Chapter 3: Reflection
That evening, after they had all gone home, sometime at around 8 or 9 at night, I was sitting by the computer. Felix hadn't gotten in touch with us since earlier that day, and I was a bit worried. I opened the text window we used to communicate with Felix, and sent him one more message.
“Hey, this is Ash, I've been worried, we're hoping you're alright as it's been a few hours since you last checked in. If you get this message, just send me a message back, stay safe.”
I minimized the window and flipped through some of the files. Felix had installed a game or two, I saw Zork and the original Space Quest (I hadn't played any of those games, though I did play King's Quest 6), and a bunch of technical information loaded up in spreadsheets and text documents. I did open one of the text documents just to see what was there, though I wasn't sure what I'd get.
Rift Assembly 20043, or “the door” as Felis had called it when I worked with him, utilizes a minimalized dark matter core housed in a proto-quantum processor to adapt digital information into living space. Originally, “the door” was created for a project out of the Unity building (now Horizon Solutions) off the coast of Ireland, though Felis had reverse-engineered one of these for his own blueprints and personal use. The only material required that isn't available at a Radio Shack or hardware store is the processor, which were custom-built by Horizon for their own experiments. Aside from Horizon and Felis, Happy Infinity is the only company that is known to own a “door” rift, which they use at a lower power setting hooked into their mainframe to create “digitized civilizations”, a promising look into the future of human settlement. With one of these, a million people could theoretically live within a room the size of a bedroom comfortably, and for a thousand years provided enough materials are created within. ENTRY DATED 08-23-1998.
Sure enough, it was really dense and while there was mention of Felis again, I wasn't anywhere closer to answers.
Felis passed away last night. On one hand, I saw this coming. The work he was doing was incredibly risky, especially with how public he was about what he did, but it's still so disheartening that someone that cared about me so much is gone forever. He brought me here, sure, but that entirely disconnected me from the family I had back home, and now I have nothing. I have the foster home and the library still, but that's not really a family. A shame, really, a darned shame. ENTRY DATED 08-26-1999.
How old was Felix then? If we assume he is 39 now (there's no way that guy is 40), he would have written this at 23, and the previous post at 22. Someone at that age would have a bachelor's degree at best, unless they were just really smart. I guess that's the case, I mean Felix writes code by the page full without stopping to think about what he wants, he can do it all at the same time, so maybe he was invited to a college at a young age? And what's this about a foster home? Surely Felix was old enough to have been pushed out of the system by then? Unless he also had another job with them.
Happy Infinity has spent the last decade ruining what hope a Digitized Civilization could have in the modern day, with rising tensions and environmental scarcity on the horizon, that I feel I have no choice but to take matters into my own hands. I am creating my own Digitized Civilization and am looking to uphold my own values of respect, beneficence, and justice within. The people who opt to live in a Digitized Civilization are no less human or otherwise than they were before entering, and as such should be protected under the same regulations and restrictions put in place on physical jurisdictions. I've already decided on a name, I need to reclaim “Infinity”. No matter where I have to settle, whether it be New York, Illinois, Texas, or Oregon, a New Infinity will enter this life looking to better the world through the ultra-compact space-saving technology of the Athenian Royale. ENTRY DATED 05-31-2009
I couldn't bring myself to stop reading some of these short entries saved in plain text documents, Felix knows a whole lot more than he lets on and I felt inclined to continue my search for Felix's backstory. Many of the other documents just contained a lot of what looked like a super compressed code like “ANTH FLS – 23 061289, 422 YTD, 1488 TTL” which I figured might have just been serial codes on the rifts or whatever.
“Ash?” Someone called behind me.
I flinched in shock, turning around and finding myself fists raised as if to initiate combat, but immediately had to drop my guard. Standing in front of me, seemingly glowing, was the image of Felix, bathed in a blue light. The light fizzled out slowly, but he still stood there. “Ash, it's just me,” he said quietly, as if to not disturb anyone.
He stepped forward, treading carefully on the living room carpet, and now under a different glow, facing the screen of his Tandy, I could see Felix had begun to grow the stubble of a beard, there was a weariness to his eyes. “Felix?! Bu--”
“Hi, nice to see you, too, but, uh, listen, I don't have much time, right now I cannot stay with you guys. I know you all have this fantasy of wanting to become a young resistance and I have to applaud you all, but I don't want Roland catching on. Not only would he kill me, for sure, but I'm afraid he might also kill you all, too. He's not above bringing harm to kids, I know this from experience. I'll try to make quick visits here with a one-way Rift, and I'm still doing a little bit of formulating here on my own, but the last thing I want, Ash, is for you or Nathan, or goodness, George, to be shot in the head for trying to conspire against him.”
“Felix, I... You don't mean... but there's no way he should be able to fire that gun, that's way too big for someone li--”
“--yes, I called him out on buying it way back when, that was $12,000 his company desperately needed, but that's not the point. Just... just stay safe, Ash, alright?”
“Felix, I--”
As I stood up, Felix disappeared from the living room. The Tandy shut itself off, and I found myself standing alone in the darkness of the living room, stranded in an ocean of silence broken only by the distant tick-tock of a clock. The computer wouldn't turn on again, I sighed, and went to bed.
I looked over at my Modifier, which I had set next to my computer. We were kind of on our own, I guess.
ns 15.158.61.20da2
