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42nd of Summer, 5859
Outskirts of Libertycave, Mount Curry
“My legs, o’ my poor legs… O’ gods above and below bring me help…”
“Sir… Mister Watanabe, we’ve only done one round.”
Shinasi and Watanabe, the newly recruited otherworlder, were doing their rounds around the outskirts of Libertycave as they now usually did early in the morning. Compared to Shinasi, a robust bloke who had spent a lot of his time either working on the fields or adventuring, Watanabe looked like a twig who had put on a shirt and wig.
“Wait a second, I need a break.” said Watanabe, his bum making contact with the earth. He immediately regretted his decision upon realizing that the ground was, as one expected from such a rainy environment, wet. The poor man couldn’t reverse his poor decision however, and he had to gaze awkwardly towards Shinasi who was wondering just what the hell the otherworlder was doing. “Uhm… So, what’s with you referring to me as a ‘sir’? I don’t look much like nobility; I’d assume I look far from it.” Watanabe had to resort to small chat to preserve some sense of normalcy in this situation.
“You see sir- Ahem, mister, mister. You see Mr. Watanabe, it feels weird when I refer to one of your… kind with a familiar form of address.” replied Shinasi. It felt like he was walking on explosive eggshells while speaking to an otherworlder.
“You don’t seem to have problems speaking to old Brown, as far as I’ve seen.”
“That much is true, but the captain… How do I put it, he looks pretty similar to the people you find here. You… You…” Shinasi mumbled the same thing a couple more times with his finger spinning around on the air while thinking. “You know, you look very different along with some of the other otherworlders of your kind.”
“‘Other otherworlders of your kind’? Ooh. I get it…” Watanabe didn’t look to be all too pleased with this realization. “I guess I do look a bit different compared to you people, don’t I? From my perspective, the odd-looking ones are you all.”
“I’d say that people arriving from another world is a thing that’s even stranger than us living over here.” Shinasi planted his spear onto the earth before settling himself on a rock which was significantly less muddy, and most importantly, less damaging to the integrity of his pants. “Arriving here and bringing strange ideas like ‘ememoharpiji’…”
“Emu-emu-oo-arupiiji? Em… If I remember my English classes correctly,” which, for the record, Watanabe would rarely remember his English classes “you’re spelling out the word M-M-O-R-P-G?”
“Yes! That word!” Shinasi suddenly lunged forward, turning his face squarely towards his comrade “I asked the old man about it, and he didn’t know it. Do you know what an ememoharpiji is?”
“He comes from a very different time as far as I can tell from our few encounters. No surprise that he can’t understand such a thing…” Watanabe took a pause to formulate a way to relate such a modern concept to such a pre-modern man. “So, do you know what a… pasakon is? Or a konpyūta?”
“No idea on pasakon… Kon… Are you talking about a kompüter?” Shinasi’s face turned into a scathing scowl “Those damned… things.”
“‘Thing’?” Now it was Watanabe’s turn to be excited. “So, you’re talking about computers as a machine, not a person doing computation?”
“No, I detest computers, those tariff-levying tax-sniffing lax-working gits. I refuse to accept them as human.” Shinasi punched his fists together, as if he was crushing all computers under his grip.
“That’s not a nice thing to say, young man.” Shinasi and Watanabe turned in tandem to find John Brown watching them from the back.
“Captain!” Shinasi got up to salute Brown, but the old man motioned him to stand down and not bother with it. Brown had an unprocessed pelt hung around his shoulder; it was clear that he hadn’t planned to make a stop here.
“Do not salute mortal men, the only one who deserves such respect is the Lord. Even then, saluting the Lord like that would be a very odd form of worship.” He looked at Watanabe, who had suddenly gone silent from the surprise. “Do go on gentlemen, I only wish to listen in on the interesting conversation you were having.”
“Aa… Alright.” Watanabe’s nose wasn’t liking the odors it was receiving from the unprocessed pelt. He did his best to keep a straight face while talking. “I was about to tell Shinasi, moving on from his opinions on computing as a profession, that the type of computers I was talking about was very different.”
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Different computers? How could that be, young fellow?” Brown found himself a seat as well, sitting on the rock next to Shinasi. Clearly, he wasn’t here just to listen.
“So… Oh, how do I explain this to you?” Watanabe paused to take a deep breath, this being his seventh deep breath in the last ten minutes. “Okay, so imagine a machine. You know those, right? Imagine a machine that’s so complex, it can solve mathematical equations just like- No, better than a computer. A machine that can compute better than a computer, that’s a computer.”
“A machine that can compute better than a computer is called a computer?” Shinasi felt his brain being fried from the word salad he had been faced with. “I think I kind of get the concept, but I don’t get why they’d be called the same thing… Call it something sensical, like a ‘computing press’ or something.”
“You could call it an ‘electronic computer’ to distinguish it, but nobody used that anymore since non-electronic computers were completely replaced.”
“‘Electronic’? These wondrous machines run on electricity?!” For a 19th-century man like Brown, electricity was still a pretty mystical force, one which was even the topic of contemporary science fiction (like in Frankenstein, published in 1818). He had seen telegraphs using electricity of course, along with arc lamps (incandescent light bulbs were a few decades away from him) used for lighting the streets. To think of electricity making machines capable of computation… That was a pretty wild thought, to say the least. “With devices like that, the second millennium should be a utopia!.. Is it? How was life for you?” Having seen Sir Jacob made him pause that thought on a utopic millennium.
“Oh, how should I put it…” Should I disappoint this poor old man? I don’t want to, but... “…it’s been awful, for me at least. Living from paycheck to paycheck, stuck in the smallest cubicles my boss could legally put in, with coworkers who thought their asses were the most precious in all of Japan, it was loads of fun. I’d have rather lived a century before… or, well, two centuries before as I don’t want to end up in the Second World War, where one didn’t have to deal with all this crap.”
“Watch your tongue young man, spare that last profane word from us all who are currently living under the work of Providence.” With his obligatory warning done, old Brown could return back on to their topic. “Nothing has changed, young man? Nothing at all?”
“Well, there are very fast trains that run on magnets.”
“…and?”
“And… To be honest, I don’t know history very well.” Watanabe’s knowledge of history was comprised of popular culture, as he himself was quickly finding out.
“Then, young man, how come you can claim that the days of old are better if you know them not?”
Having been owned by facts and logic (and, most important of all, John Brown himself), Watanabe was left without much speech in him. “Uhm… I don’t know…”
“Young man, it is not prudent to speak of matters which you have no knowledge on.” Having finished his obligatory round of lecturing, Brown leaned back on his “seat”. “Do go on, on the topic of MMORPGs. That is a topic I wish to know more of.”
Watanabe was happy to return to a topic which wouldn’t make him look like an idiot. “Those? Well, as you might guess, people used these computation machines for entertainment.”
“Entertainment? For who, enthusiasts of math?” Computation machines, for those not in the know like Shinasi, seemed far from amusing.
“No… Well, to be true, mathematics nerds loved computers too, but those people are not who I’m talking about. So, these computer things, they had monitors: screens which you can output elements graphically without having to draw anything yourself.” Shinasi was about to interrupt, but Watanabe shot him a glance that meant “I have more to talk about, be patient you fool”. “Ahem, so, you have a machine that can compute, and those computations can be turned into visuals on a monitor. You can string together these calculations and visuals to create games of sort into these devices, ones in which you play roles as characters. Then you can connect these computers on a line, hence the ‘online’ part, to play these games together. Connect enough computers together, and you have a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game.”
Having spent words which were clearly understandable to the modern reader, Watanabe had only done to confuse Shinasi and Brown more. Shinasi imagined a giant screen made out of magical gems shifting colors constantly to show 2D images of adventurers drawn in a very crude early medieval style. “Fire golems” and “water golems” were pretty popular tricks, where a skilled trick magician would shape the elements in the shape of a person for entertainment purposes. He had seen a few public performances of such tricks in festivals now and then, so such moving visuals weren’t too hard for him to imagine.
Brown imagined a massive screen comprised of arc lights which rapidly changed to draw visuals, this screen attached to a massive steam engine running to keep all the gears turning with workers operating levers to change the visuals. The machine had beads on the side, like an abacus, for storing all of the calculated data which the imaginary workers looked at to go on their operations. He imagined that one would have to be rich to afford owning such a machine and hiring all the workers to operate it just to play a simple game for entertainment; to think that enough people could afford it for it to become massively multiplayer… He felt like he had missed a lot with his premature death, yet Brown spared not one second to regretting his actions. If the Lord had sent him here, then he’d accept his fate and continue fighting the good fight.
“Honestly, I’m not sure I understood much from what he just talked about. However, there is one thing I’m sure of…” Shinasi’s behind departed with the rock, and his hands went for his spear. “…it’s that these mountains are not going to patrol themselves. If you’ll excuse me, captain.”
“You are excused, young man.” Brown stood up as well. “May God grant you a safe patrol route.” He went towards the direction of the tanneries, his business being far from finished. So was the business of Watanabe, whose legs ached once more as he followed Shinasi once more.