Stories (Yiyel & Sarre)

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"Who knows. We've always understood that the human mind can be incredibly malleable," Amber replied. "With such infinite possibilities, I'm content to wait," she said, scratching at her nose. The elevator doors opened, and she stepped out before Perry. They had set aside a few hours to meet with the man, but with his rejection, there was an uncomfortable emptiness in their schedule, and it was still dark. Nothing to do. She couldn't go back to her private apartment while it was still nighttime - that would feel wrong.

"Well, I guess there are always stars waiting for me," she murmured, looking upwards. Despite the soft blue light that washed itself over the streets, she could still see some of them, not twinkling but sitting solemly on the black sky.

She knew her horoscope - she knew every day. She checked it herself. It was a common thing to do in the department, to peer at them in curiosity, but as an unspoken rule, nobody talked about them - shared them. It was a mutual, quiet, indulgence.

Amber took hers seriously, though, and sometimes she wondered how seriously the others took it. Their research - the one they spent hours documenting and testing for - was far from applicable, yet. It was all so theoretical - attempts to standardise; to organise the stars, and the messiness of a personal horoscope was useless in that grid of information. Why she intuitively trusted such an amorphous, cryptic set of predictions was a mystery.

But what that horoscope was telling her was something she didn't particularly want Perry to be part of. She'd already made the mistake of telling him of her wish to visit the old man. And it was only by him that she'd gotten the chance - they were going on-shift. Unwittingly, she'd planted a scientific curiosity in him, and now she wanted to do anything she could to take away nourishment from those seeds she had sown.

So she looked to him for further instructions. "What now?"
 
"I'm not entirely sure, honestly. I hadn't planned the encounter to be this short - I knew it would be SHORT, but not THIS short." He followed her out, looking around, mouth slightly stretched across out and brows low. "I might just go back to my quarters to do a little research and processing on this. I need to change clothing anyway. And there's a few things I need to know." He, again, looked at Amber. "Though I have a question and a suggestion. In your research, have you found any link between other stars and celestial bodies and our predisposition? If not, I have a feeling maybe you should look into that, even though it would technically be outside your field of research for now."
 
"We are investigating every single one," Amber replied. "Hence the proliferation of photographic memory in the department. It is not at all outside our field of research, just outside mine. I do... I do the littler things."

She knew the common people thought that nearly everyone in the cities were the pinnacles of human intelligence - and maybe it was true, but within the walls, you could never tell. It was as if, as soon as she'd stepped into the grey compounds, her intelligence was sapped and beaten, and then she had become just another plebian surrounded on all sides, at all hours, by unfathomable greatness.

She never admitted it, but her visits to her family's town outside the concrete and glass cubes was just as much for her confidence as it was for her connections.
 
"Alright, as long as it's not omitted. The little things are important too - maybe even more important, because without the little things the big ones mean nothing." Perry stared off into the wall, face completely blank. "Hell, I wish the little things were more prevalent. Life just feels like it's all about big things right now - big discoveries, big secrets, big power..." He turned to face her, eyebrows sagging slightly, mouth pulled. "Have you read about the ancient populations that we grouped under the moniker 'Native Americans'? The way they lived sound like they figured out a lot of things, it seemed nice... I mean - we do have it relatively nice here, given the circumstances, but they seemed like they really knew what life was about."
 
"That's old history," Amber said. "When people still had time for art. Before resource production got so messy."

Her thoughts had flickered to ancient civilisations before - even "modern" civilisation, before the fall of cinema. How did people have so much time? She barely had time to do anything - what she knew of all that history was in bits and pieces. A sentence or two about one time, or one place, and another few sentences about sometime else, or somewhere else. And that was already more than most people - but apparently less than Perry.

"When did you read about them?" she asked him.
 
"I was lucky", he said, again losing focus as he recollected. "Before the I.W.A. Before anything relevant, actually." He snapped back to reality, looking at her with eyes wide open and a small grin. "I was quite privileged back then. Still weren't simple, but I could do quite a lot."
 
"Hm," Amber muttered, partially curious, mostly jealous. To her, the I.W.A. was a symbol of what was and what would be - she couldn't imagine a time when it, and the other huge research corporations, didn't exist, but then, she hadn't even set eyes on the concrete cities then. Maybe they were different, or maybe it was nothing - the kinds of changes you only notice if you don't witness them taking place.

In any case, she wanted to ditch Perry, so she said, "So you said you were headed off to your personal study?"
 
Perry snapped back to reality, his face going blank (but not quite relaxed). "Yeah. There's a few things I have to check. If you're interested, I'll keep you posted if I find anything significant."
 
"Sure, thanks," Amber said, watching as he strolled off. Part of her was thinking that there would be no way in hell he'd find anything. The other part of her was terrified that he would.

She just stood there, gazing upwards at what the city lanterns didn't wash away, before looking in the direction Perry had gone. Neither he nor his ride were anywhere in sight, so she turned around and headed back to the old man's apartment.
 
Perry had too much to think about and too little time to do it. He headed back home, pulled a jar of some sort of water-sugar sludge (which he just gulped down) before pulling out the only sort of paper he had, blueprint paper, and a few books he had, before starting his work by writing down his initial ideas.
 
First, she'd tried asking nicely, then desperately, and then she had pulled out a wallet. The old man opened the door then, but waved off the money."Forget it," he muttered, "Come. Sit. Tell me why you're so persistent."

Amber thanked him profusely (by her standards, anyway), and began to talk before they have even reached the plastic chairs.

"I used to own a dog," she said. "My family did, when I was very young. It isn't too uncommon to keep animals out there. She had long, grey, fur and white eyes, and died when I was a teenager."

"Sorry to hear," the old man muttered, heating a pitcher of water. "Sugar with your tea?"

"Yes, please," Amber replied.

"I didn't like her very much," she continued, when he had sat down and put the mug down. "Sometimes she acted like how dogs were supposed to. Licking you and running around and catching sticks, and that sort of thing. But a lot of the times it seemed like she was just... dead, but still breathing. I saw pictures of you and the first subject, and that's what you looked like."

"You said you didn't like that dog. Why do you care?"

"I want to know why you two had the same expression. All of my other questions can probably be answered by databases. This one can't. It's too vague, and too.. childish..."

The old man looked at her, smiled, and laughed. "Maybe," he said, "Maybe. Finish your tea. Go home, and think about your dog some more."

"What?"

"I've already told you. I can't tell you anything. This me giving you instructions."

"But that's it? Think about my dog?"

"Yes."

"Isn't there-"

"No. Nothing. No archives, no databases, no experiments. If you really want to, see if your parents can zip over a hologram of that dog. Maybe it'll help. Just think about her."


And that was it. In twenty minutes, she was in front of the apartment again, unsure of whether or not she was satisfied with the old man's answer.
 
By the time Amber was done, Perry hit his stride - writing down a lot of information across five different papers, tracing links between events and ancient beliefs and other practices. By that time, he gulped down two other jars of slurry - he most certainly needed the energy. But his theory grew more complete as he added another sheet of paper and stuck it to the wall simply to have enough space to put down everything - and enough distance to see it all. But he knew there was something missing. And it drove him mad.
 
Amber avoided Perry for the rest of the day, and the morning afterwards. There was plenty to do, and even when there wasn't, there always seemed to be a distraction ready to keep her occupied: Biased news reports, company journals, rival company journals, and random anecdotes quickly scrawled on a shared board - in case any incidents were worth pursuing - it was all there, ready at a tap or a sweep of her fingers.

Sometimes she would remember the old man's advice, and try to think of that dog. She remembered very little. It was always a shadow in the background, like a picture that had been hung up for so long that you didn't notice it anymore. It was quiet. It didn't bark, or beg, or play with her - only her parents. And when she had recovered a scrap of clarity from the blurry mess, she would be interrupted.

By the end of the lunchtime period, when she was due to wait for Perry, the only realisation that she had discovered was that there had been some kind of barrier between her and the dog. She didn't remember consciously hating it, nor did she remember the dog ever consciously hating her, yet somehow, they were rarely in the same room, never even looked at each other unless by accident. Her memory of the dog's face was of its profile, and always far away.

The moment when she had remembered it existed - the moment after subject no. 1 had returned, it had returned as a sudden shock, almost like a video-memory implant but without the steel against the back of your skull - and mingled with a life she'd actually known.

Oh. Oh yeah... Dad had a dog....
 
Perry didn't take long to arrive. Though he looked... unusual - hair completely unkempt, expression blank, and his labcoat buttoned on an offset - which means there was a spare hole at the top and a spare button at the bottom, making it look uneven. He sat down with Amber. "Hey."
 
Amber looked one look at Perry as he approached, cracked a lighthearted smile, and punched in a few numbers on the keypad in the middle of the table. "Your buttons are crooked" she said, "Long day?"

She hadn't even finished talking when a server stopped at their table and deftly dropped off a cup of a fruit-flavoured energy drink.
 
Perry waved off. "Not really. Just... it's been pulling at me. I feel like I'm missing something..." He looked at the drink for a few seconds, before taking a sip. He looked at it some more, pulled out a little bag of what looked like sugar, and added it to the mix, taking another sip. "Things just don't line up in any useful way..."
 
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"Things?" Amber asked, thinking about oral bacteria and speaking for the sake of conversation. "What sort of things? Your investigations?"

He was blabbering with less urgency than he usually did, which was both uncomfortable and refreshing.
 
"Yes and no. Maybe?" He continued staring at his drink, taking two sips. "It's less an investigation and more a cross-referencing of concepts to build a hypothesis." Perry's eyes finally left his drink, this time wandering to the ceiling. "It feels like I've assembled an old-world combustion engine car and all I'm missing is the ignition key." And back to the drink. "Or the drive shaft, not sure which at this point. I just know I'm missing something."
 
"Oh boy, starting another new proposal for the suits?" she said. "You never told me what happened to the last one - folding time or something." And before that, he'd been investigating an ant brainchip... thing...
"So what is it this time?
 
He looked at her, still as blank as before. "No, the suits won't be hearing this one, at least not yet. As for the time folding, it was a dead end sort of... we didn't have anything really useful for here - the old world would have been all over it though." Perry rubbed his finger for a little. "It's a shame, that was a nice dog..." He focused back on her, eyelids heavy. "Anyhow - this time. So far, there's five leading theories I've been trying to pit against one another with what I've found. Theory one: simultaneity. Everything is technically happening at the same time - and the only difference between then and now is a matter of... how would I explain it... resonance? Instance? Essentially, it literally boils down to this: the only reason things are what they are is because we're living them as they are right now. Second, interlacing. Similar to before, everything happens almost at the same time - but time instances are not ordered, we're just following an index. Third theory is an old theory - the multiverse, which is literally there is other universes than ours. Fourth would be memory-map - it's an expansion and inversion of the simultaneity theory based on ancient religions which state that everything that ever can happen is the result of the same intelligence travelling through perceptions - reincarnation, transfer to 'heaven or hell', and so on. The fifth, which is only supported by ancient philosophy of a dead culture and our meeting with the old man, can simply be resumed as the key poetic excerpt of one of these dead cultures."

He collected himself for a minute, breathing in, relaxing. "It went like this... 'Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and tither, a veritable butterfly, enjoying itself to the full of its bent, and not knowing it was Chuang Chou. Suddenly I awoke, and came to myself, the veritable Chuang Chou. Now I do not know whether it was then I dreamt I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.'" He reopened his eyes, blinking. "Or at least that's how the translation we have went. There's surprisingly little left of it available. And essentially, it means that there are other existences, and we are one amongst them with very little way to know if we are the real one or the dream of another."
 
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