Compulsion

Mr. Drake’s consciousness had screamed down a beam of electrons. It had been churning away happily in its squishy little home for about seventy five years or so, when it was rudely ripped from the skull where it resided. It all happened exceedingly quickly, but it wasn’t physically painful. Psychically, on the other hand, it was excruciating. Like an existential meteor impact.

Every memory, experience, and lesson learned were served an eviction notice and he found himself a wandering vagrant on the streets of existence, with no cozy place to call home. Unbound by the skull, his consciousness seemed to spread out and diffuse into an unknown medium. Like a shot of espresso tipped overboard into a churning sea.

This made things difficult. All of his memories and thoughts were available, but they were distant and were only recalled with great effort. His core, or soul, remained and he still had a very distinct Mr. Drakeness about him, but the specifics were almost impossible to pin down.

He had faced this sort of thing before, and briefly inhabited a memory from his youth. He was nineteen and painfully hungover, in a condominium that he didn’t recognise. He had awoken bleary eyed on a couch and had absolutely no idea where he was. He was alone, so there was nobody there that he could pull context from.

His first clue that something was catastrophically out of whack came from a wall socket. Instead of the forlorn face of an American plug, with its vertical slit eyes and horrified mouth, it was some sort of inset hexagonal arrangement that just looked a bit startled. Three round holes of equal size stared from the wall in a state of shock, waiting for a lamp plug to be socketed into its face. This was the wrong sort of plug to be looking at if he were in North America.

This sent his mind in motion, trying to grasp at the last relevant memory. He didn’t feel like he was late for work or anything, so that was out. He had the distinct feeling that his obligations at the Haven Store were satisfied for the time being. Was he on school break? No, he had dropped out two years previously.

He peeled himself off the couch and walked painfully over to a sliding glass door, shoulders hunched against his pounding headache. It was winter wherever he was, this was apparent from all the snow on the roofs he could see. He was in some sort of village. A strange village with very ornate architecture. The eves of the roofs that he observed were decorated with intricate scrollwork, something that wouldn’t be bothered with where he was from. Beyond that were the mountains. These were of a distinctly alpine nature compared to the rolling hills of Kingston.

“Where the fuck am I?” He asked himself, eyes squinted at the five thousand foot craggy peaks before him. He sat back down on the couch and put his face in his hands. He began a recursive search of his memory, trying to think his way around the damage that the alcohol the evening before had done. He remembered a plane ride, so he was far away from home. After that a train to somewhere, so even further than far away.

Slowly he began to piece together the last couple of weeks. The memories eventually sorted themselves into a neat chronological order. After a couple of minutes of this it dawned on him that he was looking at the Swiss Alps. He was in the town of Sannersloch, and he had been invited to an after hours bar despite a full evening of dedicated drinking. A bartender had taken a shine to him and he was at her friend’s house. That mystery was solved, but it had taken some effort.
This memory demonstrated to him that he could rebuild himself from first principles. Though he didn’t have a big fat clue like the Swiss Alps to guide him. He couldn’t see anything, not that he was blind, but there was just nothing to see. Not darkness, but nothing. His memories and experiences were available to him, but shuffled callously like a deck of cards. He had no choice but to rifle through them and try to sort them as best he could.

A worrying amount of these memories were of cutting onions and writing the date on tape. This would have been a handy clue in sorting things out, but these dates were only the month and day. He was a cook, he guessed. To sort these, instead of looking at the date, he watched for his hands getting noticeably older or gaining new scars.

Mountains of onions and miles of tape. He must have written on roughly eight miles of the stuff, and the volume of onions was incalculable. From this onion observation, he was able to make a rough timeline of his life. With this established, he was able to explore his surroundings a bit. Surroundings being a very loose term for what he was experiencing.

He stumbled across a trove of data, something coherent, something precise. These were different from his memories and experiences. Succinct files, binary data, release dates, code, pixels, bit registers, sounds, music, spells. This data, he integrated into his budding connetome, and everything started to make a touch of sense.

With this data, his brain did what any halfway decent brain would do, and hallucinated a reality.

Mr. Drake found himself behind the controls of an assault suit, crammed into a launch tube with three other piloted machines. Strapped in by a five point harness, the controls of the suit wrapped around him and interfaced with the joints of his body, conceivably to translate their motion to the machine. Red alarm lights spun their warnings, heralding an impending launch.

There was some chatter over the coms channel, but it was in Japanese. Despite some concerted effort, he had never picked up the language, but knew its rapid fire cadence. Generally, he knew what was about to happen. The ship he was on was going to ram into a space station, he and his machine would be ejaculated out of the launch tube, and then a bunch of assholes would start shooting at him.
On a fundamental level, deep down at his core, he had a Mr. Drakeness that was observing how improbable this situation was. Surrounding that mote of intrinsic personality was a set of compulsions. A desire to pilot this assault suit through wave after wave of enemy fire. This set of compulsions informed him that he was Jake, a Marine that was drafted into the Pacific States Corps, involved in a skirmish between the Federation and the Axis. Though he was on the side of the Federation, he didn’t really give a shit about the politics of the situation, and just kind of wanted to use his Vulcan Cannon to poke holes in anything that happened to be facing the wrong way. His allies would be facing the same way he was, the enemy was anyone that he could see the front of.

He had a vague memory of a genesis, like a dream, of consuming raw noise. Binary data. Drinking in acrid radio static, and letting it flow through his being. He had digested it, and instead of his body breaking it down into handy amino acids like a physical body normally would, it executed it as code. It had rules and logic, where the place he had found himself in before had none.

He preferred this reality that he found himself in. Here there was dimensionality, an up and a down, forward and backward, you know, the good stuff. Where he was before was a staccato of black and white, on and off, existence and void. He had floated there formless for seemingly thousands of years before he got his shit together. Before he was able to recognise patterns in the chaos. He was able to hold this pattern of chaos in his mind and visualise it two dimensionally. Like an electron beam scanning back and forth on the phosphors of a cathode ray tube. Turning information into representation.

With this picture of chaos in his mind, he was able to discern boundaries of specific information, domains of coherent logic. Places where things tended to have the same rule set. Turning his awareness inward, he searched his form for similar patterns. Finding none, he observed the utter chaos he was composed of. It was an absolute wreck of incomprehensible noise, lacking the rules of the data that surrounded him. He was fundamentally different.

He had the distinct feeling that he had been grown, rather than crafted. He was a product of applied chaos. It was a bit of a melodramatic designation, but at this point he’d take what he could get. So he consumed all he saw before him, digesting rules and order.

Kernel Panic – not synching: Fatal exception in interupt.

Reboot in :30
…..an eternity.
Reboot in :29
……another eternity.

The Inn where Mr. Drake found himself, was full of heavily armed people. Not in any modern sense, but everyone seemed to be sporting an axe or a sword, maybe a mace or two. Chanmail and leather seemed to be in fashion at the moment, as well as plate and mythril. He looked down at his body and got the distinct feeling he was a touch underdressed. He bore a green tunic and matching breeches.
He had a nagging feeling that he was supposed to be doing something, but couldn’t for the life of him recall what that was. Something having to do with his house? Wherever that was. Maybe. Possibly an errand? The surroundings seemed appropriate for a quest, so maybe it was one of those. Where there was chainmail, there were undoubtedly quests.

“Hey,” he piped up, “barkeep, what town is this?”

The inn where he found himself had no windows, so there was really no way to tell where he was.

“Grass Valley,” the barkeep answered, polishing a mug.

This town was familiar to him, or at least the name. In his time as Blazer, he had saved this town from Deathtoll. He had revived all the souls in the town and repopulated it, but he didn’t remember it having an inn. There was the Mill where he discovered the secret to the underground castle, the Mayor’s house, Lisa’s place, the mansion with Dr. Leo’s painting, but no Inn. Maybe he was a bit turned around, or perhaps Grass Valley had seen some sort of economic boom. His memories of it were of a static place, with everything precise and scripted, not the dynamic place he saw before him.

He had a pouch at his belt, and inside were coins of unknown origin and denomination. He reached in and grabbed one at random.

“Could I get an ale?” he asked the barkeep.

“Brother,” he answered, “with that you can drink all night.”

It seemed like a reasonable idea, so he slid the coin to the man, who snatched it up greedily and poured him a tankard.

“Much obliged,” the barkeep thanked him and slid the tankard over, “what’s your name stranger?”

“Uh,” Mr. Drake narrowed his eyes, “Finn? Yeah, Finn I think. Let’s go with Finn.”

“You’ll want to keep that money low, Finn,” the barkeep offered, “plenty in here would slit your throat for a night on the house.”

“Duelly noted,” he answered, scanning around the taproom for trouble, none was apparent.

He began the task of eavesdropping on conversations and trying to get the general vibe of the place. In this fashion, he put back a few tankards and learned a bit about the lay of the land. The room around him began to grow dim due to an unfortunate lack of blood. He hadn’t even noticed his throat being cut.

“Son of a bitch,” he tried to gurgle.

Systemd exit_code=1 : Fatal Error