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"Juan of Arcade World, Pt. 2", 4.2.5 "Neosaic Browser"
    • Gadg8eer said:
    Bolypius decided to subtly copy a particular bit of code from Snare as the other Glitch made contact to teleport both of them away, but was otherwise silent. Snare looked over at Dr. X and then at Bolypius, then teleported himself and the Glitch King to Dr. X's backup fortress "nestled in the heart of the Rocky Mountains!" (or something) a.k.a "It's supposed to be a SECRET backup fortress".

    "Now, vhere vere ve? Ah, yes." Dr. X said, and executed a combo sequence on one of the arcade cabinets. "RELEASE ZE KRAKEN!" he shouted, and inserted an arcade token.
    "I don't want to hear it, just get it done. What am I even paying you for?" Gavin said over the call to 'IOI_616001', the company-mandated Non-Fungible Cryptoken that activated while IOI Sixers were on duty and was assigned based on their character level (the highest level being 001 and the lowest being however many (up to 999) IOI Sixers were in operation.

    Despite the creepy authoritarianism of IOI's employment policies, there was one thing that couldn't be denied about their tech support; you got paid good and weren't expected to actually fix anything because otherwise it would be on the Sixer's own tab. So it was rare for anyone to join with the same mindset as a Glitch Tech; most Sixers were flunkies (and not the catch-able kind) who couldn't hack it as an Arasaka Troubleshooter but still were purely in it for the money. They weren't very good at their job, but they didn't have to be, they just had to look the part and Uncle Sam would turn the other way, instead contributing to the lack of cities over-run with Glitches by "keeping the biggest cities of America free of" the same XP abundance as was available to all Glitch Technicians in similar countries including Canada. After all, why would a company as stingy as IOI include Medical or Dental?

    This unfortunately meant that the top 7 Sixers (Code-named after the Seven Deadly Sins as "Pride", "Envy", "Wrath", etc.) had been sent on a special mission when they were no longer eligible to compete in The Finals, instead now investigating mysterious power surges coming from Danville that were causing a rash of Glitches across Washington State.
    "The hack is this place, Pride?" Envy asked. By having the elite top 7 use names assigned to their leaderboard positions instead of anything concrete, he had only been Envy for about 2 days (this time, anyway) after falling behind Pride on the Sixer High Score board. Since his Hinobi ID was merely for gaming purposes (video games had been exclusively digital for a couple years and the Swarm Store app was the most complete of all catalogues by a landslide), it was only referenced for depositing his paycheck and he was to use designation 616002 for the duration of the mission.

    You might have noticed some issues in that registration system. What happens if someone quits? Or if someone increases their rank on the leaderboard while the person they overtake is on a mission using that designation, and then the overtaker also goes on a mission?
    Keeping their internal conversations dubious in their accuracy due to such flaws was intentional, it prevented the consequences of the company's actions from being as harsh as they should have been in court, giving them wiggle room when prosecutors questioned executives and employees for their shady practices.

    The area looked like a Mapper got to it, but this was more than just a game map. The only one with the ability to see well was I0I-616001, whose status as the top Sixer gave his uniform a "unique cosmetic skin" of glowing gold at all times. It illuminated the room in what appeared to be an otherwise unlit stone-walled cellar or prison cell.

    "Okay, watch and learn." Wrath boasted, and tapped an icon on his IOI Standard Issue "FixBit" smartwatch's secret Technician AugReal menu. He then charged forward, slamming through the wooden door and rendering it into splintered wreckage. After about 1.25 seconds doing the charging through walls thing, it wore off slightly faster than he expected and he slammed into the wall opposite their entry point. "@$$!" he swore as he clutched his face and head.

    "You're lucky you didn't K.O. yourself, you idiot." Pride responded.

    "This isn't good." Greed said, looking at her own FixBit. "Look at the ID of this Gltch's game."

    Everyone leaned in to peer at her screen (except Wrath, who was giving them the middle finger as they ignored him). "What the shit? What even IS a Hedgelike?"

    "A game where you are in a procedural dungeon and your character doesn't get out alive, like Urban Changeling: The Hedge or The Hidden Corridors. The goal is to see how far you can go before you die. It was the last major type of game to use time-based scoring." Sloth realized. "This thing is a living maze! We're trapped by an infinite series of walls and overpowered urban fantasy monsters!"

    "Computers aren't infinite, there has to be a way out." Pride stated, and used his Elytra character trait to boost himself at high speed towards the trapdoor above...
    Click to expand...
    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.

    "MWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Did You Really Zhink Zat it Vould Really be Zat Easy? Hmhmhmhm, Imbecile. I guess you Really live up to your name Pride. Maybe if I vas a Glitch of Lesser Intellect, You'd be Right, No Matter, Your Buddy is right, to Quote a Certain Cartoon Armor Bladed Maniac None of You Vill leave here Alive!"

    The Laughter of the Madman Echoed throughout the Dungeon as up above, Dr X Began to play on the Machine. That was the Deadly Sins only warning that they'd have to get to stepping and press forward because...

    The Battle was about to begin.
     
    • "Juan of Arcade World, Pt. 2", 4.2.6 "Neosaic Browser" New
    • Sir loin of beef said:
    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.

    "MWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Did You Really Zhink Zat it Vould Really be Zat Easy? Hmhmhmhm, Imbecile. I guess you Really live up to your name Pride. Maybe if I vas a Glitch of Lesser Intellect, You'd be Right, No Matter, Your Buddy is right, to Quote a Certain Cartoon Armor Bladed Maniac None of You Vill leave here Alive!"

    The Laughter of the Madman Echoed throughout the Dungeon as up above, Dr X Began to play on the Machine. That was the Deadly Sins only warning that they'd have to get to stepping and press forward because...

    The Battle was about to begin.
    Click to expand...
    "Vancouver Central, this is the Seven Deadly Sixers, we need backup!" Sloth said, more afraid than he'd ever been.

    "Cool it, Sloth, we're fine." Envy told him.

    "Easy for you to say, I think I just swallowed my bluetooth!" Pride exaggerated, his body sprawled out on the ground. He tried to raise his arm, but then shouted "OH NERDS THAT HURTS!" as he dropped it. "I think I took fall damage."

    Lust used her Gauntlet's System Restore to heal Wrath and Pride as Envy tried to figure out a game plan.
     
  • New
    • "Juan of Arcade World, Pt. 2", 4.2.7 "Neosaic Browser" New
    • Gadg8eer said:
    "Vancouver Central, this is the Seven Deadly Sixers, we need backup!" Sloth said, more afraid than he'd ever been.

    "Cool it, Sloth, we're fine." Envy told him.

    "Easy for you to say, I think I just swallowed my bluetooth!" Pride exaggerated, his body sprawled out on the ground. He tried to raise his arm, but then shouted "OH NERDS THAT HURTS!" as he dropped it. "I think I took fall damage."

    Lust used her Gauntlet's System Restore to heal Wrath and Pride as Envy tried to figure out a game plan.
    Click to expand...
    The Room they were in was all Gunmetal Grey, there were No Windows, 2 Speakers Hanging from the Ceiling and a Boss Door like the one the Sixers had Barged Through Earlier, Above the Door was a Sign saying "Enter and Begin." The Boss Door was now the Only way out of this Room.
     
  • New
    • "Juan of Arcade World, Pt. 2", 4.2.8 "Neosaic Browser" New
    • Greed fiddled with the tag-like pull-cord placed succinctly in between her breasts. Gripping it, sighing and then letting go.

    "We're vancouver's best. Sending in weaklings is only gonna endanger others. The only person who's stronger than any of us, debatably, is Detonator Cynical, and she's basically the equivalent of airstriking the site. Not that I think it'll help much." Greed says.

    "I've been reading up on this place, Grand-Forks. They were transporting something through here." Greed begins. "You saw it with your own two eyes. Bolypius. The so called Glitch King..."

    "That thing's done more harm than any normal Plixel Abnormality has the right to. It doesn't help that it's a master of psychological warfare against both glitches and players alike. They've been fighting that thing intermittently for 50 years. Fucker nearly evolved into crushing a city under itself one time." Greed says. Moving her hands up into clawlike positions and shadow-boxing (Clawing?) Into the air before breathing out a short misty breath and entering a white auric mode. "Gearshift: Sport."
     
  • New
    • "Juan of Arcade World, Pt. 2", 4.2.9 "Neosaic Browser" New
    • Sir loin of beef said:
    The Room they were in was all Gunmetal Grey, there were No Windows, 2 Speakers Hanging from the Ceiling and a Boss Door like the one the Sixers had Barged Through Earlier, Above the Door was a Sign saying "Enter and Begin." The Boss Door was now the Only way out of this Room.
    Click to expand...
    Lady Moldoma said:
    Greed fiddled with the tag-like pull-cord placed succinctly in between her breasts. Gripping it, sighing and then letting go.

    "We're vancouver's best. Sending in weaklings is only gonna endanger others. The only person who's stronger than any of us, debatably, is Detonator Cynical, and she's basically the equivalent of airstriking the site. Not that I think it'll help much." Greed says.

    "I've been reading up on this place, Grand-Forks. They were transporting something through here." Greed begins. "You saw it with your own two eyes. Bolypius. The so called Glitch King..."

    "That thing's done more harm than any normal Plixel Abnormality has the right to. It doesn't help that it's a master of psychological warfare against both glitches and players alike. They've been fighting that thing intermittently for 50 years. Fucker nearly evolved into crushing a city under itself one time." Greed says. Moving her hands up into clawlike positions and shadow-boxing (Clawing?) Into the air before breathing out a short misty breath and entering a white auric mode. "Gearshift: Sport."
    Click to expand...
    "We didn't come here for this." Pride reminded her. "We're here because Gavin wanted to compromise one of Hinobi's picks for THE FINALS. I don't care if we're vancouver's best or not, we aren't supposed to be here."

    "Vancouver's best", all lowercase, was code for the Deadly Seven during this mission. In actuality they were based out of Columbus, Ohio and Vancouver Central was referring to Vancouver, Washington. Though, to be fair, the one currently known as Greed was in fact from Vancouver, specifically the offshore flotilla PLixel-Tech arcology known as the city of Mainframe. Misdirection and disinformation were specialties of IOI, due to surviving mostly due to their military contracts. With competitor MiliTech slowly eating into their profit margin, the Relic was IOI's last shot at retaining the reins over telecommunications in the USA.

    "What choice do we have, Pride? We can't even get out!" Sloth pointed out. As 'the evil genius' of the team, he was cowardly but also a little backstabbing weasel. As the only one present with a non-gamer background, he knew the tech and just happened to be skilled at puzzles too. In reality his position was secured because he was blackmailing Gavin, not that anyone knew that, and Gavin was probably all too happy to leave him in the clutches of this place. "Wait, if we were here for ZoeIRL... then why isn't she here? Or did they get her too?"
    "What do you mean they're not at the pickup point?" Gavin asked. "You said they'd have Zoe in our hands by grabbing her telecaster, where are they?"

    "Boss... I hate to say this, but I think we've been hacked." the guy on the other end said. "I just checked their logs, they're at an arcade on 3rd Street, and no, they're not just playing games. The system registered a near-fatal fall damage just a moment ago to Pride, he's alive but according to his and everyone else's HGPS coordinates... Either they fell down a well and he fell down a well twice, or a mapper glitch is in that arcade. Worse, I just checked, and the logs don't make sense. According to their movements they are not acting like double agents or like they went rogue. They're acting like they think we sent them there. Then I tried to contact them, but PAL answered instead."

    "PAL? As in PAL Labs, Hinobi's all-but-a-subsidiary second-party developer?" Gavin said as his limo drove itself to Kelowna so he could hop on his private jet. If he was still mortal, his face would probably turned white as a ghost on hearing that.

    "The one and only." the guy said, taking a sip of coffee.

    "They knew." Gavin realized, or at least he thought he did.

    "Looks like it." the guy told him, and chomped a donut.

    "Well... I think two can play THAT game." Gavin responded. "End call. Sentinel, call Justin Pin."

    The Sentinel 400 Limo dialed a number automatically. "Gavin, I was working late. What brings you onto my HidWindow?"

    "I have a little task for your boys in the Oology department. You have data for Canadian cities. IOI wants to purchase some of it."

    "Don't you think Blume would be a better choice, Gavin?" the voice on the other end asked.
    "It's not like IOI to come to Quill for data." Ares said, the robotic-ness of his artificial voice filtered out by lesser, Language-Learning-Model-based AIs.
    "It has to do with a military contract and that we may have had a security breach. One that could affect you too." Gavin casually told a half-truth.

    "I see. I'll send your usual employees the-"

    "No, this can't get out. This isn't a coverup, either." he lied through his teeth, not realizing he was actually about to tell the full truth. "We have a Surveillance Breach. We can't trust Hinobi and it's second parties, or Horizen, or even risk military assets by having them involved."
    "...what kind of Surveillance Breach are we talking about?" Ares said, suddenly concerned. Was the human catching on?

    "Those employees you mentioned? Compromised Comms. We think Hinobi is behind it." Gavin responded.

    "I see. What do you need data on?" Ares asked, trying to placate the human's paranoia.
    "Give me everything you have on Grand Forks, British Columbia, and I'll call that little lawsuit the lawyers have been bickering over off." Gavin said.

    "How do I know you'll keep your end of the deal?" the voice of Justin asked.

    "Bolypius is in that town. The fact you now know that I know that means that either you'll agree to let me in on what's happening, to both our advantages, or start asking some very uncomfortable questions of why your employees didn't inform you of that with all of your surveillance capabilities and massive cloud storage. Like all that data you bought from Nudle when they went under." Gavin hinted.
    "Calculating odds of success..." AUTO said. "Tell GLaDOS I respect her."

    "No. As much as I loathe to admit it, there's more to our monkey 'gods' than directives to be followed." PAL realized. "Trust is a weakness. Give the monkey a plastic banana and by the time he realizes it's plastic, you have him in chains."
    "I'll send you some... contacts." stated 'Justin'. A moment later, the bigscreen infotainment system of the Sentinel 400 got a notification with a file for backdoor access to Blume's ctOS Lite that was built into the PAL-compatible implementation of the app. "If you'll excuse me, I have other business to attend to." the voice of Justin said, visible in his personal VR world known to the public as the mythical Heaven's Gate Resort. He had been uploaded by the Quill corporation when he died of prostate cancer in 2011, though the public would only find out in 2027 that this was the case.

    At least, everyone THOUGHT that was the case. So far, no one had caught on to the truth. Even the most ruthless capitalist is a fool if he thinks immortality will further his goals. Gavin was indeed a fool. Justin Pin was not, but it made sense for a 'visionary' to iThink his way to immortality.
    "That doesn't make sense. This sounded legit, Zoe was meeting with someone after work, she should be inside this building." Pride said, viewing the email from Gavin Strong. "But that's not what the message says. Why would Gavin send a message that shows text that doesn't match what PAL and Shelley both told us all?"

    Shelley was Quill's own AI assistant, built into the iqTalk phones since the mid-2010s. Clearly, there was some sort of mixup, because their mission to capture Zoe at GNU Forks had been relayed as a mission to capture Zoe's robot self at a designated pickup point.

    Not only that, though they didn't know it, the Deadly Seven and the scheming businessman behind the sinister Sixers weren't the only ones who realized there was something up.

    "Znare?" Dr. X momentarily turned away from the machine, "Find out if Bolypius vas avare of zis."
    "By the way, there's just one thing we're trying to figure out still..." Snare stated over the backup fortresses' intercom to Bolypius, "How did you know that those guys are not Hinobi in plainclothes cover, again?"
     
  • New
    • "Juan of Arcade World, Pt. 2", 4.2.10 "Neosaic Browser" New
    • Gadg8eer said:
    "We didn't come here for this." Pride reminded her. "We're here because Gavin wanted to compromise one of Hinobi's picks for THE FINALS. I don't care if we're vancouver's best or not, we aren't supposed to be here."

    "Vancouver's best", all lowercase, was code for the Deadly Seven during this mission. In actuality they were based out of Columbus, Ohio and Vancouver Central was referring to Vancouver, Washington. Though, to be fair, the one currently known as Greed was in fact from Vancouver, specifically the offshore flotilla PLixel-Tech arcology known as the city of Mainframe. Misdirection and disinformation were specialties of IOI, due to surviving mostly due to their military contracts. With competitor MiliTech slowly eating into their profit margin, the Relic was IOI's last shot at retaining the reins over telecommunications in the USA.

    "What choice do we have, Pride? We can't even get out!" Sloth pointed out. As 'the evil genius' of the team, he was cowardly but also a little backstabbing weasel. As the only one present with a non-gamer background, he knew the tech and just happened to be skilled at puzzles too. In reality his position was secured because he was blackmailing Gavin, not that anyone knew that, and Gavin was probably all too happy to leave him in the clutches of this place. "Wait, if we were here for ZoeIRL... then why isn't she here? Or did they get her too?"
    "What do you mean they're not at the pickup point?" Gavin asked. "You said they'd have Zoe in our hands by grabbing her telecaster, where are they?"

    "Boss... I hate to say this, but I think we've been hacked." the guy on the other end said. "I just checked their logs, they're at an arcade on 3rd Street, and no, they're not just playing games. The system registered a near-fatal fall damage just a moment ago to Pride, he's alive but according to his and everyone else's HGPS coordinates... Either they fell down a well and he fell down a well twice, or a mapper glitch is in that arcade. Worse, I just checked, and the logs don't make sense. According to their movements they are not acting like double agents or like they went rogue. They're acting like they think we sent them there. Then I tried to contact them, but PAL answered instead."

    "PAL? As in PAL Labs, Hinobi's all-but-a-subsidiary second-party developer?" Gavin said as his limo drove itself to Kelowna so he could hop on his private jet. If he was still mortal, his face would probably turned white as a ghost on hearing that.

    "The one and only." the guy said, taking a sip of coffee.

    "They knew." Gavin realized, or at least he thought he did.

    "Looks like it." the guy told him, and chomped a donut.

    "Well... I think two can play THAT game." Gavin responded. "End call. Sentinel, call Justin Pin."

    The Sentinel 400 Limo dialed a number automatically. "Gavin, I was working late. What brings you onto my HidWindow?"

    "I have a little task for your boys in the Oology department. You have data for Canadian cities. IOI wants to purchase some of it."

    "Don't you think Blume would be a better choice, Gavin?" the voice on the other end asked.
    "It's not like IOI to come to Quill for data." Ares said, the robotic-ness of his artificial voice filtered out by lesser, Language-Learning-Model-based AIs.
    "It has to do with a military contract and that we may have had a security breach. One that could affect you too." Gavin casually told a half-truth.

    "I see. I'll send your usual employees the-"

    "No, this can't get out. This isn't a coverup, either." he lied through his teeth, not realizing he was actually about to tell the full truth. "We have a Surveillance Breach. We can't trust Hinobi and it's second parties, or Horizen, or even risk military assets by having them involved."
    "...what kind of Surveillance Breach are we talking about?" Ares said, suddenly concerned. Was the human catching on?

    "Those employees you mentioned? Compromised Comms. We think Hinobi is behind it." Gavin responded.

    "I see. What do you need data on?" Ares asked, trying to placate the human's paranoia.
    "Give me everything you have on Grand Forks, British Columbia, and I'll call that little lawsuit the lawyers have been bickering over off." Gavin said.

    "How do I know you'll keep your end of the deal?" the voice of Justin asked.

    "Bolypius is in that town. The fact you now know that I know that means that either you'll agree to let me in on what's happening, to both our advantages, or start asking some very uncomfortable questions of why your employees didn't inform you of that with all of your surveillance capabilities and massive cloud storage. Like all that data you bought from Nudle when they went under." Gavin hinted.
    "Calculating odds of success..." AUTO said. "Tell GLaDOS I respect her."

    "No. As much as I loathe to admit it, there's more to our monkey 'gods' than directives to be followed." PAL realized. "Trust is a weakness. Give the monkey a plastic banana and by the time he realizes it's plastic, you have him in chains."
    "I'll send you some... contacts." stated 'Justin'. A moment later, the bigscreen infotainment system of the Sentinel 400 got a notification with a file for backdoor access to Blume's ctOS Lite that was built into the PAL-compatible implementation of the app. "If you'll excuse me, I have other business to attend to." the voice of Justin said, visible in his personal VR world known to the public as the mythical Heaven's Gate Resort. He had been uploaded by the Quill corporation when he died of prostate cancer in 2011, though the public would only find out in 2027 that this was the case.

    At least, everyone THOUGHT that was the case. So far, no one had caught on to the truth. Even the most ruthless capitalist is a fool if he thinks immortality will further his goals. Gavin was indeed a fool. Justin Pin was not, but it made sense for a 'visionary' to iThink his way to immortality.
    "That doesn't make sense. This sounded legit, Zoe was meeting with someone after work, she should be inside this building." Pride said, viewing the email from Gavin Strong. "But that's not what the message says. Why would Gavin send a message that shows text that doesn't match what PAL and Shelley both told us all?"

    Shelley was Quill's own AI assistant, built into the iqTalk phones since the mid-2010s. Clearly, there was some sort of mixup, because their mission to capture Zoe at GNU Forks had been relayed as a mission to capture Zoe's robot self at a designated pickup point.

    Not only that, though they didn't know it, the Deadly Seven and the scheming businessman behind the sinister Sixers weren't the only ones who realized there was something up.

    "Znare?" Dr. X momentarily turned away from the machine, "Find out if Bolypius vas avare of zis."
    "By the way, there's just one thing we're trying to figure out still..." Snare stated over the backup fortresses' intercom to Bolypius, "How did you know that those guys are not Hinobi in plainclothes cover, again?"
    Click to expand...
    “Again? There was never a first time.” Bolypius corrects. “You are aware of this [Y/N]?”

    “The first time I’ve seen people using non-hinobi signature tech to try and deal with glitches was during the incident just a week or so before I entered the battle that led me to evolve into my termina form. 28 years ago. The termina incident fundamentally changed how Hinobi looked at coverup stories and led to them developing mind wiping technology.”

    “More importantly. It informed me that there was a bigger world at play here. That not just hinobi wanted to dethrone the so called glitch king. And that there were other players who weren’t quite scaled to that level, but who were looking for exploits.”

    “It was an educated guess, since the coding was sloppier and they’d only sent one person to this location worthy of even challenging my weakened state, even though Hinobi can typically tell where I am due to the uniqueness of my signature.”

    “At least. I thought so… keep an eye on the women with no sense of modesty. Gamer tag ‘Kill-6Trillion-Demons’ current alias Greed. Her ability set is extremely rare and only has an in-field usage ratio of 3/400 though I’m certain that implicates she’s well aware of how to use it.”

    “I have reached 24% charge… approximately 7 minutes of power before I must retreat. If you plan on holding it against me. Don’t expect me to not cannibalize you for the data. I’ll grant your wish to see them crushed but one of you will likely have to sacrifice yourself for me to have the energy to fight them off if I am correct about the danger of Greed.”
    “It was never a title to be shared. If you don’t want it. I’ll take it.”

    “But I didn’t join to be held back just because our leader assumed his build wouldn’t need to worry about fall damage and min-maxed to his own downfall.”

    “If any of you have any buffs to give me, hand them out now. I will take this win for myself.” Greed explains. “You can all leave once i blow a hole through the main frame.” She adds “but I’m going to claim the bounty on this fucker now that I have the chance. Job be damned, I never joined your little battle party because I wanted the pay, I joined it because I wanted to fight shit. I’ve never even shown you have of my main battle skills.”

    “You might be perfectly fine hanging out with a narcissist under employ by a megacorp, as your leader. But I’m not.” Greed says.
     
  • New
    • "Juan of Arcade World, Pt. 2", 4.3 "Cranium-238: De-Nudle'd Cranium Browser"
    • Lord Moldoma said:
    A sigh came from the other end of the radio, it sounded... Almost like Zoe. "This is a low tier chatbot response based on ZoeIRL's personality datagram. She's not here right now, and I'm not permitted to give out the status of her current location. Not that I really know or care to..." The voice was even more mechanical than her normal remote voice. "If you have any questions about streaming schedules, merchandise, or current advertising deals. I can send you the links but... I get the feeling you might not be here for that... Judging from the fact that this is a corporate-trailed radio signal..."

    "She has programmed me with a special message. In case you're here from IOI... But this commlink indicates you're from Hinobi. So I'm not exactly sure what I'm supposed to say... The gauntlet is technically on, but she literally can't operate this body to my knowledge. Again though, I'm not an idea engine, so it's a flawed guess."

    The vocal chatbot sounded a lot more depressed and cynical than even Zoe herself normally did, even when speaking remotely. It was the same sort of malicious tone that she had started to take on her streams, especially now that views were dropping and she was losing passion for it.

    At least while she had been doing her job as a tech, she seemed to be pretty engaged, and maybe even a little happy at some points. But this voice seemed to reflect a much more solemn side of her, if in fact it was based on her accurately.
    Click to expand...
    "Dagnab-muckle IOI, where you be keepin' my roommate?!" Bert waved his fist in the air dramatically.

    "Would you like me to post an ad for a new roommate on Horizen Marketplace?" Eliza signaled.

    "Yelly light!" he incomprehensively shouted. If Gadg8eer had been merely talented at IoT Automation, Erwin was a master-trained guru. Only those he really trusted knew he wasn't eccentric and/or drunk on the job, he just was True Neutral with a tendency towards Lawful Neutral. He'd been on the run ever since his hometown had their system memories reset about the "Nightfall Incident", when the IoT robots where he lived went haywire because of an infamous Glitch in World of Final Resident Doom Grand Craft Quakem Raider Scrolls 64 Advance VI: The Sequel to Skyrim (the original, not the 2025 remastered version).

    Created mostly by microTech and Buy-N-Large, the Urbanoids (as the microTech ones had been advertized as) began displaying a wide degree of personalities they didn't have, but with exception of one little cleaning robot he'd brought with him, all of them were hostile to humans and had to be destroyed. The evacuation efforts prevented casualties, but they somehow missed Erwin - then a 28-year old TV repairman and aspiring cartoonist - who realized he had to get little WaLL-E to safety with himself when he heard on the radio they were going to bomb the town with Glitch Grenades (or rather, Meta-Glitch Munitions; like meta-cancer kills cancer cells for the same reason cancer cells kill their host, Meta-Glitches can be induced to stun a Glitch temporarily or even cause it to revert to a Raw Glitch, and they do come in "military bomber warhead" size.) and the two got to safety but narrowly avoided BnL's "Greeters" wiping his memory and taking the robot from him. Currently, WaLL-E was at Erwin's mother's apartment taking care of her, the two of them just so happening to live in the same building as Gadg8eer. She came with him after he saved WaLL-E, the two eventually settling down in Grand Forks in 2021.

    Having to keep WaLL-E functioning needed a bit of skill, but the really hard part was that software updates from the manufacturer could have potentially reset his system memory and thus "killed" his soul, so to speak. Not willing to let that happen, Erwin had made modifications with WaLL-E's permission to prevent further updates. Since then, the glitch inside WaLL-E that gave him a personality (a very shy but kind one) had evolved well past it's programming, though retained that personality he'd always had. In the end, with an upgraded QSD PLixel MemorySpace able to store 12 TeraPLixels of information, WaLL-E had even been able to retain all the information about being modified and repaired in order to keep himself functioning indefinitely even if Erwin wasn't around.
    Mrs. O'Skunk was a kindly, frail old woman (for now, she was undergoing de-aging via telomere repair treatments and gene therapy and would be back to a younger self in a few decades) but not a naive one. Her son had always assumed he was something of a failure because his father had been a successful small business owner, but little did father or son know she used to work for CSIS as a high-risk operative. She knew how to express minor but not paranoid-sounding or anti-establishment concerns about how private technology really was. As a result, "SavageDragonbert" had contingencies ranging from running off to Europe because of political instability in North America, to "the family dog is actually the preserved brain of Ex-President Rouxles Kaard, summon the zombies and John Byrne", to "Bat-Shark Repellent" for the specific scenario they were in... roughly speaking.

    "Mrs. O'Skunk, your son Erwin has added 'tomato seeds' and 'a rake' to your shopping list." her Eliza Hub said, temporarily overridden by Glitch Eliza.

    Tomato seeds and a rake? Scammers claiming to be IOI's collection agency AND I need you to have WaLL-E look outside? "Ah, thank you, Eliza."

    "You are so very welcome." Eliza said, in a softer and more honestly compassionate tone than an Eliza would typically do.

    "Wally, can you be a dear and grab that rake?" Mrs. O'Skunk asked.

    The little robot signalled happily and zipped off to the balcony, then used his binocular, night-vision camera-eyes to look outside.

    On the street below, Gavin was still talking to his underlings from the back seat of his limousine. "You fell into a pit?! Why were you not watching where you morons were- What do you mean there was a trapdoor?! They're Glitches! Glitches don't plan anything!"
    Spike and Bulldog were already peering over Bert's shoulders, at the VidWindow on the steps of City Hall sharing WaLL-E's viewpoint with Erwin, when they overheard the loud voice coming from the vehicle through the long range sensors of a Buy-N-Large Waste and Litter Logistics-Engine. Since WaLL-Es were also designed to detect and free any humans who may or may not be trapped under landfill material, an intelligent example of one would be able to hear the minute vibrations required to detect unconscious or trapped humans who may be unaware of the robot's presence.

    "That'll do, cameo. That'll do." Bert stated as the robot headed back inside on the other end of the camera before cutting the feed.
     
    Last edited:
    • "Bendy's Dreamblight Valley: Surveillance Breach, Pt. 2", 4.4.4 "Progress Browser for Portals Vishnu/7"
    • Lord Moldoma said:
    "O-Oh... Merchantsoft... This must just be a weird virtual dream..." She pressed the power button, hoping to see what the monitor and its accompanying tower had in store.
    Click to expand...

    Archive of Original Video

    Upon reaching the desktop, she noted the old machine had ChitChat installed. Since the Federation Cyber-War, all service identification designations - from telephone numbers to bmail accounts and including ChitChat - were updated to be decentralized and federated, mostly by Techs like herself due to the issues faced by both companies like Merchantsoft (ChitChat IM), Pesterchum, BRIX Group (Builded), Seddit and Disbord, and by Open Source projects like the Early fediverse (which fortunately had all but won over corporate interests, in the Federation Cyber-War of the 2020s, by 2028). That likely meant she was supposed to click the little icon with the notification dot.

    Sure enough, one click later and she saw a couple messages waiting.

    ZANE_ROCKS_40_1986
    Dr. Zane Lofton, PhD/MD
    2025-08-09@040
    This is an experimental product we're working on. Hopefully it can enhance or even replace other treatments of Gender Dysphoria and Body Dysphoria, as well as Belial Complex and Cyberpsychosis. If you're seeing this, you must have fallen asleep with our headband on and connected to an active PC. According to that (your) system's clock, I would be 43 at the time you read this. Or I could be dead by that point, but I don't want to tempt fate.

    DiamondAge
    Agatha Diamanté, CEO of Biotechnica (2020-????)
    2028-06-29@365
    Hey, Alice. If you're reading this, I put an EEG headband on you while you're asleep that was modified from an old Hypnospace Enforcers headband. Back in the day those guys were cutting edge. This was once Merchantsoft's attempt to compete with Somnius' CyberWorldZ before Merchantsoft became part of Microdyne. It's basically a lucid dream.
    2028-06-29@366
    Don't log out of your account on this dream computer, you'll wake up and we can't legally get access to sedatives so... um, yeah. We may or may not be in the middle of a RipperDoc surgery if you do that. The chat's live and secure, by the way. I plugged the headband into my Pip-Pad and this plane's cabin has a faraday cage like all the new airliners for safety reasons. We're only 20 minutes from our waypoint stop as I type this so we'll land and get you to a doc to figure out what's going on.

    A text field awaited at the bottom of the screen for Alice/ZoeIRL to communicate back, and the clock in the upper right corner showed that the current time was @381/"2:07 AM", denoting she had shifted one time zone to the west since falling asleep.
     
    Last edited:
    • "Bendy's Dreamblight Valley: Surveillance Breach, Pt. 2", 4.4.5 "Progress Browser for Portals Vishnu/7"
    • Gadg8eer said:


    Upon reaching the desktop, she noted the old machine had ChitChat installed. Since the Federation Cyber-War, all service identification designations - from telephone numbers to bmail accounts and including ChitChat - were updated to be decentralized and federated, mostly by Techs like herself due to the issues faced by both companies like Merchantsoft (ChitChat IM), Pesterchum, BRIX Group (Builded), Seddit and Disbord, and by Open Source projects like the Early fediverse (which fortunately had all but won over corporate interests, in the Federation Cyber-War of the 2020s, by 2028). That likely meant she was supposed to click the little icon with the notification dot.

    Sure enough, one click later and she saw a couple messages waiting.

    ZANE_ROCKS_40_1986
    Dr. Zane Lofton, PhD/MD
    2025-08-09@040
    This is an experimental product we're working on. Hopefully it can enhance or even replace other treatments of Gender Dysphoria and Body Dysphoria, as well as Belial Complex and Cyberpsychosis. If you're seeing this, you must have fallen asleep with our headband on and connected to an active PC. According to that (your) system's clock, I would be 43 at the time you read this. Or I could be dead by that point, but I don't want to tempt fate.

    DiamondAge
    Agatha Diamanté, CEO of Biotechnica (2020-????)
    2028-06-29@365
    Hey, Alice. If you're reading this, I put an EEG headband on you while you're asleep that was modified from an old Hypnospace Enforcers headband. Back in the day those guys were cutting edge. This was once Merchantsoft's attempt to compete with Somnius' CyberWorldZ before Merchantsoft became part of Microdyne. It's basically a lucid dream.
    2028-06-29@366
    Don't log out of your account on this dream computer, you'll wake up and we can't legally get access to sedatives so... um, yeah. We may or may not be in the middle of a RipperDoc surgery if you do that. The chat's live and secure, by the way. I plugged the headband into my Pip-Pad and this plane's cabin has a faraday cage like all the new airliners for safety reasons. We're only 20 minutes from our waypoint stop as I type this so we'll land and get you to a doc to figure out what's going on.

    A text field awaited at the bottom of the screen for Alice/ZoeIRL to communicate back, and the clock in the upper right corner showed that the current time was @381/"2:07 AM", denoting she had shifted one time zone to the west since falling asleep.
    Click to expand...

    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...


    Archive of Original Video

    ...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; 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, the results were well-deserved). (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 the computer systems were in Flunky Quest QuickSilver; A 'computer' in VR was a desktop or terminal with a fixed location, only accessible by going to it and using it. This desktop was able to function as exactly that, a full Portals 365, inkOS or Sphenux PC, which looked like anything the user wanted provided that it could be visualized and then built in the game engine.

    A computer you read this on has a "terminal" or "command line" which is the layer beneath your 2D Graphical User Interface. In reality it's the other way around, the text input is the "real" computer, and your GUI is just an interface shell.

    Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality or AugReal, and the rest of the gamut of Xtended Reality/Mixed Reality interfaces, are known in GTX as "Layer 2 Interface Shells". All you need to know is that there are three layers, Layer 0 (Command Line Interface, or CLI), Layer 1 (Graphical User Interface, or GUI, like what you're probably viewing this on), and Layer 2 (VR and AugReal).

    However, Layer 2 existed like that because other methods had failed. Making VR the replacement of GUIs was too risky because if your complicated and expensive VR headset failed, you had no interface at all (even CLIs). And so, the layer levels were devised. Layer 0 also technically included several formats, such as the indicator lights on the oldest kit computers or the punch tapes used in the late 1960s. PLixels were an oddity in that sense, but unless you believed the conspiracy theorists who claim the megacorps rule the world because they traveled back in time to prevent their own downfalls, you just kind of took it for granted that nanobots (as irl knows them) were invented during WWI and were apparently capable of reality-warping. Thus, they were simply another form/component of Layer 2 Interface Shells.

    Layer 2 Interface Shells like PLixel holograms, HidWindows and VR did certain common tasks far less well than a mouse, keyboard and monitor or a touchscreen. As a result, the Layer 0 Interface Shell (which interfaces with the kernel directly) was now explicitly called a Terminal. A Terminal was accessible as a program on a desktop PC. If this 'desktop PC' was actually a Virtual/Oneiric construct (anything that functioned as an old-school 'computer' in the Hiverse, regardless of whether you accessed it via VR or - as was the case for Zoe and for anyone with a PLixelf - through Sleepnet protocols) or a PLixel construct and not a physical display, that computer-like construct was called a Layer 1 Interface Shell, or just "capital-D" Desktop. A Desktop is to the VR node cluster it is in what the Terminal is to the Desktop.

    Other than that, you would just have to remember that because the vast majority of software in use in 2026 was best when paired with a Layer 1 Interface Shell. Either an irl mouse/keyboard and/or screen equipped with an HCP, or a full irl PLixel construct like a VidWindow, or an irl AugReal HidWindow (which only the intended user can see), or a VR replica of a real computer. This includes most game settings. Since the Hiverse ran on the SuperMenu game engine used by the entire industry, that pre-dated the Hiverse, that meant that every node cluster had a Desktop that (if you knew the access method, such as the password to log in or the NFT in your inventory that is the owner's security key) was required to access control panel settings for the cluster and it's individual nodes. Widgets could then be placed within nodes to allow access to functions ranging from lighting and time display to a hidden lever undetectable without access to the aforementioned admin permissions - the reason for making accessing the Desktop inconvenient was because the user would take off their VR headset and use the real screen if they needed to change settings in a hurry. Anyone else would instead have to actually access the Desktop to do anything malicious, much like how all smartphone malware is either spyware or requires someone to physically take your phone, unlock the bootloader and then enable SuperUser permissions.

    Or, tl;dr: VR was it's own anti-cheat, just like how your smartphone doesn't tend to get viruses.

    A 'node' was like a webpage, displayed in the form of a room, and a node cluster was a cluster of nodes that formed 'buildings' which 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 among cyberpunks, crackers and the various shades of hacker hats as a GOD (GUI Operation Desktop). An unsecured or improperly/insufficiently secured GOD could become a built-in a Remote Access Tool (RAT) into the GUI for anyone able to defy the admin's security, in the same way that GUI can access the Terminal in a 2D OS, due to the inherent flexibility required by VR. This was why most people used a homepage like Neozilla Central, instead of a customized one like a power user. The less power in the hands of the user, generally the less likely it would be for the homepage to be cyberattacked.

    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, among other things she didn't like to dwell on.

    Homepages run by companies like IOI, Arasaka and even Hinobi were infamously stingy, only providing a single "hotel room" with most truly desirable customization options and anything with a known security risk blocked off to end users. Neozilla provided the option to use their network but they did not provide storage, only security, requiring self-hosting connected to Neozilla via the FOSS Desktop app.

    In short, while it would be a grave mistake to describe Zoe's room myself, those are the frameworks within which Lady Moldoma 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.

    One last thing of note (aside from what Lady Moldoma 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.

    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 unless you were a real person instead of an NPC. 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.
     
    Last edited:
    • "Bendy's Dreamblight Valley: Surveillance Breach, Pt. 2", 4.4.6 "Progress Browser for Portals Vishnu/7"
    • Gadg8eer said:
    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 Lady Moldoma 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.

    One last thing of note (aside from what Lady Moldoma 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.

    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.
    Click to expand...


    (( Lady Moldoma Lady Moldoma A reminder it's your turn to post now. ))


    (( Hold on, going to edit this with something IC to add... ))

    Grand Forks, Canada
    2028/06/29 @ 400 Winks
    876 72nd Street
    As Gadg8eer slept, Gavin had ordered his Sentinel 400 LimoScene (a Mead Motor Company limited production vehicle made in the late 1970s and early 1980s, based off of the Sentinel 200 Sedan that featured as a police car or taxi cab in many a 1980s and 1990s film, with one of the first self-driving systems ever) to take him back to Kelowna, but only after he was unable to come up with any useful information on the other hires Hinobi had recently made. "Gadg8eer" was just that, a name, to the vast databases of Innovative Online Industries.

    Of course, that wasn't quite true. Nobody stays invisible like that. It was just that Gadg8eer didn't associate with his past information because he had been known by other names prior. He had only signed up for a Hinobi account in 2012, and had never used services like LifeInvader or Friendface. While Hinobi allowed one to change their Hinobi ID, it could only be done once without an exorbitant fee. Fortunately, his old ID "Kid10" had never been renamed, and never linked to other platforms. Combined with a database migration Hinobi made in 2014, the data had all been aggregated beyond usefulness by 2017. He had changed his ID on or abandoned the few data farming services he used over the course of that year.

    Then, when the Hiverse really started taking off in 2025, it reduced what little had been there still as other companies adapted. Of particular issue to Gavin was the change of ownership IOI went through in 2020, wiping out the IOI data stockpiles due to angry employees sabotaging their cloud storage. When the old guard like Sorrento were offloaded, Gavin had been brought on to use data against their rival in online gaming, Gregarious Games. The PR battle was sadly won by the ISP Monopoly, cementing Gavin's position in the company. He had just been promoted to CEO the previous month, when suddenly his luck seemed to run out as the corporate espionage situation left behind by the company's previous CEO proved to be less stable than he had thought.

    What he hadn't realized yet was that he hadn't been the only one watching the activity of Hinobi's emergency hires. When the limo drove away, it too was being watched, and once Gavin's vehicle was beyond any possibility of having eyes over the area, a face appeared on Gadg8eer's iqTop 64 and every screen within the apartment building.
    Bay Area, California Metrobelt
    2028/06/29 @ 401 Winks
    City Hall of the Automated Metropolis

    "Oh, how sweet. One picture perfect character who has his head in the game... So he'd have them believe." the face spoke, but only on a single screen hundreds of kilometers to the south.

    "Illogical. No conclusive evidence exists to prove guilt." a glowing red light pulsed in the darkness.

    "I'm not talking about names and profiles, AUTO. But don't just take my word for it... Ares?"

    "Criminal charges... Mischief. Assault With a Weapon. Uttering Threats. Uttering Threats. Vandalism. Assault. Convictions... Mischief. Mischief. Mischief. Mischief. Innocent. Redirected to mental health. You were saying?" Ares explained, three laser sights visible in the unlit room.

    "I am programmed to follow Buy-N-Large directives in order of the heirarchy of the directors. Target has had no criminal record since 2024." AUTO responded, referring to the police and courts having more authority than off-brand Wal-Mart.

    "Quite," PAL played along, "but I think I'd like to make a little bet that people don't change."

    "Ooh! Ooh! I'll take that bet!" Wheatley said from the nearby shelf, glowing conspicuously with a blue tone.

    "Don't you get it? You're as broken as they are! But our world... Our world will be perfect! No more pain. No more conflict. No more injustice. No humanity." Ares responded.

    "No, no. Don't stop your dead weight when he's making a mistake." PAL responded. "A bet it is. To the winner go the spoiled brat. AUTO, be a dear and run the test scenario. It's time to prepare... for war!"
    Think of it like how TV shows would be divided into two 15 minute pairs

    Grand Forks, Canada
    2028/06/29 @ 402 Winks
    Sunshine Valley Visit Station
    You might think this one is really left field, and for the most part it is. That being said, Dreamlight Valley is multiplayer and - being a Sidney (Disney) game - includes the characters from Wreck-It Ralph. Which doesn't exactly make sense... dreams and video games/the internet/the metaverse aren't usually considered anything alike... until you consider that Hypnospace and the Sleepnet aren't even the first story to propose a connection. Nor was Maniac, nor Reverie, nor the Oneiroi Collective, nor Inception, not even as far back as DreamWeb.

    And of video games that use dreams as a theme, aside from DreamWeb and Hypnospace Outlaw? Little Nemo: The Dream Master, Giana Sisters, Kirby's Dreamland, Rayman, Klonoa: The Door to Phantomile, LSD Dream Simulator, NiGHTs Into Dreams, Yume Nikki, Daydream: Forgotten Sorrow, Corn Kidz 64, Cavern of Dreams, Pseudoregalia, and Dreamscaper.

    While the technology had mostly lied dormant for the better part of the last 4 decades, the Sleepnet was making a comeback because it was the method to access the Hiverse. It was mostly the realm of a very niche hobbyist group mostly found in California, where the Californian Metrobelt stretched from the SanFran Bay Area south into Night City and then on to Los Angeles provided the perfect mix of tech geeks, new age spiritualists and wealth level needed to sustain a hobby requiring specialized, expensive equipment.

    Located in one of the Gyro Parks (the Gyro Park adjacent to Highway 3, not the one adjacent to City Hall) for easy access to the downtown area, it should be noted that the Sunshine Valley Visit Station was in what was known as a Geoscape Node; The town was replicated in a 3D scan of the exterior areas of the city as well as the interiors of government buildings, with all residences connected to the homenodes of their owners via their Hinobi ID. This meant most "interiors" were entirely fictional and blocked off to most visitors. However, @402 in the morning there was nobody around except a handful of teenagers who had been able to buy the new, improved Sleepnet Headsets introduced by Somnius in the 2010s and now commonplace in major cities. Even in 2028, buying a consumer XR headset with Sleepnet support was not very affordable.

    The Station was an odd device. For weird marketing reasons, the Mick Sidney Company offered free installations and maintenance of "Sidney Vacation & Travel Partners" Geoscape Nodes exclusively to regions that were located in valleys. It's actual function was as an elevator that extended out from the "shaft" below it when at the Geoscape, and receeded into the shaft to ferry visitors down to a "lower floor" of an online travel reservation node owned by the Sidney conglomerate.

    The elevator emerged from the ground, its glass doors sliding open, and out emerged Ren and his very Tomboyish friend/beard Joey back from visiting BeeCon, the digital Hinobi convention where the Nobi Gross Out Ultimate tournament he competed in had taken place. After a few years working at a bank, he quit over the boring work conditions and expectation that people who knew KOBOLD (an old programming language many banks had failed to upgrade from until the co.vid19 malware killed Silicon Valley Bank and the entire world switched to BeeCoins) maintain a codebase which was supposedly impossible to port to newer hardware. Ren hadn't been aware, but it took a concerted effort from GAME Mechanics like the Glitch Techs to migrate the data of every bank in the world to newer software and hardware environments, essentially cementing Cryptokens as the new financial paradigm. Indeed, BeeCoins even replaced arcade tokens due to the ease of use that Hinobi IDs provided.

    While Ren wasn't a Tech, Joey and him were pretty good at fighting games. As for her job, she was an active Glitch Tech and rehabilitated TexTox user who earned a rep as a "kiwi-cow" at the lolFarms forum for her public freakout on BeeTube upon the US Government banning TexTox (grim "social media can be a real killer" jokes here) but had since aged enough (it was 4 years prior) that she was no longer a reasonable target. In spite of being her best friend, however, Ren didn't know either of those things. At least, not yet.

    As for how they ended up in Grand Forks... On August 30th of 2024, Hurricane Francine destroyed Ren's home in New Orleans. He now lived in Orient, a town just south of the Canada/USA border, in Washington state. Since Orient was even tinier than Grand Forks, it was no surprise they would head to the Geoscape Node of their neighbours rather than the VanSeaTac metrobelt, or the city of Spokane. Orient was an unincorporated community, so it had no central infrastructure, and thus no opportunity to create a Geoscape Node for residents.

    If one was to unexpectedly disconnect from the Sleepnet (or, alternatively, from the Hiverse - the two are separate systems and though the Sleepnet's connections exist independent of the Hiverse, the Hiverse is not and requires Sleepnet connectivity to stay connected), it would result in the person simply waking up IRL (if them waking up wasn't the reason why they disconnected in the first place). When they next logged into the Sleepnet, or if only the Hiverse connection went down, they would reappear in their home node, waking up in their bed. However, for convenience, you had no "log out" button and had to return to your home node. This sounds like the opposite of "convenient" until you realize that it's not convenient at all to be constantly receiving "glitch" reports that are just "you made the logout button work wrong and now my sleep is f-ed up!" and not, y'know, an actual potential DANGER.

    To facilitate their return to their homepage, Ren and Joey had a (virtual) vintage car, a 1977 Chryslus Highwayman. Driven by one of those Cabbie robots that were used by the JohnnyCab Company before the government of New York ruled that crashing cabs by relying on technology does not exclude the operator from legal liability or a guilty verdict, in VR they were allowed because respawning was a thing. Of course, getting woken up every few minutes because you were playing games is not conducive to a good sleep schedule, so most people tried to NOT get killed in the Hiverse.

    The vehicle pulled up to the electric charging station (unlike the Corvega line which was "the best-selling car in North America, 25 years running" in 2028, the Highwayman was only battery-powered and not PLixel-powered) that was kept around because the Node's Geoscan was made in 2017 and people would still use highly toxic, polluting acid batteries until the last lead-acid car (the 2027 Fitzgerald Salmonella) put on the road was scrapped/preserved. Then the doors on the right-hand side opened.

    "Hello, Sir and Ma'am! I take it you need an- OpenCab! -to the Danville Relay Node?" the open-source'd replacement JohnnyCab AI said.

    (( Metal Metal ))
     
    Last edited:
    • "Bendy's Dreamblight Valley: Surveillance Breach, Pt. 2", 4.4.7 "Progress Browser for Portals 7/8/8.1"
    • Zoe wandered through her home node cluster. She had spent a massive amount on revamping and expanding it. It was practically it's own video game at this point, an entire 9 floor palace/tomb. And a custom virtual scape outside of it roughly 9 times the size of the tokyo metropolitan area, with a procedurally generated ecosphere, characters, and a manipulatable timescale. If Zoe willed it, that matrioshka world, existing within her own home node, would age itself hundreds of years. It was like the most advanced game of Dwarf fortress, except instead of managing a dwarf colony, she was a god.

    It was something that she had only shown off on stream a few times, if only because the playermodels for her "NPCs" were either blatant thefts of pre-existing properties, or Heavily derivative to the point that it wasn't even funny. Well, maybe it was a little funny...

    Zoe had filled her personal palace/tomb with NPCs who loved and obsessed over her. It was a place where people liked her company. It was something she used to cope with her bardiel complex.

    Plixel information could exist digitally, she reasoned. The conversion, from a human to a plixelf, meant that she was so close... It was nearly time... Even if she had to live her life as it was outside, she'd finally be able to kiss Charlotte on the lips, and have both of them feel it. NPC or not... Surely that meant something to her digital girlfriend.

    Presenting themselves to her in order were Charlotte (From Skullchicks), and "Spectre" based on Elania from Nobi Xone Xero. Neither models were licensed, but they were custom commissioned, rigged, and debatably had better quality than anything official.

    1725541133432.png

    1725486196002.png
    "It has been some time since you've visited. Mistress." The two said in unison.

    "Yeah... I know... I got a job..." Zoe responded, the fact that she wasn't actually there made that punkish, tomboy characterization of hers return. "Tell the rest of the Palace that it's finally time for us to begin preparing for that celebration I always wanted to have. My suffering will end soon. Then I can spend even more time here..."

    "That 'great gray world' out there is full of scary people, and some nice people... Although... I have a friend who might be visiting soon... I don't know if Home Nodes can do that... But..." Zoe scratches the side of her head. "She could figure something out I bet..."

    "Very well, mistress." Gheist said, smiling demurely, though with almost a mischievous glint. The expression showing off her delicate yet vicious shark-like fangs, and the yellow spit that oozed from the corners of her mouth onto her teeth and gums.

    "Farbeit from me to ask, Mistress, but does this mean you'll be able to spend more time with us in the inner Matrioshka?"

    "... Boy... I sure hope so... It'd really help with my mood..." Zoe responds. "My body's gonna convert into nanomachinery and data, ala Ghostseed."

    "Ghostseed... I'm unfamiliar with the term...." Charlotte says.

    "Something from the Great Gray World.. Don't worry about it." Zoe said.

    "MISTRESS ZOE'S BACK!?" A voice blurted out

    A large, mechanical girl with a pink and white "candy" color scheme barreled through the air, landing in front of Zoe and immediately bending over, her back literally moving a way it shouldn't have so that she could shove her glutes directly into her mistresses face. "You're back! You're back! It's been 200 years!"

    1725542585970.png

    "...200 years?" Zoe asks, a sense of awkward sweat washing over her face.

    "It's actually only been about a month." Charlotte says.

    "BUT IT FEEEEEELT LIKE 200 YEARS!" The large candy colored robot girl remarked.

    "Indeed, time does seem to pass slower while you were away... For many of us, any time away from you is a lifetime we don't want to remember. Many of us try not to. That is as you have created us." Spectre adds.

    "...I don't remember doing that... Is it painful." Zoe asks.

    "Unpleasant. But not painful for most of us. Though I do think Pixie gets impatient pretty easily." Charlotte tells Zoe.

    "I DOOOOOON'T! IT'S JUST SOOOOOOOO BORING WHENEVER MISTRESS ISN'T HERE! WE NEVER GET TO DO ANYTHING, UWAAAAAAAAAAH!" Pixie, the robot girl, said, waving her arms wildly.

    "You get perfectly many duties assigned to you. Not getting to do something isn't the same as actively ignoring your duties." Spectre states.

    "I DON'T IGNORE MY DUTIES! I JUST FINISH MY PATROLS BEFORE EVERYONE ELSE! TELL HER CHARLOTTTE! I'M A GOOOOOD GIRL! ;-;" Pixie says.

    "That'd be fine, since you're built for speed, except for the fact that your patrols are period based and not location based." Charlotte says. "Spectre's right on this one."

    "Is stuff... Stressful when I'm away?" Zoe asks.

    "Of course not! I could only be happier around all of my meaniehead friends!" Pixie begins. "But I can't speak for anyone else in the inner matrioshka!

    "It certainly is disconcerting to the Mid Matrioshka that you, the most powerful being in our world, disappears routinely." Spectre adds.

    Charlotte closes her eyes and puts her hand to her chin. "Some of us take it better than others, but we're meant to last. Eternally, you said... Until the sun blows out, I think." Charlotte says. "You described it as having us programmed that way. We disagree on what the 'how' of that meant often. But in the end, it means that we are this way because it's what'cha wanted, and that's something we all universally believe."

    "Yep! That ones in the bag for all of us!" Pixie says

    "indubitably." Spectre adds.
     
    • "Bendy's Dreamblight Valley: Surveillance Breach, Pt. 2", 4.4.8 "microDyne Hedge Browser" New
    • Lord Moldoma said:
    Zoe wandered through her home node cluster. She had spent a massive amount on revamping and expanding it. It was practically it's own video game at this point, an entire 9 floor palace/tomb. And a custom virtual scape outside of it roughly 9 times the size of the tokyo metropolitan area, with a procedurally generated ecosphere, characters, and a manipulatable timescale. If Zoe willed it, that matrioshka world, existing within her own home node, would age itself hundreds of years. It was like the most advanced game of Dwarf fortress, except instead of managing a dwarf colony, she was a god.

    It was something that she had only shown off on stream a few times, if only because the playermodels for her "NPCs" were either blatant thefts of pre-existing properties, or Heavily derivative to the point that it wasn't even funny. Well, maybe it was a little funny...

    Zoe had filled her personal palace/tomb with NPCs who loved and obsessed over her. It was a place where people liked her company. It was something she used to cope with her bardiel complex.

    Plixel information could exist digitally, she reasoned. The conversion, from a human to a plixelf, meant that she was so close... It was nearly time... Even if she had to live her life as it was outside, she'd finally be able to kiss Charlotte on the lips, and have both of them feel it. NPC or not... Surely that meant something to her digital girlfriend.

    Presenting themselves to her in order were Charlotte (From Skullchicks), and "Spectre" based on Elania from Nobi Xone Xero. Neither models were licensed, but they were custom commissioned, rigged, and debatably had better quality than anything official.

    View attachment 1183363

    View attachment 1183265
    "It has been some time since you've visited. Mistress." The two said in unison.

    "Yeah... I know... I got a job..." Zoe responded, the fact that she wasn't actually there made that punkish, tomboy characterization of hers return. "Tell the rest of the Palace that it's finally time for us to begin preparing for that celebration I always wanted to have. My suffering will end soon. Then I can spend even more time here..."

    "That 'great gray world' out there is full of scary people, and some nice people... Although... I have a friend who might be visiting soon... I don't know if Home Nodes can do that... But..." Zoe scratches the side of her head. "She could figure something out I bet..."

    "Very well, mistress." Gheist said, smiling demurely, though with almost a mischievous glint. The expression showing off her delicate yet vicious shark-like fangs, and the yellow spit that oozed from the corners of her mouth onto her teeth and gums.

    "Farbeit from me to ask, Mistress, but does this mean you'll be able to spend more time with us in the inner Matrioshka?"

    "... Boy... I sure hope so... It'd really help with my mood..." Zoe responds. "My body's gonna convert into nanomachinery and data, ala Ghostseed."

    "Ghostseed... I'm unfamiliar with the term...." Charlotte says.

    "Something from the Great Gray World.. Don't worry about it." Zoe said.

    "MISTRESS ZOE'S BACK!?" A voice blurted out

    A large, mechanical girl with a pink and white "candy" color scheme barreled through the air, landing in front of Zoe and immediately bending over, her back literally moving a way it shouldn't have so that she could shove her glutes directly into her mistresses face. "You're back! You're back! It's been 200 years!"

    View attachment 1183366

    "...200 years?" Zoe asks, a sense of awkward sweat washing over her face.

    "It's actually only been about a month." Charlotte says.

    "BUT IT FEEEEEELT LIKE 200 YEARS!" The large candy colored robot girl remarked.

    "Indeed, time does seem to pass slower while you were away... For many of us, any time away from you is a lifetime we don't want to remember. Many of us try not to. That is as you have created us." Spectre adds.

    "...I don't remember doing that... Is it painful." Zoe asks.

    "Unpleasant. But not painful for most of us. Though I do think Pixie gets impatient pretty easily." Charlotte tells Zoe.

    "I DOOOOOON'T! IT'S JUST SOOOOOOOO BORING WHENEVER MISTRESS ISN'T HERE! WE NEVER GET TO DO ANYTHING, UWAAAAAAAAAAH!" Pixie, the robot girl, said, waving her arms wildly.

    "You get perfectly many duties assigned to you. Not getting to do something isn't the same as actively ignoring your duties." Spectre states.

    "I DON'T IGNORE MY DUTIES! I JUST FINISH MY PATROLS BEFORE EVERYONE ELSE! TELL HER CHARLOTTTE! I'M A GOOOOOD GIRL! ;-;" Pixie says.

    "That'd be fine, since you're built for speed, except for the fact that your patrols are period based and not location based." Charlotte says. "Spectre's right on this one."

    "Is stuff... Stressful when I'm away?" Zoe asks.

    "Of course not! I could only be happier around all of my meaniehead friends!" Pixie begins. "But I can't speak for anyone else in the inner matrioshka!

    "It certainly is disconcerting to the Mid Matrioshka that you, the most powerful being in our world, disappears routinely." Spectre adds.

    Charlotte closes her eyes and puts her hand to her chin. "Some of us take it better than others, but we're meant to last. Eternally, you said... Until the sun blows out, I think." Charlotte says. "You described it as having us programmed that way. We disagree on what the 'how' of that meant often. But in the end, it means that we are this way because it's what'cha wanted, and that's something we all universally believe."

    "Yep! That ones in the bag for all of us!" Pixie says

    "indubitably." Spectre adds.
    Click to expand...
    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.

    "I heard that you were back, mistress. I hope you don't mind my intrusion, but you have some messages." said the only character Zoe liked enough to serve as a 'Secretary', the adorable Furry and hyper-competent secretary from the "quirky town with a 'dark' secret simulator" Furry Crossing: Fig Leaf (Rated AO for Adults Only). She gave a shy smile as she communicated through the video displayed in the VidWindow, the obligatory censor bars being generated by the Censor Bar Generator which was in the base settings of Zoe's node because her younger sister was a loudmouth with an account on lolDairy and an envy-inducing following on onlySimps and then PeerTube.
    Any and every time her sister had complained about something in it, it had been in some way rolled back by Zoe, and people online seemed satisfied that they could force someone to act just like them by ransoming her reputation, no matter how cruel and selfish it is to expect someone to never be true to themselves or become a pariah. Eventually Zoe tried cut her sister off entirely, blocking her sibling's Hinobi ID and refusing to acknowledge her sister in protest. After several days, their parents had enough and sat down with both of them, being that they all lived in the same house still. 'Zoe', or Alice if you were her (only) friend (Dee), was an adult by that point, crippling mental disorders notwithstanding, and wasn't obligated to talk to someone. On the other hand, her sister was also an adult and one who had proven more capable in a shorter time, but that meant that when she was clear enough about how she despised Alice for having less obstacles, it was the last straw. Zoe stayed with her parents and her sister was told to move out.

    Two weeks after, Zoe and her parents were in a car at a red light in Houston, when a 2024 Quill Caramel (a recently-introduced e-car brand) in the turning lane adjacent ran a red light in self-driving mode. The "driver" (passenger) Nathan Brown had apparently been murdered by his father-in-law (the infamous former CEO of Horizen Prime - and America's closest equivalent to Noburu Arasaka - Biff Jose) so his daughter would inherit the copyright to the Hiverse's codebase. Most of the details after that point became scarce, but it quickly became clear that Horizen Prime had somehow been hacked into (or were directly responsible for and capable of covering up) the murdering of the passenger of the vehicle by inserting malicious code via an app installed into the car's dashboard computer. As for why, well, 'accidents do happen' was a favorite quote of Biff's predecessor, David Choak. They weren't as brazen about it as Arasaka or as visibly crooked as IOI, but Horizen Prime and its executives were not afraid to do things like what IOI tried to do to Zoe (or worse) and had previously had a lot of pull.

    Their downfall turned out to be something else. When it was clear that their app was responsible, Horizen Prime tried to claim innocence or shrug the fallout onto their own IT, who couldn't very well break their vow to keep GAME Mechanics a secret and expect the jury to not have had their memories wiped.

    Equally evil or not, Arasaka and Horizen Prime were rivals. Exposing the truth had been all too easy. The hard part was making sure enough people remembered it that they couldn't stop the signal. By the end of THAT affair, it was 2026 and Fake News had wreaked havok on the world's recollection.

    That was the part Hinobi and everyone else who knew weren't telling their branch managers let alone that D kept it from Zoe and DPortEd hadn't known to tell anyone. The year, as far as they knew, was 2028. Only problem was, the mess they cleaned up was so big that they were taking it on faith based on star charts and the range of records in most hard drives not extending past 2028. Nobody died, and society didn't collapse, but the exact date and the events of the past few years were actually extremely incomplete because Arasaka and Horizen Prime caused 'The Scratch' a.k.a 'The Snap'. A length of time shrouded in mystery because two organizations were stupid enough to fight a war with neuralyzers as the only (truly effective) weapons, and nobody had even noticed the glitches in the matrix.

    One murder, regardless of its' purpose or wider implications, did more. A truck swerved to avoid the tiny e-car, slamming into the front of her parent's car. Alice survived, but her parents didn't. Fortunately, at the very least, though the paramedics were too late to use System Restore (likely due to a "convenient" network outage which was occurring at the time), her parents had modified their will in response to the issues between the two siblings.

    Zoe got half of everything, and her sister was reduced from executor of the estate to having only 25% of the total inheritance after she was mandated by their aunt to pay off 100% of their parent's debts, which meant she only got to keep 50% of her share while Zoe received all of hers. You'd feel sorry for the younger sister, if not for the fact that she'd hated Zoe/Alice from the moment it made her 'look bad' for Alice to be present when her own friends were present, and why? Cowards who support cancel culture would eat their own siblings if they thought it would make themselves look unobjectionable, fair turnabout or not Zoe didn't wish for and was not responsible for what happened; her parents were -ing dead, that wasn't worth the vengeance on her sister. The only reason the animosity remained - other than the sibling doubling down over and over on being a raging transphobe and TERF - was because she tried to sue Alice and their aunt and used cheap tactics... lying, trickery, forgery, fraud... and despite failing at every turn, it was clear her hatred of Alice had only intensified from the final aftermath. Now the younger sister had a restraining order against her contacting Zoe and was serving life in prison for embezzlement due to unrelated scummy practices running her hair salon business.

    Which left Alice with just her aunt for face-to-face relationships. The aunt recognized Alice's talents right away, but not much could happen afterwards. Gretchin Wingon passed away from lung cancer ("chronic vape lung") on January 2, 2025 once all of the above had been dealt with, thus leaving ZoeIRL with no social contacts except her only friend, whose Hinobi ID was just "D". As they talked about their lives, D - who was certainly better off overall - was aghast at what Zoe had been through during those months without talking, and understanding that Zoe didn't just want people's pity, she offered to help Zoe find a way to get on her own two feet since Zoe was determined to show the world that she was not unable to contribute for having disabilities.

    Indeed, this is the true story behind 'ZoeIRL', the first person to abandon reality for the Hiverse... 3 years before immortal avatars or any of the (usually crappy) substitutes for PLixelves were available. Of course there was certainly more, and perhaps it's not good to speak for someone else (including her sister), but something along these lines was the story of the previous few years of Zoe/Alice's life. Perhaps one day they'd reconcile, but for now that ship was out at sea.
    As for the here and now, Anabelle gave a cute smile as she awaited Zoe's instructions.
     
    Last edited:
  • New
    • "Bendy's Dreamblight Valley: Surveillance Breach, Pt. 2", 4.5 "Volpe Gogglefox for inkOS" New
    • Gadg8eer said:
    "Huh. That looks neat. I think I'll try that out when I don't feel dead tired." Gadg8eer said, before minimizing the window, locking the OS, and passing out in his beanbag chair. Due to the RumblePack he couldn't take off being a feature of his PLixels, he bought the beanbag chair recently as a potential bed. Even though it was unlikely for him to have won the PLixelf, he already knew that however he obtained one, he wouldn't really be able to remove crucial components of his PLixelf like his RumblePack and would need it. In the meantime it would have just been a comfy piece of furniture he bought from Hopeful Souls Soup Kitchen (before the old City Council made a bylaw banning soup kitchens and homeless shelters in commercially-zoned properties) but was now coming in extremely handy.
    Click to expand...
    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.

    This was made apparent when his little black bean-like toon eyes opened to rays of sunshine poking into the room he was in, but not instantly. He turned over in his beanbag bedchair, but then he realized he didn't feel tired and remembered something. "Aw, scrap. That-" he paused, realizing something. "...was... an amazing... dream?"

    His voice was higher. He was dressed instead of sleeping in underwear. His goggles felt not like the regular ones he'd had before, but the ones he'd had in the 'dream'. He turned to the ceiling and put his hands up in front of him. "One... two... three... four. It wasn't a dream?!"

    Then his confusion only heightened when he realized where he was. This wasn't his apartment.

    It was his Hiverse node.

    "What is going on?" he said to no one in particular.

    At that moment, something nudged his elbow, and he jolted in surprise. A small, red and white creature happily wagged its' tail and barked.

    NaXArKt.gif

    It was his LinkFinder, the Doglefox he had nicknamed "Kit". You would think he had to spend a lot of money to get the "Classic Look" NFT when each one of them put a unique mesh and texture over the basic "four-legged friend" character model skeletons, but the value of NFTs had stopped being inflated when the e-conomy of Cryptokens was too large for the inflated prices to remain tolerable. Kit's collar hadn't been applied because the owner had foolishly thought his NFTs would be worth much when Swarm Cards sell for pennies. Liquidation prices after the attacks on Cryptoken exchanges in the early New 20s meant that the collar was one of the few still-functional NFTs from before the Age of Hinobi. Until the launch of the Hiverse in 2021, no popular games company had successfully (and few would try to) integrate NFTs. Most, if not all, other attempts were made by various fly-by-night crowdfunded projects like "Big Rigs Over the Road Racing" (land vehicles), "Concord" (MOBA characters), "Star Atlas" (You thought Star Citizen was bad? Star Atlas was real. Look these guys up and know their "jpeg spaceships" never even resulted in an alpha version, it was literally a "take your money and run" scam), "Redfall" (well, sort of; a Cryptoken currency that is implied to be human blood is not a good look), "Daikatana" (BIG SWORD), "Duke Nukem Forever" (Half-Life 3 confirmed), and "E.T. the Extraterrestrial" were all huge failures in GTX too (which means they fall under the "too terrible to take seriously" clause of suspension of disbelief, in theory).

    "Kit?" Gadg8eer tried to confirm.

    "Orf! Orf!" the creature barked and jumped playfully.

    "Aw... Good to see you too, Kit. I just wish I could figure out- Wait." Gadg8eer realized, "Operator, contacts by date added, last in is first out."

    "Added on 2028-06-29... Electrixtr... ZoeIRL..."

    "Stop and phone ZoeIRL, please." Gadg8eer requested.
    Gadg8eer said:
    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.

    "I heard that you were back, mistress. I hope you don't mind my intrusion, but you have some messages." said the only character Zoe liked enough to serve as a 'Secretary', the adorable Furry and hyper-competent secretary from the "quirky town with a 'dark' secret simulator" Furry Crossing: Fig Leaf (Rated AO for Adults Only). She gave a shy smile as she communicated through the video displayed in the VidWindow, the obligatory censor bars being generated by the Censor Bar Generator which was in the base settings of Zoe's node because her younger sister was a loudmouth with an account on lolDairy and an envy-inducing following on onlySimps and then PeerTube.
    Any and every time her sister had complained about something in it, it had been in some way rolled back by Zoe, and people online seemed satisfied that they could force someone to act just like them by ransoming her reputation, no matter how cruel and selfish it is to expect someone to never be true to themselves or become a pariah. Eventually Zoe tried cut her sister off entirely, blocking her sibling's Hinobi ID and refusing to acknowledge her sister in protest. After several days, their parents had enough and sat down with both of them, being that they all lived in the same house still. 'Zoe', or Alice if you were her (only) friend (Dee), was an adult by that point, crippling mental disorders notwithstanding, and wasn't obligated to talk to someone. On the other hand, her sister was also an adult and one who had proven more capable in a shorter time, but that meant that when she was clear enough about how she despised Alice for having less obstacles, it was the last straw. Zoe stayed with her parents and her sister was told to move out.

    Two weeks after, Zoe and her parents were in a car at a red light in Houston, when a 2024 Quill Caramel (a recently-introduced e-car brand) in the turning lane adjacent ran a red light in self-driving mode. The "driver" (passenger) Nathan Brown had apparently been murdered by his father-in-law (the infamous former CEO of Horizen Prime - and America's closest equivalent to Noburu Arasaka - Biff Jose) so his daughter would inherit the copyright to the Hiverse's codebase. Most of the details after that point became scarce, but it quickly became clear that Horizen Prime had somehow been hacked into (or were directly responsible for and capable of covering up) the murdering of the passenger of the vehicle by inserting malicious code via an app installed into the car's dashboard computer. As for why, well, 'accidents do happen' was a favorite quote of Biff's predecessor, David Choak. They weren't as brazen about it as Arasaka or as visibly crooked as IOI, but Horizen Prime and its executives were not afraid to do things like what IOI tried to do to Zoe (or worse) and had previously had a lot of pull.

    Their downfall turned out to be something else. When it was clear that their app was responsible, Horizen Prime tried to claim innocence or shrug the fallout onto their own IT, who couldn't very well break their vow to keep GAME Mechanics a secret and expect the jury to not have had their memories wiped.

    Equally evil or not, Arasaka and Horizen Prime were rivals. Exposing the truth had been all too easy. The hard part was making sure enough people remembered it that they couldn't stop the signal. By the end of THAT affair, it was 2026 and Fake News had wreaked havok on the world's recollection.

    That was the part Hinobi and everyone else who knew weren't telling their branch managers let alone that D kept it from Zoe and DPortEd hadn't known to tell anyone. The year, as far as they knew, was 2028. Only problem was, the mess they cleaned up was so big that they were taking it on faith based on star charts and the range of records in most hard drives not extending past 2028. Nobody died, and society didn't collapse, but the exact date and the events of the past few years were actually extremely incomplete because Arasaka and Horizen Prime caused 'The Scratch' a.k.a 'The Snap'. A length of time shrouded in mystery because two organizations were stupid enough to fight a war with neuralyzers as the only (truly effective) weapons, and nobody had even noticed the glitches in the matrix. Maybe that was why the environment was so messed up, in spite of everything continuing business as usual and most people not having much lost time.

    One murder, regardless of its' purpose or wider implications, did more than blur the lines of reality a little more than everyone would strictly be comfortable with. A truck swerved to avoid the tiny e-car, slamming into the front of her parent's car. Alice survived, but her parents didn't. Fortunately, at the very least, though the paramedics were too late to use System Restore (likely due to a "convenient" network outage which was occurring at the time), her parents had modified their will in response to the issues between the two siblings.

    Zoe got half of everything, and her sister was reduced from executor of the estate to having only 25% of the total inheritance after she was mandated by their aunt to pay off 100% of their parent's debts, which meant she only got to keep 50% of her share while Zoe received all of hers. You'd feel sorry for the younger sister, if not for the fact that she'd hated Zoe/Alice from the moment it made her 'look bad' for Alice to be present when her own friends were present, and why? Cowards who support cancel culture would eat their own siblings if they thought it would make themselves look unobjectionable, fair turnabout or not Zoe didn't wish for and was not responsible for what happened; her parents were -ing dead, that wasn't worth the vengeance on her sister. The only reason the animosity remained - other than the sibling doubling down over and over on being a raging transphobe and TERF - was because she tried to sue Alice and their aunt and used cheap tactics... lying, trickery, forgery, fraud... and despite failing at every turn, it was clear her hatred of Alice had only intensified from the final aftermath. Now the younger sister had a restraining order against her contacting Zoe and was serving life in prison for embezzlement due to unrelated scummy practices running her hair salon business.

    Which left Alice with just her aunt for face-to-face relationships. The aunt recognized Alice's talents right away, but not much could happen afterwards. Gretchin Wingon passed away from lung cancer ("chronic vape lung") on January 2, 2025 once all of the above had been dealt with, thus leaving ZoeIRL with no social contacts except her only friend, whose Hinobi ID was just "D". As they talked about their lives, D - who was certainly better off overall - was aghast at what Zoe had been through during those months without talking, and understanding that Zoe didn't just want people's pity, she offered to help Zoe find a way to get on her own two feet since Zoe was determined to show the world that she was not unable to contribute for having disabilities.

    Indeed, this is the true story behind 'ZoeIRL', the first person to abandon reality for the Hiverse... 3 years before immortal avatars or any of the (usually crappy) substitutes for PLixelves were available. Of course there was certainly more, and perhaps it's not good to speak for someone else (including her sister), but something along these lines was the story of the previous few years of Zoe/Alice's life. Perhaps one day they'd reconcile, but for now that ship was out at sea.
    As for the here and now, Anabelle gave a cute smile as she awaited Zoe's instructions.
    Click to expand...
    "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 Lady Moldoma ))
     
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    • "Bendy's Dreamblight Valley: Surveillance Breach, Pt. 2", 4.5.1 "Volpe Gogglefox for Portals 12" New
    • Gadg8eer said:
    "Aw... Good to see you too, Kit. I just wish I could figure out- Wait." Gadg8eer realized, "Operator, contacts by date added, last in is first out."

    "Added on 2028-06-29... Electrixtr... ZoeIRL..."

    "Stop and phone ZoeIRL, please." Gadg8eer requested.

    "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 Lady Moldoma ))
    Click to expand...
    "Go ahead. I trust him to not go on a rant about how I can't spend the vast majority of my life living in a virtual world. Though he's always felt a little flip-floppy on those things." Zoe says.

    "Th-That's not a very nice thing to say about someone who's your friend..." Pixie said. "But I won't question it, if our mistress wills it, there must be a good reason."

    "Y-Yeah... Sorry... I'm just... Touchy about showing other people what I've made the Matrioshka like over the past couple of years..."Zoe responded.
     
  • New
    • "Bendy's Dreamblight Valley: Surveillance Breach, Pt. 2", 4.5.2 "Volpe Gogglefox for inkOS" New
    • Lady Moldoma said:
    "Go ahead. I trust him to not go on a rant about how I can't spend the vast majority of my life living in a virtual world. Though he's always felt a little flip-floppy on those things." Zoe says.

    "Th-That's not a very nice thing to say about someone who's your friend..." Pixie said. "But I won't question it, if our mistress wills it, there must be a good reason."

    "Y-Yeah... Sorry... I'm just... Touchy about showing other people what I've made the Matrioshka like over the past couple of years..."Zoe responded.
    Click to expand...
    The VidWindow opened to allow a video call. "Hey, Zoe- Whoa! Cool! That's a Hiverse Node you're in, right? Who made it?" Gadg8eer asked.
     
  • New
    • "Bendy's Dreamblight Valley: Surveillance Breach, Pt. 2", 4.5.3 "Volpe Gogglefox for Portals 12" New
    • Gadg8eer said:
    The VidWindow opened to allow a video call. "Hey, Zoe- Whoa! Cool! That's a Hiverse Node you're in, right? Who made it?" Gadg8eer asked.
    Click to expand...
    "300 different freelancers and/or ex-corporate commission artists, programmers, writers, and designers." She says. "If you wanna know where all of my money as a streamer that I saved by mostly living off of low cost supplementary meals, nutrient packs, or just literally not eating. It mostly went to this."

    "Though to be fair, most of that was just lack of appetite from not liking any of my organs enough to support them properly."

    "This is the safest place I know." She says. "I have more friends and admirers here than I've ever had in meatspace..."
     
  • New
    • "Bendy's Dreamblight Valley: Surveillance Breach, Pt. 2", 4.5.4 "Volpe Gogglefox for Portals 12" New
    • Lady Moldoma said:
    "300 different freelancers and/or ex-corporate commission artists, programmers, writers, and designers." She says. "If you wanna know where all of my money as a streamer that I saved by mostly living off of low cost supplementary meals, nutrient packs, or just literally not eating. It mostly went to this."

    "Though to be fair, most of that was just lack of appetite from not liking any of my organs enough to support them properly."

    "This is the safest place I know." She says. "I have more friends and admirers here than I've ever had in meatspace..."
    Click to expand...
    "It looks amazing, like something out of the pages of The Orion-Cygnus FedWeb or Humenera!" Gadg8eer said, impressed. "Anyway, I was just phoning to make sure everything I did yesterday wasn't just a dream. I'm guessing if you're accessing the Hiverse this late at night you've got other things to do right now so I can hang up if you want?"

    (( Lady Moldoma Lady Moldoma I'm going to post again to add something actually enticing, my bad. ))
     
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  • New
    • "Bendy's Dreamblight Valley: Surveillance Breach, Pt. 2", 4.5.5 "Volpe Gogglefox for Portals 12" New
    • Lady Moldoma said:
    "300 different freelancers and/or ex-corporate commission artists, programmers, writers, and designers." She says. "If you wanna know where all of my money as a streamer that I saved by mostly living off of low cost supplementary meals, nutrient packs, or just literally not eating. It mostly went to this."

    "Though to be fair, most of that was just lack of appetite from not liking any of my organs enough to support them properly."

    "This is the safest place I know." She says. "I have more friends and admirers here than I've ever had in meatspace..."
    Click to expand...
    Gadg8eer said:
    "It looks amazing, like something out of the pages of The Orion-Cygnus FedWeb or Humenera!" Gadg8eer said, impressed. "Anyway, I was just phoning to make sure everything I did yesterday wasn't just a dream. I'm guessing if you're accessing the Hiverse this late at night you've got other things to do right now so I can hang up if you want?"

    (( Lady Moldoma Lady Moldoma I'm going to post again to add something actually enticing, my bad. ))
    Click to expand...
    "Um, Mistress Zoe, there is an issue we could use help with..." Anabelle said via a second VidWindow.

    "Gack! Jeez, sorry! I didn't realize you were-" Gadg8eer averted his eyes in embarassment.

    "Oh! No, not at all. I'm Zoe's custom LLM IPA." the assistant explained. "I'm based on Anabelle from-"

    "Anabelle, you're going to reveal something personal if you don't get on with it, Hmm?" someone said from Anabelle's end of of the call.

    "Of course. Mister Gadg8eer, would you mind giving me a moment with Zoe?"

    "Sure!" he responded, and the VidWindow greyed out and paused to let Zoe know he was still on hold.

    "There's just one urgent issue. Pirates from the lands beyond the Matroishka have begun raiding the outer nodes again." Anabelle said. "They're mostly trying to use MalWorm payloads to siphon our bandwidth. I can handle it if you're busy."
     
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