AJ3 – Chapter 17: The World Wide Web (Patreon)

Chapter Seventeen

The World Wide Web

It took a long time.

I had no good way to monitor the passage of time inside the system but I was pretty sure it had been at least twenty cycles of just hopping on random trains.

I never got lost. I could always remember my way back to Tread the Sky. Part of me wanted to go back and start making exploratory missions out here into this strange ‘between world,’ but it was just too interesting.

I’d discovered cameras were my best method to look into the real world, and in most of the networks I found myself in, they were incredibly easy to identify. The interface with the largest number of absolutely identical destinations was either one of three things: Access points, which usually allowed me to peek in on individual devices connected to them, phones, which were rarely interesting, and cameras, which were the most immediately useful for my purposes.

I wanted to see the real world. And boy, did invaders sure seem to want to see the real world too.

My first experience with a camera system was staring down at an incredibly ugly-looking boy. His skin had pockmarks on it that seemed unnatural to me. I’d never seen a blemish on anyone’s skin before but as I saw the people in this tiny little room, I realized that they must be common.

They were creating food, but the process was nothing like what I was familiar with. I could see an exchange of interface numbers happening between people out in the front of the building when I looked through different cameras, but the food didn’t just appear like normal.

Instead, these three boys in the back all played a part in crafting each burger.

One boy stood in front of a metal looking table that had pink… circles on it. He threw the pink circles onto the plate. They’d sizzle at the contact. The boy then lowered another smaller plate down onto them. In about a minute or two, the plate would lift and the once pink circles – meat I realized – had turned brown. They were much more appetizing at that point, but a gross slime was left over after he peeled them off the table with a flat metal tool.

Irritatingly, my dictionary was no longer available to me as soon as I left Tread the Sky’s network so I was forced to observe without instantly knowing what every object I saw was.

The meat then went into a tray that the other boys would occasionally put onto two pieces of bread with other toppings pulled from the station. Burgers! It actually took me a minute to realize that they were making burgers out of their individual components. In Tread the

Sky, they’d always been crafted fully made, but once they were finished it was easy to see the comparison.

The… ones in Tread the Sky actually looked more appealing though. I wondered which tasted better.

I spent an inordinate amount of time watching the three boys as they bantered and joked. They cooked for cycles, making a continuous stream of different types of food for the people lined up in the front of the store.

Still more food was delivered out of a window to people that I could see in large vehicles that rolled around the building on wheels.

I didn’t dare speak to any of them, though I could’ve. I heard my own voice reverberate back to me when I’d exclaimed at the marvels below.

One thing I couldn’t help but notice though was that these people were all very different.

In Tread the Sky there were a lot of different people… but they all looked sort of similar in the end as well. You might meet two people with a hooked nose. One might have tattoos on his face while the other didn’t, but that hooked nose was the same hooked nose.

Here? There were almost no similarities beyond a general body shape. I didn’t really know how to describe it, though the sheer variety of differences in the people who came through the restaurant was staggering.

A vast majority of them were also ugly.

That wasn’t entirely true either, but somehow the faces of people and NPC’s in Tread the Sky had not fully prepared me for just how repulsive people could be.

A tiny little human had spit and drool trailing from his mouth to his eerily pointed fingers. A girl had more of the strange blemishes on her face than she had visible plain skin! Their clothes were dirty and constantly got covered in sauces dropped from the burgers that had always remained neatly intact and pristine even as I ate them in my world.

It was as if Tread the Sky had included all of these things, but somehow… cleaned it. Made it… symmetric. If someone in Tread the Sky was ugly then that was how they were made to be. A representation of ugly. I couldn’t put a word to what the difference was though, other than to say that it was clear why this world was real and Tread the Sky wasn’t.

I… loved it.

I tried to memorize the different facial features. The different clothes! So many different clothes! They spoke in different accents too! Sometimes they even spoke in entirely different words that clearly meant something, but I had no clue what! It was staggering in its complexity and I devoured it as I sat in the camera system for hours. Learning. Listening to their conversations.

There were incredibly old people too. Ones so old that they struggled to move. Tread the sky had a few NPCs that were comparable but most of them also had that cleaned shine that made everything false.

Sooner or later though, I began to grow bored. I wanted to taste a burger. I wanted to talk to the cashier girl and place an order! So I started to play around. To my surprise, I could place an order. It took a little bit of work to find my way to one of the kiosks where some of the customers poked at the screen to order their food. Once I was in, though, I went a little crazy.

“It’s got to be broken,” said Jessie, one of the cooks as he stared at the kiosk.

I giggled, before pulling out of the camera and dashing back into the train that led to the kiosk. In moments, I was placing yet another order.

“Fucking hell, I really hope its not messing with the counts,” I heard him say as I placed another order for 1000 McRibs and greedily watched their confused reactions. Gods, this was the most fun I’d had in ages.

At first, at least.

A larger woman from the back came out and started yelling at the staff about how far off her counts would be. They grew agitated, and then angry, before finally shutting the Kiosk down entirely.

None of them looked happy, and the lines grew longer as a result, more people needing to go to the cashier instead of placing their orders.

I felt a bit guilty about that and decided to stop meddling. Those Mcribs looked really good though…

I could actually split my focus. I didn’t really know how to explain it, but my eyes and ears could be in one device, while my hands could fiddle in another. Or I could watch from ten different devices at once, somehow copying my eyesight into multiple cameras. Or I could be fiddling in all of the kiosks. I could also immediately remove all of my influence and return my senses to merely one object.

There did seem to be a limit though. Once I was simultaneously looking through about ten cameras at once, I started to get a bit… dizzy. At one point, one of the cameras glitched out and after that I could no longer use it to see anymore, which was a shame, because the little kid in the booth, playing with a toy of some sort, had been adorable to watch.

Finally, there were portals. They typically had no labels at all signifying where they might lead. Usually just that chain of numbers. Three digits dot three digits dot three digits dot three digits.

Peaking into one of those, I found myself inside their phones. It actually took a while to figure out that's what they were, since a lot of people kept their phones in their pockets. I could see out of the camera but it would be a black haze that seemed to shift. Clothing with light shining through. It reminded me of dungeon home and the stars and I didn’t like it.

Disorienting.

The method for doing that was significantly different than jumping on a train. I could just peek in and take a look around, or I could fully dive in, which felt incredibly risky. I still hadn’t tried that. Being entirely on a device that was so very controlled by its owner seemed risky in the extreme.

Peeking in seemed much safer. It was like… throwing an extra eyeball into the portal in order to see, without losing my own. Also disorienting.

I followed different ports too and found similar systems at the end of almost all of them. Sometimes it was a small family’s house. There were other restaurants and businesses, all populated by different humans. Gigantic department stores with hundreds of people. There were places that gave me zero sensory input but instead just contained loads and loads of data, that I could peruse and edit with a thought. A thousand thousand windows with which to view the real world… while somehow still not being a part of it.

This was okay though. It was a step in the right direction.

There were more destinations too. Some with no cameras at all. They were scary though. They sometimes had nothing but portals, along with the train back to where I’d come from. Other times they had both. And unlike the rigid structure of the train stacks which rarely had more than 48, they sometimes had thousands of portals.

I originally had no frame of reference for what the massive portal hubs could be since there were rarely cameras on those stations. Sooner or later though, I ran into one that had trains as well. It had given me a small series of cameras. Only about five. Three of which were just empty offices, though they did appear to be high in the air. One was a view of a fence surrounding support pillars that were holding something higher above my view. The last though.

Oh the last.

A camera looking out over the city from high above. I spent cycles staring at the city below when I’d discovered it. It was breathtaking. Alive. Somehow so much more advanced than Variak in every way, too. The tiny vehicles the people drove around in moved as fast as I could fly and all in choreographed pathways, each with their own blinking lights. No horses. No stench, though admittedly I hadn’t been able to smell anything since leaving Tread the Sky.

Most of all, no NPCs. Every single person I could see from my vantage point was alive. They hardly ever did the same thing and even when they did it was never in the same way. They had the barest impression of an instinct that they could break on their slightest whim. The real world.

It was glorious.

Eventually though, the glory of discovery began to wear off. I’d spent days bumping around the network, learning the light and dark cycle of the real world, but I was starting to get lonely.

I considered going back to Tread the Sky. Bugbear was surely worried about me, as was Miss Tutorial. Akwa and Iron were probably freaking out if they saw that I’d ‘logged off’ in their friends lists.

Akwa…

No. I didn’t want to think about her. Not about her. Not about Amy. Not about how mad Francis was surely going to be.

I had to go on. I needed to learn.

Each device I entered was usually very happy to give me detailed information about itself and its capabilities. What programs it was running, which actually did sometimes seem like entire worlds of their own. Banking applications with connections to distant places sending numbers that I could change on a whim through connections that routed back up through the hubs. Account information. Passwords. Lists of orders placed and received. Game Data Saves. Messages sent through the systems between individuals. Photos. Billions of photos. Data, Data, Data! Most of it was gibberish, but I could also sit inside some systems and see what the person controlling it was doing with it.

That was how I discovered internet browsers.

There were lots of them. From there, searching for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT for short, became a lot easier. Finding a path to it from within the system took quite a bit of doing, but in about a day or two, I finally had a direct, train-only path between Tread the Sky and the college. Once I knew the route, I could get there in just a couple of minutes of hopping from switch to switch.

I initially tried to register to be a student from the new admissions page, but it kept wanting pesky information that I didn’t have like “Social Security Numbers,” and “Drivers License Numbers,” and “Date of Births.” All of the human’s seemed to have these. Part of me considered going to wherever they were all stored, and just adding my own data to the databases that held them but that seemed like it might get me in trouble.

Instead, I’d just added my information to the local data pool that seemed to have all the students’ information in it, and made up the answers I didn’t know. I actually had quite a bit of fun with that.

“First name? Gell, obviously,” I thought as I filled my information into all of the fields the database had.

“Last name… Would Iron mind if I used his? Thyst. Amy said she was like my Mom right? Yeah. I wonder if that means I’m related to North Cross now?” I wondered aloud. It had been a long time since I’d thought about Amy and Iron’s estranged granddaughter. I missed her voice. It was still beautiful.

“Social security number. Hmm. What if I put in “Gell’s Number!” No… that didn’t work. It only takes actual numbers. Well, I’m technically seven years old so… 7. No.Format? Ugh! Everyone else’s looks like this so… 000-00-0007! Hey, that worked! Yay!”

“So I’m Gell Thyst, with social security number 7. Okay, what’s next? Date of Birth. Let’s see, factoring in the cycles and the current date, I was born… gosh I’m getting older!”

“Password. Oh! Look at that neat little thing turning them from words into loads and loads of characters! Uhm…. oh I see! Okay! Let's look up passwords other people used. My password is Password1. Okay, and when I plug it in, it transforms it into these giant strands! There’s surely a name for that. Jellydamn I wish my dictionary worked outside of Tread the Sky! If I search though… “passwords turning into longer passwords…” Hash table? Encryption? Huh. Neat!”

“Email? Well everyone else seems to have one so it must be kind of important. How do I get one though? Gmail? Wait so half of these people have gmails. But are gmails the same as emails? An email is both the account and an individual message? Gahh! I’m so confused! Help me, glorious question box!”

It went on like that until I was officially a registered student at MIT. That meant that when I hopped over to the Registrar portal from my isolated computer’s web browser, it was perfectly happy to let me plop my new student name into any class I wanted to attend, after I gave it my Username and Password of course.

And when I found the sheer amount of classes available my head started to spin.

Geometrical Computing? Advanced Cryptography? Principles of Computer Systems? Each class title sounded more confusing and obscure than the last, until I figured out that there was an order to each of them. Each advanced class usually listed a “Prereq,” which was short for prerequisite, which was a fancy way of saying, I needed that before I could make sense of this. Sooner or later, I narrowed down some starting classes for me to take.

After that, I felt stupid, because all of the starting classes usually began with the word “Introduction,” but since I was super lonely, there was no one around to laugh.

It was weird that I still felt embarrassed anyway though.

I shrugged and decided to sign up for all of them! Irritatingly though, the classes didn’t start for another few days, or even weeks in some cases. Some of them weren’t offered for months! That didn’t discourage me though, because as soon as I signed up I was sent an email to my gmail account – Stupid confusing thing! – that gave me a list of the books I needed for each course.

Books, as it turned out, were exactly what I’d been looking for.

END CHAPTER

A/N: Hello glorious folks! Another long delay! Sorry about that! In my defense... christmas, new years, snow days, birthdays, and biggest of all... I can't tell anyone for another week or two. Wifey won't let me. :/ 

Till Next!MB