Forty Three

When Fyndraxis had rejoined reality, it was late in the afternoon and he was alone in a fully furnished Yurt. The sounds of Aprés could be heard in the distance and he assumed that was where Bird was. The Yurt looked great from his vantage point. He had a great view because he was hanging on the wall like some sort of trophy. He guessed that it was better than being thrown in a corner somewhere, or used to level a coffee table or something.
Bird returned after an hour or so, no doubt to enjoy a bit of alone time after the frenetic energy that the G tended to have.
“Hey, Bird,” Fyndraxis said in greeting as she came inside.
“Hey, Fyn,” she said, closing the door behind her, “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to talk to you all afternoon.”
“Sorry,” he apologised, not really meaning it, “I was busy. I have a lot going on.”
“Well, leave a note next time or something,” she scolded half-heartedly.
Fydraxis wondered idly whether he could leave a message on his scabbard on occasions like this. Like a back in five minutes sign when he was otherwise occupied. He didn’t see why not.
“I’ll work on a signal,” Fyndraxis added to his running todo list, “anyway, a lot went down today and I want to fill you in.”
“Alright, let me get a fire started and we’ll have a chat.”
While Bird built a fire in the pit in the middle of the yurt, Fyndraxis tried various things to try to alter his appearance and decided that he would change the color of his scabbard to signal to Bird that he was busy doing stuff in his workshop. Black would be his signal for gone fishing or whatever.
“How about this?” Fyndraxis said, referring to his scabbard.
“Not bad,” she said, as the fire began to come together, “so you’ll change color if you are busy?”
“Yeah. Anyway,” Fyndraxis was eager to change the subject, “I feel like I haven’t talked to you in days… because I haven’t.”
Fyndraxis went on to reitterate how he could manipulate his time internally and get a bunch of stuff done. He also told her about the stuff he had done. Namely his conversation with Terra and her plan to go after the Wendigo in the winter, her subsequent plan to move down from orbit and inhabit their network so she didn’t have to die slowly from orbital decay, and his hardware hack on the Wendigo.
They had to talk about Linux and permissions and technical things for a while and Bird picked it up on a theoretical basis, but it was so wildly out of her wheelhouse that Fyndraxis really didn’t expect all that much. She had some follow up questions about his time dilation ability and asked if it was related to gravity in any way. Fyndraxis was impressed with her inference, but told her that it was more likely related to how fast he chose to process information.
He informed her about Pavel and his nature. He tried not to dwell on how spooky it was to hear about himself as a living person, and focused more on explaining the rules of Go. Bird saw right through this fog of bullshit and pressed him to speak about what he had learned regarding his old life.
That led to him recounting his experience at the hill and his memories that he uncovered there. She felt for him and said consoling words. She asked about the nature of coffee and MDMA and Fyndraxis gave her as good of an explanation as he could muster. She was glad that he had a glimpse into his past and that they had found a bit of purpose with their Wendigo project.
He also informed her about his Fyndrix scheme and she thought that it was a spectacular idea as she was in the camp of not totally trusting Terra with the future of our species. She helped Fyndraxis open his sheath a little bit so that he could let his little hunter go off into the night and begin the process of recruiting other soldiers to their cause.
She began to tire after that, and they spent the rest of her brief wakefulness discussing the different ways that coffee was prepared.
The hunter that he sent out was under instruction to check in every once in a while and tell him about its progress. It spent its evening heading west toward the waste sniffing out encrypted radio traffic centering around 915mhz. Because of its size, progress was quite slow, but after a few hours he had two hunters that were in his thrall.
It felt good for him to actually have some agency in the physical world. These hunters were like a little set of legs that could run about for him and do things that he couldn’t. Given enough time, maybe something like an entire summer, he could have enough of these little rascals to actually make some sort of difference.
He was still a bit raw from his experience at the hill. There was just so much to process existentially. Luckily, he wasn’t the only digitized human that he knew of. There was another guy out there hanging out in geostationary orbit who was uniquely qualified to give him sage advice about the finer points of being post-human.