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Feb. 1st, 2007 08:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adiva_calandiaMore AU.
Predictably, it's also doomy.
"What's the point of this?" Charles asks, watching the syringe's plunger descend. The liquid inside is clear; you could almost imagine it wasn't there at all.
"It's just a relaxant," the tech tells him. "Don't be afraid."
"I'm not," he replies automatically, eyes still on the syringe.
"Good." The tech pulls out the needle, presses a wad of cotton against the site, and pushes Charles back onto the couch. "Now just relax and listen."
Charles lays back, staring up at the ceiling, and shuts his eyes against the lights over him. He can hear his own breath, his own heartbeat, the rush of blood in his veins carrying the drug through his body.
Then he can hear the tech's heart, and the observer's, and then things open up like they never have before--
He wakes up in his room, one hand tangled in his hair, pressed against his temples. Dr. Dewey sits in the armchair across from his bed, smoking a cigarette.
"Ah, Charles." He stubs out the cigarette and leans forward. "How're you feeling?"
Charles' eyes dart to him, then fix on the shapes the smoke make as it rises and disippates. "What happened?"
"You probably know more than we do. We started the session, you closed your eyes -- and ten seconds later, you yelled and then you were out cold."
His fingers flex against his head, tight and then loose.
"Do you remember what you heard?" Dewey asks, soft, solicitous. "Or saw?"
A long silence. Charles' eyes are closed now, tight.
"Charles?"
He murmurs something. Dewey leans forward.
"I couldn't hear that, Charles."
"Everything," Charles repeats. "I could hear everything."
Lords of song and lords of stillness,
Lords of worlds both far and near,
Pride is youth's most deadly illness
Shouting over wiser fears.
In so much noise, what can you hear?
They try again, a few days later, with a different formula. Charles stays awake, this time, but not very coherent.
Too much too much there's too much student showing agitation but vitals are good God this better work is still steady but no I don't have those forms a sphere in zero gravity I know that the servants have it I am a monster of moral of the story is don't count your husband's ship comes in tonight I'll be in Amsterdam and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace yourself too much I CAN'T--
The next time, they give him a target to listen for, then give him another drug after the relaxant hits. It takes a few minutes, but -- slowly, not entirely certain -- he tells them what he hears.
There are fundamental problems with this theory, though, unless we assume that Darwinian evolution is taking some truly startling leaps. It's almost enough to make you wonder about a watchmaker.
They continue to adjust the dosages, and Charles' ability to pinpoint a person, a thought, improves. But the drugs linger in his system -- the psychedelics and dissociatives in particular -- and they give him more medication to combat the effects.
Charles has always been quiet, but his silences now sullen and distracted. His eyes flicker away from the people speaking to him, as if he's watching and listening to something completely different.
He is.
Dewey asks him about it once, and Charles looks straight at him, eyes blue and clear for a startling moment.
"You open up all the doors and tear off the locks, pry open the chinks, and then you wonder why they keep falling open. You need more mortar, doctor."
Then his eyes skitter away again, fixing on something just to the left and above Dewey's head.
"Doesn't love a wall, that wants it down . . ."
He runs a hand through his hair. "Everything yells. They don't have to yell, I, I can't hear -- the quiet places made sacred by your feet -- they built a highway there."
Then he falls silent again, eyes dull, and Dewey can't draw him out again.
Dewey's beginning to have his doubts about this project, but he keeps them to himself.
Lords of spirit, lords of time,
Lords of fire, wind, and air,
Broken eyes forget the rhyme
And music that they knew were there.
How much silence can you bear?
He wishes sometimes that Zyll or Madoc or Gaudior or the Mrs. W's would appear in his waking dreams -- someone familiar and comforting and good -- but his mind refuses to fabricate anything so real. And it doesn't make sense, because the nightmarish double vision is real, too, realer than reality, and shouldn't he be able to see something good that's just as real?
But what is real?
He's not always sure anymore.
. . . Damn, I think I broke myself with that one.
Predictably, it's also doomy.
"What's the point of this?" Charles asks, watching the syringe's plunger descend. The liquid inside is clear; you could almost imagine it wasn't there at all.
"It's just a relaxant," the tech tells him. "Don't be afraid."
"I'm not," he replies automatically, eyes still on the syringe.
"Good." The tech pulls out the needle, presses a wad of cotton against the site, and pushes Charles back onto the couch. "Now just relax and listen."
Charles lays back, staring up at the ceiling, and shuts his eyes against the lights over him. He can hear his own breath, his own heartbeat, the rush of blood in his veins carrying the drug through his body.
Then he can hear the tech's heart, and the observer's, and then things open up like they never have before--
He wakes up in his room, one hand tangled in his hair, pressed against his temples. Dr. Dewey sits in the armchair across from his bed, smoking a cigarette.
"Ah, Charles." He stubs out the cigarette and leans forward. "How're you feeling?"
Charles' eyes dart to him, then fix on the shapes the smoke make as it rises and disippates. "What happened?"
"You probably know more than we do. We started the session, you closed your eyes -- and ten seconds later, you yelled and then you were out cold."
His fingers flex against his head, tight and then loose.
"Do you remember what you heard?" Dewey asks, soft, solicitous. "Or saw?"
A long silence. Charles' eyes are closed now, tight.
"Charles?"
He murmurs something. Dewey leans forward.
"I couldn't hear that, Charles."
"Everything," Charles repeats. "I could hear everything."
Lords of worlds both far and near,
Pride is youth's most deadly illness
Shouting over wiser fears.
In so much noise, what can you hear?
They try again, a few days later, with a different formula. Charles stays awake, this time, but not very coherent.
Too much too much there's too much student showing agitation but vitals are good God this better work is still steady but no I don't have those forms a sphere in zero gravity I know that the servants have it I am a monster of moral of the story is don't count your husband's ship comes in tonight I'll be in Amsterdam and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace yourself too much I CAN'T--
The next time, they give him a target to listen for, then give him another drug after the relaxant hits. It takes a few minutes, but -- slowly, not entirely certain -- he tells them what he hears.
There are fundamental problems with this theory, though, unless we assume that Darwinian evolution is taking some truly startling leaps. It's almost enough to make you wonder about a watchmaker.
They continue to adjust the dosages, and Charles' ability to pinpoint a person, a thought, improves. But the drugs linger in his system -- the psychedelics and dissociatives in particular -- and they give him more medication to combat the effects.
Charles has always been quiet, but his silences now sullen and distracted. His eyes flicker away from the people speaking to him, as if he's watching and listening to something completely different.
He is.
Dewey asks him about it once, and Charles looks straight at him, eyes blue and clear for a startling moment.
"You open up all the doors and tear off the locks, pry open the chinks, and then you wonder why they keep falling open. You need more mortar, doctor."
Then his eyes skitter away again, fixing on something just to the left and above Dewey's head.
"Doesn't love a wall, that wants it down . . ."
He runs a hand through his hair. "Everything yells. They don't have to yell, I, I can't hear -- the quiet places made sacred by your feet -- they built a highway there."
Then he falls silent again, eyes dull, and Dewey can't draw him out again.
Dewey's beginning to have his doubts about this project, but he keeps them to himself.
Lords of fire, wind, and air,
Broken eyes forget the rhyme
And music that they knew were there.
How much silence can you bear?
He wishes sometimes that Zyll or Madoc or Gaudior or the Mrs. W's would appear in his waking dreams -- someone familiar and comforting and good -- but his mind refuses to fabricate anything so real. And it doesn't make sense, because the nightmarish double vision is real, too, realer than reality, and shouldn't he be able to see something good that's just as real?
But what is real?
He's not always sure anymore.
. . . Damn, I think I broke myself with that one.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-02-01 05:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-01 06:09 pm (UTC)Adiva?
I'm sorry.
(Yeah, um, other readers? I bunnied her. Mea culpa.)
no subject
Date: 2007-02-01 06:17 pm (UTC)Nope.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-01 07:26 pm (UTC)...also?
I'm rather glad you stopped before you made Charles a killer. I ... ... can't get my brain anywhere near there, and I don't want to.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-01 07:30 pm (UTC)oh god...
So I'm thinking of A Wrinkle in Time, when Charles Wallace got almost entirely swallowed up by It, because he went to It with his mind opened and It assimilated him. If he opened up too far, in the Academy, what would he start taking in?
no subject
Date: 2007-02-01 10:49 pm (UTC)You're right, though; Charles would die before they made him a killer. Oh, his body might still be up and about and following their orders, but do you really think Charles would still be there?
I mean, on Camazotz, that's not Charles. That's IT. Charles is still in there, somewhere, but he's definitely not in control.
BUT. I decided a while back that this Academy isn't training supersoldiers, it's creating spies, information gatherers. Or if it is training assassins, it's not in the same program as Charles. So that doom is moot.
Ish.
Yeah.
(Yeah, part of me wants to play this Charles at defy_ka.)
no subject
Date: 2007-02-02 01:10 am (UTC)what are they trying to do to him, actually? I mean, he'd make a brilliant spy if he were sane, as long as his orders didn't conflict with his moral compass. It would be a bit stupid for someone who wanted superspies to take away Charles's massive powers of synthesis and and analysis, wouldn't it? I suppose the drugs could attempt to destroy that moral compass, but then what next?
no subject
Date: 2007-02-02 04:24 am (UTC)Anyway, if you're building a radio, you don't worry about if the radio can analyze the information it picks up; that's your job. As long as the radio transmits information accurately, it's useful. There's the question, of course, of whether or not Charles can accurately pass on information at this point -- but if your homemade radio breaks past repair, you can toss it out and build a new one, with the knowledge of how it broke last time.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-02 06:23 pm (UTC)Charles Wallace doesn't have to be a spy or an assassin. Imagine you're a secret government agency. You know about the tesseract, but you haven't figured out how to harness it for your own nefarious purposes. You have, within your reach, the son of one of the world's finest physicists. (Dr Murry himself has, unaccountably, refused to take his research on the tesseract in certain directions.) The physicist's son is himself a physicist who understands more about time and space than all but about ten residents of the planet Earth, and has psychic powers that help him comprehend the universe at a very high level.
You also have all sorts of interesting psychoactive drugs, compounds and surgical tricks, and no morals whatsoever.
What are you going to do? You're going to take Charles Wallace Murry and up his precognition and clairvoyance and his already superb ability to visualize five-dimensional space-time. You'll hammer away at his sanity and prevent him from being able to function anywhere outside of a highly controlled government installation. You'll make sure, when you're done, that he can still understand cause and effect as it relates to quantum mechanics, but if he doesn't get cause and effect as it relates to killing people and destroying cities, that's quite all right, isn't it? In short, you, the amoral government agency, are going to use Charles Wallace to design the next doomsday weapon, the one that uses five-dimensional space and tesseract theory to make nuclear bombs look downright cuddly.
...um, sorry?
no subject
Date: 2007-02-02 07:47 pm (UTC)I was going to say something about how Charles' government is actually pretty moral, otherwise Dr. Murry wouldn't have worked for them, and therefore this couldn't happen; but they're not entirely moral, are they, they hid what happened to Dr. Murry, and besides all it would take would be a new administration, and it's been five years since ASTP, so there must be one now . . .
I'm going to go hide under a table now and try not to make connections to Lyra's Magisterium's bomb that can be targeted between worlds.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-02 07:57 pm (UTC)I suppose Charles Wallace could make something like that bomb, but Lyra's universe can't be in the same sheaf with the Kairos/Chronos universe. The presence of a benign God is far too important an underpinning for L'Engle's work to permit a full universe cross with the worldsheaf where Will Parry killed the impostor Authority.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-02 08:05 pm (UTC)Oh, absolutely they're not the same sheaf, although, like the FFverse, there could be resonances. (Charles' universe isn't even the same as our world; I give you Vespugia.) Mostly I'm thinking of that bomb as an example of the scale of things Charles could make.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-01 06:31 pm (UTC)*silently and a lot*
Oh, Charles.
Yes.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-02 05:59 pm (UTC)You have defeated my ability to be coherent.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-05 06:26 pm (UTC)It starts without warning, and then no one can get anywhere near that corner of the library for almost twenty minutes. She's hurling one book after another off the shelves, sobbing and raging incoherently, slamming her hands against the heavy bookcases, against the walls, against the floor.
The first thing is to get the blocks up and the other kids away before the panic spreads; it's only then that Charlie can leave Ted in charge of maintaining the good-mind and approach the corner.
"Zillah," she says quietly, and then has to dodge quickly as a heavy volume flies at her head.
Reddened blue eyes stare wildly at her through strands of tangled dark hair. "They would have the rabbit out of hiding to please the yelping dogs," Zillah snarls, hefting another book. "Do not think I underestimate your great concern."
It's an effort to keep her voice even. "Zillah, whatever it is -- can you tell me? Can we help?"
The glare holds for another moment, then crumples into weeping. "Gone. Gone and -- lords of fire and air and -- no. No. He's gone. They took him -- I am your opus, I am your valuable, the pure gold baby --"
The book falls from her hand and lands in a ruin of spilled pages on the floor, and Charlie closes the distance between them and puts her arms around the sobbing girl.
Zillah's hand fists in Charlie's denim shirt. "So, so, Herr Doktor," she mutters, low and thick. "So, Herr Enemy."
Calming the girl's panic is more important than addressing her own profound unease, Charlie tells herself.
Finding out what triggered this can wait.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-05 06:41 pm (UTC)(PLATH. *incoherents*)
So can I interest you in Academy!Charles-Charlie over in defy_ka at some point?
no subject
Date: 2007-02-05 06:44 pm (UTC)