“I feel like I’m out of my depths with these channels, Panama. Feel like I don’t even have a foundation to stand on anymore.”
“I hear ya sister.”
“So I’m turning to you.” She turns in the water. “Just like wet can turn to dry given enough time in space and distance.”
That blasted alchemical text, Panama knew. But it worked.
Lexi reluctantly hands over the keys to Ralph.
Filed under **VIRTUAL OT, 0045, 0109, Back Rooms, C2077, Kabusie
I see the Wall the Wall sees me.
—–
“Find anything?!”
“Gold!”
“Yeah, it’s out here!” the silhouetted man calls back from the distance.
“Just laying around! Like rocks!”
“Yuup!”
“So why aren’t there…?! I mean…!”
“Why aren’t there more people around, then?!”
“Yeah!”
“Because it’s fool’s gold you fool! fool’s gold you fool! fool’s gold you fool!”
—–
Fern wakes up under the umbrella the color of TILE. Desert dreams. Badlands. There’s actually only her out here… and Billy, who doesn’t really count since he’s a 3-4 foot, chrome plated mechanoid. He observes with bright, electric blue, pupil-less eyes her awakening not 3 feet away, out of the shade and into the sun. If he stretched out in place, he could almost prop his shadowed, robotic feet up on her torso. “Hi” he metes out as is his duty, and adds a little glinty morning salute to his sunny smile. “Cereal and milk has already been poured in that order. Just like you like.” He winks and his smile also appears to glint like his arm did before. Fern checks her watch (not on her arm?). 9 o’clock. She overslept by an hour and Billy was ready at 8. Can’t blame him for the sogginess then, pheh. Just following orders. She makes a mental note, to add to those orders, to rouse her at the appointed time and not let her sleep late. But for this morning, limp Toasty-O’s Snakes and Ladders pepper and mint flavored breakfast in heavily colored red and green milk to make gray it is.
He washed Fern’s bowl without water, using the sandpaper hand attachment #4 to do the job. Ceramic would hold up under this finer abrasion, he knew. But what happened to all the water? He had produced soo much of it with his endless waterfall toward the end of photo-novel 44, the last installment in our series and also perhaps perpetual it seems. At least I don’t see an end anywhere in sight using my future vision. I’ll switch it off now; back to the present.
After being unable to sand out a particularly persistent stain in the required time according to his inner clockwork, Billy cusses in his peculiar robot vernacular (“Nuts and Bolts!” I believe it was) and throws the bowl into the gorge next to them and proceeds to fashion another from the local clay. Will take him all morning, Fern reckons. Time for her to explore the hills around here without being followed everywhere. She’ll enjoy the isolation.
In the middle of the desert which was also its edge, she soon comes across this military grade helicopter, not so much landed here as crashed — both at once. Philip Stevor was working on one of the broken landing wheels presently. She approached, recognizing the figure. But why was he *here*? In the desert? Outside Nightsity?
“Cpt.,” she said about 10 feet away, unnoticed in approaching the chopper and addressing him the way she always did. He drew his gun as he stood up and spun around. Not drunk this morning, it appears, Fern thought. Impressive! Must have done a required stint in rehab.
“Oh,” he said, relaxing and putting the gun away. “It’s you, phew! So many bad things out here in the Badlands. Guess you came here through the portal — don’t mind if I keep working on the chopper while we talk, I hope. Gotta get out of here asap. I can take you with me. If you’re also stuck out here in the middle of nowhere for reasons still unknown to me.” He turned only his head now while the hands were still busy with the wheel. “Are you?… stuck?”
Was she?
Was I?
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL OT, 0045, 0106, Badlands, C2077, South Dakota
After the BD was over, the driver who was also the filmer decided to make the same loop over again to start another BD, this time focusing on the incredibly compact Tibetian city of Yajaing itself more than a drive into the city from another one called Kangding 2 hours, 44 minutes, and 20 seconds away through beautiful Himilayan mountains. Here are the two identical sections travelled, starting at 0:51 and 2:37:21 in the videos below respectively.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpZ-H3nqOMM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSHphBOAc1U
Continuing leads from FBI Agent Dale Cooper (see below), I saw it as an opportunity to study synchronicity through direct overlap. It may have paid off, because this TILE umbrella appearing on the first loop…
… was then removed by the second one, a time I estimate to be about 30 minutes later. Another highlighting of TILE, it seemed, becoming a theme for this here present photo-novel.
Agent Cooper’s advice seems to pay off again (!).
Gentlemen, when two separate events occur simultaneously pertaining to the same object of inquiry, we must always pay strict attention.
And this time — so appropriate — in his beloved Tibet he declared intense admiration for early on in the Twin Peaks series, even taping a map of it on the back of a blackboard to lecture about for others in his adjunct law enforcement department. And however confused they seem in the moment here, I’m sure they got a lot out of it. 🙂 And Cooper’s advice I quote above comes from the same talk.
Speaking of TILE umbrellas: back to the cyberpunk desert.
Filed under **VIRTUAL OT, 0045, 0105, Asia, Badlands, C2077, MAPS, Twin Peaks, Washington
“Ahh, there’s me in the middle again. Surrounded by my 2 favorite men, Cary to the left and Madison to the right. If only it were still that way and I could choose and select who I wanted to be with in any one alternate reality, *sigh*.”
“I’m worried about you, Tin. I really am.”
“Why? Because I know who I am and what I want?”
“Maybe,” I admitted, thinking of my own insecurities. Sure I was a writer. But of what kind? What genre? The list goes on.
“Then you need to go away and think about what I’m telling you. Goodbye. Shoo now.”
—–
I first heard of Lizzy over in Rocky Boy toward the edge of the desert. Not *at* the edge. But getting there. Someone named Fern met me at Ten at Sunset during the afternoon soon to turn to night. Told me not to head back into Nightsity on my motorcycle. Told me to go east instead of west. Rocky Boy. Here I am.
I parked my motorcycle on the edge of the small, trailer dominated town, speaking of edges, intending to walk around and see what’s there. The pavement on the main road through it was heavily cracked and overgrown with weeds. Toward the middle of the place there was a garage business with an unlit E in the neon OPEN sign next to its office door, the only building I could find with a walkable interior. Seeing no indications of hostile forces, I go inside to check it out.
Devoid of people, but its lone TV was playing. Someone, some kind of influencer let’s call it, was talking about Lizzy and how’d she’d thrown her hat into the brain daze producing ring, starting with a murder most foul. Of her own doing. Listening to it, I somehow knew this Lizzy person, who, after all, I didn’t know about 5 minutes before, would never do this and that the BD was a fake, if it even depicted a murder. I don’t know how I knew, but it turned out to be correct. There was no body. There was nobody.
(to be continued?)
Filed under **VIRTUAL OT, 0045, 0104, Badlands, C2077
—–
I was an expert on The Pit and all matters fleshy. They had set up a base of operations for me in an old castle surrounding the quarantined area. I looked for the promised local airport in which to land my orange PA-18 Super Cub Amphibian 1.2, bought on a lark day before yesterday’s tomorrow 5 years ago. Seems like it’s just the strip of land next to the castle over there. Oh well — it’ll be tight. Here goes!
Nailed it! Barely, phew! Now to find Baker Bloch the owner of this town and see what the deali-o is about the anomaly. Creature coming all the way under the oceanic plate separating Maebaleia from Jeogeot here? Highly unlikely. Probably an independent entity, hopefully smaller in scope.
(to be continued)
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0045, 0103, Big Woods, Bright Moon Cottage, Bull's Bar, C2077, Cement Village, Jeogeot, Kabusie, Maebaleia/Satori, Newtonia, Oooo, X-City
“Well Wheeler. Here we are at the end.”
“So… you’re admitting I’m Wheeler,” spoke Shelley to his side, also watching the water rise on the scene below.
“You’re Wheeler, yes. You’re my *daughter* Wheeler. I also have a wife Wheeler. And probably a mother Wheeler and also a dog Wheeler.”
“Down there,” she spoke, pointing to the robot dog still positioned in the middle of the bar, likewise water walking Fern Stalin studying it, wondering what makes it tick or if it could have ticks or fleas, but especially where it’s taking humanity as a whole. Obviously a lot of people will die as a result of this — flood. But the ones who survive will have a cleansed world to repopulate, free of the former dirt and smut and filth. Led at least in part by Fern, the chosen one. The one with the WOW factor.
“What about Billy?” asked Wheeler-Shelley, seeing the water submerge his small 3-4 foot robot body completely now.”
“Waterproof,” Newt spoke.
“Oh, of course. From novel 34.”
“Well,” said Newt. “Close enough.” He raises his glass of high alcohol purple snog beer from the counter. “So should we toast to the end? Another successful photo-novel?”
“Not quite,” Wheeler-Shelley said, keeping her beer on the counter and knowing more was to come.
“Why is this lady dancing up a storm?” Billy logically asked.
“I don’t know, but she better be *careful*,” Fern returned. “She better remember Edward — out in the desert.” But then she turned away from frenzied bartender Lexi to stare at Edward in a nearby booth with the owner of the night club, this Tin Lizzy she knew pretty well now. She’d brought him here just for this very reason, she then understood. To prove that the other Edward, the other Edward D. even, is separate from this one, who is still alive and well thank you very much and living in Our Second Lyfe where he belongs. Not up there in the real (virtual) world of Cyberpunk 2077.
That explains the black and white photo on one side of the bar; she also obviously set that up as part of the message (“Crybaby”)…
… along with the other b&w on its opposite side. So if one side of the bar is a foot, she thought, then the other side is also also a foot?
“Got it!” she shouted again in a Eureka moment, common for the brilliant, ever-thinking woman. She could see now what was really going on. In the middle of the bar, Lexi changed into a dog which spoke to Billy in a language only robots could understand. “End this,” it said to him.
The perpetual waterfall, Billy remembered. The final attachment. He and Lexi were waterproof — they’d be fine, ha ha ha ha. Ho ho ho ho ho.
Filed under **VIRTUAL SL, 0044, 0615, C2077, Kabusie, Massachusetts, NIGHTSITY
“Can I ax a question?”
“Uh HUH. Clever. But go ahead.” She was closely studying the act happening in front of us which didn’t interest him — me. Wrong body type. I wondered why. Gay? But maybe she’s just studying the girl’s moves for some kind of future reference. I popped it.
“Why?”
“Why?” she said back. I knew she knew what I meant. And she knew I knew. So I let the question stand as is. I thought of Dr. Why coming out of left field in Fern’s hospital scene to join Who, What and Idontknow in a makeshift team of physicians that didn’t care about answers in the end. Maybe Lizzy doesn’t care either. She decided to extend an olive branch.
“Let’s go back to Oklahoma and not Texas to see how much you remember. Sepisexton — Olive to Oklahoma. The Abstraction, 7 to 6. Gaeta, the 7th (continent), suddenly went dark. That affected everything that runs Our Second Lyfe behind the scenes. A change was made. The Flesh Pit was exposed for what it is, mystery no more. There’s even a bit of it poking through the supposedly vacant lot behind Aisle of Palms now, threatening its very existence if you didn’t know about that already.”
“I’ve already determined I’m going to give that up,” I said through Edward, handy in the moment.
“You have no *choice* now, though. If you’d taken that 4096 when it came up for rent. Or just bought it — maybe all this could have been avoided.”
“Who?” Pause. “What?” More standalone questions. Our fields of energy were becoming one. She was changing back. But not yet — hold off.
“I am the Ten that can turn into One,” she answered the first. “Ten is more important that Gold here. Do you have to ask?”
“Lincoln.”
“Correct. Lincoln is an alchemist.”
He had some time to kill before he was needed again, so Edward D. decided to explore a bit more of this re-creation of Cyberpunk 2007’s Night City occurring out in the Estate sims, beyond just his involvement with Shelley Emily. At the core of this re-creation: Lizzy’s HoloCore nightclub, run by our own, chrome plated Tin Lizzy. Or at least tin. That’s one of the things I want to discuss when I catch up with her next through one character or another, perhaps Edward D. but perhaps not — perhaps here but perhaps not here as well. Why the switch from gold to tin in the conversion of Night City to Nightsity? And since this is Our Second Lyfe, I suppose this is Nightsity too, so she’ll be that dulled silver color again when we meet up with her in person, like we’ve seen at least once before in this here photo-novel, 44 in a series. I’m guessing it had something to do with a humbling and coming back down to earth, since tin in alchemy is often described as a base metal leading to gold, where you start the whole process from. Along with the more commonly named lead in this role. Here we can turn to Texas for more information, specifically one county in the longhorn state named Coleman. What’s going on here? Cornering the gold market?
Anyhoot, back to Edward and the present. He reads more about this particular brand of Nightsity in the floating text at the entrance:
Hmm. Corners again.
And peeking around the corner or edge of Lizzy’s nightclub in the still-being-built city: that damn, bright red apple tree popping up again, sometimes called cherry. But we know better.
(to be continued)
“Thaaat’s betterr.”
“Hold still Mr. Middle Slaughter, tee hee. Say cheese.”
“Cheeeeeese.”
“Perfect.” Snap.
Filed under **VIRTUAL OT, 0044, 0611, Arroyo, C2077, United Kingdom, Wiltshire
Sunklands 