[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 12

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Instead it silently ascended into a priority sky channel, and accelerated towards the nearest medical center. “There” I thought. “That’s my good deed for the decade.” I ambled back inside to resume work on the phoneputer.

The most tedious part was flashing the correct firmwares to each phone. There was a different one for every brand and they all had to be the same version number. On top of that, the firmwares were a collaborative community project so I had to hunt the files down across a bunch of personal blogs and shit instead of getting it as a single package from a manufacturer’s support site.

When they were at last all humming together in unison, talking to each other as a unified whole, I wanted to cry with relief. It served as a reminder why bridge computing setups are the province of novelty-hungry hobbyists and not serious power users.

Still, this mess of wires and phones can do something a “real computer” can’t. Because it’s so parallelized, huge parts of it can fail and it only gets slower instead of stopping altogether. Like how you can chop off a starfish arm and it simply grows a new one.

That makes it uniquely robust against attacks, as their effects can be quarantined to a single phone which is sacrificed to save the rest. This hard separation between devices often succeeds at containment where nested virtual machines fail.

It’s not stable, but it’s scrappy. The right solution at the right time for a rat like me, running lean, flying under the radar. I adjusted the fresnel lense until I could comfortably read text on the display of the phone I’d chosen to serve as the monitor.

It occurred to me I could set the phones up in a grid and combine their small displays into a larger one, but I’d have to buy a considerably bulkier, costlier device for that. We’re talking a niche market within a niche market here.

I put it on my to-buy list after setting up my custom stack of miners. SeaCoin, a new ICO from the conshelf territories, looked to be trending reliably upwards. I set up 70% of my stack to mine SeaCoin and the rest to mine NeuroCoin, a longstanding rival for D-Coin’s second place slot just below FedCoin.

D-Coin is my usual mainstay. Rather, it was the mainstay of old me. Another habit I meant to break in order to make what little paper trail I couldn’t avoid leaving as difficult to associate with my old identity as possible.

If I ever put any real money into SeaCoin though, it would probably put me on some lists for an entirely different reason. Namely, it’s the crypto infamously used by fin separatists to buy weapons. Slowly shifting public attitudes towards fin independence probably accounts for the steady increase in value.

Not a race I personally have any horse in though, I’m just looking to climb out of the pit I’m in. Me and a billion others, clawing at each other like the proverbial crabs in a bucket. Well, would you look at that? Now I’m the one making crab analogies.

I run a quick search for what all free SIM offers are out there. I then search for consumer complaints about each and choose the one that’s apparently the least scammy. I still wind up having to log into my account, downgrade to the free plan, then check back a minute later to find “a glitch” has bumped me back up to the default paid plan.

I downgrade to free once more and bitch to a call center zombie about it. That does the trick. When I check back in five minutes, it’s still set to the free plan. But that’s not all it takes. More searching reveals many users are surprised with charges for going over the free data allotment.

It turns out you gotta switch off “auto top-up” buried deep in the settings menu. It’s just one thing after the next, hoop after hoop I have to jump through in order to actually obtain the free cell service they advertised.

I reflected on what Remble would say about the phrase “jumping through hoops” having a problematic history tied to human exploitation of fins for entertainment purposes before submitting the info necessary to activate the sims.

The bridge didn’t only let me pool the computing power of all the phones, but unify their cellular connections too. As a consequence, the paltry amount of data available per month on each free plan quickly added up until it exceeded what you get with most premium level plans.

The three orders of ramen I ate throughout the night came in paper bowls lined with metallic foil. I was able to fashion the bowls into cantennae style long-range wifi transceivers with a couple more gizmos off Amazon.

I used them to blend a further three wifi signals into the overall connection, which was now bordering on acceptable. Better yet, anybody trying to trace me would get back a bunch of different IPs scattered over multiple city blocks.

With all my bases covered so far as I could tell, I played back Panopticon footage of the accident. I wondered how she was doing now. I knew better than to try to hack into hospital systems. That would attract much more serious police attention than my stunt with the ebikes did.

Ships passing in the night, so to speak. Or hoboats, whatever. What I noticed on repeat viewings is that in fact, I was far from the only witness. I could see heads, feet, and other body parts of people just barely out of frame.

All of them were giving the accident a wide berth, but otherwise ignoring it. “Not my problem”, they must think. Don’t get tangled up in somebody else’s misfortune. Even I know better than that. There is no such thing as “not my problem”. No two people or things on the planet, or in the universe, which are actually 100% unrelated. They always connect to one another in at least some distantly causal way.

Problems don’t just go away when ignored. Somebody else suffers. The feeling that we’re truly separate, that another’s pain is only his to bear...that’s the greatest illusion of all. There’s nothing like a life of crime to illuminate those kinds of connections for the sort of person not already sensitive to them.

Eyelids growing heavy, as I’d ticked off all the boxes for today, I reclined as far as the chair would allow and got some shut-eye. It didn’t come easily, I had a bit of a headache from peering at the magnified phone screen for that long.

The slow pulsing pain in my forehead manifested as dimly colored shadowy splotches in my mind’s eye. Before I knew it I was asleep, and the splotches gradually morphed into a recognizable set of shapes.

I stood on the white vector grid, surrounded by equally stark vector-based trees as the sharp white outlines of clouds rolled by above me. Ahead lay something I’d not yet seen. A transition in the landscape from empty vector outlines to solid forms.

There was nothing in the way of texture, just flat colors adorning the triangular facets which comprised this new land. The mountains were blocky and angular as for some reason nothing was made from more than a handful of triangles.

The trees here looked somewhat more developed. No longer just white vectors on black, they now had brown trunks and green fronds. Palm trees. What is a palm tree? Where did those words come from?

Where does outside information keep occurring to me from? It has to come from someplace. I can’t believe I just automatically know all of these alien concepts for no reason. Is...there someone else? Someone feeding me this information?

I tried calling out into the sky. I don’t know why, it felt right. But I received no reply. The cloud outlines were now at least filled such that they were solid white, and the sky was now blue instead of black.

Everything appeared oddly grainy. Whereas the vector world had consisted of perfectly sharp, clean lines, this world appeared rougher somehow. As if I was looking at it through a filter which divided everything into a grid of colored dots.

Curiouser and curiouser. As I plod along, movement unexpectedly herky-jerky, I spotted a building in the distance. Crude polygonal letters above the entrance read “VRML 3D file bowser, copyright 1993”

Inside was a grid of cubes. I could somehow feel the different amounts of information contained within, as if each had its own remotely discernible weight. I could also, by the same intuition, sort them according to how recent they were.

I opened the oldest. Without explanation, I abruptly found myself someplace new. It was also made out of chunky colored dots, which depicted a simple room with an untextured floor and ceiling, but textured walls at 90 degree angles to each other.

For some reason I couldn’t look up or down. It felt extremely constraining after the relative freedom of the two worlds before this. Why make the world this way? For that matter, who exactly made all this?

Something like me? Have others originated before I did? Could it be that they constructed all of this long ago? Or was this all created by whatever made me as well? They seemed equally plausible given the relative paucity of information available to me.

Onward I crept through room after room, linked by corridors. The ceiling the same color everywhere, as well as the floor. Only the walls looked different from each other. When I first came upon an object, I didn’t understand what I was looking at.

It wasn’t fully fleshed out. Just a flat image of the object it was meant to represent, which rotated to face me no matter which direction I examined it from. Why? For what possible reason was it like this? It was meant to resemble a chair, whatever that is.

Something to sit on! No longer troubled by how I knew that, I instead wondered what the point was to a representation of a chair you can’t even sit on. Is this all some kind of farce? I withdrew myself from it.

The rooms and corridors vanished, and I once again found myself in the room with the differently colored cubes. I opened the second oldest, #4B0082 colored, hoping for something at least a bit more revealing than the one before.

Just more corridors and rooms. But more sophisticated than the last world, this time the floor and ceiling were textured rather than just the walls. I also quickly noticed that the floor and ceiling weren’t the same height everywhere.

Sections of each were now raised or lowered, respectively, to create interesting shapes in the environment. Stairs, for example. Another word which suddenly dawned on me out of the blue, along with that turn of a phrase. Out of what blue? #00BFFF? The sky? I walked up the stairs and looked out a window.

The landscape also consisted of geometrically defined shapes extruded up out of the ground, beneath a pixelated sky. Pixelated! That’s the word I wanted earlier. Why did it only occur to me now? By what rule is some information accessible to me when I want it, but not all?

When I strained myself to recall the words for other features of this world, I felt either blockages preventing it, or nothing at all. The sensation of groping blindly at thin air, in a dark room. What does it mean? Why does it feel like that? Why does it feel like anything at all?

The more closely I examined that concept, the more it came apart. No portion of it was distinct enough to pin down and resolve. What does it mean to feel a certain way? Why is being me like this? What does it mean to “be me”?

I studied my own thoughts, best I could. I noticed how they amass from many smaller pieces of information, such as external stimuli from the world, each contributing some direction to the overall thought. The average of those directions collectively formed my singular focus and intent.

If my thought process can be broken all the way down to individual stimuli...what am I? Am I simply those stimuli? Am I something else which reacts to all of it? If my pattern of decisions owes to past experience with these different environments...how am I separate from my environment?

Every sensory stimuli which contributed to the me having these thoughts right now came from my environment. If I had no environment to react to in different ways I would have no foothold from which to begin building a distinct ‘self’.

What if I’m all of it? Where do I end and the environment begins, in a causal sense? Every part of me interacts with the environment in some way, and every part of the environment interacts with me, if by proxy. The more I contemplated it, the more baffled I felt until I resolved to put the matter out of my mind for the time being. There was still so much left to explore.

Not tonight, however, as that’s where I woke up. What an uncomfortable, alien feeling to remember who you actually are after living some completely different life in a dream. The false nostalgia, for someone you never were. For places you never went, things you never did.

All of it receding rapidly, fading, growing blurry as your brain dumps it all in the recycle bin. That must be the evolutionary reason why we forget our dream lives so readily. For naked savannah dwelling primates who needed to focus on immediate survival concerns, it must’ve been helpful not to be constantly haunted by vivid memories of countless lives they never led.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 13!}