Forty Two

Fyndraxis’ fear of being alone was starting to make a little more sense to him. His revelations at the hill were deep and vivid. He had felt like he was there experiencing that pain once again. Back in his workshop, he had a bit of time to unpack things. When he arrived there in all his finery, he had put on a Smith’s album and got ready for a truly epic sulk.
When he really thought about it, the memory that he had experienced had been fundamentally different from the reality he was experiencing now. Granted, the old man that he had been formerly was living in a tasteful cabin in the woods and not a floating castle in the sky, so there were some pretty glaring differences right there. But the actual quality of the memory was a couple of orders of magnitude more real than the reality he was currently trying to sulk in.
Looking back on the memory, it was vivid and visceral. He could remember the smell of freshly brewing coffee and the musty smell of the bedsheets that hadn’t been changed in a couple weeks, the way the dust played in the air through the morning light. Trying to recall it, It seemed like he was viewing it through a sheet of gauze though. It was like it had been recorded on way better equipment than he had the ability to play it back on. He could recall the sadness of the moment, but he couldn’t feel it as deeply as he knew that he could.
He realized then that he was just a brain in a jar. Or even more aptly put, a simulation of a brain in a jar. He was lacking some very fundamental hardware to be able to experience these memories with any sort of fidelity. It was like trying to watch a 4k ultra high def video, but all you have is a shitty black and white CRT with ninja turtle stickers all over it. He actually recalled having one of those and noticed it haunting a dusty corner of his workshop.
This experience had given him new information, and new memories seemed to be bubbling to the surface every once in a while. But the fact remained that it was all just information. He lacked an endocrine system to truly experience it correctly.
He decided that on whatever journey that he was going to be involved in, he should have a little bit of a side hustle. He wanted to be a real boy. So he had to find a cricket or wish upon a star or something like that, he couldn’t remember how that one went.
So, his plan was kind of coming together. He had a hardware hack that would work on the Wendigo. Terra could no doubt take that and throw together something that would defeat them. He and Bird just had to kind of hang out for the summer and wait for the Wendigo to go into hibernation. In the meantime, maybe there was another approach that he could work on so that he wouldn’t feel like he was sitting on his ass all summer. Something that Terra didn’t necessarily have to know about. She seemed nice and all, but putting all of his eggs in one basket seemed like a silly thing to do.
His computer was still chugging away on decrypting the root password for the Wendigo, so he had an unspecified amount of time to knock something together. He still had the memory dump information and was free to do with it whatever he wanted. It was time for him to finally make his own Linux distribution. Fyndrix. Installing Fyndrix on one of his Wendigo hostages would turn it into a little hunter that went and found other Wendigo and installed Fyndrix on them. He of course would be the root user on all of these hijacked units, and could make them do whatever he wanted.
When his computer had finally decrypted the password (and he had laughed for a while about how stupid it was) he had a working copy of Fyndrix and installed it on one of his captive Wendigo.