[Plot] Like a Melody Stuck in My Head

[Will Stanton]

"Don't want to get too philosophical here, but that again may be why the things resonate with more than with, say, Sam. Sam's alive, a living breathing thing even if she also has a place in a greater cosmology. But I'm not; you could call me the crystallization of a power in a medium, if you so chose."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"You did arrive in this reality through a spatial anomaly from across dimensions. I can see how you could arrive at that conclusion. And you are extremely susceptible to your own ontology. At the very least you're very similar. Perhaps this is what happens when a mutant's power is as close to our layer of reality as yours is or your nature was affected by what happened to you. Perhaps it is a combination of the two. It could even be an evolutionary leap towards a stronger adaption to this power."

[Will Stanton]

"Hrm. That's a lot to chew on. Some deep philosophical ponderings," Will nodded, scratching his chin.


"I wonder what happens if we do more than just poke it?"

[Ashlie Minamida]

"There's a range of possibilities here from benign to exceedingly dangerous, so you'll have to be a bit more specific. Anything involving high-energy particles is out because if we disrupt it's quantum equilibrium we'll take a chunk out of the northern hemisphere."

[Will Stanton]

"Well, that's my favorite hemisphere, so I think we'll postpone that," Will deadpanned.

"But no. I'm interested to see if this casual effect works backwards, too, or if it's one-directional. Because if we can send things backwards, that implies two-way causality. And if we can send effects in both directions, we might be able to communicate back along some sort of path at some point. Gotta be able to do both ways if we're going to communicate.

And perforation was what the Titan was very much trying to do, so I'm curious if that, uh, intent, as you put it, is the only thing possible, or if we can send alternate signals, signals we choose, or if it's something inherent to the structure of the thingamabob itself."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"You're thinking we could use this as an antenna." she says, tapping her chin with her finger. "Not a bad idea in theory, though I'm uncertain how to practically suffuse it with information. Electrical signals might not translate well."

[Will Stanton]

"Well, if it's just to send information, you just need off/on states to start with. Even punctured/non punctured technically works, though the problems with that are, shall we say, numerous.

But if we can find out we can send other information with this, and if we can send it backwards, then we'll have a greater scope of what we can and can't do."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"It ultimately functions on particle physics directly. I'd imagine the puncturing is just a result of quantum entanglement. If it parses ontological concepts on a quantum level then all it might take is a sufficiently strong environmental factors. Conduit's gun resonated with music. Tempo and rhythm might be close enough to time-manipulation in concept."

[Will Stanton]

"See, you're thinking about this ten levels higher than I am; I'm no scientist. I poke a hole with it, holes appear. What if I used it to, say, flatten something. Or heated it and burned. Or more direct interactions.

Except none of those specifically, as I wouldn't be shocked at all if, at one point or another, the Titan did that to me. I'd love to ask, but it looks like I'm not getting anything out of them. So I would have to try to think of something to do with it that the Titan would never have tried; to see if I can introduce it to a new concept and get that to be transmitted through."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"I'd imagine it would transmit the induced properties just the same. I'm not sure novelty is going to redirect the transmission."

[Will Stanton]

"Perhaps you're right," Will said, after a moment's pause. "I was just suggesting that we might not be limited to what the Titan intended to do."

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Then perhaps we should find a middle-ground. Novel concepts imposed onto it rather than turn it into a rolling pin. Or... hang on. Piercing a hole is simplistic, devoid of much context or information in the broader sense. There's nothing for it to transpose into a response even if it cared to do so. What if we turned some of that clay into tablet to inscribe with the fragment?"

[Will Stanton]

Will shrugged. "If they're not down with the concept of talking, I don't know that we'll be able to find a written word that's much more to their liking, yeah?"

He moved the titan spike from one hand to the other, contemplatively (and a little bit possessively.)

[Ashlie Minamida]

"This one did talk. In a way. But you're not wrong. The problem is that we are quite limited in how we can communicate even simple concepts and even more so when we have to do it utilizing a piece of debris operating on Strange Physics. But are you concerned about whether it'd work or do you simply not want to let go of this piece of Neutronium?" she asks carefully.

[Will Stanton]

"Hrm?" Will said, glancing down at his hands. "Huh.

No, it's not that. We can try your tablet idea if you really think it would help," he said, carefully dodging the second question.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"Will, you've exhibit extremely possessive tendencies towards a Titan fragment before. I'm not saying this to make you hand it over or condemn you for it but because you've said you're drawn to them and this might well be a symptom of that. One that might be worth investigating?"

[Will Stanton]

Will looked down at the fragment in his hand, and then back up at Ashlie.

"Testing how?" he asked, after a moment.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"I'm not certain. Especially if it has a psychological component. Unless... Can you turn into a computer that the shard can slot into? Perhaps looking at what your 'code' does with and without it present might help."

[Will Stanton]

"I mean, it's a fairly non-standard peripheral. But I'm more than willing to give it a try, if that's the paradigm you're most comfortable working with," Will nodded, hoisting himself up on to the workbench next to the manikin and the massive blob of clay.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"It's where a lot of my expertise lies and, frankly, the only way I can think of to get hard data on subconscious or psychological effects."

[Will Stanton]

"I'm a bit more versatile than your average psyche patient; even moreso now that there's a literal portal to my inner self collecting dust in a dorm room. But I've got no problem playing the hits," Will nodded, closing his eyes as his body shrank, became more plastically and boxy, and dwindled down into a workstation -- not nearly as shiny and flashy as some of the modern supercomputers in the room, thanks to his own personal sense of style dying somewhere in the early 1980s, but more than capable of doing laps around most electronic devices, if he put his mind to it. Well, 'mind' being a relative term and whatnot.

Plenty of the usual array of ports and connectors were available on the back of Will, including one that Ashlie had not seen before -- basically, a large, threaded slot into which Ashlie could essentially screw the Titan spike into. Logically, part of the spike should go deep enough into the computer to interfere with some of it's components, but she knew logic didn't always hold when dealing with a Stanton.

[Ashlie Minamida]

"First things first, let's make sure we get a good baseline." she says, pulling a cable from the workstation and plugging it into Will, connecting him to the diagnostics part built into the bench. Only once she sees him pop up as a recognized (if unusual) device does she take the Titan spoke and twists it into the custom port.

[Will Stanton]

The initial diagnostics all come up green -- err, mostly green, at any rate. Functioning, though with some error messages about missing files and unfound peripherals. Nothing that would impede function, at any rate.


When the spoke is twisted in, however, everything lit up like a Christmas tree. Fans whirred and memory usage skyrocketed as the spike worked it's way into Will's system. His screen started flashing, flipping through text at a phenomenal rate.

[Narrator]

With a new and unknown peripheral being connected Will's 'code' tries to make sense of it, checking for drivers and such to communicate with the added hardware. To perhaps nobody's surprise, it is not recognized as any type of device which makes it even more surprising when seemingly out of nowhere, a sub-routine starts up that adjusts the functionality of the 'port' with what it calls a 'Quantum Resonator'. A quick search by Ashlie as to the origins and nature of those drivers only shows them labeled as Stanton Technologies and tagged as 'downloaded 963,037,001,080 days ago'.

Soon after the driver installation the Willputer parses an array of files on the foreign device. On some level he'd know there isn't actually any data stored on there but rather that through the port and drivers he's parsing something much much more abstract into terms that fit his current shape. He even recognizes the file structure as vaguely similar to some of his own before things unfold into an odd virtual environment around him. Extremely high-fidelity versions of terrible 90s Cyberspace visuals stretch out around him. The ground is neon-blue wireframes of chess-board patterns and echoing from all around is the steady staccato of the clack-chunk-tick-tick-tick, clack-chunk-tick-tick-tick of pieces being moved and a chess-clock being swapped back and forth.

There are a couple of Will-sized pieces on the board, though Will gets the impression that the ones being moved are very far away beyond the infinite horizon. A couple of sections near him are labeled with all the various components of his own file structure. Personality, Memories, Likes, Dislikes, etc but the only ones with any pieces in them is Temp File Storage holding a couple capture pawns that are toppled and broken, a White Bishop with a plaque on it's base reading 'Traits.dll' and a Black Queen that looks like it has been carved to fit into the picture but clearly has been placed here by a third party. The queen is simply identified as 'Config.ini'

[Will Stanton]

A representation of the part of Will the is able to access and interact with this data materialized on the 'playing field' -- a knight, on horseback, decked out in red armor; the traditional third chess color. The plaque on his base simply read 'SSH', as he prepared to interact with the strange and confusing code.

The queen called to him -- oh lord, did the queen call to him. One might even suspect that's why the queen was chosen in the first place, considering Will's natural inclination to be drawn to powerful women, and there was no piece more powerful than the queen. But a rare bit of safety and sanity took hold, and Will first approached the bishop, in order to check out 'Traits.dll' -- and cleverly positioning himself offset from the queen, so he couldn't be directly attacked.

The queen called to him

[Narrator]

The Bishop looks so familiar. Not in shape but in materiel and texture. It would fit right in with Will's data, though it would inevitably change how things are run. A lot files and programs have co-dependencies with his own trait library after all. He can tell that it's very structured (possibly why a chess environment was generated in the first place), rigid in it's movement and confined to the black squares but able to approach from oblique angles with no limitations on the distance, which is made more pronounced by the fact that the chessboard seems to stretch on into infinity.

But at the same time it stands on it's own with no other pieces (Queen aside) to augment it. It is, ultimately, a simple thing. It moves back and forth along the set path of time. It can side-step at fixed intervals (seconds? milliseconds? How thin can you slice a single moment?) into parallel paths, retrace it's steps and junctions. It's more vessel than creature but there's a beauty in it's simple purpose and a strange calling to it's nature. An urge to respond to what it resonates with. It longs to move as directed, to give from itself and do what it does. At least that's what one might read into the abstraction of code if one was inclined to. The Bishop itself is simply filled with access points to it's functions and strict instructions on how to move.

[Will Stanton]

Will smiled and patted the bishop. There was something warm and comforting about it; something familiar and safe. But, a bishop is by it's very nature limited, and can't effect everything. So it was time to check out the queen before doing anything too rash.

Yet.

[Narrator]

The Queen is much harder to parse. It doesn't feel as familiar though the nature of it is that of reign and orders, not aimed at him but probably best not to try and copy it. It's set of instructions are best described as 'Search & Retrieve' aimed at a long alphanumerical string, only part of which parses at all and even then Will has trouble really visualizing it. It's another Chess Piece but whatever subconscious workings are creating the virtual metaphor is really straining to make it fit. It's kind of a Rook but as it moves it shrinks down into more of a Pawn or grows into an approximation of a King, though the more symbolic meanings don't quite seem to fit. It shrinks. The part of the code that parses describes a power that shrinks as the only way the Titan seems to be able to comprehend and identify it's target.

[Will Stanton]

"An interesting game," Will mused aloud. "Leaders and followers. The code and the coders. And it's very clear what side I'm supposed to be on."

He reached out and added a digital 'tag' to the queen -- a pointer so Ashlie could follow along later, if needs be. But as he retreated towards the bishop, his armor and horse changed color, going from red to white to match one side of the game -- the side that he naturally fit into; the side that he felt a part of in some unimaginable way.

[Narrator]

Not a lot happens at first other than a vague feeling of kinship with the piece. Taking on the same color presents an united front. No... more an united purpose. And the Queen is not a balanced part but an interloper meddling. There are no hard feelings, just an acknowledgement of purpose and even an odd sensation about curiosity about it. The Queen is doing what the Queen does, just in odd and unusual ways.

On a deeper level, Will can feel some kind of data comparison happening. The Bishop's DLL file is accessed and he feels a sense of rhythm. Not the flowing, flexible and potentially syncopated kind of playing music but more stringent, like a metronome dictating a pace. It fits well with his current circumstances of Being A Computer. Everything in it's place and time. Normally when he's a computer (or other tool) being actively used he has a hard time changing his shape because he's fulfilling a purpose. Now in addition he feels like it wouldn't be the right time. Perhaps the same end-result but approached from different angles. That's generally how he feels about being connected to this fragment. It meshes so well, even if it uses very different methods. Even the exchange of code between them just... works. It really shouldn't. There's not even any circuitry or electrically encoded data in the shard. But it does and it feels right.

In the distant horizon of the cyberspatial chessboard two tiny suns rise. Or maybe they're just holes in the firmament of this highly theoretical and metaphorical space that a light shines through. Will's computer-nature identifies them as network ports.

[Will Stanton]

This was right, wasn't it? No one else really understood -- not Robin, not Sam, not Tereza, not Miriam. There is a deeper order underlying everything if you just looked for it. Maybe these Titans, somehow, were connected?

Code: Select all

>>I think I've found a way to communicate with them.  Stand by...

Will started making his way towards the the two suns, zigging and zagging his way across the board towards the distant points of light.

[Narrator]

Distance is relative. Especially when he notices that the Bishop moves alongside him and is doing... something. Will doesn't understand the math happening inside the simulated Bishop but on some strange gut-level he gets what it is doing. Distance as a function of time; and with a minor adjustment each of Will's jumps takes him as far as a hundred of them would have. The lights don't seem to grow as he approaches, by the time he's crossed the near infinite plane they still appear about the same size to him. Up close they're less bright somehow and he can make out more detail about the opening itself, a strange mix of geometric, biological and artificial structures melting and flowing into each other and beyond only abstract masses of energy. Inside one jerky, rapid motions form intricate patterns that remind Will of the inside of a very complicated clock, inside the other a mass that seems to respond to him, moving as he does, following his motion and adjusting it's shape from one abstract form to another as if it's trying to find something that meets Will's approval.

[Will Stanton]

"Well, hello there," Will said, as he glided across the chessboard. "Aren't you just the most handsomest thing I've come across recently?"

Will paid less attention to the clocky bits, and approached the more shifty quivery mass. "More of a Bouba than a Kiki, aren't you? Me too, usually."

[Narrator]

The mass quivers in response to Will and for a moment he could swear it grows round protrusions, then briefly hardens them into more angular bits before returning to it's default undefined shape. There's no sound but somehow Will knows exactly the kind of friendly, upbeat bubbling trill it ought to make as a greeting. It's not even telepathy, Will has had plenty of experience with how that feels. He just knows what this thing is trying to communicate and in the same vein it knows him. He also, perhaps a bit disappointedly so, realizes that it's not sentient or alive. Not really. It's a refraction of his own being that makes it seem that way. As if to underline that thought the blob grows a stubby appendage and wobbles it at Will as if to wave. Because that's something he might do.

[Will Stanton]

"Now, that is damn peculiar," Will mused to himself, waving back more out of habit than anything else. "So, if it's not sentient in any way," he mused, heading towards the other portal -- the endless mechanical clock. "You can dance like I can; perhaps I can dance like you can."

[Narrator]

The mechanical patterns continue their choreographed dance and while it feels vaguely familiar in the way the Titan and it's debris had, it's nothing compared to the Bouba. Even the opening itself looks weaker, wavering at the edges and looking like it's slowly shrinking. Without the Titan's core bridging the space between realities the connection is failing. The aperture briefly flickers into a ring of black feathers but it's merely imitation of a pattern. It harkens to the idea of ravens passing through but there's nothing here for them to carry. It's sad, like it never had a chance to truly find a way to fulfill it's true purpose. Then again, there are many worlds beside this one and time means nothing/everything to it. Maybe in another time, another place, things will go right.

And while Will might not be able to be something that truly resonates with this pattern, he is forming the computer currently rendering this entire bizarre virtual space. So the White Knight might not dance like the Clockwork-Spark, the simulation as a whole flickers and the Bishop dissolves, reforming into the translucent afterimage of the Titan, hovering in front of the strange 'network' port.

"Dance. Rhythmic movement to an external beat. Partners. Your time signature is not compatible. You cannot dance with me." It's voice sounds quiet, almost childlike though that is a mostly arbitrary interpretation on Will's part from the signals the Titan Shard is picking up and by the end it sounds more like a tired old man.

[Will Stanton]

"I'm flexible; I can metrically modulate," Will said, stepping forward towards the Titan's afterimage. "Add a beat, and the clapping falls in time, without the world noticing anything has changed. You don't have to dance solo if you don't want to. You may be stuck in your groove, but I can find it, if you let me."

[Narrator]

"No." the Titan says.

"Yes! Yes yes yes! I want to! You need me to! Yes!" echoes a voice eerily close to Will's own from the other port. "I'll learn how to! I can do it, yes, yes, yes!"

"No." the Titan repeats.

[Will Stanton]

Will turned around and looked at 'Bouba'.

"Someone not allowed in first chair? Stuck playing the proverbial triangle at the back of the class?"

[Narrator]

"Time signature incompatible. Modulation would result in permanent loss of previous dance partner."

"It's right. I can't do that. I want to but I can't. You'd be gone gone gone. All of you."