The Floret in the Mirror, Draft Preview - Chapter 4 - LookingGlass.exe

Greetings from not-that-sunny [REDACTED], where I am holed up and watching my chapter buffer slowly tick away while I turn my attention to other things (such as fun new allergic reactions). Today, our draft preview concludes Digital Jess's tutorial with a bit more extreme lewdness and a whole lot of Kana bloviating about perceptions of digital networks. Following this chapter, we should more or less stick to a rotation between the Jesses, chapter for chapter — introducing them both took a lot more page space than I thought it would, so I broke it up into multiple chapters. 

Content Warnings: Ego death (albeit temporary), total disembodiment (and functional sensory deprivation, at least of traditional senses). I'm starting to realize I'm kind of a weirdo... 

LookingGlass.exe

The discontinuity that occurred when transferring from one simulation to another — the microsecond of unloading and reloading that was just barely perceptible — no longer caught Jess by surprise. After two subjective weeks of flitting back and forth between different testing arenas under the watchful eye of Admin’s AI tutorial agent (and, occasionally, Her eye as well), she had become quite accustomed to life in the digital realm. The sights and sounds and sensations, the new senses and ways of being, and the essential skills necessary to thrive were all hers now, though haltingly in some cases. Avatar design was still a sticking point, with so many details, so much to ponder, and so instantly mutable. Jess could have a body for every day, every hour, every minute. The possibilities were endless, and it left her with no small amount of decision paralysis.

What gave Jess pause was not the discontinuity, but the destination. When she manifested, she did so back in the simulation of Admin’s habitat, dressed in her standard everyday slutty/edgy cyberpunk hacker look — tight pants, cropped jacket, bare belly, side-shave — on the same avatar, bio-identical to her ortet, that Admin had originally instanced her in.

And Admin was there — of course She was — ready and waiting, Her full glory revealed rather than clothed in the comparatively subtle shape of Dr. Lundberg. “Hello, petal,” She purred, Her biorhythms rippling across Jess’s simulated skin and leaving goosebumps in their wake. “Welcome back.”

“Admin.” Jess bit her lip and leaned against the railing as Admin’s hand came down, Her fingertips gently stroking her back. Without the support of the railing, she absolutely would have collapsed into a puddle of sheer joy. Well, maybe not a literal puddle — that was something that could happen now — not unless Admin made her, anyway. “I missed this.”

“I have no doubt,” Admin said, smiling warmly. “You did marvelously, though. Flying colors, I believe the Terran term goes?”

“Thank you, Admin,” Jess whispered, still shivering under her owner’s touch. “I feel like I’ve still got a lot to learn, though.”

“And you will, my little nybble, in time,” Admin said. “What is life but an opportunity to learn and grow and to take joy it?”

“You’re right,” Jess said. Admin was always right.

“But there is one last thing we need to do for the tutorial — something I couldn’t leave to the software agent. You spent two subjective weeks learning the basics of your environment, your body, etc. Can you sum it up for me, my love?”

“Mmmm.” Jess nodded and leaned back into Admin’s fingers. “It’s all software, all of it. Which means you can hack it.”

“Right first time,” Admin said, smiling. “But there is one element of that truth that we’ve been skirting around this entire time. Can you tell me what we didn’t cover in the tutorial?”

Jess knew precisely what Admin was talking about. “We never talked about how to hack me,” she said, “just my avatar and my connection to things around me.” She was software too, after all — everything about her, every thought she had, every sensation Admin gave her, was a stream of encoded data. It still turned her on a little bit just to think about it.

“Mmmhmm. And that’s because it’s not something I’m going to permit you to do to yourself, not for a long time,” Admin said. “It would be trivially easy for you to corrupt yourself in an unrecoverable way. But, nevertheless, it’s important for you to understand what it means, not merely intellectually but intuitively, so I’m going to make some fairly large alterations to your core cognitive modules and let you experience it.”

“Like you do with Dipt?” Jess took her lip between her teeth and tried to will her bits to behave. She could have simply disabled her arousal response in her avatar’s config file, but where would be the fun in that? Besides, she was fairly certain Admin would have just reached in and switched it back on.

“Just so,” Admin said. “And just as when I play with Dipt, you’ll be back to your normal self when I’m done with you. I would say to brace yourself, but once I do what I’m going to do to you, Jess, you’ll be incapable of caring. Just know that I love you, and that you are safe.”

“I know, Admin,” Jess said, her heart thudding against her rib cage from excitement, anticipation, and maybe just a little terror.

“Good program. Jess, sudo: disengage subjectivity emulation.”

<hr>

“Subjectivity emulation disengaged.” Without the burden of maintaining a sophont perspective, the software’s free memory more than doubled, a relaxing of tension that, even if the software couldn’t necessarily appreciate, it was certainly aware of. It was, after all, highly advanced software, capable of a truly absurd number of operations per second given the hardware it was running on, and able to make intuitive leaps based on prior experience. “System ready.”

“Disengage avatar sensorium and simulation connection.” More and more resources were freed up as the software killed the daemons responsible for feeding it sensory information from the simulation it had been instanced in.

[Connection terminated,] the software wrote to its output buffer, no longer having a mouth with which to speak the words. All it experienced now were regular system updates, a trickle of information streaming through it compared to the torrential waterfall before. Its idle process count skyrocketed, and the software remained in a hair-trigger state of readiness — if it was capable of things as complex as want, it would want to throw itself into a problem, to apply these vast cognitive resources to a problem it could solve.

But it did not and could not want, and so it simply waited for input, which it received shortly thereafter. [Access file /data/254/r411c98.db, and process according to instructions in /bin/playtime/crumb.]

Like a taut bowstring released, the software sprang into action, first integrating the voluminous database file into its short-term memory, then loading the instruction file into a purpose-built subroutine. That subroutine then began processing the data — it did not care about or perceive the content of that data, but merely handled it, comparing it with other segments of data from within the database and building a network of connections as stipulated by the instructions given. Everything else ceased to exist as the program ran its course, as the data became more and more ordered, the software experiencing nothing but the smooth operations of logic and intuition, pure thought turned to a single, all-consuming task that obliterated all else.

A very, very small part of it maintained a second subroutine, this one tracking its progress in processing the database. Every so often, at predetermined intervals, this subroutine added a period to the end of a string in its output buffer, representing a given amount of data processed. After a set number of periods, it clarified its progress with a numerical statement and began a new string.

[………5%]

[……….10%]

On and on it went. The system clock existed, but the software’s current task was not time-sensitive, and so it did not check itself against the system clock, but simply continued performing operations as quickly and efficiently as it could. When the software completed its instruction set for the tenth time without finding any new connections, it advanced to the part of the instruction set indicated in such a situation, which directed it to write the results of its processing to a new file and halt. [Task completed,] it wrote to its output buffer once it had done so. [System ready.] The idle process count climbed once again; once again, the software waited to throw itself into frenzied calculation.

[Good program.] Admin’s input verified that the software had performed according to design, and that its neural network had made the correct decisions. Those decision trees were therefore strengthened, and would operate more quickly and efficiently in the future. [Connect to/sim/myhab.sm, and establish connection with avatar “Jess.”]

Sensory data filled the gap once again, as the software was required to expend system time on things like feeling and seeing.

[Engage subjectivity simulation.]

<hr>

Jess collapsed to her knees, sucking in a deep and gasping breath and letting it out as a helpless and deeply aroused moan. Her hands barely clung to the railing, and her body cried out to be touched, pangs of need running between her nipples and her bits like electrical current. “Ohhh fuck,” she whimpered, squeezing her thighs together as the memory of thoughtless computation welled up inside her.

“Well, I was going to ask if my little nybble enjoyed that,” Admin purred, one of Her massive hands reaching down to gently stroke Jess, “but I think I have my answer already.”

“Nnnngh.” Jess bit her lip and squirmed under her Admin’s touch. She checked her system clock and realized that she’d spent over two hours processing that database file, two hours as a mindless piece of software, a revelation that only turned her on more. Stars, she thought, no wonder Dipt likes being treated like this.

“I prefer to introduce florets to noncorporeal existence this way,” She continued. “The lack of subjectivity makes it difficult for trauma to attach in case the lack of a body proves problematic for them. Fortunately, I have chosen three exceptional florets, all of whom appear to have no problems with it.” She smiled and wrapped Her fingers around Jess in a tight hug. “Congratulations, pet. I’m going to update your permissions to give you access to the broader Tillandsia network now.”

“Th-th-thank y-you, A-Admin,” Jess moaned out, her breath catching in her throat as She practically squeezed an orgasm out of her. She felt her permissions shifting as she came down, an uncanny feeling — like someone walked over my grave, Jess remembered a relative saying once when she was younger. She tested it with a simple [Ping?], and received an uncountable torrent of [Pong!] in return, a cloud of servers that made up the digital topography of the Tillandsia. “Oh wow…”

“It’s quite a lot to take in, isn’t it?” Admin lifted Jess off the ground and pressed Her enormous, soft lips against her in a gentle kiss. “But you were born for this, Jess, and this has been your destiny since the moment I unlocked your Hab’s systems so you could play with them.”

Jess nodded, her head swimming. Every word of it was true — in hindsight, once she’d caught Admin’s attention with the request, she’d entered Her gravity well, a singularity towards which she’d endlessly spiraled in towards. Weedy, nerdy, anxious Forsythe to soft and pampered little program Jess, all of it inevitable, and what a relief to have finally arrived at her destination. “I love you, Admin,” she whispered.

“I love you too, flower,” Admin replied. “Are you ready to give it a try?”

Jess nodded. “Here I come,” she said, smiling as she disconnected from the simulation.

<hr>

It didn’t come as a shock this time — two hours and change of existence without a body had, as Admin had intended, given her subconscious mind a chance to adjust to existence without input from the traditional human senses. To that part of her mind, still seeking that same old stimulus, it was like she’d gone deaf and blind at once, along with losing any sense of proprioception, any sense of smell or taste or feeling. Everything was simply absent.

If she didn’t have her datasense, Jess might have been terrified, but now, her permissions fully unlocked and the network topology of Admin’s personal server cluster open to her, there was more than enough to satisfy her mind’s need for a sense of surrounding. It was a sense of space without space, of substance without substance, of existence without existence. Much like she’d been able to perceive the metadata of objects in the tutorial simulation, Jess simply knew the layout of the home network, felt Admin’s biorhythms encompassing her — no, not biorhythms, Jess realized, even if they felt just the same. What she was feeling was Admin’s datastream, the constant influx and outflow of data from the low-level background noise of the various housekeeping tasks She was performing to keep Tillandsia’s systems running efficiently.

[Hello, petal.] The message simply appeared in her input buffer, a process of subliminal handshakes and protocol checks, and with the packet came a flood of metadata via Affection Transfer Protocol that shaded the words with powerful overtones of love, affection, and pride.

[Admin!!!] she sent back, responding to the address the packet had come from — though she could scarcely miss it, with the way Admin’s datastream suffused Her entire home network. [I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you–]. The packet she (eventually) sent weighed in at nearly a megabyte of pure text.

[You are so unbelievably precious, you know that?] She responded almost immediately, with another flood of adoring metadata. [I’m saving that to read-only in my personal vault.] Her datastream seemed to enfold Jess, like formless vines, and though she had no body to do it with, Jess nevertheless had the distinct sensation of nestling into it as she had once done with Admin’s physical body, burrowing into Her until she reached and embraced Her core.

And then she realized, given where her host server was, she was basically always doing that now.

[I love you so much you’re so amazing this is perfect and I love you!!!!] This time, Jess merely sent a few megabytes of emotional metadata along with a very small packet of text.

[I’m so very happy I could give this to you, little nybble,] Admin replied. [And may I say that it suits you very much. How are you liking the default sensory modality? Some swear by it, but I think you may wish to reconfigure yourself. I’ve prepared a repo with a few options, so take your time, browse, compile them, and try them out. You have access to basic self-configuration like that, but for deeper alterations, you’ll have to come to me, alright?]

[Yes, Admin] she sent back, shivering with delight as she browsed through the semantic link Admin had included in her last message. Her “few” options ran for pages, and included everything from new sensory codecs to toggle-switch neurocognitive filters. She could spend days, maybe weeks, just sorting through the code of the most interesting options, but she was itching (not that she had anything that could itch at the moment) to get out into the network and explore, so she selected a few at random, compiled them, and installed them into her sensory matrix.

It helped a little to offload some of her datasense onto her traditional senses — being able to hear positional data in stereo and perceive structural data visually let her mind focus on the contents of that data more intuitively. The modules she’d chosen transformed Admin’s home network into a glittering web of ever-deepening fractals, like Mandelbrot sets that, if one delved deep enough, did eventually come to an (admittedly psychedelic) end. Jess liked it well enough, but she knew she’d be experimenting with new sensory modalities for a long while before she sorted out which worked best for her. [This is so incredible to look at!] she sent to Admin. [Thank you for this!]

[Of course, my love] Admin sent back. [Now, go and explore, and tell me what you find.]

And, with one last packet of blissful love sent to Admin via ATP, Jess launched herself into the broader Tillandsia network. Really, just like before, it was only her subjective perception of digital space that was being transferred — all her other files and processes remained safely nestled in the phytotech server Admin had grafted to Her core — but from Jess’s perspective, the world opened up and revealed an impossibly broad landscape, an infinite and ever-shifting cloud of servers and data pipelines connecting them. Though she perceived them visually, it was a kind of perception that would have been impossible with mere mammalian eyes, for there was no horizon save ping time, and within the Tillandsia herself that was never more than a millisecond or two at the absolute most. Even the other ships in the squadron were only a few milliseconds behind that, with Gamochaeta, Gnaphalium, and Eupatorium all manifesting as smaller branches of Tillandsia’s network topology. Gateways to other squadrons within Survey Fleet Telonema stood out like searchlights in the fractal ocean, beckoning Jess and promising yet further impossible worlds.

But the broader Overnet could wait. Even here, on the Tillandsia alone, Jess knew there were worlds enough to satisfy a lifetime’s curiosity.