daddy problems | Glowfic Constellation

Julie is kind of losing track of all of the problems that she has. She should write them down, except putting them in the ship's computers would be beyond stupid and the shuttle's not exactly equipped with art supplies so she could put them on paper.

She recites them to herself, instead. Her voice is still gone from the days of futile yelling in the hold of the Anubis. But it beats trying to keep all of it straight inside her head.

Problem number one: She has four days of water and no more food.

Problem number two: She really, really thought this ship was on course for Eros, and if she's anything at all she is a competent pilot, but the navigation is bleeping confusedly and doesn't even have a course correction to recommend and she's not picking up any radio traffic from other ships headed to Eros. Or...from anywhere, actually.

(Maybe she's too late and humanity has already gone extinct? But surely they wouldn't be that stupid. And surely it couldn't happen that fast.)

Problem number three: There are a bunch of people with a weapon that might destroy humanity and she's the only one who knows what it is, where it is, and what it did to the crew of the Scopuli and the Anubis. And also what happened to some other ship, she doesn't know its name, and she's still not sure whether it was just in the wrong place at the wrong time or whether its destruction was part of the plan. And they're going to deploy it in the Belt and she suspects the Anubis didn't have the only sample and the Belters will be able to defend themselves if only she can communicate the situation, which she can, once she gets to Eros, assuming she's not infected, which she has no way to check.

That's possibly too many things under one problem heading. Problem number three, revision two: Weapon, destruction of humanity, etcetera. Problem number four: Only she knows what's going on and she needs to get word to Dawes. Problem number five, she might be infected. Problem number six, all her friends are dead and she's sad about it.

There, she whispers to the computer screen. I think that's all of them. There is also an agonizing cramp in her leg and she suspects three of her knuckles are broken but it feels kind of ridiculous to even list those, alongside all of the other things. And she's lightheaded but that almost definitely folds in under either 'no more food' or 'infected'. What's the joke, an engineer's ship is on fire, so he puts it out. A mathematician's dinner is on fire, so he waits until it has engulfed the whole ship, gestures at the engineer, says, 'I have reduced the problem to a problem with a known solution' -

Problem number seven, isolation is bad for people and she might be going crazy, or whatever.

She resets the sensors. There's no way that Eros just fucking went missing. Maybe she got turned around, but there's got to be something she'll recognize, out there, once she's casting a broad enough net.

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Nayoki of Kmbata

running-to-the-sun

:All right: She'll leave it alone. :Can you get the message to Fred Johnson securely?:

"Yes."

running-to-the-sun

:Thank you:

She relays this to Leareth along with the fact that wherever Naomi’s mysterious backstory is, it’s not obviously related to any of their current headaches.

Leareth

the-final-accounting

Leareth thanks her and then, since he’s not especially required for drafting comms, goes to sleep.

One of his staff keeps eavesdropping on the scientists (and Emril keeps an eye on the human test subject and sends reassurance if he seems especially panicky.)

The human test subject is having a much worse time than Emril! His immune system is attacking the proto and the proto is fighting back.

blue-goo

Danger!

Here, this is how you use Healing to fix that! Calm down the immune response, but specifically like this, not everything. Can it copy her?

blue-goo

Not exactly, not at first? There's not that much of it there and it's not ideally distributed and it's also whirring around panicking about the danger.

:It's all right. It's all right. I'll keep you safe. Just - calm, slowly, careful...: She isn't sure if the Proto is humanlike enough to respond to wordless reassurance but she can send lots of it! And throw in some less specifically-targeted immunosuppression, it's a lot faster and it's not like the human subject is in a room full of contagious diseases right now, aside from the one.

blue-goo

With enough repeat talking-through it can eventually manage!

Pride!

She's proud of it too! Also very busy trying to clean up the various bits of damage it caused while it was panicking, and show it how to help with that as well. The poor test subject has to feel pretty crappy, and she can't directly throw Healing-energy at him via Proto-relay - although, actually, can it share energy with more distant parts of itself? There's not much Proto in the patient yet but there's a whole lot of it right there, around the reactor.

Elsewhere, eavesdropping happens. What are the scientists up to? Leareth's mage is expecting they'll have to wake Leareth himself at some point, if anything major comes up, but he's hoping to put it off as long as possible.

They're in communications with the director and he's burning harder for Io; he can maybe make it by Monday. They have thought of lots more tests they want to do, and are mostly posing them to the protomolecule in visual math form. They're delighted by the results and covering a lot of ground; their society seems to know a lot of math Leareth doesn't.

They want to know a lot about the protomolecule's creators. They keep trying to work this into math questions.

blue-goo

They are the protomolecule's creators. It will answer math questions.

…Wow he cannot keep up with that math at all but Leareth is going to want to know all of it. Maybe the Proto can play it back later.

He’s also not familiar with the calendar system. :How do I check what day it is today?: he asks Julie.

Juliette Andromeda Mao

fathers-weapon

"Autodoc, what's the date."

"It is Thursday, May 17th, 2330, Earth Unified Standard."

:All right: He stretches out his Mindspeech to include Holden as well. :I think the lab director will be arriving there in - four days? Which means we will be there substantially sooner?:

"Should be. Where's the lab director coming from?"

:I don't know. It's - sort of tricky to eavesdrop specifics without being obvious and it could be a classified location. I can work on finding out?:

"Doesn't matter that much. I guess if we wait to nuke it until then we get that person too but that's not - I don't have any idea how much it'd really solve -"

:...Might cause more problems than it solves. Apparently there's also Proto someone else, or...was at one point, I wasn't clear? They talked about another lab. I couldn't figure out how to ask the Proto about it and get it to understand that I wanted to know where, though, Leareth's better at that but he's resting;

"What, uh, skills are involved in asking the proto questions, our world might have technology that'd help -"

:It's...bad at understanding the concept of spatial distance? And it - doesn't really get that different people exist, I think, I'm not sure what it thinks is going on here, it must be so confused. It understands math right away, and I think Leareth is really good at sort of visualizing all his requests to it as math-in-some-way?:

"Huh. Well. We'll get to Io first, and can figure out what to do from there."