Scene 9

The assumptive house of cards that Fyndraxis was building was reaching some rather lofty heights, so he deemed it wise to retreat once again to his sanctum. He could also breathe in and out there comfortably, so that was a welcome respite as well. There were some assumptions making up the ground floor of his new reality that warranted some investigation.
When he dicked around on his computer, he did so through an interface called the command line. This was an arcane and powerful way to interact with the machine. This was also a bit of a pain in the ass, but it was a trade off. If he wanted the computer to do something, he would have to type a command. There was no handy window manager that would hold his hand through the process offering helpful menus or configuration wizards. He had to be the wizard.
It was a black and white world of monotype font where he did his wizarding. He thought of commands like spells, and approached the whole situation as a great working of magic. In the use of these commands, he had to pay in the currency of knowledge. To use a command, you had to know everything about it. Something as trivial as a typo or a misunderstanding of syntax would yield an undesirable result. It was a black art that he was not half bad at.
Because of its nature, a computer does exactly what you tell it to do. If you tell it to do something dumb that doesn’t make any sense, it will happily return a cryptic nonsensical result. Those familiar with the works of Douglas Adams will know that the question and how it is posed are sometimes far more important than the actual answer. In other words, garbage in, garbage out is the general rule.
One of the general assumptions Fyndraxis was basing his current world view on, was the fact that his mind and the computer in his Sanctum were intrinsically linked. He had thoughts and stuff changed on the computer. He had evidence of this from the landform text file that he had been dicking around with.
One thing that computers excel at is turning ideas into reality. Assuming that you have a well formulated idea and can convey that information to the computer in a way that it can interpret correctly, it will manifest whatever idea you give it. It will happily chug its way through any algorithm that you give it, as long as it doesn’t have to divide by zero or something similarly impossible.
Where the rubber meets the road is in how the computer interfaces with reality. It does this by interacting with devices. Device is an extremely broad term that does its very best to wiggle out from under the thumb of definition. A decent example of a device would be a hard drive. A hard drive is a piece of storage media that can be physically manipulated in some fashion. Let’s say that you want your computer to add two numbers, great that’s very simple. You input the numbers that you want to add and you can review the result to your heart’s content. This is an ephemeral result. Both you and the computer could forget that very easily. The computer can save this result for you by physically flipping bits on a hard drive, and remembering where that information is.
In this simple act, it had turned something digital into something physical. It has breached the veil between the realm of the mind and the physical world. It has turned an idea into reality.
Fyndraxis, being soul bound to this sword, kind of has a de facto body. There is some magic or technology that contains his soul and the sword itself is the interface with the greater reality where the forest and the boy are. If he were to figure out what sort of agency the sword has in the physical world, he could go about the business of exercising his will. Whatever that was.
On the computer, the coal face of this intersection between thought and reality was a place in the file structure called /dev. This is where the operating system tries its very best to define the term device. This is of course a tricky business, so it is full of a myriad of files that try to do so. Each instance of a definition is a file that is linked to a device in the real world. Interactions with these files can produce real world results.
It didn’t take Fyndraxis very long to track down what he was looking for, but once he found it, he felt a bit like the dog that caught the car. He also felt a little silly for not finding it in the last couple of thousand years of poking around in his computer, but that was beside the point. The file that he found was called /dev/sword, but it was unclear what he should do with it. He took some time to familiarize himself with the information in this file. He considered himself rather smart, so getting a handle on things only took a couple of weeks of dedicated work.
When he returned once again to the forest, absolutely nothing had changed. He had spent a significant amount of time getting up to speed with the /dev/sword file, and Hugin and Munin were still just beginning to deflesh the boy. He hadn’t bloated or rotted, it was as if no time at all had passed out here while he was in the sword. Like time was screaming by in the sword and the outer world was plodding along lazily. He recalled his dirt naps and how he would return to novel continental configurations in his realm. This was troubling, but inconsequential for now. He had some hardware testing to do.
Some of this hardware testing would best be pulled off after the sun went down, but for now he wanted to make some noise. He had figured out that he could make the sword vibrate. This could help his situation in a number of ways. He could conceivably wiggle himself out of the raspberry bush where he was posted up, but he was fortunately oriented in a rather vertical situation and didn’t really want to change that. He was point down and handle up, and he enjoyed his point of view despite the dead kid being front and center.
If he could modulate the vibration of the sword, he could make sounds. He could act as a speaker of sorts, and alert a passerby. He had been able to manipulate the landform text file unconsciously and had spent some of his time in the last couple of weeks figuring out how to do that sort of thing consciously. It was tricky, and a little clunky, but he was kind of getting the hang of it. He had a set of switches that he pictured in his mind and could flip them pretty reliably.
He imagined the one that had control of sound flipping in his mind, he saw it as a pretty classic toggle switch made of glimmering steel, with a threaded housing. With that out of the way he began to yell for help as loud as he could. Both Hugin and Munin took umbrage at this and left a couple of flight feathers as they disappeared into the forest.
An hour or two of yelling for help yielded no results. Once he had quieted down, the pair of crows returned, this time with some friends and he finally had a proper murder on his hands. They spent the afternoon doing their best to eat the boy between the inevitable arguments that crop up when involved in a large project. The speech of the crows was quite a bit more effective in the forest than his had been. Their constant squabbling had attracted the attention of the local turkey vultures. They showed up in their dozens, and by the time the sun was going down, the boy was a fetid smear of exposed meat and bone.
With the light failing, the day shift packed up and Fyndraxis had about an hour’s respite from the carnage, and then the night shift began. It started slowly with a fox. It slinked cat-like from the cover of the forest, trying its best to balance its hunger and paranoia. Once it determined that this wasn’t some elaborate trap, it ate its fill and moved on silently.
Next were the coyotes. They were neither quiet nor paranoid. They descended on the corpse, a pack of hungry yipping mouths. Their approach to the whole situation was a lot like the crows, taking time to have a fight or two between mouthfuls. When they were finished, nothing was left of the boy. Even his bones had been packed up and taken to unknown dens or secreted beneath the earth for leaner times.
Fyndraxis had let himself get distracted by this demonstration of applied ecology. He had front row seats to how mother nature hid a corpse, and on some level it was fascinating. He had some more testing to do, so he flipped another mental toggle switch. This one controlled the lights.
In poking around in the /dev/sword file, he had discovered something that hinted toward illumination. He didn’t understand it very well, but it seemed to work to some degree. He cast a white directionless light into the night. This had the effect of lighting up his little clearing in the forest, and in retrospect, he should have used it to scare off the coyotes. Now that there was no corpse here, he might be screwed. Certainly somebody would come looking for the boy, but he was kind of counting on some olfactory clues to help guide the way.
He spent a couple of hours blinking his lights on and off in hopes of calling attention to himself, but he doubted anyone would come in the dead of the night. He decided to sit in the dark of the night and observe the stars. A great number of things could be deduced from staring into the void.