Uploaded Fairy: Dantino The King Quarterer

第10話 Epilogue Final

Vella thought she had a rival, then she realized it was just a computer. No matter how much data you filled it, it was always the same; it would never come out with anything creative. It might be able to fake it by using your words, in a psychopathic manner, against you. But it was still the flow of pixels in the screen. She fed all the data from her old friends different tests, hoping the computer to generate something consistent. But there was a part of her than on some level, she knew she couldn’t fool her sensei. She wasn’t sure why her mother continued to insist on programming her own stuff, as computers seem to do just about everything these days, from cooking to chopping your head off. Any irregularities was simply the standard unevenness in the automated manufacturing process. – Would you stop playing video games, if an AI could play better than yourself?

This was something that her mother would always ask. Vella never knew, as she had never been one to play video games, and only recently got into simple rogue likes. What she knew is she didn’t merely spit out data that was fed to her, but came up with her own conclusions. Her computer would sometimes conclude that was she Hitler, despite her own input data explicitly saying she wasn’t. – You’re Hitler, you can’t convince me otherwise, don’t give me those sweet lies.

It was not the classical world of American cherry pies, or key lime or that matter. Only a world of petty corruption, and machine generated criminal justice. For predatory capitalists, justice was a water chestnut at a Chinese restaurant, and just about as tasty. As long as they could appear tough on crime. Everyone else covered in grime, from the old cars they cleaned. And the occasional crook they ripped out the spleen from.

Not a world of soft melodies.

But a faint buzzing hum.

Midnight was like doing the robot at the guillotine. All those old dance moves gone to waste, all those metal parts on the floor. Eyeballs flickering like disco lights.

Vella would sneak out after dark to go to rave parties. Her friends were the girls that could repair themselves with screwdriver if the need rose, while she herself couldn’t stretch to touch her toes. Resistance to pain was something that she always seemed to lack, yet until recently this never seemed to hold her back. Because life was a mixture of prerecorded lines in machine learning algorithm, or a dance on a rave floor. But many hours of constant puking galore.

It was many a night before, when Mr. Clocktime came to her door, and he brought whither in his wake. And the very ground under his fine black dress shoes with crumble and decay. But his footsteps were always as if he were walking on eggshells, as if the ground itself was so weak that it could not handle his very presence. In defiance of the Earth, in defiance of the universe. His very black trench coats set the land ablaze. Thus he came only in the midnight hours, careful to turn back the clock. – What’s up clock, how’s it going?

He tossed a coin in the air, and it landed on an old poppers scalp, going pock. – What’s the coin man! Only drop wooden nickels! Then Clocktime rewound the clock.

All in a days work, after a taste of ordinary Chinese food at midnight galore. In a city of robots dancing on a guillotine floor, constantly repairing their metallic limbs. The street lights rusting and in disrepair. Decay and death everywhere. Nothing but the finest dust, in your hair. Everything in this world should come to an end, but Mr. Clocktime had other things in store for Vella, without the world coming to an end.

– Perhaps I’ll see this world again, someday soon. He hoped all the way to the moon.

And the moon winked.

Vella remembered the stories Nadine would tell her about her teen years. How it was almost to an epidemic proportion how many of her peers had at least some variation of post traumatic stress disorder; the symptoms were distributed in lots of different ways. The main factor were the two civil conflicts that split the once United States, one of which was the various miniature revolutions that finally separated America from the rest of the French neo-colonial power. It used to be, about 110 years ago, that people wore rubber and plastic shoes. Yet the richest among the proletarian wore wooden shoes. In a sense, in some ways it seemed like society had went backwards.

The poorest among them were even worse off, often little more than spare parts for various mutations of cyborg disorder. She couldn't recall a time when things were different. But Nadine would tell her how when she was growing up, it was relatively rare to actually be a cyborg: in fact you were the freak in a crowed of engineered normalcy. When she grow up surviving various cult groups, no matter how superficially good it seemed you have it, it was a time bomb waiting to happen when you finally have nothing; Nadine grew up being used to having it all. She came from the city in the sky. She came from a world of flying school buses. Yet the entire world in which they lived was engineered by a vampire, locked inside of a super computer; an amalgamation of different incarnations of her own organic brain and countless brain chips merged into the same machine learning framework. This isn't the story of a top class computer hacker. Or the story of a cyberspace cowboy, but the story of fallen goddess.

It begins when Vella had entrusted her livelihood part time to Mr. Clocktime, who appeared to her as a guardian angel in the darkness. And with his top hat tipped backwards, and tapping the ground with his cane, he treated the world like Novocaine for his cosmic arthritis. -- Vella, have you ever been to the fourth dimension?

-- Didn't you see my friends parents there?

-- Well I brought them back didn't I?

-- That's not the point.

-- So then you must know then. It wasn't designed for the existence of mortals.

-- I don't completely understand what you're telling me. It's all going a little bit to fast. And I still have my own world to process.

Mr. Clocktime almost dropped his hat:

There is no rush,

For the world of metallic bushes.

No shush, wired appendage of life.

And be the fourth dimension's wife.

-- Will you stop that, it's your way of speaking that freaks me out.

-- You don't like poetry?

-- It's not that, it's your whole being.

-- You'll love it in time.

Nadine would visit her occasionally to take her to the park, with her holographic tattoos flipping like sparks. But Mr. Clocktime would always be watching. With security cameras, they were not always accurate. But he was something beyond a machine, it was a very different feeling even from the creator of The Potato District, in all its trashy glory.

His life was not a human story.

Or anything on this Earth.