[Open] Love, Blood, and Rhetoric

[hellonspectacles]

Who: Palamedes Sextus and you!
What: Blood science!!
When: Early February
Where: The infirmary, or anywhere you feel like finding Pal
Warnings: As you might have guessed, there's blood.



[I. He Blinded Me With Science]

For months now, anyone who enters the Serena Eterna infirmary would have noticed the set of test tubes and petri dishes lined up in one corner of the room’s counter, and labeled with a large note:

Property of Palamedes Sextus, Room 105. DO NOT TOUCH. I will know if you do.

The test tubes each contain a sample of blood taken from a ship-board volunteer: young and old, human and non-human, alive and dead. The petri dishes are for his various experiments. Once upon a time, his question had been simple, or so he thought: could you tell if someone had died, either on the ship or before arriving, by studying their blood chemistry? But like so many matters about, things have gotten much more complicated since those early days.

And they are about to get more complicated still.

Pal spends most Saturday afternoons in his makeshift lab, and today is no exception. Back in January, he had started an experiment regarding the rate of cell decay. Everyone knew that the food on the ship didn’t rot. Everyone knew that people who died returned to life—usually. But what happened to the living on a cellular level? And could that affect be manipulated to guarantee resurrection upon death?

Humming tunelessly to himself, Palamedes inspects each sample in the petri dish, visions of cell clusters dancing in his head. Each time, he notes the thanergy and thalergy levels. Each time, he counts the number of living blood cells. He double-checks the numbers, triple-checks them, quadruple-checks them.

There’s no getting around it: after a month, absolutely no cell death has occurred.

Pal takes his handkerchief from his pocket and wipes a sheen of blood sweat off his forehead.

“Well, fuck me.”

[II. Wildcard!]

Want to hang with Pal, but don’t have a reason to visit him in the infirmary? I welcome your prompts! Pal is often in the library or drinking tea in Sand Dollars, or curled up in a chair in the lounge. Gimme what you got, or hmu on Plurk

Comments

[astrogator]

Yes. That second theory is... I don't like it at all. It would suggest to me that we really are in some sort of simulation, which was my initial theory when I arrived. A badly-programmed one, at that. Light on detail. I've been in a lot of training simulations with more depth than our situation here.

[That isn't making it any better, Ari!]

The first theory suggests some permeability between this universe and others. At least one other. That's more encouraging, I think.

[hellonspectacles]

Agreed. And I like to think it fits better what we know of the Captain. He doesn't like details. [He flashes a rueful smile.] I hope that isn't just wishful thinking.

[astrogator]

Doesn't like them, or doesn't know how to attend to them. Although in this instance, at least, it might work in our favor.

[She does think carefully about it, though. Ari's demand for a high standard of proof for everything in the black binder means that she'd be a hypocrite if she accepted other theories as truth just because she liked the sound of them, or liked the people advancing them.]

I think it's a sound and logical conclusion, even if not a definitive one.

I ruled out the simulation theory eventually because I thought that he would have a greater degree of technical knowledge if he were capable of creating one, even an imperfect one. I did consider that the man calling himself Captain might be another part of the simulation, but that strays very quickly into metaphysics, causes-of-causes speculatory stuff that ultimately leads nowhere. For me, it's better to proceed as if the other people here are all real, even if there's a small probability that they aren't.

[hellonspectacles]

Agreed. And if one isn’t careful, one finds oneself dissecting the meaning of real. [Palamedes scrunches up his nose slightly. Metaphysics has never been his area.] The Captain responds to stimuli. He makes choices. He expresses desires. Even if he was made in some sense—simulated, constructed, or otherwise—then he is real enough now.

So we operate under the hypothesis that we are in stasis, if an imperfect one. What does that mean? [At this point Pal is thinking aloud, the question directed at himself more than Ari.] For one thing, that we're not entirely outside of time in the Captain's bubble. Lieutenant, you weren't here when he brought us to the lizard island, were you?

[astrogator]

[She shrugs.] Virtual characters in simulations can respond to stimuli and make choices based on their programming, that doesn't make them real. It's the uncertainty of it that makes me err on the side of caution.

[It's an interesting debate, but ultimately a wholly irrelevant one. She tries to refocus.]

The lizard island? No, I don't think so. I arrived not long before the Halloween festival. Why, what happened on the island? More death?