Ceci n'est pas une pipe
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Date: 12/05/2018 |
Everywhere and Nowhere
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Cast: Storyteller: | |
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Aster's studies feel like they've hit a dead end. There's only so much she can learn about the mind just by reading about it in a book. To refresh herself, she diverts her attention to different efforts, somewhere else she can improve. Ugh, there are far too many such realms, but for now... A dive into the Digital Web often drains her, at least the way she does it: soul-deep focus, putting her all into her latest target. She needs to do better than that, to stop taking so much time and effort just to enter virtual reality. So, she needs practice. Into bed she goes, with her virtual reality headset strapped over her face and those customised controllers gripped tight in her hands. Her focus slips away from her body, and into something greater. The Digital Web spreads out in all directions, like the sprawl of a metroplex made of information. Electricity and thought crackle along ambiguous pathways. Are they circuits the size of freeways? Are they silken strands, webs enmeshed to the point that they form an ocean of correspondence with waves thick enough to surf on? Are they the axons and synapses of one great nervous system, the shared brain of all sapient-kind? Her icon, a crystalline mass in a vaguely humanoid form, twirls as it rises into the grey, cloud-filled sky. Though the icon lacks any such features and expression, Aster smiles in physical space. There's nothing else quite as /freeing/ as having all the world's information literally at her fingertips. Justifications aside, this is why she made this choice: the Digital Web /feels good/. Freeways or silken strands: does the distinction even matter, so long as they have the throughput? In the sense that a wizard arrives precisely when he means to, perhaps they have precisely the correct form to accommodate their precious cargo - thought, or electricity, phantasm or fantasy, other such rarified stuff. Today the ocean of correspondence undulates and finds a shape in a cityscape, evoking somewhere far more densely populated than Detroit, and more adept at masking poverty as well, if it even exists here. Still, many details are mundane; people who speak a curiously familiar but unintelligible language stop at stalls for small parcels of food and go on their way, by foot or ducking down into subway entrances. Neon abounds. The first sign to come into focus and form an intelligible word is in Mandarin: ARCADE Aster's digital self resolves better, the crystal arrays floating closer together now. Her hands, though made of so many disparate crystals in place of jointed appendages, appear almost solid. She drifts down just above street level, to better engage with this particular form. Is it that this world speaks a language she doesn't know, perhaps one of its own design? Or is this even a 'language' as a normal human mind would understand it? She strains her ears, to pick up even an errant syllable -- ah, but then the almighty Web gives her a sign. Literally. An arcade sounds damn good for freshening herself and sharpening her virtual skills, so she shifts her speed up by a gear or two to fly along the path the sign indicates. On the contrary, the language feels real, and close to Mandarin - even the unintelligible words on signs had that feel. Actually, as she's ducking in it occurs to her that between the density and the close kinship with Mandarin, this feels a lot like it might be Hong Kong - or some Web-based conceit based on it, needlessly (since who's forcing anyone to build UP instead of OUT here?) Inside the arcade, it takes a moment for her eyes to adjust. Eyes! To adjust! There are kudos owed to whoever designed this hub; they took great pains at verisimilitude, the fine details that give a place a sort of keen resonance. A series of machines ring the perimeter of the space, as well as a couple of pillars located more centrally. The spacing between things is too perfect, which is one of the only clues that the space is Web-based at all - your typical meatspace arcade will have too narrow a walking-space adjacent a great waste, a coin-op glorified lottery next to a too-loud motorcycle thing. There are - quick count - about forty machines here, give or take. How does she choose? This 'virtual' reality sure takes pains to resemble what most people think of as the 'real' reality. It takes effort to be so immersive, sure, but Aster's generally more fond of the abstract, of ideas that go beyond the senses and experieces she's already so used to. But, this Hong Kong-alike shows enough effort to be worth probing at least a /little/ bit more. As for finding a machine, hm. She's recently read all about the advertising techniques that try to grab her attention 'now now now', how the designer put the brightest lights and best positioning to the game he /wants/ her to play. She's in a more contrarian mood, and so drifts around to the back of the pillar, to a machine that hadn't been given such top billing. It sure does! It's a style thing, but also more; given what she knows about the Digital Web's interfaces with the mundane web, this place seems rendered to be a top end experience for the sort of gear-loaded muggle who'd log in for the atmosphere... and then play pong in their fancy Oculus Rift getup. The conceit even tastes like nostalgia. On the back of the pillar are three games, depending on what gets called 'back.' One is in fact a classic - Pac-man - one is Sugar Rush (yeah, the game from Wreck-It Ralph) - and one is an inscrutable classic joystick experience that is either glitching or features rapid-cycling images the likes of which one might see in a ReCaptcha, so compelling are they. (Find the squares with a street light!) Situated between the latter two is a small stand for vending play tokens. Aster spends a little whlie just staring. A stand for vending play tokens. In a /virtual/ arcade. Has nostalgia gone too far this time? Regardless, she buys a few tokens, and ultimately picks the joystick game. If there /is/ a pattern in the flashing madness, then she's in the mood to scrute something unusual. In fairness, it might be purely cosmetic; though it dispenses the number of tokens she 'paid' for, there is no apparent deduction of any actual funds. The games still seem to require them, though. Once coins are inserted into the maybe-glitching machine, the flashing rapid-fire images slow until they settle on a single image. It really -is- like a reCaptcha. It's a grid of sixteen squares, and the instructions - well - Choose all squares that contain _bicycles_ Joystick to move | |
