I stared in dull surprise. Both at the laptop and my reddened push notification. My eyes hurt after half a second of ambivalent depth perception, so I focused on the laptop first.

Namely, what? How?

Charades Enthusiast with a Sword looked back at me and raised an eyebrow. Some spiders this is. He pointed at the mountain, then the early morning sun.

Daylights burning?

I blinked away my surprised confusion at the reappearance of my aluminum co-worker and stood up. A mild head rush and some poor imitation of the previous night’s sky later, and my laptop was once more in my hands.

Impatient Barbarian – I should really pantomime a request for his name soon – looked on with mild curiosity. Or perhaps it was pity. Then he turned, sheathed his sword, and walked into the forest. Impatience, I should have gone with my first hunch.

I spared a quick glancing reunion with my estranged metal companion – it didn’t even look scuffed – before hugging it tight to my chest and following the giant.

***

While I have been known to power walk through corporate hallways – or more recently, my bedroom – to dominate the competition, I could not keep up with a man with twice my leg span through forest floor without half-jogging.

If I didn’t have a clear visual example of where to place my feet, I would have broken my neck twice over on exposed, twisting roots. Thankfully, there was less incline here than on the slopes of Mt. Goat-Doom.

Intrepid Viking on the other hand walked with surety and grace, something that was easy to say, but hard to understand. Watching him walk while I carefully traced his steps was like trying to understand calculus despite only knowing the times tables.

The first perplexity, he didn’t look down – ever. His head was constantly swiveling side to side or otherwise focused up, in the trees. While I appreciated his surveillance, it would have struck me as foolhardy on any other eight-foot-tall man. Harder they fall and all that.

Despite paying zero obvious attention to the ground, his hide covered feet landed solidly every single time. The forest floor itself seemed to be paving him a path forward. And, even with zero evidence of any unnatural earth movement, the fact that the man maintained a perfect rhythm of movement made me think something must have been going on. I mean, that’s just part of hiking. Sometimes you take longer strides, sometimes shorter. Sometimes you lift your knees, lean forward, lean back. The Hiking Viking on the other hand, just had one perfect movement repeated to a consistent beat.

I had questions.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t a class where I could raise my hand or talk to the professor during office hours.

Not to mention, there were things more important than learning how to walk. With my laptop firmly held to my chest – I wasn’t going to be dropping it again without following suit myself – the UX disaster kept hovering in my lower left vision.

Compatible tribute available for MEMORY_NEXUS augmentation. Perform sacrificial sequence to retry initialization.

Manual retries available: 1.

Frankly, I was being irresponsible. Granted, I had no preparation for this new world experience, nor its unique laws of physics and un-sanitized error messages – but I should have offered up my laptop as soon as I saw the option. Empirically, it would solve at least one time-critical problem, namely the infection, and it might answer a few questions besides – once the ‘system’ initialized. Assuming it could cannibalize enough RAM off my 32GB work horse.

Now though, ten minutes into our there’s-definitely-a-monster-at-end-of-this-hike hike, I was feeling some decision paralysis. For starters, I just got it back. At least let me say goodbye.

But also, who’s to say I couldn’t get a better deal elsewhere? I’d sold enough one-off software and second-hand electronics to know that most people just don’t know quality when they see it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the god of android-phones slash goat-hating was probably great at parties, but I somehow doubted they were going to give me the best deal on a fully customized, upgraded, developers-best-friend laptop chock full of code and proprietary trade secrets. Well, not really trade secrets, but I did have at least a couple tens of gigs of pirated music.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Not to mention, the first eye-cancer-inducing message I received spoke of a mediator being rewarded. Could I cut out the middleman? What if I couldn’t and the margin was bigger? I could get Zeno’s paradox’d to death out here in the wilderness without any other sources of RAM or its new world equivalent.

What I really needed was some good old-fashioned market research, the first step of any successful project. I glanced at the nearby trees and nearly tripped over a root.

Well, in lieu of a target audience…or really anything that could resemble a market in the first place, I turned my attention the red-white object of my ambivalence.

And thought really hard at it.

Help.

Info.

Admin.

Definitions.

Status.

Status unavailable until system is initialized.

Perform sacrifice now?

Y/n

No. I thought hurriedly before intrusive thoughts of Yes could, well…intrude. The previous message reappeared in a flash of red.

Well. I suppose that answers one question. I didn’t have to call up mediator Don. Theoretically.

More importantly, imagine having a neurally interactable UI without some kind of user guide or help function. If this software – or meatware? Magicware? – had been released in the US, it would have been sued into bankruptcy within the first week.

Letting a user make potentially critical and permanent decisions without even a tooltip was just asking for trouble. I mean, Linux is great and all – but I wouldn’t want my brain hooked up to a command line so I could accidentally think myself into a fork bomb explosion.

As a developer I was tempted to just never touch the thing again. Although that might be hard considering it was apparently reading my thoughts.

Well, fuck. With the knowledge that at least one command worked, or more accurately did things, there was a high probability that there were other pseudo-functioning commands as well. Was it worth treading on potential land mines to do my so-called research? At this point I was the QA tester they sent in with the expectation of breaking everything. No documentation, no user guide, just a mouse, keyboard, and an infinite pit of masochism.

At least QA testers had time. All I had was a nominally friendly Big Friendly Viking and Murphy’s guarantee of meeting another monster within the next…hour? Two?

I wish my companion could explain to me a little more about what exactly we were doing heading back to the scene of the crime. Although maybe that was exactly it.

The…other giant. The one without a head. They were important to my giant. Maybe this was a mission of vengeance. Or retrieval?

I thought back to the skull I saw in the waterfall pool. Had it been giant sized? I didn’t trust my visual memory enough to say.

I did not hear the waterfall, so there was still some assumed time. The earlier attempt at system initialization reaching 50% took what felt like fifteen minutes, human imperfection acknowledged. Could I project that to thirty minutes for the full thing? Was it worth activating a potentially dangerous ‘system’ on the off chance of increasing my likelihood of survival in the next hour? The next day? What was the cost-benefit of looking around for similarly dangerous commands now? Cost is time and potentially sanity, benefit is more information.

I could use more information.

I stared at the feet of my Park Ranger Viking and wished, not for the first time, that he could talk to me.

My thoughts froze.

Why was my system-installer.exe in English? I completely took it for granted that the new world neuralink was in a language I knew. Was it inter…universalized for English? Was it translating based on my own meat computer?

Two potential conclusions. It was universalized for English. Therefore, I could assume it was somewhat aligned with my own interests. At the very least I was supposed to use it. You didn’t build websites internationalized for the French if you didn’t want the French to use it. I could rule out the domain space full of dangers caused by unintentional usage. Which was a lot.

Or it could translate. Which again, inferred some level of alignment. But, more importantly – it indicated the possibility of translation and even more so the achievability of doing so with system tooling.

I focused on the oversized Foreign Exchange Viking. If I could actually talk to him then my chances of survival would skyrocket in comparison to my current might-as-well-be-zero.

Of course, this still left room for intentional dangers. I received this ‘gift’ from a being my instincts told me to run away from.

But what was the alternative? Hoping that Professor Viking teaches me a completely new language? How long would that take? All while being at the mercy of the monster’s we were currently rushing towards? Not to mention the likelihood of monsters in every other direction?

No. Maximizing survival relied on befriending my local Viking God Battle Warrior.

And to make a friend, I needed to speak his language.

Goodbye laptop, I’ll miss you.

Status.

Status unavailable until system is initialized.

Perform sacrifice now?

Y/n

Yes.