DVD Commentary: "School of Lost Souls" (Part Two)
Continued from here.
* * * * *"Papa," said Sara, "you see, if I went out and bought a new doll every few days I should have more than I could be fond of. Dolls ought to be intimate friends. Emily is going to be my intimate friend."
I'm abandoning the Fred:River::Minchin:Sara parallels here to go for something like Sarah:Emily::Fred:River. Which is a loaded parallel, because Sarah and Emily are "intimate friends" but at the end of the day Emily is still justa doll, an object, a floating signifier for Sara's rich imagination.
Now River got to see a new side of Fred. In the classroom, the scientist had always been cold, stern, aloof. In the privacy of their apartment (for it was their apartment now, River recognized with an excited shiver), however, Fred was like a whole different person. She was more friendly, effusive even, almost bubbly.If I had more faith in my ability to evoke the Fred-like characteristics of soulless!Fred, this bit of exposition would be superfluous and badly in need of cutting. I need to show Fred being Fred. As it is, however, I am afraid it is a necessary evil.
River quickly learned to enjoy the routine-or, more accurately, the lack thereof-of living with Fred. In a way, she was the embodiment of quantum chaos. Every day brought something new, some quirk of behavior that didn’t fit in neatly with everything else River knew about the gifted scientist. River quickly despaired of ever finally piecing everything together, but that was all right-she was enjoying herself far too much to care.
* * * * *"It is a story," said Sara. "Everything's a story. You are a story -- I am a story. Miss Minchin is a story."
Yeah, on one level, I'm really flailing for a quote. On the other hand, the quote really is appropriate: Fred's story is one hell of a story.
Above the fireplace in the living room, there was a framed print of what looked like a woodcut of some many-tentacled beast.That may just be the most awkward transition I've ever written.
River asked about it once. “That’s Illyria,” Fred had explained. “It’s the thing that took my soul.”
River had asked how Dr. Burkle, scientist in all things, could believe in something as amorphous and unquantifiable as a soul. Fred had paused for a moment, looked at River. “There are more things in heaven and Earth, River,” she said softly.
* * * * *The absurd old feathers on her forlorn hat were more draggled and absurd than ever, and her downtrodden shoes were so wet that they could not hold any more water. Added to this, she had been deprived of her dinner, because Miss Minchin had chosen to punish her. She was so cold and hungry and tired that her face began to have a pinched look, and now and then some kind-hearted person passing her in the street glanced at her with sudden sympathy.
The notion of the teacher punishing the student introduces, of course, the BDSM elements of this spanking scene.
The restricted psycholinguistic research that River’s new access codes allowed her to read included more than just trying to teach pigs to talk. It seemed that there was no aspect of the human psyche that the Alliance did not find worth studying, no experiment they would not conduct. There was detailed documentation of how human subjects responded to various types of psychological and physical torture: solitary confinement, rape, the witnessing of physical injury to loved ones. All in closely controlled settings, utilizing the scientific method in all of its precision.
In general, these experiments all took the same form. The experimenters would attempt to disrupt the linguistic network, create some type of imbalance within it. The dissonance created within the network would be so great as to completely shatter the subject’s sense of self, alienating her from her own body, mind, and environment. The so-called “ghost within the machine” would be obliterated, leaving only a calculating machine able to carry out orders without resistance.
River incorporated this new research into her matrices. Still, however, chaos continued to prove a problem. She would think her matrix was one thing, and then all of a sudden it would butterfly into another.
“Do you know what a butterfly was?” Fred had asked when River had explained the problem to her just as they finished dinner: chocolate chip pancakes.
River looked at Fred strangely. “To butterfly,” River recited. “Verb, intransitive. To produce changes of a greater magnitude by introducing changes of a lesser magnitude into a nonlinear dynamical system.”
A butterfly, Fred told her, was once a type of insect on Earth-that-Was. River didn’t ask her how she knew that.This fic was written after I saw Serenity, but before I got it on video. Pre-Serenity, there seemed to be a feeling that in the loss of Earth-that-Was, a lot of old Earth culture and knowledge had been lost. Where we (or maybe it was just I) got this impression, I don't know; reexamining canon in retrospect, there doesn't seem to be much textual support for the notion. That River wouldn't know what a butterfly is seems pretty ludicrous to me now. But that notion is the one under which this fic, as well as "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," was written. (The notion in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" that Mal wouldn't know who Han Solo is is even more anti-canonical, seeing how Kaylee has a Han Solo figurine in the engine room.) When Fred quotes Shakespeare, as she does at the end of the last section, or Orwell, as she'll do later in this scene, it was intended to underscore her position as a part of our world transplanted to the future. As it is, it just seem to make her seem unnecessarily OOC, my own lit geek being pasted onto her science geek.
Instead she asked about the gruesome experiments she had found on the cortex. “Why does the Alliance allow such research?” she asked. “It’s inhumane.”
But Fred had only turned the question back on her in true Socratic fashion. “Why do they allow the research? You know the answer, River.”Even before I begin quoting Orwell directly, I begin setting up the parallel to the dynamics of O'Brien's interrogation of Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
She paused. “To know. They want to know, and they consider the human suffering caused in the process of finding out negligible.”
“Partly right,” Fred agreed. “But why is this knowledge so valuable to them?”
“It represents power,” River answered readily. “It gives them control over humans. They need power. They need to control everything, every little detail of every person’s life.”
“Close,” said Fred. “So close. And why do they want to this power?”
“To unite the system,” answered River. “To spread civilization-”I think I justified just how talky this part of the scene is by comparing it to Orwell's version. The only think is that I think in Orwell's version it works, and I'm not sure that here it does.
“Foolish, River, foolish!” Suddenly the approving look on Fred’s face quickly changed to frustration as she rose from the table. “Have you let their unification propaganda eat your brain? You’re smarter than that.”
River rose herself as she raced to apologize. “I’m-”
Fred held up a hand. “Enough of that, River. Your pants at your feet now.”
River hands went to her belt, unbuckling it, then pulled her trousers and panties to her ankles.What is going through River's mind here? Does she consider not obeying? What does she think the potential consequences of not obeying would be? I honestly don't know the answers, and I really should.
“Bend over the table.”What follows is more or less the same dynamics as every spanking fic ever written. I don't think that's a problem, though. Apparently the formula works, at least for some people.
River complied. Fred walked over, placed her palm on the girl’s bare buttocks.
“Spread your legs wider.”
River did so.
“You are better than that, River. Such stupidity deserves to be punished.” River felt Fred drive her nails into the skin of her buttocks. “What do you think?” Fred asked. “Will eight spankings be enough?”
When River said nothing, Fred continued, “Very well, if eight isn’t enough, how about ten? Will that be enough?”
Realizing the count would only go up if she didn’t say anything, River quickly said, “Yes, Fred.”
“Good. I want you to keep count.”
And then Fred’s hand was no longer on River’s buttocks, and then it was again, for a split second, bringing with it a flash of pain. “One,” River cried out, just before the hand came down again. “Two.”
“It is not that they don’t care that their research causes human suffering, River. They do care. They relish in the fact. The Alliance is not concerned with civilization or with enlightenment, River. You know this. They care only for pure, unadulterated power. It is not a means but an end. ‘The object of persecution is persecution.’"
Fred’s hand slapped against River’s skin. “Three.”
“‘The object of torture is torture.’”
Again. “Four.”
“‘The object of power is power.’”
River had counted out another four when the doorbell rang.
“I’ll be right back. Stay there, and don’t move,” Fred commanded as she left the kitchen and made her way to the front door. It was just out of visibility from the kitchen table, but River could hear the door slide open.
“Harmony,” she heard Fred say, surprise evident in her voice. “What are you doing here?”I decided to introduce Harmony into this fic when I realized I needed something to happen in the middle of this fic, after the Fred/River relationship began but before River was given up to Project Pandora. I needed something that would be evocative of her old life, that would make her face her soulless nature head-on. Harmony was perfect for that rôle, plus had the added benefit of being able to plausibly survive not only "Not Fade Away," but also the destruction of Earth-that-Was.
“Mr. Tenshi got mad at me,” came a young-sounding, somewhat flighty voice."Tenshi" according to some random unreliable source found through Google, means "angel." Make of that as you will. Personally, I don't think it means a damn thing.
A blonde, River predicted.Again--latent psychic ability, or just plain old-fashioned stereotypes (with some stereotypes lasting forever)?
“I was thinking I could come here and crash until he calms down again.”
“Hera is a week’s journey by transport from Regina,” Fred pointed out. There was no reply.
The blonde woman must have entered the apartment, for River watched out of the corner of her eye as she rounded the corner and entered the kitchen. She didn’t even glance twice at River bent over the kitchen table, her pants at her ankles, but instead made her way for the refrigerator. “I don’t suppose you have any blood on hand,” she said, as she pulled out a cola.
“One day, Harm, I’m going to de-invite you,” Fred answered, entering behind the woman. “I’m telling you I don’t want anything to do with Blue Sun.”
“Oh, like you could really get away from them,” Harmony said, holding up her cola can to showcase the Blue Sun logo on its side.River can see a lot out of the corner of her eye, it seems.
“They like, what? Bankroll half the budget for this school?”The rôle of Blue Sun was a plot thread that was more or less completely dropped in Serenity, so I make sure to reference it to show I haven't forgotten. (A lot of my fanfic gets written as a je me souviens--and I'll do a meta post on that subject, eventually.) Also, I fell in love with the image, once I decided that Harmony would appearing in the fic, of her using a can of cola in Fred's fridge to prove that it was impossible to escape Blue Sun's influence.
“Be that as it may, if I find out that you are here to try to sell me on some-”
“Oh, please,” Harmony interjected, “you’ve made it quite clear to Blue Sun you want no part with them. Still, you can’t blame them for being interested in your research.”
River shifted her weight just slightly, trying to get a better view of Fred and this Harmony woman, but Fred caught the movement. “River,” she said sternly. “I said not to move. That’ll make it twice the punishment.”
“Is that your student?” Harmony asked.
“Her name’s River. I would have said she was the most brilliant girl I’ve come across, but she’s recently put the lie to that statement.”
“So you’re punishing her?” River could see the smile on Harmony’s face, almost hungry, even.
“She’s still owed twelve spanks, now,” Fred said. “Would you like to do the honors?”
Harmony was stronger than she looked; the blows that rained down upon River’s buttocks were much more forceful than Fred’s had been. Yet Harmony was not slow and deliberative like Fred, letting the maximum amount of time pass between spanks to intensify the agony. River counted out the blows as they came, and soon it was done.River, of course, has no idea that Harmony is a vampire, mostly because she has no idea that vampires exist. Yay for unreliable narrators.
“Very good,” Fred said. “Now River, on your knees.”
River got up from the table, then immediately sank to her knees.
“Now thank Harmony for helping to punish you.”
“Thank you, Harmony.”
“Oh, you’re welcome,” said Harmony, beaming. “It was fun.”I pulled back from writing oral sex here for two reasons. I still wasn't comfortable writing sex (as well as sex with the power dynamics so skewed) and I just didn't have time in writing this to develop a Harmony/River dynamic. The Harmony/River/Fred triangle, had I developed it, would have subordinated, demeaned, and objectified River even more, for sexual access to River would become something so trivial that Fred lends it out to a woman who doesn't even quite qualify as a friend. Of course, the set-up for oral sex is still pretty explicit here, I think.
* * * * *"And now you've lost her," she cried wildly; "and some other school will get her and her money; and if she were like any other child she'd tell how she's been treated, and all our pupils would be taken away and we should be ruined. And it serves us right; but it serves you right more than it does me, for you are a hard woman, Maria Minchin, you're a hard, selfish, worldly woman!"
Here we begin to foreshadow that eventually Fred will, indeed, "lose" River (to Dr. Mathias and Project Pandora).
Harmony stayed for the next few days, sharing the bed with both Fred and River, and the two of them quickly integrated the blonde into their routine, such as it was. River could only wonder what shared experiences could have brought such two different women together. Sometimes there seemed there couldn’t be two women more different, the yin and the yang. Then, other times, one or the other would say something and the other would laugh and they seemed like two peas in a pod, just two young woman who wanted to have fun.While I can't say what happened between Fred and Harmony after Fred's resurrection, or even why Harmony already had an invite to Fred's apartment, they do share two things in common that nobody else has: they remember Earth, and they lack souls.
Perhaps it was inevitable that it would only take a few days for the two women to be at each other throats.
River didn’t know what caused it; she had been in the study, working hard on her conceptual matrices. But she had been able to hear the yelling from the living room, and had quickly given up any hope of getting work done while the two were fighting.
When she entered the living room, the two women were standing on opposite sides of the room. Two bottles of Heran cactus wine were on the coffee table, one half empty and the other full of nothing but air.
“We used to be friends,” Harmony insisted. “We went out for drinks and everything.”
“Once,” Fred said with a sigh. “Just once. ‘That was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.’”Look how careful I am to make it clear when Fred's quoting! If I were to write this fic today, I'd probably take out the interior single quotes just to be contrary. [BTW, if you really care and don't know, the quote is from Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta. Which a google search would have turned up pretty easily without me needing to tell you that.]
What I love about this use of the quote, however, is that the "dead wench" is of course her (souled) self. (Although of course Harmony is also dead.)
“Oh, can you please get over that?” Harmony erupted. “So you died. Big deal. Do you see the rest of us obsessing?”Because vamp!Harmony really would think the fact that Fred died and lost her soul was really not a big deal at all and Fred was so just being melodramatic.
“‘The rest of us’?” Fred asked, anger seeping into her voice. “There is no ‘the rest of us,’ Harm. You’re the only one who made it off Earth-that-Was.”
“So I’m a survivor. How is that my fault?”
“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality, Harmony.”No single quotes here, because I don't think Fred is thinking of herself as quoting JFK so much as using a popular paraphrase of Dante. Of course it's a paraphrase which totally misses the point, because in Dante's Inferno the deepest and most horrible levels of hell are really, really cold. And you should get me off this subject before I start quoting "The Hollow Men."
Harmony's shrug was the most abject show of apathy River had ever seen. "I'm a soulless creature," she said. "What do you expect?"
Harmony paused, then took a step closer. "That's what this is about, isn't it? You're mad at me for losing your soul. Well, I'm not the one who made you touch that sarco--sarc--that coffin thing. If you want someone to blame, blame Knox. Blame Gunn. Blame Wesley or Angel, even. But no, they're dead. So you have to project your anger and your hatred onto me. Well, get over it, sister. There are better things in life than souls."
* * * * *How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.
Again, FHB is randomly philosophical for no good reason. But in a story about "cognitive linguistics," it creates some really cool echoes when used as an epigraph.
Harrmony left, and life returned to the ebb and flow of chaos that passed for normality within the apartment. With one less distraction, she was able to better turn her attention back to her work. The more she developed her matrices, however, the more it became obvious how great their limitations truly were. No science could account for consciousness; the best any mechanist could do would be to attempt to dismiss it as an illusion, and insist that human thought could be explained purely in the strict causal terms one would use to describe a computer or a sheep brain. Yet the existence of the consciousness was an empirical fact, wasn’t it? River was conscious of herself as a person, an entity, as more than the sum of processes going on in her brain. Could all that really only be the result of systemic chaos?If you're asking me, then yes, I think it can. But the queer metaphysics (which has nothing to do with other varieties of queerness) of consciousness as a res cogitans is perfectly at home in the pseudo-Platonic Jossverse.And the understatement of the year award goes to Winifred Burkle, Ph.D.
Indeed, it was. What was the spark of consciousness, the magic of thought, the essence which could not be translated into pure mathematics? “Is it the soul?” River had asked once, still unsure how she felt about invoking such an un-empirical entity.Except in the Jossverse a soul is completely an empirical entitty, and not a metaphysical one at all. You could do double-blind studies if you had enough Thesulan Orbs.
But Fred had shaken her head. “I don’t have a soul, remember? I’m still conscious, although I suppose couldn’t prove that to you. And what about someone in a coma, or who is braindead? They’re not conscious, but they still have a soul.”
So River continued doing research, kept on developing her matrices, assuming for the time being that the mechanists were right, and there was nothing more to consciousness. There was no choice, really. Any other option would be unscientific.
If that were the case, it was clear that not every statement that was true (whatever that meant) would be intelligible within the conceptual matrix. Gödel’s theorems proved that much. So she integrated within the matrices a submatrix-a “reality matrix” as Fred nicknamed it-that networked the various intelligible statements. The reality matrix wouldn’t be particularly powerful-about on par with first-order arithmetic-but as long as it was consistent the overall matrix could function.I think I was reading Gödel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid as I wrote this fic.
It was the portions of the matrices which rested outside the reality matrix that fascinated River. By necessity they manifested all sort of paradoxes: inconsistencies, infinite regresses, self-references. It was this chaotic core that would allow the reality matrix to cohere.Note that the phrase "reality matrix" is canon, appearing in the first nine minutes of Serenity.
When she told Fred about her success the scientist had only laughed. “So it is necessary to have chaos inside to give birth to a dancing star,” she said.And Nietzsche just had to make an appearance in this story, don't you think?
* * * * *"Do you think," Becky faltered once, in a whisper, "do you think it could melt away, miss? Hadn't we better be quick?" And she hastily crammed her sandwich into her mouth. If it was only a dream, kitchen manners would be overlooked.
The quote is about dreams.
“Londinium bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down,” a woman was singing in an unfamiliar accent, her voice softly lilting. “Londinium bridge is falling down, my fair lady.”
“Excuse me,” River asked, “Am I late for the war?”
The woman turned towards River, looked at her. She had long black hair, and was dressed in a long red dress. A black shawl was wrapped around her shoulders.On the extremely unlikely chance you hadn't figured this out, that is Drusilla. I couldn't resist putting her in this story--in fact, I don't think I've written a dream sequence in which she doesn't appear.
“The war is over, fought hundreds of years ago. The toy soldiers have fallen to the ground, rusted away.”
“Oh,” said River, and turned away.
“Shh!” said the woman, as if River had been about to say something. She grabbed River’s arm. “Hush now. There will be new soldiers. The toymaker is preparing them even now.”
“The humans fought against each other for centuries,” interjected another voice, and River turned to see a woman in a red, blue, and brown bodysuit. “It made them weak, able to be conquered from without. Only the vessel of the Shadowmen stood between their race and their destruction. Now there have risen among men those with the will to take dominion over their brethren. A single people are unified under a rule of iron.”
River looked at the woman. “Fred?”
Only it wasn’t Fred. She looked like Fred, but this creature was not Fred. Her hair was blue where Fred’s was brown. Her lips, eyes, and forehead were blue. Her demeanor was not Fred’s.
“The child always returns to where the father buried the hatchet,” the dark-haired woman said. “Here comes a candle to light you to bed; here comes a chopper-”This nursery rhyme is referenced to in Nineteen Eighty-Four, of course, creating all sorts of intertextuality. It's also a poem I would recite to myself everytime I passed by St. Martin's (say, on the way to Trafalgar Square) while I was in London.
* * * * *"It was there when I wakened, miss--the blanket," she whispered excitedly. "It was as real as it was last night."
The aftermath of the dream.
River awoke to voices emanating from the study.
“If you go through with this, Timothy, you’ll be going to be killing the goose that laid the golden eggs,” she could make out Fred saying. “It’s largely her research that made your project possible.”I really love the idea that it is River's own research which makes possible the way in which they steal her sanity. It's a theme I plan on revisiting in a future fic, even.
“You have no idea how difficult it has been securing suitable subjects,” a male voice replies. “The requirements are-”
“I am well aware of the requirements,” Fred snapped.Which means she knows quite well what is going on, an important thing to establish.
“You have this entire station at your disposal. Use one of the others.”
Then Fred must have terminated the communication, for River did not hear the male reply.
Moments later, Fred entered the bedroom. “Good morning,” she said cheerfully, as if she hadn’t just been in a disagreement with the mysterious man. “Slept well?”
“I had the strangest dream,” River answered, getting out of bed and changing out of her nightshirt and into a sleek blue dress. “There was this weird woman who looked just like you, only she had blue hair. She kept talking about how humans were weak and the species should be united.”
Fred froze, her face suddenly ashen.She recognizes the description of Illyria, of course.
“Was there anything else in your dream?” she asked, a new note of desperation creeping into her voice.
River nodded. “There was a dark-haired woman with a strange accent who kept on talking about toys and nursery rhymes.” She sung to Fred “Londinium bridge,” recreating the strange woman’s accent
“Cockney,” Fred answered. “One of the dialects from an island called Britain on Earth-that-Was. It still can be heard today, on some of the border planets. Dyton Colony, mainly.”I'm sure Dru's accent isn't actually intended to be even faux-Cockney, but I couldn't resist the reference to "Shindig."
They didn’t talk about the dream ever again, but for the rest of that day Fred kept casting uneasy glances in River’s direction.
* * * * *
“Aiyā huàile!” River cursed under her breath. A particularly insidious paradox in one of the upper meta-levels had managed to infect the reality matrix, destabilizing it completely. She had tried every way she could think of to fix the problem, and none of them were working.
She sighed and logged onto the cortex. Maybe if she tried something else and came back to it, the answer would be more clear. She keyed in a search code for her own name.Yes, River googles herself!
TAM, RIVER
Student, Academy Station, Regina
Well, that was boring. She keyed in her special access codes-there had to be more information than that.TAM, RIVER
ACCESS CODE NOT ACCEPTED
RESTRICTED ACCESS
[CLASSIFICATION LEVEL ZHEN DAOMEI]
That was weird. Her own file was classified beyond her access? She keyed in a search for Fred instead.BURKLE, WINIFRED
Instructor in Cognitive Linguistics, Academy Station, Regina
Previous Employment
Head of Research and Development, Wolfram & Hart Los Angeles
Associate, Angel Investigations
Librarian, Los Angeles Public Library
Education
Bachelor of Arts: University of Texas, 1993
Master of Science: University of California, 1994
Doctor of Philosophy: University of Londinium, 2511
She paused, then ran another search.
KENDALL, HARMONY
Supernatural Porphyriac [See Renfield File BA0072.] [This is how the Alliance explains vampires to itself, very Initiative-esque.]
Personal Assistant to the Vice President in Charge of Special Projects, Blue Sun Industries [The parallel to Wolfram & Hart is, of course, deliberate.]
Previous Employment
Special Client Coordinator, Weyland-Yutari
Occult Systems Analyst, Cyberdine Systems
Vampiric Affairs Manager, Quicksilver Ltd.
Special Consultant on the Supernatural, SRT International
Public Relations Liaison, U.S. Robots [Yes, over half of these fictional companies are ones I didn't create. If you're already writing a crossover, why not go hog?]
Personal Assistant to the Chief Executive Officer, Wolfram & Hart Los Angeles
Education
Sunnydale High School, 1999
River stared at her source box. Not only had Fred and Harmony both been on Earth-that-Was, the Alliance knew about it. She had even been able to access the information with her access code-a code which wouldn’t permit access to her own file. She thought for a moment, then ran another search.
ILLYRIA
ACCESS CODE NOT ACCEPTED
RESTRICTED ACCESS
[CLASSIFICATION LEVEL TIAN XIAODE]
What had happened on Earth-that-Was so many years ago? What did Fred and Harmony both know that the Alliance wanted kept hidden?
* * * * *"It is true that the first thought was mine, Sahib," he said; "though it was naught but a fancy. I am fond of this child; we are both lonely. It is her way to relate her visions to her secret friends. Being sad one night, I lay close to the open skylight and listened. The vision she related told what this miserable room might be if it had comforts in it. She seemed to see it as she talked, and she grew cheered and warmed as she spoke. Then she came to this fancy; and the next day, the Sahib being ill and wretched, I told him of the thing to amuse him. It seemed then but a dream, but it pleased the Sahib. To hear of the child's doings gave him entertainment. He became interested in her and asked questions. At last he began to please himself with the thought of making her visions real things."
Of course, the boundary between imagination and reality will be blurred for River in a much less benign way.
River soon found that the matrices with the destabilized reality submatrices displayed a rather odd and inexplicable property: when run at the same time as matrices with coherent reality submatrices, even ones fashioned from radically different linguistic networks, they would produce synchronistic results. There was no possible scientific explanation for the phenomenon, except for the increasingly implausible move of scratching it up to pure chance; what they were dealing with, if it were real, was some type of acausal connecting principle.Which, of course, is the foundation for the psychic abilities the Project Pandora subjects develop.
“A coin can fall on the same side a hundred times in a row,” Fred had said, scrunching up her nose. “But when it happens, it’s a pretty good sign you might want to check if you’re a character in a play.”A reference to Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, of course. I really did go crazy (deliberately so) with the intertextuality in this fic. And of course here we get to reference that play's metatextuality, reminding us that Fred and River are both characters in a fanfic, and I the fanfic author am behind the curtain, pulling all their strings. And if we really want to stretch, we can compare the way in which I use them as sex objects with the way in which the Alliance uses them.
They had certainly run the simulations enough time for the results to be statistically significant, then had checked their math and ran the simulations all over again. There was little doubt that whatever they were dealing with, it was real.
“This just might be the greatest scientific break-through in the last three hundred years,” Fred said, but River had thought that she didn’t exactly look very happy.Hopefully, this functions as a moment of moral ambiguity. Fred knows that the chance to create psychic assassins will be one the Alliance will not be able to pass up.
* * * * *
Dearest Simon,
Life at the Academy continues to go well.
River was worried. Fred had changed in the past weeks, after since they had discovered the synchronous effects in the destabilized matrices. The fun-loving young woman was gone, as was the piānzhí de jiūcháyuán. Instead, they had been replaced with a women who was withdrawn and sullen, who spoke only when spoken to and little even then, who avoided looking River in the eyes whenever possible.The device, of course, is that River's letter--her plea to help to Simon that we see in canon--is contradicted at every turn by what is actually going on: River beginning to recognize the danger she is in. This means my fic isn't quite compatible with "The R. Tam Sessions"--where her letter to Simon is written much later, after she has already met Dr. Mathias--which is a shame.
This weak we are learning about the French revolution back on Earth-that-Was. It’s very interesting, although it’s heard to study because the French spoke a ded language.
I go a bit overboard with misspellings.
River didn’t know what was going on, why things were suddenly so different. She only knew that her instincts told her that something was coming, and it wasn’t going to be good.
Did you have a good time at the D'arbanville's ball this year? From what I’ve heard it was much duller than last year.
Your loving sister,
River
* * * * * "Are you learning me by heart, little Sara?" he said, stroking her hair.
"No," she answered. "I know you by heart. You are inside my heart." And they put their arms round each other and kissed as if they would never let each other go.
'Cesty! But also a goodbye, so thematically relevant.
Conditions in the destabilized matrix mirrored concepts in the stabilized matrix, although there was no possible explanation as to how the destabilized matrix could create such conditions. An already destabilized matrix could be caused to destabilize even further simply by running it concurrently with another
Could she stabilize the reality matrix by running it concurrently with a stable matrix that contained the right conditions to counteract the imbalance? River didn’t know, but it was something she could find. She could make attempts, construct hypotheses, test them. Like a scientist.She's about to find the cure for the condition she will suffer. If only she had had a week longer. . . .
“River,” Fred said, entering the study. “I need you for something in the living room.”
“In a little bit,” River said, watching intently as the simulation ran. “I’m in the middle of something.” A cascade of concept-regressions was forming, and-
Fred disconnected the source box. “Now.”
River nodded, uncertainly, then got up and made her way out of the study. Already standing in the living room was a middle-aged man in a lab coat just like the one Fred wore for her classes-and was wearing right then.Fred is wearing the outfit she wears when she takes on the persona of a heartless bitch for her classroom lectures. We can only assume she developed real affection for River (perhaps even the twisted version of love of which soulless beings are capable), since we saw her fight with Dr. Mathias to protect her from Project Pandora. Now, she is trying to dissassociate herself as much as possible from what she is being forced to do.
“River,” Fred said, “I’d like you to meet Dr. Mathias.”This line was one of the first things I came up with when I first envisioned this fic. Everything that came before was moving inexorably (particularly for the reader, to whom this endpoint is even more inevitable) to this single moment.
* * * * *To: Burkle, W. [winifred.burkle%fac.acad.reg]
From: Mathias, T. [timothy.mathias%clas.reg]
CC: Valerio, L. [li.valerio%parl.ld]
Subject 56743, River Tam, has escaped. Due to normal Pandora Project procedures, she is both insane and extremely dangerous. Should she attempt to contact you, please report to us immediately.
* * * * *"Papa," said Sara, "you see, if I went out and bought a new doll every few days I should have more than I could be fond of. Dolls ought to be intimate friends. Emily is going to be my intimate friend."
I'm abandoning the Fred:River::Minchin:Sara parallels here to go for something like Sarah:Emily::Fred:River. Which is a loaded parallel, because Sarah and Emily are "intimate friends" but at the end of the day Emily is still justa doll, an object, a floating signifier for Sara's rich imagination.
Now River got to see a new side of Fred. In the classroom, the scientist had always been cold, stern, aloof. In the privacy of their apartment (for it was their apartment now, River recognized with an excited shiver), however, Fred was like a whole different person. She was more friendly, effusive even, almost bubbly.If I had more faith in my ability to evoke the Fred-like characteristics of soulless!Fred, this bit of exposition would be superfluous and badly in need of cutting. I need to show Fred being Fred. As it is, however, I am afraid it is a necessary evil.
River quickly learned to enjoy the routine-or, more accurately, the lack thereof-of living with Fred. In a way, she was the embodiment of quantum chaos. Every day brought something new, some quirk of behavior that didn’t fit in neatly with everything else River knew about the gifted scientist. River quickly despaired of ever finally piecing everything together, but that was all right-she was enjoying herself far too much to care.
* * * * *"It is a story," said Sara. "Everything's a story. You are a story -- I am a story. Miss Minchin is a story."
Yeah, on one level, I'm really flailing for a quote. On the other hand, the quote really is appropriate: Fred's story is one hell of a story.
Above the fireplace in the living room, there was a framed print of what looked like a woodcut of some many-tentacled beast.That may just be the most awkward transition I've ever written.
River asked about it once. “That’s Illyria,” Fred had explained. “It’s the thing that took my soul.”
River had asked how Dr. Burkle, scientist in all things, could believe in something as amorphous and unquantifiable as a soul. Fred had paused for a moment, looked at River. “There are more things in heaven and Earth, River,” she said softly.
* * * * *The absurd old feathers on her forlorn hat were more draggled and absurd than ever, and her downtrodden shoes were so wet that they could not hold any more water. Added to this, she had been deprived of her dinner, because Miss Minchin had chosen to punish her. She was so cold and hungry and tired that her face began to have a pinched look, and now and then some kind-hearted person passing her in the street glanced at her with sudden sympathy.
The notion of the teacher punishing the student introduces, of course, the BDSM elements of this spanking scene.
The restricted psycholinguistic research that River’s new access codes allowed her to read included more than just trying to teach pigs to talk. It seemed that there was no aspect of the human psyche that the Alliance did not find worth studying, no experiment they would not conduct. There was detailed documentation of how human subjects responded to various types of psychological and physical torture: solitary confinement, rape, the witnessing of physical injury to loved ones. All in closely controlled settings, utilizing the scientific method in all of its precision.
In general, these experiments all took the same form. The experimenters would attempt to disrupt the linguistic network, create some type of imbalance within it. The dissonance created within the network would be so great as to completely shatter the subject’s sense of self, alienating her from her own body, mind, and environment. The so-called “ghost within the machine” would be obliterated, leaving only a calculating machine able to carry out orders without resistance.
River incorporated this new research into her matrices. Still, however, chaos continued to prove a problem. She would think her matrix was one thing, and then all of a sudden it would butterfly into another.
“Do you know what a butterfly was?” Fred had asked when River had explained the problem to her just as they finished dinner: chocolate chip pancakes.
River looked at Fred strangely. “To butterfly,” River recited. “Verb, intransitive. To produce changes of a greater magnitude by introducing changes of a lesser magnitude into a nonlinear dynamical system.”
A butterfly, Fred told her, was once a type of insect on Earth-that-Was. River didn’t ask her how she knew that.This fic was written after I saw Serenity, but before I got it on video. Pre-Serenity, there seemed to be a feeling that in the loss of Earth-that-Was, a lot of old Earth culture and knowledge had been lost. Where we (or maybe it was just I) got this impression, I don't know; reexamining canon in retrospect, there doesn't seem to be much textual support for the notion. That River wouldn't know what a butterfly is seems pretty ludicrous to me now. But that notion is the one under which this fic, as well as "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," was written. (The notion in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" that Mal wouldn't know who Han Solo is is even more anti-canonical, seeing how Kaylee has a Han Solo figurine in the engine room.) When Fred quotes Shakespeare, as she does at the end of the last section, or Orwell, as she'll do later in this scene, it was intended to underscore her position as a part of our world transplanted to the future. As it is, it just seem to make her seem unnecessarily OOC, my own lit geek being pasted onto her science geek.
Instead she asked about the gruesome experiments she had found on the cortex. “Why does the Alliance allow such research?” she asked. “It’s inhumane.”
But Fred had only turned the question back on her in true Socratic fashion. “Why do they allow the research? You know the answer, River.”Even before I begin quoting Orwell directly, I begin setting up the parallel to the dynamics of O'Brien's interrogation of Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
She paused. “To know. They want to know, and they consider the human suffering caused in the process of finding out negligible.”
“Partly right,” Fred agreed. “But why is this knowledge so valuable to them?”
“It represents power,” River answered readily. “It gives them control over humans. They need power. They need to control everything, every little detail of every person’s life.”
“Close,” said Fred. “So close. And why do they want to this power?”
“To unite the system,” answered River. “To spread civilization-”I think I justified just how talky this part of the scene is by comparing it to Orwell's version. The only think is that I think in Orwell's version it works, and I'm not sure that here it does.
“Foolish, River, foolish!” Suddenly the approving look on Fred’s face quickly changed to frustration as she rose from the table. “Have you let their unification propaganda eat your brain? You’re smarter than that.”
River rose herself as she raced to apologize. “I’m-”
Fred held up a hand. “Enough of that, River. Your pants at your feet now.”
River hands went to her belt, unbuckling it, then pulled her trousers and panties to her ankles.What is going through River's mind here? Does she consider not obeying? What does she think the potential consequences of not obeying would be? I honestly don't know the answers, and I really should.
“Bend over the table.”What follows is more or less the same dynamics as every spanking fic ever written. I don't think that's a problem, though. Apparently the formula works, at least for some people.
River complied. Fred walked over, placed her palm on the girl’s bare buttocks.
“Spread your legs wider.”
River did so.
“You are better than that, River. Such stupidity deserves to be punished.” River felt Fred drive her nails into the skin of her buttocks. “What do you think?” Fred asked. “Will eight spankings be enough?”
When River said nothing, Fred continued, “Very well, if eight isn’t enough, how about ten? Will that be enough?”
Realizing the count would only go up if she didn’t say anything, River quickly said, “Yes, Fred.”
“Good. I want you to keep count.”
And then Fred’s hand was no longer on River’s buttocks, and then it was again, for a split second, bringing with it a flash of pain. “One,” River cried out, just before the hand came down again. “Two.”
“It is not that they don’t care that their research causes human suffering, River. They do care. They relish in the fact. The Alliance is not concerned with civilization or with enlightenment, River. You know this. They care only for pure, unadulterated power. It is not a means but an end. ‘The object of persecution is persecution.’"
Fred’s hand slapped against River’s skin. “Three.”
“‘The object of torture is torture.’”
Again. “Four.”
“‘The object of power is power.’”
River had counted out another four when the doorbell rang.
“I’ll be right back. Stay there, and don’t move,” Fred commanded as she left the kitchen and made her way to the front door. It was just out of visibility from the kitchen table, but River could hear the door slide open.
“Harmony,” she heard Fred say, surprise evident in her voice. “What are you doing here?”I decided to introduce Harmony into this fic when I realized I needed something to happen in the middle of this fic, after the Fred/River relationship began but before River was given up to Project Pandora. I needed something that would be evocative of her old life, that would make her face her soulless nature head-on. Harmony was perfect for that rôle, plus had the added benefit of being able to plausibly survive not only "Not Fade Away," but also the destruction of Earth-that-Was.
“Mr. Tenshi got mad at me,” came a young-sounding, somewhat flighty voice."Tenshi" according to some random unreliable source found through Google, means "angel." Make of that as you will. Personally, I don't think it means a damn thing.
A blonde, River predicted.Again--latent psychic ability, or just plain old-fashioned stereotypes (with some stereotypes lasting forever)?
“I was thinking I could come here and crash until he calms down again.”
“Hera is a week’s journey by transport from Regina,” Fred pointed out. There was no reply.
The blonde woman must have entered the apartment, for River watched out of the corner of her eye as she rounded the corner and entered the kitchen. She didn’t even glance twice at River bent over the kitchen table, her pants at her ankles, but instead made her way for the refrigerator. “I don’t suppose you have any blood on hand,” she said, as she pulled out a cola.
“One day, Harm, I’m going to de-invite you,” Fred answered, entering behind the woman. “I’m telling you I don’t want anything to do with Blue Sun.”
“Oh, like you could really get away from them,” Harmony said, holding up her cola can to showcase the Blue Sun logo on its side.River can see a lot out of the corner of her eye, it seems.
“They like, what? Bankroll half the budget for this school?”The rôle of Blue Sun was a plot thread that was more or less completely dropped in Serenity, so I make sure to reference it to show I haven't forgotten. (A lot of my fanfic gets written as a je me souviens--and I'll do a meta post on that subject, eventually.) Also, I fell in love with the image, once I decided that Harmony would appearing in the fic, of her using a can of cola in Fred's fridge to prove that it was impossible to escape Blue Sun's influence.
“Be that as it may, if I find out that you are here to try to sell me on some-”
“Oh, please,” Harmony interjected, “you’ve made it quite clear to Blue Sun you want no part with them. Still, you can’t blame them for being interested in your research.”
River shifted her weight just slightly, trying to get a better view of Fred and this Harmony woman, but Fred caught the movement. “River,” she said sternly. “I said not to move. That’ll make it twice the punishment.”
“Is that your student?” Harmony asked.
“Her name’s River. I would have said she was the most brilliant girl I’ve come across, but she’s recently put the lie to that statement.”
“So you’re punishing her?” River could see the smile on Harmony’s face, almost hungry, even.
“She’s still owed twelve spanks, now,” Fred said. “Would you like to do the honors?”
Harmony was stronger than she looked; the blows that rained down upon River’s buttocks were much more forceful than Fred’s had been. Yet Harmony was not slow and deliberative like Fred, letting the maximum amount of time pass between spanks to intensify the agony. River counted out the blows as they came, and soon it was done.River, of course, has no idea that Harmony is a vampire, mostly because she has no idea that vampires exist. Yay for unreliable narrators.
“Very good,” Fred said. “Now River, on your knees.”
River got up from the table, then immediately sank to her knees.
“Now thank Harmony for helping to punish you.”
“Thank you, Harmony.”
“Oh, you’re welcome,” said Harmony, beaming. “It was fun.”I pulled back from writing oral sex here for two reasons. I still wasn't comfortable writing sex (as well as sex with the power dynamics so skewed) and I just didn't have time in writing this to develop a Harmony/River dynamic. The Harmony/River/Fred triangle, had I developed it, would have subordinated, demeaned, and objectified River even more, for sexual access to River would become something so trivial that Fred lends it out to a woman who doesn't even quite qualify as a friend. Of course, the set-up for oral sex is still pretty explicit here, I think.
* * * * *"And now you've lost her," she cried wildly; "and some other school will get her and her money; and if she were like any other child she'd tell how she's been treated, and all our pupils would be taken away and we should be ruined. And it serves us right; but it serves you right more than it does me, for you are a hard woman, Maria Minchin, you're a hard, selfish, worldly woman!"
Here we begin to foreshadow that eventually Fred will, indeed, "lose" River (to Dr. Mathias and Project Pandora).
Harmony stayed for the next few days, sharing the bed with both Fred and River, and the two of them quickly integrated the blonde into their routine, such as it was. River could only wonder what shared experiences could have brought such two different women together. Sometimes there seemed there couldn’t be two women more different, the yin and the yang. Then, other times, one or the other would say something and the other would laugh and they seemed like two peas in a pod, just two young woman who wanted to have fun.While I can't say what happened between Fred and Harmony after Fred's resurrection, or even why Harmony already had an invite to Fred's apartment, they do share two things in common that nobody else has: they remember Earth, and they lack souls.
Perhaps it was inevitable that it would only take a few days for the two women to be at each other throats.
River didn’t know what caused it; she had been in the study, working hard on her conceptual matrices. But she had been able to hear the yelling from the living room, and had quickly given up any hope of getting work done while the two were fighting.
When she entered the living room, the two women were standing on opposite sides of the room. Two bottles of Heran cactus wine were on the coffee table, one half empty and the other full of nothing but air.
“We used to be friends,” Harmony insisted. “We went out for drinks and everything.”
“Once,” Fred said with a sigh. “Just once. ‘That was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.’”Look how careful I am to make it clear when Fred's quoting! If I were to write this fic today, I'd probably take out the interior single quotes just to be contrary. [BTW, if you really care and don't know, the quote is from Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta. Which a google search would have turned up pretty easily without me needing to tell you that.]
What I love about this use of the quote, however, is that the "dead wench" is of course her (souled) self. (Although of course Harmony is also dead.)
“Oh, can you please get over that?” Harmony erupted. “So you died. Big deal. Do you see the rest of us obsessing?”Because vamp!Harmony really would think the fact that Fred died and lost her soul was really not a big deal at all and Fred was so just being melodramatic.
“‘The rest of us’?” Fred asked, anger seeping into her voice. “There is no ‘the rest of us,’ Harm. You’re the only one who made it off Earth-that-Was.”
“So I’m a survivor. How is that my fault?”
“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality, Harmony.”No single quotes here, because I don't think Fred is thinking of herself as quoting JFK so much as using a popular paraphrase of Dante. Of course it's a paraphrase which totally misses the point, because in Dante's Inferno the deepest and most horrible levels of hell are really, really cold. And you should get me off this subject before I start quoting "The Hollow Men."
Harmony's shrug was the most abject show of apathy River had ever seen. "I'm a soulless creature," she said. "What do you expect?"
Harmony paused, then took a step closer. "That's what this is about, isn't it? You're mad at me for losing your soul. Well, I'm not the one who made you touch that sarco--sarc--that coffin thing. If you want someone to blame, blame Knox. Blame Gunn. Blame Wesley or Angel, even. But no, they're dead. So you have to project your anger and your hatred onto me. Well, get over it, sister. There are better things in life than souls."
* * * * *How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.
Again, FHB is randomly philosophical for no good reason. But in a story about "cognitive linguistics," it creates some really cool echoes when used as an epigraph.
Harrmony left, and life returned to the ebb and flow of chaos that passed for normality within the apartment. With one less distraction, she was able to better turn her attention back to her work. The more she developed her matrices, however, the more it became obvious how great their limitations truly were. No science could account for consciousness; the best any mechanist could do would be to attempt to dismiss it as an illusion, and insist that human thought could be explained purely in the strict causal terms one would use to describe a computer or a sheep brain. Yet the existence of the consciousness was an empirical fact, wasn’t it? River was conscious of herself as a person, an entity, as more than the sum of processes going on in her brain. Could all that really only be the result of systemic chaos?If you're asking me, then yes, I think it can. But the queer metaphysics (which has nothing to do with other varieties of queerness) of consciousness as a res cogitans is perfectly at home in the pseudo-Platonic Jossverse.And the understatement of the year award goes to Winifred Burkle, Ph.D.
Indeed, it was. What was the spark of consciousness, the magic of thought, the essence which could not be translated into pure mathematics? “Is it the soul?” River had asked once, still unsure how she felt about invoking such an un-empirical entity.Except in the Jossverse a soul is completely an empirical entitty, and not a metaphysical one at all. You could do double-blind studies if you had enough Thesulan Orbs.
But Fred had shaken her head. “I don’t have a soul, remember? I’m still conscious, although I suppose couldn’t prove that to you. And what about someone in a coma, or who is braindead? They’re not conscious, but they still have a soul.”
So River continued doing research, kept on developing her matrices, assuming for the time being that the mechanists were right, and there was nothing more to consciousness. There was no choice, really. Any other option would be unscientific.
If that were the case, it was clear that not every statement that was true (whatever that meant) would be intelligible within the conceptual matrix. Gödel’s theorems proved that much. So she integrated within the matrices a submatrix-a “reality matrix” as Fred nicknamed it-that networked the various intelligible statements. The reality matrix wouldn’t be particularly powerful-about on par with first-order arithmetic-but as long as it was consistent the overall matrix could function.I think I was reading Gödel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid as I wrote this fic.
It was the portions of the matrices which rested outside the reality matrix that fascinated River. By necessity they manifested all sort of paradoxes: inconsistencies, infinite regresses, self-references. It was this chaotic core that would allow the reality matrix to cohere.Note that the phrase "reality matrix" is canon, appearing in the first nine minutes of Serenity.
When she told Fred about her success the scientist had only laughed. “So it is necessary to have chaos inside to give birth to a dancing star,” she said.And Nietzsche just had to make an appearance in this story, don't you think?
* * * * *"Do you think," Becky faltered once, in a whisper, "do you think it could melt away, miss? Hadn't we better be quick?" And she hastily crammed her sandwich into her mouth. If it was only a dream, kitchen manners would be overlooked.
The quote is about dreams.
“Londinium bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down,” a woman was singing in an unfamiliar accent, her voice softly lilting. “Londinium bridge is falling down, my fair lady.”
“Excuse me,” River asked, “Am I late for the war?”
The woman turned towards River, looked at her. She had long black hair, and was dressed in a long red dress. A black shawl was wrapped around her shoulders.On the extremely unlikely chance you hadn't figured this out, that is Drusilla. I couldn't resist putting her in this story--in fact, I don't think I've written a dream sequence in which she doesn't appear.
“The war is over, fought hundreds of years ago. The toy soldiers have fallen to the ground, rusted away.”
“Oh,” said River, and turned away.
“Shh!” said the woman, as if River had been about to say something. She grabbed River’s arm. “Hush now. There will be new soldiers. The toymaker is preparing them even now.”
“The humans fought against each other for centuries,” interjected another voice, and River turned to see a woman in a red, blue, and brown bodysuit. “It made them weak, able to be conquered from without. Only the vessel of the Shadowmen stood between their race and their destruction. Now there have risen among men those with the will to take dominion over their brethren. A single people are unified under a rule of iron.”
River looked at the woman. “Fred?”
Only it wasn’t Fred. She looked like Fred, but this creature was not Fred. Her hair was blue where Fred’s was brown. Her lips, eyes, and forehead were blue. Her demeanor was not Fred’s.
“The child always returns to where the father buried the hatchet,” the dark-haired woman said. “Here comes a candle to light you to bed; here comes a chopper-”This nursery rhyme is referenced to in Nineteen Eighty-Four, of course, creating all sorts of intertextuality. It's also a poem I would recite to myself everytime I passed by St. Martin's (say, on the way to Trafalgar Square) while I was in London.
* * * * *"It was there when I wakened, miss--the blanket," she whispered excitedly. "It was as real as it was last night."
The aftermath of the dream.
River awoke to voices emanating from the study.
“If you go through with this, Timothy, you’ll be going to be killing the goose that laid the golden eggs,” she could make out Fred saying. “It’s largely her research that made your project possible.”I really love the idea that it is River's own research which makes possible the way in which they steal her sanity. It's a theme I plan on revisiting in a future fic, even.
“You have no idea how difficult it has been securing suitable subjects,” a male voice replies. “The requirements are-”
“I am well aware of the requirements,” Fred snapped.Which means she knows quite well what is going on, an important thing to establish.
“You have this entire station at your disposal. Use one of the others.”
Then Fred must have terminated the communication, for River did not hear the male reply.
Moments later, Fred entered the bedroom. “Good morning,” she said cheerfully, as if she hadn’t just been in a disagreement with the mysterious man. “Slept well?”
“I had the strangest dream,” River answered, getting out of bed and changing out of her nightshirt and into a sleek blue dress. “There was this weird woman who looked just like you, only she had blue hair. She kept talking about how humans were weak and the species should be united.”
Fred froze, her face suddenly ashen.She recognizes the description of Illyria, of course.
“Was there anything else in your dream?” she asked, a new note of desperation creeping into her voice.
River nodded. “There was a dark-haired woman with a strange accent who kept on talking about toys and nursery rhymes.” She sung to Fred “Londinium bridge,” recreating the strange woman’s accent
“Cockney,” Fred answered. “One of the dialects from an island called Britain on Earth-that-Was. It still can be heard today, on some of the border planets. Dyton Colony, mainly.”I'm sure Dru's accent isn't actually intended to be even faux-Cockney, but I couldn't resist the reference to "Shindig."
They didn’t talk about the dream ever again, but for the rest of that day Fred kept casting uneasy glances in River’s direction.
* * * * *
“Aiyā huàile!” River cursed under her breath. A particularly insidious paradox in one of the upper meta-levels had managed to infect the reality matrix, destabilizing it completely. She had tried every way she could think of to fix the problem, and none of them were working.
She sighed and logged onto the cortex. Maybe if she tried something else and came back to it, the answer would be more clear. She keyed in a search code for her own name.Yes, River googles herself!
TAM, RIVER
Student, Academy Station, Regina
Well, that was boring. She keyed in her special access codes-there had to be more information than that.TAM, RIVER
ACCESS CODE NOT ACCEPTED
RESTRICTED ACCESS
[CLASSIFICATION LEVEL ZHEN DAOMEI]
That was weird. Her own file was classified beyond her access? She keyed in a search for Fred instead.BURKLE, WINIFRED
Instructor in Cognitive Linguistics, Academy Station, Regina
Previous Employment
Head of Research and Development, Wolfram & Hart Los Angeles
Associate, Angel Investigations
Librarian, Los Angeles Public Library
Education
Bachelor of Arts: University of Texas, 1993
Master of Science: University of California, 1994
Doctor of Philosophy: University of Londinium, 2511
She paused, then ran another search.
KENDALL, HARMONY
Supernatural Porphyriac [See Renfield File BA0072.] [This is how the Alliance explains vampires to itself, very Initiative-esque.]
Personal Assistant to the Vice President in Charge of Special Projects, Blue Sun Industries [The parallel to Wolfram & Hart is, of course, deliberate.]
Previous Employment
Special Client Coordinator, Weyland-Yutari
Occult Systems Analyst, Cyberdine Systems
Vampiric Affairs Manager, Quicksilver Ltd.
Special Consultant on the Supernatural, SRT International
Public Relations Liaison, U.S. Robots [Yes, over half of these fictional companies are ones I didn't create. If you're already writing a crossover, why not go hog?]
Personal Assistant to the Chief Executive Officer, Wolfram & Hart Los Angeles
Education
Sunnydale High School, 1999
River stared at her source box. Not only had Fred and Harmony both been on Earth-that-Was, the Alliance knew about it. She had even been able to access the information with her access code-a code which wouldn’t permit access to her own file. She thought for a moment, then ran another search.
ILLYRIA
ACCESS CODE NOT ACCEPTED
RESTRICTED ACCESS
[CLASSIFICATION LEVEL TIAN XIAODE]
What had happened on Earth-that-Was so many years ago? What did Fred and Harmony both know that the Alliance wanted kept hidden?
* * * * *"It is true that the first thought was mine, Sahib," he said; "though it was naught but a fancy. I am fond of this child; we are both lonely. It is her way to relate her visions to her secret friends. Being sad one night, I lay close to the open skylight and listened. The vision she related told what this miserable room might be if it had comforts in it. She seemed to see it as she talked, and she grew cheered and warmed as she spoke. Then she came to this fancy; and the next day, the Sahib being ill and wretched, I told him of the thing to amuse him. It seemed then but a dream, but it pleased the Sahib. To hear of the child's doings gave him entertainment. He became interested in her and asked questions. At last he began to please himself with the thought of making her visions real things."
Of course, the boundary between imagination and reality will be blurred for River in a much less benign way.
River soon found that the matrices with the destabilized reality submatrices displayed a rather odd and inexplicable property: when run at the same time as matrices with coherent reality submatrices, even ones fashioned from radically different linguistic networks, they would produce synchronistic results. There was no possible scientific explanation for the phenomenon, except for the increasingly implausible move of scratching it up to pure chance; what they were dealing with, if it were real, was some type of acausal connecting principle.Which, of course, is the foundation for the psychic abilities the Project Pandora subjects develop.
“A coin can fall on the same side a hundred times in a row,” Fred had said, scrunching up her nose. “But when it happens, it’s a pretty good sign you might want to check if you’re a character in a play.”A reference to Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, of course. I really did go crazy (deliberately so) with the intertextuality in this fic. And of course here we get to reference that play's metatextuality, reminding us that Fred and River are both characters in a fanfic, and I the fanfic author am behind the curtain, pulling all their strings. And if we really want to stretch, we can compare the way in which I use them as sex objects with the way in which the Alliance uses them.
They had certainly run the simulations enough time for the results to be statistically significant, then had checked their math and ran the simulations all over again. There was little doubt that whatever they were dealing with, it was real.
“This just might be the greatest scientific break-through in the last three hundred years,” Fred said, but River had thought that she didn’t exactly look very happy.Hopefully, this functions as a moment of moral ambiguity. Fred knows that the chance to create psychic assassins will be one the Alliance will not be able to pass up.
* * * * *
Dearest Simon,
Life at the Academy continues to go well.
River was worried. Fred had changed in the past weeks, after since they had discovered the synchronous effects in the destabilized matrices. The fun-loving young woman was gone, as was the piānzhí de jiūcháyuán. Instead, they had been replaced with a women who was withdrawn and sullen, who spoke only when spoken to and little even then, who avoided looking River in the eyes whenever possible.The device, of course, is that River's letter--her plea to help to Simon that we see in canon--is contradicted at every turn by what is actually going on: River beginning to recognize the danger she is in. This means my fic isn't quite compatible with "The R. Tam Sessions"--where her letter to Simon is written much later, after she has already met Dr. Mathias--which is a shame.
This weak we are learning about the French revolution back on Earth-that-Was. It’s very interesting, although it’s heard to study because the French spoke a ded language.
I go a bit overboard with misspellings.
River didn’t know what was going on, why things were suddenly so different. She only knew that her instincts told her that something was coming, and it wasn’t going to be good.
Did you have a good time at the D'arbanville's ball this year? From what I’ve heard it was much duller than last year.
Your loving sister,
River
* * * * * "Are you learning me by heart, little Sara?" he said, stroking her hair.
"No," she answered. "I know you by heart. You are inside my heart." And they put their arms round each other and kissed as if they would never let each other go.
'Cesty! But also a goodbye, so thematically relevant.
Conditions in the destabilized matrix mirrored concepts in the stabilized matrix, although there was no possible explanation as to how the destabilized matrix could create such conditions. An already destabilized matrix could be caused to destabilize even further simply by running it concurrently with another
Could she stabilize the reality matrix by running it concurrently with a stable matrix that contained the right conditions to counteract the imbalance? River didn’t know, but it was something she could find. She could make attempts, construct hypotheses, test them. Like a scientist.She's about to find the cure for the condition she will suffer. If only she had had a week longer. . . .
“River,” Fred said, entering the study. “I need you for something in the living room.”
“In a little bit,” River said, watching intently as the simulation ran. “I’m in the middle of something.” A cascade of concept-regressions was forming, and-
Fred disconnected the source box. “Now.”
River nodded, uncertainly, then got up and made her way out of the study. Already standing in the living room was a middle-aged man in a lab coat just like the one Fred wore for her classes-and was wearing right then.Fred is wearing the outfit she wears when she takes on the persona of a heartless bitch for her classroom lectures. We can only assume she developed real affection for River (perhaps even the twisted version of love of which soulless beings are capable), since we saw her fight with Dr. Mathias to protect her from Project Pandora. Now, she is trying to dissassociate herself as much as possible from what she is being forced to do.
“River,” Fred said, “I’d like you to meet Dr. Mathias.”This line was one of the first things I came up with when I first envisioned this fic. Everything that came before was moving inexorably (particularly for the reader, to whom this endpoint is even more inevitable) to this single moment.
* * * * *To: Burkle, W. [winifred.burkle%fac.acad.reg]
From: Mathias, T. [timothy.mathias%clas.reg]
CC: Valerio, L. [li.valerio%parl.ld]
Subject 56743, River Tam, has escaped. Due to normal Pandora Project procedures, she is both insane and extremely dangerous. Should she attempt to contact you, please report to us immediately.