orderonto

I have been thinking as of late. Not that I would not normally do so-- but I've had a baby girl, well, another girl, very recently, and she was new and helpless and she enveloped all of my thoughts for a time. She still does and I am still confused, but I am also a private man in some ways and that is neither here nor there. That she exists makes me elated. And that makes me feel other things.

Something has happened. Something which has made me a very different man than the one I was years ago, who some of you may have known. I am sorry for that. But you see, I want-- have always wanted-- to make amends for all the deaths that have happened around me. My father Chandra Suresh, Charlie Andrews, Eden McCain, Dale Smithers, Isaac Mendez, Ted Sprague, Alejandro Herrera, Meredith Gordon, Bob Bishop...Elle Bishop. God help each and every one of them.

All of these sacrifices, I felt that if I could just kill one unrighteous man, that all of that meaningless loss would balance. I felt that I could teach a monster what it was to take so much from so many, that I could return his favor and that that was justice.

A man asked a question some time ago-- I think that it was just for play. Harry Dresden was his name? He asked whether or not we agreed with Friedrich Nietzsche when he said one thing:



I can do nothing but agree, for I used my ideals of justice to turn myself into what I had been seeking to destroy. A monster. And now, in the process of saving myself, I learn that the monster that I was chasing after with desperation for all of those years was not a monster at all. He was just something wearing on the outside something which we all have buried inside of ourselves. Not a monster, but a beast, a part of nature trying to claw its way out. The things that some of us know, or can do, the differences between our power simply make it easier to lose control, and more terrible when we do.

You cannot kill something like that.

You cannot even hope to stop it.

The most that any of us can do is try our damndest to keep that beast at bay inside our own hearts.

I cannot keep trying to pretend that I am seeking justice. I cannot keep chasing you. I have a family; I have children. They are the ones who will make everything balance in the end.



I can't do this any longer. Sylar.

Nothing is simply given to man, no matter how much supposed power he has, and little which we conquer for ourselves in any way is paid for without sacrifices from another, however unjust this seems.

Our greatness lies in our conscious decision as sentient beings to be stronger and prouder than our cruel natures and the unforgiving life that we have been thrown into without our asking, no matter how weak or strong we perceive ourselves as.

Our hearts can be at peace with ourselves despite the necessity for unfairness, because we say, we did what was necessary to be not only alive but also just.


[ooc: *sliiiides this one in* here's lookin' at you, luke and sylar. ]

I have a free moment at last.

This night, Claire Bennet did something very brave, and very special. She was honest with herself. It may not seem brave or particularly special to the majority of you-- what she is capable of may seem commonplace. But in her heart, it represents, no doubt, a brand as well as a weight, holding her down. Something that marks her. Something which makes her special. Specialness is not always desirable, although my opinion used to differ very much, was less informed.

I feel as if I want to be honest myself. Not quite in the same way. That was how Claire knows how to tell her stories. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but I enjoy words. I enjoy stories. I know where I stand with them. It occurs to me that new people arrive here all the time, and that some leave, and that we do not always make an attempt to inform others of who we are and what we may have in common. Or not at all in common.

My own story is different than hers. My name is Dr. Mohinder Suresh, and I am from Chennai in the state of Tamil Nadu, in the country India of the continent Asia in the world that I come from. However, I have lived for some time in Brooklyn, New York, as well as various places in Southern California. I used to be a professor for Chennai University, like my father was. The both of us quit some time ago. This background isn't very necessary, but it's good to offer a starting point, something conversational.

I quit my job and moved to America when my father, who was a man with flaws like any other but a man who still loved his family, was murdered-- by another man who is among you here. But he isn't the topic of this story. I am. While I was in the country, I discovered that my father, who was a geneticist, as I was, had discovered the truth-- that people who had abilities outside and above the normal existed. Over the years I've met dozens. All of them left their mark on my life. Some for the worse. Most for the better.

Here the idea would be obvious-- but at home, that people could be so much more special-seeming than I was was both something that very few were privy to and something which held an unavoidable fascination. At home it gave me mixed feelings, feelings which I never talked about until they ate at me and I made rash decisions out of, what? Jealousy, perhaps. Inadequacy. Desire. Resentfulness. Fear. The need to defend myself, as well as the need for revenge. The thirst for power in myself where I had recognized it in others. Nasty emotions, which turned me into an evil thing. At home, and here in this place, the City. I manipulated my own genetic code in order to force my body into an unnatural state, to give myself an ability. I wanted to turn myself into a God. What I became was slowly a monster, an extremely powerful one but one which was evil by nature. For the greatest flaw that creature had was my own-- that it felt it was beyond reproach. I did exactly what I had told myself I wanted to protect myself and my loved ones from, and I treated my monstrous state as a reason to take advantage of others. I kidnapped other people's loved ones, I had planned to make a meal out of them, very literally. I abused the emotions of women that I loved, at times intentionally. I told myself that I was only doing it all to survive. That I wanted to live and had a right to.

I turned myself into a monster. A parasite, feeding off of the circumstances which birthed me.

And for that to this day I am still sorry.

That is the story I wanted to tell. Now I've been honest with myself.

Where the hell is my taxi cab?



And why does my mouth taste like dead rat?

Plato argued that time is a constant. To Plato, it was life that was the illusion. Galileo generally ignored Plato's philosophy of time and figured a way in which to plot it on a mathematical graph so that he could get on with the important part of everything (according to a man like himself); the physics. Einstein posited that time was just another dimension, a fourth one to go along with the up-and-downs, side-to-sides, and forward-and-back-agains, which we physically move through every day. What pathetically little we understand about the concept of time, Einstein said, is based almost completely on time's relationship to our environment. Curiously, he states, the faster that we travel, the slower time moves around us. The most radical interpretation of this portion of his theory of relativity suggests that the past, present, and future are figments of our limited imaginations, so much more limited are they than reality itself. Past, present and future are constructs built by our brains so that we, living things which interact with our environments, can comprehend:

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.”

Of course, as with most things, this theory works better on Galileo's graph paper than it does in actual practice. If time is a dimension at all, and we have no proof that it is or isn't, it simply isn’t like those other dimensions. We can move only one way within it. We cannot change which way it flows. Time is not something that we interact with, not like we do with the other three physical dimensions. Time simply happens. Perhaps what is needed to understand how we relate to time is not to try to make relativity work or to go back to the notion of an absolute, but to consider something new.

Somebody will give us an answer eventually. Who knows when, who knows who; perhaps it won't happen for a thousand years. Nevertheless, someone will get it right eventually.

It will just take a little time.

Excuse me, I've come to a very firm decision. I'm quitting my jobs. Eden, I'm taking a week's holiday. Hiro, I won't be needing any letters sent. Molly, we're going to the museum.



And I'd like to make a deal with the gods of this place.

All of my accumulated research for a single working taxi.




[ooc: totally not filtered. look he doesn't even admin password protect his Microsoft Windows in canon.]

I know precisely what it takes to be a father. But what does it take to be a dad? I mean this in the most practical of ways.

It's about time I've started making some actual decisions for myself. And making the right ones.




( private -> eden mccain; )

( private -> matt parkman; )

( filtered -> heroes crew - sylar + luke )

[ a tenor voice comes on, with a thick South Indian accent-- Tamil or Kannada to someone who would recognize it, not refined but educated. ]

Friends, hello. My name is Thambi Iyengar, I've arrived in this place two weeks ago. I thought about getting a pet but as it turns out, I work too much of the day to own a pet and too many strange hours. The ticking noise is bothering me, so I wanted to find someone to room with, please.

I'm clean and quiet and conscientious. You will hardly even know I'm here. I am also willing to cook and do laundry, and I have a steady income so sharing rent will not be a forseeable problem.

I'm begging you all, if anyone has the hospitality to offer me, now is when I need it the most. I thank you!

If there's ANYONE else who needs help or is trapped under debris, please tell me. I don't know how much I can help, but I do have a little medical training. Enough to help you to a hospital.


private to SYLAR;

I have no doubt that you've already put your ability to work, put two and two together and come to a conclusion which must amuse you deeply. You know who this is. I want to talk. Soon.

In person.



[ooc: Long story short, Mohinder's done some Bad Things in his recent canon and now he needs to think about them. Far far away from Eden. Possibly with the help of random strangers and intense discussion with Sylar. he's going under the name Thambi Iyengar and working a job as a bodyguard currently, so know that if you offer to be his roommate, that's the name he's going under. If your character COULD come to the logical conclusion that Thambi = Mohinder by hacking or recognizing his voice, feel free to let them.]

[there is the sound of semi-automatic gunfire, far-away, hollywood-esque but unmistakable, and the same as the sounds coming from another post a day ago.]

Matt-- what are you doing-- Matt, NO!

[a body hits the ground, wetly and heavily, as Mohinder falls on his back, no longer held upright by Matt Parkman's solid weight as he tugs him away from the firefight. he gasps, once out of surprise and then out of realization.]

Oh-- oh my-- CLAIRE! Claire, are you here? MATT? Anybody, somebody.

Oh my God, it's a bloodbath. Why now, why just now, why is all of this happening.




[ooc: updated to A Clear And Present Danger, just as Claire Bennet is using herself as a meatshield against Danko's men.]

I haven't written in a while. Properly, I mean.


The question: Why do we die? A physicist would have an immediate answer; to not die would violate that confounded law of thermodynamics. Everything, absolutely everything in existence, be it mineral, plant, or animal, a Nissan or the Taj Mahal or a star or a mitral valve or a protein in a cell wall, eventually breaks down. For biologists, the question becomes a little more complicated. What is it that makes us age and brings us to that eventual breakdown? The answer is many things. Genetic damage caused by free radicals, shrinkage of the telomeres of our chromosomes. They get smaller with each cell division, like a countdown. At a certain length, apoptosis occurs, which is a less sentimental way to say death at the cellular level.

Biologists have a rough but usually somewhat accurate way of calculating a living thing's life span. The larger the species, the slower its energy-delivery systems, if only because of the basic mechanics of it all. Big things are big, and we are all works in progress; all of those internal structures and highways, all that complicated traffic, like driving in India or China. I have picked up mice many times in my life. Their tiny frames are vibrating, their hearts beating so very fast. I have leaned my ear against the side of a trained elephant and listened to the slow metronome, like the sound of church bells. The slower the energy-delivery system, the lower the metabolic rate and, essentially, the longer the life of the organism. God's little reminder that there are two ways of being.

To get the most out of our regrettably ephemeral lives, we must work fast or burn slow.

Elephants and mice alike get the same number of beats of their vastly different hearts, some one-hundred million odd and a handful of change. There is this invariant which causes all living things to have about the same amount of energetic life. One-hundred million spread over two years, for the mouse; for the elephant, seventy.

There are many beautiful exceptions to the length of time, if not the amount of energy that we consume in a lifetime. Man, for example, is longer-lived than any other mammal, even his primate cousins. After him, in life span, comes the elephant, hippopotamus, horse, rhinoceros, the big cats. Why are we anomalies? Why live longer than anything else, even the other macrofauna six times our size or more? Size is not the only thing that makes big animals dangerous. Like the hard to pierce hide of a rhinoceros or the sickle-claws of a tiger, human cleverness makes us tough to kill. That means that random, beneficial longevity-enhancing genes have a priceless shot at evading natural selection. A finch that gets eaten in its second month of life never passes on whatever gorgeous fluke mutation it may have been born with which might have given it-- and its progeny --an extra year or two to live.

Interesting that the same biological cleverness which allows man to contemplate his own mortality is responsible, albeit indirectly, for delaying it.





Does anyone know of a good doctor here? One that could prescribe some anti-nausea medication?



[ooc: sooo eden mccain is pregnant, yes, and she is recently starting to show. which has led to mohinder developing sympathetic mood swings and nausea. because we're horrible.]

It is an absolutely fantastic day today, isn't it? The weather's been mild, the company enjoyable, the work not nearly as monotonous as usual. I could have spent the entire day digging on the job today and not felt it in my shoulders, I was so busy listening to the sound of birds finally lifting their voices again.

Well. I can't imagine what could make it any more exceptionally fantastic than it is.

Actually, I can. A waffle cone of butter pecan and I might never remember my troubles at all.

Troubles? What troubles?


By the way, I want every last one of you to know: I AM GOING TO BE THE FATHER OF A BEAUTIFUL, PERFECT BABY GIRL with all ten fingers and toes well accounted for. Absolutely.

Today is the two-hundredth anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. I am not sure how many of you know who this is. I am not sure how many of you who even do have read any of his works. But they are wonderful, for both their insight and their meaning as symbols. True enough that his writing is at times both antiquated and full of an almost well-intentioned but still shocking racism, to those who might read it in the year that it is here, a bit ahead of my own. But his writing is thoughtful, and it is clear that he had a true love of all of his subjects.

Darwin was eminent as a naturalist, geologist, and biologist; after working as a physician’s assistant and two years as a medical student he was educated as a clergyman; and was trained in taxidermy. He was my father's favorite author.



I shouldn't have eaten those candies. The heart ones. I don't even normally like sweets very well besides things like baklava and burfi, but I felt compelled. Still, it was a violation of others' privacy and for that I apologize. I certainly do.

Well, I don't apologize to you. How did it feel? Being so helpless and unable to perform even simple tasks without great effort? If I had one wish in this world, it wouldn't be to see you die. It would have been to see you reduced to that for the rest of your wretched existence. If you hadn't threatened the thing in this world that I loved the most, I could have seen my dream come true. A pity.



I have a question of some large degree of importance to me. A very personal one. And perhaps I have no right to ask these kind of personal questions anymore. Is there a thing which is beyond forgiveness, regardless of circumstances?

This has got to end already. I don't know if I can take another moment of this, honestly, it's ludicrous.

Supposing I should just be happy I've only got two arms and I haven't been struck with more in a fit of cosmic dramatic irony. I'd rather put recent events behind me.

...was that a tiger in my apartment?


[ooc: physically whammied but not mentally cursed into an image of civilization's first bodice ripping ladies' man, complete with jewelry and costume.]

A perfect world is one in which we are all equal. One in which no one person is vastly more or less advantaged than any other. This may not sit well with those of us who would like to believe in the ideals of survival of the fittest, but I do not and never have been fond of those ideals. At one time I thought of equality as monetary, at one time spiritual, recently I considered an equality of power, of safety, of personal agency. As it turns out, none of these are what makes us equal. I have had ideas recently that I thought would change the world for the better. It was not the change I thought it would be.

Because, of course, the other side of the coin of change is not pretty. Our differences, what makes us more or less special than one another, they inflame hatreds, cruelty, strife, war, genocide. Social Darwinists are the unfortunate price that civilization has to pay for progress. They may see natural selection as a consequence for the struggle of existence. But struggle does not always mean strife. The importance of cooperation relative to competition is the biological ideal for mankind. By and large, human evolution is driven by the forces of love; sexual love, brotherly love, love of oneself and one's fellowbeings, love of God. We can be united without casting off diversity; I am of course not suggesting some kind of vapid uniformity which unites us as one benign stereotype. We can have a sort of groping self-transcendence. We have only to try. As we seek each other out as fragments, we become one being.

Perhaps our equality is in this basic humanity, this capability of caring about one another, and in our shared lack of agency.

We find ourselves not in this world by choice; we want at the very least to avoid excessive suffering while in it.




I...where in the hell is Claire Bennet?

[loud, excited laughter, with a hint of satisfaction]

It worked. I'll be damned, it actually worked-- I can't even--

I need to. I need to turn myself over and explain-- explain everything.

IT WORKED!

private to sylar || unhackable

I've something for you.


[ooc: transfused himself with Claire's blood, cocooned himself overnight and came back out in a puddle of amniotic butterfly goo minus scales and dying of crazy mutant cancer. idk blame heroes.]

I am not a monster.

I'm not.

None of you understand. And if any one of you comes for me on my property, you'll be made to regret it. There are things here which I won't allow that kind of threat around, and criminal though I may now be, self-defense is my right.

Sylar, you--

Claire, may we talk?



[ooc: busted by rodney mckay. D: he's been shoved between a rock and a hard place and so he's released any of the pc or npc hostages he had. they'll be sitting in the lobby of building 8 to wake up, with some blankets and orange juice. because he's a psycho, not a murderer )8]

Life is not so mechanistically predictable or controllable as my father would have led me to believe, I am beginning to realize. The human body is not a machine-like "something," it interacts or changes with its environment. Genetic 'engineering,' despite the precise sound of the name, produces very messy results it would appear.

According to Dr. Richard Lacey, a medical microbiologist at the University of Leeds, who predicted mad cow disease some time ago, "wedging foreign genetic material in an essentially random manner causes some degree of disruption. It is impossible to fully predict what specific problems could result."




I haven't been feeling well, even worse than before. It will seem I need more time off, and really wouldn't advise any visitors for some time. I'd feel guilty if anyone else picked up what I've managed to catch.