The Laptop - Ch.53 - Past Lives (Patreon)

"Maybe our next field trip will be to some far-future sci-fi realm?" Gwen commented. "Then you can get it upgraded to the same kind of holographic implant thing that Annie's got."

I sighed, "Yeah. That would definitely be convenient right now."

Chels added, "Not to mention the peace of mind it'd bring, right? I mean, not having to worry about it ever getting lost, or stolen, or broken. Plus it'd always be available"

"I know," I agreed with another sigh as I tried once again to get the little laptop to fit comfortably tucked inside my jacket. "Right now the biggest benefit would be not having to carry the damn thing around everywhere."

The three of us had finally moved on from the big plaza, we were walking down the middle of one of the empty streets towards the library building. Gwen and Chels were both sort of ready for action, incase anything came up. I tried to have my bow ready as well, but I didn't have any convenient way to carry the laptop.

After another few seconds the little catgirl smirked as her tail flicked. "I'm surprised you haven't thought to get yourself a purse or something? The laptop's small enough that you wouldn't need anything too big."

"Maybe you could get something custom-made to fit it?" Gwen suggested. "I think I saw a leather worker in the market at Hoag's Hole, you could probably commission him to create something to let you carry the laptop comfortably while keeping it handy. Like a laptop holster?"

I grimaced, "That's not a bad idea. A little late though, considering we're already here. So maybe next time? Unless next time is when I get the thing upgraded."

"You don't actually sound too excited about the upgrade idea," Chelsea commented.

I shrugged, then had to adjust the laptop again since moving my shoulders made it shift awkwardly against my boobs. I finally responded, "Despite all the positives, there's also one big drawback I'm worried about? Getting it upgraded will probably mean having to learn a whole new UI and everything? It took me a day or two just to find my way around its funky custom OS, but at least it was familiar enough that I could do that. Something from the distant future of another world is probably going to come with an even steeper learning curve."

"You'll figure it out," Gwyneth stated confidently. "Doesn't matter how advanced it is, it's just another computer. And I know you know computers."

My cheeks warmed up a little as I smiled, "Thanks Gwen."

"Hey there it is!" Chelsea suddenly announced, as she pointed to our left. "That's it, right?"

The building had just come into view as we approached an intersection, and it stood out among the other structures for a couple reasons. First off it was only about a dozen stories high, instead of being another massive skyscraper. And more telling, the facade of the first couple stories was a lot more ornate, like it was clearly meant to stand out as something special.

The biggest clue came into sight as we got nearer, the place had the word 'Library' laser-etched into the brushed steel above its grand entrance.

"Here's a question," the little catgirl commented as the three of us headed for the building's big open doorway. "I know Annie said in one of those texts way back when that we didn't need to worry about language. And obviously she was right, we didn't have any trouble talking to the people in Hoag's Hole."

She continued, "It feels improbable though that everyone in every realm speaks English. Especially since that's not even the case on our world, there's hundreds of languages back home. So when we go through a portal between realms, is it doing something to us to ensure we can read and write and speak the local language when we arrive?"

"And if so," she added while her tail twitched, "If we went back to Earth but arrived in say, Montreal or Quebec City, does that mean we'd end up speaking French but not knowing English anymore?"

Both Gwen and I stopped in our tracks at that thought. The elf girl looked somewhere between surprised and confused, while I just frowned.

After a second or two I finally shrugged, "I have no idea Chels? And honestly, I'm not going to worry about it. Or at least not now. When we go home we're going straight home, like right back to my bedroom in our basement where we started. Until then, I'm just grateful for the fact that we can communicate with people while we're travelling."

"Ok Lisa," she smiled. "Maybe something to ask Annie about later, but you're right. It doesn't really matter. And hey, at least it means we'll be able to read whatever stuff we find in here, right?"

"Right," I nodded.

The three of us started moving again, and a moment later we were in a huge lobby area. There were dozens of corridors leading deeper into the building, and between all those doorways were dozens of counters where clerks or receptionists used to work. There were markings on the floor that indicated where people should line up if they needed to talk to someone. And once again it was all eerily empty and quiet.

"So how do we do this?" Gwen half-whispered. "How do we even know where to begin?"

Fortunately it only took a few seconds to spot a map on one of the walls, like one of those 'you are here' things you'd find in big malls or institutional buildings. And like most libraries back home, this place was very well-organized, so it only took a moment to figure out where I wanted to go.

"Archives is this way," I announced as I pointed at one of the many nearly-identical hallways.

A couple minutes later we found ourselves in another large open chamber. This one was home to dozens of workstations, each in its own little semi-private cubicle with a desk and chair. I picked one at random then sat down at the terminal, while my girlfriends dragged a couple more chairs in from neighbouring cubes.

The terminal came to life when I tapped the keyboard, and from there it only took a few minutes to figure out how it all worked. Not because I was some kind of genius hacker, but because the thing was designed to be easy to figure out. It was meant for the general public after all, so the interface was pretty self-explanatory.

"Alright," I frowned. "Now we're here and we've got access, what do we want to look up?"

My 'assignment' from Annie hadn't been about finding any specific information, it was just to visit the archives here and check it out, before returning to Daearen again. Still, all three of us were curious so we ended up poking around and looking up random things.

Once again we were able to confirm Annie's story, about what happened to this world and how its population grew out of control while all the natural resources were methodically extracted and used up. Then they went on to consume the resources of every other available planet and moon in their system.

That was all kind of depressing though, so after reading some of that we moved on to look at other random stuff. That was kind of interesting, like following random articles down a very deep wiki rabbit hole. Like there was some cool or weird or curious stuff, but nothing particularly important or meaningful. Until we stumbled onto a suspiciously large database.

"Oh wow," I mumbled. "The last census. This is the final record of almost three hundred and seventy-five billion Enðeddians."

I selected an entry at random and the information appeared before us. It was mostly the sort of thing you'd expect to see from a census back on Earth. It listed the person's name, age, where they were born, how many years of education they had, their occupation, and what city they lived in. It also indicated their marital status, if they had kids, and if so it included links to their spouse and children's info as well. It also mentioned what world or moon they lived on, which was something you definitely wouldn't get in an Earth census.

Finally it displayed a low-rez monochrome image of the person, that looked like it was scanned off an ID card or something. And at the bottom the screen displayed their citizenship number, their digitization ID number, and indicated the date they were digitized. The date was meaningless to us since we had no frame of reference, but we knew from Annie all this happened a millennium ago.

After a minute or so I pulled up another random entry, then another. We probably looked at a dozen of them before we hit one that didn't have any digitization info. Instead it listed the date they died along with a cause of death, which was complications from lung cancer. After staring at that for a second or two we continued browsing through more random entries, but out of several dozen we only saw the one that didn't go into the system.

The other thing we noticed while looking at this odd assortment of people's lives was just how normal they all seemed. Men and women, boys and girls, enbies and gender-nonconforming folks. Some were in straight relationships, others were gay. There were lawyers, construction workers, cooks, nurses, teachers, and students. Some were single, others married, some with families and others without. Apart from a few minor details all the records we saw could have come from Earth instead of a dead civilization on a world we barely knew anything about.

We must have spent a good fifteen or twenty minutes silently browsing the census records before anyone spoke up.

"This is kind of freaky," Gwen commented quietly. "I mean we're looking at the last records of the last living people from a civilization that ended a thousand years ago."

She nodded at the screen as she continued in that same low voice, "Like this Reebo guy? Forty years old, worked as a manager in a logistics firm. Married to his husband Xoll who was aged thirty-nine. And they had two kids, daughter Tisk age twelve and son Bal age nine. Totally normal little family of four, except they're all gone. Nobody remembers them, just this dusty old computer terminal in an empty city in a simulated world that's hidden away where almost nobody can find it."

"They're not gone though," Chelsea replied. She pointed at the screen, "See? Reebo's got a digitization ID, just like almost every other record we've looked at. So he's in the system, and I'll bet his family is too. They were probably all digitized together."

Gwen sighed, "They could have lived and died a dozen times over since then. They won't know each other now, they're probably not even all on the same realm anymore."

The catgirl's ears drooped while her tail tucked under her chair. She shrugged sadly, "That's just life Gwen. Whether it's digital or biological, that's how it goes. You live, fall in love, grow old, then die."

I stayed quiet while the two of them were discussing what sounded like philosophy. Instead I kept staring silently at the data on the screen, until something suddenly clicked for me.

"Oh shit!" I gasped as my eyes widened. "Those digitization IDs look an awful lot like the character IDs in the laptop. Same length, same formatting. If I'm right then we could actually look ourselves up on this thing. We could find out who we used to be, back before we were digitized!"

My girlfriends both stopped talking as they looked at me in surprise.

Chelsea's ears folded back as she asked slowly, "Is that something you want to do? Whatever you find it's not going to mean anything about who you are now Lisa. Honestly, I can't see that sort of information being useful or helpful in any way."

"You're not even a little curious?" Gwen asked the little catgirl. "You don't want to know who you used to be in a previous life?"

Chels made a face and shook her head, "Nope. Last thing I need to know is I used to be some frumpy old granddad accountant dude named Jorp."

The elf girl bit back a laugh as she pointed out, "That was oddly specific."

"I'm just saying the odds of getting something cool or fun are really low," Chelsea stated while her tail swished back and forth. "For every kick-ass rock star or world-famous brain surgeon there's going to be a hundred accountants and a thousand fry cooks."

The two of them continued their debate while I went back to staring quietly at that digitization ID on the screen. Then after another half minute or so a new thought struck me, and I exited the census records completely. Instead I started searching for other large databases that contained references to digitization IDs or realm IDs. And sure enough, I quickly found what I was looking for.

"It's here!" I announced in a quiet but intense voice. "There's a master list of all active digitized IDs in the system. And it's cross-referenced by realm, so it knows what world they're all currently living on."

Gwen frowned as she looked at the screen, then back at me again. "Why's that important?"

Chelsea figured it out almost immediately. Her ears and tail were drooping again as she answered softly, "We might be able to use this to find our moms."

"Yeah," I nodded slowly. "If we can figure out their character IDs then we can find out who they are now, and where they're living. Then with the laptop, I could take us right to them."

The elf girl looked back and forth between me and Chelsea. Then she gently reminded us, "Don't forget what Annie said, ok? They'll be living new lives now, with new families. If you show up out of the blue and try to talk to them it'll probably just be really confusing for them and their families. It might even be disruptive."

Neither Chels or I responded right away. Instead we ended up looking at each other, and I was sure my expression mirrored the pain and sadness I saw on the little catgirl's face.

We both knew Gwen was right, Annie was right. Assuming they started over immediately, my mom would be a six year old kid while Chelsea's would be twelve. And they'd probably be nothing like the people we used to know.

After a few seconds Gwyneth gave Chels a gentle nudge and asked, "Isn't it better remembering your mom as she was? I mean, you don't want to track her down and find out she's become some awkward derpy tween named Jorp, right?"

The catgirl's pout broke as the corners of her mouth started edging upwards, and soon she was holding back a smile. She finally gave Gwen a playful punch in the arm and mumbled, "Shut up you. No using my own logic against me, that's illegal."

I reached out and turned off the terminal then gave them both a sad smile, "I think we can call this field trip a success. Let's head back to Hoag's Hole, then maybe I can summon up something fun for dinner. Anyone else in the mood for pizza and sodas?"

Gwen's eyes lit up as she nodded, "Yeah, I'm in!"

"You mean pizza and cherry vodka coolers," Chels corrected me with a smile. "Sounds great, let's go!"