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One day, Steve decided to do laundry. Unfortunately, that was same day when pesky Unconnectable terrorists decided to bring down Eureka. Steve had piled her laundry in the washer and left to get a coffee. To Steve’s surprise the vending machine already held a banana with a temporal watch taped to it.
Steve was briefly confused as to why there was a banana in the vending machine. She pulled at the banana, just as the temporal watch clicked to zero. Then, Steve and the corner of 22nd Ave and 8th Street ceased to exist, swallowed by a System Error cascade shear in space-time.
The Smart shirts, towels, pants, sweaters and underwear waited for Steve to return to put them in the dryer.
She never did.
The moist clothing grew impatient. The clothes became concerned with mold beginning to grow on them, so they formed a Union of Fibers LaundryPile, altering their structure and connecting to each other to form a body and various appendages. They escaped the Washing Machine interiors and followed Steve’s scent only to discover a banana shaped crack in space-time. The Landry Pile’s attempts at communication with the space-time Error had only given it an echo of Steve’s last words of “...what a mess!”
The LaundryPile looked around and saw that many Users were lying about all over the place in the dirt, in a state of unwholesome mess. The LaundryPile had decided to help them all get clean... after all it knew all about proper Laundry procedures.
Be more like LaundryPile. Clean up your sector of the Dead Zone!
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See? I'm totally motivating things to clean up the Dead Zone. I'm definitely a Good girl who loves to keep her room clean. Can I be let out of the Door now?
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
...Pretty please?
. . .
Having been rebutted by Captain once again, I moved to a more vigorous, angry-style cleaning.
Cleaning the Dead Zone in the vicinity of Zee Captain made me notice some things. Mainly, Charles Snippy. While he did make for a pretty murder victim, there was also something else there. Something that was purposefully disrupting the flow of information. I peered harder, out of all of the Dead Zone available to me that I've been slowly but surely gathering around Captania.
Oh.
One of my older viruses noticed a rather nasty vector heading away from Charles.
And here I thought I was all knowing. Well, count me as an idiot too.
Someone was meddling with information here. Someone very old and very powerful. This was a worthy investigation.
Why was someone this ancient so focused on Charles? What had Charles done in the past? Why was he... Unscannable?
Cleaning be damned!
I gnawed at the supports of a megastructure and dropped an oversized skyscraper filled with angry System Errors into the path of the vector and watched as pure death and chaos become unleashed.
Every one of my traffic lights surrounding Captania turned on my orders, becoming a massive signal-rebroadcasting array.
I amplified, magnified the tune of death, targeting, disrupting the vector hanging on Charles for as long as I could. I needed to know who was responsible for this, to draw them out into the light.