some shit that went nowhere

prologue

[ 01:15:22 ] [amber_WAV] o shit hes not breathin
[ 01:15:26 ] [%maxbot] Breathe, breath in the air Don’t be afraid to care
[ 01:15:32 ] [amber_WAV] serius, he is out
[ 01:15:38 ] [bigJess] bullshit
[ 01:15:41 ] [amber_WAV] he sdaid he was trying something neww
[ 01:15:48 ] [amber_WAV] he was fine a minite ago
[ 01:16:12 ] [bigJess] another stunt
[ 01:16:14 ] [%maxbot] ICY HOT STUNTAZ!
[ 01:16:18 ] [bigJess] lemme tell u bout the scene went down few months back
[ 01:16:25 ] [funkY KiNg_St0n3] Jebus, Jess, nobody want to hear bout how your mom read three weeks worth of your chat logs again
[ 01:16:26 ] [bigJess] i won;t terroize u with the whole story but the punchline is I ended up talikin 2 teh copz 4 4 hours and my mom read 3 weeks of my chat log courtesy my fuckn ISP. Where the hell u think I was for 3 weeks, gronded is where
[ 01:16:34 ] [amber_WAV] man his nose is bleeding look at the cam
[ 01:16:40 ] [amber_WAV] im going to call my dad
[ 01:16:42 ] [%maxbot] Who’s Your Daddy?
[ 01:16:43 ] [funkY KiNg_St0n3] NO AMBER
[ 01:16:54 ] [funkY KiNg_St0n3] Our rule here is free will and trust. If he didn’t ask for a safety net he’s flying solo and that’s his choice. You want I should tell your dad, he comes online, about what you were agonizing about doing with your little friend last week?
[ 01:17:04 ] [amber_WAV] Funky this isn’t like that
[ 01:17:09 ] [amber_WAV] theres blood all over his face look
[ 01:17:04 ] [bigJess] funkY is right amber.
[ 01:17:05 ] [80210] whoa looks like i picked a helluva day 2 come in late what the hell is wrong with c/OR?
[ 01:17:15 ] [amber_WAV] fuck you funky and you to jess. trust is trust he may be dyin and
[ 01:17:17 ] [80210] whats that thing on his head?!?
[ 01:17:20 ] [HARDc/0R] holy shit
[ 01:17:23 ] [%maxbot] sh1t happenZ!
[ 01:17:25 ] [HARDc/0R] omg amber, tell me you didnt call ur dad
[ 01:17:33 ] [funkY KiNg_St0n3] let this be a lesson amber. Welcome back c/0R. So just where did you go man? You snort something? Your nose is bleeding in case you missed that. And what IS that thing on your head?
[ 01:17:35 ] [amber_WAV] no but u came really close. dont scare us like that man!
[ 01:17:40 ] [HARDc/0R] thank god for that... no I didnt snort nothing but have i got a story for u bout that funky
[ 01:17:45 ] [80210] so why IS ur nose bleedin
[ 01:17:50 ] [HARDc/0R] lost it a second and did a header into the monitor but listen now
[ 01:17:54 ] [bigJess] LOL

-=-

Chapter 1 basement blues

He’s half lost in general clutter. Stacks of illicitely obtained commercial milk crates (some thefts dating back to his father’s college days) give a rough stratification of his history: children’s books he finds too prominet in human mythology to discard (Oh the Thinks that You’ll think, Fox In Socks, I Had Trouble in Getting To LaLaPaloo by Seuss, Blue Moose By Pinkwater, The Great Escape, or The Sewer Story by Lippman). Stuck between a haphazard selection of fantasy and science fiction are various iterations of Dungeons and Dragons (the original basic set inherited from his brother, five years elder (and almost a collector’s item when Rupert won it in a taut Ebay joust), including the venerable first edition of the Keep on the Borderlands, the full complement of Advanced D & D hardcovers, giving way to various G.U.R.P.S. when the invented worlds of others seemed too much of a restraint. Late high school’s venture into literature, Karamozov and Two Cities and Hamlet and Ulysses (too much for a high school senior and still unread). The top level: college and computers. Textbooks, classics, Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming in three volumes, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Mythical Man Month. And stacks and stacks stacks of printout.

The attention of Cyrus Smith, predictably, is not on these artifacts of dead print but the dynamic glow of an obscelescent liquid crystal display piping data from an even more obscelescent cast-off tower he gifted his parents when he outgrew it his freshman year. His computer, his real computer, which is the size of his fist (or his heart) and about 500 times more powerful than the cinderblock-sized chunk of junk feeding his current interface, is hiding in the bottom of a box (more books, more printout) in his room, upstairs, sleeping like his parents.

No: despite the best efforts of some computers still lack sentience and it is not the computer that is hiding, it is Cyrus. The computer is stocked with the work of the last four years, serious pursuit of a serious goal, many thousands of line of pretty good code that right now spell out too clearly the final and most unexpected conclusion of it all. Cyrus doesn’t have a clue what to do next.

this is what is up with this.