Post by Vilicious on Feb 13, 2015 6:30:06 GMT -8
Nearly 15 years ago.
The sands await.
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In his mind, in the distance, there were lights.
The sky was immense. Boundless. Free. Most importantly, free. A half millennium of digital liberty represented in a flawlessly programmed desert sky accurately depicting, on nights such as this, the real-world's own experience out to approximately 100 light years and reflecting changes within 1 picosecond of reality's own view.
...But that was impossible for this vagabond to know by sight. His head lolled back to aim a pair of blindfolded eyes skyward and saw nothing. Underneath the bindings over his mouth, he frowned. He liked to think he appreciated beauty, even while he could not experience that of a "normal" being.
It was a curse, in the manners that mattered.
Even so; in his mind, in the distance, there were lights: These were the lights of souls, beautiful in their own right, rendered by his mind to take the shape that each's owner made for themselves in their own. Generally, that was what they were programmed to look like. Generally. He had seen beings with self-images both grander and smaller than themselves, and further still, those with such force of personality that their appearance consisted solely of light, or of darkness, or of fire or water.
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The lights proximal to the navi this night were those of a small village to which he had never been. The coordinates given him were inscribed in his thought and logged to his navigational processes, and he floated his way across the netscape as those dictated... and in cases such as this, when given vagaries in the place of direction, he simply read a navi's soul for their intended instructions.
Much simpler.
What lay before him now was his goal, was what was both inscribed and read. It surprised him in both its low population and its relative seclusion from even the most enterprising wild viruses.
At his approach, a few less wary members of the society (that had not run or hid themselves) simply watched him pass with the utmost scrutiny, trying to sense his hostility, or capitalistic intent, or dominating presence... but they would find none of that, he knew. They would find a single, definitionless, neutral entity in their midst; obsessed with none of the human quirks that many navis prided themselves on. Purpose was written on his being, loyalty encoded into every bit of his soul, and that was in many ways what brought him to this outlying spat of lost hovels.
He settled to the ground to let the sand sift over his sandals to his toes. The sense of a world under his feet, of a connection from him to the earth to the others here... it was real. This village was old beyond reckoning, to have taken in such a life from its residents.
The locals were old models, all over a century by the feel of them. He considered their lives:
Whatever routines they were running had not changed since their operators had left them to whatever fate, and the log-in port seemed unused in almost as long an age by how empty it was of residual soul - The real world location must have been buried under the sand and been as forgotten as this place. Their fashion was surely as aged, if the years of wear had not rendered them skeletal frames. He couldn't tell. Certainly, their souls were not well tethered to what they may have considered a life.
One of the runners came back. Its mind was full of holes, its body wavered as it returned, and presumably it bent over with the most exertion it had suffered in years.
But a single thought flared over the mess.
A name it knew, from where?
"Maelxus."