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It’s not that Virgil finds the times when Logan sits him down and asks him a million questions about his entire Brain Thing and takes intricate notes on every one of his awkward responses annoying. It’s – okay, well, maybe it is a bit annoying, or maybe the better way to put it would be ‘sort of irritating and mildly distressing’ because Virgil really doesn’t know how to properly answer any of them.
Or… okay, he does know how to answer them. But there’s always that nagging sense that he’s getting it wrong somehow without knowing it.
But there’s no way in hell that he’s going to tell Logan any of that. He knows intimately well how much it sucks to get shoved to the side when you’re really into something, and maybe it’s annoying, but it’s a bearable sort of annoying. He’ll take it, for Logan. Not even take it , because it’s actually pretty enjoyable all things considered. Logan’s cool, in more ways than one. Virgil likes Logan. He likes being helpful to Logan. He just wishes there was a way to help that he wasn’t so ridiculously sure he’s messing up in every way possible.
All that aside, though… it’s kind of fun to try to work out what makes Logan’s cool glassy rain-patterns shift from blue to purple to yellow to the faintest hints of orange. And as long as they’re in Logan’s room, and Logan is doing his whole scientific note-taking thing, Virgil might as well do a bit of observational experimenting of his own, because apparently in here, the Science Is Catching.
It’s not how he speaks, not the tone of his voice or the emotional quality of it, because it’s the exact same taste of blue no matter if he’s curious or vaguely irritated, and it’s not like it shifts whenever he yells anyway.
It takes him a while to pin down that the shifts and ebb and flow of it all almost definitely correspond to the way Logan holds himself. Body language, probably, although he has no idea how or why his senses have chosen to interpret it like this. It’s not bad; it’s actually pretty cool now that he’s paying close attention to it. But... weird.
Which reminds him.
“Ah... L?” Virgil tries, in between inquiries and clarifications and a fair amount of vigorous note-taking. “I have a question.”
“I have asked you a fairly numerous amount of those so far,” Logan says. “So it only seems fair that you should get to return the favor. What is it, Virgil?”
“Well, it’s not that I don’t like spending time with you, and working out my whole – ” Virgil gestures, first at Logan, and then kind of abstractly around his own head.
“Your synaesthesia?” Logan places down his notebook on his lap, and interlaces his fingers, absentmindedly stretching them. A shift to lighter blue, like Patton’s shirt. Virgil prefers the darker, but it’s not like he can tell Logan how to sit.
“Yeah, that.” Because that’s what it is, apparently. The way he sees things and has always seen things has a name, and nobody else experiences the world quite like he does, and he only found out about a month ago. He’s still kinda reeling about that. “But. Uh, I was actually wondering... can’t you just... see for yourself? You know, cut out the middle man and all that.”
“I’m not sure if I quite understand what you’re saying,” Logan tells him.
Virgil scrunches up his face a bit, trying to find the words. Logan has a tendency to just kind of… not get it, when Virgil’s being evasive or not saying what he means directly. It takes effort to be clear and direct, sometimes. “I mean, we’re not real. Right?”
“Correct?” Logan makes it into a curious-sounding question, wiggling his ballpoint pen back and forth in the air.
“We can do, uh, things that humans probably shouldn’t be able to do. Like, stretchy arms – ” He demonstrates, twisting his arms into a neat pretzel knot and then uncurling them to stuff them back into his pockets. “ – shapeshifting, giving ourselves impossible heterochromia, turning into living puppets that move of their own accord – that sorta stuff. Right?”
“...Right,” agrees Logan. “I’m rather curious to hear where you’re going with this, actually.”
Virgil shrugs. “So can’t you just, you know... give yourself synaesthesia?”
Logan’s eyebrows go all the way up, and then his mouth opens, and then he shuts it. The look that crosses his face is really something special, and the way he shifts makes Virgil think all pinkish-and-rattling stones. “Hm,” he says, and then, “ Hm! No, I – mm.”
“Hm?” Virgil tries.
“Hm,” Logan agrees. “An interesting suggestion. You’re proposing I rewire my technically non-existent brain chemistry to bestow upon myself a complex neurological condition?”
Virgil now immediately regrets mentioning it. “It’s probably not possible, right?”
“...Most likely not, but not for the reasons you are thinking.” A breath, then: “I’m about to co-opt a philosophical thought experiment for a purpose it was never intended to be used for,” Logan informs him, with the air of someone who’s about to commit a heinous crime worthy of capital punishment.
“Cool,” says Virgil. “I... won’t tell anyone?”
“I’d appreciate that,” Logan says seriously, and clasps his hands together. “The basis of the hypothetical experiment is that there is a rather brilliant scientist by the name of Mary who’s lived her entire life in a single, completely black-and-white room, only able to observe the outside world through a similarly monochrome screen. She has never experienced color of any kind, not firsthand.”
“Sounds miserable,” Virgil says, idly breathing in the brightness of the purple-fading-to-blue that’s Logan in the midst of elaborate explanations. “Wait, wouldn’t she be able to, I don’t know; just look at herself? It’s not like she’s also monochrome. Her skin’s got to have some sort of color, right?”
“As a matter of that, that’s the exact thought I’ve always had while considering this experiment,” Logan says, with a slight twist to his mouth and just a hint of green in the way he holds himself. “But then again, it’s only meant to be hypothetical. Let’s just stick to the original terms of the problem set out by Frank Jackson.”
Virgil shrugs. “Sure, okay. Mary the Scientist, trapped in a black-and-white room with no colors. Miserable and probably unethical.”
“Oh, massively so,” Logan agrees. “But imaginary people don’t tend to have very many rights when it comes to the sorts of experiments they become entangled in.”
“...Let’s not think about that too hard. Why are we talking about Monochrome Mary?”
“Well, the thing is,” says Logan, “Mary, despite never having seen a color in her life, is the world’s premier expert on the color red. Via her black-and-white screen, she’s able to observe the outside world in phenomenal amounts of detail, and access all kinds of scientific articles and textbooks – so that, in essence, she’s able to gather every bit of information pertaining to that particular part of the color spectrum. The philosophical part of the experiment being this question: if, after she’s gather up all this information, Mary is then presented with an actual red object, and she witnesses that shade in person for the first time – has she really gathered any new information?”
“Uh,” says Virgil. Logan’s giving him that look, the one that he gets when he’s expecting Virgil to reply with something amazingly smart in response to what he’s said. He kind of hates that look because he knows he isn’t nearly as smart as Logan thinks he is, and whatever he says is going to be endlessly disappointing. “I mean... yeah?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because...” Virgil thinks hard, turns the stones and the blueness and the rainy-feeling over and over and over in his mind. “Um. I guess it’s because... knowledge isn’t everything? Sorry, Lo,” he adds, hastily, but Logan just shakes his head, easily dismissing the apology. “Like, sure, you can know everything about red or blue or rocks or whatever it is that you’re an expert at, but if you’ve never actually seen whatever it is that you’re researching, you’re going to be missing the most important thing.”
“Congratulations, Virgil,” Logan says, with a tiny little upwards quirk to his mouth that feels so purple it’s almost edging upwards into pink. “You appear to be a Cartesian dualist by proxy.”
“I think I’d be a lot happier about that if I actually knew what it meant,” Virgil admits. “Uh, and also if I knew how it was relevant. How is it relevant?”
Logan appears to think hard for a split second, all thoughtfully royal purple, and then says, “Well, I’ll explain the basics of dualism and physicalism later. But for the moment, we can agree that pure knowledge of anything, no matter how detailed or all-encompassing, is missing a crucial something without first-hand experience of that particular thing, no matter what it may be?”
This is a mouthful – a brainful, really – that Virgil has to take a second to try to chew his way through. “Ah, yeah. I guess. Isn’t that what I just said before?”
“Essentially, yes. And you’re most likely aware that in order to create or modify anything, we – all of us – must have firsthand knowledge of it?”
“Um,” says Virgil.
Logan folds his hands together with a washing feeling like rattling rocks in an ocean of royal blue. His eyes are gleaming in a way that they haven’t been, not lately. He seems incandescently excited to be explaining something to an audience that’s actually paying attention. “An eslaf is a species of medium-sized amphibian about this big.” He gestures with his hands, indicating a wallet-sized creature. “It has blue porous skin, leopard-like grey markings all along its back running down to a short stub of a tail, and is a distant relative of the common salamander. It’s rare enough that these facts that I have just described to you are essentially all we know about it.”
“What? Uh, neat, I guess. Why-?”
“So could you create one for me, based on that description?” At Virgil’s horrified look at being put on the spot, Logan is quick to assure him, “I will not be angry or upset if you are not able to accomplish this, and there are no real wrong answers. Consider this... another thought experiment, if you will.”
“That’s not what I was worried about,” he says, but pulls a face, cups his hands in front of him and tries to imagine up this weird salamander-like animal of Logan’s anyway. Making things isn’t Virgil’s strong suit unless the ‘things’ in question are ‘panic attacks’ or ‘uncomfortable situations’. But Logan makes him want to try.
After a second, Virgil carefully opens his hands. There is now something the approximate size of a wallet sitting in them. It’s blue with grey markings, slightly slimy to the touch, and blinks up at him with tiny adorable eyes. Its weight and presence are a blue that’s a shade or two lighter in his mind than Logan’s is, although it’s only really noticeable if he concentrates.
“Huh,” he says, and offers it out to Logan, who leans in to examine it with curiosity before glancing up at him over his glasses.
“You have not made an eslaf,” he says. “You appear to have created some kind of... strange axolotl.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was an admirable effort, especially considering that eslafs do not, in fact, exist. I made up the species on the spot.”
Virgil had been expecting something along those lines, and nods. “You were trying to show me that you can’t just make something up based on information alone.” He weighs the tiny, slippery creature in his hands. It chirps wetly at him, which is something he hadn’t intended to make it capable of. “It’s... kind of cute, though. For a thought experiment.” Raising it to eye level, he gives it a rueful half-smile. “Welcome to the world, little dude. It only gets worse from here; trust me.”
“An exaggeration, surely.”
“Is it?” Virgil looks up. “We’re born – well, sort of; I guess in our case we just sort of... blipped into existence at some point? Never mind, that’s not the point – we have some good times and some bad times – but mostly bad times – and eventually it’s all going to culminate in death. If you graphed it all, which... you probably would, actually, I know you love graphs – I bet you anything you’d see a pretty noticeable downwards trend.”
“That’s a pessimistic and highly reductive way of looking at a nuanced and complex existence,” Logan says. “And as, ah...” He fumbles for his notecards. “An unnamed, famous philosopher, according to Roman, puts it – ‘there’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s just throw away the entire suitcase’. We’re getting off-topic yet again.”
“Right,” says Virgil. “Sorry. Back on topic. Let’s do this.”
“To recapitulate: as we’ve demonstrated in this experiment, complete theoretical knowledge of a subject isn’t enough. In order to truly know everything, you must first experience it. Or so the theory goes.”
“I,” says Virgil, and then pauses. He places the axolotl-thing very carefully on his lap, hoping that it won’t squirm off and get crushed or something else equally terrible. He’s pretty sure it won’t. Anything created by him had better have an extremely strong self-preservation instinct by definition, or he’s doing something wrong. “I can’t remember why we’re doing this?” He twists it up into a hesitant question at the end, hoping Logan will pick up on the hint – which he does, without a word of complaint.
“You suggested I give myself your synaesthesia instead of asking you questions about it. I explained the principles of the Mary’s Room thought experiment to lay the groundwork of the reason why I can’t , and this creation-experiment was an extension of that explanation. Does that make sense?”
“Gotcha,” Virgil says. He feels like he’s being pumped full of information. It’s a bit overwhelming and a bit exciting. He’s not sure if he’s catching all of it, but he feels like he can almost see the bigger picture, and it’s a pretty cool picture, all things considered. “So. Why can’t you just give yourself synaesthesia, and what does it have to do with, uh...” He gestures vaguely at the blue thing chirruping contentedly away to itself on his lap. “...this.... thing. Should I name it Mary? Does that feel right?”
“Ownership of a pet often necessitates a name. Are you intending on keeping it?”
“God. I don’t know. Should I? I feel responsible, I think.” Virgil frowns. “Is this what parental responsibility feels like? This sucks. I think we should compensate Patton, if this is what he feels like all the time.”
Logan smiles, so slightly that Virgil probably wouldn’t have noticed it if... well, if he weren’t himself, and he didn’t know Logan so very well. The rock-rattle feel is soft and blue and cool. “To answer your question,” he says, “I can’t simulate your synaesthesia because I don’t – and could never in a million years – have a full conception of what it is. I could simulate a form of synaesthesia, similar to you creating – ” He hesitates, and then nods at the blue creature that’s now clumsily trying to climb Virgil’s hoodie. “ – Mary. But, just as your recreation didn’t quite manage to match the internal image I had of the creature in question, my recreation of your synaesthesia would never quite match up to the real thing.”
“Like... trying to imagine what someone you haven’t met is going to feel like, color-wise,” Virgil offers. “Like, you might accidentally hit on the right thing, but it won’t be really the right imagined taste or color, not really. You’ve got to interact with them properly in order to feel it.”
Logan reaches for his notebook, fading to something thoughtfully purple, and scribbles something down. “I imagine so, yes.” He pauses, pen hovering just above the paper. “My apologies if that disappoints you. It would certainly be an easier research method than asking you so many questions...”
“No, it’s fine,” Virgil dismisses, and settles back into his chair, drawing up both legs to sit crookedly cross-legged. “Should’ve guessed, really. I just thought you’d want a more... empirical?” He glances up at Logan, questioning, and then – at his nod – “Empirical way of getting information about it. Because, I’m trying to answer correctly, but I’m basically the embodiment of bias whether I want to be or not.”
“Please stop saying unkind things about my friend,” Logan says, so deadpan that Virgil has to take a moment to process what he’s talking about before laughing, surprised. “Your perspective is perfectly adequate, Virgil – more than adequate,” he amends. “Trust me, I have learned more from you in the past two hours than you could ever possibly imagine.”
Virgil blinks, because – two hours? It’s been two hours? Time tends to be stretchy and flexible around here in the way that only a completely imagined, made-up existence can be, but still. When it’s been that long it usually tends to feel like it’s been that long.
“Speaking of two hours,” he says. “Not gonna lie, my head’s starting to hurt from all of this. Can we, uh...?”
Logan just looks at him quizzically. That’s the thing with Logan. You tend to have to say exactly what you mean for him to understand you, and that rubs at Virgil weirdly in a way that he’s never been able to pin down. He clears his throat. “Take a break? Just for a bit. See what everyone else is up to. Roman might want to see – ” He waves a vague hand Mary-wards.
This time Logan does get it. “I suspect it’ll amuse him, if nothing else. And I do suppose a short break might be advantageous.”
Virgil watches Logan tidy his things and file them away into nothingness to be gathered up later, and can’t help a slight smile. “So... what do axolotls eat?” He gently coaxes Mary onto his shoulder. “I know it’s not actually an axolotl, but – close enough, right? I did kind of base it off one, so I guess it eats axolotl food. If it even needs to eat. What do you think?”
“Do you know, I have absolutely no idea,” Logan replies thoughtfully and stands up, purple flaring in Virgil’s mind all the way. “I would assume it to live off a crustacean-based diet, but I’ve never put much thought into the dietary requirements of small amphibians.”
“So let’s go find out,” Virgil says, and stands up to join Logan, and they sink out together into whatever comes next.