@uncinerated sent: do you have a human soul and can you prove it?
SO HERE’S THE FUNNY THING ABOUT BLASEBALL, THE THING PEOPLE DON’T REALLY LIKE TO TALK ABOUT. people have always made bets on blaseball since the beginning. which was maybe forever ago. or maybe always. ever since some fucking caveman first smacked a projectile with a stick by accident. there is some terrible human impulse, or maybe inhuman impulse, to play ball. that’s just kind of how it is. but the system of blaseball – the workings, the nuance, the bureaucracy – had to be built. it had to be made. someone had to decide to democratize it, and decide they did. elliot’s best guess is that the powers that be just don’t have the ability to hit keys and write code.
you know. spinning howling peanut (peanut shell?) that likes to manifest and shit. can’t exactly make exact keystrokes. so you hire a mix. some script kiddies to get all the basic work done, and you pull together some programmers thanks to a seemingly infinite budget to create things according to your whims. apparently the front-end guys get a lot of the shit. he wouldn’t know. he just works on the back end of things, and leaves the backdoor into the system open that they ask him to. he tries not to ask questions. sometimes he thinks if he asks too many questions, he’ll have to see something he doesn’t really want to see.
fine. okay. sometimes he asks questions, but they’re just in his head and between him and the other people in there.
watching jaylen makes something in his head hurt. maybe it’s the smell of smoke that seems to follow her, faint but present. maybe it’s something about the way she looks, or the knowledge she shouldn’t be. what he hasn’t said to any of the players, the few that do actually ever notice him huddled in the stands, thinking about how to translate stats to the audience, is that he put together a good portion of the idol system. it wasn’t hard to do. they already had individual blocks for every player, and it wasn’t a big deal to sew everything else together into –
well. the point is: coding’s easy. results? difficult.
he doesn’t know what to say to jaylen. she seems curious. not many of the people involved on the higher levels of blaseball actually show up. maybe they don’t need to. but he isn’t part of that level yet, where the splort and the person are the same thing. no. he’s just a programmer. that’s all. he just watches sometimes. avoids certain weather conditions. observes the peanut shells piling up on the field. there’s compulsion there, but he’s been good at resisting certain kinds of compulsions.
❝ … what, you think everyone who puts together the background shit is just… gone? like you sign a contract with blaseball incorporated and they steal your soul like a fucking demon? ❞ he isn’t sounding particularly mean, as sharp as his tone is. he’s just tired, his body sinking down into the cheap plastic seat and ignoring the sun beating down from overhead. he hunches there. it’s technically too hot to wear a hoodie, but it’s not like he really gives a shit. he just keeps staring out at the field for a moment. ❝ i know it must be weird to… talk to a guy who helps run the whole system. but i can tell you i don’t really do much. upper level – yeah, they might be pretty soulless. i just write the code. blaseball across all borders, right? or something like that. ❞
he can imagine the way it must sound, like words inscribed on a corporate letterhead. maybe they were, in some email he skimmed and trashed as soon as he got it. he peers over at her for a moment. wants to ask what it was like to be incinerated, in the same way that he used to read up on ways to die when he was a kid. all the ways it might happen. percentages of survival. what might happen if catastrophe struck and he didn’t die.
but he won’t. it’s not his place to ask.
she’s been thinking a lot about contracts lately.
you know, maybe that makes sense. debt and all. she’s wondered a few times, though less than she probably should, whether she could walk off the field and keep the second chance at life she’s been so graciously allowed to fight to keep. the short answer: no. the long answer: sometimes jaylen blinks and the time between games is just gone, up in smoke (ha), and she’s not sure she really exists beyond blaseball. maybe at one point, she did. she had friends and a life before she died. none of that holds true.
she can’t actually remember if the contract she’d signed when she’d joined the garages, almost a goddamn decade ago, had provisions for umpire-related deaths. seems like all the players would’ve fought back, refused to sign onto the league, if that were part of the established rules. what legal bearing does the opening of the forbidden book have, and why was it enough that her own death was overlooked, mourned but not fought for? mourned but only fought for when she would be convenient to resurrect for the team? (mourned, fought for, regretted the moment that fighting had consequences.) she’s asked around a bit, but the higher-ups claim the paperwork doesn’t exist anymore. go fuckin’ figure.
there wasn’t anything official about her resurrection, but she knows the price she has to pay, anyways. doesn’t need to be spelled out on corporate letterhead for her to know she owes a debt.
what she knows is: blaseball is part of her, somehow. blaseball’s the only thing keeping her alive. if she fights hard enough, maybe, someday, there will be something beyond the rotating cast of stadiums, the players that grow deathsmoke when a ball goes sideways. but, y’know, not right now.
she laughs. not like she thinks it’s funny, but like she’s trying to show how sharp her teeth are. ‘ i dunno, ’ she says. she’s sitting backwards in the row of seats in front of him, the hellmouth stadium otherwise empty, too early for the trickle of crowds, or maybe too late. is it before the game, or after? to say her sense of time is fuzzy since her return would be the understatement of the season, and the sun here beats down the same regardless.
‘ thought everyone involved in blaseball signed their souls away. not just the background people. seems logical, you know, from a player’s perspective. ’ she doesn’t say how else do you explain what happened to me?, but she doesn’t need to. everybody knows who she is, what happened to her, what she does now. a fucking blaseball tech asshole definitely knows all about her. probably knows things about her she doesn’t know, yet.
she wonders just how much control the behind-the-scenes folks have. did he know what the book being opened would do? did he know about the umps? when he was inputting all the numbers into his little computer, watching them appear on the screen in neat orderly lines, did he know what it’d equate to in the real world?
‘ been going on a soulless until proven otherwise basis, here, anyways. saves me a lotta grief. ’ she’s almost always got a ball in her hand at this point. she wonders, absently, if that frightens him. it scares most people, but most people don’t have that kinda insider perspective on the inner workings of the splort. she hasn’t tested out whether beaning someone outside of a game has the same effect; maybe he knows, one way or the other. ‘ i don’t know how much wisdom you’ve got about all of that, but don’t correct me if i’m wrong on this one. ’
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