Bytecode DVD commentary
Hi, this commentary of my remix_redux fic Bytecode (You Are Still In The Matrix Remix). I had a total blast writing Bytecode and I really wanted to dig a little into the process of remixing, the general process of how I write, and the world I tried to create here. So, let's begin!
Title: Bytecode (You Are Still In The Matrix Remix)
Bytecode doesn't exactly mean what I want it to mean here, but the meaning is close enough to what I wanted (binary code that's executed at a very low level) that I was willing to bend it a bit. I'm not going to go into detail, but you can check out the Wikipedia article if you want. I was thinking about keeping "Variations" as a title, but since I made the changes to the titles, I figured that it didn't apply in quite the same way anymore.
For some reason, even though I usually have trouble coming up with regular titles, the right remix title comes to me almost instantly every time. It's very annoying.
Author: thedeadparrot
Summary: Five times House unplugged and thought he was somewhere else.
Fandom: House
Pairing(s): House/Stacy, House/Wilson
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: House and the other various characters do not belong to me. They belong to David Shore, Bat Hat Harry, etc.
Original story: Variations by queenzulu
Notes: Big thanks go out to savemoony and leiascully for audiencing. This is a cyberpunk AU. Just warning y'all.
So this is a cyberpunk AU, mostly because I really like cyberpunk and find that it warms the geeky cockles of my heart. I've always wanted to write a cyberpunk AU, and this was the perfect chance, because it's the perfect thing to do for a remix, take the author's story and translate it to a different place and a different set of circumstances. Variations is quite good, stripped down and bare, covering a good amount of House's life, which was really fun to work with.
00100
In case anyone didn't notice, the section titles are variation numbers of the original in binary.
"We have to go," his father said, his eyes tired and sad, his hand resting lightly on the handle of his gun. "Start packing."
Greg timed his response to his father's irritation, waiting just long enough to piss him off, but not long enough to get the long suffering sigh and the look of disappointment.
So this was the first thing I managed to sink my teeth into. The difference in canon!John House and cyberpunk!John House, which I needed to figure out. In this world, he's a lot more worn down, a lot less unbending, exhausted and tired of doing gruntwork. Important gruntwork, but gruntwork nonetheless.
It was the fourth bunker they'd had to stay in for the last four months, and Greg couldn't even remember which state they were in. All the bunkers looked the same on the inside, dirt floors, metal walls, and they all felt the same, cold and echoing. Topside was different everywhere. Empty desert, crowded forests, endless grasslands. But he didn't see it often enough for it to matter.
The government was laying down new cable, even more enhanced fiber optics for the national network, and his father had been assigned to protect the crews as they worked. (Never knew who might want to carve potholes on the American information superhighway. The Chinese, maybe, or the Indians. Information was power and no one had ever believed it like they all did now.) Greg was just along for the ride, as his father followed them across the country.
This is probably the only real good amount of large-scale world-building I do in this entire thing, which I kind of regret not working into the later ones, because you don't get as much of a sense of the greater world outside of House's tight perspective later on as you do here.
It wasn't much, this whole thing, wasn't anything, but when he plugged in, the new cable was a bright neon blue in the Stream, and when he rode through it, the information parted for him like water.
When he unplugged, he never could remember where he was.
00111
House lived in a clockwork hospital, each dose timed to keep him asleep for exactly the right amount of time. A routine of pills and arguments, though it was just meat, and meat didn't matter much, not anymore.
I kind of totally stole that last line from Neuromancer, and I think House does like to think of that. Um, the original idea veered sharply around this section, because I wasn't originally going to make them all doctors, I was going to make them hackers of some sort, so yeah, there's a certain amount of irony in a doctor thinking that the physical body doesn't matter.
They let him plug in when he wanted to, a jack easily accessible from the bed, letting him back into his real home, where he really lived. His leg didn't hurt while he rode through the wires (the cables laid down when he was a kid are dull and dingy now, dark and faded like a T-shirt left out in the sun),
queenzulu mentioned the colors, which do play a big part in this story, mostly because I wanted to give the Stream a sensory feel to it, like it's a concrete thing to be experienced. In my mind, the Stream is information, constantly flowing, but the technology allows you immerse yourself in it in different ways, and the way the human brain reacts to jacking in is to try to conceptualize it into a three dimensional thing. The reason the wires seem duller is not so much that they are duller, but that they're not as up to date and powerful, and the brain renders it as darker, less vibrant, because it doesn't carry as much information.
and it was better that way. So much better. (He'd been inside a patient when the pain first hit, not realizing what was happening until he pulled out and felt it all at once, his body already twisting and pulling into a ball.)
The technology turned off the pain receptors, but it left some limited awareness of the outside world, the moving things at the edges of his consciousness. He learned to tell them apart; Stacy clear silver, like stainless steel, Wilson dark brown, like earth. He'd unplug in the mornings to find them sleeping in a chair by his bedside, waiting. He never understood why.
Here's some more about colors, and I think I chose silver for Stacy because she feels sharp like that. Strong, too, and sort of steely. Wilson is just sort of warm, inviting.
When Stacy brought him home, he plugged in, lying down on the bed, sliding the jack into his wrist, riding the Stream until Stacy's bright silver faded into a dark, forest green.
He unplugged to a dark room, a throb in his thigh, and a ceiling that looked too strange and too familiar.
So, for the next section, I copy-pasted the entire corresponding section of Variations, and wrote around it (and through it, a bit). The original was wonderfully stripped down, and I tried to keep to it as much as possible.
01100
"Adam Quong is seizing," Cameron said.
House unplugged to the bright sunlight of midday streaming through the windows, hurting his eyes.
Looking back on this one now, I may or may not have contradicted myself later over this line about just what happens to your eyes when you're in the Stream. I kind of imagined it like staring at a movie screen, bright, but when you walk outside, the sun is still blinding.
"What have we got him on?" he asked, tongue heavy and unfamiliar in his mouth. Was inside for too long. Does weird things to your body.
"Prednisone," Cameron said, "and he's crashing." She eyed him carefully, sizing him up, and House hated that, being looked at, watched.
"It's not Crohn's," House said. His brain raced ahead, proposing and rejecting tests, procedures, treatments, eager to get back in. Different network, same idea. Plugged into the nanites that would scour Quong's systems, searching and recording every stray twitch of his internal organs.
This whole idea of what doctors do in this world was the coolest to me, and I hadn't even thought of it as I started out. As I imagined it, it's sort of like an internal network, set up like the Stream, but not connected to the wider Stream, so it still feels like the Stream, but it's not really the Stream. If that makes any sense whatsoever.
"We should take him off the prednisone--" Cameron started, a quick wave her hand, showing off the metal plating on the inside of her wrist, the cradle for the jack that could (would) take her inside (a body, the Stream).
I would have thought this kind of sentence construction would have pegged it as me right off, what with the weird parentheses and such. I kind of like the image of what exactly the interface looks like. In my mind, it looks like the kind they have for audio cables, the thick ones they use for microphones and speakers.
"Too soon." House rolled to his feet. A second later he landed hard against his desk, his leg collapsing under him. Stupid. Stupid. The mind is willing. The body is weak.
I like that dichotomy between mind and body. It was one of the first things I thought of while I was planning it out.
Cameron rushed forward, arms out. "Are you--?" Still hadn't gotten his balance back from unplugging. Hadn't remembered the nerve damage and missing muscle tissue. (And he didn't understand how Dr. Jacobs managed to fuck up that procedure, way back when, but he did.)
"Shut up," House said. "Get moving." He followed her, snarling, aching once again for the cool feel of the Stream.
Okay, this next section is probably, in my opinion, the weakest, because I'm not really a poet at heart. I do like the imagery of it, and it gave me the opportunity to insert random nerdy computer references in there.
11001
It tastes
like blue, like the
feel of ice down the back
of his neck.
One of the things that I really wanted to get in here is the synaethesia. It was one of the things that really stuck with me about Neuromancer, and I knew while writing this, that I really want to write some of my own.
The world assembling the
world parsed and compiled to binary
around him.
Okay, this is not really correct computer-y stuff, but I liked including it. "Assembling" refers to assembly languages, really low level, close to the hardware languages. "Parsed an compiled" refers to the process of turning code into binary, you have to "compile" it in order to do so, and in order to turn the text you write into something the computer can understand, first it has to parse it.
He sees the sound of water running, the
stream of the Stream, and it bends for him,
moves for him. It blooms like a flower
and he moves moves moves feels no pain and moves moves moves.
Information sounds like the feel of a machine humming under your fingers vibrating vibrating vibrating.
Body is useless, empty. Mind is full, full. Jump from socket to socket, server to server, ride ride ride
I'm sure my friendslist is sick of me whining about sockets, but they're a way in which to write and read from some other computer, so they're very key in networking. God, I never really want to think about them again.
jump jump jump. Piggy-back across packets.
Packets are chopped up pieces of information that are sent over the internets. I think they still have them in this world, even though their bandwidth is much better.
A prick at his ear, just a tingle (not there not there), a warning, too long inside,
can't stay can't stay.
I hit on the idea that you can't stay in the Stream too long a lot, and I think it was mostly because House likes it too much there and if he could, he would never leave.
He unplugs
to an empty apartment
surprised and not at all.
Looking back at this, I kind of wish I switched up this last line a bit more. It resembles the one from the second section quite closely.
j 0x01
This last section title is a bit more obscure than most. It refers to an assembly instruction which says, "jump to this address and continue executing from there." In this case, it's the location designated by the hexidecimal digit 01, which is just 1. In the original, it's "Aria da Capo", which is sort of going back to the aria and repeating. I tried to get at the same idea in code, here.
He pulled out not knowing what time of day it was, the room dark around him, his arm useless at his side. It always felt numb after unplugging, deprived of sensation. The pain in his leg came back in waves, a slow slide of sensation. The air smelled humid, like fresh rain, like dirty puddles on asphalt.
I like writing about the weather. People know this about me. And I kind of like the hint of that, the sort of idea that there's still life outside of the Stream.
He twisted, bumping the body next to him. It was Wilson, unplugging himself for a moment, his pupils tiny in the dim light (the brain fooled while in the Stream, thinking that it was bright, that it could see). "Okay?" Wilson asked.
Um, yeah. This is the part that I thought was kind of contradictory. I should probably wander off and hope no one calls me on it.
"No," House said, because he was on the bed, staring at the wall (peach and ugly; he should have that repainted some day), because he was feeling and breathing and hurting, because he wasn't in the Stream. "Being annoyed by oncologists."
"Hmm," Wilson said, distracted, plugging back in, but not before pulling House closer to him, tucking his face into the crook of House's neck, his fingers curled over House's hip.
Snuggling! I love snuggling. They should snuggle all the time.
House closed his eyes for a moment, letting his mind sink back into his body, letting it rest for a moment.
He still didn't trust unplugging next to Wilson. (The real world was never what you wanted it to be.)
But plugging in (riding through sun-yellow wires in the Stream, a hand steady and solid at the edges of his awareness, a presence that felt like the taste of chocolate), was getting easier every time.
Okay, so a few people commented that this ending wasn't quite happy as the original, and yeah, it's true, mostly because of the way I kind of equated the Stream with Vicodin and sleeping which meant that if I was going to continue in the vein of the original story, it was going to take on darker implications than the first. I think, though, that there's a certain amount of warmth to this ending, though, because Wilson's there, he gets it, gets House's need for the Stream. Wilson plugs in with House, and House appreciates that he's there.
end
Okay, that's it! Any further questions are welcome, and they would totally make me happy.
Title: Bytecode (You Are Still In The Matrix Remix)
Bytecode doesn't exactly mean what I want it to mean here, but the meaning is close enough to what I wanted (binary code that's executed at a very low level) that I was willing to bend it a bit. I'm not going to go into detail, but you can check out the Wikipedia article if you want. I was thinking about keeping "Variations" as a title, but since I made the changes to the titles, I figured that it didn't apply in quite the same way anymore.
For some reason, even though I usually have trouble coming up with regular titles, the right remix title comes to me almost instantly every time. It's very annoying.
Author: thedeadparrot
Summary: Five times House unplugged and thought he was somewhere else.
Fandom: House
Pairing(s): House/Stacy, House/Wilson
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: House and the other various characters do not belong to me. They belong to David Shore, Bat Hat Harry, etc.
Original story: Variations by queenzulu
Notes: Big thanks go out to savemoony and leiascully for audiencing. This is a cyberpunk AU. Just warning y'all.
So this is a cyberpunk AU, mostly because I really like cyberpunk and find that it warms the geeky cockles of my heart. I've always wanted to write a cyberpunk AU, and this was the perfect chance, because it's the perfect thing to do for a remix, take the author's story and translate it to a different place and a different set of circumstances. Variations is quite good, stripped down and bare, covering a good amount of House's life, which was really fun to work with.
00100
In case anyone didn't notice, the section titles are variation numbers of the original in binary.
"We have to go," his father said, his eyes tired and sad, his hand resting lightly on the handle of his gun. "Start packing."
Greg timed his response to his father's irritation, waiting just long enough to piss him off, but not long enough to get the long suffering sigh and the look of disappointment.
So this was the first thing I managed to sink my teeth into. The difference in canon!John House and cyberpunk!John House, which I needed to figure out. In this world, he's a lot more worn down, a lot less unbending, exhausted and tired of doing gruntwork. Important gruntwork, but gruntwork nonetheless.
It was the fourth bunker they'd had to stay in for the last four months, and Greg couldn't even remember which state they were in. All the bunkers looked the same on the inside, dirt floors, metal walls, and they all felt the same, cold and echoing. Topside was different everywhere. Empty desert, crowded forests, endless grasslands. But he didn't see it often enough for it to matter.
The government was laying down new cable, even more enhanced fiber optics for the national network, and his father had been assigned to protect the crews as they worked. (Never knew who might want to carve potholes on the American information superhighway. The Chinese, maybe, or the Indians. Information was power and no one had ever believed it like they all did now.) Greg was just along for the ride, as his father followed them across the country.
This is probably the only real good amount of large-scale world-building I do in this entire thing, which I kind of regret not working into the later ones, because you don't get as much of a sense of the greater world outside of House's tight perspective later on as you do here.
It wasn't much, this whole thing, wasn't anything, but when he plugged in, the new cable was a bright neon blue in the Stream, and when he rode through it, the information parted for him like water.
When he unplugged, he never could remember where he was.
00111
House lived in a clockwork hospital, each dose timed to keep him asleep for exactly the right amount of time. A routine of pills and arguments, though it was just meat, and meat didn't matter much, not anymore.
I kind of totally stole that last line from Neuromancer, and I think House does like to think of that. Um, the original idea veered sharply around this section, because I wasn't originally going to make them all doctors, I was going to make them hackers of some sort, so yeah, there's a certain amount of irony in a doctor thinking that the physical body doesn't matter.
They let him plug in when he wanted to, a jack easily accessible from the bed, letting him back into his real home, where he really lived. His leg didn't hurt while he rode through the wires (the cables laid down when he was a kid are dull and dingy now, dark and faded like a T-shirt left out in the sun),
queenzulu mentioned the colors, which do play a big part in this story, mostly because I wanted to give the Stream a sensory feel to it, like it's a concrete thing to be experienced. In my mind, the Stream is information, constantly flowing, but the technology allows you immerse yourself in it in different ways, and the way the human brain reacts to jacking in is to try to conceptualize it into a three dimensional thing. The reason the wires seem duller is not so much that they are duller, but that they're not as up to date and powerful, and the brain renders it as darker, less vibrant, because it doesn't carry as much information.
and it was better that way. So much better. (He'd been inside a patient when the pain first hit, not realizing what was happening until he pulled out and felt it all at once, his body already twisting and pulling into a ball.)
The technology turned off the pain receptors, but it left some limited awareness of the outside world, the moving things at the edges of his consciousness. He learned to tell them apart; Stacy clear silver, like stainless steel, Wilson dark brown, like earth. He'd unplug in the mornings to find them sleeping in a chair by his bedside, waiting. He never understood why.
Here's some more about colors, and I think I chose silver for Stacy because she feels sharp like that. Strong, too, and sort of steely. Wilson is just sort of warm, inviting.
When Stacy brought him home, he plugged in, lying down on the bed, sliding the jack into his wrist, riding the Stream until Stacy's bright silver faded into a dark, forest green.
He unplugged to a dark room, a throb in his thigh, and a ceiling that looked too strange and too familiar.
So, for the next section, I copy-pasted the entire corresponding section of Variations, and wrote around it (and through it, a bit). The original was wonderfully stripped down, and I tried to keep to it as much as possible.
01100
"Adam Quong is seizing," Cameron said.
House unplugged to the bright sunlight of midday streaming through the windows, hurting his eyes.
Looking back on this one now, I may or may not have contradicted myself later over this line about just what happens to your eyes when you're in the Stream. I kind of imagined it like staring at a movie screen, bright, but when you walk outside, the sun is still blinding.
"What have we got him on?" he asked, tongue heavy and unfamiliar in his mouth. Was inside for too long. Does weird things to your body.
"Prednisone," Cameron said, "and he's crashing." She eyed him carefully, sizing him up, and House hated that, being looked at, watched.
"It's not Crohn's," House said. His brain raced ahead, proposing and rejecting tests, procedures, treatments, eager to get back in. Different network, same idea. Plugged into the nanites that would scour Quong's systems, searching and recording every stray twitch of his internal organs.
This whole idea of what doctors do in this world was the coolest to me, and I hadn't even thought of it as I started out. As I imagined it, it's sort of like an internal network, set up like the Stream, but not connected to the wider Stream, so it still feels like the Stream, but it's not really the Stream. If that makes any sense whatsoever.
"We should take him off the prednisone--" Cameron started, a quick wave her hand, showing off the metal plating on the inside of her wrist, the cradle for the jack that could (would) take her inside (a body, the Stream).
I would have thought this kind of sentence construction would have pegged it as me right off, what with the weird parentheses and such. I kind of like the image of what exactly the interface looks like. In my mind, it looks like the kind they have for audio cables, the thick ones they use for microphones and speakers.
"Too soon." House rolled to his feet. A second later he landed hard against his desk, his leg collapsing under him. Stupid. Stupid. The mind is willing. The body is weak.
I like that dichotomy between mind and body. It was one of the first things I thought of while I was planning it out.
Cameron rushed forward, arms out. "Are you--?" Still hadn't gotten his balance back from unplugging. Hadn't remembered the nerve damage and missing muscle tissue. (And he didn't understand how Dr. Jacobs managed to fuck up that procedure, way back when, but he did.)
"Shut up," House said. "Get moving." He followed her, snarling, aching once again for the cool feel of the Stream.
Okay, this next section is probably, in my opinion, the weakest, because I'm not really a poet at heart. I do like the imagery of it, and it gave me the opportunity to insert random nerdy computer references in there.
11001
It tastes
like blue, like the
feel of ice down the back
of his neck.
One of the things that I really wanted to get in here is the synaethesia. It was one of the things that really stuck with me about Neuromancer, and I knew while writing this, that I really want to write some of my own.
The world assembling the
world parsed and compiled to binary
around him.
Okay, this is not really correct computer-y stuff, but I liked including it. "Assembling" refers to assembly languages, really low level, close to the hardware languages. "Parsed an compiled" refers to the process of turning code into binary, you have to "compile" it in order to do so, and in order to turn the text you write into something the computer can understand, first it has to parse it.
He sees the sound of water running, the
stream of the Stream, and it bends for him,
moves for him. It blooms like a flower
and he moves moves moves feels no pain and moves moves moves.
Information sounds like the feel of a machine humming under your fingers vibrating vibrating vibrating.
Body is useless, empty. Mind is full, full. Jump from socket to socket, server to server, ride ride ride
I'm sure my friendslist is sick of me whining about sockets, but they're a way in which to write and read from some other computer, so they're very key in networking. God, I never really want to think about them again.
jump jump jump. Piggy-back across packets.
Packets are chopped up pieces of information that are sent over the internets. I think they still have them in this world, even though their bandwidth is much better.
A prick at his ear, just a tingle (not there not there), a warning, too long inside,
can't stay can't stay.
I hit on the idea that you can't stay in the Stream too long a lot, and I think it was mostly because House likes it too much there and if he could, he would never leave.
He unplugs
to an empty apartment
surprised and not at all.
Looking back at this, I kind of wish I switched up this last line a bit more. It resembles the one from the second section quite closely.
j 0x01
This last section title is a bit more obscure than most. It refers to an assembly instruction which says, "jump to this address and continue executing from there." In this case, it's the location designated by the hexidecimal digit 01, which is just 1. In the original, it's "Aria da Capo", which is sort of going back to the aria and repeating. I tried to get at the same idea in code, here.
He pulled out not knowing what time of day it was, the room dark around him, his arm useless at his side. It always felt numb after unplugging, deprived of sensation. The pain in his leg came back in waves, a slow slide of sensation. The air smelled humid, like fresh rain, like dirty puddles on asphalt.
I like writing about the weather. People know this about me. And I kind of like the hint of that, the sort of idea that there's still life outside of the Stream.
He twisted, bumping the body next to him. It was Wilson, unplugging himself for a moment, his pupils tiny in the dim light (the brain fooled while in the Stream, thinking that it was bright, that it could see). "Okay?" Wilson asked.
Um, yeah. This is the part that I thought was kind of contradictory. I should probably wander off and hope no one calls me on it.
"No," House said, because he was on the bed, staring at the wall (peach and ugly; he should have that repainted some day), because he was feeling and breathing and hurting, because he wasn't in the Stream. "Being annoyed by oncologists."
"Hmm," Wilson said, distracted, plugging back in, but not before pulling House closer to him, tucking his face into the crook of House's neck, his fingers curled over House's hip.
Snuggling! I love snuggling. They should snuggle all the time.
House closed his eyes for a moment, letting his mind sink back into his body, letting it rest for a moment.
He still didn't trust unplugging next to Wilson. (The real world was never what you wanted it to be.)
But plugging in (riding through sun-yellow wires in the Stream, a hand steady and solid at the edges of his awareness, a presence that felt like the taste of chocolate), was getting easier every time.
Okay, so a few people commented that this ending wasn't quite happy as the original, and yeah, it's true, mostly because of the way I kind of equated the Stream with Vicodin and sleeping which meant that if I was going to continue in the vein of the original story, it was going to take on darker implications than the first. I think, though, that there's a certain amount of warmth to this ending, though, because Wilson's there, he gets it, gets House's need for the Stream. Wilson plugs in with House, and House appreciates that he's there.
end
Okay, that's it! Any further questions are welcome, and they would totally make me happy.