SHIP'S LOG:

The Flying Comrade

Ben Tater 10/28/2020 10:15pm

"I'm not here to take your treasure."

It came out automatically. I wasn't even thinking about talking to the tiny green man inside the cave.

"I'm just after my frisbee. See?"

I hold it up to him, shaking off the sea water. I find myself flicking the water droplets towards him. Like I'm trying to sprinkle him.

"Hey, whoa! You just keep your distance there, big guy. Run along now."

I run along. Back up the beach. Yul is gone. I head back to camp. It's deserted. But it's late. Getting near dinner time. The sun is sinking low. What time is it? Where did everybody go?

In the center of camp is an old metal ammo can. The one we use to keep matches in. It's got my name on it, spelled with torn duct tape.

B E N

I open it up and find the letter.

"Dear Ben. We have left this message on the off chance that you should return someday. We can wait no longer..."

Ben Tater 9/15/2020 11:21pm

"Go long!!!"

Yul laughs at his horrible throw.

I head off into the tide pools to retrieve the frisbee. The tide is out, and there are clear sand paths through the rocks. Tiny canyons encrusted with barnacles and anemones and big purple sea stars. And sometimes there are caves.

"Found it!" I call.

There's water trickling out of the mouth of this one. The frisbee's half underwater in a tiny pool. And there's something shiny there too, glittering in the water.

"You're not here to take my treasure."

It's a statement, not a question. From a tiny green man inside the cave.

Ben Tater 8/6/2020 10:24pm

"Hey Ben. Can you toss me one of those beers?"

We're back on the beach. Been here for about a week. Ever since we ate those chips.

"Sure Scruffy."

The sun is heading down. The crew in the water are about done for the day. They'll come in and brag about the waves they caught and dry off, and we'll head back up to the bungalows and make a dinner and drink more beers.

"Not sure how much more of this I can take," Scruffy says, looking into the sun in his sunglasses.

I look over at him. His face is stern.

Then he cracks up and looks my way.

We're safe. Really safe. For the first time since we've met, and longer for the Giant Guinea Pig crew. Scruffy was right about "the whole burrito." What the core consisted of was more than just the VR source code. And it was more than the whole of the world we left behind, too. The VR world, and the world where we left The Flying Comrade; all of it was part of a bigger code set. And now that we had integrated it into ourselves, we could truly write our own stories. And we could write them in either world, or a whole new one, that was bigger than both of them.

"So, what do we want for dinner tonight? We should get our order in so the fisherfolk have time to deliver it. Food tastes better when we don't just manifest it on the spot, don't you think? I needs at least a little backstory."

Beefy Ray Cakes does enjoy grilling.

"More shrimp?" I ask. "Are we bored of that yet?"

"THIS," says Scruffy, "can NEVER get boring."

And I watch the sun sink lower, slowly.

Ben Tater 6/30/2020 8:48pm

"Or is THIS what we expected?" Handsome Becky asks.

It's a rhetorical question. By design, none of us knew exactly what the final heist consisted of. Not just to protect the mission, but because it was unknowable. Heisenberg style.

"Heisenberg STYLE!" cries Scruffy, doing an ollie of what looks to be a raised dias. In front of an altar.

Heisenberg in the sense that it was unknowable. Not the kind of "oh the observer changes the outcome" kind of unknowable. But, mathematically unknowable. And our plan was to land us right here.

"Right here" was a place in this info-cathedral where things took an unexpectedly realist turn. That abstract mathematics (made physical) of the virtual world around us had coalesced into what on all accounts appeared to be a church, with a ritual altar surrounded with silver pots and pans, rich carpet and wood. Everything but the pews. It all still held that virtual sheen but at a minimum. A definite respite from our raw-data addled brains.

It was the central core of the reality generator for the entire VR-rackspace world.

"It's more than just the central core of the reality generator for the entire VR-rackspace world," Scruffy said, walking up behind the altar. "The VR world can't run on simulation alone. It's tapping into something. Something bigger. The whole burrito."

Scruffy rattled around in the cupboards behind the altar. "And yes! Here it is!"

He took up position behind the altar, and displayed a bowl full of chips.

"I want some of those chips..." said Ruth.

And with that, we all lined up behind her, awaiting our prize.

Ben Tater 5/16/2020 10:11pm

"Is this, uh... what we expected?" Handsome Becky asks.

Stage three, the smash and grab, seems to have taken a turn.

FREEZEFREEDOMMAGNETNUMBERTHREEZHWOOOOOOOMMMMMM

A shard of pure information slices past us. It's the size of a semi truck but in only two dimensions.

And it's one of the small ones. All around us, as far as our infinite-seeing eyes can see, it's a cathedral of crystal. More like a canyon, really. There isn't exactly "color" here, but it somehow presents itself as white-on-white layers of mathematics. Look in any direction too long and you can feel the tug of its seductive algorithms, integrating with your own fragile definition.

"Eyes sharp," says Scruffy. "There's got to be a pattern. Concentrate on the data coordinates in envelope C.

Everyone sorts through their survival kits. Each step of our heist has been carefully planned out, but also carefully NOT committed to memory in case any of us were captured on the way. We each carry a range of possible targets and instructions, all of them decoys. Except one.

As each of us reads the contents of envelope C, we seem to log in to a shared network. And as we do, a path begins to present itself through the fractal landscape ahead of us.

Scruffy leads the way, leaving a wake of cast-off ones and zeros in his wake.

Ben Tater 4/8/2020 9:38pm

Stage two, the Lightning Run. 

Only the highest priority data gets the big highway. That’s part of what the Giant Guinea Pigs got from the boards and syndicates of the earth. 

And let me tell you, it is a big highway. 

We’re all ensconced in diamond lightning form, identical to all the packages shooting down the highway. It’s so big — to facilitate the quantum buffering — that all the packages are at great apparent distance. By “apparent” I mean you can see too well. The edges of the Lightning Run stretch to a horizon extending for every digit emerging from an infinite decimal point. 

And you can see every one. 

I mean, you can’t even count that high, but you can SEE every ONE. 

And when the Great White Antibody Patrol starts coming your way upstream, you can see every fractal detail on their multi-purpose q-foam hulls, antennae growing back through your eyes into your brain and takes you apart byte by byte—

ZWOOOOOOOOOOSHHHHH

“Looks like we got what we paid for,” says Scruffy. 

Protected encryption? Payoffs?

The multiplicity of creation continues to unfold before my eyes. 

Ben Tater 3/2/2020 8:23pm

Stage one, we're back at Nemo’s, the underground VR cyberpunk bar. This time the crew's all in off the shelf Scene Kid avatars, which means they blend right in with the e-boys and cool girls and the occasional full blown electro-goth.

"Yeah, we got some keys we can trade..."

They work their way up various ladders, probing for the right kind of mark.

"Ooooh, I dunKNOW! That kind of hardware is like, military restricted."

Until eventually the right doors open. Pixels of air folding back into themselves lead to invasive scan DMZs, opening into smokey back rooms of the boards and syndicates of the Earth.

That's when the giant guinea pigs drop their masks and pull out their claws.

"How did you discover this information?"

"We've been tracking you capitalist pigs for years. Raiding your banks and Timothy Hay fields has been merely a distraction as we gained control of your networks."

"What do you want?"

In the end, the capitalist fat cats have no choice but to oblige. The lesser of two evils, though just barely. And now the giant guinea pigs have upped the ante, shown a card.

But in the end, they've got what they need to initiate stage two.

Ben Tater 1/27/2020 7:54pm

The original reason I got the giant guinea pigs into VR was because I thought they'd be good at games, and we could enter some eSports tournaments and make enough money to upgrade The Flying Comrade. But, these particular giant guinea pigs took it as an opportunity to attempt the biggest heist of their career.

But things went south. And Chuckles died.

Now it's personal for the guinea pigs. They want payback.

We've put The Flying Comrade back on autopilot, circling the wilderness of the Western Ocean, avoiding all contact, charging up the solar batteries by day. We've gone over the simulations hundreds of times, every single moment choreographed, every possibility mapped and accounted for. The reality generators have been recalibrated, and our extensive shadow network silently reactivated.

We slip the headsets back on, and enter the dankweb in stealth mode, quiet and dangerous as black glass spiders.

Ben Tater 12/24/2019 11:54pm

The entire crew has been working hard on the coding for our assault. We've remained in a connectivity blackout zone in the wilderness of the Western Ocean, living off the staples in our stores. Among those stores was a bushel of Cuties, those tiny mandarin oranges, which we busted out for a Christmas feast. Not only is the vitamin C crucial for the health and nutrition of the giant guinea pigs, but provides a huge morale boost for the holidays.

We'll need that vitamin boost for the final phases.

Ben Tater 11/8/2019 9:48pm

We buried Chuckles at sea the next morning. We would have preferred to return to land, but we're currently weeks from home and had no way to preserve his giant guinea pig body. There was a storage locker big enough for him though, which we tipped out of the open cargo hold and watched splash and sink into the water below.

Scruffy paces the deck. Skies are clear. The water calm.

"WEEEEEEK WEEEEK WEEEEEK?" asks Ruth.

Scruffy doesn't respond. Apparently he still hasn't set a heading.

Are we defeated? Is the giant guinea pig crew really ready to return to a life of robbing banks and Timothy Hay fields and spreading Marxist revolutionary literature? VR seemed like a natural home for them, a place to truly achieve what man's world would deny them forever. But now they were marked, never able to return without their particular brainwaves being noticed immediately and fried on the spot.

Yul held the computer core in his giant buck teeth, dropped it, and rolled it across the floor to Scruffy with a flick of his nose.

We hadn't come back empty handed.