Observer Effect

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG-13
IDW, post LSOTW
Perceptor, Jetfire
warning: for pretentious SCIENCE
tf_speedwriting ‘s prompt 5 Visiting a place one hasn’t been to in a long time. AND tf_rare_pairing Perceptor/Jetfire these secrets that keep us in the darkness. 

Garrus-9.  Jetfire stepped off the dropshuttle, feeling the radiation and some other emanation, like malevolence made into a palpable forcefield, battering at his armor.  He hadn’t known what to expect, hadn’t really let himself think of what to expect. 

It seemed, sometimes, that his life was some kind of Klein bottle, surfaces crossing over and over again, intersecting, cutting through at surprising angles, wanting to expand, to move, but merely pouring its own substance out, making no progress, unable to hold any meaning.

Here. Thunderhead Pass. Kimia.  How many times had he been circling around these places, as though unable to achieve escape velocity?  Again and again, like the limiters of his life, while he ran in a spiral like some dying clockwork.

“Ready?”  Perceptor, holding the sniper rifle with that crisp familiarity that almost hurt to watch. What had happened to Perceptor? What had happened to all of them, of course.  The war.  The war had stripped the joy of discovery from Perceptor, just as it had warped Ironfist’s wild creativity.

And Jetfire himself?

He shook his head, then realized that Perceptor was watching, waiting for a response, and lurched the gesture into a nod. “Yes.”  He wasn’t, but then again, who could be ready to set foot on the slaughterhouse Garrus-9 had become? It was either damned or sacred ground. Or both. 

Either way, tread lightly. 

His footplates seemed to cast red dust in the low-g atmosphere, as he crossed to the first perimeter wall. Useless, now: Overlord and his mech had stripped out the security systems in an orgy of destruction, damage for the sake of ruining something.  Perceptor swung the rifle behind them, covering his six, but they both knew it was needless.

Nothing lived here.  Nothing could except bad memories. 

He pushed at the battered door, which gave with a shriek of wrenched metal on grit-crusted hinges.  It was as if everything here was decaying, breaking down.  The sound seemed to slice the silence of this place, loud enough that Jetfire jumped, startled.  He gave a nervous titter of a laugh. 

Perceptor stepped through, like a ghost. And perhaps he was, his optics darting, as though seeing layers upon layers in this place. 

Jetfire felt the urge to speak, like a pressure building up in him, steam wanting release. But Perceptor’s very presence, the shroud of memories that seemed to tatter off him as he moved, seemed to obviate speech, render it almost an insult.  “Aequitas,” he managed, finally.

A nod of the black helm, and after a moment of studying the yard before them, a sharp turn to the right.  Jetfire followed, his gaze flitting from the battered, pocked walls of the prison, and the churned up ground, which clinked and rang against his footplates from the sprung gears and bits of armor of mechs so long dead even their names had corroded into dust.  There was a story here, a thousand stories, intersecting lines of lives that had come here and never left, like light pulled inexorably into a singularity: warped out of shape before torn apart entirely.

“…even while I was here,” he murmured, scuffing one toe plate along a threshold half-buried in the red soil. 

Perceptor, ahead of him, looked over his shoulder, helm tilted, rifle lifting, optics intent. 

Jetfire gave a soft laugh, that seemed an affront to the palpable death around them. “Just…was it any different before?” 

Perceptor turned, “Everything’s dead.”   He looked pointedly at the wreck of a doorway Jetfire stood in. 

“Yes.” Jetfire subsided, chastened, gaze dropping to the ground, still, in places, clumped with the energon of the dead.  How could he forget?

Perceptor didn’t move, not even the muzzle of the long rifle wavering, optics uncannily steady on Jetfire’s face.

“We should—“

“What did you mean?”  A rare question, spoken so softly that the brittle wind almost bore it away, like a thin tendril of smoke. 

“Just,”  Jetfire stepped closer, almost wincing at the crunch of the grit beneath his foot plates.  “Even before, was it much better? Living, but without hope.  Stripped of your body, free will, anything resembling freedom.” He frowned blinking at a gust of wind across his optics. “We wonder why they chose death, slaughter, when Overlord came.” He gave a sickly attempt at a smile. “I…wonder how much of that is really our culpability.”

“Our culpability.” Perceptor’s mouth twitched, an infinitesimal gesture.  “We’re all responsible for our own lives, Jetfire.”

A Klein bottle. Self-contained, untouchable. “I don’t want to believe that.”

A snort, somehow sad. “A scientist shouldn’t want anything other than the truth.”

“No,” Jetfire agreed.  And maybe, he thought, that was his confession.  Maybe that was what the war had scarred him with: a thick cheloid of wanting standing in the way of seeing. “But also,” he said, scraping up some defense, “Quantum theory. Observer effect.”

Perceptor’s head tilted. “Subjectivity matters.” He sounded dubious, the dim light filtering through the poisoned sky glinting dully off his reticle. And Jetfire thought that the scientist Perceptor had once been might still be under there, might still be recovered.

“An outside influence creates measurable difference.” 

“To whatever the observer expects.”  Light as a wave, or a particle, depending on what the observer was looking for. When in, reality, it was both and neither, too large for the limited measures.

“And what do you expect?”

Perceptor gave a shrug, the curve of his spaulder cutting a crescent against his cheek. “Nothing.”

“That’s…impossible.” A ghost of a smile. “Scientifically.”

“You can’t use science to explain everything,” Perceptor said, turning back to the prison’s massive walls, in which the ruins of Aequitas hunched, a testament to that very folly, that misconception that anything could be absolutely, utterly objective. The moment of connection faded, like the sun of this dead place across the broad, unforgiving shoulders.

Comments

[tainry.livejournal.com]

Ooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!! The Klein bottle analogy is wonderful!
<3333333333333333

[femme4jack.livejournal.com]

I really loved all of the imagery in this, and the observer effect conversation.

The mood was bleak and sad, as was befitting the setting, and I just felt like Jetfire so wanted to have something to hope about, to connect about. The image of Perceptor gripping his rifle, stripped of his thirst for discovery had me teary.

A painfully and eloquently written story. I agree with Tainry, the klein bottle image is lovely (and brutal, all at once). I learn something new every time I read one of your stories. I didn't know what klein bottle was. That image will stay with me.

[playswithworms.livejournal.com]

Klein bottle! I apparently still have some joy of discovery because I am all a-squee ^^

Klein bottle, Perce, Klein bottle!
?
Gah ;_; *snuggles*