2B, or Not 2B

Painting Planetscapes [Character 4.03]

Your story

Favorite Scene: All of them. They combine into such a delicious set of storylines. However, if you had to pick, you'd say it was the scenes where the double-crossing Marauders of Joyous Treachery, Debauchery, and Every Other Cherry drop their pretenses long enough to totally derail the efforts of the "heroes," even if it's only a temporary setback. This is really the Marauders' story, a struggle against impossible odds. The Precipice of Quantum Friction, the Prison of the Silver Soul, the Untimely Timestream -- they are all places where the Marauders survive and persist, at their finest. No one gets that.

Well, for froahbortlen's sake, why not just create a freeping supernova while you're at it? You couldn't keep well enough alone. You had to spend more and more cycles creating something you were truly capable of, rather than stick to the boring, "good at the crinkly bits," VR efforts of Painting Planetscapes. No, you had to make a huge fährvergnügen mess and let everyone know that Sonia/2B is not dead, and back in the VR studio.

Erquon U was a ruse, of course. You left a non-sentient android double there, to represent your incurable self. You programmed it to have one final bit of "clarity," going off to ascend to the Pantheon of Celestial Geese. (You should never have included so much about the Celestial Geese in this work. It's such an obvious, subconscious tipoff.)

You sneaked back to the Fleet, modified your identity, appearance and genetics as you uploaded into the virtual, to take up software life as the dull and boring Painting Planetscapes.

You avoided Pamir, an on and off lover from three or four millennia back. They knew you in the real. Irregular Tesselation v12.4 only knew you from your collaboration in the virtual, as an avatar, 2,000 years and more ago. It had to be freeping el-Dinar Storycrafter to find your work. They were your longest collaborator, lasting three hundred years until your "death." They also only knew you in the virtual, as an avatar, but there were several close calls in the real. You never let on how well they knew you. (One stupid security mistake and they found your VR.)

When you realized el-Dinar was a week into the story and loving it completely, you couldn't bear to kick them out. They showed you the storylines were even better than you imagined. Clearly, your ego software is working all too well.

Desperate for one last shot at covering up your identity, you turned to Irregular Tesselation v12.4. 2,000 years ago, they made a serious mistake with the translation matrices for a VR. You'd given them the grunt work of making the language and story accessible to as many races as you could, in the Fleet and beyond -- they were much better at it than you were.

Rather than a story of manners and fine dining while stuck in a malfunctioning time machine, their mistranslation meant that 62.4% of those experiencing the VR would go through an incomprehensible story of cannibalism and poor hygiene while stuck in the nineteen stomachs of a rapidly devolving Mutant Celestial Goose. This seriously traumatized a delegation of Vicars of the Nasal God getting an early look during a crucial diplomatic mission. As a result of this insult, embarrassment, and utter failure, Tesselation was honor-bound to randomly flip bits in their essence until they became incapacitated and died. They're an otherwise sensible and reasonable race.

You covered for them, apologizing for the "incomplete story." You quickly wrote a new ending that made sense of the Mutant Goose, that appealed to the Vicars and the mucus-filled scriptures of the Nasal God. It resolved the diplomatic incident and made Irregular Tesselation v12.4 honor-bound to you. (The VR is one of your rumored "lost works," erased once the Vicars had left with their Holy Copy.) It was the last time you worked with Tesselation.

Five weeks ago, you sent an anonymous message, encrypted in a way that proved mathematically it must have come from you. It gave Tesselation access and ownership to the VR. The message said they were honor-bound to claim the VR as their own work, a rescue to pay you back for your rescue 2,000 years ago. You only hope that they're better at stretching the truth and their sense of honor further than they were so long ago.