"Get the fuck away from me."
That is what the black cat in a straight jacket named Iker said to the pig in a red nurse outfit.
"Why would I bother opening the door for me to just leave?" Ember asked rhetorically with a smug smile under her snout.
With a faint whine from metal touching and a whiff of strong cologne, Iker glanced over where both sensations came from and it was Bastian the white cat barging in with two floating red gear vinyl players.
"Element of mercury... pause!" Bastian yelled.
Time stopped around Ember's pig body, and Iker spotted a seam of mercury around her wrist before she stopped completely still.
The red gears spun, and it seemed as if Bastian was hiding what song played as Iker found the red gears tilted upwards.
"Bastian!" Iker yelled, trying to drag himself closer to his childhood friend with his free hind feline legs.
"I got you," Bastian said. "We are taking this scrofaoid back to Bolsa Mágica to gather intel. We can locate Ember's real mind using this."
"Don't we need earthplexus chairs? Virtualtops?" Iker asked. "I don't believe they were invented yet in Derry Hill 2."
"That iteration of Bolsa Mágica was deleted..." Bastian murmured.
"What?" Iker asked while the yellow in his eyes widened.
"Don't worry, Bolsa Mágica's data is still good," Bastian reassured. "We need to recreate a new simulation, but there will be a limit of ten of them. I still have no idea how time travel will work. It seems the enemy is targeting words and tags on whatever computer we are existing in. It seems jaunting and espering operates under new rules now too."
Iker smiled back at him. "So he found himself huh?"
"Yea," Bastian replied smiling with his teeth out this time. "I believe this is yours by the way."
And from a glowing portal above Iker...
A cat-sized magical duffel bag spawned, and it levitated then swayed elegantly above Iker's back as he slipped his front paws into the shoulder straps that dangled.
When the backpack adjusted snuggly to the black cat's back, Iker said...
"Summon cassette laptop!"
The duffel bag opened by itself, and what slipped out was a bulky white laptop with a simple keyboard designed more for speech-to-text programming, and it fell gently in front of Iker's front paws.
"Time to get coding then."
[https://img.wattpad.com/7dd7c460207075286c6b35fb44cc7b87ee1bcc31/68747470733a2f2f73332e616d617a6f6e6177732e636f6d2f776174747061642d6d656469612d736572766963652f53746f7279496d6167652f304b3356417a65737a7431574f413d3d2d313430363633333431352e313761323235656235376134383538373735383530343334363438372e706e67?s=fit&w=1280&h=1280]
"Your mom is going to spawn here," Zinnia said.
Zinnia and Joaquim were standing together in the boutique shop that was repairing itself with glitches. They were both wearing flannel shirts and ripped jeans and they still had metal seams around their necks and wrists. Joaquim was ecstatic to be wearing a blue flannel shirt as he was tired of having to wear red due to only possessing whatever Gabe outgrew. The flannel shirt on Zinnia was beige.
"I saw animals here earlier... is that a joke?" Joaquim asked.
Zinnia laughed. "Nope. She is going to spawn as a Lil' Morti bot actually."
Green please, Joaquim heard a voice say.
As zaps flashed on the gray roof above them with flickers of what seemed to be a tree portal, the next batch of talking animals spawned and...
In the middle was a green Lil' Morti model and the talking animals gasped in awe.
"Your name is Renée? How did you get that skin?"
"I want that skin! How much was it?"
"That's so cool!"
"Son?"
Joaquim and the green Lil' Morti bot named Renée locked eyes, turning her bot body with a rustle in her metal torso.
[https://img.wattpad.com/7dd7c460207075286c6b35fb44cc7b87ee1bcc31/68747470733a2f2f73332e616d617a6f6e6177732e636f6d2f776174747061642d6d656469612d736572766963652f53746f7279496d6167652f304b3356417a65737a7431574f413d3d2d313430363633333431352e313761323235656235376134383538373735383530343334363438372e706e67?s=fit&w=1280&h=1280]
"Wait a minute," Iker said as he finished a simple c script on the bulky laptop using thick cassettes as hard drives. "The MWAOS operating system was already installed on the existing one's cosmic brain."
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
"Yup, we don't have enough time to create it from scratch here or wait for an AI to make it without it hallucinating on the way," Bastian said as he glanced over at the frozen Ember scrofaoid with a red nurse outfit. "There is a limit to how long I can time stop a certain element and we need this body at Bolsa Mágica before she starts moving again. She has both the experience and the tech to help her control multiple bodies at once, so she will be aware we are trying to extract intel from it very soon if she isn't already."
"Okay," Iker said. "The script is running now on the brain we exist in."
Inside the padded asylum room, the base of a glowing tree manifested setting glitchy roots while its trunk and branches made a ring, creating a round gate. However, the gate was only starting to focus influx into the center.
"Now this will be the only way anyone can jaunt from simulation to simulation," Bastian said. "This has been Alice's, Byza's, and Renée's plan to weaken the 0 or 1 singularity. To rewrite the element or asset of influx to be quantum nanobots rather than just leylines from Spiderland that keep expanding then fading over time. This affects our ability to jaunt and esper as well, but we will have the lead on info this time. We need to make sure we play stupid regarding this info and either stop them from reading our minds, or we will need Uzi or our biological singularity Spiderland to steal that info from our brains before they steal or read it."
"Let me see if I follow," Iker said. "I have very faint memories of the joker face in the sky... it basically dismembered our access to the earthplexus by destroying Bolsa Mágica, which was the main way we could esper and jaunt extremely far distances... to the point we could jaunt and esper to different timelines and simulations. We have found that in the fabric of reality that we live in that the big bang can happen anywhere on what we call the eternal grid, but the big bang pretty much plays out the exact same way until high intelligence forms... meaning only the arak and human civilizations deviate from each other with each big bang that spontaneously happens-"
"Sorry to interrupt, but with Alice's changes that might no longer be true," Bastian said.
"True true... so influx was also key to what I was talking about earlier... so that will change too," Iker murmured. "So let's say in a reality where the eternal grid is still a thing, whether it's ours or not, if one's jaunt was powerful enough... one could just jaunt to another timeline... because with all the big bangs only deviating when biological intelligences form and what we call simulations is just a big bang that happened somewhere else on the eternal grid... jaunting to a different timeline that is convenient to us is far easier than let's say... an eternal grid where all the big bangs deviate after the first year. Those hypothetical big bangs would have different alien species altogether even, and humans are less likely to form too instead of spawning every time basically. There are humans and araks in every big bang on the eternal grid... well, it eventually will have both species if the big bang is younger. The farther we can jaunt... the more likely there is a simulation where our past is playing out exactly the way the past has played out here. It seems the things we imagine and remember also take place in a location somewhere on the eternal grid, or at least it used to if Alice's nanobots haven't changed reality so much that it is no longer true. Ember's conglomerate built the main tree of the earthplexus inside the A Big Satan Under Your Pinky Toe game in which its code was so extremely detailed that it might as well be a real place to most beings... and it seems video games also manifest somewhere on the eternal grid... being both a simulation on a computer and a physical place in an unimaginable distance on the eternal grid. And that was especially true after the tree inside the game branched into all the simulations that ever was and ever will be by going through Prunus Tantalum trees and branches which also exist in other big bangs that happened due to them being more similar than different... and don't forget virtualtop machines and earthplexus towers. The branch both Byza and the Felixs used went through the mod named Bolsa Mágica which was under the nose of Ember's conglomerate the whole time... and you kept going back in time until you could also weaken 0 or 1 by changing the nature... or asset of influx itself. And the reason you were doing that Bastian... was because you never were able to prevent 0 or 1 from deleting Bolsa Mágica... so you are now weakening them back instead. What makes sense to me is that you would have tried stopping 0 or 1 many times until you decided to just let it happen, and you just let it happen while using a backup to bring it back."
"From what I followed, you're making sense. We were also able to kill two birds with one stone by having me and Uzi capture your... biological dad instead of having both of us fight 0 or 1 in any of the reruns," Bastian said. "The main thing was that we did keep trying to save Bolsa Mágica over and over again... and we kept failing so this is our first time trying this instead, and we realized we could trap Maverick too. I am really fucking hoping Uzi wins that match. I have memories all the way up to when we were adults Iker, but listening to you just now... how old do you think you are? In human years? What do you remember?"
"I am supposed to be fourteen right?" Iker asked. "I was in Joaquim's body earlier as just influx and introns. One condition on that ability is being close to the same age if I am not an esper... and I've never been an esper... I think."
"I am still fourteen too," Bastian said. "The less logic holes or time contradictions there are, the weaker 0 or 1 gets. 0 or 1 feeds on paradoxes. We were close to the same age on the very first timeline. Before I had the power to just send my consciousness to be reborn on session fifteen."
And with that, the influx gate finished focusing influx in the middle of the ring, and the luminous substance inside it looked like an ocean of light tilted sideways.
"Now we are at three simulations existing as far as I know," Bastian said. "Ember's main mind should be busy rebuilding A Big Satan Under Your Pinky Toe with a backup, maybe with Camilo shapeshifting into beings to make sure conscious minds transfer without accidentally killing someone by jaunting them or making them spawn without linking minds. I only say probably because Camilo sometimes is not there, and I am not sure what is the butterfly we step on that stops him from being there. Whether this is all on the eternal grid I am used to... I have no idea. It seems he also betrays Ameen for some reason, and Uzi and I haven't been able to figure out why. We can only go up to ten simulations according to what Alice said."
"Hey... when we first brought you in with Mami and Papá..." Iker murmured. "I have both memories of you fighting Dominic and also saving him. Do you mind me asking... who were you crying for the night we went back to Earth for the first time from Bolsa Mágica? That night is branded into my mind..."
Bastian's feline blue eyes softened as he glanced away in the padded room. "At first it was for our parents, but then it was for Alice too. Even though she is alive at this time place... we have no other choice then to let her... pass on... and it took me a lot of reruns to accept it."
Iker also lowered his head closer to his front paws. "This... all this shit began with you gaining the ability to be reborn on session fifteen in the future didn't it?"
And as they stepped through the influx gate to a brand new simulation of Bolsa Mágica, both of the cats working together to pull Ember's frozen metal body while biting her collar...
"Yea, we have been trying to stop non-existence altogether. All of us and the Spider Herald," Bastian said.
"Joaquim never made it."