Work Text:
It started, as many ideas are want to start, with procrastination. There had been a ding on the outer edge of one of the repaired fuel bays a few days ago and neither Rocky nor I were particularly enthusiastic about going out and checking on the damage. Thus far there have not been any issues, but that might all change if a source of carbon dioxide were to come along and reveal some microscopic crack in the structure or something.
But going out and figuring out if the micrometeorite had affected the Mary requires, well, going out and checking. And I’m already on half rations at this point, I was not looking forward to it at all. And Rocky was back to trying to retrofit the Mary with a robot rail system (never mind the fact that they would also require me to go out and install them, thus rendering the whole thing moot) and cursing out human science inefficiencies that required us to manually go out and check the outside of the ship.
I could be cranky and remind him that that inefficiency would have been helpful with fixing his broken astrophage collector, but I’m not that petty. Or mean. I hope. Maybe just thinking that indicates something about my psyche that the drugs still haven’t unearthed just yet.
As it were, we were both entirely ignoring the problem and hoping that it will be able to be resolved another day. Rocky was playing video games today, and I was watching and commentating like a good back-seat pilot.
It was kind of interesting using video games as a medium to determine where Rocky’s and my own mind diverge. We had already chewed through the vast majority of the hard science year 1 of the roadtrip from hell, the biology and physics and even some of the ecological differences between Earth and Erid, and now were sedately nibbling on those softer subjects as our interest piqued. So this tentative foray into comparative neuropsychology is kind of fun, in a ‘I have absolutely no idea what I am doing’ kind of way.
For instance: did you know that Eridians (n=1) don’t seem to have nearly the same capacity for individual focus on tasks as humans can? They are absolutely fantastic at multitasking (you do not know true efficiency until you see an Eridian play Factorio), but what we would consider a ‘flow state’ would to an Eridian be ‘obsession’ or perhaps ‘a brain injury.’ Perhaps I should apologize to Rocky for all the long science binges I have gone on throughout the time we’ve known one another. Or explain that, for a lot of humans, that isn’t the standard. Ah well.
For another, Rocky in particular seems to have some difficulty with projectile motion. Part of it is definitely the gravity difference – he was used to either microgravity in the Blip-A or 2.09g on Erid, so human simulations of 9.8m/s2 would of course be disorienting. But the human brain does a lot of movement mathematics under the hood that feel instinctive and instantaneous. The cerebellum is involved in a lot of coordination and timing and fine-tuning muscle movements, and it’s all entirely subconscious. Humans and other primates are more pre-disposed to throwing things than most other animals, at least when it comes to consistent aim. How much have I been taking that for granted when it comes to video games?
Now I want to know what is considered subconscious to an Eridian. How conscious is all the tiny temperature shifts that occur to create movement in an Eridian? Do they have muscle memory like we do?
Rocky was playing Minecraft (He had been uninterested at first, but I had known enough about its internal ‘coding’ system to explain a little to him and he has been a fiend for redstone since) while I watched uncomprehendingly at the wild tangle of unmarked lines. He liked how hard it was for me to understand what he was doing, it cut down on how much color commentary I could offer. It was easy to just watch what he was doing, but now I was curious for other reasons.
He used what could best be considered ‘tank controls’ when using any video game that has a first-person perspective, moving up and down towards things before twisting the view to fine-tune the movements. Never both at once. Personal preference, or some indication as to how Eridians interpret movement compared to humans? He was clumsy with the aiming of the view, and finds it frustrating when he cannot precisely target a specific location. Poor responsiveness because of our shoddy fixes for human plastic equipment for Eridian environments, or indicative of their obvious lack of a ‘front’ to focus with? Would it be easier for Rocky to work in Minecraft if he had five accounts all stuck together, or something?
I suppose I will have the rest of my life to try and figure out experiments to do in order to understand more about Eridians, if they can’t just give me the information themselves. Perhaps I can figure out how to adapt something for an omnidirectional attention span. Or live long enough to see them do it themselves. What would it look like, five games of tetris at once or… something I cannot even imagine right now?
It does beg the question as to how well Rocky can interpret the screen though, compared to me. I had gotten incredibly used to imagining his hearing as like... a grainy monochrome version of sight where every source of noise is like a glowing lamp. I can see the shifts in texture and movement of his view screen when it's pointed at visible signs. Is that how it feels, or is it some other way that I as a human cannot properly understand?
"Teaching concept," I say aloud while continuing to stare blankly at the jumble of - I think those are repeaters? - on the screen. "Sensory neuropsychology."
I threw teaching concepts at him every so often, things that I only knew bits of and he knew nothing about that we could research together. Sometimes he picked them up, sometimes he was utterly uninterested in it. That's how I learned that Eridians do have examples of prehistoric Erid life (not fossils, but curiously metallic structures apparently, and might be rarer than Earth fossils. The inherent capacity most surface Erid life has for seeing through rock rarely leaves corpses undisturbed long enough), don't have an inherent capacity to detect when something else is looking at them (obviously, since there's no eyes, and might further explain the difficulty with pointing focus in one direction, and humans don’t know why we can do that regardless), and do apparently have wide-spread maglev systems for travel (can't wait to see those). On the other hand he had absolutely no interest in Earth vs Erid cloud formations, Earth gender studies, or much of anything to do with organic chemistry (boo). Given the lack of application to Erid chemistry that subject has, I suppose I can't fault him. Much.
“Long word,” Rocky muttered, accidentally yanking the mouse a little too far again. “Word for… how sensing affect brain?”
“Pretty sure, yea. Just thinking on how things are different between us, is all.”
“Have sound, have touch. Not all is different.”
“That’s just it, though,” I tapped a finger against the ground and readjusted so I can better see the viewscreen trained on the laptop. The lines and details of the - I’m going to not even guess what it’s supposed to do - the contraption were hard to pick out, though perhaps I just can’t detect the same fine gradations in texture that Rocky can. “Even that is not one to one. I’m soft, you’re hard, why would we feel touch the same?”
One of Rocky’s unattending limbs shifted, and I could see him subtly rub his fingers together. “Doesn’t matter? Still the same result?”
I waved my hand back to Minecraft. “Sure but, like. Are you even getting the same thing out of the movies and games and stuff that I would? I don’t even know how to guess at it.”
Rocky tilted towards me in that ‘this is a useless tangent Grace please stay on topic’ way (we’ve had a lot of time together, I’m getting good at telling expressions from a faceless rock) for a few seconds before, seemingly, getting intrigued by the idea himself. He moved his character further away from the contraption to get a wider view. Yep, no idea what’s going on there. Is that a piece of TNT?
“Screen hard to follow because far-away objects move too fast.” Rocky hesitated, wiggling the mouse again. “Difficult to determine what is close and far.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. “Is the view too distant?”
“View too… precise. Makes it feel things are closer.”
I squinted at the screen, trying to see what Rocky ‘saw.’ Maybe I could move the FOV out or something… “How is it supposed to feel then?”
He tapped the spacebar a few too many times and the player character twitched in the air and fell. Rocky hissed just on the edge of my hearing, like a crocodile growl. “Sound give front and back location. Find in space where object is. No… sharp cut.” He punched at a block, then moved over to demonstrate punching into thin air. “Hard to remember edge. No back of object to keep it not-moving.”
“Stationary,” I offered because if I could backseat something…
Rocky flapped an unobstructed hand in a ‘who cares’ way. How do I know? I just do. Who’s the guy stuck on this tube again? I’ll review your answers in 20 years.
Interesting to consider how his brain views space compared to me. He doesn’t use the parallax for identifying space like humans do, as much as he is just constantly comparing the front and back of an object to keep track of it.
“So if I turned off the screen reader, would you be able to identify where anything is?” I asked, now well and properly curious about this line of questioning.
“Turn off screen reader can’t hear screen lights,” the ‘stupid’ was left out at the end there but I knew it was implied.
“Not what I meant. Like, could you remember the -“ I squinted. “Rail tracks on that part of the build, enough to go around them?”
Rocky raised the same arm as before to wave off, before stopping and considering. Then he pointed the reader gun away from the screen and pawed at the mouse.
Through the tinny speakers of the laptop we both could hear the sound of the character walking around, but Rocky was increasingly getting hesitant about it. He tried to go in direct lines, stepping first to the side then backwards, but the character got no closer to the rail tracks except by coincidence. Eventually he stepped enough over one block for the sound difference to register, a dull metal ‘tink’ rather than the fuzzier grass steps, and he locked on. “There.” He sounded relieved and a little embarrassed at the same time. “Stupid game, stupid lack of sound, stupid not to hear before step on…”
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, because I knew Rocky had killer memory and yet… lost track of things? Somehow? He pointed the reader gun back at the screen and went back to work on his contraption.
Hmm… a consideration, perhaps without any landmarks like the front or back of an object, the location is distorted and cannot be remembered properly? I struggle to imagine any situation where an Eridian would be in a location where they cannot hear everything immediately around them except with this hodgepodge experiment with human computers and the reader gun, but…
Oh. Outer space. Of course. No air out there, nothing for the Eridian to latch onto. Oh god, they wouldn’t be able to properly remember the shape of their own ship out there. If an Eridian went out into space, a tether wouldn’t be enough. They’d need to be magnetically attached or something at all times just to remember left from right, wouldn’t they?
Maybe I’m making assumptions here. It could just be that Rocky’s bad at Minecraft. But it would be neat to continue to look into that.
And maybe I should invest in the robot rail system after all. Just the idea of Rocky having to go out entirely disoriented onto the hull in the event of some freak Grace-killing accident slash major dip in my health during the journey home has me breaking out in cold sweat as is.
“Have you considered changing up the colors of the contraption?” I ask, just to be an ass.
“Has Grace considered ‘shoving it?’” That was one of his favorites. He was quite delighted to have something that is as vulgar to humans as it is to Eridians in his repertoire. I laugh because I’m a good friend, and let him get on with his work in peace. Anything’s better than an EVA, after all.