Chapter 3: Ice Beamed
I grabbed a jacket and headed out to confront Felix over this. This was getting way out of hand. He was not at the coffee shop, so he had to be at the capitol, I figured. Sure enough,he was sitting at the front desk, reading through a copy of In Cold Blood. “Oh hey, Ash!”
“Felix, what the hell.”
“Well,” Felix began, setting the book face-down on his desk, “I figured this is the easiest way to flush that imposter out! See, chances are he'll grab a coat for himself. I'll either have no coat at all, or the one I handmade myself. He can't match the craftsmanship of my coat, I know that for a fact. I can get back into my terminal, in case you're curious, but it's only for a few seconds before I get kicked out. More than enough to type in what I need into the command prompt. Using the menus would just take too long! Well, Ash, hope that answers your questions!”
It... kinda did. It made sense, in a very Felix way. I mean, if you could control stuff like the weather, and you had a sociopathic doppelganger after you, and you were a good-natured yet somehow shady computer programmer, you'd likely do the same. I mean, that's not a scenario that comes around often so I have no idea, but it's New Infinity. Weird shit happens, and I guess I've learned to accept it at this point. The sky is blue, water is wet, Felix is weird and his town is weirder. There's more under his facade, yeah, but I can't confirm that any of it is bad anymore. He's just... frustrating sometimes.
I decided to go back home, let all my friends know what the big deal is, and then get on TF2 for a good chunk of the day. This is not how I wanted to spend my summer, but I guess we just have to live with it anymore.
Alex had just gotten up when I got back home, and was awfully confused at the snow on the ground. “Hey, uh...”
“Felix is trying to bust a manipulative doppelganger and is doing so via the weather.”
Alex stared at me for a moment. “Know what? I'm just... I'm just going back to bed. Yeah, this is... well.”
I got back onto my computer. The date said 11 July 2015, the time was just before 10 AM, so it's not like it was December in New Infinity. I got curious and searched up some nearby places online. Portland was at 67 degrees right now, 68 in Seattle, 88 in Jefferson. And here in New Infinity, we were at 28 whole degrees Fahrenheit. Good job, Felix.
A couple hours later, another snowstorm had kicked up and I sighed. This was definitely not the Summer I wanted. Sometime after, the phone rang. I didn't recognize the number, so I let it go to the answering machine. “This is an automated call from the New Infinity capitol. Everyone is invited to attend a monumental conference held at the capitol July 12th, at 7 PM. Thank you, and we hope to see you there.”
Huh, that's weird. Normally Felix would have handled something like that himself, and the number was wrong too, so I quickly dialed up his office. The phone lines seemed down, so I would have to venture out towards the capitol myself. That's when I had a revelation. If New Infinity is a computer simu-- er, “digitized civilization”, then couldn't I just use the Modifier to shut off the snow? I picked it up, threw on a coat, and headed outside.
It was snowing an awful lot, and visibility was nearly zero. I tried to select the snowflakes as they fell, and eventually did. All that was attached was a variable to control the shape randomization. So next I tried to select a cloud. Again, most of the changes I could make were just about the cloud type and shape, that type of stuff. I tried again, and didn't actually select a cloud. A distant object did get selected, which the Modifier called “pDev_SkyandLighting”, containing a large set of complex variables as well as a handful of scripts that I didn't even try to open. This was probably important stuff for Felix to know, so I headed out towards the capitol.
I opened the door and was immediately greeted by a red mug full of hot cider. “Hey, Ash. I saw you headed up here in the cold and it just about broke my heart. Warm up.”
“Thanks, Felix,” I replied, not wanting to question why cider and not anything else, “I actually wanted to talk about some stuff.”
“Oh?”
“About the town.”
“Oh. Go on, then.”
“So there was a phone call a while earlier about a conference tomorrow night. That's not legit, is it?”
“No, it couldn't be. Was that—that probably was the duplicate. I didn't get that call.”
“And I tried to call you about it and the lines were dead.”
“Probably our hooligan interfering with things again.”
“Also, I tried to turn off the weather with the Manipulator, and I hit a distant object in the sky. This one,” I said as I showed him the Modifier screen.
“Oh, this? Ash, you ever made a video game?”
“No, have you?”
“No, but I did play around with them a little at my old job. Well, a lot of properties of the world have to be on the world. So the ideal thing is you'd attach it all to invisible objects all over the place. There's a few like that around New Infinity, and most of them are actually synced to the actual weather and conditions out in the world right now. Of course, I do have the power to override them if I want. You probably already knew that,” he said, pointing outside.
“Does that mean that someone else could override them?”
“They could, but I locked most of them behind a password. You can select them and view what's going on, but...”
He took the Modifier, stepped outside, selected something off in the distance, and stepped back in. “I have selected the weather control object here, and you can see everything updates in real time. But if I wanted to change the weather type to, say, rain, it then asks for a password. It's that easy, Ash.”
“Okay, but how hard is the password?”
“You'd have to know a very specific bit of history to just guess the password, so it's pretty safe, Ash. Well, anyways, we should probably find out about what's going on tomorrow. Seems like our duplicate will be there, and I have to put him to a stop before then. If I can get back on, I could just disable him, but I have no way to know how the computer handles his name.”
“Couldn't I just--”
“No, the Modifier won't quite do the trick. It can select objects, but I've locked it out from selecting people. There's too many things that can go wrong with that. I might have to work on a firmware patch for mine later, but until then I'll just stay down here and keep trying to check what edits have been made. Stay safe, Ash. Can I fill your cider before you go?”
“Aren't you going to want your mug back?” I asked.
“Oh, you can keep it for now. I might swing by later to pick it back up but I can spare just one mug for now.”
I headed back out into the blizzard, shielding the top of the mug from the snow. I get back home and search for my keys, setting the mug on the porch for a moment. As I step into the door, I pick up the mug out of the snow and set it on the kitchen table. The drink is topped with some snow from just a few seconds of being unattended like that, kinda watered down and much colder than it was. I watched the snow melt into the cider before finishing off the mug and washing it, and headed upstairs. It was 4:00 PM, and I couldn't do much but stay indoors. I aimlessly went from server to server in TF2. Snow silently fell through the night, illuminated by the streetlamps in town. Sometime in the evening, I heard a low, loud sound from out in the distance, and at that time decided I should get to bed. It was 11 at night by then, anyways. I walked through the kitchen, grabbed my stuff out of the laundry room, and the last thing I did before calling it a night was to take Felix's mug out of the dish water I left it in, rinsed it off, and set it on a towel on the table.
The next morning, I looked outside to find the snow was nowhere in sight and the air unbelievably warm. I quickly shut the heat in the house off and opened the front door. Sure enough, it was close to ninety degrees outside. I wonder what happened last night.
ns 15.158.61.6da2
