White Noise

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People weren't made to live forever.

Perhaps that was why Caius went insane. It couldn't just be because he had to watch Yuel die over and over… it was continually waiting and then finding her and losing her, and that wait being longer and worse than the short time he had with her.

But he was excusing the actions of a man whose actions couldn't be excused, wasn't he?

Hope frowned at his calculations, tapping a stylus against the hologram he had pulled up, unable to make sense of the usually neat numbers. There was something wrong with the coding of this program, and he just— he didn't know what it was. One simple sequence of numbers done in the wrong order had reduced a complicated analysis program into… white noise. Nothing.

Years ago, he would have been able to solve it within seconds. Now…

His mind was blank.

Then again, there was no such thing as 'years' any more, was there? It was debatable at the very best. Time was an abstract construct, to be measured in increments thanks to the human mind needing a way to keep track of things. It was intangible, immutable, but amaranthine. The term was a concept invented by humanity, and yet it's effects were undeniable.

Time washes everything away, seen even by human eyes.

The cessation of time… how was that to be measured? Clocks would still tick. Calendars would still be made. To say that 'time stopped' when chaos was unleashed wouldn't be entirely correct. It was easier to say that the cells had stopped decaying, that more than humanity— even plants and wild creatures were affected. Death existed only as a ending for those who were murdered… or had taken their own lives because they could not stand the unchanging world.

Couldn't stand the fact that with the lack of age came also the lack of new life.

But decay couldn't be stopped. Cells may be everlasting, but the human soul…

He dropped the stylus. The soul? Really? As a scientist, he wouldn't be able to prove…

And yet.

He had pondered this for a long time. The religions of Gran Pulse had said that the human soul was immortal in the way that the body, and even the world around them, was not. Those who worshipped Etro claimed that she imbued their souls with Chaos, and that Chaos would return to Valhalla upon the death of a person. If Chaos had indeed been released to the world… was that where the immortality came from? Because they were surrounded by the very same thing that kept the soul immortal?

The balance was in having both an immortal soul and a mortal body. The human mind was part of the body and thus just as mortal as the world around it.

Hope couldn't concentrate on the coding.

"What's taking so long?"

"It's not working." Hope responded calmly, refusing to be startled by Noel's sudden voice behind him. The younger man had always been too quiet in his movements, but Hope had gotten used to that through the years. Enough to cover his jumpiness whenever Noel tried to catch him by surprise. "I'm fixing it."

In the corner of his eye, he could see Noel pull up a stool, sitting down heavily to watch Hope's actions. It made the silver-haired man cringe just slightly to be put under scrutiny. "You don't usually take so long."

"Unless you want to do this…"

"Too many numbers." Noel excused himself. "But I mean you don't usually take so long to fix things. It's been, what, twenty minutes since you just sat here to find what's wrong with it?"

Hope moved to pick up the stylus again. "It's a complicated problem."

"It's the same thing that happened last week, right? You took, what? Two minutes with that?"

It wasn't the same as last week, was it? Last week it had—

White noise.

Hope's frown grew and he tapped his stylus to where he had corrected the coding last week. Sure enough, the same red flags signalled in his head when he saw the numbers there. How had things become skewed there?

True to form, it took mere seconds for him to correct the equation.

He turned to the hunter afterward, trying to clear his frown with little success. "I didn't know you were paying attention to how long it took me to correct these problems."

"I pay attention to a lot of things."

Hope turned back to the screen, not sure what to make of those words, or the curious stare that had accompanied it. Of course Noel would pay attention. Hope had set up problem after program running to try and discover as much as he could about the chaos that currently consumed this world, and about just would happen later on.

It wasn't an ability to see the future, but it was a program that would decipher the most probable of outcomes based on current events and the actions of people. While it wasn't as accurate as the Seeress's abilities, it was nearly 92.86% accurate, taking into account every person still alive in the world to predict the violent crimes that had been on the rise once people grew tired of living the same day over and over.

It was a program he had developed after the dissolution of the Academy, taking him nearly thirty years of schematics and testing before getting it to where it was now. During that time, it had been Noel who had gone to look for the parts he needed, and Noel who not only made sure they wouldn't be found by vengeful people but also encouraged him to continue on a nearly impossible endeavour.

Ten years after the first prototype was created, and Hope was trying to push the machine beyond the bounds of what it had been created for. To see not hours and days into the future, but months. Years. Decades. Centuries.

He wanted to know, had to know: would things ever change from what they were like now?

Staying twenty-seven for eternity had been a novel thought that tickled at the back of his head in the dark moments of morbid humour late at night, but forty years of it… It was burdensome. He felt old. Tired. He couldn't imagine how it must have been like for Noel, to have stayed eighteen for so long. Or for the children who had stayed that young, stayed small and knowing that they would never be able to grow up. The two of them had it easy in comparison. They were neither young nor old, at the perfect age for chaos to have come for them.

Technically, he was already over five hundred years old. The first time he had travelled to the future, he had felt it. The weight of time pressing down on him in a way he had never expected. He had hardly been able to sleep then, unable to close his eyes for too long for year that his corneas would rot and fall to ashes right inside his head. It was a needless fear; a stupid one. But it had been a lingering nagging in his mind, eating at his thoughts in the quietest hours of the night. Enough for him to abandon his sleep and overdose on caffeine, excusing all concerns as restlessness and a need to complete his work.

He hadn't needed anyone intruding into his thoughts and fears then, and he didn't need that now. Not even from Noel, whom he called as a friend… perhaps the only real friend he had left. All his other colleagues… while they would do so much for him, he couldn't ask it of them. They had their own lives to attend to now in the twisted society erected after the suspension of time.

Things were different now.

"Did you manage to pay enough attention to fix it next time?"

At that, Hope heard a snort at his side before Noel's face came into view again, the man leaning against the desk.

"That's what you're here for, right? To fix things up? I'm more of a, uh… physical fixer-upper. New parts, fights to put down… hey. If that thing manages to find a way to fix things…" Hope didn't dare to look in Noel's direction. The sheer faith in his tone was bad enough. "Then we could put everything to rights again. Continue on."

Forty years, and Noel hadn't lost that faith. Had believed completely in Hope in a way he couldn't believe himself. But then, Hope had set himself up for this. It was something someone had to do; reassure Noel in those moments when the other didn't think there was a future left.

"We'll manage it. It's not impossible."

It didn't matter if Hope believed in that or not. What he had learned was that the first step was insisting, even to himself, that things were possible. And luckily enough, in the process of convincing himself, he managed to convince everyone else around him.

But he could feel the weight of all those years. Pushing.

He turned to face the younger man with a slight smile. "I think you'd have a knack for it. Fixing this. If you don't mind listening to me talk, I can tell you how to do it."

"What, this thing?" Noel pointed a finger at the computer terminal. He shook his head incredulously. "Hope, I don't think anyone in the world other than you can operate this thing. It'll take you years just to teach one of your Academy workers how to fix this thing up. Me, I don't know the beginning of what any of this is."

Not entire true, since Hope knew that the hunter had been picking up lessons the past few decades. Noel had watched quietly while Hope worked, usually there asking him what he needed. Forty years together and the two of them had formed an almost… silent repertoire, a method of communications that meant Noel usually knew what Hope needed before Hope himself knew.

Or, as was just proved, Noel would know what was wrong with the machine before Hope did. If nothing else, he already had years above everyone else just because of that. The hunter probably knew much more than he thought he did.

For right now, the machine could only predict what would happen in a few days, but the future from what Hope could see remained pretty much the same. Everything stayed the same except for the length of time it took for his mind to focus.

He smiled and pushed his chair over a few inches to give Noel space in front of the holographic terminal.

"We have time."

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A/N: Personally, I want to know what happened in those 500 years between games. So, uh... throw prompts at me? Is there anything anyone would like to see? I figured a series of flash fiction might work, since I've spent the last few days staring intensely at Kinematics and having absolutely nothing come to me.