Hunched over a screen with one hand shoved up into his hair, embroiled in the tangle of code that lay behind his molecular mechanics modeling program, Bruce might have seemed a pretty poor candidate for conversation. But his reply came as quickly as they ever did to someone so naturally slow to speech - not delayed so much as simply slightly drawled. "I did not."
There was something pleasant - something remarkably comfortable - about being able to separate into these two layers, the lower, deeper current of intense focus and the easy-floating stratum of dialogue that passed over it. It required a certain level of affinity to accomplish, a harmony he hadn't achieved with very many people, but when he found it, it amplified efficiency in ways he wouldn't have expected, probably much in the way knitting or whittling or labyrinth-walking had been helping to hone people's attention for millennia.
Still, it came with certain drawbacks. It required enough familiarity with one's partner-in-thought that irregularities stood out just as starkly as (much more starkly than) the imperfections he was trying to search for in this endless file of gibberish. Questions like what the hell do you care about polar bears could jerk one up out of the depths like a fishing line.
He turned his face to him, disengaging for the moment from his wall of text, coming around to the fact that it was time to start reading between the lines like the prow of a very unwieldy ship swiveling into the wind. "Did you know their livers are so rich in vitamin A that ingesting just a gram will kill you?" Most people would probably have looked considerably less probing when asking that question, but - most people would probably actually have been asking about polar bears.