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by Adélie 1/24/2015, 2:41 pmOOC: Long post :3 + me trying to sound smart
In the evening, an hour before curfew, Saskia storms out of the Athena cabin with dark smudges of ash in her hair, grease marks on her fingers, and a fuming expression on her face. She's holding a silver telescope that's almost as tall as she is, dragging it so hard that it tears up clumps of grass and leaves fresh imprints in the earth below. It seems like a regular telescope, but she's made a couple of modifications - mostly just to recognize certain constellations upon sight and then calculate, based on the seemingly minuscule movements of the planets, their average velocity, angle of trajectory, and so on.
She arrives at the observatory, observing with a brief glance that it is unoccupied. Good. It's a beautiful night, with a new moon, creating perfect conditions for stargazing. Not that she can bring herself to notice - or to care. She's only here to clear her mind, after all.
There's a barrage of emotions running through her like a torrent of water, from stark curiosity to feeling downright murderous. Saskia knows that she promised to finish the wiring of her invention tonight, but the heavenly bodies wait for no man, and she cannot resist their call, just as Newton found himself unable to resist the recesses of the universe some centuries in the past.
She's having some trouble with the artificial intelligence device; that's pretty much a lie, it's just not working altogether, and she's so frustrated and tired that she almost wants to go make a bonfire out of books, and watch all of them burn to a crisp. Poetry books, that is. The programming is the easy part - she can write differential equations for thousands of different emotions and thought processes, with respect to time, each subject to change with an alteration of a single variable. But the actual inventing, bringing her ideas into reality - that is, though she may be grudging to admit it, outside of her comfort zone.
People and the universe are so simple, yet so complicated at the same time. It is strange to see how, even throughout history, there are some fundamental questions that have always existed - like in Newton's time, when people had no explanation for the workings of the cosmos, or even just the natural world. He was a brilliant physicist - reducing everything to a set of equations and laws -, but even his theories had prominent exceptions.
His Law of Cooling, for example, which deduces the temperature of an object at any time, given the initial temperature and the temperature of its surroundings. It was a nice idea and all, to have a model for temperature, but there are just too many things to account for. Say there are two objects with the same mass, but one has a greater surface area; obviously, the one with the greater surface area would be more exposed to the surrounding environment, and thus the derivative of the function describing its cooling process would be larger in value. Newton's Law, on the other hand, would be unable to account for this difference.
Saskia feels like that sometimes, like no matter how hard she tries to simplify the world, there are just little details that slip through the cracks. Technically, thoughts are just electrical impulses, fired between the ends of neurons until somewhere and somehow, it just registers into recognition and information. But somehow the energy needed to power the flow of electrons between so many synapses and the ion-channel populations is so much - she's caused a power shortage in her cabin more than once.
Great as Newton was, and as many theoretical physicists were after him, he was never able to touch upon the workings of the human mind, such a complex apparatus, but composed almost entirely of fatty acid molecules. In comparison, the movements of the stars above her, in the night sky, are child's play. The stars remind her of barnacles, that send billions of their larvae away in milky white clouds; the stars, too, exist in multitudes, twinkling wherever the eye can see.
Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, she catches a glimpse of blonde hair, silkier and smoother than her own, and deduces who it is in a matter of seconds. Victoria Laroche-Guyot. Of course. Saskia makes this little half-grimace, half-scowl and turns away, pretending that she didn't see anything. She met Victoria once - how could she have not? Too many times has she seen Victoria, holding her mediocre philosophy books, parading around the cabin and sprouting quotes by Socrates, or Plato, or some other useless old Greek philosopher, at her unsuspecting victims.
She focuses instead on putting together her telescope, trying to pretend that Victoria doesn't threaten her. The truth is, she's never met anyone that frightens her so much. Victoria's passion for the sciences is something that she can respect, but her love for weaker subjects like philosophy, literature, and especially classical music bring up unwanted memories in Saskia's mind. Of Russia. Of her father. She tries to convince herself that it is only a chemical reaction in her body that sends her heart racing away, like a galloping horse - nothing but vasopressin transmitting signals at the amygdala and cortisol in the hypothalamus. To calm herself down, she starts picturing their molecular structures in her mind, reducing everything in the world back down in to formulas. Simple and predictable.
Nothing but a chemical reaction. Somehow, the more she thinks it, the less convincing it sounds.
