“Before we’re in too deep, I got something I’d like to talk about too.”
“Good, it can wait,” she tells me with a wry smile. “So, I figured out why Luther Godsick’s position keeps changing – simple, really simple. So there’s this turtle … ”
“What kind of turtle?” Rocket asks.
“The correct word for it is biktakh morla, which translates to ‘island turtle’. Imagine an island on the back of the body of a giant turtle.”
Time to nod out. I close my eyes to catch a message from Doc.
Doc: Logging in!
Me: Sophia is going on about an island-sized testudines, which sounds salacious btw. Be there in a jiffy.
Doc: Oh, the turtle island, got it.
Sophia snaps her fingers at me. “Um, Quantum, are you imagining a turtle?”
“I’m imagining something,” I tell her. Frances shoots me the ‘be nice to Sophia’ look and as usual, I oblige. “Ahem, go on, Dr. Wang.”
“Thank you. So as I was saying, there’s a whole mythology behind this turtle and why it is the only one. The turtle itself is about the size of the smallest one of the Hawaiian Islands, Kahoolawe to be exact. Its back is covered in mountains and rivers and fauna and all that tropical island stuff you’ve probably seen in movies.”
“The turtle is an island?” Rocket asks.
“Were you not listening to a word I said? Yes, it’s an island and the back of its shell is the island part.”
“We’re just trying to picture what you’re describing here,” I assure her. “Another question, if I may, does a guy named Gilligan live on the island?”
“What?”
“A three-hour tour?”
She sighs. “Can I finish?”
“Okay then, serious question this time. What happens if it goes under water?”
“The turtle hasn’t gone under water in thousands of years.” She sniffs. “Sorry, I think I’m getting a cold. No sleep. Anyway, the island, it’s amazing! Like, I can’t describe, I can’t even begin to express to you how big of a breakthrough this is.”
“The turtle island? We on the same page here?”
“It actually exists!” she says. “Most people – even the NPCs – think it’s just folklore. Ha! There’s even a little pop-up tea shop in Valhalla called Morla’s Place which changes locations every day. They have excellent scones; the cranberry ones give you plus 40 HP for three days!”
“Mmmmm … scones … ”
“Are you hungry?” she asks me. “Because if you are, I have some Soylent Blue vitamin-infused Air Bars in my bag.”
I pat my belly. “No, no, I’m good.”
Frances says, “Okay, because this conversation has now spiraled out of control, let’s get down to the crux of your gist: the reason Luther’s location keeps changing is because he is on this island, correct?”
Sophia raises a single finger above her head. “Exactly!”
“So what are we waiting for? Let’s get to this island,” I say.
She raises a finger. “That’s where it gets complicated.”
“We have a dragon, remember.”
“I know that we have a dragon! The reason that Luther’s coordinates keep changing is that the island keeps disappearing and reappearing.”
“Then how are we supposed to find it?” Rocket asks.
“What do you two think I was doing after our potluck last night?” she asks.
“Probably not studying up on How to Win Friends and Influence People or doing Thulean crossword puzzles in pen.”
“Why would I want to do that? Actually, I was undercover in Valhalla doing a bit of research. Ran into the Ivys too. They weren’t able to get much info on Veenure. Oh, and just so you know, Thulean crossword puzzles are technically impossible because the script uses vertically written characters connected by a single line, known as a burakha.”
“Sorry I asked. Let’s touch back on the topic of Veenure in a moment, and screw the Ivys. For now, just explain to us how we get to this island.”
“The island disappears and reappears somewhere in the Endless Sea every twenty seconds. No one has seen it in years.”
Frances asks, “And it doesn’t bother the inhabitants?”
“Sophia shakes her head. “My guess is that there is some sort of in-game gravitational pull for those on the island so they don’t notice it appearing or disappearing.”
“What about the sky? Wouldn’t they notice the clouds and the sun changing locations?” I ask.
“I don’t know what it’s like on the island,” she says, “I’m not there, remember?”
“Alrighty then, how do we predict where the island is?”
“Is there a pattern to the numbers?” Frances asks.
“Now there’s a question I can answer. It’s an easy pattern to figure out, actually. It’s just your basic integer sequence; well, I should specify exactly which … ”
Doc: Are you guys logging in yet?
Me: Madame Brainulo is still impressing us with how she’s so much smarter than us mouth breathers and knuckle draggers.
Doc: I’m about to dive. Tell her to make her point and let’s go, because after we get Luther’s permission, Arnie and I are gonna have to take care of him, which will add hours to our already busy schedule.
Me: What about Arnette and Mrs. Doc?
Doc: What about ‘em?
Me: Can’t they do it?
Doc: What, are you going to ask her? I’d pay money to see that!
Me: Jeez Doc, you’re not afraid of her, are you?
Doc: Son, let it just suffice to say that I am well aware of how busy she is and how hard she works, and that I have tremendous respect for my bride’s abilities and proclivities.
Me: That sounds like ‘Yes’.
Doc: Not so. They’re pretty much maxed out with the magic critters here on my little slice o’ Farmville. Yeah, they’re all ensmartened and help out with their own care, but they still need help from us opposable thumb-equipped folk every day, rain or shine. And who do you think picks up the slack when I’m out gallivanting – I mean conducting serious FedCorpGov bidness – in the Proxima or out playing real-world Sterling Archer for extended periods? They’d do it, but they wouldn’t be happy about it. And trust me on this, if Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.
I tune back in just as Sophia finally gets to the point. “There’s a place where the turtle appears twice an hour. This is how we’ll get onto it.”
“You three dive and I’ll be in-game monitor,” Frances says. “Is that okay with everyone?”
Rocket and Sophia nod.
“Good,” I tell them, “now onto my news.”
“I’m not finished yet,” Sophia says. “You will like this next part.”
~*~
I listen intently as Sophia lays out what has to be the second craziest thing I’ve heard in a while, and as a man who routinely sees, hears, and deals in crazy things, this one is truly for the record books.
Sophia stands up, and clutches a clipboard to her chest, and begins in a conspiratorial tone. “I’ve got a way for an NPC to spawn in the real world.”
“In our world?” Rocket asks. “NPCs?”
“An NPC is basically an artificial personality in the digital equivalent of a Humandroid body in a digital world, right?”
Cautious nods from the audience.
“Okay, well long story short, I’ve already conducted a small-scale proof-of-concept experiment – and it worked! You three are the very first people to hear about this!”
“Doc?”
“He’s a faun, so he’s not really a person,” she smiles, and it slowly fades at my blank look. “What? I can’t do that word-play thing that you do all the time? Of course Doc knows, but no one else, not any of my colleagues or any of my profs, or anybody, not yet anyway. And just wait until I publish!” Her eyes narrow. “This will show them.”
Rocket shakes his head. “She’s crazy, crazy I tells ya. She’s a witch –
burn her!”
“Not crazy, and not a witch – I’m a mind mage,” Sophia huffs. “As I said, based on the results of the test I successfully conducted yesterday, an NPC will be able to dive from a digital dreamworld into a Humandroid body in our world. I’m serious here.”
“Explain this to me in the way that you’d explain it to a five-year-old.”
She thinks for a moment. “Okay, an NPC has an algorithm that has created its D-NAS, or digital neuronal autocorrect system. While complex, and while this takes place on a plane of existence virtually – ha! – unheard of thirty years ago blah blah blah, blah, blah-blah, and blah … ”
At this point, I can still see her lips move but all I hear is yet another version of Sophia’s number one smash hit ‘I’m The Biggest Brain In The Room’. Eventually, her lips stop moving and she looks at me with expectation written all over her supercilious beezer.
“So it’s like a … reverse dive or something,” I say.
She drops her clipboard, claps both hands to her mouth, bounces up and down on her toes and squeals, “Oh. My. God! You were paying attention! That’s exactly right!”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this, Frances?”
“She hasn’t done it yet.”
Sophia clears her throat and retrieves her clipboard. “We’re doing it later today, after we get Luther. I can’t wait any longer. I’ve run all the tests and I’m damn certain this will work. I would have done it this morning – that’s how certain I am about it – but I fell asleep in my office. As I said before, I spent most of the night working out the in-game electronics, in the basement of the Brit’s Wankenstein Castle, actually.”
“You’re doing this in their basement?”
“I told you I was working on something. I made them give me the space and I sealed the door so they couldn’t bother me. Back to what I was saying about the reverse dive: this requires complex wiring on both the digital side and our side of the continuum. You may or may not know that I’m fully qualified to build a dive vat and other dive gear given the right parts. I took several classes on this and trained at home in my spare time to become a successful, in-demand, highly paid haptic rig repairperson, mostly to save myself money when I modify NV Visors and other dive gear.” She takes a deep breath and continues.t. “What I’m trying to say is that I built something similar for NPCs so they can dive to our world.”
“A dive vat for NPCs to come here?” I rub my temples for a moment, and the consequences of too-rapid ingestion of tres supremo excellente breakfast burritos deluxe suddenly make themselves known in a simultaneous gaseous eructation both fore and aft. I don’t even bother to try to cover it with a cough.
With furrowed brows, wrinkled noses, considerable hand-waving, eye-rolling and genteel expressions of distaste, my three compadres put as much distance between themselves and the latest eruption from Mount St. Quantum as the conference room allows.
“Holy human pressure cooker!” remarks Rocket. “Did you get any of that on you? You may want to check your shorts, too.”
Frances pinches her nose. “Well, there goes the ozone layer!”
Sophia glares at me, as if she’d have us all believe that she’s on too high a plane for such biological crudities.
“Better out than in, I always say. Do you want to annotate that for your Quantum log, Sophia? No? Okay then – who’s the first happy camper you’re going to shanghai here to the RW?”
“Your bromance buddy, Aiden,” she says, and continues with her disdainful glare undiminished, “He’s about the only NPC in our guild with any sense, and I already have a Humandroid head and torso rigged up in my office to receive him.”
“No arms or legs?”
“I know I can make the transfer successfully, but I’m unsure how it will affect him because this is all undiscovered territory,” she reminds me, “even if he signs the NDA.”
I chuckle. “Why are you making him sign a non-disclosure agreement?”
She shakes her head incredulously at me. “I can’t have NPCs realizing that this is possible! With a torso, he can’t really go anywhere.”
“I have to hand it to you, Sophia, I thought today was going to be more or less another day at the office. I see now that it is not, but I kind of feel like Doc should be here for this.”
“This is a preliminary test and he’ll be monitoring. He’s the one that helped me get some of the Humandroid parts, FYI.”
“Hokey smokes!” The realization hits Rocket like a cruise missile. “I could have a NPC girlfriend in the real world, couldn’t I? That’s frickin’ awesome!”
“What about your Steam girlfriend?” Frances asks. “You told me you love her!”
“She lives in Calcutta, or is it Mumbai – she goes between the two. What I’m trying to say here is that she could dive into a Proxima World and from there, dive into a Humandroid’s body. I have no idea how to phrase this because while it’d be her, she’d technically be using an avatar to complete the second dive, which is very NPCish. That’s how this could work, right?”
“Human to avatar to Humandroid body?” Sophia looks at him with no little surprise and more than just a twinge of respect. “I actually hadn’t considered that. Funny, I know, because I usually consider most angles.”
“Then I call dibs on this part of the invention, if it works!”
Doc: Y’all finished up yet?
Me: You didn’t tell me Sophia has come up with a way to reverse dive, NPC to Humandroid.
Doc: She hasn’t done it yet.
Me: She’s seems pretty confident she’ll do it today.
Doc: We’ll see. Anyway, I’m diving in thirty seconds.
I clasp my hands together. “Doc’s diving soon, and I got equally interesting news that has been vetted by our favorite War Faun.”
“What’s that?” Frances arches an eyebrow.
I do that lean in real close and glance in both directions for sheer dramatic effect. “Veenure’s name is Victoria G. Mays, and that ‘G’ stands for ‘Godsick’. Veenure is Strata’s daughter.”
Rocket launches himself out of his chair. “You’re kidding! And she was part of our team the whole time?”
“That’s what the tea leaves read. Anyway, just let that marinate for a moment. No time to comment on it now because we need to dive.”
“The bitch,” Sophia whispers.
“Yeah, you could call her that."
Chapter Four
Bless the feedback that giveth and taketh away. Words fray at the onset of digital rain.
~*~
I awaken on the other side of mind. Aiden is comfortably seated at the big round table with a big plate of fluffy pancakes, a forty-ounce Foster’s lager, and four different kinds of genuine maple syrup in cut glass decanters in the epergne. He alternates watching the Lobby Boys add to the mass of stone and concrete that is their Castle Anthrax with perusing the e-copy of Pneumatic Ninja LowRider Hotties magazine, the annual apple bottom issue, if I’m not mistaken. For once he’s not in his usual ninja garb. No siree, he’s stylishly accoutered in a bathrobe and a pair of SpongeThug SquareNuts boxer briefs. He doesn’t look like much at first glance, but he’s wiry with well-defined musculature and a thin carpet of chest hair that looks like an eagle spreading its wings. Spread eagle – ha! I kill me sometimes.
“What in hell are you doing?” I ask.
“All work and no play makes Aiden an unproductive member of the proletariat, comrade. I’m taking a day off,” he tells me on the tail end of a yawn. He daintily picks up some pancake on the back of his fork, delicately slathers it in whipped sheep butter, anoints it with just the right amount syrup, and stuffs it into his mouth.
“Sounds like a plan.” I pull up a chair next to him, and when he glances over at his e-zine, I reach out to snag some pancake. His fork thumps into the table, right between my thumb and forefinger.
His grin is most evil.
The King o’ Combat Caprines makes his presence known with a clatter of
hooves. His latest tactical vest is an eyeball-searing shade of zombie green, and is no doubt freshly stocked with blades, grenades, joy buzzers, whoopee cushions, and other tricks of the trade. His big ol’ crossbow is slung across his back, but once things heat up, I’m sure that he’s got something a little less world appropriate on deck. “I think that commie cupid got to him. He was reading Mao’s Little Red Book when I spawned. ”
“I’m taking the day off, oppressors,” says Aiden, “until later anyway.”
“You can’t take the day off,” I tell him, “you’re the best we got.”
“Think again, burrito breath!” I turn my head just in time to catch Rocket somersault into a crane kick. He almost lands the kick without losing balance but botches it in the end. Sophia’s avatar forms; she floats up to her usual passive-aggressive dominance position and laughs at our youngest member.
“Do you see why we need you?” I tell Aiden.
“Fine, fine, I’m in.” His robe disappears as do his undies. For a moment, he stands there buck naked as tight ninja clothes form on his body. His mask covers his wolfish grin, but I can tell by the way the fabric stretches over his mug that he’s still smiling.
“What happened to your boxer briefs?” I ask.
“I’m going commando,” he says, “care to join me, Doc?”
“Pfft! I’m already commando.” Doc trip-trap-trips in a little circle to ensure that Sophia gets the best possible view of his goaty sports equipment and the underside of his little goat tail.
Frances Euphoria: You are ridiculous.
Doc: No, I’m clever. There’s a fine line, a fine line indeed but it’s still there.
“Where’s Dolly?” I ask.
Doc locks eyes with me for a moment, his face devoid of expression.
A flash of light and a burst of displaced air nearly knocks me out of the chair. “There ‘e is! ‘Allo squire!” Burly claps me on the back. “‘Erself is out there with Pippa the Sheep. She’s taken quite the shine to Dolly, ‘as our Pippa; the bleedin’ poo pixie too. Funny, innit? Take a look for your bloody self!” He leads me over to the window and pops it open.
Cyber Noir Redux: (Book Six) (The Feedback Loop 6) Page 3