The Doctor in black pulls one knee up and leans his arms on it, watching his other. Huh. He hadn't thought of that—that his other might not even know the risks attendant on what he wants to explore. That explains some of his eagerness.
"Well..." He runs a hand through his hair, expression ambiguous—embarrassment, earnestness, uncertainty, something a bit like fear, and a kind of tense eagerness—this is an experiment he's never before let himself consider running, one he couldn't run on his own, and now that he's actually thinking about it, he just wants to go with it, to see how far he can push it. It's like walking to the edge of a cliff—get too close, and the whole world opens up below your feet, and you just want to jump. "It doesn't just appear, I've gone...what is it, now, almost two years without a flicker. Judging by what happened in the wardrobe, it must be generated only while I'm in extraordinarily close...contact, I s'pose you could call it, with my TARDIS. I don't know if you could feel it, no reason you should have, but while she was making contact with you, I—I was her and she was me. Her in my mind, that's nothing new. I invite her in all the time, she helps. But loss of identity boundaries like that...that's very close to...there was a liminal state, when she'd—this is all theoretical, I've only got the barest memories, but I've got hers, too, and they corroborate this—she'd got the best part of me out of the watch but she had to..."
He plucks at one of the wires hooked into his chest, frustrated and uneasy—all of this is somehow, oddly, very personal. It feels almost wrong, indecent, to talk about it. "...I wasn't all in the right order. It took her years to put me right. And we're not sure she did, there're bits that stayed in the wrong one of us, and I reckon she did some patching, with her own memories of me, where she'd lost my own memories."
"So, rough analogy, she had to defrag the software before she reconstructed the hardware. And, while she did that, there weren't any divisions between us. The entire process involved her recreating the division."
"That's what it felt like, in the wardrobe. Faster, of course, moments, not years, but the same process. Subsumption and redivision. It's a new field, I haven't developed terminology."
He throws his other an apologetic, frustrated look—this is a long, convoluted explanation, and terribly imprecise, almost metaphysics, not science, and he's sorry for that. He wishes he had better words, knew more.
"If we want to recreate that scenario under laboratory conditions, I'm certain I need an external focus point for her to attempt contact with. I've run tests pushing our symbiote resonance up to levels far beyond any historically recorded—brain scans show activity indicative of the Rassilon Imprimature throughout the nervous system, beyond the symbiotic nuclei. But identity permeability increases with increased resonance. If I push it to the levels I think are necessary for energy emission, she'll...we'll merge again. I'm not certain what the effect would be."
"But, if she has an external focus, the merge, judging from what happened in the wardrobe, becomes a temporary state, it's controlled. Once contact with the external focus is made, the conditions the merge was triggered to achieve are met, and the redivision occurs spontaneously. It becomes an unstable peak, emitting energy and returning to ground state, instead of a...a stable jump, up from one energy level to another. Physical reaction instead of chemical. Conducting electricity instead of being burned by it."
"It's not clean." By this point in his monologue, his hair's standing out at all angles, he's run his hands through it so many times, and he's given up fidgeting with the electrodes and wires in favor of tapping his rhythm against his knee, unconsciously, as the picks his way through the imprecise mess of words. "The science is rubbish. I'm making the language up as I go."
no subject
"Well..." He runs a hand through his hair, expression ambiguous—embarrassment, earnestness, uncertainty, something a bit like fear, and a kind of tense eagerness—this is an experiment he's never before let himself consider running, one he couldn't run on his own, and now that he's actually thinking about it, he just wants to go with it, to see how far he can push it. It's like walking to the edge of a cliff—get too close, and the whole world opens up below your feet, and you just want to jump. "It doesn't just appear, I've gone...what is it, now, almost two years without a flicker. Judging by what happened in the wardrobe, it must be generated only while I'm in extraordinarily close...contact, I s'pose you could call it, with my TARDIS. I don't know if you could feel it, no reason you should have, but while she was making contact with you, I—I was her and she was me. Her in my mind, that's nothing new. I invite her in all the time, she helps. But loss of identity boundaries like that...that's very close to...there was a liminal state, when she'd—this is all theoretical, I've only got the barest memories, but I've got hers, too, and they corroborate this—she'd got the best part of me out of the watch but she had to..."
He plucks at one of the wires hooked into his chest, frustrated and uneasy—all of this is somehow, oddly, very personal. It feels almost wrong, indecent, to talk about it. "...I wasn't all in the right order. It took her years to put me right. And we're not sure she did, there're bits that stayed in the wrong one of us, and I reckon she did some patching, with her own memories of me, where she'd lost my own memories."
"So, rough analogy, she had to defrag the software before she reconstructed the hardware. And, while she did that, there weren't any divisions between us. The entire process involved her recreating the division."
"That's what it felt like, in the wardrobe. Faster, of course, moments, not years, but the same process. Subsumption and redivision. It's a new field, I haven't developed terminology."
He throws his other an apologetic, frustrated look—this is a long, convoluted explanation, and terribly imprecise, almost metaphysics, not science, and he's sorry for that. He wishes he had better words, knew more.
"If we want to recreate that scenario under laboratory conditions, I'm certain I need an external focus point for her to attempt contact with. I've run tests pushing our symbiote resonance up to levels far beyond any historically recorded—brain scans show activity indicative of the Rassilon Imprimature throughout the nervous system, beyond the symbiotic nuclei. But identity permeability increases with increased resonance. If I push it to the levels I think are necessary for energy emission, she'll...we'll merge again. I'm not certain what the effect would be."
"But, if she has an external focus, the merge, judging from what happened in the wardrobe, becomes a temporary state, it's controlled. Once contact with the external focus is made, the conditions the merge was triggered to achieve are met, and the redivision occurs spontaneously. It becomes an unstable peak, emitting energy and returning to ground state, instead of a...a stable jump, up from one energy level to another. Physical reaction instead of chemical. Conducting electricity instead of being burned by it."
"It's not clean." By this point in his monologue, his hair's standing out at all angles, he's run his hands through it so many times, and he's given up fidgeting with the electrodes and wires in favor of tapping his rhythm against his knee, unconsciously, as the picks his way through the imprecise mess of words. "The science is rubbish. I'm making the language up as I go."