"Oh. I've been here, what, three days?" The question was rhetorical. Mostly. Give or take the yawning chasms in what passed for the normal passage of time here.
If the entire fucking Institute was on some faster-than-light Spaceship Earth hurtling around the galaxy at Warp 9, would they know it unless the Klingons attacked?
Would there be some quasi-mystical spider-sense that would tell the passengers that their loved ones were dropping like flies due to old age while they were eating pancakes and chasing phantoms in the dark? Some sort of trans-dimensional resonance bullshit involving quartz crystals or quantum entanglement?
It was coincidence, through and through. Memory cheated, and people forgot all the near misses and wild shots in the dark. The phone call to an ex-roommate you hadn't seen in a decade that turned out to be fifteen minutes before he wrapped his Volkswagen around a telephone pole but walked away from it because you'd made a crack comparing seatbelts and condoms and he remembered to buckle up. If you were mediagenic, you could convince Joe Public of a connection between anything and anything. The number of home games the Sox had lost and the monsoon season in Burma. Floor wax and sex appeal. Correlation is not causation, but people liked stories.
What it amounted to, as far as he could tell, was that he'd been there for about three days.
"Though I might have missed a shot due to the local narcolepsy pandemic." A nap sounded good, right about now, except for the part where it was a sign of giving up. Instead, he looked down at the grass. It was the sort of uniform monoculture green that was the Holy Grail of suburbanites everywhere, and kept chemical manufacturers in donuts and cologne. "Where's home?"
no subject
If the entire fucking Institute was on some faster-than-light Spaceship Earth hurtling around the galaxy at Warp 9, would they know it unless the Klingons attacked?
Would there be some quasi-mystical spider-sense that would tell the passengers that their loved ones were dropping like flies due to old age while they were eating pancakes and chasing phantoms in the dark? Some sort of trans-dimensional resonance bullshit involving quartz crystals or quantum entanglement?
It was coincidence, through and through. Memory cheated, and people forgot all the near misses and wild shots in the dark. The phone call to an ex-roommate you hadn't seen in a decade that turned out to be fifteen minutes before he wrapped his Volkswagen around a telephone pole but walked away from it because you'd made a crack comparing seatbelts and condoms and he remembered to buckle up. If you were mediagenic, you could convince Joe Public of a connection between anything and anything. The number of home games the Sox had lost and the monsoon season in Burma. Floor wax and sex appeal. Correlation is not causation, but people liked stories.
What it amounted to, as far as he could tell, was that he'd been there for about three days.
"Though I might have missed a shot due to the local narcolepsy pandemic." A nap sounded good, right about now, except for the part where it was a sign of giving up. Instead, he looked down at the grass. It was the sort of uniform monoculture green that was the Holy Grail of suburbanites everywhere, and kept chemical manufacturers in donuts and cologne. "Where's home?"