Arc the Fifth: The Center Cannot Hold
Chapter 1: Corruption
I got up the next morning to the sight of the house across from mine facing the other direction, and the capitol being moved to a slight angle. Felix can apparently rebuild the whole town, so why make just these little adjustments? I figured I’d go out and speak with him. I got ready for the day and headed out. He was just down the street, at the coffee shop, watching the birds. “Oh, hello, Ash!” he exclaimed.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Probably,” he responded.
“I saw you moved the capitol and the house across from it a bit. Why did you do that?”
“Come again?”
I got up and walked a few houses down, and pointed to it. “It’s the only house facing away on this street. Why is it like that?”
“I didn’t do that. But it still works. It’s fine. Not exactly right, but fine.”
“Yeah, well—“
I was interrupted by a school bus that suddenly blared its horn as it plummeted through the street. Felix looked concerned. He got up, left behind a few dollars for the coffee, and walked towards the capitol. “Hopefully that doesn’t mean things are happening again.”
“Again? Felix, what are you talking about?”
“Well, this happened sometime in the Summer, too. You called it out, if you recall.”
“I don’t!”
“Wait, I might have w—nevermind.”
“Might have what?”
“Yeah, I did wipe your memory of that, didn’t I?”671Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡVQqPaV1r5F
“Felix, what the hell?!”
“Now, now, I’ll explain things. Look, this should be fine, go back home and—“
There was a lot of creaking noises, and a few houses sunk under their foundations as if they were no longer holding them up. All that remained were a few slabs of concrete. The middle house was my own. I freaked out. “Mom! Alex! F—my computer was in there! Felix!!”
“…Alright, I can let you stay at the capitol in this case. I have no idea what is going on but I’ll try to see if I can’t… if I can’t pause the situation.”
“Pause it?! Felix, you can’t just—“
“Come with me,” he said.
“My house, though?!”
“I’ll try to see what I can do. No use worrying about it now. When all this blows over, your family and your things will be safe.”
Felix walked up to the door on the capitol building, pulled it, and found it stuck. He sighed, took a device out of his pocket, selected the door with it, and it vanished. It was the upgrader I had been using for a while now. “You have one, too?”
“How do you think I got things done around here? The Modifier is pretty useful,” he said.
Well, that answers one question, I guess. He picked up the phone at his desk, dialed a number quickly, and then set it down before pushing the bookshelf out of the way. “You’ve seen this workshop door before,” he said as if it were fact. I guess he was right. I had seen it before. I never punched in any numbers to open it, I just used the Modifier. The workshop was still a small room with shelves of equipment. Felix flipped through the shelves, looking for something, before finally exclaiming “Aha, there we go!” and pushing one backwards.
From there, he pulled a couple other ones out of the way, revealing the rest of his workshop. A large terminal stood in the formerly sealed part of the room. It was gray and kind of ominous-looking compared to what the small section I had seen before looked like. In fact, I recognized it vaguely. Probably because Felix went and wiped my memory. He crosses quite a few lines, I feel. “So this is my workshop. I know you’ve seen the small section before, and you’ve been in the blocked portion. It’s time I finally come clean with you. I know you’ve heard that Francisco go on about digital towns before, and I might as well say it. Yes, New Infinity is one of them. That said, it’s not for what they think.”
“Really? What do they think?”
“They were on the right path, but took the wrong turn. Yes, this stuff has been used for evil, but that is not what I want to do. This is all so important to me. Now, let me just pause the rest of New Infinity, and… there we are.”
He had typed in a few lines into the computer, and then opened a separate laptop sitting on a desk. It was hooked up to multiple monitors that appeared to be linked to cameras in town. “Yep, everything’s stopped. But I wouldn’t go out there if I were you. Whatever caused this instability is still at work. I’ll figure it out. Until then, just keep yourself company. I’m sorry this happened.”
As I headed up the stairs, Felix chimed in. “Oh, and because everything is stopped, you won’t have Internet or mobile service for a while. Apologies.”
Well, shit. That’s just great. Fantastic. I figured I might as well check the place out. My first stop was the library. I never really got to check out just what it contained, and to be honest it contained a ton of books. Dozens of shelves with hundreds of books each, 30 laptops to check out and a nice array of desktops for people to do whatever I guess. Alex told me a story that back in 2005 or so, Mom was into Runescape and she’d have Alex sign into her account and take care of things while she was at work. He’d always use the computer at the Jefferson library when he did that, and the librarian had no issue with him coming along because she knew that Alex was pretty mature for a kid of 13 at the time, and he and I needed a place to stay while Mom was at work. We had no other choices.
I picked up a book from the shelves, Of Mice and Men. I read this book in school, and to be honest it was the one book I paid attention to. 1984 was a distant second. I mean it was cool and all, but to be frank it felt like nothing happened throughout it. I lost interest quick in that one (maybe that was my problem. All the good stuff is near the end, anyways). I flipped through it and put it back. Most of these books were fairly new editions and mostly untouched. The oldest book I could find was from 2009, and even then that was a book on motor vehicle parts, nothing interesting.
I headed out from the library and decided I’d check the two hallways. Down the first one I saw the broom closet Francisco tried to burn us alive in back during Halloween, followed by a storage room that contained nothing but box after box of floppy discs, each numbered. I found disc 1, but had no idea what the last one was. Once I saw “2,281”, I gave up on looking for a higher numbered one. The hall turned and looped back around to the other hall, which contained just two restrooms and a drinking fountain (that proudly proclaimed we had saved the equivalent of 20,000 disposable plastic bottles), and then headed upstairs. There was a large back room that was locked, but through the window I could clearly see what appeared to be a large TV and some tables. Why didn’t Felix have his movie night here? That’s another thing to ask him. It might have just been because it’s stairs only, to be honest. Or maybe it didn’t work? I mean, he was showing the film off of a laserdisc projector, so maybe he just didn’t have a DVD copy. Opposite of the large room was a balcony overlooking the town.
Felix was out there, at a table with a laptop. “How’d you get up here?” I asked.
“Oh, I just needed a change of scenery. And now I can watch what I’m doing instead of having to use the cameras.”
“Mind if I ask a few more questions?”
“Go ahead,” he responded.
“So you have this room up here with the TV and all. Why didn’t you have the movie up here?”
“I had a projector copy of E.T., and it’s a bit tricky to project onto a TV. There’s also no ramp for anyone who might have needed one. That’s not safe.”
That’s the most Felix answer I could have gotten.
“Also, I noticed you have a lot of numbered floppy discs.”
“That’s the software the town came on.”
“Floppies?”
“Yep.”
“When did you get the town?”
“…A while ago.”
“When? What year?”
“It’s not important. I’ve had to store a lot of information on discs, and that’s what I had at the time.”
“How many are there?”
“…3,681.”
“That only works out to be like 4 or 5 gigabytes, though. And what about the load time?”
“It took a couple of days, yes, but I just got into the habit of using floppy discs early on. They were always cheaper than CDs. Oh, this looks interesting. Ash, tell you what. I’ll open up that back room for you; can I get back to work? I think I found out what’s happening.”
“Sure,” I said.
Anything to get a bit more dirt on Felix.
ns 15.158.61.8da2
