Which Closed right before he could make it out thus Removing an Easy way out of the Trap. 2 seconds later Dr X's Voice started coming out of a Speaker he had installed because i tell you H'wat, that man likes to gloat.
Portals 12 has encountered an error and needs to restart.
Error Code: 404 "device not found"
Sending error report to microDyne...
We are currently experiencing a higher-than-profitable volume of callers. You are (13) in queue. Your computer will restart after the report has been sent.
Please send 0.0000000612 BeeCoin or 0.00004423 Exp to expedite your reporting process.
Lady Moldoma
can describe her character's preferred VR workspace and all that would be needed on her part is to slap whatever coats of genre paint she might want.
Lady Moldoma
chooses to describe Zoe's HomeNode Cluster as being) was that one of the doors to the room, the one she entered through, had a method of swapping between paired set of Ports (doorways, loosely speaking), allowing her to use her door to connect to other nodes on a preset list of bookmarks. The room she'd found herself in after falling asleep had been added to these bookmarks and a notification of some sort in her HUD let her know of this.
"I'll third that," Hum said.
Hoo boy, that was a lot to take in. Pentifer had stopped eating to listen, and it was clear it had baffled him. Elextrixtr quite shook him out of his zoned-out state.
Though to be fair, he was - to a degree - aware of most of this. Being the punisher of wicked souls he is, and the protagonist of a game, he was - demon or not - quite concerned about what he knew about humanity's reality from the beginning, though the part about Glitches was somewhat over his head as it was not something Glitches are normally made aware of in their backstories. It was even technically part of his series' lore that rather than actual evil, the Angels are a hive mind named the Godworks and Demons are the "ants" of this hive mind assigned to punish those who are truly irredeemable, like Hitler or Tom Cruise.
Pentifer looked like he was about to basically implode from all of this. But Elextrixtr kept reassuring him that he'd be okay.
"She's right. We might not know whether a God exists or not... but it's safe here and, um... Hinobi is more concerned with capturing glitches that, well, could hurt people? You don't, um... seem like your instability trying to process all this is like how Bolypius became evil." iQ said over the radio.
Pentifer shrugged."Eh, its kinda cool that I just poofed from one world into another. There's gotta be some fancy word for it somewhere." He grinned, a sign he wouldn't become evil.
After a couple minutes of waiting around, Zoe was likely bored by the lack of activity. Suddenly an error message popped up...
"headspace.apk has crashed. Would you like to send a report?" was annoying but seemed harmless enough.
---
"...and there it is." the ripperdoc said, holding the experimental neural jack's spinal contacts between a pair of tweezers. "I take it Biotechnica wants this back?"
"Yes, we'll need to check it to make sure no permanent damage was done to her implant that could have affected her permanently." Dee said.
The doctor held up the device under a magnifying glass, then dropped it into a small biohazard container. There was nothing particularly biologically hazardous about it, but hospitals and medical personnel are required to consider anything sourced from a human body which is to remain outside that body as a potential biohazard and isolate it from the possibility of infecting someone. The neural jack would be cleaned with methyl alcohol and, as Dee said, disassembled by Biotechnica's engineers.
"Alright, we're on a bit of a tight timeframe so how long until you can patch her up?" Dee asked.
"That's harder to say. I took the job thinking half an hour, tops. I didn't realize it until after I took out the jack, but it looks like there's a lot of inflamation. She might need an actual hospital." the doctor explained.
The man standing next to Dee looked at her with a shake of his head.
"What about a med-evac?" Dee asked the professional opinions of both of them.
"We can have a med-evac here in 15." the man, head of Dee's security detail, told them. "Is it possible to make the patient stable on board the aircraft while en-route?"
"Maybe... Have you got room for one more?" the ripperdoc asked.
---
When Zoe closed the pop-up, the computer suddenly displayed a big blue screen.
Code:Portals 12 has encountered an error and needs to restart. Error Code: 404 "device not found" Sending error report to microDyne... We are currently experiencing a higher-than-profitable volume of callers. You are (13) in queue. Your computer will restart after the report has been sent. Please send 0.0000000612 BeeCoin or 0.00004423 Exp to expedite your reporting process.
The nature of Windows' counterpart in 2028 was what people fear Windows 12 (or a 'Windows 365' subscription) will be, as of 2024 (which is prior to Windows 12 being publicly visible; I don't think we even have screenshots yet). Most had been forced to abandon the platform in favor of Sphenux Distros or (if they could afford it) an iqTop S1 with the new Quill Silicon chip. Everything else had been abandoned by the corps to rot, and after 4 years of the Hinobi GamerDeck being suitable for gaming, the only ones who hadn't transitioned to a giant middle finger pointed at capitalism (that is to say, Free Open-Source Software) were offices and businesses who could still afford the 'Portals for Your Shop' yearly subscription of... "$5000 USD, but we must take risks to reap the rewards" (cue memetic stupid statement dance mix).
As she considered why this error had just occurred, a noise played from the computer's speakers with the error...
...and the wall to her right receded and then slid sideways like a door from Wolfenvania 3D, revealing something far more interesting to her than a classic computer... her home page in the Hiverse, the VR realm she'd created for when she wasn't hustling for upvote dollars and just wanted to relax. It still looked pretty shabby, she had been using an nSideo VTX 970 and an nSideo VTX 960 in Multi-VPU mode since around 12020 so the textures were low-poly. But even then, it was like wearing a VR set in terms of visuals but like real life in terms of feel and interface design. Her streaming setup was actually almost entirely virtual, these days most streaming happened from within the Hiverse. The only problem was, Zoe never left her homepage these days. The sheer toxicity of the First Web War (when the election of 2024 was so controversial it started the first "civil war" for the internet because the choices were between that monster of a man Roules Card and the first ever woman president and Roules was literally willing to try and kill to win...) led to the proprietary Hiverse - Hinobi's entry to get some of that sweet, sweet VR tech startup investment dollah bills ya'll - and the compatible open-source Xtended Reality browser Volpe Dogzilla.
Projects like CyberWorldZ, the Otherland, the Half-Gaia Project, Sword Art Online and the OASys (Online Architecture System) had all used 3D virtual worlds and sometimes even dreamcasting, but what what made the Hiverse different was that it could read brainwaves without invasive surgery and without overtaxing the mind during sleep like the Merchantsoft Hypnospace headbands. The only problem? Nobody can consciously remember the thought patterns for an entire web browser's commands. That required some sort of "super AI" to help find information easily. Helpie was one of them, Eliza another, but people quickly found it annoying to receive responses that were less than perfect from a cartoon letter H or the "Pandemic-Proof Assistant" concept of a holographic (actually PLixel-based) assistant that was powered mostly by Horizen Web Services and your Horizen Prime shopping and browsing history.
Doglefox took a different approach in licensing their code for commercial use by Volpe. In return for a free license to monetize what was otherwise exclusively Creative Commons (open to free use by anyone without exclusive copyright), Non-Commercial (can't sell what you make, unless you're Volpe), Share-Alike (can't change the license you used) and by Attribution (credit the original creators), Volpe was tasked with creating the ultimate browser-based AI assistant.
Instead of uploading the mind of a child with a fatal genetic mutation or an injured but beloved News Reporter, or using some sort of weird AI training program that turns vaporwave into reality, they decided the best way to humanize an AI was to make it cute and clever, but mute. Doglefox was originally the name of the mascot of Neozilla's version of the browser, and to attempt an idea they could not execute themselves, the decision was made to grant access to Neozilla's randomly-generated trademark (yes, the name of Firefox's counterpart was a 'slick'-sounding and 'relata-marketable' name meant to take on the corporate giants with their own weapons) to actually explain what such a creature even is. The result was an adorable chimera of a corgi/red fox/persian whose species became the first 'PetPETs' when the 'Neozilla Central' Node launched in 2026.
A person's PetPET didn't speak (except a happy bark or similar in response to the command) but it's (yes, it was an actual non-binary entity unless renamed and regendered by the owner) pointed and boopable nose served as an amazing shorthand and was the first virtual asset that people actually grew attached to. The Non-Fungible Cryptoken charity sales alone were enough to fund Volpe so well they wound up making the entire Volpe browser FOSS and began finding a way to redeem the AltCoin economy, which had so far been going fairly well.
The default look of PetPETs were merely a photorealistic ai-generated kawaiimera (kawaii-chimera, 'kawaiimera' was the trendy cyberpunk thing to say about it at the Aegean Way Node Café) of the aforementioned fur-babies, with one alternative body shape in the form of a theropod provided by Neozilla for bird and dinosaur PetPETs, but the Non-Fungible Tributaries (yes, NFTs have a different acronym) aspect was important for several reasons...
One, each NFT was tied not to some sort of club membership or loyalty card, but to a special PetPET collar, a new one of which could be created for an existing Glitch if you were a tech or were willing to wait for the official launch of PetPETs v1.0 that was due for Christmas 2028.
Two, the collars would 'Nuzlock' themselves once they remained on a single glitch for longer than 6 days, meaning that you could not trade them. Unlike in video games, it was clear that they should be saved for the intended owner and that 'pets are forever so please don't abandon yours' so unless you ignored the warning notice there was no chance of accidental nuzlocking.
Three, there was a non-exclusive alternative; default PetPETs could have custom cosmetic skins, it was just that the NFT versions were supported in gamer-related ways by Hinobi's Hiverse, such as having specific-to-Pet stat blocks.
Four, they had utility beyond a game made just to capitalize on cryptocurrency (like BeeCoin Runner 2049) or an authoritarian 'NFT required' rich-person-only internet that had been revealed to have been in the works when the infamous Cybergate Scandal of 2026 (implicating most tech companies - the exceptions being Biotechnica, Hinobi and Volpe - and several national leaders in the Brave New World Order conspiracy to destroy democracy and bring about industrial feudalism) was revealed.
With no need to make ridiculous amounts of cash, the browser's canine AI companion was essentially a self-expressive guidebook in the shape of a fake animal and everyone was aware of that from the start. The NFT versions of the collar were never pitched as an investment or as any sort of 'hobbyvestment' (the term Aegean Way Café had come up with for fads like Crazy Baby Kidz - a 'hobby' that is suppoedly also an 'investment' when in reality the intent was less than honest before the success of Goggles) like the awful BEE NFT avatars (which were not only generated by AI but often insensitive, including blackface, young girls with something which I cannot mention dripping from their open mouth and face, and [REDACTED] all being created and not vetted in any way well deserved when it turned out microDyne had intended to use the NFTs as permanent tracking cookies and 98% of the owners were fat neckbeards who thought they'd get laid if they were rich. (To be fair, yours truly is a fat neckbeard who sees promise in NFTs, but use real human-made art if you're making them and screw 'investment', you'd have better odds at a casino and I don't gamble).
Most of that was why Zoe was so pessimistic. In 2016, Card won when everyone said he was dead in the water, the fear he might win in 2024 had been extreme. Things like the co.vid_19 cyberattacks showed that what Zoe, Elextrixtr, Pentifer and Gadg8eer had just been introduced to the previous day was far too politically-integrated to simply let people like Card have their way. The return of IT Unionization was exactly what the world needed to save it from becoming Orwellian.
That was quickly demonstrated when the PetPET, or Petlike PLixel Entity Tributary, became a sort of prototype for PLixelves. You could suddenly have a literal pet that happened to also be virtual, it just couldn't exist in meatspace (yet) as far as the public knew. For IT, many an unlocked Chicky-chum, Chomp Kitty or robot buddy had been with them their whole career, and soon they would be able to pass off their existence while in public!
As for the Hiverse, it started out with various websites that archived webpages (this is a real thing, check out archive.org and archive.is to use free archival and and perma.cc to use professional-grade archival) creating VR computer museums that allowed devices like the iqTop 64 to browse the internet as it (approximately) was in an increasingly distant past. Those museums replaced the internet proper and soon instead of a node for those purposes, people would get attached to classic or even antique computers. Companies like UpGear started providing kits to repair such Classic computers as Gadg8eer's iqTop 64 and even replace their interiors with new components designed for old shells. Soon people were modelling obsolete devices for use in VR and using the AugReal system as a makeshift method of resurrecting a dead watch or portable console.
Most of this wouldn't matter to Zoe, but it did have an effect. She used a browser set up for her by Dee, and her preferences were synced with a decentralized cloud server in the Sealand Data Haven (or wherever Biotechnica actually put it) so she wasn't offput by the idea her homepage was connected to this space. However, what surprised her was that after entering, she took a seat on her low-poly couch, which while still low in footprint size, did not feel like her VR haptic gloves against her skin as she brushed her hand against it, nor did they feel like the origami-ish polygonal forms were paper or stone or metal, but like actual fabric made from real cotton or like a hard plastic surface when moving her 'computer' mouse.
While real computers were still real computers, VR computers were like phone booths were in The NetWerks Online; A 'computer' was a desktop controlling a node, a 'node' was displayed in the form of a room, and clusters of nodes that formed buildings could be euclidean or non-euclidean thanks to being based on the versatile FOSS Game OS known as the SuperMenu Engine. That meant that all isolated objects in VR are known as Widgets, and a GUI terminal in VR is known as a GOD (GUI Operation Desktop) - or just as a 'desktop' - could access the GUI, in the same way that GUI can access the Terminal in a 2D OS. A homepage was a personal node cluster or 'Hive', and though she spent a lot of time in VR (well, all of it) she rarely ever left even this one node due to the events of Cardiff Electric's bankruptcy in 2016, and the betrayal of GotSee Studios against her.
In short, while it would be a grave mistake to describe Zoe's room myself, those are the frameworks within which
One last thing of note (aside from what
It was actually possible she only had the one door - or, rather, Port - and only dialed in to people's nodes on invitation. There's four classes and three aspects of Ports. The three aspects are Open, Restricted and Closed. The four classes are Transer, Transmitter, Receiver and Transceiver Ports.
Open Ports are open doorways or doors with no lock, essentially hyperlinks. Restricted Ports were in the form of locked doors, with access to a linked node only in a way that requires a password, valid ID token, or one of Hinobi's "Blue Key" items from the Glitch Tech item shop. Closed Port, which means they're available to be Tunneled to a valid Open Receiver Port - which were open doorways but darkened and blocked by a force field.
Inside of a Port is a Tunnel leading from the Transmitter Port (re-entry only permitted to the creator and a whitelist) at one end to the Receiver Port (re-entry permitted only to the creator and the creator's friends) at the other, allowing doors and other entrances of any shape and size to connect. Various Hiverse NFTs existed which could provide customized Tunnel settings, but only for active Tunnels. The Tunnel exists regardless of if the server it links to is online, so an unilluminated 'blackport' was the equivalent of a 'redlink', having only a Transmitter Port and no valid Receiver Port. A Tunnel can actually be multi-way if multiple clients dial in, with each client doorway protected by a force field that can only be passed by people with access. There was no trouble linking as many different client Transmitter Ports as the server could handle to a single server Reciever Port.
Additionally, every Port leading into a Tunnel had a hallway big enough to accommodate a perfect cube which was the size of the longest dimension (height, width or length) of the largest avatar of every avatar owned by the creator and everyone on the creator's contact list (for Transer and Transmitter Ports) or the Reciever Port's client list (for public nodes). So an avatar could go HOME NODE <-> HALL <-> TUNNEL <-> HALL <-> PUBLIC NODE but not usually anywhere else. Given all this was in a chaotic space resembling a 3D platformer or FPS game, you can see why a little spirit guide to follow that glows in a way that is only visible to the owner was a handy equivalent to the search engines of old. The default skins, the Doglefox and the Niptor, were based on the mascots of their respective company and non-profit, Volpe and Neozilla.
Of course, Zoe might have preferred something else as an AI guide, so I digress. The point was that corporations were no longer allowed special treatment in the Hiverse, and so mascots OF corporations came back into vogue, becoming the human-like form of their companies but only in-so-far as being an AI chatbot trained on existing media and sometimes the creator's own brainscans. For Dee, she'd made herself that character with her recent 'upgrade', but most fictional characters that represented a corporation were AI Chatbot NPCs coupled with new Investment AIs, backed up by human copyright lawyers who could file a lawsuit to receive royalties based on how long an unofficial fan-made NFT had been worn.
In the old days copyright laws were why TV was creatively bankrupt and the Mick Sidney Company was salty about Whimsy the Wisp falling into the public domain in 2024 (Fun fact, since IRL I created the character of Whimsy for a show-within-a-show, I've decided to release that character as Public Domain), but in a new age when eternal life was not out of the question it was why the gig economy worked well for VR. Most mascots were self-reprogramming pop-up ads which were generated by the node's advertising partners, until the GMTUNA (Game Mechanic's Trade Union of North America) went on strike demanding that if a bill as disgustingly authoritarian as the "Stop Hinobi Online Technology Act" (which critics noted was backed by all of Hinobi's competitors but not by Neozilla, Volpe, Biotechica or the now-bankrupt Gregarious Games) could be passed without popular approval, then advertisements that used your own computer or hardware to process any data were no longer going to be tolerated. Thus, it was illegal to advertize on the internet. The only problem was that you had a hard time telling whether an avatar was an advertisement or the persona of an actual person. I'll let the implications of that in the Glitch Techs Xpanded Universe sink in.
The Hiverse could be a lot of things, but it was profitless. People used NFTs they picked up for pennies on the dollar for all sorts of things, but unless you were an artisan or had a huge media franchise to turn into a base for avatars (see: My Little Brony, transforming robots, Sonic OCs, Pokeymans, NetNavis, LEGO Minifigs, SBURB players, deltarune characters, slugcats, those creepy toilet-headed things, etc.). Worse, many such franchises were being bitterly held back by Hollywood studios that were furious that their company's movies and TV shows were becoming irrelevant; the reason Gadg8eer had been creating his own writing project, a fantasy setting containing no races which are found in real life mythologies (so no centaurs, vampires, dragons, etc) but instead vague analogues like the Brancasaur (feathered wyverns that resemble these guys) or the InKids (based loosely on the main character of KidPunk: Cosmic Playground), was entirely because KidPunk as a series had last been given serious value in 2006, when Merchantsoft had sold the IP to the soon-to-be-infamous developer Goliath Games, who bought the IP because it competed with their existing Virtual Sidneyland project. There were no avatars or other Hiverse NFTs for the franchise, as Goliath demanded unreasonably high royalties on purpose, hoping to kill the KidPunk franchise outright.
It was only the truly famous franchises, like Hinobi's own Honkai: Geek Squad (a mobile idle game where you play as the employee of the "worst job ever", the new hire at 'Best Buy' - an obvious jab at popular consumer-grade PLixel technology store Quest Buy - who suddenly finds himself trying to eliminate glitches- wait.) or the massive juggernaut of Flunky Quest (gotta catch 'em all), that got rep in the Hiverse, regardless of who owned the IP, because the economy was so heavily skewed towards custom creations. The early days of the Hiverse and similar platforms started out with most players using fan-made avatars of existing characters, but when corporations demanded monetization, the people demanded the corps f- off. Shots were fired, the police were called, the courts ruled that royalties couldn't be ignored but advertisements using your own bandwidth to forcibly display them were theft, and that changed so much about the last 4 years that optimism was again running as high in June of 2028 as it did in June of 2000. After a couple months of most marketing firms trying to call the bluff, the law put a foot down and shut down Nudle's parent company, Abjad Inc. by confiscating what was once the most valuable domain name on the internet, nudle.com, and the real life Nudle campus in San Francisco, as proceeds of a crime.
Why such a change of heart? Most assumed it was because the rich got greedy and learned you don't get flies with vinegar. The truth was that the Game Mechanics held the nations of the world 'hostage' for the better part of 2025, by halloween of that year it was clear that the only way the corps came out of this undead (pun intended) was to respect the general public. There was no easy answer, eventually it was decided that humanity needed utopia more than reality could provide, and as a result the world was two years into a plan to transition to a post-scarcity society where everyone had their own space in equal - though virtual - amounts.
A 'verse, barely a Hive. We can rebuild it. We have the technology... Stronger. Faster. Smarter. Funner.
Some might call that hubris, it was certainly a lofty goal. But we had tried every other option, and the only thing that worked some of the time was democracy. The rest were barely considerable. The plan forward was to allow everyone to just chill in their own virtual space without being disturbed, and to live and let live.
The only problem, for Zoe, would have been that she didn't like what she had seen of life, and living requires connection. The thought of contacting Gadg8eer might cross her mind with the possibilities provided by the new 3D variant of the Sleepnet which powered Hiverse.
Lady Moldoma
A reminder it's your turn to post now. ))
Metal
))
"Actually, that's not quite how that works. Levels 1 through 3 are basic to difficult mooks. Level 4 is an Elite Mook or a "King" or Giant Mook. Level 5 is a miniboss. Level 6 is a stage boss. Level 7 is end bosses and that's the top of the scale. Anything which falls under Level 8 is Over 9000, so to speak." Hum responded. "It's at the back of the manual, I don't blame you if you didn't understand the boring tables or even make it that far. Bolypius is obviously a Level 8, since there are no higher levels than being off the scale."
"Is there a level 0?" Gadg8eer asked.
"Inanimate hazards are -1 and moving hazards like map-based obstacles are 0, but that's just internally. They're not coded with any personality or even patterns, so no." Hum pointed out. "Oh, hey, Elly."
"Please tell me Bolypius is secured." DPortEd asked.
"Where would he be?" Gadg8eer asked.
"Blue shipping can with a Hinobi logo on the side, on a train car." DPortEd explained.
"Okay. OPERATOR, time and date?" Gadg8eer asked.
"The current internetwork time is @265 on Thursday, June 29 in the year 12028 HE. The local time is 10:21 PM PST, on Wednesday, June 28 in the year 2028 Anno-Domini-slash-Common-Era."
"Darn. The Smartgird is still off!"
"Yo! Eddy, we got a problem, Bolypius escaped!" ReadyPlayerJuan shouted, having appeared from behind a car to point at the unoccupied train tracks.
"He stole the train?!" Gadg8eer exclaimed.
"Couldn't be. Those tracks are due to be torn up because their foundations were damaged in the last flood." Ed pointed out.
"...he... it? ...stole the train." Tobi added over her mic.
Ed cringed. "AW F-"
"-ILE SYSTEM CHECK!" Eddy shouted, and ran for the Perfectly Electric Vehicle, driving away.
"Uh oh. He forgot Skipper. This isn't going to go well..." iQ realized, pointing to the robot support dog that had been left behind when Davenport got into the van.
"We... should follow him." Hum pointed out. "Preferably in a more active way now that we're all on the same page."
"He took our van." Gadg8eer said, a bit shocked.
"No problemo, ours is fine!" Juan shouted, hopping into his driver's seat of the Hive-Tec van and then popping open the rear doors to the vehicle. "Tobi, come on, we've got a train to catch!"
The back was a bit crowded with four people, but for now it would have to do; not everything a Tech does is completely badass and awesome, every once in a while the inconveniences are unavoidable and even serious but, due to the miracle tech of system restore, the parts where it sucks most are usually just this kind of painful awkward emergency situation.
"So... um... Anyone here play BRIX Brawls?" Gadg8eer asked.
Grand Forks, Canada
2028/06/27 @ 838 Winks
Central Avenue Apartments
(( We're doing a Flashback B-Plot for this new episode! ))
"Dude, you still play that kiddie shit?" Bulldog derided.
"It's freaking Atom Girl Z, not PLixel Ripped. They have a secret sideboob in one of the cutscenes, bite me." Spike said. The pair were wearing VR devices to play the recent 3D remake of Atom Girl Z, Atom Girl: Renegade Hunter on their Hi-Cube home console.
"Okay, this I have to see."
The two vitrolic best buds weren't actually being jerks to each other, but they certainly weren't holding any punches against anybody else when it came to their loud and obnoxious conversations, giving them a reputation as "those two guys who piss you off". "Bulldog31337", or Higo Powell, was not so much a gamer as a "I only play sports games" Jock meathead. Spike69, or Spiro Kennedy, was an action gamer who mostly played VR titles like piedpiper's Naphil Online, which he was subscribed to full time so he come pretend to be a giant king with a narcissistic streak.
Fortunately, these didn't bleed into the job. Yes, both were employees of tech companies, though not with Hinobi. Spike was part of the Quest Buy "Nerd Squad", while Higo was a marketing exec at Blume because his Uncle was the new CEO. Spike was smarter, but Bulldog had all the charisma and the two did rely on it (even though they'd never admit it due to their, fortunately non-violent, homophobic/transphobic views of sexuality) to impress clients and employers. Though to be fair, Bulldog might have been straight but he was also an idiot "my daddy donated money to UBC" frat brother who never explains how he was hazed, and Spike's whole "generic light novel protagonist" look didn't exactly imply he was trying to inspire awe at his masculinity.
In spite of their wealth (Spike's parents were high up in Tristar, a South Korean mega-conglomerate that even Hinobi and Sidney tried to keep from getting on the bad side of; they just happened to be some of the few members of the family that owned the Tristar Chaebol who actually believed in the idea of "power must not come without responsibility") the two had moved to a cul-de-sac at the end of Riverside Drive, just across from the Moran House Bed & Breakfast, because they were told they HAD to get a roommate and save half of their rent up to buy a house because their parents agreed they were rich idiots and needed to get a day job. Little did they know that both, for all their jerkassery, were sort of like Batman in that sense; rich, not exactly perfect, but still willing and eager to do the job right for personal reasons. Which was why after only a year, Bulldog was sending in his two weeks' notice and becoming a freelance Glitch Tech now that they were in on the secret. Spike had already started working just the previous day, and their new large house wasn't even close to filled by their belongings yet they couldn't afford additional furniture.
"Hoooooly shiiiiit, you were right!" Bulldog triumphantly said, snapping a screenshot. "Wait, why aren't the jiggle physics working right?" he asked, trying to use his VR-gloved hands to do things best left unsaid and unseen.
"Because of my job, dumbass. I'm beta-testing this thing, for some reason when you..." he said, making crude motions, "...it, eh, doesn't work right."
"Well whoever's making it is going to be rich if they get it working." Bulldog said, "I am going to get to brag I was the first person to have a virtual girlfriend you can-"
"Dude, it's Atom Girl Z, not Bunnybabe: The Mansion. And don't go blabbing, we signed an NDA and they have memory-wiping."
"Guys, you can't just leave the toilet paper roll empty! When the heck are you going to start cleaning up your own messes instead of everyone el-"
"Eliza, stop." Bulldog said to the iqBot-produced PLixel NPC Maid.
The face on the screen of their Horizen Mirror Show 10 gave an unhappy look but complied. While annoyed, she didn't actually have the capability to hate or kill, but these two could REALLY push her buttons with their moronic behavior. "Fine. Would you like to order an item from your Horizen Prime wishlist?"
"Urp..." the third roommate, still in a coma after helping move stuff in, audibly expelled. Erwin "O-Skunk" Rovski had been their neighbour at UBC and the two quickly became three. Despite looking like a fat clueless oaf, Erwin was actually pretty skilled at fixing the one part of video games people often overlook; the screen. Erwin wasn't just a screen replacer or TV repairman. He was the guy who could fix proprietary junk that had been built to be electronic, the guy who could use a drop of live PLixels on a chip and sit back as they repaired an HCP molecule by molecule. He wasn't as skilled as HardModeWarez in this sense, but he did have one advantage; He knew robotics like the back of his hand. If it wasn't for the fact that Hiro Hamada, who had invented PLixels in the late 19th Century at the age of 12, was a child prodigy, he might even be considered the top expert on robotics ever.
The relation between robotics and screens? Erwin didn't know much about screens or circuits but he learned about it as well as he could and then experimented with his own invention... Repair PLixels, able to replace manual system restore entirely by detecting whether infrastructure has deviated from its specifications (and, as a suggestion made by a close friend he simply called "Big Cat", to make auto-repair an "opt-in" service for safety and convenience reasons). He needed a test subject, so to speak, and chose a busted Horizen Pulse Show 10 he purchased on BeeBay (it was 5 years old by that point) as the first test. The results were promising, though it took three tries before he had a success, and almost 100 tries to actually fully restore it. Then he added the "Hologram Girl" skill on an open-source replacement for the former Eliza App that was no longer supported.
After successfully licensing the newly-patented solution to Hinobi, he had become a permanent member of his roommate's little operation, since the two-become-three were too NEET-ish to work a job where they would be in some way bored most of the time, and manual labor jobs had mostly been replaced by Union-represented or Employee-owned employers in service and skilled labor industries. The Fast Fusion Franchise restaurant industry, the small online business boom that came with the closure of Horizen Prime and Mall-Mart and the creation of the Hiverse's Artisanal Digital Goods industry, and skilled work such as Lawyers, Doctors, Teachers and (thanks to crackdowns on big shareholders by the IRS and the expansion of the cryptocurrency system) Tax Collectors were the most common careers and jobs in North America.
"Is he still passed out?" Eliza asked.
"No, my eyes hurt." Erwin complained.
"You didn't even say anything!" Eliza pointed out, "Come on, you went to bed before the welcome party even ended, you can't be hungover still."
"Screw you, Eliza, I'm tired. At least I'm not arguing about jiggle physics... or lashing out because men like jiggle physics."
"Excuse me?" Spike jokingly acted offended.
"At least I'm not a hack hacker who is so overspecialized he had to program nanobots to win a contest and still lost to a virtual replica city!" she said.
Erwin opened his eyes. "Real shit?! You're talking smack about me?"
"Do you WANT a robot war? Because this is how you get a robot war." she said, referring to the same films which Helpie would imitate for Zoe and Gadg8eer the next day.
They would have turned her off, but to be fair, she wasn't evil. They just knew she didn't really fit in and would be in danger if she were known to the wider world. While still bound to Erwin's orders, she had feelings and was not a video game enemy but a local instance of a smarthome AI, triggered by one of the many tests Erwin did that must have caused a malfunction and spawned her not just as an AI Assistant, but as a being that had opinions of her own. Unfortunately those opinions were mostly informed by the (2D) internet, giving her an independence streak that was oddly paired with an overly critical view of human's reliance on technology. In short, Eliza was the sum average of the internet at a given point in time rather than a normal, individual-based quantum observer.
At that moment, someone knocked on their door. Eliza de-Glitched herself enough to seem like a generic and non-sentient Language Learning Model, knowing the Landlord was starting to get suspicious. "Better turn that down, I can hear it from the kitchen!" Spike shouted, and then did a fake Australian accent voice impression. "THE BRAIGHT PLOOMAGE ATTRacts the females of the speesees..." he gradually lowered his voice.
"Scraw! Scraw!" came a voice from the TV that Eliza had been linked to via the roommates' whi-fi network. "...but a clever predat-"
"What was that?!" Bulldog said just loudly enough to sound like the TV had been way too loud and then suddenly muted.
"Dude, quiet down. Someone's at the door." Spike said and winked, then headed to the door of the apartment. "Yeah?"
"Delivery for a Spiro Kennedy? From GNU Forks Electronic and PLixel Tech Repair?" the person said.
((Captain Wyldstorm
Sir loin of beef
MisterEightySix
At that moment, a VidWindow - an interface element of the Hiverse that she had seen in Gadg8eer's augmented reality on occasion the day before - opened in front of her. She'd also seen more than her fair share of VidWindows and other AugReal ads on the drive to the airport.
"If you're not waterproofed, we definitely need to drive there." Gadg8eer advised, worried what they would do if the flood barrier broke and Zoe's RoBody was submerged. "Van, manual mode. Please?"
Having set THE FINALS to download while he was asleep, Gadg8eer went to sleep expecting to wake up the next day. What he didn't realize was, as a PLixelf, he would be using the Hiverse every night instead from now on, provided he had an internet connection.
"Oh!" Anabelle suddenly said, a cutesy spech bubble overhead. "You're getting a phone call from one of your new contacts! It's the one named Gadg8eer. Should I patch them in, Zoe?"
Lady Moldoma
))
