Fifty One

While Bird and Lange were on their little stroll, Fyndraxis had some time to kill. He had a number of projects that he could have been working on, but he deemed this time appropriate to do a little bit of self improvement.
His revelations at the hill had started the process of clearing up his amnesia, but that journey was far from over. Another trip into the depths of his past could conceivably help him gain some insight into his present. He could also use a distraction to keep him from raging about what Bird had just done. It was time for a vacation.
One little quirk of his realm was the abundance of secret doors. Seemingly every structure had one or two, if you knew what you were looking for. Fyndraxis couldn’t help but know where these were, because they called to him. They sang a sort of suicidal siren song that he had to actively avoid.
He had made sure that there were none of these in his workshop. That was one of the reasons that he was able to spend so much time there, it was a distraction free zone. There were a couple hidden around the keep though. They were secreted in cupboards, or hidden in otherwise nondescript walls, but they made themselves apparent to him.
He had a feeling that behind these doors were hidden structures and secret buildings that didn’t follow the rules of his simulation. Sort of a non-newtonian playground. Up until now he had avoided them like he had the hill. The hill hadn’t ended up being that bad though. Sure, it was very sad to be a grieving old man, but the payoff in precious memory and information had been far more than worth it.
He made his way down to the kitchens. There was a cupboard there that led into the depths of his mind. He took a couple of seconds to take some deep breaths and psych himself up for the inevitable opening of the way. Then, without pomp or circumstance, he just opened it and went in.
Suddenly, Fyndraxis was a child. In this transformation he had the distinct displeasure of inhabiting a child’s mind. All of the hard fought neural pathways that he existed in were reduced to the sort of naive dream logic that children use to interact with the world around them. To him, at this moment, Santa was a cold hard truth, and his father was the toughest man in the universe.
Fyndraxis sat cross legged in a living room, puzzling out the inner workings of a VCR. The living room itself was a masterpiece of 80’s lower middle class trappings. There were two television sets, one of them perched upon the other. The lower television was basically a piece of furniture, it had scrollwork, doors, knobs of all kinds, walnut veneer, it was a real peach.
When it had given up the ghost, it had made a lot of sense to use it as a TV stand instead of trying to move it from the crater it was forming in the wall to wall carpet due to its sheer weight.
This home had a terminal carpet infection. One only had to walk into the kitchen or the bathroom to see how serious things were. This infection was a symptom of the age of the home. When the house began to lose the pitched battle it was in against the gravitational forces of the entire planet, it started to sag like a swayback mare.
This sagging served to louver open the clapboards of the house, and turn it into something akin to an accordion. As the forces of atmospheric pressure differentials wreaked havoc with the structure of the tired old house, it played its tune for everyone to hear. Instead of a wistful diatonic drone, it played this symphony in creaks, knocks, and audible drafts. The family within played out their lives in its bellows. The carpet had been employed as a stop gap measure against these drafts.
Fyndraxis was involved in a bit of casual magic, and the VCR before him was an alter to this power. The spell he was involved in had a number of requirements, a television, a giant antenna, a VCR, and a blank tape. The result of this spell would be a crystal clear broadcast quality recording of season 1 episode 5 of the Simpsons. This brand new show was being broadcast all over the country free of charge, and anyone savvy enough to figure out how to capture that signal would be able to enjoy it at their leisure.
This show was broadcast after Fyndraxis’ bed time, and he was missing out on a cultural phenomenon. This wouldn’t do. He had already figured out how to watch television after his bed time, that was an easy one. He had a small black and white television secreted away in the closet of his bedroom. After he had convinced his parents that he was undoubtedly asleep by loudly snoring for a while, he could silently tiptoe into his closet and watch whatever the universe cared to provide.
He would undetectably turn the knob that controlled both the power and the volume of the television until it was just barely on. It was important that this operation was silent, because if his television was discovered any number of awful things could happen. Groundings, disownment, hard labor, anything was possible.
This volume issue limited the already slim selection of shows that he could watch. The television set needed to be tuned to the same channel that was playing in the living room, so that the audio portion of the broadcast could be heard through the paper thin walls of the house. Depending on the weather, moon cycle, solar angle of incidence, tide, and a multitude of other unknown factors, he could receive two, or possibly three channels. Four if there were a planetary alignment. These channels were CBS, PBS, ABC, and if the planet thing lined up, The CBC.
The CBC was broadcast out of Canada, where there were no rules. There were advertisements for Bare Naked Ladies that made this fact very clear. From this foreign country where they had European sensibilities, the possibility of catching a broadcast where there was brief nudity was very high.
Nudity was certainly interesting to the young Fyndraxis, but it wasn’t what he was after today. Today he had a plan to pirate an episode of The Simpsons, a cartoon show for adults. This checked a lot of boxes for him. The mere idea of an adult cartoon show was intoxicating to him. He had grown tired of the standard Saturday morning faire, and lusted after a more nuanced experience.
There were cartoons coming from Japan that could be ordered from the backs of obscure magazines that would curl your hair. These exotic treasures from overseas were unreachable for him though, he lacked the funds to pursue that particular vice. Sure, he had some pretty cool stuff that he had traded for, but there were mind blowing experiences in the world beyond. Piracy though? That was completely possible.
The plan followed as such. Step one: secure a blank video cassette. Step two: calculate planetary alignment and coincidence with broadcast date and time of The Simpsons. Step three: program the VCR to act as his agent and come to life just as the broadcast is beginning. Step four: watch The Simpsons and enjoy the trappings of adulthood. It was a simple and straightforward plan.
He had already procured a blank video cassette, this was easily done. His father had a room that he called The Study, where Fyndraxis was forbidden. He saw these rules as rather flexible, due to the amount of unsupervised creative time that his parents’ work schedule allowed him to have. During this time, he had full reign over the house and its secrets. Nothing was hidden from him. Christmas gifts, nudie mags, compound bows, knives of every description, gunpowder and associated firearms, animal skulls taken as hunting trophies, none of these were an undiscovered country. So a blank cassette was child’s play.
The next part in the plan was a bit more difficult, this was the planetary alignment thing. Most of these calculations were carried out in his head, and relied almost exclusively on gut feeling. This gut feeling told him that tonight was the night, there remained the issue of the antenna though.
This antenna was far too large to be an indoor thing. It was a full fifteen feet tall, and was able to be slewed about like the turret of a tank. Slewing this piece of equipment was difficult due to the sheer air resistance offered by the improbable amount of surface area the thing had. Originally, this could be done from inside the house using a handy dial that talked to some sort of motor, but after a couple of hard winters it had joined the large Television in the category of in situ nonfunctional technology. So for the next foreseeable future, any antenna fiddling would be carried out manually.
This was a fiddly business. From where the antenna was, Fyndraxis could just barely see into the living room via its enormous picture window. He could tune the television to the station that he wanted to receive, and watch static while he finessed a signal into being. This was functionally a medium sized radio telescope, so he had to be careful not to tune into the emanations of errant celestial bodies, like venus, or the galactic center, and the blackhole that lay hidden there. If he managed that, he would no doubt be awarded a Nobel Prize and his piracy scheme would have to be explained in any number of academic journals, so his cover would have been blown.
Once a suitable signal was acquired, there remained the issue of programming the VCR. This was an arcane art that required deep study and careful attention to detail. The process was covered in the manual, which lay deep within the bowels of The Study. He had been working on his tradecraft, so covert extraction of the manual had been handled during the blank tape operation. Its absence would probably go unnoticed, but a later mission would have to be undertaken for him to cover his tracks.
He, like his father, paid careful attention to his surroundings and belongings, so a missing manual might be a dead giveaway to a heist. This would result in the aforementioned grounding, and or disownment.
The VCR had a clock on it that perpetually insisted that the time was noon, or possibly midnight, both equally wrong. This was standard operating procedure for a device of its nature. A VCR rarely had to know what time it actually was, unless it was aiding and abetting in piracy. Once the clock was set to something approximating eastern standard time, an alarm could be set for it to wake up and start recording whatever was coming in over the antenna.
The signal that Fyndraxis was able to acquire was of suboptimal quality. Kingston, the town where he lived, was surrounded on all sides by mountains. These mountains did their level best to absorb or reflect all but the most tenacious radio signals. This was what made it much easier to tune his radio telescope to the galactic center than a Thursday night broadcast from the CBC.
In the valley of Kingston, there was truly wild country. There were mountain lions. He had seen one out of the picture window of the living room. He had been watching the northern hills, making sure that his planetary alignment calculations were somewhat correct, when he saw it flow liquidly out of the forest and disappear into the tall grasses north of the house. He had watched the field for a full five minutes as it slowly stalked from west to east. Evidence of its passing was not apparent until he saw a pair of black tipped ears laid flat to its head as it stalked out of the grasses, crouched low like a housecat.
It maintained this posture as it stalked on silent paws over the road that ran by the house, and vanished into the field across the street. That was last Thursday. It had put his plan behind by a week, but a delay due to unforeseen circumstances was acceptable when there were mountain lions involved.
He had done a rather fastidious mountain lion check today before he had gone to adjust the radio telescope, and had deemed the chances of an encounter low enough to risk the effort. So with that, all the parts were in place for his plan. The only variable that was standing in his way was the suboptimal signal.
He had thought about this. The VCR was a piece of high technology. It would take data and inter it onto magnetic tape for storage. He had looked at the guts of it, and had a pretty good idea of how it worked. He had taken it apart one afternoon during his unsupervised creative time to try to understand its mysteries. The fact that he had gotten it back to a state where it could still function spoke to his knowledge of its inner workings.
Deep in the guts of this machine somewhere was a signal processor. This would undoubtedly take a sub standard broadcast and clean it up to something that he could enjoy. He had evidence to this fact. He had eviscerated a number of VHS tapes in an attempt to scry his future in their entrails. After the working was completed and the tape rewound to its normal state, it was as if nothing had happened.
He tried this on Aladdin, Vampire Hunter D, Akira, and even his most treasured tape Robot Carnival. Performing this working on Robot Carnival had been an exceedingly risky thing to do, but it had paid off in the form of precious celestial data that he used for his calculations.
With all of his technological/magical ducks in a row, he continued about his day and waited for the VCR to wake up and do his bidding. Dinner came and went, followed by some light television viewing, and before he knew it, he was off to bed. Once his parents had fallen hook line and sinker for the snoring trick, he returned to his closet to monitor the signals that his thrall would be burning onto tape for him. He quickly fell asleep, exhausted from his efforts.
Overnight, he was abducted by aliens, but he decided not to bring it up over breakfast. His parents had grown tired of what for him was a quite singular experience. They had been sympathetic the first few times, but quickly fell victim to the tedium that repeated abductions tended to instill. Undaunted, he began his day, thinking solely of the tape that awaited him in the VCR.
His unsupervised creative time would start around ten in the morning if all things went to plan, so he busied himself with the task of getting caught up on current events. Namely, Mister Rogers neighborhood, and Sesame Street. He was too old for these shows, but he harbored a certain nostalgia for these programs and enjoyed them for what they were.
Once he was once again alone in the house, and the Price is Right was over, he had time to review the fruits of his labor. He went to the VCR and ejected the tape to see it had indeed woken up and started recording like he had programmed it to do. It had. All of the tape was spooled up on the right hand reel in a sign of victory.
He put the tape back in the machine to rewind it. This seemingly took forever. It was like watching a pot of water come to a boil, so he decided to double check the integrity of the radio telescope for a while and circle back when he could.
Once back inside from the expedition, he sat before the stack of televisions and prepared to watch what was shaping up to be the best show of his life. He pressed the play button and awaited the crystal clear broadcast that would be provided by the signal processor in the VCR.
What he had recorded was static. Two and a half hours of it. He was a patient young man, so he sat there and watched it, waiting for his episode of The Simpsons to begin. The entire time, in his head, he was double checking his planetary math and making bargains with the VCR, but all that was displayed was static. He even checked with another couple of tapes to make sure that the VCR wasn’t broken, but it was fine.
He had a realization. Somewhere along the way, he had been fundamentally wrong in his reasoning. It couldn’t have been the planetary alignment stuff, that was dead on. He realized he had a fundamental misunderstanding of what the VCR was doing. There was no magical signal processor in there that would turn static into an episode of The Simpsons, this was a dead, non magical, inert object, that just recorded what it saw and played that back. Granted, that in itself was a miracle, but there was no magic wand when it came to technology.
This was a difficult lesson to learn, but it colored his thoughts about technology and magic. On further inspection, he had made a two and a half hour recording of the cosmic radio background with a homemade radio telescope, so going forward, he would check the mailbox every couple of days for his Nobel Prize.