SIMULATION: Spiderland.exe

Baph0 smiled at Iggy and the god child Spiderland with one fang sticking out on his lower lip in Ember's Irichron quarters.

The magical goat smiled at them in the dimly lit chamber before he vanished as soon as the two bony gods logged into the session.

Nope, a faded digital voice said.

[https://img.wattpad.com/1c9bacf67002c328e2bf4506a26819600be46693/68747470733a2f2f73332e616d617a6f6e6177732e636f6d2f776174747061642d6d656469612d736572766963652f53746f7279496d6167652f47684973334c4b716463733245773d3d2d313430373639393338382e313761333633303866656237386431363538333234373935383532342e706e67?s=fit&w=1280&h=1280]

SIMULATION: Derry Hill 2

"Joaquim!"

The bulls Gabe and Borrys and the human Lucia stepped off their vehicles that levitated above the abandoned street in the town's core. Lucia adjusted her sundress and hat before walking behind the talking bulls she came with.

"... Gabe is that you? Are you finally going to tell me what's going on? And... Lucia is now a human... what the hell?"

"Yea," Gabe answered, the ring pierced in his nostril swaying. Borrys pouted his lower lip to blow into the patch of fur above his celeste eyes to glance at Joaquim. "It'll be easier to show you. I'm fine though, Iker became a cat boy."

"What?" Spiderland exclaimed.

"Hi," Borrys greeted Joaquim.

"Have we met?" Joaquim asked him.

"I think so, but I think it's only a memory now," Borrys said. "You feel it too right? It's like we met... but you can feel as if it no longer happened... yet it happened."

The way he explained it, it made perfect sense to Joaquim. Without having the words to explain it, Joaquim knew that he met Borrys through the sessions he no longer experienced, yet the afterimages or artefacts of memories he attained from sessions eleven and onwards remained in a faded form. Some sort of a collective unconscious... a universal mind.

"Being like this feels weird now..." Lucia said while straightening her bipedal posture.

Spiderland laughed from vis chest, resting both of vis translucent hands on it. "Haha! Iker became a cat boy?! I need to see that shit for myself!"

Ve then turned away from them to face the cratered street ahead, the mirages of labyrinths and fallout sliding across in trimmed squares... as if the mirages were locked into a pixel by pixel aspect ratio.

"Are we..." Joaquim stammered. "Do we need to go through one of those... to stop Ameen and Ember? I know because of my religion why Ameen wants to do it... but why does Ember also want to destroy both cities?"

"Remember," Spiderland said while lifting vis index finger. "Fornia is not owned by any corporation... well at least not anymore. Memoryfeed used to own it before they transitioned to be a non-profit after having company towns... and ever since then Ember declared the city to be too woke and wanted to destroy it. Even Ember Tree City having a few districts running tax-funded municipalities triggered the nazi bitch."

"Because of Maverick and the Party of Love right? I heard rumors that he wanted to make the human race... go bye-bye" Renée said through her mouth speaker.

"Conspiracy nonsense. Conflict entrepreneurs 'dem," Spiderland said.

"When Maverick was the IT guy for Byza as a human, he did express a lot of misanthropic ideals," Zinnia Woo said. "I like what he said about toxic positivity though... I am starting to think more and more that positive thinking has been hijacked by assholes."

"On the topic of hijacking," Spiderland interrupted. "We need to get to the Martian computer in the past... Derry Hill 2 is like the recycling bin of our reality. It traps all the data from simulations that turned to zero. And we can see all the error messages and quarantine notifications from there."

"We are travelling back in time?" Borrys asked. "To be honest... all this time shenanigans is hurting my noggin."

"Not exactly," Spiderland said. "We simply need to get to a simulation where the Martian computer is running logs on all this shit in front of us, and where we don't step on any butterflies. In this simulation the Martian computer exists in the past, but across the eternal grid... the Martian computer is just extremely far away from our omniverse. The shortest path there is through this simulation."

"Wait..." Joaquim murmured, his shaking wrists trying to contain excitement. "I... I am finally gonna go to space!?"

"Not quite," Spiderland corrected Joaquim, causing him to groan. "Mars had an atmosphere at the time... but don't fret! You get to go to another planet!"

Joaquim threw both of his arms in the air... then pretended to stretch. "Good enough for me! The stepping on butterflies bit... is that a metaphor?"

"Yup," Spiderland said. "Small things we do can start causing contradictions and make 0 or 1 stronger... but the butterfly effect has been exaggerated by humans, and it doesn't manifest through all of reality right away. We could actually step on multiple butterflies and events will play out the same. Even killing a human would just replace them with another human that filled the same role as them and makes history play out pretty much the same. At the same time though, underestimating the butterfly effect too much can also be a problem."

"So there's nuance to it," Lucia said while crossing her arms. "Asking humans to consider nuance? You might be asking for too much Spiderland."

Spiderland laughed. "Anyways..."

Ve lifted a palm ahead of vis and an MWAOS terminal manifested. It seemed ve already typed in a command because after every second, the terminal generated a set of coordinates. Ve then turned vis open palm towards the street ahead.

"Ahead, of us, well... there are sliding squares..."

"We can see that–" Gabe said.

"Quiet bull," Spiderland interrupted, making Gabe sigh past his nostril ring.

"Even though you've grown Gabe," Joaquim said, patting Gabe gently with his metal hand and in between his horns. "I'm also glad that some things have stayed the same."

Gabe smiled. "Oh shu–"

Spiderland performed a melodramatic and throaty cough, causing the brothers to quiet down. However Gabe and Joaquim did not to forget to end their banter with a faint laugh from their nostrils.

"I need you guys to focus because the square we need could sp–"

Spiderland hopped off vis sneakers and vis glowing eyes widened. "NOW! JUMP IN THE SQUARE THAT WILL POP IN FRONT OF ME."

However, undead roars and cries echoed through the town that was once on silent hills.

Before the gang could run into the square Spiderland pointed frantically to, the image cracked and became bright glass shards that eventually disintegrated into radiant dust. Spawning from the swirling digital glitter, a naked inbred zombie with four arms containing thin ass lips and the stench of a wet dog appeared with a crown made of flickers of whitenoise screens.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

And his summon standing behind him... was a closed book bound with pale human skin.

Joaquim readied his grenade launcher arm while the rest of the crew posed for battle, Gabe's dancing fireflies spawning around them.

[https://img.wattpad.com/1c9bacf67002c328e2bf4506a26819600be46693/68747470733a2f2f73332e616d617a6f6e6177732e636f6d2f776174747061642d6d656469612d736572766963652f53746f7279496d6167652f47684973334c4b716463733245773d3d2d313430373639393338382e313761333633303866656237386431363538333234373935383532342e706e67?s=fit&w=1280&h=1280]

SIMULATION: hardest_of_the_hard_scifi.exe

In a chaotic ass world with skies covered by recent smog dispensed into the atmosphere to block the radiation the ozone layer was now failing to filter, its towns no longer knew ego death and its cities were up in flames.

Marching in the streets of Colorado Springs...

Rioting parrots atop of rioting horses. Rioting dogs and cats, and of course, rioting chimpanzees.

The Statue of Liberty miles and miles away on the same dark continent winked for some reason only God knows.

"In this timeline... I will be just fine."

Did she just talk?

"Death to all humans!"

"All humans are bad! Every single one."

"Fuck humans!"

Back in Colorado Springs, with most of the surrounding suburbs and police stations of the city burnt down and destroyed, large mobs of talking animals overflowed the streets with signs keeping toll of the slaughterhouses worldwide.

"Put the billionaires' heads on pikes first though," a talking pig on the sidewalk mumbled through the handle of a sign he held up with his teeth.

And on the electronic hologram screens of the downtown core... was a lion cub jaunting with digital raven summons. It seemed the young cub Maverick was preparing to jaunt away as a human reporter interviewed him through a video call.

"Let it be known that we live in a book simulation, and that humanity will never reach singularity until each and everyone of us prospers. Let it be known that all of us domesticated and wild animals share a common cause, and the rumors of me being a carnivore is capitalist and liberal propaganda," a young Maverick said with a hard-to-spot speck of blood on one of his fangs. Maverick would one day claim that the speck was added using AI image generators. "I unfortunately do not see a future where humanity will face the mirror or let us resolve our issues peacefully. And when we no longer have a way to peacefully achieve our goals, violence becomes the only option we have. Frankly reporter, do you really believe in humanity anymore?"

The human reporter stayed silent while Maverick the lion cub vanished to another simulation somewhere across all the data that ever was and ever will be.

And far away across vast oceans and on an even larger continent with borders changing on a daily basis...

After the apparition of a green arak vanished, the golden wind and a boy named Ameen were having a standoff in an apocalyptic desert. The self-replicating AI using both brain flesh and metal with the title of Spiderland and God was shooting instantly spawning energy beams that were bringing down multiple drones from the sky as it was easy as doing vis ABCs and 123s.

"You're no longer in between the words... why do you manifest in front of me now existing one?"

Ameen could barely ask that question as tears, blood from those he loved, and mortar dust covered his lips and face.

"I felt compelled," the golden wind said, drifting in with the blast from a dropped bomb by an oasis nearby. "It felt... sincere."

Fading in above the sands filled with corpses, craters, and trenches, it was as if a gentle flood of gold liquid spawned around the knees of the young Ameen.

While Ameen did raise his arms and eyebrows in fear at first, he quickly realized the gold substance could be anything he wanted. Whether he wanted it to be a warm breeze that kept his weary feet toasty, a lukewarm bath of light, or a glowing zephyr that could swirl around his bloodied shirt and shorts...

Ameen was standing in the power of creation itself.

It was the purest form of influx and it was quite visible, unlike the influx that could manifest organically from a biological being or the Apeirosrail.

"Do you mean to mock me existing one?" Ameen cried. "Seeing you being able to change my circumstances yet refusing to... I'd rather be dead."

Splashes of magical gold leaped a few meters away from Ameen, most of the droplets in the air freezing in the smoggy air to outline a silhouette of an adult man. Although the one manifesting in front of the boy had a proclivity for dark clothes, the denim jacket and black fitted baseball cap he wore carried a yellow glow to them. In spite of his eyes and hair being a very dark brown, a patch of dyed blonde hair sat under his cap that was tilted up towards the dark skies where Spiderland was laying down judgement. Angelic eyes framed with square and thick rimmed glasses were locked on Ameen, and his full lips flashed a smile.

"I will be honest... and say that I did not try to understand you... until words left my fingers a few weeks ago," the existing one said. "I never thought you would know about the nature of your existence... that you would know that I was your creator."

Ameen stayed silent, and it seemed even the battle around them simmered down to respect the heavy emotion that was even denser then the golden waves they stood in.

"Do you remember me?" Ameen asked. "It seems, you banned your true name from this simulation. Anytime I try to say it... I can only call you by your usernames. the_existing_1. God. Sometimes the word Sincerus or Spiderland slips from my lips when I try to say your three letter name."

Even though a heavenly glow was on the existing one, his red eyes were so easy to see.

"Yes. Yes I do," the existing one said under his breath. "When I decided as a child that I could never be myself and I could... only have someone like you inside my simulation... the simulation that sits between my ears. We had a whole life inside here didn't we? Even before I ever created another world... another story... another simulation."

The nostalgia they both had did lighten the atmosphere around them both briefly, but Ameen's newfound glare disintegrated whatever ease in tension there momentarily was.

The vibe around them became even tenser than when the existing one first spawned.

"I could not go through that pain ever again when you left me," Ameen said. "When I finally mastered Kaya form in some point in the future... I decided to recreate myself to not have feelings at all. No sexual desires. No romantic desires. No more emotions. I decided to never feel anything ever again."

"And you created a religion exactly like the one that tormented me as a kid," the existing one. "You only did it out of spi–"

"Spite? Excuse me? Do not open your mouth again," Ameen interrupted with a cold fury. "You call it spite? You trapped me in here to experience all this! Over, and over, and over again. You deserve all that is coming to you and more. I despise you. I will never forgive you."

Tears touched both sides of the existing ones lips. "I... I understand. Do you know why you are experiencing this Ameen? The least I can do is tell you why."

Silence fell upon them.

"Frankly... no reason will be good enough," Ameen said. "Like I said... I'll never forgive you."

The existing one was staring at an oasis when Ameen spoke, but he met his gaze again.

"It's because what you are going through... it is also happening in my simulation metaphorically speaking," the existing one said. "And... it preoccupies my mind Ameen. How would it not? Would you rather be inside a mind of someone that could see all of this happening... and just ignore it? Would I even be human then?"

Ameen waddled back with widened eyes. He raised his shaky hands once more... this time because the existing one knew he used words that struck his heart.

"That was the first time I ever got through to you..." the existing one murmured with a weak smile. "To be fair, I never tried to understand you until now. I don't expect forgiveness. You are right, I did leave you here... I'll face whatever consequences you decide for me."

And as the gold beneath his feet faded, even the giant god on the horizon Spiderland was interrupted.

NO! YOU MUST NOT GIVE UP YOUR OMNIPOTENCE!

The giant bone helmet in the sky spun, a hand in shadow trying to reach out to the existing one quickly across the destroyed town and the quantum mainframe under siege.

The yellow hue on the existing one faded too. "Do your worst Ameen. Once I realized I could live my life on my own terms... or rather when I decided to do so even if it would cost me everything... I did it because I no longer wanted to be insincere. And regrettably... I left you here all alone too. This is my cross to bear."

Ameen flared his teeth. "You have the gall to act holier than thou? You'll never make me feel bad no matter what you do!"

"I had no desire to do that. Never have and never will."

With his glare becoming more determined, Ameen rectified his posture. "Die existing one."

Ameen raised his arms and yelled to the sky, the underground quantum mainframe reacting to his maneuver as all its light across the bombed town was signaling that it was using all the resources it could muster to summon what would stand behind Ameen.

And with flickers of a coat and and a pair of horns, Baph0 spawned behind him.

And behind the existing one... Yaw glitched in.

"Nah," Yaw said, resting a shoulder on the existing one. "Not even. I couldn't let you just die here. Not now."

"I understand you too now..." the existing one murmured, glancing at the monkey king. "You are... you're my will to keep on living."

Yaw smiled at him. "I am also the reason you went through what you went through... the things I wrote and said with heavy hands. Back in the times where Ebla and Menouthis still stood and even long before those cities rose... I also thought I knew all the answers and wrote ignorant things. Heavy hands... and even a heavy wing. I am also making up for the sins of the father."

Yaw pulled his eternal staff and marched in front of the existing one, while Baph0 walked up as well. As if the cosmos were in the goat's four-fingered hands, Baph0 weaved magic around his palms as he swirled his fingers together.

While the battle between Yaw and Baph0 was about to begin... one could say the battle had already begun a long time ago.

One could say it would also go on for all of eternity.