Once we both got over the initial shock of what had transpired, picking up where we left off was relatively easy. For once I could be in another room of my house and still have a conversation with Kappa. He marveled at the house that existed beyond the one wall in my bedroom he had been witness to and while we talked he stopped continually to pick up a statuette or turn on a lamp. It was all very 80’s computer movie of him but I didn’t want to lean into the trope of teaching an Artificial Intelligence how to love. I wanted to figure out what the hell had happened and fix it.

Sitting at the counter in the kitchen I gave him my egg and kept talking through the problem;

“Everything in the code seems to have been populated by the real world, but when I accessed you, it pulled you into this…” I said more to myself than to the bard who hungrily devoured the cold egg before him. “What would happen if I deleted the line of code, the one about you that I added?”

Kappa looked up and shrugged, a human gesture that I don’t remember programming into him, and said “Perhaps I’ll just return?” but there was a note of doubt that seemed subtle for a program.

“Or you’ll be deleted,” I said woefully. Despite knowing that Kappa was not real I felt a tinge of responsibility in understanding what would come of him should I delete the file. I shook my head and laid out the options,

“Ultimately we need to figure out what the hell this code is for and what it does. I think the best place to start would be the crime scene but being that I’m a person of interest in a murder investigation I can’t imagine how that would be possible.” I sat beside Kappa, who finished the egg mom left for me and wiped his mouth between words.

“Well, perhaps we can wear a disguise,” he said in a way that inspired excitement and adventure, very much like Dunn and very much like Kappa. I shook my head no.

“In the real world it doesn’t work like that. There aren’t stats for sneaking or disguise and you can’t really…” My mouth had more to say but my mind kept walking towards a thought; an idea that didn't want to leave me alone. After a moment I pushed back my stool with a screech and headed upstairs. Kappa followed and when I reached my room I clicked on the code window and scrolled back up to section for my bedroom. I studied the lines as Kappa offered a nervous word,

“Lester, be careful…” but the words were meaningless opposed to my curiosity. I looked through the populated items in my room until I found the blue lamp on my nightstand. All the details were there; colour, size, height, all the pieces of information that were required to make that lamp exist and after a deep breath I highlighted the ‘blue’ and changed it to ‘red’.

There was no fanfare, no chorus, no zap, poof or screech. As silently as Kappa had entered my world the lamp, equally silently, changed to red. My heart beat fast and I changed it back to blue, ensuring that nothing of substance was lost and again. Without sound, it changed back. The possibilities ran through my mind and just before I went to change another thing in my room I realized that if Kappa was populated when he entered this space, maybe I would be too.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

I scrolled above the code that mentioned my bedroom but no line for me, just something called;

outside_alley1

I was about to continue past when I realized that was the alley, as in the alley where I found the computer and the body, where I uploaded the code. I studied the lines, recognizing certain objects that were near the PC and then my eyes fell upon the small green text that read;

lester_dunn

My mouth felt dry as I tongued the roof of my mouth. The details below defining me; hair, eye and skin colour, even the clothes I was wearing last night seemed to be detailed within the lines of code and for a moment I paused. I hovered over the parameters of my height, just below my age and the details of my appearance and after a breath changed them; giving myself another inch. Like the changing of the light it was instantaneous, I could see the screen shift lower as if sitting up slightly but I didn’t feel any different, just my perspective. I changed it back nervously and continued up in the code. I scrolled past the alley until I saw the location;

apartment1_graves

It was the apartment that the computer fell from.

“Graves…” I said to myself but Kappa responded as if I had spoken to him,

“Mhm, where they put dead people…” he said in a serious, knowing tone, nodding his head as if understanding the question. His face was beside mine staring at the same screen. I turned and looked at him,

“No, that was his name, maybe he was the guy who made this code,” I said as I opened my web browser and googled Graves and Computer Coding with no real results. I leaned back in my chair and thought for a moment. Kappa spoke up,

“What are you hoping to find out?” Kappa said innocently. For a moment I was surprised by my own uncertainty. I had been certain that we needed to find out more about this code and where it came from but as I turned to Kappa my mind went blank.

“I’m honestly not too sure,” I said perplexed by my own doubt. “I guess I want to know what this is and why it’s here,” I said gesturing to the code. I stood up and turned back to Kappa;

“This code is populating based on locations that it’s encountered. It’s allowing me to change aspects of the world. It’s allowing me to redefine things that are static.” I said as my mind wandered, “but there is no coding for my car, the bar or even the house... only the places we’ve been to since the code has become active.” I nodded to my own words as I spoke, “which means this isn’t The Matrix, I’m not some pawn in an artificial world or stuck in a video game.” I could see the words forming in my mind before I said them and though I tried to find better ones, I couldn’t;

“I’m like a God.”

A loud crunch broke my train of thought as Kappa begun eating from the bag of goldfish crackers I kept on my desk, chewing through a slow nod. After an uncomfortably long chewing session, Kappa finally swallowed the mammoth mouthful and in the most innocent way said,

“What’s a God?”