[ROYCE]

hello. my name is royce. i'm an engineer, at cloudbank. or at least. i used to be. you see, i found myself in a bit of a predicament. as it so happens, i'm a little bit stuck and i haven't had much success, that is in getting myself, well.. unstuck. [ A.I. / Alexis ]

[panickedsilence]

[emptybracket-blog]

yes, i'm completely certain that this is exactly what the watercolor sketchbook contains. it's not at all the fault of, say, shoddy programming. not at all.

[emptybracket-blog]

i won't pretend to understand. those two are inseparable, that much is...experimentally verified. like quarks in a hadron. sybil showed that well enough, now didn't she? well, not a day goes by where i don't wish she didn't, but it's a little too late for that. if that's what it is, though, i guess it's a good thing he keeps insisting on going back with her. even if he's given up, himself, he keeps going back in just because she hasn't.

well, i didn't mean break quite so literally. i'm not sure if it's even possible to destroy the transistor, and even if you did, i'm not convinced that'd be our way out as much as it'd mean our deletion. but we're trying. trying everything we can. i'm starting to run out of ideas, i'm sure i'll get more creative if need be. i'm an engineer, after all. that's what we do.

[emptybracket-blog]

reiszingsun:

 Grant Kendrell? Of course I know him! I’ve most certainly met him, but I haven’t been able to speak to him that much. He usually lets people like me go around and chat up the other little people.  😄

oh, well, that’s fair. that’s certainly fair. he’s awfully reserved, for someone so often in the public eye as he is. i was surprised, really, when he approached me to strike up a conversation. but we hit it off. started meeting over dinner to chat and...discuss our plans. we haven’t had dinner like that in a while, but we still talk.

what about his husband? asher seems like he’d be more your speed. he always was the more outgoing of the two.

[musicnoteemoji-blog]

A common trait shared between I and my alternates. An unbreakable will that is often translated to stubbornness and general hardheadedness. I don’t think anyone ever does. I follow my own rhythm.

I don’t have much to say since you’ve promptly summarised my thoughts.

[emptybracket-blog]

to your credit, or more accurately her credit, that might just be what gets us out of here. we’ve all given up. everyone but her. i’ll still help her, so long as she keeps asking. it gives me something to do, even if it feels like we’re not really accomplishing anything. who knows. maybe she’s right, and we can find a way out of here.

well, at any rate, we’ll see how long that unbreakable will of hers lasts. something’s got to give at some point, her or the transistor, and with how stubborn she is, there’s always that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that it just might be the transistor. we’ll see. we’ll see.

[musicnoteemoji-blog]

You’d be hard pressed to command me to do anything after several repeat loops. Even if you were a voice in the back of my head.

Perhaps, perhaps not. I lack the necessary knowledge to properly comment on that fact and mostly due to all I’ve done is simply observe. All I can truly say is, I use the word template lightly as there are alternate realities and universes where we exist but are different enough to not be considered “normal” by those that know of us.

[emptybracket-blog]

please. i have a hard enough time getting the you that i know to follow my instructions. she’s always so stubborn, when she forgets. of course, when she’s all back in the transistor, back with all of us, we all laugh about it, but when she’s out there again, trying it another time...well, needless to say, i don’t want to bother trying to get you to do anything. i don’t have that kind of patience.

not like i’d want to in the first place.

oh, there’s them. and then there’s an infinite number more who we wouldn’t even recognize as us. oh, they’d be us, down to our dna, but we would never know that if we met them. that’s the funny thing about people. the farther you zoom out, the less clear it gets just who we are. now, us, we’re lucky. our universes, as it would seem, would likely have been completely indistinguishable at some time in the recent past. so even though we don’t really know each other, you and i, we can make some inferences. and i’d say we’d probably be right, about half the time, at least.

[emptybracket-blog]

reiszingsun:

Of course I know you, Royce! Never would have expected you to get on social media and come talking with the rest of us. Good to see you spreading out and talking to people! You’ve already done so much for Cloudbank - we’re lucky to have you around the community.

I can’t really say I’m sure what you’re talking about though - Sorry! I could never totally follow you. Always going over my head with that brilliant mind of yours.  😅

hah...well, even the most reclusive of introverts occasionally get the urge to socialize. believe it or not, i do sometimes leave my place of work. it’s rare, but i’ve shown up to a handful of parties in my time. social media is...far less draining than those. though they do have their uses. that’s how i met grant, after all, at a party...

oh, now that i think about it, you might not have actually met him yet. have you met him, yet? grant kendrell? i don’t suppose i need to tell you who he is. you always seemed to have a knack for...knowing everybody, or so they say.

[musicnoteemoji-blog]

I’m not going to comment on that. There’s always a way but what I did was more or less, crashing every other program and using what I had amassed in the Transistor to break it all.

Different variations and growths. I feel I’ve departed from the template as I’ve been in this world for a number of years now.

[emptybracket-blog]

suit yourself. of course, i don’t have to tell you to do that, now do i? no, you always did.

template...you say “template” as if there’s some sort of standard that we all either conform to or deviate from, but that frankly doesn’t exist. in spaces like this, where our realities tend to fly closer together in terms of...probabilities and outcomes, you might see recurring features in one person and think that those are representative of the whole. but you’d be wrong. you’d be...well, very far from the truth, actually. everett doesn’t pick and choose which eigenstates fit some sort of “template” and discard outcomes based on how closely they conform to it. that’s...not how this works.

[emptybracket-blog]

// Royce just laughed so hard he started coughing at Sybil’s response.

[emptybracket-blog]

musicnoteemoji:

Well enough that I’ve stabbed you enough times before I broke apart from the system loops and found myself in a new role with the Transistor being a part of me and I it. That includes the Process.

I have been on this site for quite some time and I’ve long found myself in a different Universe.

interesting. well. i guess it would be, if i was still actively trying to find a way out of here. but i’ve more or less given up on that, you see. so it’s not really all that interesting to me. 

but i guess it’s convenient that there’s not so much explaining that i’ve got to do. not like the last time i met one of you. oh, that was tedious. she didn’t even stick around, did she? nope. all that explaining, and she didn’t even stick around.

[emptybracket-blog]

well, how do you do, sybil. i’m gonna go out on a limb and say you’re not my sybil, so maybe you don’t know me. but. well. i know you. or at least i knew you. one of you.

oh, that’s not a good way to start a conversation, is it? no, not good at all. well, like i said to red, i like being direct. sometimes, that’s just not what’s best for talking. i was never that good at talking.

i’m royce, in case you don’t know me. royce bracket. and if you don’t know about the more...everett nature of our reality, well, i must sound like quite the loon.

[emptybracket-blog]

musicnoteemoji:

Two familiar faces and two new ones. For the newcomers, bonjour. My name is Red.

To the other two? Welcome.

red. right. red. well, i’m royce, royce bracket, and i’m not one to beat around the bush, i like being direct, so i’m going to just get right to the chase. be direct.

how well do you know me? or, perhaps a better question would be, how well do you know the me that might already know you. because while i’m not certain, i think the probability of you being someone i already know is very...slight. we haven’t spoken in a while—well, she hasn’t spoken in a much longer while, but you get the point—but i’m pretty sure she’d tell me if she was attempting to make some sort of outreach to the world outside, and well, your blog doesn’t exactly seem new anyways.

[emptybracket-blog]

well, i...might as well give a status update.

red. she’s trying. she’s...still trying. trying over and over and over again, to break this...this loop we’re in. trying something new each time, thinking that maybe. just maybe. this will be the time.

i don’t think it’s a bad idea, necessarily. every...every good loop has a termination condition, right? i don’t think the transistor, or...whomever or whatever it was that made the transistor would have just put while (true) and just left it at there, with no break statement. i mean...just look at this thing. if someone programmed this, it’s...impressive. no. impressive doesn’t quite cut it. it’s immaculate. the only way there’d be no way to stop recursion would be if recursion was the goal. but we can’t afford to think like that, now can we?

me, i’m trying something different. i haven’t given up. no. not at all. i’ve...stopped. stopped trying to beat red. i know i can’t. the me that’s out there, though, he doesn’t know. no. he doesn’t know. he doesn’t know that it’s futile. she’ll win. every single time. she’ll win.

maybe trying to terminate the loop isn’t how we should be approaching this. i’ve made some headway, as you can tell. because, well...i’m talking to you. information. information can be transmitted out of the transistor. people, now. people seem to be a one-way trip. but what is a person but information, really. not...not the body, no. the body isn’t what i’m concerned about. the transistor...the transistor can make a body. what i’m concerned about is...well, i don’t want to call it a “soul” but i guess there’s no better term for it than soul.

i can project myself out. if you let me set up a connection, i can project myself onto your screen, no problem. if you let me, i can even manipulate some things that i can connect to. i can...hack, i guess, though i really don’t like that word. i don’t like that word at all. all that, that’s just commands. that’s just...information.

i feel like i’m close. like i can find some way to manipulate this thing from the inside. but the transistor...it’s not working with me anymore. i found it, i’m convinced, because it was working with me. and now it’s stopped doing that, and i’m having a much harder time getting it to do what i want. but i’m close. i know i’m close.

[emptybracket-blog]

is there anyone that still follows me anymore? i mean, i doubt it. i’ve been gone for a long time, and well, it’s not like i had many in the first place back when i was active. but who knows, things happen that surprise you.

[emptybracket-blog]

alright, now i feel is a good time to actually disappear for a bit. perhaps watch a stream flow, and arrange some rocks in its path and enjoy how the current changes.

[emptybracket-blog]

that would have been the last post on the matter, had you not found it necessary to barge in on the content that i decide to publish to my blog. but of course, since you did find it necessary to do just that, it was, obviously not. and if this irritates you, well you only have yourself to blame.

[emptybracket-blog]

on top of that, amazingly, it seems that all interactions live in a vacuum and that venting my frustrations on my personal blog is a terrible faux pas. as if i cannot use the services given to me for their express purpose because some person won’t find my usage of them agreeable.