A Splinter in Your Mind - Matrix Quest

open_sketch · 2021-12-26T00:08:28+00:00

The date is March 29th, 1999. Monday. It is March 29st, 1999, because the calendar hanging in the break room, the ticking clock on the task bar of your computer, the word-a-day on Mabel’s desk in Accounting all insist on it. It was in the tickers on the news in the morning, on the announcements while you rode in, scrolling by in lights as you waited for the subway. Every piece of concrete evidence pointed to today being March 29th, 1999. There was no argument you could construct that it was any other day, no story you could tell. It didn’t even particularly feel like it wasn’t March 29th, 1999. It just didn’t feel like it was, either. It could have been the 30th, the 28th, the 1st of April. It could be 1998 or ‘97 or 2003 or 2021 or 2199 or 1867. All of it seemed the same. All of it just blended together into one endless, beginningless, meaningless forever. It might not even be Monday. You sipped your coffee, held onto the bitter taste as something real, just for a moment, then got back to work. It was the same task as always, some company you’d never heard of needing a unique payroll solution or scheduling software or accounting program. You felt sometimes like you’d written the same thing every day of your life. You hit compile and went to get more coffee. When you sat back at your desk, the compiler had predictably crashed and spewed out a cascade of errors. You groaned: you were sure it’d work, you double-checked everything, but you always seemed to make the same mistakes. Once or twice, you’d thought to yourself that it was, somehow, the compiler's fault. When you first started, you’d gone as far as to copy your code over to a fresh file to compare it, and there were times you swore you’d watched a typo or incorrect operator or misused variable appear in both files that hadn’t been there. It had kept you up at night. But you knew better now. The reality is that writing thousands of lines of code meant that there were always problems somewhere. No complex system was without errors. --- The date is March 30th, 1999. Tuesday. Your work was never difficult, but neither did anything ever seem to come easy. Just once, just once, you wanted a program to compile right the first time. Just once, you wanted the debug window to be blank. You sipped your coffee. You couldn’t complain. The money was good, better than you could have hoped really. The only catch was the overtime. The company said you were done at 5, but there was a clear implication that you were to stay longer, that anyone who didn’t was letting down the team. People who went home at 5 didn’t care about the company, didn’t have passion for the work, and more often than not that meant they’d be clearing out their desk in short order. The rumour you heard was they added up everyone’s hours in the office and just cut the bottom five percent of every department quarterly. You didn’t know if that was true, but you’d certainly resolved never to be in the bottom five percent. You had grown to hate your cubical so much. When you first got here it had felt cool, your own little office almost. You’d put up posters and a little corkboard, tried to personalize the space, make it feel like yours. Now, though, you felt trapped. That was the nature of a cubical, that you were boxed in like a horse wearing blinders, no awareness of anyone else but no privacy from people walking past. The purpose of the cubicle was to narrow your world down to 36 square feet, to hide everything other than your desk and your screen while not letting you hide in turn. You hit compile and went to get some coffee. You passed Chris, the new guy, walking zombie-like past you, going back to his cubical after doing the same. He’d pulled a fourteen-hour day yesterday, his first, and he seemed barely sentient now. Something had drained the life from him, the same vampire that had long since turned you. You returned to a full debug log and a crashed compiler. ---- The date is March 31th, 1999. Wednesday. You’d stayed late yesterday, trying to get it to run, but every time there were new errors, new bugs, new problems. It was never this bad when you wrote software at home, when you used to write it in college back when you had dreams and ambitions and programming was fun. You swore you had to fix the exact same mistake more than once; it was like somebody had gone back and undone what you did. It was nearing midnight when you finally gave up and went home. You were exhausted now. Your computer booted up and you opened everything back up, reading over it with fresh eyes. You double-checked everything. Explained it to Bentham, the rubber duck which sat atop your monitor facing the door to your cubical, watching the watchers. It was perfect. Flawless. It would do what it was meant to do. You were good at your job. You pressed compile and went to get more coffee. Sandra was there, in the break room. She smiled at you on the way back to her desk. She was so stunning, you always felt strange about it. The way a crush would always make you feel ugly and misshapen and wrong. How you always felt insufficient. You returned to your desk to see the longest error log yet, line after line of red exceptions and loops and broken code spilling out. You trembled. There was a moment where you almost dumped your coffee on your computer and walked away. A moment where you kicked through the tower in a rage and screamed to the heavens until God himself came down to sort it out. A moment where you pulled a gun from your briefcase, a gun you’d never seen or held but often dreamt of, a gun with one bullet for your boss and one for you so you can finally, finally be free of this fucking prison, of the screaming lights and grinding computers and insipid conversation, of the bitter coffee and endless papers and stress and overtime and errors, errors, errors in your perfect code, in your body in your brain in your fingers and hands and eyes the mirror lying to your every time your look, your tie a noose around the neck of a body that didn’t feel like yours- You sighed, sat down, took a sip of your coffee, and started fixing errors. Life of a programmer. What could you do? ---- You left just before eight. Punching out early. You deserved it. Nobody accosted you on the subway, nothing went wrong. You got Chinese on the way back and were so hungry you’d eaten most of it by the time you reached your apartment. Normally, you’d now open Mozilla Suite and IRC and uselessly browse the internet for a few hours before collapsing into sleep. You’d spend that time pretending to be somebody else; used to be literal, playing Ultima Online, but when you’d started at Cisco and the hours had made keeping up with the game impossible you’d ended up keeping the username, one you’d been using for one thing or another for years. It was a comfort, to escape yourself for a while. For the first time you could remember, though, you had energy, just a tiny bit. Enough to work on the projects you wanted to work on, to pick something back up. You sat down at your long-unused desk, letting the wheels of your reclaimed office chair slide you in front of your keyboard, booted up as you started hunting through the CD-Rs and floppy discs in the bookshelf. A half-written IRC client, a handful of Quake mods, those fractals you’d made in Excel using conditional formatting as a laugh. You know what? Fuck it, let’s be ambitious. You’d dreamt for years about writing an adventure game, like the kind you used to play as a kid on your dad’s Amiga. You only had sketches of a story, but you had ideas for mechanics, about writing a text parser that could understand naturalistic sentences using some stuff you worked on in college, and you’d filled sketchbooks with drawings of the protagonist, this badass chick in a long coat and sunglasses who fought megacorperations in the cyberpunk dystopian future. A little Aeon Flux, a little Major Kusanagi. You’d been thinking about her since middle school. As sirens blared outside your window, you grabbed your old notebook and opened files you hadn’t touched in the better part of a year. You were going to make progress today. You spread your notebooks out over the coffee table and- There was a knock on your door. Of course. Of fucking course. Was probably your bitch of a landlady after rent early, or some drunk fucking neighbour who’d locked himself out again. Or the cops outside had decided that they had probable cause to randomly search your apartment for the weed that they would, in fact, find under the cutlery in your barely-used kitchen. Fuck. More knocking. “Come on, Eugene, open up!” a voice came from the other side. You couldn’t place it, but it sounded like somebody you knew. They sounded distressed. Maybe even in pain. You opened the door, and there stood a familiar stranger. He was a shorter man with short brown hair, wearing an all-black suit and tie with a white leather jacket over it, and he was clutching his side with a pained expression. There was blood on his hand, and the other held a gleaming silver pistol with a pearl grip. “Eugene, man, thank God,” he said, stepping forward. You stepped aside. He had a gun. “Close the door, man. Fuck…” “Sorry, I…” You almost asked who he was, but there was something more pressing. “I’m going to call an ambulance.” “Fuck, dude, no. Hold on,” he said, collapsing against your ratty couch and exhaling. “Fuck, clipped me good though. Um… off chance, do you reconize me? Know who I am?” “... no,” you said honestly. His face fell. “Yeah, figured. God, the shit they do to you… is this how you live?” he said. You looked around your apartment and shrugged. It wasn’t much, but it was home, as long as they didn’t hike the rent again. “Shit. Where you working these days?” “Cisco Systems. I… I write payroll programs mostly. Sorry, how do you know me?” “I… I’d explain but you wouldn’t believe me. I just need a minute to catch my breath and I’ll-” There was a buzz under his coat, and he dropped the gun on your coffee table and, with pained movements, drew a phone from his jacket. “You got my exit? I… yeah, I know, I didn’t exactly have a lot of options. No, I knew him, he’s… he’s harmless.” You paced nervously for a minute before the man indicated for you to take a seat. At his behest, in your own home, you sank back into your office chair and tried not to look too anxious. There were sirens outside, closer now than they’d been. You realized this man was almost certainly a criminal and that meant you were harbouring a criminal and that meant your life was over, one way or another. Strangely, it didn’t seem too distressing. It was just Wednesday. “Yeah, I can make that,” the man concluded, hanging up and stuffing the phone back in his jacket. In its place he withdrew a pair of green-tinted sunglasses, so dark his eyes disappeared behind them. He didn’t look in nearly so much pain anymore. He plucked the gun back up off the coffee table, then paused. Shuffled the notebook around with the barrel. “You still writing about her, huh?” he asked. “Sorry?” “The, uh, cyber-chick you used to draw. Shit, what was her name? You’d go on and on about her. You still going to write that game?” he asked, holstering his gun under his jacket. “I was. I was just sitting down to, uh-” You paused. “How do you know about that? I’ve never told anyone about her.” “You told me. Just me,” he said. “... did you have any friends in school. A best friend?” “Yeah,” you answered reflexively. “What was his name?” he asked, and you opened your mouth and there was just a void where it should be. Helpless, you just shrugged. “Yeah. That’s what they do,” he said, sighing and staggering to his feet. “Thanks, I’ll get out of here. No trace of me. It was good seeing you again, take care of yourself,” he said, moving to the door. Dumbstruck, you just watched him go, walking with a bold confidence now, right until his hand touched the doorknob. He turned back to you. “... actually. Hold on.” “Who are you?” you asked again, not sure what else to say. “I think you might be asking the wrong person that question,” he said. “Tell me something real quick. If you could be her, instead of you, would you want that?” “I… I don’t understand,” you said honestly. “Like… if there was a button you could press, or… heh.” He paused to laugh to himself. “A pill you could take that would make it so that you never existed, and instead, you were her. The cyber-chick in your drawings. Would you take it?” It was such a stupid, bizarre question. “Yes,” you said, without hesitation. “Yeah. Yeah, I would. I would.” The man nodded, reaching into his coat. You were expecting him to pull out his gun, to shoot you dead on the spot for your transgression, for admitting something so embarrassing, something so… wrong. Instead, he was holding a small red pill. “What’s your name, girl?” ---- [ ] Write In

Thread starter open_sketch
Start date Dec 25, 2021
Mature Sci-Fi
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the matrix action cyberpunk (punk) science fiction do not expect canon female protagonist trans protagonist big wulf energy

A Splinter in Your Mind

Created: Dec 25, 2021

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An even more trans, even more anticapitalist reimagining of the world of the Matrix, running on the Artificial World roleplaying game.

Last edited: Dec 25, 2021

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The Ashur

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open_sketch

I don't know how to use a computer

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Jan 1, 2022

#670

Btw, it's the Ashur, which is an Assyria god, but Google keeps autocorrecting it to Ashtur, a place in India. Thanks, Google! I'll go on a hunt and fix it everywhere its wrong (which is probably most places), please do note it if you see it in the future.