Day 56: Bus 3

[full_score]

As the day came to a close, Claude's conversation with Tear weighed heavily on his mind. All the implications hadn't quite sunk in yet, but it unsettled him that she'd been able to feel and experience his time in the basement in such a strong way. Was there some kind of significance behind the fact she'd lived the moment he ran toward Guy in a

Comments

[yin_yang_fox]

Her seatmate was more accurate than she might think. "You would," she agreed wryly. "There's a few more variables than a simple, easy to read version." Which reminded her somehow, of something else. "I'm Renamon." A bit late, but it likely didn't matter. Both of them seemed to care more about the interesting aspects than pleasantries.

Like I.R.I.S. for example. Here, at least, Renamon could speak confidently. Give credit where it's due--there were some things that could be more easily understood when one was originally digital. Renamon gave a thin smile. "Just a computer system can encompass many things. Myself and a few others here are from worlds where computers and programs have sentience. I.R.I.S. may not be in that grouping, but there are suspicious aspects."

She thought backwards, trying to remember. "The most obvious and least sense-making point is the binary she was saying. It was a poem or a story--it had little to do with anything that I could analyze. Another thing to consider would be the 'program' that she controlled the first night she was active." The Digimon tilted her head questioningly. "A program to make others experience death? In truth, that seems more like we're in a digital representation of the world, if we can be influenced by the start-up of a backup program." Which was initiated by a dead-man, if rumors were to hold.

"A last point would be only something interesting. I.R.I.S. has a higher authority than Landel's manual input commands. Once she was started up, he couldn't override her function. That places her as suspicious, because what computer program has a higher authority than the man who runs the facility?"

[shorttank]

"Turanga Leela." She smiled, but only for a moment, because what Renamon had to say about I.R.I.S. was very interesting. Was Landel as stuck as the rest of them in this human zoo, psychology experiment, Near-Death Star for people who weren't old, or whatever it was?

Renamon's theories were close enough to her own that Leela didn't think she'd be written off as a weirdy if she shared them. "I kind of thought from the beginning that we might be in some virtual reality. I'm from a time way ahead of this one, but some of the things that've happened here would still be impossible then. I think it's only simulating the late Stu-- twentieth century."

Which would mean that Chie's world had been a simulation, too, and that actually made a lot of sense. Leela was still a little freaked-out when she thought about how they hadn't been able to interact with any of the people there. "Wait a minute, they didn't need I.R.I.S. to make us think we'd been sent to another universe. Or maybe they did, and just didn't use her any obvious way. I wasn't around for people thinking they'd died. They only thought so, right?"

But she had experienced something not too far from it, thinking Fry was dead. If one mass hallucination were possible here, who knew how far it really went?