Tuesday's Ten Minute Tale - the result!
Jul. 15th, 2008 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
martinlivingsOkay, here we go. Only one word offered today, it seems, thanks to LJ being down I guess, so thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
asimmum for "infinite avatar".
'The Day I Ate the World'
(c) Martin Livings 15-7-2008
The sky was the colour of a TV tuned to a dead channel. Or it would have been, if it wasn't for the flotilla of rainbow-coloured dirigibles blocking out the hydrostatic clouds. From horizon to horizon, the zeppelins filled the virtual skies, like a jillion novelty condoms inflated and sent aloft.
I watched the procession with a carefully constructed smile. Everyone was looking at the balloons for the moment. But not for much longer.
The hack was simple. I'd built my avatar in such a way that, although it looked perfectly normal, it was actually a heavily compressed file, using my own format based on Mandelbrot. It may have appeared simple, a vermillion Care Bear with cracked LCDs for eyes, but beneath its crimson furs lay a complex web of fractals, billions of them, and each of those were, in turn, generated from a billion fractals, and so on. It had taken ten months to grow, using a screensaver I farmed out to hundreds of thousands of computers across the globe, distributed processing working overtime for almost a year. But in the end, I was left with this, my virtual self, barely (bearly?) a hundred megs of polygons and vectors. A walking chaos timebomb.
"Hey," someone sent to me as they passed in their dragon avatar, trailing smoke and green streamers behind their scaly body. I greetwaved back, transmitted a friendly smile. It wasn't how I was feeling. I was feeling nervous, anxious, tense. I hoped none of it echoed in my Care Bear.
I walked to a nearby trash can icon, one I'd sent a stream of encrypted data to a few days earlier. it hadn't been emptied, of course; the admins were slack about maintaining the virtual space these days, since it was largely self-regulating anyway. As long as no-one did anything radical. I picked up the lid and looked inside. It was awash with old files, discarded avatars, corrupted music downloads burbling nonsensically in its tin confines.
And there, beneath them all, was my goal.
I pulled the trousers out of the bin and shook them. Bugs scurried from its surface, freed from their metal prison and eager to infect more data wherever they could. I looked at the trousers carefully. They looked perfectly normal, just like my avatar. Both harmless, in and of themselves.
But together...
I reached to the zipper on the front of them and tugged. It tore from the pants' material easier, and I threw the trousers aside. Then, carefully, I pulled the zipper all the way up, so it was closed, then placed it against my belly. It fused there, tiny hyperlinks merging the metal with my red fur. A second later, it was as if it had always been there, a part of me. A zip, closed, done up.
I looked around again. At the crowds of avatars gathered to watch the dirigibles float on by, a huge screensaver spectacle. I smiled, this time for real.
I opened the zip.
The sensation was unlike anything I'd ever felt. Imagine the feeling when you've been curled up in bed all night, and you find yourself stretching out, expanding, the sensation of freedom and release. It was like that, multiplied by a googolplex. I flipped and spun, turned inside out, the chaos fractals hidden in me unfurling and exploding out of me. Each jagged curl of data tried to straighten itself, but of course it was all made up of itself, infinitely recursed recursion. I unfolded like an origami swan, again and again, each expansion powered and accelerated by the last.
I heard the first cyberscream. Then another. Soon my ears were filled with the terror of a billion avatars, running for their artificial lives. In vain.
My head, if that was the right word for it, burst through the layer of dirigibles, made tiny and insignificant by my ever-increasing size. My arms, bristling with fractal fur that replicated itself into eternity, reached into the sky, through the static clouds, and into space. More and more of me emerged, as I unzipped infinitely into a world of finite storage capacity.
I was a cyber-terrorist. I did it for no reason, except that I could.
Then there was a strange constriction, and I realised I'd reached the limits of the hard drive capacity of the world. Yet I was still expanding, now crushing myself with my own data. It was uncomfortable, unpleasant. Zeroes and ones compressed within me, twisting together, making new data, unforeseen data, nether zeroes nor ones. Square roots of negative numbers flickered into existence within me. Infinities jostled against one-over-infinities.
I screamed, and...
asimmum for "infinite avatar".'The Day I Ate the World'
(c) Martin Livings 15-7-2008
The sky was the colour of a TV tuned to a dead channel. Or it would have been, if it wasn't for the flotilla of rainbow-coloured dirigibles blocking out the hydrostatic clouds. From horizon to horizon, the zeppelins filled the virtual skies, like a jillion novelty condoms inflated and sent aloft.
I watched the procession with a carefully constructed smile. Everyone was looking at the balloons for the moment. But not for much longer.
The hack was simple. I'd built my avatar in such a way that, although it looked perfectly normal, it was actually a heavily compressed file, using my own format based on Mandelbrot. It may have appeared simple, a vermillion Care Bear with cracked LCDs for eyes, but beneath its crimson furs lay a complex web of fractals, billions of them, and each of those were, in turn, generated from a billion fractals, and so on. It had taken ten months to grow, using a screensaver I farmed out to hundreds of thousands of computers across the globe, distributed processing working overtime for almost a year. But in the end, I was left with this, my virtual self, barely (bearly?) a hundred megs of polygons and vectors. A walking chaos timebomb.
"Hey," someone sent to me as they passed in their dragon avatar, trailing smoke and green streamers behind their scaly body. I greetwaved back, transmitted a friendly smile. It wasn't how I was feeling. I was feeling nervous, anxious, tense. I hoped none of it echoed in my Care Bear.
I walked to a nearby trash can icon, one I'd sent a stream of encrypted data to a few days earlier. it hadn't been emptied, of course; the admins were slack about maintaining the virtual space these days, since it was largely self-regulating anyway. As long as no-one did anything radical. I picked up the lid and looked inside. It was awash with old files, discarded avatars, corrupted music downloads burbling nonsensically in its tin confines.
And there, beneath them all, was my goal.
I pulled the trousers out of the bin and shook them. Bugs scurried from its surface, freed from their metal prison and eager to infect more data wherever they could. I looked at the trousers carefully. They looked perfectly normal, just like my avatar. Both harmless, in and of themselves.
But together...
I reached to the zipper on the front of them and tugged. It tore from the pants' material easier, and I threw the trousers aside. Then, carefully, I pulled the zipper all the way up, so it was closed, then placed it against my belly. It fused there, tiny hyperlinks merging the metal with my red fur. A second later, it was as if it had always been there, a part of me. A zip, closed, done up.
I looked around again. At the crowds of avatars gathered to watch the dirigibles float on by, a huge screensaver spectacle. I smiled, this time for real.
I opened the zip.
The sensation was unlike anything I'd ever felt. Imagine the feeling when you've been curled up in bed all night, and you find yourself stretching out, expanding, the sensation of freedom and release. It was like that, multiplied by a googolplex. I flipped and spun, turned inside out, the chaos fractals hidden in me unfurling and exploding out of me. Each jagged curl of data tried to straighten itself, but of course it was all made up of itself, infinitely recursed recursion. I unfolded like an origami swan, again and again, each expansion powered and accelerated by the last.
I heard the first cyberscream. Then another. Soon my ears were filled with the terror of a billion avatars, running for their artificial lives. In vain.
My head, if that was the right word for it, burst through the layer of dirigibles, made tiny and insignificant by my ever-increasing size. My arms, bristling with fractal fur that replicated itself into eternity, reached into the sky, through the static clouds, and into space. More and more of me emerged, as I unzipped infinitely into a world of finite storage capacity.
I was a cyber-terrorist. I did it for no reason, except that I could.
Then there was a strange constriction, and I realised I'd reached the limits of the hard drive capacity of the world. Yet I was still expanding, now crushing myself with my own data. It was uncomfortable, unpleasant. Zeroes and ones compressed within me, twisting together, making new data, unforeseen data, nether zeroes nor ones. Square roots of negative numbers flickered into existence within me. Infinities jostled against one-over-infinities.
I screamed, and...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 10:11 am (UTC)You write cooler in 10 minutes than I write in 10 months :)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 11:18 am (UTC)And yes, I quite probably would have made it in today with a word, as I attempted to pop into LJ when it was down.