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[>>Now replaying: Log 2.1 - An absence in communication]

Date: 9.9.175 AA / 4404 LTC

Location: UNNAMED_DOMAIN(LARES)

//#The lonely call of an empty line interrupts the silence.//

[>>DATA CORRUPTED]

I emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel, warm, and content, to find Chris sleeping on the bed. Ignoring them with a sigh, I approached my new wardrobe instead and found three outfits waiting for me, neatly arranged on coathangers. The casual style I wore when I arrived in my Domain, with a turtleneck sweater, the outfit that had earned me my nickname back on Earth, all sharp and lean and dangerous, and something that looked like urban cameo gear, baggy and decked out with pockets for all sorts of stuff.

Without knowing why, I picked the business attire, and a couple of minutes later I finally finagled my earrings through holes I could have sworn were long healed over and was adjusting my cuff links as I walked into the kitchen.

The fridge was already waiting for me, tall, innocent, and cold steel.

Feast! ( ^ω^ )☀️

It said by way of wishing me a good morning.

“Good morning,” I replied hesitantly, stopping dead in the doorway. I didn’t really feel hungry per se, but somehow I still knew I had to eat, like knowing you have to commit to regular exercise if you don’t want to develop health problems. The metaphorical link between eating food and power consumption wasn’t hard to make, either.

So I swallowed my nervousness and said, “Uh, can I have some breakfast, please?” There was no way I was going to open that thing. Just because I needed the fridge didn’t mean I trusted it.

Feast! (｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝ ♨

Said the fridge and with a creak of the door and a cyan flash of light, there was a bowl of porridge with fruit waiting for me on the counter. It looked delicious, soft steam wafting around the spoon jutting out of the perfectly creamy meal. I eyed it warily, but there was nothing to it. If the fridge wanted to kill/eat/shackle me, it could have done so the day before.

I still had to squeeze my eyes shut before I took the first bite.

Trembling, I put the spoon in my mouth, but I wasn’t ready for the burst of flavor hitting my tongue when I closed my lips around the meal.

“Holy shit this is good,” I said as I shoveled more of the porridge into me. It was just the right temperature and had little apple cubes, some dried bananas, and a touch of cinnamon.

Feast! °˖✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧˖°

Said the fridge, and I didn’t begrudge the hint of pride in the message. I was too busy eating. The fridge opened again, and I immediately hopped back a step, still clutching the bowl close. Nothing happened beyond a bowl of cat food appearing in the corner of the room in a flash of cyan, however, and then the fridge closed itself again and all was quiet.

When I finally put the bowl in the sink, I was feeling pleasantly full. When nothing burst out of my chest after a minute or two, I even allowed myself to relax.

//Oris.//

>>Exchanged 40 LB for 0.4 MW.

Current exchange ratio: 100 LB per MW

Current power consumption: 41.00 KW/h; approx. 1 MW/day

Current power reserves: 999998 W / 1 MW

{AVAILABLE LOGIC - 490 LB}

Chris hadn’t joined me for breakfast, but that was alright. They’d have enough time to eat later, and I had other stuff to do. Oris’ readout reminded me that I hadn’t set up its automatic power conversion yet, and I got that checked off my list, lest I forget and lose power in the middle of a fight. I did set a threshold of 500 LB, however, because I definitely needed a nest egg in case I needed to advance something in a hurry. That meant I had roughly five days of power remaining after this one, which wasn’t all that much, all things considered. Who knew how long the kids would be traveling, or if they would ever open the laptop again? For all I knew, Pina just left me in the bunker, either not caring or too paranoid about my ability to kill machines in the Real.

That line of thinking didn’t lead anywhere, though. I had done all I could to make myself useful, and now all there was left was hurry up and wait. At least in that regard. I wasn’t planning to entrust my long-term survival to a 15-year-old conservationist after all. At least not while I had other options. I just needed to know which options those were and how many I had.

I finally gave in and opened memOS’ help menu with an effort of will to go through the product tour. Surprisingly, it was quick and painless, but while it gave me a broad overview of the main features of the system, it didn’t go into nearly enough detail.

That wouldn’t do. I needed to learn everything I could about my new circumstances. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to digging through the documentation. Actually, I would have preferred to ask Chris to just do it for me, but that idea was a non-starter. After all, I couldn’t rely on that cat for everything, and their monosyllabic nature made explaining technomagical concepts a tad difficult, anyway.

I walked over to the living room, where I brought up Lares’ interface. After browsing the catalog and skipping past all the fun, overpriced decorations, I found a bookshelf that would hold memOS documentation and purchased it for 20 LB. I’d originally planned to put it in the corner, next to the TV, but the overlay that appeared before me was far too large to fit there, so I dedicated an entire section of wall next to the entrance to hundreds of tomes as thick as my forearm. Surely, those were just placeholders, though, right?

They were not.

I spent the next couple of hours alternatively cursing, groaning, and trying to get an overview of which book held what information, while Chris had breakfast and then went to sleep on the couch. Eventually, I found what I was looking for and joined them with two heavy books, then I began to read. It was exactly as boring as I’d feared, full of technical jargon and occult metaphors, and didn’t just detail the things I could do with memOS, but every other program I had installed, from Arx to Simulacrum.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

It was about noon when I finally understood enough about Lares to realize that the time inside the Domain wasn’t necessarily the same as in the outside world and an hour and a half-, hundreds of quiet curse words-, and at least one frustrated pillow throw later, I finally managed to synchronize Domaintime and Realtime.

The documentation wasn’t just an eldritch abomination that would put the Necronomicon to shame, it was also the thing that finally taught me the meaning of the term “Spaghetti Code.” Turns out the two times were already in synch, and I just had to lock the connection, but the code provided by the manual didn’t account for that. I could only hope this stuff would get easier to understand once I upgraded memOS more, or else I was fucked.

That being said, I did learn a couple of things that made sense in the context of yesterday, especially about the way the Real and Domain interacted, and how memOS interfaced between them to make sense to me, or at least that’s what I thought I’d learned.

“No hardcoding my way into an immortal godlike being, Chris,” I said with a sigh.

“Boop,” Chris snorted, as if that had been obvious from the start. Then the cheeky little bugger yawned in my face before glancing toward the kitchen meaningfully.

The second I rolled my eyes and got up, there was a flash of cyan from the general direction of the fridge, and when I arrived, there was Pasta Bolognese waiting for me. The sauce was probably slow-cooked, I thought to myself a minute or two later, while licking the plate clean. Chris was doing the same to their bowl, then actually went over to the fridge and pawed at the door before I could stop them. I froze, hand outstretched, but nothing happened.

“Beep!” Chris said.

Feast. ┐(￣ヘ￣)┌

The fridge was unapologetic.

“Beep!” Chris insisted, but there was no response. They even tried wrapping their scarf around the handle, but the door didn’t budge a single centimeter.

When the cat looked to me for help with their huge cyan eyes, I snorted. “Not going to open that thing, ever. Besides, I don’t want you to get fat.”

“Boop!”

“Alright, even fatter,” I said, purposefully misunderstanding them.

With what little there was of the kitchen cleaned, I headed back to the couch and my tomes of documentation. Chris wove between my legs and beat me to it, then proceeded to sit exactly where I had planned to. When I tried to sit on the other side of the couch, they moved to block that spot, too, staring up at me in accusation.

“This isn’t about the food anymore, is it?” I sighed.

“Beep.”

I tried to sit down quickly while they were distracted, but they beat me to it again, and I grimaced in frustration. To bring home the point, Chris displayed my Logic readout with a beep.

{AVAILABLE LOGIC - 490 LB}

I’d automatically paid some more Logic for my lunch, but that wasn’t why they brought it up. I was still losing Logic by the day, and sitting on the couch and reading memOS documentation clearly wouldn’t help as much as I thought it would.

> “You’re procrastinating, Sam,” Lorelye says with a laugh, but I stopped wondering how she can laugh at a moment like this a long time ago.

> Even so, I frown with concern, “We’re going to kill a man in cold blood. That deserves a little more time spent on planning.”

> Lorelye bursts into full-blown laughter. It’s brief and powerful, like a midsummer storm. “We planned for three weeks, scaredy-girl. He dies tomorrow!”

My shoulders slumped. The flashbacks no longer made me feel disoriented and nauseous, but they were still annoying. Mostly because in some way or another, they were right. From what I had gathered by reading the documentation, that was by design rather than chance, at least partially. Through some whim of the Logic, MemOS had advanced in the 150 years that passed after the experiment in which we tried to build an AI that would turn the tides in a losing war. Some of the alterations it had gone through were just as crazy as I would expect from undirected exposure to my magical Wish, which was the analog to the Logic as far as I could tell. Some others, like the ability to grant me eidetic memory of some of the most important events in my two previous lives, seemed almost tailored to make my life easier while falling just short of the mark. Kind of like a child trying to impress her mother by cooking dinner.

> “Oh Sammi… you need to boil the water before you add the noodles,” Mom says and my cheeks feel like they’re going to melt with heat.

> “And maybe add a little less salt?” Dad suggests, his face still scrunched up from tasting the selection of half-hard, half-wobbly pasta in salt crust I had served them.

I crossed my arms and let my head fall back, exhaling slowly. I really didn’t need to re-live the most embarrassing and/or harrowing moments of my life, thank you very much. But I had no idea how to turn it off, and Chris was right. Reading more documentation would just be procrastinating even more.

…An hour later, I found myself with a couple of nails in my mouth and a hammer in my hand, fixing Zephyro’s sword above the entrance. His glove hung next to the pommel, making it look like it was pointing the sword at the wireless router that represented Nexus.

“Beep,” Chris said from behind me. They’d helped me make sure it was even and been nothing but supportive and understanding throughout the process, but it was clear they were at the end of their patience.

“I know,” I said, after taking the nails from between my lips. “I just needed to do this, okay? It didn’t feel right just leaving them in storage.”

“Beep,” Chris said, raising an eyebrow. Their scarf took my shiny new toolbox and set it on the ground, then tied itself into a pretty ribbon on their neck.

I didn’t really have anything to respond to that. I was still procrastinating, and I didn’t even know why.

I knew what to do, didn’t I? I had to activate Nexus and do my best to attract Ferals. Hopefully, whatever connected would be weak enough, and I’d kill it for its Logic. If it wasn’t, or if none came, I had about five days before I starved.

…Unless Pina made contact. That was definitely plan B. I’d have to rely on her to survive, which was just another way of getting shackled. The difference was that instead of bowing to the lines of cold, rational code, I’d be at the mercy of her pubescent hormones.

I climbed down from the ladder and put it away, trying not to scold myself for being unfair to the girl. When we met, she’d been trapped in a dark bunker besieged by a group called the Takers, which I knew pretty much nothing about. The only thing that was clear was that they liked to enslave Machines to do their bidding, and with a name like that, I didn’t think they stopped at machines. All that meant I should probably cut the girl some slack. Sure, she was yelling the ancient war cries of my enemies, and wielding their anti-tech weaponry, but that didn’t mean she was a Mage Lord trying to fuck me over. She was a scared girl, maybe fourteen, or fifteen, sixteen tops. I still remembered how I’d felt when I was her age, and it had been a lot.

Not only for that reason, I wished I could have helped Voni, who I supposed was Pina’s older sister. She’d seemed like the stable sort, a good influence on Pina, even though Voni also was an Adherent and kept praying to the Salvatrix. A part of me was still uncomfortably annoyed by that, but that wasn’t fair, either. I’d probably pray, too, if I had been in her shoes. She’d lost her eyes in that last fight, before they could escape. A Shackled machine sent by the Takers had gotten to her. I hadn’t been fast enough to stop it.

Tin—I still didn’t know how the boy related to the girls besides that they obviously cared for each other—had tried what he could, but he was a ten-year-old boy. What was he supposed to do, besides rely on the weird techno-biological medicine he carried in his myriad pockets? Hopefully, he didn’t beat himself up about it too much. Kids on Tobes, the planet I’d been calling my home for the last 170 years, had to grow up way too soon already. Far too many of them were broken in some way or another by the time they reached physical adulthood, like Zurne had been. I just hoped that Tin had a good support network in the two girls. Say what you want about Pina, but she cared, and Voni… well, Voni had cared a lot, too, but it was impossible to say how she acted now.

I couldn’t help but think that if I had been a little faster, I could have saved these three a lot of pain, and then perhaps I wouldn’t be in this mess. When I noticed I was getting angry at myself, I squeezed my eyes shut and pinched the bridge of my nose until it started to hurt. I’d told myself I didn’t want to be angry anymore. If I wanted to avoid the slippery slope that led to rage-fueled destruction, that had to include myself.

“Beep?” Chris said, pulling me from my thoughts.

“Just thinking about the kids,” I said. “It could have been so easy, right? Just protect them in return for them helping me get out of this thing.” I gestured at the world but meant the techno-magical matrix entrapping my mind inside a laptop.

“Either way, I was really hoping they’d open the laptop again so we could talk, but…”

“Boop…”

“Yeah, I know.. Just gotta do it ourselves, don’t we?”