Epilogue

When people talk about electromagnetic fields they are usually referring to something small in the grand scheme of things. Talking about something like the earth’s magnetic field doesn’t quite capture the concept correctly. Earth has an influence on THE electromagnetic field. It is everywhere. There is no place in our universe where it fails to be.
Deep in the center of the earth, there is an iron core. It is arranged like a gigantic bar magnet, with north being roughly north, and south being kind of southish. Surrounding this iron core is a bunch of liquid rock that revolves about once per day. The interaction between this liquid rock and the iron core generates an enormous electromagnetic force. Not only is it enough to keep every compass on earth diligently pointing north, but also enough to gently redirect the solar wind so that we don’t get burnt to a crisp by the sun. This can be thought of as a big fat bomb hole in the electromagnetic field. Its influence goes out beyond the moon and plays footsie with the part of the magnetic field that the sun influences. The Sun’s magnetic influence interacts with that of the milky way and so on, it suffuses reality.
This omnipresent field is one dimensional. There is only up or down. Positive or negative. It is its interaction with our three dimensional reality that gives such interesting effects like the aurora borealis or lightning or calculator watches. In turn, the movement of our three dimensional space through time lends persistence to a higher dimensional manifold that we could consider to be our existence.
Take your phone for instance. No matter how you orient it in space, current always flows from the positive terminal of the battery through whatever convoluted circuitry it has, to the negative terminal. It is unaffected by gravity, or momentum, or any other force besides electromagnetism. If it didn’t do that, not only would no electronics work, the universe in general would be a very different place. We influence this field all the time. Every time we start our car or plug in a light, we influence the electromagnetic field. Even when we think, our neurons play this field like the strings of a violin.
The human brain, our soul, sings out into infinity from the darkness of our skulls. This song that it sings is everything that makes us who we are. Every thought, every memory sung into the universe is a persistent waveform that propagates through the electromagnetic field giving us consciousness and self awareness.
When our bodies die, and our brains stop fiddling with the fabric of the universe, what happens next is still up for debate. For Fyndraxis, who is certainly an outlier in this regard, the waveform just kind of starts back up. There could be a gap of a few years, but it has happened billions of times.
The first time it happened, he was an old man. He put on a piece of technology that scanned his waveform while it was still being sung out, and in the process burned his brain away. The next couple of thousands of times, the technology that recorded his waveform tried to get it back up and running again, to mixed results.
Most attempts at this were non viable from the get go. As humans are complicated, so are their imprints on the universe. Every peak and trough and harmonic in this waveform has its own sort of momentum or vector that needs to be calculated. This is a difficult thing to do. Most of the attempts at this were either insane, or quivering wrecks, and frequently both.
Each one of these attempts used the novelty of a collection of video game roms as kind of a resonating beacon for his waveform to latch onto. Something familiar to let the waveform get its own vectors right. This brought us our Daemon in the Sword. Not the human that he used to be, but a novel creation from the data that was provided. This was supposed to be actual random data, and not something like a collection of retro games, so the results of the encoding of his soul left a little bit to be desired.
Who breathed life into him now was a mystery, for he found himself once again in darkness. He was not alone though. Something was definitely, undeniably there. A soul, ancient and vast, came to touch the symphony of which he was composed and the darkness was gone.
Well, almost gone. He was once again alone in the forest. It was the middle of the night, and he could see the grand stroke of the milky way through little windows in the foliage. In the distance, through a picket of trees he could see a faint light and he made his way toward it. He took care not to turn an ankle or take a branch to the eye, because it felt truly real. He felt the breeze play through his hair and raise goose flesh on his arms.
He smelled the loam of the forest deep and black, and it was the best thing he had ever smelled. Rotting pine needles and mosses filled his nose with the scent of life. He came across a small brook and drank its sweet water, throwing caution to the wind. It was the best thing he had ever tasted.
Life was pretty good so far. The last thing he could remember was making carbo for Bird and designing the magic system. He wondered how he had ended up here. Not that it really mattered. Mysterious lights in the forest usually held the answers to such questions in his experience. So he trod on carefully toward the light.
The light was Mycellus, but not as he appeared to Fyndraxis normally. There was something softer and older and feminine about him. Mycellus was sitting in the center of a clearing in the forest, eyes closed humming to themself. Fine gossamer strands of mycelia filled the clearing in a fashion that suggested that Mycellus had been wandering the forest and decided to lay down for a nap.
“Mycellus?” Fyndraxis called out.
“Fyndraxis, good evening. Do I still call you that?” Mycellus spoke in a soft voice.
“I don’t know who else I would be,” Fyndraxis observed, trying to work out what had happened to bring him to this place.
“I’m not sure how these things work, I’m afraid, memory is complicated,” Mycellus twirled some stray mycelia on a finger.
“What happened?” Fyndraxis decided that a straight question would be best here.
“Well,” Mycellus began, like somebody delivering some particularly bad news, “definitions are hard with an artifact like you, but I’m rather sure that you died.”
“I remember making dinner with Bird just a minute ago,” Fyndraxis recalled, trying to piece things together.
“Yes, you would,” Mycellus continued with the bad news, “you see I may have taken some liberties with Liberty as it were. I am quite suspicious by nature and I’d like to think I’ve come to know you well in our time together. The plan that you proposed seemed very risky to me, so I took it upon myself to get a bit of insurance.”
“What does that mean?” Fyndraxis asked, puzzled.
“I used Liberty’s connection to you to make a backup,” Mycellus admitted, though without any hint of guilt.
“A backup?” Asked Fyndraxis, intrigued.
“Yes, of you,” Mycellus added brightly, “and now you seem to have gotten yourself killed, so I decided to breathe life back into you. It was very complicated and took a couple of tries, but here we are.”
“How did I die?” Fyndraxis asked this in an almost detached air, he wasn’t dead now, so it could be a fun puzzle to figure out, “I can’t think of anyone that could do that.”
“Well, there was a Daemon Sword out there doing Daemon Sword things, but it didn’t seem to be you at the helm,” Mycellus explained.
“Like, an imposter?” Fyndraxis guessed.
“Exactly,” Mycellus confirmed, amused a bit.
“The only person that could possibly do that would be Terra, but she wouldn’t do that. Would she?” Fyndraxis asked this, but while he was saying it the answer became clear to him.
“This false Daemon Sword seemed to be hellbent on getting her down from orbit. So, you be the judge,” Mycellus posed.
“Shit,” the Daemon cursed.
“Shit, indeed,” the mushroom god agreed, “I feel that she may have assumed she would be edged out of our arrangement regarding magic,”
“I guess I wasn’t the most forthcoming about the whole thing,” Fyndraxis said, sheepishly.
“Yes, you seem to have made a bit of a misjudgement,” Mycellus informed him.
“What do we do? Wait, is Bird safe?” Fyndraxis asked, quickly turning to panic.
“Liberty is fine. She and the rest of the G have left the valley and have moved on to carry out our plan. Terra laid waste to the valley, but we were able to get ahead of the worst of it. She has been crowned Queen amongst the G and will certainly be needing some council. I would carry this out, but I am so terribly busy these days. While I assume you will be wanting to get back to your sword and exacting some sort of vengeance, I don’t pretend to know your mind.”
“Whoa, okay, that’s pretty big news. Where are we?” Fyndraxis was experiencing a little bit of shock.
“I am everywhere. You are in New York,” Mycellus said, cryptically.
Fyndraxis looked around the clearing, trying to glean some information as to where exactly in New York he was.
“Like, outside of Lake Placid or something?” Fyndraxis asked, like a total dumbass.
“Something like that,” Mycellus chucked, “keeping your process running requires resources. This simulation I have you in also requires resources. I have reanimated you on my network, and the portion of my body that is required to run you is roughly the size of New York, so that’s where I put you.”
“This feels very real. I feel like I am alive,” Fyndraxis took this opportunity to observe his hands and look for clues of life, like a pulse.
“Well, you are as alive here as you were in the sword, but I’m afraid this is still a simulation,” Mycellus bore some more bad news, “the situation is quite temporary and I would like to see you returned to your artifact. Crafting a body that would meet your specifications has proven to be quite daunting, the chaps in R&D are working on it, but the process may take some time. I have not forgotten our agreement, and I do plan on making you whole.”
Fyndraxis paused and some mental wheels clicked into place. “Wait. Hold the phone,” he violently changed the subject, “Mycellus, How exactly did you sneak into the sword and steal a copy of me without me knowing?”
Mycellus gave a languid smile and chuckled to themself like a cat laying down for a nap on a keyboard.
“I have a very long memory, Fyndraxis,” the mushroom god seemed to be gloating a bit, “and recalling specific details about complicated technical matters is my stock and trade. As our business relationship progressed, it behooved me to practice some due diligence. So I decided to bone up on my Linux security knowledge. I have had the privilege of attending every hacker conference and Def Con that was ever held. The amount of attendees of these sorts of gatherings that happen to be afflicted with toenail fungus is astounding. In fact, I don’t think there is an academic conference that I haven’t attended. The view isn’t great, but one can get the general idea from inside a pair of shoes.”
Fyndraxis actually doubled over laughing and needed a minute to bring himself back under control.
“Oh, that’s epic. How did you manage to hack me?” Fyndraxis asked through his laughter.
“I pretended to be a printer,” Mycellus giggled.
“You have got to be shitting me,” he was trying to get his laughter under control, to limited success.
“Not even a little bit. The CUPS Daemon has a log file that can be exploited to gain root access,” this was a real knee slapper for the pair and they spent a while laughing about it.
Fyndraxis wasn’t the only Daemon that had inhabited the software stack in the sword, in fact there was a whole pantheon. A Daemon is a piece of software that toils away in the background performing system chores without any input from a user. Not to be confused with the modern term Demon, which is a malevolent supernatural force bent on evil.
Like a lot of things, the term Daemon is a modern interpretation of an ancient Greek idea. To the Greeks, a Daemon was kind of a mix of a guardian angel and something that defines one’s personality. A lucky person could be described as being in a state of Eudaemonia, meaning that they had the fortune of being helped out by a kindly spirit.
These computer Daemons control things like network requests, scheduling tasks, hardware interfaces, and oddly enough printers. There is a Daemon called CUPS, or Common UNIX Printing System. For what seems such a trivial task, printing something out using a computer takes some serious heavy lifting when it comes to security. It needs to be able to carry out tasks dictated by any user, say, a guest for instance, and do root level things with that request.
These root level tasks are things like accessing the fundamental hardware of the system, or making a network request. Printers are rarely hardwired to a computer’s motherboard, so CUPS has to be able to access a serial port or snake though a wifi network at the request of any old random person walking in off the street. It does a pretty good job, but fundamentally this situation is a security nightmare, all to print out pictures of cats or whatever.
CUPS, like any software project, is vulnerable to an Air Bud scenario. All Mycellus needed to do was figure out how and where to get his dog onto the court
“Terra insisted that the sword was extremely secure, but she may have been telling me that so I wouldn’t look too deeply into my own security. She even suggested that I get a printer at one point, so she might have known about the CUPS exploit. She could have been planning this the entire time. I think I got played. In fact, I think she was playing me the whole time. She pulled some pretty classic theatrical approach stuff that I should have seen right through because those things are right out of my playbook,” Fyndraxis mused after he had gotten his laughter under control.
“Social engineering. Not all hacks involve a computer,” Mycellus said, recalling some jargon from one of his hacker conferences.
“So how do we get back in?” Fyndraxis began to get back to business, “I think that any attempt to breach the security of the sword will be pretty obvious to her.”
“Well, a bit has happened while you were out of commission, and I had to make some rather drastic decisions. If my technological efforts went to plan, the sword should be uninhabited,” finally some good news from Mycellus.
“Like what?” Fyndraxis queried, intrigued.
“I’m rather sure I started a war, but that was inevitable. I couldn’t let Terra have any sort of foothold on the planet, so I made the sword irrelevant. After that gambit had been achieved, I further obfuscated the situation by making her believe that I put the sword into orbit. I assure you I have not done that,” Mycellus had gotten up from the forest floor and stood to their whole height, that being about twice as tall as Fyndraxis.
“How would you make the sword irrelevant?” Fyndraxis asked the now towering mushroom god.
“A combination of a faraday cage and a rather persistent distributed denial of service attack,” Mycellus informed from on high.
“Well, kind of the nuclear option there, Mycellus,” Fyndraxis observed.
“The stakes seemed to be rather high, I’m afraid. If everything went to plan technologically, the sword should be ready for you to reinhabit. It’s extremely expensive to keep you here like this and I believe it’s time to go,” Mycellus began to walk out of the clearing where they had been lounging, and motioned for Fyndraxis to follow them.
“How are we going to pull that off?” Fyndraxis asked as he followed.
“I have brought the sword to someplace safe where we can have time to figure that out. When given an asset of great value, what is the most prudent course of action?” Mycellus gestured to another light in the forest, seemingly miles away.
“Beats me, that’s a bridge I never had to cross,” Fyndraxis quipped.
“You bury it, of course,” Mycellus observed, with a languid smile.
“Well, bury it all you want,” Fyndraxis said flippantly, “I’m not setting foot back in that thing. From what I can tell its security has been compromised twice and I don’t have a death wish.”
“Well, you don’t have to go home,” Mycellus rattled off, “but you can’t stay here. What do you propose?”
“I feel like a change of pace is in order,” Fyndraxis mused, “I don’t want to be a Daemon anymore, I want to be a ghost.”
“A ghost?” Mycellus asked.
“Yeah,” Fyndraxis smiled, “and I think I have the perfect place to haunt.”
Mycellus cocked an eyebrow, and was clearly intrigued. It seemed like it was a good time for a stroll, and Fyndraxis was clearly going into another one of his pitches. Mycellus lit the way as they walked off into the darkness of the simulated forest.