his temples. << {Start with what they want. Work toward how we can get there without anyone getting eaten or brained. } >> << {What do any of us want?} >> The rattling is lessening, in Hive's voices. When he speaks again his voice is just a soft echoing whisper, gentle in its sigh through Bruce's mind. << {Why do you want it? The cure is there. You could stop. The patrols would take care of the rest.} >> << {An existence free from suffering.} >> Bruce is frowning, but not at the zombies or even at Hive's questions--at least not the question, per se. << {You're them. Or you were them. Then you can...serve as an intermediary? A translator? } >> He closes his eyes, giving them some rest from the ache of too much reading. One hand lifts to rest on the thick transparent composite of the window. << {They are sentient beings whose lives chance has place into my hands. My expertise on the disease which produced them gives me leverage to influence their fate, and that of others like them. It would be wrong to stand aside and do nothing.} >> He shakes his head, opens his eyes again. Far more quietly, beneath the stream of his clear, deliberate thoughts, is a whisper: << Men like me /need/ vows and codes of ethics. >> << {Not even sure the world is ready to allow them an existence.} >> There's a twinge of discomfort in Hive's words, twitching and guilty. << {We --} >> The guilt thickens. << {Were them.} >> His mental presence twists and curls within Bruce's mind, pulling back -- away from the other man's answer, recoiling as if injured. But, quiet: << {Yes. Yes, yes. It would be wrong. But when will you know. What the right thing...} >> This trails off, a sudden mental silence following. Bruce shakes his head. << {The world is not ready.} >> Hive's discomfort and guilt confuses him. He searches the other man's prescence in his mind, methodical but inexpert in navigating mental spaces. The quiet place in him rumbles again, the Hulk straining for consciousness now in response to /Hive's/ distress rather than Bruce's. << {I'm not certain, but I'd know a sight better if I can communicate with them. You...you are...} >> A different voice completes his thought, << HURTING. WHY HURTING? HULK MAKE IT STOP. >> Bruce grits his teeth, leaning forward against the isolation chamber window and removing his glasses, bracing for the change even before it begins. The mental presence has retreated deeper into Bruce's mind, a quiet background current rippling softly, fluid and churning underneath his more methodical thoughts. There is, at first, only further silence when Bruce is thinking, no answer given -- at least not until the second voice speaks up. Then there's a greater stirring, a flutter that stirs more awake. Coils out around Bruce and Hulk both with a whisper of soothing, the psionic equivalent of a shushing, << (there, there) >> Kind of reflexive. Kind of on autopilot. More deliberately: << {That's complicated. Not sure you can stop it. Appreciate the thought, though. Thank you.} >> The change does not come, and Bruce finally stops tensing. He looks down at the glasses in his hand, quite puzzled but even more relieved. "{I'm sorry,}" this comes out aloud, in soft Quebecois French, "{I didn't mean to pressure you to...to rejoin with them. I have no concept of how difficult that would be, or how distressing. But you /can/ tell me more about how they think, and I would appreciate your assistance there.}" He studies the two zombies inside the chamber. "{If you are willing, and when you are able.}" Meanwhile, the Hulk has subsided somewhat, though not into unconsciousness. << But...Hulk STRONG, >> this comes more as an /offer/ than insistence. Their mental presence envelops Hive's, a bright immensity of uncomplicated love. << {It might be as distressing for them.} >> It takes a while for this admission to come, from Hive, the words dropped slow and heavy into the back of Bruce's mind. << We know their minds. But they feel what we feel as well. >> << -- oh. >> At the feeling from Hulk, though, his presence in the others' minds shivering suddenly and expanding. Relaxing outward to nestle into that feeling, a quaking knot of stress and guilt and sick worry -- not quite uncoiling so much as burying itself within the enveloping feel. << {I -- don't think. You can smash this.} >>