Difference between revisions of "Temporary Displacement and the Rabbit Hole"

If offices say anything about the hierarchy of those who inhabit them, the occupant of this office is somewhere on the lowest portion of the totem pole. An ancient door has a new name plaque that reads "Dr. Durov" and leads into painted cinder block-walled office. Cramped, the occupant has managed to make good use of every available inch. A nearly antique steelcase desk divides the office into two, with a battered swivel chair behind it. A tea kettle sits on one of the filing drawers on the occupant's side. On the visitor's side of the desk, an aged chair sits opposite the instructor's position, worn from many-a-student's visit. The previous tenant managed squeeze a sofa into the side space on the visitor's side, a beige, musty beast long enough to take a nap on, stained by coffee spills and time, and a chalkboard hangs opposite it. A few potted plants dot the office to bring some much needed color to the space, and a large, glossy poster of Jupiter is taped to the ceiling, in such a position that the office's occupant can lean back and gaze at it. Various pieces of equipment lay scattered around the office in different states of repair.

Today, Aster has to come and visit a university teacher in her office, and has decided to look the part. Specifically, the look of 'slutty co-ed', all the way from the shiny Mary Jane shoes, up the faux-Catholic-schoolgirl outfit and all the way to putting her hair in pigtails. She twirls her finger around one such ponytail as she taps at the doorway. "Doctor Durov? Are you, like, in...?" She just barely manages to remember to put some extra husk in her tone, and mostly fails to be convincing at all.

Emma looks up from her desk, having expected something else. Certainly not Aster, dressed as she is. There's a moment before she recognizes the other; it prompts a long roll of her eyes. "Come in." She says with a weary tone. It's not just her tone that's weary - there are big bags under her eyes, and there's a steaming cup of coffee sitting next to her laptop. "Christ I should really get an unlisted office." She murmurs under her breath.

Aster steps inside and closes the door behind her, sealing them into privacy. She frowns at the weariness evident throughout the other woman, and steps in closer for a better look. "Ugh, are you okay? You look like how Maya used to."

Emma waits a moment, before shaking her head. "Kai slipped into a coma yesterday." She explains, waving a hand dismissively. Then, like realizing the topic probably deserves further elaboration, "She's up and at 'em again. But it was a late night for me." She adds, raising the mug to her lips to sip the sweet, sweet caffine. When she sets the mug back down (repleat with the logo, 'Aperature Science: Doing what we must because we can!') she waves Aster towards the comfortable but worn chair across from her. "It's good you're here. I got something for you."

Aster's eyes go wide. "Oh fuck." Even with Kai being up and at them again, she still looks shaken, and she shakes her head as she settles into the chair. "Oh? That's cool. I have something for you too. Maya said we needed to look into Amane's background, right? Make sure she's not some Technocrat spy."

Emma waves a hand. She's doing that a lot; it must be a substitute for intelligent dialogue. "Side effect of something... I don't know. Witchy. Her words. That and bleeding from the ears." Emma gives a brief shudder, like she doesn't like to think about the situation. The mention of Amane gets her to furrow her brows. "Who's that?" She asks simply. "I haven't met any Amane's before..."

Aster wrinkles her nose. "Sounds like a heaping helping of backlash, if it's from 'something witchy'." She shakes her head, sighing. She blinks at Emma's confusion. "Er. Virtual Adept girl, Japanese and cute, has a pet rabbit AI in her tablet? She'd been around here a bunch of months ago, went off the grid, and came back. Maya was going to get me her surname too, but I started tackling it with what I already knew."

Emma's eyebrows go up at the mention of the AI, cracking a smile. "Please tell me you aren't BSing about the AI stuff. I want a pet AI. I'd name it GLADOS and it'd try to kill me periodically and it'd be /great/." She says, enthusiastically. "So went off the grid... any reason to suspect her more than, I dunno, any of the other wanderers we get here?"

"Not BSing at all," Aster says. "I met the thing. Though they seem more cooperative than anything thinking with portals. The main suspect thing, as I understand it, is timing. Ahana is taken, and very soon after, Amane returns to the city. That, plus..." She sighs. "My search has been inconclusive at best. Up until February, she was travelling in Asia. After that, she disappeared for six months, and then turned up here."

Emma considers for a moment, before nodding slowly. "Okay. Slightly supicious." She concedes. "Though, hell, I've fallen off the grid before. But I'm not an Adept. Either the normal sort or the virtual." She takes another sip of her coffee, asking afterwards, "So what all did you learn?"

Aster shakes her head. "That's all so far -- the fact that she disappeared from the web for that period. I did meet her last time she was around and we bonded over comics -- or, well, comic cartoons -- so I could meet with her and try to get on the level, but that's not exactly the subtle approach."

"Honestly? My money is on 'not spy.' Mostly because if they had us, they'd be moving in with black helicopters to sweep up the 'reality deviants' in one fell swoop. And we don't have anything important enough to spy /on/." Emma gives a bit of a shrug, gesturing around with her coffee mug. "If people really, really want, I could try to dig into where she been... I'm not adverse to the elbow grease, even if I'm better off in a library than I am in an investigation. But all I'm hearing is 'someone left for a while then came back.' Which isn't a hell of a lot to hang much on." Emma drums her fingers against the outside of her coffee mug. "What's your gut say?" She asks.

Aster lays her hand on her stomach. Which, yes, is exposed by the fit of that ridiculous fake-schoolgirl top. "Right now? Not a spy. But I haven't seen her since she got back yet, to really get a feel for her or if she's changed." She sighs. "I'll keep looking into it, grab her for some in-person time. In the meantime, you said you had something for me?"

"Oh yeah." Emma says, with a muggy sort of recognition that she had, in fact, said that only minutes earlier. She opens a file drawer and leafs around a bit, before she finds a correct manila evelope. "Back issues of Paradigma." She says, waving it at Aster for a moment. "And I took the liberty of doing some cross referencing. Turns out there's some weird stuff afoot."

Aster sighs happily, a smile on her face. "Awesome, just what I'd been after." She tilts her head. "Huh. What kind of weird stuff, and how worried should I be about it?"

Emma pulls a dossier out of the manila envelope, thick with paperclips and notes on yellow lined paper. "So. It wasn't old at all. In fact, I would have noticed it if they hadn't flubbed my address at the Paradigma office. There were a load of letters to the editors, plus a few written papers, discussing it. It started about a year ago." Emma turns to a page with a map, illustrating different cities it had been seen in. It's basically a map of major cities in the US. "You can see there's really no spatial pattern. Most of the reports? Same story: some equipment started acting up, usually something that's geospatial, GIS, or temporal equipment, like chronomoeters, chrondynes, and a bunch of other things with 'chrono' in the name." She flips pages, with a bit of a flow chart written on it. "It usually goes like this. The equipment starts malfunctioning - alarms, overheating, clock malfunctions - followed by rapid contra-entropic flows. This culminates with spontaneous dissasembly, though what appears to be typically temporary." She taps something on the flow chart, before sitting back. "All very odd."

Aster's eyebrows shoot up when she sees the range of places this has happened before. She scoots her chair in closer, leaning in to peer at the dossier. "Huh. So, it messes with dimensions first off. Space and time." She chews her tongue. "I wasn't in Streetpass so I didn't notice anything like that, but... it /did/ flip the map I was playing, which is sort of altering its internal space. And I didn't notice anything weird about the clock, but it did revert to earlier saves and to a pre-setup environment, so that's sort of twisting it along its timeline. Now, what do you mean by 'contra-entropic flows'? Just... falling apart?"

"Not at all. The entropy of the system - the total amount of disorder of the device, appears to /decrease/ in some cases." Emma says, tapping the manila envelope with a nail. "This would be characteristic of the arrow of time very temporarily getting reversed. Or, a variety of other phenomena. There was a very interesting paper on that..." She trails off, shaking her head. "Sorry, getting distracted. So, I can't say much about the specifics of your case; after all, I wasn't there. I can just talk about the generalities of the wider set of cases." She plucks out a sheath of papers from the lot, revealing some graphs. "I took the liberty of crossreferencing wind, temperature, number of bats, anonamlous crossings, UFO reports, and construction equipment orders. There's a pattern here, but it's pretty weak, and it'll take more work..."

Aster half-smirks when Emma reaches the point of 'number of bats'. "Any one of those could be behind it," she says. "Could I get a look at the raw data, too? So we can both be poking at it for patterns. My thing is more computers than Science!, but Science! is what's called for here." Yes, she pronounces the capital, and to a lesser extent, the exclamation point.

"Not at all. I can put it on an ecrypted virtual harddrive and send it your way." Emma agrees easily, waving one hand. "Dropbox work for you?" She settles back, having finished with her report. "You can see the synopsis on page 4. Just the facts, minimal interpretation. Let me know if you have any questions. It was a great Scientific problem. Albeit, one slightly out of my ken..."

Aster nods. "Dropbox is perfect, and you have my email for the link already, right?" She tilts her head. "Oh? Not up your alley? From things we've talked about before, I'd thought time was one of your things, and if it's about reversed time..."

Emma shakes her head, picking up her mug to gesture about the room, especially at the chalkboard. "Time is... an interesting topic, but not my primary specialty. My *primary* specialty is spacetime, higher dimensions, and going from the quantum to the stellar." She pauses a moment, before saying, sotto voce, "Correspondence and 'Spirit,' for the... charm-bearer types." You can hear the airquotes around 'spirit'

Aster aahs, looking up at the chalkboard. "Fair. And I get you, yeah. I'm a little bit with location, myself, though I seriously need to reach some higher grades of Arett." Yes, she pronounces it 'ah-RET'. "Whoever designed this game had shitty ideas about rate of progression, I'm telling you."

Emma laughs as if Aster were joking, a wry grin spreading across her face. "Well, clearly you need to get on more raids, start bogarting that XP, right?" Oooh, Meta. "Speaking of... I never did get you how to get ahold of Alexandra..." She pulls out a slip of paper and starts scribbling on it. Once done, she passes it over. "That'd be good for a quest or two, eh?"

As the paper passes across the desk, Emma finds Aster glaring at her, her eyes narrow behind her glasses. She crosses her arms at her abdomen and, for the moment, doesn't take the note.

Emma pauses, hand still extended, looking suddenly caught out. "... uh. Joking?" She tepidly ventures, not at all sure what boundary she transgressed.

Aster sniffs. "About as much joking as Maya would be while talking about the Umbra."

Emma blinks owlishly. "You're shitting me, right?" Emma asks, setting down the slip and leaning back. She peers at Aster for a moment, brain churning away. "Wait. You believe this is all a simulation?" She very, very slowly ventures, as she puts the details together for the first time.

"YES," Aster says, as effusively as the all-caps make it seem. "A game, to be specific. A massive blend of genres. Sometimes-painful restriction and oversimplification -- have you noticed how easy it is to divide how fast you move into meters? It's like Dungeons & Dragons and we're just counting hexes broken up by invisible lines."

The wheels in the tired professor's brain slowly churn away, as she slowly soaks in the understanding of what Aster is saying. "Is this a... something you assert? Or is this a Virtual Adept... uh... thing that you all broadly believe." She asks, squinting through her glasses.

Aster makes a hand-waggling gesture. "The broad strokes, we agree on -- that's what makes us VIRTUAL Adepts, the understanding that it's all virtual. But the specifics vary as much among us as hyperscientific theories vary among Etherites. Some say it's like the Matrix, a simulation of a world gone by to keep us complacent. Some, like me, say it's all just a game. And the thing about games is... you can play to /win/."

Emma settles back in her chair, the thing creaking under her weight as she does. She peers long and hard at Aster, slowly taking this all in, before she abruptly grimaces. Leaning forward, she has an ernest, apologetic expression. "Listen Aster... I'm sorry I joked about your beliefs." She says, gesturing wide. "I didn't know that about your Tradition. I came from a very... sheltered place. You're literally the first Adept I know. I'll be more respectful in the future."

Aster takes a slow breath. After a moment to process, she gives Emma a smile. "It's alrigiht. You didn't know. Just... may be a bit touchy sometimes, since it /is/ the kind of thing people tend to joke about."

Emma pauses a moment, before asking, sheepishly, "Are there any other cherished beliefs I should know about, or is it better to discover them when I inadvertantly take the mick?"

Aster hmmns. "'All the world's a game and all the men and women merely players' is the important one. I mean, you're clearly not homophobic and you don't seem the slutshaming type, so you're clear for the rest."

"'They have their exits and their enterances, and one man in time plays many parts.'" Emma finishes almost automatically, sitting back in her chair once again. "What makes you think I'm not a giant homophobe? I could be the self-hating type." She says, some of her humour starting to return.

Aster smirks, shaking her head. "You wouldn't have joked about flirting before, if you were phobic. So, we're all cool now. And I need to get in touch with Alexandra--" She finally takes the paper with a nod of thanks. "--and Rei about the Ahana issue, and grab Amane herself for the Amane issue."

Emma nods to the other, gesturing to the folio as well. "Take it. Those are all copies, because I need to return much of the originals." She adds, starting to take another sip of her coffee. "I'll let you know if I turn anything more up."

Aster oohs, collecting the folder. "Thank you. I think the next thing, hm. Both hammering to try to find the underlying pattern, of course. But I think also getting together any information we can about those running spatial and temporal experiments in the near future. That's where we'd get more data points, getting ahead of the game before their main findings are even published."

Emma thinks for a moment, before gesturing with her mug. "Why not try to prompt the phenomena? Study it first hand." The coffee starts to slosh around, and she stills it before she spills it. "Make a device based on the reported characteristics that is maximally likely to trigger... whatever the hell is going on... and then collect copious data?"

Aster rubs her chin. "That's a thought. I mean, my personal hypothesis is that these devices /detect/ and are affected by the phenomenon, but don't necessarily cause it, like how mercury rising in a thermometer doesn't cause the temperature to rise. But I could be wrong, and either way, it'd be perfect for collecting Scientific! data on the subject."

Emma's eyes glance around to the various bits of equipment in her office, brain already beginning to through iterations. "This is a good problem. One that lets me get back to my roots." She muses. Then, enthusiastically. "I think I'm going to do that. I'll let you know when I have such a thing built, and I'll invite you around to collect data. If you're game?" Emma winces as soon as she says that. "Er, wait, sorry, is that phrase rude?"

Aster rolls her eyes, a grin on her face. "You're fine, Emma. If anything, phrases like that and 'it's game time' are even /more/ appopriate for me. My perspective -- yes, this is all a game to me, but why should that be a bad thing? And, are you sure you don't want me helping build? I'm pretty good with tech."

Emma seems a tad surprised by this. "I'd love an extra set of hands at the bench. Not many people are willing to get greasy with a Etherite!" She remarks with a weak smile. She takes another sip of her coffee - surely she must nearly be done with it - before adding, "I've already got some ideas. I'll send some blueprints over to you along with the encrypted vhd."

Aster smiles. "Awesome. And hey, gives us something to work on together and makes me feel a bit more useful in this whole... /situation/, since you've knocked it out of the park with the research."

Emma blushes a bit. "Hey. I'm not good at very much..." She says, modestly enough. "But when it comes to research, I have my moments. Or, I hope I do!"

Aster grins. "And hey, gives me a chance to learn from you. I'm decent but not great at research. Where I really shine is the hacking."