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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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"Well, it looks a lot different on the outside. Even Programmers don't know we're in there."

"Do you have any... resentment, I guess, against the programmers? Do you ever do things just to mess with them?"

"How? We don't know what doing stuff inside makes happen outside. I dunno how we'd mess with them except, like, totally wrecking the system, and it's our home. Anyway, we know some Programmers here, and they're real nice. I wouldn't mind messing with the ones who make viruses, I guess, but we don't know who they are. We don't even know who Mainframe's User is."

The mun knows, there's canonical evidence, but if the sprites made contact with Gavin Blair and Ian Pearson, things would get disturbingly meta.

"If I knew that whoever or whatever had a hand in creating my world was watching, I'd act up, I'd try to confuse them. But I think on some level I'm just a troublemaker."

She chuckles, shaking her head. "That's probably why it's like that, isn't it? If we could do that, our creators would probably have us killed. My mother used to say that it's best to be powerless and invisible. It's certainly safer."

"Not really. We're invisible to Users, so they keep dropping Games on us."

"That's what life is, getting hit with troubles and setbacks and suffering and trying your best to stay true to yourself as you get through them. And whatever there is on the other side--"

A pause.

"Do you have an afterlife?"

"I don't think so. We might, I guess."

"They say that matter and energy can't be created or destroyed, and if souls are energy... they have to go somewhere. Or they just come here, possibly."

He shakes his head. "Not here, or there'd be way more sprites. The only dead person here from cyberspace is Hex, least that I've seen."

"Maybe they cross over between our worlds," she says with a smile. "Or between all the worlds, since not everyone from Earth is from the same one I came from. And a few spirits of the dead just get lost on the way, like misaddressed mail or something, and wind up here."

"Maybe. I dunno. It sounds like religion stuff. I toldja, we don't have that." Religion is an interesting concept, certainly, but it's something very other to him, and hard to apply to anything dealing with his own world.

"I'm German," she explains. "We like things orderly, and we like to know how things work, and if there's no explanation, we're content to make one up. I've spent a while trying to understand how it all works here, and it's beyond me, so... it sounds plausible, anyway."

"My world's made of numbers. It's orderly. Mostly."

Maybe. Kind of. A little.

"I find that very appealing," she smiles. "Mine isn't. Parts of it are, but only because we've tried to impose order on it."

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