milliways_bar | (no subject)

Current Music: "Beastie" by Jethro Tull

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It was difficult sneaking the guitar into the utility tunnels without attracting comment, especially since the most convenient entrance is via the restroom off the student lounge, but Enzo managed it. He's on a sofa now, trying out some of the sheet music Tommy gave him for Christmas. Happily, he's gotten a lot of practice recently, and his voice is decent enough, so no one's ears are actually likely to bleed.

^♫From early days of infancy,
Through trembling years of youth,
Long murky middle age
And final hours long in the tooth...^♫

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Enzo ponders this. "There's people in cyberspace who don't believe in Users, but most people think they're random."

"I suppose it's only natural to not believe in something you've never seen," she says. "But if there's one thing I've learned, it's that there's a lot more out there than what we can see, and denying it only leads to trouble. Sometimes the things you don't believe in force you to believe, if you've been denying them."

Well, even if the User can't be directly seen, there's concrete evidence that something's out there, like Games and upgrades. But you can't argue with conspiracy theorists.

"Like how?"

"Well..."

She slouches gracefully into a chair. "Do you know the old stories of what happened when men dared to think they could do things that the gods thought only they should do? Or there's love... that's one thing no one can shield themselves from."

"...no?"

"There was Daedalus," she says, "a brilliant man, a scientist and architect. He built a prison for a very rich king, a maze that no man could escape--and to keep him from telling anyone the way out, the king shut him up in that maze with his son, a boy named Icarus. But Daedalus knew the way out, and he planned their escape--he built them each a set of wings, so they could fly away."

A pause, as she takes another sip of coffee. "Daedalus was humble, and he only flew high enough to clear the tops of the waves. But Icarus, he wanted to see the world as the gods saw it--so he flew higher, and higher. He thought he was like a god, that nothing could happen to him--so the god of the sun melted the wax holding his wings together, and he fell into the sea."

"Oh." It's a good story, but... "Weird. Why didn't the gods want them to fly? We fly all the time."

"We don't fly--except in airplanes, but that's different. The gods, at least back then, were very afraid of humankind realizing its potential, so they did everything they could to see that we didn't try, didn't think about it, didn't dream."

She says it like she was there.

"But eventually, some of us did start to dream."

"Well, that was selfish of them!"

"If you had almost-infinite power, would you want your biggest threat to take it away from you? We're the only ones who can."

A pause.

"Do your people have gods?"

"We've got you."

"It's been a long time since someone called me a god," she says with a chuckle.

"Really, though--people?"

"Users. Only most of us don't know you're people, not people people, and most of you don't know we're in there. We don't talk to you or anything, like you do with gods. And we don't have that 'religion' stuff."

"Except when you come here, and can talk with anybody?" she asks. "Do many of your people come here?"

"Just me and my sister and our friends. I haven't seen any sprites here who aren't from Mainframe. No binomes, either. Weird, huh?"

That was a lot of words she doesn't quite understand, hence her vaguely confused look.

"Are there other places you go? Do you all live in one big computer?"

"Uh-uh. Each computer's a city, or more than one city sometimes. If your system's connected to the 'Net, you can travel to other systems. Mainframe's my home system, but I'm going to the Guardian Academy in the Supercomputer now."

She thinks about that.

"Are you... made of energy? Like thought, or electricity?"

Enzo beams - she's the first one to guess that without being told!

"Uh-huh! We can't go into matter worlds, except Milliways, or we get hurt, and you can't enter cyberspace. We can't eat each other's food, either; the format's incompatible. You get zapped."

She smiles. "Is your food electricity, then? We have it in us, but it's very... diffused. We can't handle it in a purer form."

"Yeah, our whole world is. Oh, but there's a couple things here that we can both eat. I dunno why. It's Milliways stuff, I think." No other explanation is needed, really.

"Are they good, those things you can eat here?"

She has no idea how things would even taste, to one used to electricity.

"Mm-hmm! And Bar's got lots of regular sprite foods, too. And Dr. Stantz and Harper built this laser we can use to digitize matter, so we can have User foods that way, too! Like chocolate." Mmmmmmm, chocolate.

"Chocolate is good," she agrees. "I've had so many kinds of candy since I came here... and pies, and ice cream, and... it's not sweets, but the pizza here, I've found, is also very good. Actually I haven't had anything here that wasn't."

"Oh, yeah, she does great piezoelectric pizza," yes, you heard that right, "and code freeze, that's like ice cream."