"Juan of Arcade World, Pt. 2", 4.2.15 "Nudle Crane"
Gadg8eer
K.i.D Player 10
"Nah. People keep non-sapient Glitches around all the time, though unlike Pentifer they're usually pets. Don't spread it around but he's like a good antithesis to Bolypius. Sapient, according to the Turing Meter." Hum explained, tapping an icon on his Hinobi-RobCo PIP-Boy, a device created in a collaboration between Hinobi and RobCo made during the 1970s Oil Crisis. "Hey, Juan, I'm going to pop the hood. I need you to flip the manual debugging switch from 'Fixed' to 'Broken'."
"What's a Turing Meter, again?" Juan asked, opening the hood and flicking a switch.
"A Geiger Counter but for self-awareness." Hum answered, and plugged his Gauntlet into the pink, bunny-themed Tech Van's USB-C port.
"...what's a Geiger Counter?" Elextrixtr added, as Hum tapped through some menues.
"...Look it up on Nobipedia or, if you need info only available to techs, look up Spoilerpedia now that you're a registered tech." Hum expressed, and pointed at the Vault-Tec Pip-Boy Mark V on Juan's left wrist. "But fun fact, if - like Juan - you have an actual Geiger Counter and it starts crackling as you get closer to something and then beeps annoyingly... Drop whatever radioactive material it's detecting and NOT the counter itself, run, and don't stop running until the counter is almost quiet, because it's probably labelled 'RADIOACTIVE DROP AND RUN' in capital letters for a very good reason. I think the Hinobi Store in Pripyat gets a surprisingly good soviet knockoff of the Hinobi Tech Gauntlet with a Geiger Counter function by default, those guys are hardcore badasses."
"Pripyat, Ukraine. I'm radioactive?" Pentifer asked.
"Oh, no, my bad. More like, ionizing radiation and sapience can both have purpose-built detector devices. Bolypius aside, sapience isn't inherently dangerous to everything in it's general vicinity, or we humans wouldn't have been around to create PLixel Tech. Cancer, as I'm sure you're aware from your backstory, is a relatively indiscriminate killer." Hum responded. "That, unfortuately, is why Ed's wife was uploaded using Horizen's new brain emulation tech. It works, but because you would just be a copy if it actually uploaded you, your brain is essentially file-sync'd to the brain emulation rig. Both the brain and the computer it's attached to become one, and when the brain dies, the mind lives on. That's how Melvin Ames Carne, the first person to become a transhuman, became undead. His real name is a mystery, but we know he used to be a top expert for the US Military and that his mind was too important to lose without fighting death itself as hard as possible. You know, like what they did with the brain of that Nazi rocket scientist slash evil mad genius in the Novel Comics movie Florida Man: The Winter Spoiler."
"But it's also pretty dubious technology for other reasons." Tobi pointed out. Hum nodded, opening a program to scan the file contents of the Tech Van's code. A progress bar slowly began to fill.
"Yeah." Hum agreed, "Unlike Gadg8eer, who only recently came around to the idea that maybe Melvin Carne really wasn't the greatest person and should not be the one - or ones, long story - pioneering transhuman living, I've always been willing to admit that about becoming a Zoenet. About 1 in 1000 attempts at immortality have resulted in an unresponsive lump of data in the shape of an avatar, rather than the mind upload that results the other 999 times a brain dies while hooked up to the machine. When it was revealed that Melvin cloned himself illegally countless times to have willing test subjects for unethical experiments, the scientific community pulled his creative license, but that only happened after the technology was approved for medical use."
"You said earlier you were worried about Ed's wife. What did she do that you think she wouldn't go to the place upstairs?" Pentifer asked.
"Ed's wife... She got a rare form of metastatic cancer, recently we all found out through the grapevine that she's not going to make it. Which in practice, means that if she's one of the unlucky ones... she really wouldn't make it." Hum explained. The scan was at 35%.
"But there is an afterlife." Pentifer responded, "Wait. Did humans make Heaven and Hell up?"
"To the best of our current knowledge, no there isn't and yes, we did. The details are still a mystery, but there isn't much evidence that any beings that would be called Gods ever existed. If there's no Gods, not even sufficiently-advanced aliens masquerading as gods, any afterlife that might potentially exist - by the nature of cause and effect - would have to be a creation of future or present day humans that does not yet truly exist. Zoenets are, in theory, immortal machines. Only problem is, it's not really immortality, because real computers actually have far less longevity than healthy and unblemished human bodies. It's rare for a computer from prior to the 1990s to still function today, and when they do the PLixels inside them have usually become prone to Glitches." he said, and checked the scan again. This time it was at 70%.
"Then she'll be gone before she knows it." Pentifer looked disheartened, knowing from his 'time' as a Lord of Hell - an angel assigned to punish the wicked and reform the suicidal, that life can be fleeting. "Will she at least be happy?"
"Hopefully, eventually. It takes a lot out of a person, their soul might be data but data is not just an illusion, and as I said, worst-case scenario is that her brain dies but it's all for nothing. Worse, except a Zoenet's family, nobody can visit them because the cybersecurity requirements needed for the Upload procedure are very tight. She can play singleplayer and local multiplayer games, but she can't talk to people unless they use a VR device attached to the Zoenet until she's been declared legally undead. If the brain is still alive, you literally have to airgap the brain-computer cybernetic being that the person becomes until they die because any interference by malware could do seriously nasty things, and for legal reasons no one undergoing the process is allowed to request their brain be killed as soon as they've integrated with the attached computer server. So it's a long, slow, boring wait unless you were already on borrowed time, and worse, if you are on borrowed time, there's a slim but very real chance that you'd be one of the 8 and a half million people out of 8 and a half billion alive today who for whatever reason, would die if they all tried to gain immortality via a Neural-Cybernetic Fusion Mind Transplant. That's the scientific term for 'make someone a Zoenet', and a Zoenet is a computer containing a self-aware and originally human mind."
"I... I didn't know." Pentifer said, sad. "You created us as a sort of prayer. You wanted to be saved from death so badly that you couldn't live without some hope of living forever, and when you tried it wasn't even good enough to actually save you."
"Not your fault. You wouldn't have been able to know, Melvin didn't succeed at his method of transhumanist ascension until 2010, a decade after your first game was published. It's not too bad, there are other ways to achieve immortality available now, but at the time being none of them are publicly available for a reasonable price. Fusion was the only way to do that for years, and only if you were dying of a lethal illness." Hum responded, his system at 70% still.
"Paid immortality?" Pentifer said, worried. He was well-aware of the hit 1980s genre-naming movie Cyberpunk 2013 and it's lukewarm sequel Cyberpunk 2020, though not of the ill-recieved Cyberpunk 2045 and the much more fondly-remembered Cyberpunk 2077. That last one was a new concept that was a smash hit. The main character, known in-game as 'V', was the viewer - specifically their body, Hiverse avatar, or PLixelf depending on whether they're still biological and whether they had a Hinobi ID - but rigged up as a digital actor. V wakes up as a passenger in the mind of the protagonist of the first movie, Johnny Silverhand, who has gone from Rockerboy celebrity to forgotten in the time between 2020 and 2077 as a metaphor of the changes between the 1980s and the year 2020 (when 2077 was shown in theatres) that made Cyberpunk irrelevant and then relevant again, like meeting an old friend and trying to reminisce but realizing your entire life sucked. Needless to say, the people who were reduced to playing games on discs again, during the co.vid_19 virtual pandemic that started eating the internet, ate that shit up.
"Hinobi makes these things called PLixelves, I actually found out about Gadg8eer becoming one after winning the Canadian National Bracket of the Hinobi HiTexpo when I saw him as his Hiverse avatar, but in real life, for the first time." Hum explained, spotting the system scan had jumped to 87%. "I was already aware he had won the Regionals and the Provincial but his simulation exposed that the hospital here is woefully underfunded and doesn't even have a surgeon anymore but needs one. See, it's mostly boring political stuff that has caused the most issues in recent history, not death. I won't go into details, but just a kilometer south of here in the States, they just elected the first female POTUS in '24 after having to wrench Hitl- I mean Kaard from literally committing mass voting fraud to steal the Presidency."
"What's a Potus?" Pentifer said, confused.
"Oh, right. Language drift. It's an acronym. President of the United States." Hum answered, and relaxed as the scan reached 98%. "Anyway, back to Gadg8eer. That's probably why he wasn't scared of Bolypius. He was more worried about everyone around him, since his prize makes him one of less than a thousand people in the world who have a PLixelf. Much worse odds than becoming a Zoenet, but he hit a jackpot. Too bad he's still broke as shit, but then I don't think you need cash when you're a living Hiverse Avatar." he explained, and then tapped the 'Okay' button which had appeared as the scan completed.
"Ah, that makes more sense." Pentifer said. "Hey, have you considered running for prez?" he asked Elextrixtr.
"We live in Canada." Juan pointed out.
"It's the middle of the night and I'm sweating in this hoodie, this can't be Canada." Pentifer half-joked. "Does it not actually snow here?"
"In winter it does. At least, most of Canada is pretty snowy in winter. Not so much in the summer." Juan pointed out.
"But here in Grand Forks specifically, we're in the only desert in Canada." Hum pointed out, and called up a map on his Gauntlet to demonstrate.
A U-shaped region was on the map, stretching from Grand Forks, British Columbia in the east down into Washington State in a U shape and then back up into Canada to the west of the other end, via Osoyoos through to the Okanagan.
"This area gets less rainfall due to the east-west valley making air currents a bit funky." Hum explained, and closed the map to return to his file scanner. "Not sure if it has a name, I keep having to explain this is a thing to yahoos on the internet who still think Canada has 6 feet of snow all year."
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