petronia

I really should have a League Of Extraordinary Redheads icon. But that's far easier said than done.

(

supacat, are you out there? Would you mind very much if I send the SSAE fic to you with a small portion of the end missing? It makes sense up until then, and I think it would help. >_> That's if you haven't given up entirely on me finishing this, she says pathetically, which is no more than I deserve.)

Tonight's 300 words were more like 150. But is okay, because I went over yesterday, and they were difficult-but-pivotal words. Anyhow I can post this chunk, seeing as how it's all part of the same explanation anyway.

***

The edge of Nagi's bedroom door banged against the rubber doorstop, hard. "Where the hell is Schuldich?" said Crawford's voice.

"Please to clarify semantic frame of query," said Nagi. He did not turn around. "'Where' as in general availability and presence – or lack thereof – or 'where' as in actual, precise location on a macro-physical scale?"

"What?"

"The answer to the first question is, he's not around. The answer to the second doesn't compute. The metaphysics would make for an interesting discussion, though."

Crawford stepped up behind Nagi's chair. The Hyperspace Lab projector was jacked into Nagi's laptop, which was jacked into an ethernet wall socket. Windows of complex, ever-changing graphical models crowded the laptop screen, and that of Nagi's personal workstation. Text data streamed unobstrusively underneath, green and white on black, quick enough that the lines flickered and blurred.

"What's this?" he asked.

Nagi leant back in his chair, massaging the inside of his forearm. "One aforementioned individual was a stupid shit," he said. "Remember when I told you the configuration profile of this thing differentiated between animate and inanimate? That I'd set it to recognise only the four of us, but I'd have to recalibrate to bring in more than thirty-five pounds of inert mass at once?"

Crawford nodded. Nagi reached out and tapped at a flat-topped peak on one of the three-dimensional displays.

"That's fifty pounds worth of interior decorating right there. Something like an extra-"

"Recliner," said Crawford. "Something like the recliner currently missing from my office." And then, "Goddamned idiot. Is he in there?"

"In a manner of speaking..." Nagi looked up at him. "Your office recliner? Really?"

"Schuldich likes it," Crawford said absently. (Nagi's mind provided him with a belated image: Schuldich happily sprawled and napping on the aforementioned piece of furniture like an oversized marmalade tomcat. He'd always suspected, however, that Schuldich liked the recliner not for itself but because it was in Crawford's office; the way cats will invariably hop into the lap of the one allergic person in the room.) "Farfarello's in one of his moods, he probably wanted the quiet. What manner of speaking?"

Nagi sighed. "Look, this – place, all right, this place isn't in the box. It doesn't even answer to the box, apart from visual templating. What answers to the box is the door. I've set rules for what goes in and out the door, and as long as those rules are followed the door opens between here and there. Break the rules, though, and the whole thing goes pear-shaped, see? I open the door here and it throws an error, system destabilises, the lot. And if someone opens the door there-"

He threw up his hands.

There was a pause. Then Crawford said with exaggerated calm, "Just tell me, is he in there or not? In a word."

Nagi hesitated. "No," he said finally. "He left the system more than an hour ago, and until he opens the door and walks back in again there's really fuck-all I can do to get him back."

Crawford, uncharacteristically this time, said nothing. Nagi glanced up again and saw that he was gazing intently at one of the renders: a jagged, slow-blooming fractal flower. The bottom half of his face seemed clenched. Nagi wondered if he was seeing something in the future instead, and whether it was unpleasant.

Surely nothing unpleasant, he thought. He'd always had the intuition that the Lab liked Schuldich. He wouldn't have been surprised if Schuldich could talk to it. Surely nothing would happen.

"So—" he ventured when the silence began to verge on the oppressive. Crawford straightened, expression reverting to the annoyed preoccupation Nagi pegged as his default mode.

"So we wait," he said.

***