taxonomites | [text: everyone] ch-ch-ch-changes

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[text: everyone] ch-ch-ch-changes

My flat was on a tram line before. -SH

Late at night, not long after 3AM or so, everyone in Taxon receives a text message notification. It seems someone's come out of his pause-glitch-induced reverie. But it's not his sense of time he's worried about or the foggy memories of disturbing, frog-on-the-dissection-table dreams, apparently: at least, not right now and not that he feels like broadcasting to Taxon. No. What Sherlock Holmes is spamming the rest of Taxon with right now is:

It was at the juncture of two tram lines, as a matter of fact. -SH

It's moved. -SH

Not showing any signs of letting up.

I'm not anywhere near any tram lines. -SH

I would never have chosen this flat. -SH

This is ridiculous. -SH

Consider this a letter of complaint. -SH

Nope.

A STRONGLY WORDED letter. -SH

Do the tablets have a block setting?

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"I'll take a coffee too."

She was thinking about a beer or something clear with a punch but this doesn't seem like that sort of conversation. She'd like it to be, really, but it isn't. "A few weeks. The weirdest part is I didn't notice untilyou came back that you'd been missing. That really kind of pisses me off."

Sherlock drums the tips of his fingers on the table while the waitress fetches them both coffee. He scowls a little at the mention of his absence, which still bothers him, but the face he makes is clearly directed at the ceiling and, by metonymic extension, their captors. "Some sort of memory tampering," he says after a moment. "The things they do with us--well, no matter."

It's far from no matter to him, but it's just clarified his resolve to master and escape this place one way or another. "The city," he gestures, "has it shifted before? In your memory?"

Selina doctors her coffee with cream and sugar. It isn't what she always does but she has the feeling that this is the cort of coversation that calls for that sort of thing.

"Not other than to add or substract buildings when people have come and gone. There has been some of that but nothing like this, no."

"Perhaps," says Sherlock with a frown--the personal vexation over his flat's gone for the time being, replaced by a deeper sort of preoccupation--"we weren't being entertaining enough as it was."

The theory's thin, but they're all thin. There's nowhere to start with theorizing when it comes to Taxon. There's no ground to stand on, no established facts, no assumptions for the formal proof. The idea that Taxon's shrinking and gaining more dangerous aspects for captors' personal amusement seems as valid as any. The idea of it compressing into some sort of enlarged gladiatorial arena seems unpalatable, and unfortunately also highly plausible. "I'm afraid the likelihood of virtual reality is growing increasingly high."

"Well, it does make more sense than having the entire city on some sort of tracks or materializing things quickly from a subactomic level. Or being a city in a jar."

Not that she's seen these things. Oh no. She takes a sip from the cup of coffee before starting to pull the clawed gloves from her fingers and place them on the table next to her. "The question is are we actually here interacting with the VR or are we somewhere else and think we're here?"

"I wouldn't know how VR technology that advanced would work," Sherlock muses. For the first time--no, truthfully, not for the first time, not if he's being perfectly honest--he misses James Moriarty. It's occurred to him before that a perverse VR world is exactly the sort of cruel trick Moriarty would play, but Moriarty's dead and this world isn't quite perverse enough to suit his tastes: no, he would've made Sherlock suffer, not let him languish in boredom, comfort, and confusion. So he misses Moriarty because as much as it pains him to admit, this is a puzzle Moriarty would be better suited to solving. He might have even solved it already.

God damn him. He would decide to be dead just now. "We could be comatose and--" the science fiction terminology bothers him, but he goes on, "--plugged in to some sort of computer system. Or highly drugged and given hypnotic suggestion somehow. Or a mixture. It seems like it'd be easier to suggest a world of this complexity if we were allowed to fill it in, but that would imply a solipsistic dream-world of my own making: and I don't think that's likely. Not even my dreams usually feature characters that interact with this much verisimilitude." An odd sort of backhanded compliment from Sherlock--you're probably too complex to be a figment of my imagination--but it's the best you get out of him when he's on this sort of tangent.

"I've grown resistant to mind altering drugs and a little bit to hyponotic suggestions but it is still entirely possible. I'd go with the plugged in idea too. It seems the most likely but, well, that precludes magic and that... Well, I can hypothesize all I want but Magic is weird." Selina takes a long drink from her coffee cup looking at Sherlock over it.

She likes him, in a weird way. He's like... well, he's like a lot of people she knows and yet entirely a creature of his own.

Sherlock shrugs. "Yes," he says simply. "It is. It's weird because we don't understand it." He means 'we' in the narrowest sense here: clearly someone understands magic, although none of these someones seem willing to share this knowledge with Sherlock in Taxon.

Virtual reality--or hallucination--is certainly the most unifying theory he has, but it's hardly comforting. He threads his fingers through the handle on his mug and takes a sip of the cheap, partly burnt coffee. It tastes real. He can't remember the last time his imagination created something so... realistically mediocre. "What are you doing here?" he changes the subject abruptly, glancing at Selina. "Have you really got nothing better to do?"

"It is weird because it works differently depending on who uses it. That's frustrating," Selina says before shrugging. Why isn't this one of those places that has a pitcher of coffee on the table for refills?

"Is it really so hard to imagine that I might want to spend time with you?"

Sherlock, with a similarly empty coffee cup, comes to a different conclusion: he snaps his fingers, then claps his hands together sharply like he's summoning an errant dog until the Extra server comes by again with refills. He still finds the concept of tipping Extras to be intrinsically insulting; however, as his own income now largely depends on Extras tipping him, he's grudgingly considering it. But that doesn't mean he has to like it.

"A bit," he says with raised eyebrows. "I'm beginning to wonder what you're hoping to accomplish."

"Accomplish?"

Selina turns the word over a few times in her thoughts as she looks at him. The snapping of fingers and clapping of hands gets an arched brow. She's never been waitstaff but she's certainly been in a profession where others think of you as something of a service object. Still, she doesn't comment on that since she's not sure what she thinks of Extras yet.

"You interest me. You're familiar enough to people I know at home to be comfortable and yet different enough to make me curious." Also, well, she doesn't like losing and that score seems to be completely up in the air. At least if you were to ask her about it. Not that there's a competition of any sort happening at all.

Sherlock's opinion on Extras has coalesced after a bit of experimentation: they may be human enough not to kill or hurt, to be sure, but that doesn't mean they're human enough to be offended by brusqueness with respect to coffee refills. He shrugs off her allusion to someone she knows; people are always reminding people of others in Taxon, a symptom of the displacement and homesickness they all have, he supposes. He's not immune. He finds himself drawing comparisons all the time. It's comforting to their primal, amygdalic selves, probably. That doesn't mean he's interested.

"Some of my plants aren't salvageable," he says apropos to nothing. "They suspended me long enough that they went unwatered. The Phalaenopsis deliciosa likely won't recover."

"Who you remind me of, though, changes. Most of the people you remind me of are more charismatic, though, more's the pity." She isn't attempting to goad him, not really, she's just used to people who are so much larger than life that normal people are just flat our boring. After having twisted up Harvey and Eddie and, well, Bruce, normal people are just not at all interesting any more. And Sherlock reminds her of a number of them, without the flair.

"That's unfortunate. I'm not a big fan of plants. There is someone back home who uses them to control people."

Insulting Sherlock is a gamble, to be sure, but more like playing the slots at a casino: sometimes you end up with more coins than you were planning on carrying, but it's also depressingly easy to keep putting coins in and wonder if the machine's even working. The machine appears to be off at the moment. While Selina talks his face clearly broadcasts his reactions: IE, thinking about something else, thinking about something else, yes yes, going back to thinking about something else--wait, what?

"Sorry, did you say 'to control people?'" he says, momentarily stymied by the concept of Poison Ivy.

"Yes. To control people with some sort of amped up pheremones. She's a piece of work that much is certain," Selina says as she takes another long drink from her coffee cup. She really does not like, at all, being manipulated like that by anyone but by Ivy especially.

It says a lot about how long Sherlock's been in Taxon and how much he's come to accept what other worlds appear to think of the rigidities of "science" that he doesn't even say anything to the effect of pheromones don't work that way. (Though they don't. They really don't. Then again, neither do dinosaurs.)

"I have memories of an examination table," he says, looking up at the light overhead. "I can't say if they're dreams or not: they've got a dreamlike quality," but then again, doesn't everything? "My sense of time really has been warped. It's like I've had a very long, very bad trip."

She really doesn't care how the science actually works. She's still pissed off about the whole mind controlled and forced to be into girls or plants in Ivy's case, depending on how you want to take it.

"That sucks. I've been there," she says softly.

If Sherlock were in Selina's head he might have something to say about people who don't care how the science actually works. He isn't, which is probably a good thing in a number of ways. He lifts his coffee mug up to the light as if noticing it for the first time, then sets it back down carelessly as though he's bored of it. It makes a solid clink against the tabletop, like it's a real, solid thing in a real, solid city. Almost like.

"Well," he says in a curt voice. "Perhaps someday none of us will have to be there again." He stands and taps a few buttons on his bracelet--paying for his coffee, and yes, tipping the Extra waitress, although he still doesn't look happy about it.

"Then again, perhaps not," he says. "Good night, Ms Kyle."

".....Right."

Selina shakes her head and raises a hand to wave toward him. A soft sigh and she slowly, carefully puts her head down to the top of the table.

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[text: everyone] ch-ch-ch-changes

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