John Umland
April 28, 2021 7:07 PM
Physics Magic by John Umland
John knelt down to put himself close to eye level with his niece, his expression perfectly serious. Cecily looked back just as seriously, if with a bit more ferocity given the extra effort it took her to deliberately control her expression and narrow her attention. Solemnly, John held up an artifact for her examination.It was a plastic straw he’d gotten from Tim Horton’s.
“Last chance, Sesame,” he said gravely. “Are you really sure you don’t believe me when I tell you I can make this straw pierce that apple – “ the relevant apple, on the patio table to his left, was gestured at with the straw – “without using magic?”
Cecily scowled, though whether it was annoyance or an attempt to be intimidating, he had no idea. Was Cecily old enough to understand concepts like intimidation? Did she have motivations beyond the basic – food, warmth, attention, entertainment – at this stage, or was that too advanced for her? Irrelevant data – for the moment. He’d look that up later, after he noted down the observations in his current journal.
“Yup,” she said, her hands on her hips, in a tone that implied that expressing any further doubts about the strength of her opinions would result in her doing her six-year-old best to break his nose.
“Very well, then,” he said, shaking his head slightly and attempting to make his voice sound as if he regretted what he was saying. He doubted it was a very good effort. “Observe the straw, Creature. You agree that this is a completely normal drinking straw, correct?” Cecily nodded her agreement, but he pressed the point. “So you can see – it is easy to flatten it – “ he used a thumb and forefinger to press one end very briefly flat. “And is it is very bendy,” he added, bending it one way and then another to demonstrate.
“Very bendy,” Cecily agreed solemnly. “That’s why it won’t work.”
“Hm. You’re reassuring yourself about your hypothesis. You might still have some doubts. Here – test it out for yourself. I don’t want there to be a single question in your mind about this straw, Cecelily. There’s no funny business going on here. It’s a completely ordinary drinking straw from Timmy’s.”
“Jo – ohn,” she complained, rolling her eyes in a dramatic fashion, but she accepted the straw and repeated his demonstrations of its properties before handing it back to him.
“So, you have no doubts about this straw, huh?”
“No.”
“You’re sure, now?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then…”
John reached for the apple. In his peripheral vision, he could tell his sister was grinning, but he avoided catching her eye to ensure he preserved the necessary gravitas for the demonstration. Of all the things he’d thought he might do in his life, pretending to be the inverse of a carnival entertainer to entertain a six-year-old was not one of them, but if it promoted the cause of scientific inquiry….
He held up the apple, allowing as much as possible of it to remain visible, so it was sitting on his palm. “Now, you don’t have any doubts about this apple, do you?” he checked, just to be sure. “Want to examine it at all?”
“Jo – ohn!” Cecily exclaimed again in exasperation, this time stamping her foot for good measure. Julian immediately made one of those odd noises that only mothers made at their own children, a sound which was not quite a word, but fell between the verbalized pause ‘uh’ and the degraded word ‘nuh’, followed with a warning, “Ceci, that’s not nice.”
Cecily, predictably, did not seem very perturbed by having been rebuked. John hoped it was either that all her attention was on the experiment, or that she knew that he didn’t feel his Adult Privileges were particularly threatened by that sort of thing (to the extent he was even sure he had Adult Privileges, or if he’d particularly want them even if he was qualified for them), or both, and not Cecily taking after her father….
“Very well, then,” he said, also ignoring Julian for the moment, trying again for a specific voice other than his default – this time, the impressive intonations of a circus ringmaster, scaled down somewhat to account for talking to one person instead of a crowd. “Behold, little child: the Wonders of Science!”
Cecily’s eyes were fixed unblinkingly (he had to admire the dedication; eyes started to dry out remarkably quickly when forced to stay open, even considering that they were mostly water themselves) on the apple. This meant it was not difficult at all for John to contrive to seal off one end of the straw with his finger, so that when the other end met the apple, air was trapped within the straw, creating pressure, which, with a little effort, could be used to do work – specifically, the work of shoving the straw through the apple. Cecily shrieked, her hands flying up to her mouth, and Julian began laughing.
“You cheated!” said Cecily indignantly. “You had to, you did magic!”
“Hey,” he said, a bit sharply. “You know the first rule. You never, ever cheat on your procedure or falsify your results just to get the outcome you want.”
“But you had to!”
“Nope. All physics.” He tossed the apple-straw combo to her. “Your hypothesis was disproven, so you move to the next step – figuring out why you were wrong.”
Cecily looked suspiciously at him, as though expecting him to take it back and admit to some deception, but finally nodded curtly. “Fine,” she said, and went to sit on the stairs and work on that puzzle.
“You do realize that a six-year-old isn’t old enough for the scientific method, don’t you?” asked Julian, sounding amused as John applied principles of leverage to return to a standing position before claiming one of the other patio chairs.
John shrugged. “Everyone starts somewhere,” he said.
“It drives William crazy when you teach her that kind of trick. He insists that it’s beneath her dignity as a witch to use Muggle sleight of hand.”
“Well in that case, tell Bill to try a Switching Spell to shove his dignity where his head usually resides,” he suggested, and Julian shook her head.
“I did tell him he was being stupid, but you two…sometimes you’re exasperating! You both act like you’re the biggest kid on the playground and someone locked you both in a room with just one toy,” she said. “I’ve never understood why, either. You’re hardly in competition for resources or partners, either, before you Darwin at me,” she added.
“I…wasn’t going to…Darwin at you,” he replied, resisting the impulse to lecture Julian on why anything he said to her in a non-educational context would not actually really comprise talking directly about Darwin at all, as evolutionary science had advanced significantly in the past couple centuries, leaving parts of his work outdated and others proven flat wrong. “I was going to complain about your analogy. I have no idea what it’s like to be the biggest kid on the playground, I was the kid who got kicked around on the playground whenever other kids were there.”
“Well, except for that time you hit that one kid in the head with one of your books after he tore some pages.”
“Except for that time I hit that one kid in the head with one of my books when he tore it,” he agreed. “I didn’t want to, especially, but they had all proven over and over again that they didn’t have the mental capacity to reason with. It would be like trying to convince a bear not to attack you because of the ethics of the thing.”
“Which doesn’t work even if you wish a lion into a Christian,” said Julian with a grin, and he obliged her by chuckling at the moral of a very, very old joke. “Though telling them they were non-sentient probably didn’t help your popularity any. You really were kind of unlikable sometimes when you were a kid, honestly.”
“I quit trying to interact with most of them by the time I was Cecily’s age,” he argued. “They were the ones who’d bother me, after that. Besides, I’m pretty sure none of them knew what the word ‘sentient’ meant, anyway.”
“Which is also part of why they got angry about it. You have no idea how frustrating it is to be the opposite of the smartest person in the room, or to have to worry about losing face in front of your friends because of the smartest kid in the room…or maybe you do?”
“I can name at least two people who might be smarter than me, and I enjoy their company, but I’m not sure that’s what you meant.”
“Not at all,” Julian confirmed. He couldn’t help but be slightly hurt by this, as her tone before had very much implied she had experienced said frustration; in context, it was as good as her saying that she’d occasionally gotten angry with him, too, for…using words she didn’t understand? But Julian’s vocabulary was fine, even if her attitudes toward the practices of standardized spelling and punctuation were rather liberal for his taste. And if he’d said something she didn’t understand, why would she get angry instead of just asking, so he could explain and then she could know the word, too…? Irrelevant data; the whole emotion and thought process were childish, should have long since been eradicated as possibilities. Since they had not been, he’d just ignore them.
“I was talking about worrying about losing face in front of people, because of someone else,” Julian was saying. “Maybe that’s why you and William are so….” She raised one hand and made an odd sort of flapping gesture with it. “You threaten each other somehow, subconsciously.”
“I didn’t Darwin at you, so you can’t Freud at me,” he said. “I tend to know when I’m feeling threatened. That happens when feeling threatened is something that only happens to me if there are explosions and bears involved. Besides – for one thing, at that rate, you’ll talk yourself into thinking I don’t like him because he's a government man, and that that ties into some long-buried trauma from something to do with the Before-Time – “
“The what?”
“Oh – that’s what I call…the Before-Time. Before I learned to read,” he explained awkwardly. He didn’t like to acknowledge the Before-Time, those four years and change before he'd met his parents, making it extremely helpful that he had very few memories of it, and that those few memories he did have were all hazy and uncertain and fragmentary. He had been sort of learning to read when it had come to an end – one of the things he remembered a little was Paul shoplifting letter magnets and those very thin kindergarten workbooks for him from supermarkets to keep his past self occupied long enough for Paul to do his homework – but it was impossible to be more precise without mentioning Her, and he preferred not to do that. Anyway, Julian could do math, more or less. Arithmetic, at least. “Pretty useless part of life, really. I should try to isolate the genes that make it take so long for our brains to function properly, see about prodding evolution to work a little faster, early childhood’s a complete waste of time. Anyway – psychology. It’s literary analysis that got a big head. As you just proved, because how can Bill be a threat to me when there’s nothing I have he wants, and nothing I want that he has?” Which, now that he organized various thoughts enough to remember it, she had also admitted.
“I suspect you both think the other might have hidden something,” she laughed. “And you’re…you’re way too much alike. Which really might explain it.”
John looked at his sister carefully, then pointedly looked at the glass he’d assumed held water beside her, then looked back at Julian again. “Come again?” he asked.
“Oh, not the details, but – you’re both – “ Julian made the odd flapping gesture again. He really was becoming concerned that she might be drunk at one in the afternoon. “Neither one of you can sneak into a room,” she managed. “People notice you. Maybe he’s more comfortable with it, but you both do it. I blame an excess of personality. And when you know what you’re aiming at, you’re certain you’re going to get it, and you – it’s all you think about. You have to have your own way.”
John frowned. “I worry about you sometimes,” he informed her. “Though that reminds me – “ he reached into his jacket to remove his current notebook, opening it to the next blank page. “I was thinking – I was wondering how well Cecily understands concepts like intimidation and motivation. Can you think of any examples of her behavior that indicate anything, one way or another?”
OOC: The trick is one I found via googling; I have not tested it and have no idea if it actually works.
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John Umland
Physics Magic
285
1
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John Umland
April 30, 2021 3:50 PM
Observations on the Social Behaviors of H. Sapiens. by John Umland
Observation: humans, though capable of complex thought, are still half-animal, and this is very apparent in environments called ‘break rooms.’ In these bleak surroundings, they form social groups through something similar to phagocytosis, with senior appendages choosing newcomers to integrate into themselves, and these groups typically move into and out of the break room as units, but there is an unspoken hierarchical relationship between groups with regards to shared resources (refrigeration, use of hot plate, use of coffee machine and/or provided industrial-sized tin of coffee, use of kettle). Due to said cooperation, communication between groups is frequent and often amiable, sometimes with visiting between packs, but hierarchical behavior is apparent nevertheless.Even before J&Ju. came east, I felt that most of my social needs were adequately met by C. and S., so I have mostly managed to remain independent of the system. However, two others talk to me on breaks sometimes, so I suppose we have formed at least the nucleus of another social amoeba. Composition as follows:
1) Me. Unsure why my reputation seems to have such a strong element of ‘explosions’ in it. Reasonably sure why it involves being considered slightly insane, as a number of people have met S. over the years, one way or another.
2) Mason. Good fellow, possibly a touch paranoid, but I like him. Two great-uncles are semi-legendary in certain circles, and this causes him Anxiety about measuring up, plus he feels bad when someone finds out his last name and ends up with hot tea with lemon in their sinus cavities (don’t recommend).
3) Gus. Gus is…Gus. I am not sure from whence he came, or why. One day I showed up for work and there was Gus, happily doing calculations and introducing himself. Then he started following me around. Constantly speaks in a way that makes sentences sound like questions.
John was just finishing a sketch of Gus – rotund, with curly hair above a round face with a nose which looked absurdly tiny in context – when the three-dimensional version appeared. John quickly put his notebook away as Gus, predictably, wandered over. The writing was far from any form that anyone else was likely to be able to read, but that being noticed might create as much trouble as plaintext would have....
“Oh, you’re back?” He sounded pleased about that. The witch they were currently serving as research assistants must have made his weekend…pleasant. “Good weekend at home?”
John shrugged. “My niece was petulant and my sister tried to psychoanalyze me, but it was good to see them,” he said. “And my nephew and brother.”
“Your family always sounds very large to me? I’m an only child.”
“There’s only five of us,” objected John mildly. “Though I guess to an only child,” he conceded. He stirred his tea for a moment, frowning at it, thoughts arranging themselves without him much noticing them until he looked up and said, as though he had planned to do so all along, “say, Gus, may I ask you a personal question?”
“Is it about being an only child?”
“No – not exactly, anyway. Would you say you’re a person who has friends?”
“Um – well – um, yes, I’d say, I’d say I have a few?”
The verbalized pauses were enough to make John wonder if Gus in fact was really uncertain about what he was saying this time. If so, that was…awkward, for one thing, and also unhelpful. However, Gus had ended on an affirmative, so he’d go along with it. It was, after all, a question it was arguably impossible to give a true answer to, as it was always impossible to be absolutely certain what someone else felt and thought. Everybody lied, sometimes even to themselves.
“Good, good," he said. "So - you talk to people, yeah? You know how people use double meanings all the time?”
“I suppose?”
Hesitant again, but John went on anyway. “If one of your friends started asking about speciation in butterflies, and how you might determine anything about that by casting a spell on caterpillars,” he asked, “can you think of anything that could possibly mean other than…what it appears to mean? Is there a metaphor in there?”
Gus looked mystified, but John didn’t hold that against him; even he recognized that it was a strange question, which was why he was asking for additional input. He had, in the situation when Clark had circuitously asked him that, just spoken about literal speciation, then with the qualification that he was not even particularly a recreational lepidopterist after they’d approached specifics, but by the time Clark had gotten around to being curious about which butterflies went with which caterpillars, John already begun to suspect Subtext – which, in context, was also odd, because Clark knew perfectly well that John was perhaps the last person to use that tactic on. He also liked to think, at least, that Clark also realized that just because John generally failed to pick up on what Subtext meant, it didn’t necessarily always follow that he didn’t notice its existence, especially if the speaker was someone he knew well enough to notice fairly minor changes in tone and expression in.
“I…it sounds like a straightforward question? Unless maybe – “ Gus cut himself off abruptly and froze, and John knew him well enough to realize that he was mildly horrified now.
“Unless what?” he asked impatiently.
Gus hesitated, looking at John as though trying to divine some kind of subtext in the current situation. “We’re not talking about you, right?” he confirmed.
“No. Why would I ask you what I meant by something I said?”
For a moment, Gus looked as though he very much wanted to say something about that rhetorical question, but apparently he thought the better of trying to answer it. John could think of contexts where he would have pretended to think it was an honest question, but since this wouldn’t have been one of them, he wrote Gus’s second thoughts off as Recognizing Social Convention before he said, “And – it’s definitely not about Mrs. Welles? Or your brothers?”
“What are you on about, Gus?” he asked, now vaguely alarmed by the references to Julian and his brothers. Whatever other answer Gus had come up with was clearly Very Bad, with Implications, and that meant it was probably very relevant data, unfortunately. Why was it that really appalling things so often made relevant data, so much more often than positive ones did?
“Well – the thing that – that came to mind – ?” Gus flushed, clearly very uncomfortable with whatever was going on in his head. "Um - figuring out - if a child belongs to you?"
John did not choke on his tea, but that was only because he’d been disturbed enough by Gus’s demeanor that he had deliberately not picked his mug up yet. He did, however, blink rather hard, and then deliberately picked the mug up and took a swallow, and then another, thinking through the suggestion.
Gus, unfortunately, was not someone who tolerated silence well. He’d make a terrible spy or company man, because all one had to do to get him talking was to not talk to him. John had a working knowledge of campus gossip just from that trait of his, despite having no interest in the subject or desire to seek the information out. “It is, um, not the most likely idea?" he said. "You know, I think there might be a spell for that – not, um, that I ever…well, you know, needed to find out, but anyway, that’s a completely different thing from speciation – “ he said, until John raised a hand to stop him.
“No, no, that would make sense,” he said slowly, “except that for some reason, all the girlfriends go away not long after I meet them - " Which was fairly rotten of at least some of them, he thought; he didn't know much about such things, but he was fairly sure that if courtship rituals went on to the point where the participants started meeting members of each other's families, it was statistically improbable that all of them had both heard Sammy insisting John and Clark were in a relationship, and been unable to figure out it was a joke. Normally, he'd assume the problem lay in the common denominator, but that was Clark, and there was nothing wrong with him, unless it was just that he had really wretched taste in women....
“What are we talking about?” said another voice, as Mason joined the break clique of those who were independent at the same time for various reasons.
“Whether a friend who asks you about casting spells on caterpillars to see what kind of butterflies they turn into could possibly be using subtext,” Gus explained.. "Or if there's possibly a metaphor in it."
Mason’s eyes narrowed speculatively. “Sounds more like a code to me,” he said. “Or an illegal breeding experiment. Or someone trying to sneak things into a population where they don't belong. Who are we talking about?”
“Someone I know outside of here,” said John absently, his thoughts mostly elsewhere as he looked at the paper napkin he had started fidgeting with without noticing it. Something about that….He looked up and shook his head slightly, deciding to change the subject. “So – anything burn down while I was away? Or did anyone cheat me out of the opportunity to see Abernathy turned into a cockroach?"
The idea of turning Claude Abernathy into various insects was always amusing, but things he couldn’t (in the ethical sense, at least) actually do rarely held his attention for long. Which meant eventually, he looped back to recent oddities in his social life, which was a subject he really would have rather not looped back to. He had, hours after lunch, had a sudden thought in the library inspired by Gus' bad idea, just before he'd left for home, and he did not like the thought at all.
- He couldn’t really want to do that.
- Why not? Joe spoke to Her once. Julian accepted hers into the family. Other people are like that.
- Yes, but Joe was a kid at the time, and he and Julian are both Teppenpaws. They’re fairly incomprehensible. Clark isn’t incomprehensible, comparatively. Why would he do a damn fool thing like try to find his biologicals?
He had retreated into a tree, as was his habit when he knew he was going to be arguing with himself for a while about something. Since he also not infrequently retreated into trees when he legitimately just wanted to watch the birds, or had had too many people, or Sammy had company he didn't enjoy, he assumed this behavior did not stand out, which at the moment was necessary. Sammy’s family was a bit unconventional, too, so he couldn’t exactly mention his hypothesis to her, much less ask for advice on how to convince someone not to do something he couldn’t just say that he was trying to convince them not to do. Could he?
He thought about it. Dr. Dill…John respected the man deeply, but even he, someone who probably fit in better with the local crow murders than with other humans, could see that Dr. Dill was…an unusual person. Not someone the system would usually consider the better option, as far as potential parents went. Which…well, there were multiple possibilities, of course, but there was an excellent chance this meant that Clark’s biologicals had been bad enough at it to make Her look like a good mother, and She had nearly…it had only been years later that Joe had told him about the conversation they’d had after John had accidentally frozen half the kitchen in sheer panic upon realizing She had somehow gotten into his house. Apparently, she’d either believed or at least told Joe that John’s biological father had been quite insane, and had told Joe she had always reckoned John would turn out the same. As a result, Joe had completely misinterpreted everything John had done during those last couple of years when John had been scrambling to conceal the situation with Joanie. As a result of that, Joe had been planning to relay his reasons for believing Her to their mom during – That Evening, The Evening Everyone Preferred To Forget. He didn’t want to think Mom could have been convinced there was something Very Wrong with him, but – it was mathematically possible, and if that had happened….
He flinched away from the very thought.
And look at Julian. Look at all the bad that had come from her meeting her biological mother. Yes, all right, if that hadn’t happened, they’d not have Creature or George, and Joe wouldn’t have had such a good opportunity to sell his soul to Ottawa as he did presently, and they’d not have the same assurance of Mom and Dad being taken care of if it became necessary – but he and Stephen, at least, could have doubtless worked their way up before Mom and Dad were realistically old enough to worry about it, and there were a great many downsides to Julian having allowed Sallie to worm her way into their lives. If Julian had never met Sallie, it seemed quite impossible that she’d have ever met Billy Boy. If she’d never met Bill, then – why, if that had never happened, then not only would his sister not be married to someone he had instinctively disliked and deeply distrusted from the moment they’d met, she also almost certainly wouldn’t have had her engagement party when she had, which meant they wouldn’t have gotten into an argument during it, which would have very likely concluded in a timeline where John never would have been almost murdered the next day in the first place! And he and Julian would not have had all those disagreements leading up to the last one, and then –
Biologicals. Nothing good there, not for any of them, anyway. Best to avoid them…unless one of two scenarios was in play. One was something related to reproduction – the sort of thing Gus had hypothesized, or, more likely, else wanting to make sure selecting a given mate wouldn’t involve keeping the best genes in the family, so to speak. The other potentially involved genetic illnesses or something, but even then, how would identification of the adult forms of developing organisms help with that? Which led back to reproduction, probably – which led in turn back to something he’d been trying to avoid thinking about for several years: specifically, that things were going to have to Change.
John liked his flock the way it was. It wasn’t perfect, that would involve Mom and Dad and Stephen and Paul and Joanie all being closer by, and Paul and Joanie additionally not being so very grounded in space-time as they were, but he liked how things were. The problem, though, was that millennia of evolution meant that the vast majority of the group was bound to become less and less content with it, until they went off and built their own nests and John presumably stayed where he was, and....
...And...How had he gotten to this thought? He had started with the thought that Clark might have taken it into his head to look for his biologicals, with the intention of trying to figure out some way to discourage behavior which was extremely likely to end badly. How had that led to the thought of no longer having friends and barely having family by the time he was thirty, and how, while he didn't need any of them, of course, he really didn't enjoy that thought any more than he enjoyed the thought of Clark being Traumatized by some lunatic biologicals, or of finding his own biological father and discovering that mental instability might actually be something he could be genetically susceptible to?
John pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut. Not relevant. He was spending too much time around Mason, or something. Overwork, maybe. He had been working a lot lately. He was trying to finish school within the next year and a half, that took a lot of work. Most likely, there had been no Subtext or Metaphor at all. Julian, at least, thought a lack of empathy was why, but in any case, he had started sometimes pretending he was far more oblivious than he actually was just because he so consistently misinterpreted what he noticed, or later wondered if he'd overthought the whole thing. Heavens knew that he was utterly inept at interpreting that sort of thing, too, when it was real, and Lepidoptera was a perfectly valid subject to take an interest in for no particular reason at all. Julian must have gotten to him more with her psychoanalyzing over the weekend than he'd thought; he'd have to watch out for that, when he wasn't staying where he belonged, in the worlds of facts and theories only tangentially related to people at all.
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John Umland
Observations on the Social Behaviors of H. Sapiens.
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