Robert Lutece (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ablankpage) wrote2014-07-27 11:21 pm
ablankpage) wrote2014-07-27 11:21 pm
Voxophone 8/?? - Voice
"How?"
[Robert addresses the Journal as he would a voxophone. It's an old habit, one he's mostly outgrown, but sometimes it remains.
Like when he's working late in his lab, reviewing all his notes and indulging in something that isn't quite experimentation.
It is the step before that -- the step of hypothesis and philosophy. Of breaking down not what he knows but what he doesn't know.
He can still remember having these discussions in front of a flickering, almost sepia window, talking to a woman who was so very like him and so very unlike him as they tried to solve the mysteries of the universe in two separate ones.]
That is the question I find most intriguing in this place.
[He sketches in the Journal as he talks.
A dot with increasing circles around it. The epicentre of a ripple.
A crack that branches in several directions, each one of which has several branches in several directions.
A series of parallel lines with one diagonal one going through all of them.]
How is the barrier that maintains our enclosure maintained? How did it fail in the past? How is running water and electricity delivered? How do shifts come to occur? How was this perpendicular universe created? How are we brought here?
[The Malnosso are incidental, according to what he's learned. They control the enclosure, yes, but they aren't a part of this world any more than the inhabitants. It's an interesting, peculiar thought.
He's been here a year now. Over, actually, and he only understands a fraction of what this place could teach him. It makes it interesting, at least.]
"Why" is a very human concern, something that tangles itself in emotion and ethics. "How" is physical and mineral; it can be charted and examined and tested.
[Which makes it a far more comfortable area for him. Unlike Rosalind, who simply prefers cool logic because that is what makes sense... he prefers it because it does not challenge his sometimes troubled conscience.
A conscience that has bothered him increasingly since his conversation with DeWitt.]
If there is any way to leave this place, it will be found by answering questions about the very foundation of this world.
[Of that, he is certain.
If only he could know how long it would take.]
[Robert addresses the Journal as he would a voxophone. It's an old habit, one he's mostly outgrown, but sometimes it remains.
Like when he's working late in his lab, reviewing all his notes and indulging in something that isn't quite experimentation.
It is the step before that -- the step of hypothesis and philosophy. Of breaking down not what he knows but what he doesn't know.
He can still remember having these discussions in front of a flickering, almost sepia window, talking to a woman who was so very like him and so very unlike him as they tried to solve the mysteries of the universe in two separate ones.]
That is the question I find most intriguing in this place.
[He sketches in the Journal as he talks.
A dot with increasing circles around it. The epicentre of a ripple.
A crack that branches in several directions, each one of which has several branches in several directions.
A series of parallel lines with one diagonal one going through all of them.]
How is the barrier that maintains our enclosure maintained? How did it fail in the past? How is running water and electricity delivered? How do shifts come to occur? How was this perpendicular universe created? How are we brought here?
[The Malnosso are incidental, according to what he's learned. They control the enclosure, yes, but they aren't a part of this world any more than the inhabitants. It's an interesting, peculiar thought.
He's been here a year now. Over, actually, and he only understands a fraction of what this place could teach him. It makes it interesting, at least.]
"Why" is a very human concern, something that tangles itself in emotion and ethics. "How" is physical and mineral; it can be charted and examined and tested.
[Which makes it a far more comfortable area for him. Unlike Rosalind, who simply prefers cool logic because that is what makes sense... he prefers it because it does not challenge his sometimes troubled conscience.
A conscience that has bothered him increasingly since his conversation with DeWitt.]
If there is any way to leave this place, it will be found by answering questions about the very foundation of this world.
[Of that, he is certain.
If only he could know how long it would take.]
[Action]
She listens to and watches Robert write and record, still hazy with a nap that had run a bit too long, and lets the words tumble about in her mind as she nurses a tea. Foundations. Physical, mineral, perpendicular. Human concerns.]
There's a heady temptation to ascribe every last unexplained phenomenon to the shifts, isn't there.
[Action]
Robert Lutece is very aware he has let himself become distracted by human concerns, not unlike spells of this in Columbia. And New York and London before then. There are just enough variances, he knows, between them that he suffers that weakness far more than his "sister."]
It may not be an incorrect temptation. [But it's said almost derisively.] Yet, the shifts must have a cause.
They may be a force of nature in this place, but something still creates them and can, therefore, be understood.
[Voice]
It is all run by shifts and powered by the unending tears of those who bemoan their fate here.
And if you don't understand the mathematical proof behind the existence of infinite universes in parallel, you ought to do a better job with your reading.
Why has little to do with ethics. Don't be ridiculous.
[Voice]
[They have written books, built machines, tested and defied the boundaries of such things.]
What interests me is the mechanics of the tangent universe. Or, far more likely -- tangent universes.
YOU TOTALLY DID NOT SEE THAT
voice
[There you go putting disturbingly smart words into your sentences, Booker. If you keep it up people might think you've read a book.
Just one.]
voice
[Alright, Booker. He's impressed. A little. Just a bit.]
How, in simple terms, is a question of "in what way." Why, on the other hand, is "for what reason."
In terms of phenomena, those two are closely related, if not one and the same altogether.
But in a place like this, where phenomena and sentient beings -- the Malnosso, Third Party, and possible others -- act either together or separately, the distinction is important, I feel.
voice
[Yeah he should have never started this conversation. He's barely following right now, he can't imagine in five minutes what this is going to be like.
He may hit Robert. Find him and punch him to feel a little less stupid.
How that works, only Booker knows.]</small.
voice
But that's my point precisely.
It doesn't matter who or what made the barriers. Why they're up. Those things are interesting, of course, and perhaps even good to know, but they're not essential to fortifying or destroying the barriers.
How they work is.
voice
So, what. You wanna escape?
[And do what? Go where? There were so many possibilities of what could happen should the barrier fall...]
voice
[The questions once the barrier are gone are endless.
What else is out there? How far does this world extend? Does anything exist beyond the barrier? If they leave the enclosure, can they leave the world?]
voice
[He's just cutting right to the chase. Booker is very against dying again.]
voice
[And come back in a week.
Because of the barrier? Because of the world? Because of the Malnosso?
"How."
That's the question to be answered with all of it.]
voice
[Dying here is like having a stomachache. It comes and goes. In actual reality (the one he grew up with, not the one he knows now) people died and they stayed dead. That was it.
What if this barrier was all that was keeping them alive?]
But what do you care? You'll just go back to being ... everywhere. [He doesn't have a good explanation for it.]
voice
[That's the difficulty of the matter. What makes time here precious and dangerous.]
What we set in motion, DeWitt, was the unraveling of that.
[They ended the cycle before it could begin. Everything would go back to that origin point and proceed... without Comstock.]
voice
[He wasn't quite expecting that. For them to have sacrificed immortality and god-like knowledge for Elizabeth.
Booker leaves himself out of the equation because while it temporarily soothed whatever guilt rested on his mind (after all, he was alive now) it was never about his happiness. He was needed but not the goal. Which was what needed to happen, because Elizabeth was the only innocent.]
voice
[The repetition of the phrase is... a strange kind of comfort. Because that is a language they can understand.
Debts. Physical ones, yes. Monetary. But they know about the debts of a conscience, too. Both of them.]
voice
Did you two ever tell me that? Before I ... y'know. [He makes a vague gesture at his head - supposed to symbolize the entirety of him losing his memory upon entering each tear so his brain wouldn't explode.]
voice
I never had to. One look at me, and you knew exactly who I was. Every time. So when I offered a chance to set things right, I... I think you understood.
voice
Right. I guess I would.
voice
voice
[He says it like suddenly he remembers just what he was thinking whenever he punched Robert.
Then he gets to thinking that he possibly got to punch Robert in 100 different universes and smiles.]
voice
[Because for that, he deserved every blow. Which was why he always braced himself and simply took the strike.
It was earned.]
voice
[He wants to growl "You'd better be", as if it'd instill a fear of him in Robert but he knows the man well enough now to know he doesn't think much of Booker's habitual violence. Or think much of Booker either.]
voice
You were told what you needed to be, and you didn't care beyond that.
[Unsurprisingly. Because why would DeWitt care what happened to the people responsible for what Comstock had done?]
[Written]
But my area of expertise was always with life forms. The strangest sights I've ever witnessed were the workings of the aspirations of living things.
[Written]
How it brought us here, how it keeps us here. What it hopes to gain, for instance, is secondary to the actual problem. After all, if we can circumvent the method by which we are kept here, then dancing attendance upon something else's whims becomes unnecessary.
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