{Loading…}
{Loaded.}
[>>Now replaying: Log 2.5 - Logical_Steps.ppt]
Date: 10.9.175 AA / 4404 LTC
Location: UNNAMED_DOMAIN(LARES)
Remaining Logic: 1120 LB
//As you can see, the next quarter is going to be tougher than usual, mostly due to the resource shortages we have discussed…//
//Can’t you just make more code?//
[>>DATA CORRUPTED]
I managed to work through the stag’s death on my way back to the house. Beautiful as it might have been, it had been a Feral, and I needed its Logic keep the lights on if I wanted to survive. That didn’t mean if I ever found one of these wonderful constructs again, I’d kill it blindly, but the simple need behind the thought allowed me to cope with what had happened. In the end, I didn’t regret the tears I’d shed for the animal, but clinging to the grief wouldn’t help me move o—
> It’s been three days that I have been stuck in this corporate retreat when I could have been working—which is irritating enough—but the last day takes the cake. They invited some sort of motivational speaker to “work through our emotions,” whatever that means, and he just finished guiding us through some sort of meditation that involved walking through a forest and finding a reflection of the perfect “you”. I didn’t listen, my mind too busy running the numbers my team needed to finish their project next week. I do, however, perk up when Lisa from HR starts crying. That’s shameful. She should know better how to comport herself, especially in front of her colleagues. Even more surprising, then, is that our COO walks over to her and places a comforting hand on her shoulder. At first, I think he’s making a pass at her, but then I see he’s crying, too, as are most of my colleagues.
> Feeling woefully out of place, I decide to pay more attention, and that’s why when I look up, find the guy leading the exercise looking at me, holding my gaze. Carefully, like one would look at a skittish bird. I feel the muscles in my jaw harden, but then he says something I will never forget.
> “Holding on to regret is just hoping for a better past.”
> I really don’t want to remember my dad, or the cancer, or the antiseptic smell of the hospital ward, or any of it. I also don’t want to cry. And yet I do both, all the while cursing myself for being so weak in front of my colleagues.
I let out a puff of air at the memory, but the words still clung to my brain. It sounded like such an easy thought to internalize, but it took me until the sun began to set and the house came into view before I finally let go.
----------------------------------------
Chris beeped and threw themselves against my legs the second I pulled off my muddy boots.
“I missed you too!” I smiled, but when I tried to pick them up, they evaded my grip and pitter-pattered toward the kitchen, throwing a “hurry it up!” look over their shoulder when I didn’t follow immediately.
“Oh, I see how it is,” I scoffed. But then they gave me the huge-pleading-eyes treatment and what was I supposed to do?
Follow a smug cat into the kitchen, is what.
Feast! ( ˘▽˘)っ♨
said the fridge as it flashed, and my meal appeared on the counter. I hesitantly nodded a returned greeting, but there was no response, other than Chris’ teeth breaking some cartilage as they dug in.
My eyebrows rose when I saw what was for dinner, and I threw an accusatory glance at the fridge. “Venison? Really?”
¯\_(•́ ﹏├┬┴┬┴ Feast?
It worked with what it got, I supposed.
After a long sigh and a first, delicious bite, I began telling Chris about my day. About the lack of traces of civilization in the Domain, about things I’d seen in the forest, and finally, about the stag. They stopped eating when I described the animal, as rapt in my story of its beauty as I had been when I first beheld it. When I told them about the stag’s death, they stared at their bowl the same way I’d looked at my dinner, but in the end, we both needed to eat, so I encouraged them to go ahead.
After a full day of exercise and excitement, I was ravenous, and the steak with mashed potatoes and green asparagus hit the right spot. By the time I put the dirty dishes into the sink and they vanished in a flash of red and blue, I was feeling full and so I didn’t even mind the 50 LB the meal had cost me.
{AVAILABLE LOGIC - 1070 LB}
“Still, we have to be careful,” I said to Chris, picking them up and throwing them over my shoulder while heading to the living room. “Those regular Ferals were only worth about 40 LB a pop, if my math is right. Even with the stag, we’ll still be down a couple of hundred LB at the end of the week.”
“Beep!” Chris agreed, and added “Boop!”
“True,” I said, catching their meaning. “It was all chance, too. I know I’m not a great hunter, but it shouldn’t be this hard to find and kill a bunch of Ferals in my own Domain.”
“Beep,” Chris said.
The question was just… what was I going to do about it? I could go through all my different options I could think of, one by one, and ask Chris as we went, but that was a crapshoot. It would take forever, and they couldn’t even give me any details, let alone provide their own input. No, I needed more information than what I could decipher from their beeps and boops.
Realizing the inevitable, I looked at the bookshelf containing memOS’ documentation and groaned.
----------------------------------------
A couple of hours later, I rubbed my forehead and closed the book of gibberish I’d just fought my way through. The headache had been worth it, though.
“I know what’s going on!” I said, grinning at Chris. “My Domain is too big!” They, in turn, blinked at me lazily.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“Beep?” Chris said sleepily, as if saying “So what?” I’d woken them from napping on my chest.
“No, you don’t understand. You remember how there’s a discrepancy between Domaintime and Realtime?”
“Beep?”
“The same thing is true for Domainspace and Realspace! Think of a Domain like a very fancy map, right? But the map is not the terrain! It does show everything that’s going on in the Real, but only if the owner of the Domain knows about it. Now, here’s the kicker: you remember how my Domain has like this gigantic filesize?”
“…beep?”
“That gets translated to a vastly increased terrain size! I didn’t do the math, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one meter in here are ten meters in the real world. Might be more, even. Who knows?!”
I stared at Chris with an excited grin on my face, waiting for them to get it.
They blinked slowly, as if they were trying to figure out if I was being dumb or just joking. Eventually, they snorted and said “Beep,” as if they could have told me that a week ago, and promptly settled in to continue the nap I had so rudely interrupted.
“Chris?”
“Beep?” They lazily flicked one ear in my direction.
“I swear to god,” I said sweetly, picking them up and holding them at the end of my outstretched arms. “If you keep giving me these levels of sass, I am going to feed you to the fridge.”
Feast?! (ノ*°▽°*)
Came an excited not-voice from the kitchen, but once again Chris hit me with the old huge-eyes-of-innocence tactic and I couldn’t help but laugh. After shaking them a little to make them scrunch up their face, I finally set them down again. They kneaded my thighs a couple of times, then rolled up on their rightful resting spot.
“You’re going to be the end of me, you know that?” I asked as I petted the cat, but they just booped and purred their CD-Rom purr.
They were right. Losing power being the end of me was far more likely. My thoughts returned to my napkin math. If it hadn’t been for the rare encounter with the shiny stag, I’d be down more than a thousand LB week-over-week. Usually, I’d start to ration the Logic, but I was already cutting it as close as I could. Sure, I could trim on my spending on the Domain even further, but that would leave me dangerously exposed, and things were only going to get harder from now on.
Chris and I had hidden the bunker deep in the Shorewatcher mountains, which laid on the southern tip of a peninsula that jutted out of the Kingdom of Wexler like a spike and bordered on the sea to the east, south, and west. That was a problem. I had no idea where the kids were going, but there was no other way they could be going than north.
Assuming they picked me up, and I wasn’t just sitting in a dark, sealed bunker, waiting for help that would never come, our itinerary would take us through a long stretch of wilderness, then some isolated hamlets, and maybe even the ruins of Peruti. If we traveled north for about a month, we’d reach Novus Apex, but I doubted that would be their goal. The Mage Lords probably made good on their promise to raze it, and even if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be the city my friends and I had built. Somehow, it was hard to imagine anyone living where I’d seen so much death.
But that was beside the point. A month would be too long of a journey. There was no way a bunch of kids could carry enough provisions for two months of travel, assuming they didn’t have either a bag of holding or something equally ridiculous advanced by the Logic.
That still left hundreds of possible destinations, if the world hadn’t changed even more than I expected. Maybe one of the villages? Or possibly Wexler?
Whatever the case, the gist of it was that they were traveling north, and while I had spent far too little time with Kasha before I… before she died, I distinctly remembered she told me that the further north you traveled, the stronger the Ferals got.
While I’d managed to kill the pack of hounds today, but we were only three days into our journey, and it had been a far closer call than I would have liked. I had no frame of reference for how strong Ferals could get, but one thing was clear: If I didn’t invest in myself, I’d run into a Feral I couldn’t defeat sooner or later.
That brought me back to square one, and I closed my eyes with a soft groan. I needed more Logic, but hunting Ferals was dangerously inefficient. Unless an entire herd of shiny stags connected in my front yard tomorrow and I could bring myself to ruthlessly murder each and every one, I was going to slowly waste away.
Yeah, more of those stags would certainly be nice. Heck, I wouldn’t even need to kill the things, they could just be bait. With as much Logic as I’d gotten from the one I’d killed, it was easy to see why the Ferals would be drawn to them.
Either way, I needed to find a better way to track Ferals, or failing that, a way to make them come to me. But what was a way to make that—
My eyes flashed open.
“The Logic!”
“Beep?” Chris mewed, still half asleep.
“Remember how every time I advanced something in Zephyro’s Domain, it drove the Ferals into a frenzy?”
“Beep?” Chris said, raising their head.
“They can sense it, Chris! They can sense high concentrations of Logic! That’s how they found the stag the moment it started grazing!”
“Beep!”
“So maybe I can kill two birds with one stone here! What if I pump all the Logic we have into Ardor?”
“Boop?” Chris’ face scrunched up in worried confusion.
“Stop giving me that look,” I said, briefly pressing my finger against their nose. “It’s not that crazy if you think about it,” I continued as they pawed their face to rub the tingling away.
They looked justifiably grumpy, so I massaged their forehead with both thumbs, which got me back on their good side. “If I spend Logic, I’m relatively sure that the Ferals will come running, and I think Ardor is the best program to advance right now. Sure, it’s not Pharus or Arx. It won’t help me fight, but what it will do is make me see things. I mean, still can’t control Logic the way I used to with the Wish—“
“Boop,” Chris snorted.
“—Shut it! I got pretty good at it towards the end! Anyway, I think it’s safe to say that like the Wish, Logic advances programs along certain concepts. Except when using Logic, it’s even less about the visuals. Take Cura, for example. How does a medal look anything like a webcam driver? I mean, what does a webcam driver even look like? It’s all about what the item represents, Chris! Cura became a webcam driver because that’s the concept I mostly connected to General Turret’s medal; his ability to reveal what’s happening outside my laptop!
“So if Cura allows me to communicate with the outside world, Pharus allows me to attack and Arx protects me, then Ardor allows me to see things in Domains.”
“Beep,” Chris agreed, and smugly.
“Yes, thanks again for making the drivers. You are a very good… um… uh… nonbinary… feline… hacker!” I said, then intensified the scritches for a second before concluding my point. “All of this is to say that Ardor is my best chance of getting out of here alive.”
“Beep. Boop.” Chris pawed at my hand and my chest. Awww. They wanted me to be safe!
“Sure, I could just advance any of the other programs, and have the Ferals come to me, but there are two issues with that. A: It’s dangerous. And not just for me. I don’t know how many Ferals I’ll attract, and I promised the kids I’d keep them safe. What if there are so many Ferals that I get overwhelmed? And B: If I don’t lure in enough Ferals to cover the cost of upgrades, eventually, I’ll run out of Logic and die.”
“Beep…” Chris said, still skeptical.
“Yeah, sure, the upgrade isn’t guaranteed to give me what I want, but come on! Ardor is the only choice that gives me a chance of a safe future, and I got memOS to guide the Logic now! Besides, what else can we do? Unless you can you build me some sort of tracking program that spans my entire Domain before our power runs out?”
“Boop…” Chris sighed, their sidelong glance admitting defeat.
“Then Ardor it is,” I said.
Then, I added, “Tomorrow, though,” with a suppressed yawn. It was way past midnight already. After the trek today, it was a miracle I hadn’t fallen asleep while combing through the documentation. I still didn’t quite understand why I got tired if I didn’t have a body and my entire consciousness was digital. I suspected it had something to do with uncluttering my hard drive or something.
Back when my dad was still alive, he’d defragmented our computer with almost religious fervor. Every Sunday, come hell or high water, he’d start the damn thing and not let anyone touch the family computer until it was done. Remembering the countless hours I had to wait before I could finally log onto MSN Messenger to talk to my friends still made me roll my eyes today, almost 300 years later.
Not to mention I only had a couple of minutes of Internet-time per day, anyway, since I needed to pay for it myself and—
I smirked and shook the memories away. Yeah, I definitely needed to unclutter my mind, if nothing else.
“Bed?” I asked Chris, and they didn’t even wait for me to get up, just jumped off of my stomach and over the backrest of the couch.
“Ooof,” I coughed, rubbing my poor belly as I got up. Before heading to the bedroom, I made a stop in the kitchen to switch off the lights. They were still just bulbs hanging from the ceiling by their wiring, but if my plan played out, that wouldn’t be the case for much longer.
“Night, fridge,” I said. “Tomorrow’s a big day!”
Feast? (٭°̧̧̧ω°̧̧̧٭)
“You bet,” I said, and switched off the light.
I couldn’t help but smile when I saw the gentle blue glow creeping out from behind the fridge’s door. It wasn’t enough to light the kitchen, but just like my childhood night light, it calmed me down nevertheless.