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Feb. 27th, 2005 03:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flybywashIt's while he's taking them around Telemachus that Serenity starts beeping at him.
At first, the part of Wash that he locks away when he's really flying starts yammering in panic. The nav's kept up its shakiness ever since the feds let them walk, but it hasn't been so shaky as to flat-out kick on them. It's only as he's shoving his chair to the left side of the panel that he notices things seem...smoother, somehow.
He touches the yoke. Gives it a small push, just enough to send the ship into a slow, languorous barrel roll through the black, unnoticeable by anyone on board unless they're looking right out at the spinning stars. It moves without so much as a hiccup.
When he looks away from the windscreen and sees what's on the main display, there's a moment of dead, disbelieving silence.
"You're kidding me," he mutters at last. "That was why -- ?" And he drops his face into his hands, elbows on the console, teeth gritted so he won't scream at his own stupidity. "Oh, Jesus, Wash, you gorram idiot...."
CALCULATIONS COMPLETE, the screen reads.
Math from eight thousand years ahead of their time. Of course. It'd be like doing three-dimensional calculus with a rutting abacus. Wouldn't matter how much you tried to break it down -- it'd still trip up the computers, kill the nav because everything would be struggling so hard to understand it....
Idiot.
He grabs a scrap of digital paper and feeds it into the system. It spits the data back out at him a few seconds later, and he immediately erases all trace of the equations from Serenity's computers, resisting the urge to bash his forehead against the controls as he does.
Harper might have to owe him a little bit more for this.
At first, the part of Wash that he locks away when he's really flying starts yammering in panic. The nav's kept up its shakiness ever since the feds let them walk, but it hasn't been so shaky as to flat-out kick on them. It's only as he's shoving his chair to the left side of the panel that he notices things seem...smoother, somehow.
He touches the yoke. Gives it a small push, just enough to send the ship into a slow, languorous barrel roll through the black, unnoticeable by anyone on board unless they're looking right out at the spinning stars. It moves without so much as a hiccup.
When he looks away from the windscreen and sees what's on the main display, there's a moment of dead, disbelieving silence.
"You're kidding me," he mutters at last. "That was why -- ?" And he drops his face into his hands, elbows on the console, teeth gritted so he won't scream at his own stupidity. "Oh, Jesus, Wash, you gorram idiot...."
CALCULATIONS COMPLETE, the screen reads.
Math from eight thousand years ahead of their time. Of course. It'd be like doing three-dimensional calculus with a rutting abacus. Wouldn't matter how much you tried to break it down -- it'd still trip up the computers, kill the nav because everything would be struggling so hard to understand it....
Idiot.
He grabs a scrap of digital paper and feeds it into the system. It spits the data back out at him a few seconds later, and he immediately erases all trace of the equations from Serenity's computers, resisting the urge to bash his forehead against the controls as he does.
Harper might have to owe him a little bit more for this.
