I woke up disoriented. I hurt all over, and I felt heavy. I was - was I dry? I was out of the water, and I couldn't move. I couldn't see or hear or even smell anything. I could feel, though. Whatever I was laying on, it was hard and coarse and maybe woven? Was I in a basket?
I still didn't have a body, so I couldn't do breathing exercises, but I could check on my little file tree. Open root!
S://
Yeah, it was still there. List files.
Earl; Not_Earl
Open Earl. I decided to take a look at what had happened that led up to me being here now, instead of floating in the river, which was a lot more comfortable than this.
S://Earl/
Open Memories.
S://Earl/Memories/
Sort memory files by order of creation, with the most recent at the top.
I reviewed the list of memories, and felt a surge of relief when I saw that my command had worked. There was a memory of waking up and realizing that I was in a basket, and there was a memory of being impaled, and there, in between, was a memory that I didn't remember. I opened it.
I was in so much pain. I could feel the barbs on whatever had run me through digging into me, ripping and tearing my (not flesh, I had no body) whatever I was made of. Something gripped me, warm and branching, and forced me further onto the thing, sliding the foreign object through me; I could feel every barb slipping smoothly up and out, followed by a smooth shaft that was almost a relief, though it was painful in its own way. And then, the foreign object was gone, and I fell onto something hard and unyielding. It was gritty, and the grit dug into me. Then, the warm thing was back, one-two-three-four branches there and another there and a plane between and - was that a giant hand? Or was it a normal sized hand, and I was just very small?
The hand lifted me up, then let go, and I fell fell fell onto something hard and rough and ridged, but thankfully free of grit. A basket?
So, I was impaled by something, pulled out of the river, and then chucked in a basket. Like a fish. Am I going to be cooked and eaten?
The world shifted and moved upward. The basket was being lifted and moved, bumping and jostling as who, or what, ever held it stepped along the beach (or riverside?). I then learned that you don't need a stomach to feel sick to your stomach, because the bumping and jostling sure had me sick to my nonexistent stomach. Just when I thought I was going to find out if you can throw up without a mouth, it all stopped with a thump.
Well, I didn't hear the thump, but I sure felt it. I'd been put down. It was just me and my memories, sitting in a basket with no way to look, listen, or move.
Time to get a better look at what I had available to me. Open S://Earl
S://Earl/
Open Memories
S://Earl/Memories
List folders
No folders found
List files
...oh wow, that was a lot of files. Right. It was all of my memories. Maybe there was a way to organize these better.
Create folders representing years and sort memories by date into folders.
...
......
.........
Ow. What just happened? Oh, right, I was trying to organize my memories. Open Memories!
S://Earl/Memories/
Show me memory files.
...no change, no folders. Messing with my own memories is probably what knocked me out and gave me this headache (for lack of a better word). Maybe I shouldn't have tried to do that.
Go up a level.
S://Earl/
Show folders.
Memories; Skills; Tools
Show files.
There was documentation. There was documentation in my soul.
I lost track of time reading the documents. There were a few of them, and I needed a few tries to get through them. There were logs with summaries of past lives, which contained an alphanumeric identifier for what world I'd lived in, a brief description of species, and how long I'd lived. Apparently I'd once spent a thousand years as a tree, and then had all memory of it wiped to make way for a new life. There was even a summary of my life as Earl, which looked just like the other summaries.
Wait a minute. If everything is wiped to make way for a new life, how come these logs are still here? Go up a level.
S://
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Show files.
There. There was a master copy of all of the logs, along with a short program that made the logs and copied them from root into the new life, along with a document explaining the purpose of that practice. The logs were meant to help determine the character of a new life. They represented my experiences, accumulated over multiple lifetimes. I'd never reincarnated as a true blank slate, there was always a hint of my past lives there, ready and waiting to influence my preferences and behavior.
No wonder I'd liked climbing trees so much as a kid.
Eventually, the basket I was in was picked up and moved again. This time, whoever was moving me was way less gentle. I was jostled, bounced, and even rolled from surface to surface. With a final jerk and a moment of weightlessness I crashed down and landed on the curved side of the container.
Crash.
Something had been dropped on top of my prison. And then something was dropped on top of that something.
Silence. I waited, trying to ignore my rising anxiety, for something to happen. I didn't have to wait long. Everything started to move again. I could feel my basket wobbling and rocking, bumping against other objects, as I was transported somewhere.
It was a long trip. Long enough for me to get used to the rocking and bumping and bouncing. Long enough for me to get bored and start looking through my memories for something to do.
I was re-watching a favorite movie from my childhood when the movement stopped. Wherever I was being taken, I'd arrived.
My basket prison was picked up again and moved and put down again. Then, there was nothing for a while. I just sat there.
I went back to my movie. I was interrupted again before I got to the finale, where the bad guy is redeemed through the power of friendship and violence.
Something was touching me. It was warm and felt like a hand, but a different one than the one before. The hand squeezed me, hard, then another hand appeared and I was palpated and stretched and dangled uncomfortable and pricked with needles or pins or some other thing sharp thing, then put down on a hard, smooth surface that felt cold and unforgiving.
Something was stabbed into me, bigger than the things from earlier but much smaller and smoother than the awful thing that had impaled me and started this series of events. A rush of something cold flooded out of the thing - an injection - and everything faded away.
------
I woke up sitting in a cool bowl with an itchy feeling in the back of my mind. Something was strange. What's going on?
Download in progress...
Download? What? What's downloading?
Download in progress...
Why does it itch?
Folder Not_Earl deleted. Folder Not_Earl replaced with folder Dungeon. Download in progress...
A wave of relief that I'd made Not_Earl washed over me. If I hadn't, would I have been deleted? Time to look at the damage. Open root.
S://
Show folders.
Earl; Dungeon; Tools
Show files.
...the master copy of the log files is gone. The program that made the log files isn't gone, but all the files it made is.
Open Earl.
S://Earl/
Show files.
My log files were still there in me, it's just the master copy that was gone. I copied the log files and put them back where they belonged, loose in Root. It was sloppy, but I wasn't going to mess with it. There, better.
Download in progress...
Go up a level. Open Dungeon.
Error: download in progress.
Oh. I had to wait for the paint to dry before I could find out what was going on. Fine.
I narrowed my non-existent eyes and opened the memory of watching that movie as a little kid again. I was going to finish it, and then see how that download was going.
Three movies later, the download finally finished. I noticed, not because I got a notification, but because I suddenly had more senses than just touch. Or, I still just had my sense of touch, but I could feel more than just what was touching me, as though I'd suddenly grown into more than just my soul. I was sitting in a shallow bowl, but I was also the bowl that I was sitting it, and the pedestal the bowl was attached to, and the floor and the walls and the ceiling, and I could tell that the room was about the size of a broom closet and that it was made of stone. I was made of stone.
Open Dungeon. I needed to see what was going on here.
S://Dungeon/
Show folders.
Resources; Minions; Traps; Contracts; Treasure; Construction; Templates
A pulse of energy washed through me. It tasted of dirt and rock and ice and trees. That was weirdly delicious. Reflexively, I stretched toward the "trees" taste, moving without moving. My sense of self expanded and I felt one of the stone walls wearing away, like licking a piece of candy until it began to deform and dissolve on the tongue.
What in the world was going on here?
Show files.
ReadMe; Log
Open ReadMe
The ReadMe file in the Dungeon folder turned out to be a dense mass of technical jargon that I could barely understand. I was able to glean a few scraps of knowledge between the pulses of stone and soil and light fluffy snow that falls in the early morning before a clear day, which as an oddly specific flavor. I learned that I was now a "dungeon core", which was an artificial living filter made from a soul (there were a lot of details on what kind of soul and how it got changed, which were kind of horrifying, this was like that meme about waking up in a tub full of ice and missing a kidney, but real, and so much worse, like waking up in a back alley with a folder detailing all the brain surgery you went through without giving consent). I learned that dungeon cores filter something called "mana", removing contaminants from it and releasing pure mana back into the environment.
There were no details on what "mana" was, or what the contaminants were, or what the contaminants did to dungeon cores. Was I a disposable filter that would do a job for a while, and then be thrown away or destroyed? Would I eventually be poisoned by doing what I had no choice in doing?
Open log.
The log turned out to be full of time stamps and "impurities" collected. It started counting from the Dungeon download finishing and had an easily understandable time stamp based on hours, minutes, and seconds. It also counted the impurities in units smaller than one.
00:00:10 - 0.1 Stone Impurities Collected
00:00:10 - 0.08 Granite Impurities Collected
00:00:10 - 0.02 Quartz Impurities Collected
00:00:20 - 0.1 Soil Impurities Collected
00:00:20 - 0.1 Life Impurities Collected
00:00:30 - 0.01 Snow Impurities Collected
00:00:30 - 0.5 Tree Impurities Collected
00:00:40 - 0.1 Stone Impurities Collected
00:00:50 - 0.08 Granite Impurities Collected
00:00:50 - 0.02 Soil Impurities Collected
It continued in the same vein. Please organize logs by day and begin new days at sunrise. I don't want to have to slog through weeks worth of this to find something if I need to.
Updating Log sorting algorithm...
Log sorting algorithm updated
I had no idea what was making these program changes for me, and it was probably me on some level, but it couldn't hurt to be polite. I needed a moment to process.
I focused on the pulses of energy, and the taste of the "impurities", instead of breathing. The pulses began to slow down, and I realized - this was how I breathed now. In, and out. Iiiiin, and ooouuuut.... I could meditate again. My therapist would be so proud.