#deep zoom fractal

[quad-nova]

any way in a modern linked universe wind is in like a remote/home school co-op because he lives on an island with canonically a total four (4) school aged kids and no physical school so he does online classes with people from different islands, which is how he originally meets like medli and makar. tetra’s boat got that satellite internet so he sits in his 9th grade english zoom call and discusses great expectations with some teacher who lives on windfall and then the second he leaves the call he and tetra have an hour to commit pirate crimes until he has to be back on for geometry.

(the pirate crimes wind and tetra commit are not the act of exploring uninhabited islands, actually - i'm imagining tetra's boat to be like a offshore ketch (since its carrying a crew most of the time and because i want the a e s t h e t i c that comes from having multiple sails, but i also want link and tetra to ditch the rest of their crew and go off on their own) so they can probably sail at 6-8 knots (7-9 mph) which makes leaving territorial waters* (12 nautical miles (~14 regular miles)) a viable day trip adventure for them. the government of hyrule defines piracy as (conveniently for me) "acts that endanger the safe navigation of ships" **(and ive decided sailing without a boating license is included in this list along with, ya know, the usual things like seizing control of a ship or plundering distressed vessels (has tetra's crew ever seized control of a ship or plundered a distressed vessel? who knows, certainly not a court of law)) gonzo has a valid boating license and tends to be at the helm since it causes the least problems if they get questioned at port. tetra, however, (as an unfortunate side effect of being born in secret to escape unspecified hyrule royal family political turmoil(context pending)) does not legally exist in the eyes of the law, and therefore has not only no boating license, but also no legal identification at all. therefore, the act of sailing on the open seas without a license counts as a "endangering the safe navigation of ships" in international waters ∴ piracy)

four is home schooled because he refuses to learn anything that he isnt intensely interested in, so grandpa smith threw in the towel years ago and just counts his 16 hour long deep dive on 18th century occult practices as a history assignment. he'd love to push for some grammar lessons today but four has already disappeared into the garage to use a disassembled microwave to do fractal wood burning*** on the handle of a bowie knife he made out of a broken crescent wrench.

*contiguous zones? economic exclusion zones? never heard of them, its my half thought out modern au, the bureaucracy only exists in ways that are convenient for me

** us law defines acts of piracy that endanger the safe navigation of ships as: seizing or exercising control of a ship by force or threat of force, performing an act of violence against a person onboard a ship, destroying a ship or its cargo, placing or causing to be placed on a ship a device that could destroy or damage the ship and its cargo, destroying or damaging maritime navigational facilities or interfering with their operation, communicating navigational information that is known to be false but likely to be believed, plundering distressed vessels, corruption of seamen, depredation at sea, privateering, injuring or killing a person while committing any of those acts listed, and attempting or conspiring to commit those acts listed. i choose to believe that tetra has committed a third or more of this list

*** there have been 34 reported deaths from fractal wood burning, do not attempt.

[pthariensflame]

Which fractal is that in your pfp, or if you don’t know, then how did you find it? And why did you pick it?

It’s the Mandelbrot set because I’m basic. It’s a deep zoom I captured myself years ago; I have no idea how to find it again. I picked it back then because it’s pretty and it’s symmetrical-looking at a distance; I’ve stuck with it because it’s distinctive and I like to have a consistent expression of identity.

[joemuggs]

Albums of 2023 part 2

And so, on from part 1, we continue. This is more dreamy synth-dub that sits perfectly next to the Harrow album: Richard Norris is another artist with an extraordinarily long and illustrious career but who also has never lost the exploratory urge and total delight in sonic finesse.

Honestly Uruguayan-in-Ireland Lila Tirando a Violeta is right up there with the very best of the "deconstructed club" generation - dark, gothic, complex, VERY WEIRD - and this collab with Berliner Sin Maldita is up there with her best. It's really, REALLY intense!

Just impossibly beautiful elegies from ambient harpist Mary Lattimore which builds towards the final track collaboration with Slowdive's Rachel Goswell that is so lovely it will single handedly bring back swooning as a popular pastime.

Officially an EP but there's enough here to cement Nia Archives's place as a heavyweight - add "Off Wiv Ya Headz" and that Jorja Smith remix, and she's had a humdinger of a 2023....

Saw some discourse suggesting that Burna Boy is resting on his laurels here, but I don't hear it. Maybe it's the fact that the cover looks dashed-off? But musically, this bangs: it expertly joins so many dots but keeps his voice and personality right at the heart of it.

I mean come on there was no way a collab between Earl Sweatshirt and The Alchemist was going to be anything but good, right? Just purest essence of deep and dreamy stoner hip hop. Yet another small (27min) but beautifully formed album - definitely a trend there.

Feels kind of (literally) sacrilegious to say I prefer Cleo Sol's more personal, less scriptural records (e.g. Rose in the Dark) - and this is, top to bottom, a gospel album - but the conviction to her performance and the whole realisation of it here is still really magical.

From Coventry via Skopje, man like NOT_MDK's first album in 23 years, and he's zooming into the deep flows that join grime and dubstep into the longer, deeper electronic funk continuum... These tracks are so crisp and crunchy!

She's from Turkey but Ahu's been plugged into the London Plastic People / NTS / etc scene for years - file this with Yazmin Lacey and similar LDN soul-jazz, also it's very Boho and vibesy and incensey, definitely one to light your best candles for.

Can't remember who put me on to this, possibly Radio 3? Anyway if cold wet misty Scottish hillsides are your jam Claire M Singer has you covered - these slower-than-slowly unfolding organ-led pieces practically smell of wet moss, and are extremely beautiful.

He's lent vocals to a who's who of electronic music, but it turns out Paul St Hilaire's own studio craft is the equal of just about any of them - this is just a stunning, ocean-deep album of dub abstraction and subtly potent lyricism.

Icelander Eva Jóhannsdóttir aka EVA808 has already made a name in the dubstep/grime world but this is her really spreading her creative wings. Mad psychedelia, elemental abstraction, movie-theme composition - there's not much she can't do. Big things beckon!

There's still SO much to say about amapiano, and so much incredible UK, SA and wider world stuff last year (this isn't even the only great DJ Maphorisa album - he had THREE out in 2023, including a mini album with Shino Kikai and a 25-track one with fellow originator Kabza De Small!!). Suffice to say this has gorgeous songs, primal grooves, endlessly sophisticated mixdowns and bass that'll take your breath away.

Just gonna link to my review for this one (it's got the music embedded) - but TL;DR Darren J Cunningham aka Actress is the holy prophet of the era of enshittification, yet for all that his music is constantly "off" and made for a world that is "off", he alchemises it into real gold.

Yeah I'm going to be THAT space-jazz hipster and say this is the record I wish Andre3000 (who is on it, and Carlos Niño co-produced his album) had made. It's just a more lavish, free, FUN way to cavort with the five-dimensional fractal machine elves.

Zoning in on the platonic breakbeat mathematics that underly Jersey / B'more club Chicago hip house, UK rave, trip hop etc, Bored Lord could seem arch or retro if her beats weren't so gloriously functional and bumping.

Fed up of generic records? You will never EVER find another one that sounds like IFS MA. Polish abstract slightly Autechre-y footwork / drum'n'bass with Japanese rapper MA sounding like a cyborg beat poet Taliban Trim and I.... 🤯

Every man jack and their dog are doing high bpm retro rave lately but you can trust Meemo Comma to put a fresh and uneasy twist on it. These tracks will get you proper buzzing up loud! I got to DJ for her live performance of this at Spiritland earlier in the year, hearing them on that system was a real treat.

You get a twofer with this one. Phil Kieran's ode to Belfast is gorgeous in studio form here, but he also recorded and released a version with the Ulster Orchestra that single handedly revivifies the idea of electronic music done classical style!

Two true underground troupers teaming up here - Jordan GCZ from Juju & Jordash and David "Move D" Moufang with some otherworldly good-dream ambient, deep house and space-soul jams heavy on the Fender Rhodes, fuzzy reverberation and sensually sweeping portamento.

My musical safe place for so much of this year. Brooklyn "electronic jam band" Purelink somehow burrowed into electronic music history and found the softest, happiest, warmest fur lined chamber and then invited us in. I cannot emphasise enough how LOVELY this record is.

More modular synth grooves from E Ruscha aka Secret Circuits, but no over-indulgence here and the grooves REALLY DO GROOVE. Trippy as a weasel circus and twice as funky.

Talking of trippy, here's Optimo Music's second acid-drenched entry, from the man formerly known as TB Arthur and the mighty Magda trading as Blotter Trax, it's a kind of parallel universe early 80s alt disco where everything gurgles and melts.

More from South Africa - King Mzaiza Sound via the reliably tough Parisian PSSNGR label - not 100% sure what you'd call this though it definitely has some gqom sonics, some trap drums, and some strident rap vocals... It's HARD AS NAILS is what it is.

EVEN HARDER - Nyege Nyege brought us a sampler of this (and I don't use mental health language lightly) FUCKING MENTAL shrieking, raging, solvent-huffing sound from São Paulo stewarded by the young DJ K, and it's extremely funky and scarily thrilling.

OK there we go, part three is here.....

[slimeclimbtime]

Uriel Character Analysis Deep-Dive: Mingyu from GSM

hey yall! this is gonna start becoming a recurring thing; idk if anyone actually reads these but im starting this series so that you can check out how i meant for these characters to be portrayed, their character arcs, and so on so forth.

today's analysis is JUNG MINGYU from GOD-SHATTERING MANIA, the sequel to my infamous zoom-team centric fic FRACTALS AND DOMINOS. this was requested by @peridoughnutt, so here it is as promised (finally, lmao). THERE WILL BE HEAVY SPOILERS, PROCEED WITH CAUTION!

and of course, if you want to see my EVEN STARS DIE EVENTUALLY KAMDEN character analysis from last time, check it out here!

Mingyu's General Character Arc

Mingyu is one of the main five, and he's supposed to be the parallel to Hyunbeen — wanting to prove himself and be just as useful to the rest of the team. This ties in with his naturally-hardworking nature that we can see in BP—even though he was in on it as a joke and didn't really care for debut, he still gave it his all and tried his best to get as far as he could. His whole arc in GSM is quite similar—wanting to prove that he's able to be a useful member of the team. Unlike in BP, however, this backfires, due to the mistakes that he ends up making that end up proving fatal to his mental state.

Speaking of his mental state, he was already in a bad state of mind from the start of GSM. It's mentioned in his talk with Jihoo post-Hiroto that he never actually recovered from the trauma of Fractals and Dominos: "Honestly, I...I've always been acting like things have been okay for me since I got possessed, but they haven't. They never did. Sometimes, I feel like Mnet's...clawing its way back into me, like I'm going to spiral all over again because of what it did to me...I'll always feel like Mnet's somewhere in the back of my head, trying to corrupt me all over again." As the first district back in Fractals and Dominos, he was under Mnet's mind control the least amount of time along with Doha, making him one of the only other two aside from ZOOM team to fully remember everything that happened, with very very minimal gaps in memory. Unlike Doha, he never truly recovered from that hell, nor did he ever truly feel as if he really escaped Mnet. It's almost like he could subconsciously notice that Mnet wasn't truly gone, a backwards foreshadowing to what would come in GSM. It's why Jihoo couldn't empathize with him, because Jihoo wouldn't be able to truly understand the amount of mental trauma Mingyu was going through.

Mingyu and Hiroto

One of Mingyu's biggest mistakes, but also his saving grace, was befriending and later falling in love with alternate-universe Hiroto. He and Hiroto already shared a lot in common in both worlds, having the same part for the same song for K vs G. Despite all the warnings, Mingyu's more of a bleeding heart than anything else, and it shows in his caretaking side, which is why he ends up reaching toward an outside yet familiar face. His soft spot for Hiroto existed even before switching over to the other world. It's this kindness that he extends to Hiroto, who's never experienced that sort of hope in a long time, that causes them to get drawn to each other.

Despite their growing relationship, Mingyu already knew he was setting himself up for failure, whether or not he knew Hiroto would become a world eventually. He's already trying to hide all of the information about being from an alternate universe to Hiroto, trying to keep the fragile timeline together in order to stay undetected by Mnet (even though at that point there was no reason). Almost everyone warns Mingyu too, such as Gunwook ("I don't think you keeping this up is a good idea. Not because it's Hiroto, but because of the timeline and shit—he's not gonna be the same Hiroto when you come back, you know."), Woonggi ("Hiroto's memories won't sync up like Seowon's. I'm not gonna stop you, Mingyu, but it is a setup."), and Taerae ("Hiroto isn't going to become magically aware, like Seowon or Zihao did. He was never touched by the alternate reality back in our world, so there's no way he's going to change all of sudden."). Jihoo is the only one who doesn't say anything, but even he knew ("I know, Mingyu. But it's not our Hiroto.").

Mingyu still insists on sticking with Hiroto because he's grown too attached too quickly to the point where he ends up relying on Hiroto's existence as an anchor. Even though he's self-aware that Hiroto's memories won't sync up, or that eventually the timeline would be destroyed and Hiroto would go along with it, he wants to hang onto that brief moment of happiness and hope. In this way, he also still calls out everyone for being a mild hypocrite, with them still deciding to befriend Zihao even though his memories wouldn't sync up either (though to be fair, Zihao was possessed and later awakened). It makes Hiroto's death all the more painful and tragic, and it's why Mingyu is so devastated post-death. It takes Jihoo's comforting and words of encouragement, as well as seeing the creature that led Hiroto to his death, for Mingyu to regain his resolve: "No, I can't linger on him anymore. The only thing left to do is crush Mnet."

Mingyu's Ending

Back in the real world, Mingyu finally reunites with the original Hiroto, though this Hiroto doesn't share any of the memories that the alternate-universe Hiroto had. With Mnet's influence finally gone for good, and Mingyu still recovering from all of the long-term grieving and trauma, he's able to finally place that hope back in Hiroto again—though this time, there's no Mnet to take Hiroto away from him. Mingyu, being the hardworking person he is, has a lot of perseverance, and even when he's still in a low and trying to recover, he still decides to place his faith in something he knows is fundamentally good and he can trust—and to him, that's Hiroto. To him, Hiroto is like home, and even if that home has escaped him many times, he still tries anyway. It's a very hopeful ending, and maybe, just maybe, Mingyu will finally get the peace he deserves.

Thanks for reading this analysis! Not sure who I'll do next, but I think I'll be asking a fellow friend of mine for the next character arc :)

[olbaid-st]

Deep Mandelbrot Set No.151 Magnification=3.24ｘ10＾1600

This is a fractal zoom video of Mandelbrot Set. I hope you enjoy it.

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The full size image(4096x4096px) of the final location is available on deviantArt. https://www.deviantart.com/olbaid-st/art/Deep-Mandelbrot-Set-151-Mag-5-05e-1600-940751340

[saratogaroadwrites]

Tron: Liberation (7/15)

Tron: Liberation | saratogaroad rating: T total wordcount: 106,965 characters: Tron, Beck, Mara, Zed, Paige, Pavel, Tesler, Clu 2, Dyson, Yori, Quorra, Original Siren Character relationships: Tron & Beck, Beck & Mara & Zed, Tron/Yori other tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon Continuation, For Want of A Nail warnings: none

The Game has changed. The Revolution has begun. With Tron healed and once more in the fight for the Grid, the war has begun. But Clu will not give up so easily, and this is a war that will be fought in the streets. But it is a war that Beck and Tron intend to win, so long as they can do one thing first:

Survive.

[AU: Fanmade Season 2]

=

Beck’s cry echoed down the alleyway, a sharp sound that seemed to rattle the very space around them despite the breathlessness in his voice. His disk fell from his grip and into hers, almost painfully hot as the echo died out. She swore it was still rattling.

Or maybe it just rattled Paige’s core. She grimaced, pulling with every bit of strength she had to get him out of the light, deeper into the shadows between the buildings. He struggled, bucking and trying to throw her, but she was having none of it. With a cry of her own she turned him, slamming him into the wall nearby and grabbing both wrists to hold them together, one arm at his neck.

“Be quiet,��� Paige hissed, holding him in the shadows as a Lightjet zoomed past overhead, “I can’t help you if Tesler hears you and comes running!”

“Help me—” Beck choked, turning his head as he struggled for air. Carefully, she lightened the pressure on his neck so he could get enough to not overheat but not so much that he could get free and fight her.

Not that he’d have stood much of a chance, wounded as he was. She swallowed hard at the sight of all the patches across his frame, the largest crossing where the emblem had once been on his chest. It was, she realized, almost as if someone had tried to carve the mark of Tron right off of Beck without caring how much it would hurt. The edges still looked raw. Slowly, she eased more weight off of him. The green-red burns beneath both eyes shifted as he frowned at her.

“What do you mean, help me?” Beck finally got the energy to say, forehead leaning against the alley wall even as he looked at her with bright, wide eyes. “You left me back there—”

“I didn’t have a choice!” She leaned in, frame pressed against his, “Or did you want me to get caught, too? Tesler would have had my disk if Clu or Dyson didn’t beat him to it!” She narrowed her eyes. “And then where would you be? Derezzed or worse.” She sighed explosively. “Look, I’m sorry. But right now, we have to move.”

“That kind of implies—” He shifted his weight off his injured leg, “That you have to let me up. Though if you want to stay like this…” He almost grinned, a tight little smile full of pain and playfulness in equal measure. “I wouldn’t mind too much.”

Paige reared back, then sighed.

“Move, Program.”

It was easier to ignore his gasp this time as she pulled him away from the wall, marching him deep into the alleyway. He limped, hobbling along and carrying most of his weight on one leg. She couldn’t blame him; his other limb was badly injured, the raw code beginning to give way to voxels and fractal lines. If he wasn’t careful, he’d lose the leg. Though that was probably the least of his problems right now. He looked back at her as they turned the corner, the alley under the highway sheltered and dimly lit.

“Where are you taking me?” He asked softly, all trace of amusement gone. Paige didn’t answer, couldn’t answer. She didn’t know herself. The loyal thing, the action that would save her disk, would be to take him to Tesler, to turn him in. The right thing to do, she was realizing slowly, was to let him go. Let him be free to at least try, because every time she tried to add up what she knew, Clu was the threat. And how was that right? It wasn’t. But she was a loyal soldier and she had to do her duty…even if she knew, in the end, she couldn’t. Not with him. She simply held her silence and marched him along, kicking aside a loose bit of code debris that lay on the alley floor. It rattled off the wall, rolling to a stop. Another piece of debris rolled beneath Beck’s foot and he stumbled, weight going on his bad leg. With an aborted cry he crumpled, the sudden movement pulling her down with him even as it wrenched his wrists from her grip. Beck turned mid-fall, landing port down with a groan as she collided chin first with his chest. His circuits flickered feebly beneath her as, for a moment, they lay still in the relative quiet.

Then she sat back up on his hips, dragging her hands down her face. Grid, what a mess. She scrubbed at her hair, fingers catching. She couldn’t turn him and she couldn’t help him. What was she even doing?!

“…You’re not turning me in. Are you?” Beck whispered cautiously. Slowly, Paige lowered her hands. He was looking at her with tempered hope, fractal lines showing through the render of his dull white suit. She sighed heavily, lowering her hands.

“No.” The word caught in her throat. “I don’t—I’m not taking you in. Not this time.”

“Then why—”

She shook her head, looking at his disk for a long moment. It would be so easy to turn it on, to get her own confirmation of events. She tightened her grip on the dim unit…then slowly set it down by his hand. “I needed to talk. There’s…there’s a lot of things that I’ve been doubting lately. Including you.”

He blinked at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” She sighed, brushing hair out of her eyes, “That I’m not sure what to believe anymore. Clu lied to us.” Her shoulders slumped. Why was she telling him all of this? She already knew the answer to that: Beck, soft-cored as he was, was probably the only one who knew what that meant. His eyes widened a bit as she continued, “And now…I’m not sure I should believe General Tesler, either.” She shook her head, hair slipping back into her vision. “He said—showed me a memory—that implicated you as the one who set me up. Made me look…guilty.” Put that brute up to manipulating her code. She shuddered, but as the true meaning of her words dawned on Beck his eyes went wide and he surged up.

“Paige, I would never—” His words cut off with a groan, circuits flickering again as his injuries flared. She grimaced a bit, the need to know the truth warring with her old medic code. Her lines flickered to a bright green, held for a second, then went occupation red again. She forced herself to look him in the eye instead of helping him back down.

“Show me.” She said instead, picking up his disk again as he leaned his weight on his elbows. “Show me the memories from then. Prove to me that you had nothing to do with it.”

He looked at her for a long moment, sides stuttering as he tried to kick his systems back into some semblance of function, before his eyes shuttered closed.

“…Help me sit.”

She almost didn’t. If he sat up he’d be able to attack her but if he didn’t, then…she shook off the thought, reaching for his arms and pulling him up. He groaned softly, likely little more than a ball of pain and code at that moment in time, and she forced herself not to access his patching protocol. She had to be sure…his frame trembled faintly as he took up his disk, holding it between them as the memory started up, the glow of the hologram making his stark white suit glimmer even as it cast odd shadows across his face. She watched wordlessly as the memory of that triple played out, from their dive to the arch to his talking with Tron—Grid it really was Tron!--to their time together in the club to Pavel’s arrival. Never did his memory so much as look at Purgos, let alone that old disk modifying program. She swallowed hard as the memory turned to their time in the cell, before going quiet as Beck shut it down.

“…Now do you believe me?” He asked softly. A lump in her throat, Paige nodded. She gave her processor a proverbial thump, taking a steadying breath.

“I believe you.”

There weren’t many other options, after all. If she was being honest with herself, she’d known all along. She just had to be sure…she took another breath, then let her shoulders slump. This didn’t change anything at all, really. Beck was still a wanted fugitive, and if she didn’t take him in, then she’d be deemed a traitor as well. And who would that help? But if she did take him in, then…could she live with herself? Could she really do it? Her core lurched, a sickening drop of the ground beneath her knees sending her reeling internally. The more she thought about it, the more obvious it became. She couldn’t turn Beck in, and she couldn’t go back knowing what she did. But someone had to try and protect Argon and that meant she had to go back. Her thoughts went in circles, over and over and over. Grid, what had changed?

“…So…what happens now?” Beck asked suddenly, voice quiet. She raised her eyes to look at him, his dark brown eyes cautiously hopeful. Paige swallowed hard, hands still on his disk. Their fingers were touching.

“Now…I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I’m supposed to take you in, but with everything that’s happened I don’t think that’s an option.” She raised her head, listening as a lightjet flew overhead; they must have still been searching for Beck. Sooner or later they’d be found. She frowned. “Even if I really should.”

“Paige…” He sighed heavily. She shook her head, looking back at him.

“It’s my job, Beck. I’m a soldier. My duty is clear.”

“Is it?” He asked more firmly, raising one eyebrow. “Your own people framed you—tried to derezz you. And in case you missed it, they almost derezzed all of my people. How can you still be loyal to that?”

She sighed. “That was Pavel. And he had no authority to—”

“No authority?” Beck yelped, leaning back as Paige grimaced at his sudden increase in volume. “Authority doesn’t care, Paige. Dyson was this—” He lifted one hand, holding his thumb and pointer finger scant millimeters apart, “—to taking my eyes out!”

She shook her head a bit. “I’ll admit that General Dyson can be a little much, but Clu wouldn’t have let him—”

“Clu ordered him to!”

Paige blinked, startled. Clu lying to them was one thing; she could rationalize it as him trying to prevent further casualties by holding back an uprising for as long as he could. But that—no. No. She frowned deeply. “Well if you hadn’t gone and made yourself such a paragon of chaos, then maybe he wouldn’t have had to!” She hissed irately. Beck blinked, then narrowed his eyes at her.

“So this is all my fault?”

“Yes!” Paige slapped a hand against the ground, the chill of puddled rain sloshing over her fingers. “If you’d just stuck to your directive, none of this would have happened!”

Beck threw his hands up. “I am sticking to my directive!” He yelled, then quickly had to catch himself as the motion nearly toppled him clean over onto his back. Paige didn’t reach forward to help him up. She frowned at him instead.

“You’re a mechanic, Beck. Not a soldier.”

“Then explain why, “ He groaned, managing to lever himself back upright, “Why fighting and protecting programs makes more sense than fixing bikes ever did!”

“I don’t know!” Paige exploded, startling them both. She swallowed hard, scrubbing her face. Water clung to her hair, her skin as she said more quietly, “Some glitch in your programming?” Except that couldn’t be it. He was right; she’d seen him try to fix things as a mechanic, and had seen him in action as a fighter. Maybe it was just his training, but he’d seemed a thousand times more at home fighting her than he had trying to fix the shot up train. She frowned behind her hand as Beck continued.

“I don’t think so. I mean—look at you. You were a medic who became a soldier and you’re not having problems. How does that work?”

If only he knew. She shook her head, lowering her hand to her lap, his disk cold between them. “I had my code altered. My directive was shifted.” She blinked. It couldn’t be. Could it? Beck frowned at her.

“…What do you mean, altered?”

“I mean that. I was reprogrammed…” She frowned, looking up at him. “And maybe you were, too.”

Letting his questioning sound wash over her, Paige reached back and palmed her disk. Rather than kick it on, she turned it sideways and brought up the display, brow furrowed. Memory storage, suit modifications, helmet mods—there. Base code. She scrolled through it in the dim light of the projection until she came to the section she was looking for, the code flaring red as she tapped it. No editing access, of course, but it remained open.

“Here,” She said firmly, “This is the code that was altered to shift my directive. Yours might be the same.”

Beck frowned. Silently, he took up his disk, flipping through windows and sliders until he came to his own base code. Paige watched as it scrolled, familiar strings and command lines disappearing too fast to see clearly but giving her enough of a glimpse to recognize them as security code. Was it true? Could Beck be more than a mechanic? She frowned deeply as he found the string for his directive, holding her disk up so they could compare the two. Beck swallowed hard after a second of staring; the two weren’t an exact match, but there was no mistaking the shared command. She looked at him through their displays, his eyes wide.

“…Paige…who shifted your directive?” He whispered, voice unsteady.

“Clu.”

His disk shut off. Slowly, she shut hers off as well, core spinning quick as she put the pieces together. Beck’s directive had been altered and the memory removed, if it was there at all. He’d been trained by Tron of all programs and had taken to it despite his more peaceful directive. Clu wanted him intact, and she was beginning to doubt it was entirely to remove Beck from the field. Slowly, she looked up at him. He was staring at his dual-colored disk with wide, unseeing eyes. Swallowing back her trepidation, she raised a hand to put on his cheek. He startled, looking at her as she shook her head.

“You’re not going to stop fighting, are you?”

Slowly, cautiously, he reached up to cup her hand in his. “No.” He said just as quietly as she’d spoken, a hint of violet flickering across his arm. “I can’t. Not after—not after what they’ve done.”

She knew he wasn’t just talking about what Clu must have done to him before he could even remember. She closed her eyes. “You’re going to get yourself derezzed. You do know that, right?”

He leaned forward until they were touching foreheads, the feel of him warm across her skin. “I know. I’ve known that since I started.” He sighed quietly. “But I can’t stop now. Not until it’s done.”

“You really think you have to? Clu’s just…trying to look out for the Grid.” The words rang hollow, sour across her tongue.

“Paige.” Beck whispered, his forehead warm against hers, “You know we can’t trust him.”

We. Her core tightened. We. Grid, he was soft-cored. He was right, though.

“I know. I just…” She sighed, her other hand coming to rest on the nape of his neck, fingers tangling in his short hair. “Tesler brought twenty-thousand soldiers. Clu brought almost five times that number, and there’s still thousands of them left. How can you expect to fight all of that?”

“We’re not. We’re leaving Argon.”

She leaned back, opening her eyes to contemplate the soft look on his face. He was watching her as if she’d created something big, something important; soft eyes, parted mouth, curious hope glimmering in the depths of his code. Her core twisted. We. Soft-cored to the bitter end. That’s what Beck would be. Grid, she didn’t want to take that away from him. She pulled her hands away from his frame.

“No. You are.” He blinked at her, watching as she stood up. “I can’t go with you.” She said quietly, clicking her disk back to her port. He stared at her.

“What?”

“I have to try and protect Argon, Beck. Someone has to.” She looked up, taking a steadying breath. “And Grid knows Pavel’s not going to do it.”

Slowly, painfully, Beck got to his feet. She hugged herself to keep from reaching out to him, watching as he clicked his disk to his port and took a deep breath of his own. His circuits flickered once, twice, then held firm. He reached out, pulling her hand until he held it in his, grip warm and strong.

“…I never could have changed your mind, could I?” He asked softly. Paige shook her head.

“No more than I could have changed yours.”

He smiled a little. She smiled back just a touch, core twisting harder. Now she was getting soft. She opened her mouth, then stopped as a roar sounded behind her. It was the roar of a bike coming closer and closer! She whirled around in time to see white circuits skid around the corner, a female-designate with her accent marks masked taking the turn at speed, one arm outstretched. The next two nanos felt like an eternity as the bike closed in; Beck looked from her to the rider, an apologetic look crossing his face, before he reached forward and let the rider pull him onto the bike, disappearing in a streak of white and black.

Paige watched them go, the stirred up air of their passing kicking her hair up as she swallowed hard. There was nothing else she could do for Beck now. She had her own goal to focus on. Maybe, in some future milli, they would meet again.

“…Good luck, Beck.”

——

“You okay?!” Mara shouted over the roar of her engine, weaving through the streets. Clinging to her shoulders, Beck grit his teeth. Every byte of his code was screaming and if he took another hit he’d crash but—

“I’ll manage! How’d you find me?”

“Like following the explosions was hard!” She skidded sideways, his added weight causing her bike to drift, the slower turn giving her a moment to throw her disk at a barricade on the road ahead. Alarms began to blare as she shot through the gap, glimmers of red appearing from side-streets and engines revving behind them both, soldiers on bikes dropping into pursuit. Mara cursed fiercely, palming her disk, but Beck tapped her shoulder and reached for his own.

“Just keep steady!” Beck yelled, his weight balanced on her shoulder as half stood to throw his disk behind. It curved through the air, slicing four bikes to cubes before returning, and he yelped as she shot off down the street and onto the highway, looping curves and twisting turns shooting them across Argon. More bikes fell in around them, their riders closing the gaps, three on either side. Only their lined formations kept their light-walls off, and only Mara gunning her bike as fast as it would go shot them out ahead with a jerking jolt of speed.

“Do these guys ever shut down?!” Mara yelled in frustration as the six soldiers continued to follow. Clinging to her shoulder, Beck chanced a look back. Six behind, chopper overhead…no. They weren’t going to stop. Not with Beck in his still glimmering whites to be a beacon for all to see. He frowned deeply.

“Get us off the highway! We can lose them in the city!” He hoped. Mara’s growl rattled up her frame and into his fingers as she drifted sideways again, white light-wall causing their crop of ground based pursuers to have to stop or impact. One impacted anyway, the air-rattling explosion of a bike making Beck’s audio input ring as Mara shot back down off the highway and into the city proper, using every byte of knowledge she had of Argon’s twists and turns to outmaneuver their pursuers.

And there were plenty of those. Beck clung to her shoulders as she took a hard turn off the highway and back onto the roads and alleys of Argon’s main roadways. Bikes roared in pursuit, falling away one by one as the roads grew narrower and narrower the closer they got to the alleys. But one still followed, and a laugh echoed through the streets. A familiar laugh. He turned over his shoulder, biting back a harsh curse as he caught sight of Pavel drawing near, disk glowing as if on fire. Quickly turning back, he leaned forward enough to be heard over the roar.

“Slow down!” He yelled, quickly snapping out a hand and grabbing a broken pipe from a nearby recycle bin. Mara jolted beneath his other hand, startled.

“Are you glitching?! He’ll be on us in a second!” She yelled back, voice high.

“Just do it!” He hefted the pipe, remembering, and as Mara slowed down, he could feel the heat from Pavel’s disk sizzling along his side. Pavel swung widely, trying to hit them even as Mara jerked her bike to avoid the impact. He was only going to get one shot at this. Hefting the pipe over his shoulder, Beck struck. Flynn himself must have been watching over them, because the pipe caught in the spokes of Pavel’s front wheel and immediately his bike began to buck and weave. With a yell, Pavel was forced to take both controls and try to right his bike, giving Mara enough time to pour on the speed and rush away. Beck could faintly make out Pavel yelling in alarm and the forced derezzing of a vehicle, before he sighed in relief as their bike roared on ahead into the alleys and blind turns of the inner city. Mara took turn after turn, doubling back on her path more than once to alter her trail before finally shooting into the tunnel entrance that gave quick access to this part of the city. Though damp, the tunnel was empty and once inside, she derezzed the bike. For a long moment, she gripped Beck’s arm as they listened for any pursuit.

For a long moment, neither dared to so much as blink. Thunder rumbled overhead, another storm threatening to crack open on them, but besides that, it was quiet. Distant vehicles roared, the pursuit in the district overhead making the ceiling rattle, but none came close. The tunnels remained quiet. They were alone.

With a heavy sigh and a soft groan, Beck lowered himself to sit against the wall of the tunnel, not bothering to correct his slide. Everything hurt, from his port to his feet, and he just wanted to go into sleep mode for a while. But he couldn’t, not yet, and he forced himself to look up at Mara. His old friend had her arms crossed over her chest, eyes on the roof of the tunnel as it rattled, lip caught between her teeth in her familiar expression of concern.

“Did the others get out?” Beck asked softly. She jolted, looking down at him, before tucking a wild lock of hair away from her face.

“Yeah. It’s just me and Zed left now. Well, us and Tron. He’s still flying around up there.” She made a face at that, but Beck smiled lightly. Somehow he wasn’t surprised Tron had elected to stay. Still, it was good to hear his old crew had made it clear. He leaned his head back, closing his eyes.

“Good. I knew being a distraction would work out.”

“Oh, you definitely managed that.” She snorted, dropping into a crouch beside him. “The whole city is on high alert. I don’t think even a bit could get around topside without getting spotted now.” She stopped, then whacked Beck’s arm when he grinned. “Don’t look so proud of yourself. You’re about a step away from dropping and derezzing, aren’t you?”

His grin became a grimace. “…Maybe two steps.” He hedged, contorting to reach for his disk. It had been simple enough to ignore the pain while they were rushing for their lives, but now everything was starting to hurt again. “Tesler fights dirty.” Extremely dirty. He frowned at his disk, slowly patching the new injuries. He was starkly aware of Mara watching him, her eyes roving over his render and fresh blue injuries clashing against older patches. Only when the patch had settled and he’d docked his disk did she shake her head, still staring.

“Is it…always like this?” She asked voice still quiet as she contemplated him. Beck inclined his head back up at her.

“Sometimes it’s easier, sometimes it’s harder. Tesler’s always a problem.” But he wasn’t usually this angry. Something must have happened to have pushed him over that edge. Had Clu threatened him? Pavel certainly hadn’t changed, so maybe only Tesler was in danger. Paige hadn’t seemed too concerned about her own disk. She was more worried about Argon, and he couldn’t blame her. Gridbugs, but he hoped she’d make it. …Oh, who was he kidding. Of course she’d make it. She always did. He bit back a smile at the thought.

“Always, huh?” Mara asked suddenly, jolting him from his thoughts. He looked at her, actually looked, and couldn’t put a word to the look on her face. She looked torn between screaming and breaking something. Someone, maybe. She looked down at him, eyes glimmering in the dim light of the tunnel.

“…Why did you do it? Why didn’t you tell us?”

“There was never a good time, and I…” Couldn’t work up the nerve. He sighed. “I didn’t want to put you in danger.”

“Beck.” Mara stopped him, crossing her arms over her chest. “Did you even want to tell us?”

For a nano, he blinked at her. But then the words struck with all the force of a lightning bolt on his port and he scrambled to a seated position, ignoring the flare of pain from every single injury as he managed to rise with a yelp.

“Of course I did!” Before she could step away he reached out, clasping his hand around her forearm. She blinked at him but didn’t move as he said, “Mara, I wanted to tell you when I first started!”

“Then why didn’t you? Why did you—” She paused to take a breath, then said, “Why did you take all of this on your own?”

“I was trying to keep you safe,” He responded, tone almost pleading. Pleading with her to understand, or to listen in general? He couldn’t tell. “It was bad enough dodging the soldiers on my own. You know Tesler doesn’t play around.”

And she did know. He knew she knew. It was Tesler’s word that put her on a train to the games. She’d been there, watching as Beck had almost been derezzed in that mismatched fight beneath the Square, and then Tesler’s soldiers had almost derezzed her friends. Shot her right out of his ship. One of his Commanders had been ready to have her derezzed. She’d seen the dark side of the Occupation nearly as much as he had. She reached up, grasping at his upper arm.

“No he doesn’t,” She acquiesced. “But you know I can take care of myself, Beck.”

Giving her an unconvinced look with a furrowed brow, Beck shook his head. “That’s not what this is about. I know you can fight, Mara, but this isn’t a game.”

“You think I don’t know that?” She yelled, surprising both Beck and herself with her sudden volume. She forced herself to stop, taking another deep breath. “I know it’s not a game. I know we could all get derezzed at any nano, but you still should have told us.” She looked up at him, and he watched the anger drain out of her face as she tightened her grip on his arm. In the end, only hurt was left behind, because that’s what she was, he realized. Hurt that he hadn’t told her. Hurt that he hadn’t let her help. His core twisted. “We could have helped you, if you’d just trusted us…” She stopped herself, shaking her head.

“I just wish you’d trusted me.”

For a moment, he didn’t answer. But then he sighed, ducking his head. “It was never about not trusting you. It was about not losing you like we lost Bodhi.” Senseless, unable to stop it, and painful to this nano. He closed his eyes. “When I saw it was you with Rasket and Moog, I almost crashed right there. And when you wouldn’t leave, I thought it was going to be Bodhi all over again.”

But it wasn’t about him. It had never been about him. Tron had been right all that time ago. It was about them, and his decision had led them here. He watched as she raised her head to look at him, bright eyes glimmering in the dim light. She tightened her grip on his arm.

“Beck, I…”

He shook his head. “It’s okay. You’re right to be mad.”

“Yeah, I am.” She scrunched up her nose, “But I can…kind of see why you did it. It’s been hard, hasn’t it?”

“Harder than you know.” He nodded, shoulders slumping heavily. Tron had helped, and he’d helped a lot once they’d gotten past the mountain that was Dyson, but lying to his friends had weighed on his core for nearly the entire time. Now that they knew, the weight was replaced with shame. He should have told them sooner, but there was no redoing this. No restoration from a previous version to save his pride. “But you’re right about all of it. I should have told you and Zed a long time ago.” Forcing himself to look up, he looked her in the eye. “I’m sorry.” He finished quietly, trying not to think about how they’d likely never forgive him for this. He’d tried to do the right thing, and this was the consequence. Mara sighed heavily.

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry too.” He jolted, looking at her as she swallowed hard, “I should have noticed sooner. I should have…” She trailed off, grip tightening on his arm. “I said some awful things to you, Beck. Things I shouldn’t have, after…after Able…” She couldn’t finish. Beck’s face fell.

“Mara, it’s okay—”

“No,” She interrupted, clenching her free hand into a fist, [cease] bouncing down his arm, “It’s not. You’ve been looking out for us for who knows how long and all I’ve done is yell at you. That’s not fair.”

“No,” He agreed, “But it’s okay.” He reached over, putting his other hand on her shoulder to bounce [trust/friend] down her circuits and smiling softly when she looked up. “I did kind of earn that yelling.” He paused, then said, “Although, I do have to admit something.”

“What?”

“You are really scary when you start yelling. Scarier than Tesler.” He said lightly, tilting his head in her direction, still smiling. “And I’ve been fighting him for a long time. You should be proud.”

Mara rolled her eyes. “Don’t joke about almost losing your disk, you bit-brain.” She sighed. “I…really should have been there.”

“And I should have explained before now. We’re even.” He breathed in, then patted her shoulder. “So. Friends?” He asked softly, as if he was unsure she would answer. She blinked, then smiled softly.

“Friends.” She nodded, then gave him a stern look and said, “I’m still a little mad at you, though.”

Beck laughed quietly. “I can live with that.”

“Good.” Mara stated, clasping both of his arms. “Because you’re going to have to. Now come on—” She rose to her feet, all but hauling him up with her before settling his arm over her shoulders to help take his weight. “We should get back to the others before Zed comes looking for us. You know how he gets.”

Yes, he did. They both did. Beck smiled a little as they started walking in a mostly-easy silence, Mara’s grip strong on his arm. It felt almost like old times, even as he caught her looking at him with undisguised curiosity.

“What?”

She looked at him sideways. “Just one question. That friend of yours—dark and stoic?” When he nodded she continued, “Is he really Tron?”

“Yes…” Beck’s brow furrowed. “Why?”

She shrugged casually. “No reason. I just thought he’d be taller.”

Beck couldn’t help it. He laughed.

—

"You just can’t stay out of trouble, can you?” Tron asked with an exasperated sigh as he walked towards the pair of young programs walking down the tunnel. Mara sighed quietly as Tron took some of Beck’s weight off of her, but Beck simply smiled sheepishly as he limped between his friends. The large patch across his chest glimmered faintly in the dim light of the tunnels, and his sides were marked by red-green burns, but both he and Mara were mobile. Back at the access ladder, Zed’s quiet sigh of relief was swallowed by the rumble of a tank overhead, and the young mechanic frowned.

“So…what now?” He asked quietly, clutching at his elbow, “Do we leave like the others did?”

“That would be ideal, but it’s no longer an option.” Ruby said with a shake of her head and an open palmed wave of her hand as everyone looked at her. “The distraction worked to ensure your crew got clear, but now the entire city is on lockdown.” She sighed, gripping her elbows tightly. “Our best bet is to find a place to wait topside and get some rest a bit.” She quirked a brow at Beck. “You seriously need it.”

His answering sheepish smile was more of a grimace. Tron shifted his grip, taking more of Beck’s weight, but everyone went silent as two more tanks rumbled above them. Being under the main highway, Tron griped to himself, meant no silence at all. He sighed within his helmet, then looked past Ruby towards the tunnels.

“Then we’d better get moving. It won’t be long before they’re canvassing the tunnels.”

“If they haven’t started already,” Zed grumbled, pausing for a moment as thunder cracked overhead. Then he groaned, dragging both hands down his face. “And it’s going to rain again! Great!”

“Zed…” Mara sighed as they slowly began to walk forward, Ruby pinning Tron with a look before she turned away. Beneath his visor, Tron grimaced. He knew what that look meant, but wouldn’t let himself think about it. No matter how logical Ruby’s thought process was, he wouldn’t accept it.

He wouldn’t leave Beck behind, no matter how much a part of him wanted to go and see Yori.

And so, the little group of five plodded along down the empty tunnel. Puddles of rainwater had pooled in dips and divots, making channels between them and causing the ground to become slippery. It was slow going back towards the residential district, but for a while they walked in relative silence, Tron’s audio inputs strained for any sound of approaching attack. All he heard was Zed’s inane chatter up ahead, as the mechanic quizzed Ruby upside down and sideways.

“So Clu really doesn’t care what’s going to happen to Argon?” He asked, eyes wide and attention off the ground in front of him. Ruby snapped out a hand to grab him by the arm as he nearly slipped in a puddle, causing Mara to sigh loudly.

“He cares,” Ruby said as she righted Zed back on his feet, “It’s just that, for him, the costs would outweigh the benefits of keeping Argon.” She looked back over her shoulder at Beck and Tron and then said, “Losing Able’s crew is acceptable. But the rest of the town is ready to side with you both, if given the right push.”

“And Clu can’t accept that,” Tron said. Ruby inclined her head, causing Beck to sigh quietly.

“So they’re all going to get derezzed,” He said, head hanging. Tron frowned down at him, eyes softening faintly even though no one could see them.

“One way or another,” Ruby confirmed, turning her attention back to the road. “Argon’s about ready to frag itself, and you don’t want to be here when it does.”

“Is it that bad?” Mara asked. Ruby made a soft humming noise.

“Worse,” She said, then lifted a hand and began to tick off on her fingers, “For one, Clu won’t tolerate dissent. He’ll probably have Tesler do it, but anyone who remotely breaks a law or rule will be sent to the games. For another,” She paused, looking up as a quiet hiss began above them. Water began to trickle down from access grates and drain pipes curling up the sides of the tunnels, slow for now. The storm had broken. “For another, Argon isn’t in the best of shape. All this rain isn’t a good sign.”

“It’s the Grid,” Tron said, causing everyone to look at him, “It’s automatic. Trying to keep this part of the system from total collapse.”

Only, without an Admin to properly guide it, the System would just keep pouring until everything remotely sentient had washed out to Sea. A complete wipe. He shook his head, catching sight of Mara and Beck’s identical frowns.

“It’s…rained a lot since the Occupation rolled in, hasn’t it?” Beck asked, looking from Mara to Zed. Both nodded, and Beck looked back to Tron. “What happens if the Grid can’t keep up with the damage?”

System Failure. Tron shook his head to dislodge the thought, then said, “It’ll ping a System Admin to quarantine the damage. With our only Admin being Clu…” His core lurched, the world stepping sideways. He blinked. “Argon will likely be sandboxed and reformatted.”

All three mechanics stared at him, eyes wide and renders desaturating. Ruby simply nodded.

“One more reason to get out of Argon as soon as possible,” She said, turning back down the tunnels. “We’ll go back to the apartment so Beck can rest for a bit, but I want us out of here before the next Milli.”

No one protested. Slowly, they continued the long trek back to safety. Their slow pace dragged what would have been a fifteen micro walk into an eighth of a milli, but eventually they returned to the residential district where the crew had taken shelter. They waited, Ruby on the ladder, as they watched a squad of soldiers march through the alleyway and practically up-end the building. No one dared to move, Tron gritting his teeth so hard the bones in his jaw protested.

This wasn’t right. How Clu thought he could just keep getting away with this—! Flynn would have had his disk for this.

If Flynn was even still alive to care about any of them, a quiet part of himself chimed in. If he even cared about them at all. It had been a…very long time since his friend had fled the Coup and the Portal went dark for the last time. For him to not come back, for him to abandon them all…the thought caught in Tron’s process like a bad read. He shook it off as Ruby pried open the access cover, droplets of rain sprinkling down into the tunnel through their new entrance as she stuck her head out into the street. A moment later, she looked back down.

“All clear. Move.”

Zed scrambled up the ladder right behind her, reaching down to help Beck up the final rungs as Mara pushed from below. With one last look over his shoulder to check that they were clear, Tron nimbly climbed up and darted across the alley, into the apartment building they’d abandoned just an eighth ago. It wasn’t exactly as they’d left it; furniture was overturned, any trinkets from the previous owners shattered or up-ended onto the floor. The soldiers, Tron thought to himself, and when they’d found nothing of interest they’d simply marched on, basic programming moving them down the list of tasks.

He’d almost been one of them. He shuddered, took a quick breath, then turned back out the door.

“Clear.” Quiet. He turned to Beck. “Can you make the stairs?”

Beck looked from him to the stairs, all three flights of them, and Tron’s core stuttered for a moment. The tables had turned, it seemed. He gestured to the one couch that was still upright, trying not to watch as Zed and Mara settled their injured friend down on the slightly lumpy cushions with a soft groan. It had been a very long milli for all of them. Soon, hopefully, they’d all get to rest. He turned to Ruby.

“Are we still on course for Lithium?” Tron asked. Ruby looked up from where she was peering out the alleyway window, then inclined her head.

“We are,” She replied in an almost too even tone, “But we’ll have to take the long route through Radon and Thallium first. I won’t have us drag half of Clu’s army straight to them.”

Behind his visor, Tron frowned. Beck’s quiet “Them?” went unanswered, while Mara leaned forward on one knee.

“How are we supposed to get to Radon, though?” Mara asked, crossing her arms over her chest. “I mean, it’s not like the trains to Bismuth or Xenon are still running. Not with the lockdown.” Ruby frowned, brow furrowed. Looking out the window, Tron mirrored her expression. In less than a half a milli, Clu had managed to lock Argon down entirely. Outside, tanks and bikes still rumbled and rattled down the highway. If they tried to leave, they’d be caught at a checkpoint. If they tried to stay, they’d be derezzed. He turned his eyes upward, then stopped.

“There is the Spire,” Tron tilted his head towards the outskirts as everyone looked at him, “It’s our old base. Clu shouldn’t know about it.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “We can wait there for the heat to die down, or go through the Outlands to Gallium instead.”

“Only problem is,” Beck extended a hand, “it’s fifty kilometers outside Argon’s eastern gate.” He shook his head. “No way we could get through that right now, because it’s the—”

“The most heavily guarded checkpoint in town,” Zed finished for him, dragging both hands down his face. Mara tilted her head skywards with a quiet sigh.

“We’ll think of something, I guess. Not like we have any other option.” She said, though she didn’t look convinced. Neither did Ruby, but the Siren nodded and stepped back towards the alleyway door.

“Zed, Mara,” Ruby said, “You two come with me. We’ll secure transport. And you—” She turned on Beck, sitting on the couch, “Put yourself into sleep mode. I want that code patched, you hear me?”

Beck held up both hands in a gesture for peace. “Acknowledged!”

Ruby smiled. Tron turned away to stifle a snort, finally folding back his helmet as the door whooshed shut behind Ruby and her two mechanic followers. With a groan, Beck sank back into the couch.

“Remind me not to get on her bad side…” he breathed softly to himself, though Tron heard it anyway.

“Most Sirens are like that,” He said, “You’ll get used to them if you meet enough.”

“Really?” Beck raised an eyebrow, “They’ve always seemed so…quiet. On point.”

“It’s their directive,” Tron shrugged, then frowned as something odd flickered across Beck’s face. It looked almost like pain, but it wasn’t physical. Something was bothering him, but…what?

“Mara—Mara, come on!” Zed called suddenly, pulling their attention back to the door as it whooshed open, letting Mara inside.

“I know, I know—just let me get something real quick!” Mara shouted back over her shoulder, trotting for the staircase on the other side of the room before she stopped as she turned back around. No one moved as Mara finally caught sight of Tron’s uncovered face, and the female-designate paused for a moment, blinking at Tron’s uncovered face, before she shook her head and kept running. Beck leaned his head back on the couch cushion.

“Think you startled her.”

“How?”

He grinned, unrepentant. “By having a face and not just a helmet.”

Tron blinked, then huffed and turned away to hide his growing smile. Mara’s footsteps disappeared with the whoosh of an apartment door, and he peered out the window at the city beyond. Lightjets and Recognizers still flew in the blue, search patterns combing the lower levels of the city. So far, they’d been lucky. But he knew they couldn’t hold that luck for much longer.

“We should split up.” Tron said firmly, watching Beck visibly startle in the glass of the window, “You’ll be able to get clear if I draw Clu away from you.” He looked at Beck from the corner of his eye. “You’ll be safer.”

Beck blinked at him for a moment, patches on his face gleaming in the light. Then he frowned.

“No,” he said firmly, “I’m going with you.”

“Beck—” Tron frowned. Beck shook his head.

“Tron.” Beck turned, half his body over the back of the couch, “Wherever you’re going, I’m coming with you. In case you forgot, the last time I left you alone without backup,” he snarked, “You nearly ended up in a viral collapse. Not happening again. Besides—” He waved a hand in the air, “They’ll stand a better chance of getting out if we’re not dragging the Occupation down on their heads.”

“And what about you?” Tron asked him softly, trying to hold back from voicing his concern. Beck stopped, drew back, and then looked at his hands. He was silent for a few nanos before before he shook his head and drew in a breath.

“It’s not about me, it’s about them.” He looked up, face firm even as Tron grimaced at his own words played back at him. “What matters is that we continue the fight, right? Mara and Zed aren’t trained. If Ruby can get them to safety, that’s all that matters.” He turned back to sit properly, dropping his hands to rest on his knees and rubbing at a small damage mark on one knuckle. “We can just…figure the rest out as we go.”

“Is that your plan?”

“No,” Beck snorted, “I don’t make plans anymore.” He leaned back again, looking at Tron upside down over the back of the couch. “Plans tend to get fragged when you’re involved. It’s like you’re a magnet for trouble or something.”

Tron made an insulted noise, reaching out to give Beck’s head a gentle shove. Beck just laughed, shoving at Tron’s wrist in retaliation.

“Go to sleep,” Tron said with a put-upon sigh, “Your logic center is clearly failing.”

Beck snickered, but did lower himself into a horizontal position. Tron shook his head with a roll of his eyes. Betas. Always Betas. How would Alan-One have dealt with this situation? A part of him still wanted to know, and yet…he’d been abandoned twice over. Maybe it was best if he just never found out. He closed his eyes.

“Tron?”

He opened them. “Sleep, Beck.”

“Yeah, I just…” Beck sighed, frame out of sight behind the couch back. “There’s…something I’ve been meaning to ask you.” He went quiet but for the sound of a circuit flickering. Before Tron could turn around he quickly spoke up, “Tesler’s ship? The explosion? How many explosives was that?"

"One." Tron said flatly. Beck sat bolt upright, and Tron rolled his eyes at his friend’s wide-eyed reflection in the window glass, the rumble of a lightjet covering his quiet chuckle. "What? I'm not an engineering program. A runaway explosion is hardly the worst outcome."

"If you don't want to call that "worst", Beck breathed as he sagged back down again, "Remind me not to get on your bad side."

"And here I thought you'd appreciate Tesler's ship being gone."

Beck’s answer was a groan muffled by both palms. Tron opened his mouth to reply, only to stop as Mara called out from the upper level.

“Uh, Tron?” Her voice wavered, shaky and afraid, “Do you know what assignment Gold is supposed to be?”

Gold? Tron frowned, turning around. Beck rose to his elbows and frowned as Tron walked towards the staircase. Orange was certain platoons of soldiers, Yellow was Command, but Gold? He stopped, hand on the railing.

“Clu’s Honor Guard,” He called back up to her, “Why?”

“Because—” She peered down at him halfway over the railing, hair drifting from her face, “There’s three gold-lined jets taking a pair of Recognizers out of the city.” Her eyes were wide. “Towards a spire in the Outlands.”

The realization struck home in a nano. Tron bolted up the stairs, taking the turn so fast he nearly slipped, and Mara jumped back with a yelp. Beck called out to him from below, but he didn’t wait. He paid no attention to the footsteps behind him, shouldering open the rooftop access door as thunder rumbled and rain pattered against the awning that shielded the exit from the worst of most storms. He swung around, looking due east and—sure enough, there were the jets Mara had mentioned, two large Recognizers between them. Tron held on to the door frame, watching as his core spun up faster and faster. They couldn’t know what the structure was. They had to just be exploring the area, out looking for high priority targets.

“Did he send them out looking for us?” Beck suddenly asked from behind, and Tron turned enough to see that Mara had helped her friend hobble up the stairs. He shook his head, turning back out to the Outlands.

“I don’t know. It would make sense, but—”

He kept his eyes on the tiny group. It would make sense if they were just scouting, looking for any escapees or signs of dissent. What else could they possibly want out there? It was nothing but snow covered cliffs and canyons. Why would they go out there?

Core in his throat, Tron went rigid as the tiny group turned, altering their course and heading directly for the Spire. For a corestopping micro, the Recognizers hung beside the fortress, one on either side, orange lines reflecting in the glass. For a moment, Tron wondered if they were simply scanning it, checking for anything in the oddly shaped stone, as their escort circled around and around. But then he saw it: bright blue energy beginning to gather between the pairs of thrusters, just like when the single Recognizer had turned Able’s Garage into nothing more than rubble and burnt code. He knew what was coming. Just one of those had leveled the garage. Two? Beck inhaled sharply and Mara yelped, but by the time Tron turned around Beck had already turned his back and pushed Mara down to shield her, braced with both hands by her head. Tron followed him down, covering the two as best he could, and in the next instant the very Grid itself seemed to shake

Tron didn’t look up, didn’t need to. The energy blast was as loud as a thunderclap directly overhead, loud enough to send his audio inputs ringing, and the shockwave that followed rattled everything to the the core. The buildings nearby shook, rumbling like a tank was rattling past, and glass shattered. Inside the apartments all along the road, programs screamed. In the mountains, snow tumbled in rapid avalanches caused by the shockwave. Tron cursed between his teeth, forced to wait helplessly as the rumbling stopped. Argon stilled again, and slowly, he raised his head.

The Spire was gone. In its place was nothing but empty space, the Recognizers still hovering with their escort. A plume of code dust wafted out towards the Outlands, the only remnant of the fortress that had once overlooked the city like a watchful eye. Beside him, Beck and Mara turned to stare.

“Somehow,” Beck whispered, “I don’t think this can get any worse.

Somehow, Tron was inclined to believe that.

[andronetalks]

Forests Break a Mesmerizing Law Found Throughout Nature

Science Alert 05 February 2024By CLARE WATSON The beautiful thing about fractals, the self-repeating patterns found throughout nature, is their enchanting repetition which runs infinitely deep. Zoom in on the branching found in objects like fern fronds and snowflakes and you’ll see they repeat in miniature – sometimes all the way down to atomic and quantum matter. Mesmerizing as they are, such…

[aditichotra]

So to start my Judge a book by its cover after looking into the briefs of the different books, I selected A brief history of time because I really like the concept of infinity in context to cosmology. I researched into different key words that I spotted that could work and twelve deep into related topics of the books beginning of time and the universe. I thought of gifs and pen plotting machines that are considered to be in a loop as infinty. I felt all space and time, spiral galaxies, string theories images were an organised chaos which leads to the thought of fractals. Infinite loops and zooms leading to the same and also nature and fluid dynamics for adding elements of nature as cosmological.

[sylvietg]

animated fractal from SylvieTG Animations on Vimeo.

From Chaotica, this is a few second dive into a fractal with lots of spirally bits.

[mandelbrowser]

Generated by @mandelbrowser for Android A Mandelbrot Set deep zoom (3.07e+28) using the "Stripes 2" paint mode. #mandelbrowser #fractal #fractals #fractalart #fractalgeometry #fractalgallery #fractaldesign #amazingfractals #art #visualart #modernart #contemporaryart #abstractart #abstract #digitalabstract #abstractpattern #digitalart #digitalarts #generativeart #generative #computerart #codeart #artmadewithapps #creative #design #graphicdesign #math #maths #mathart #mathisfun https://www.instagram.com/p/ChGGL9jDIGQ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[space-city-traffic]

what do you have against mandelbrot fractals :( (/lh)

i cannot explain why, but they TERRIFY me.

they just go on forever, you know? it sucks you in, you start zooming in and zooming in... and then eventually you move and there’s just the huge vast blackness of the nearest iteration, and it’s so big and blank that you immediately zoom out to get away, but then you realize that was only a tiny part of it, and the massive bulbous form of the fractal itself is too huge for you to even comprehend... zooming into the seahorse valley gives you the uncanny feeling of being eclipsed between two fearfully huge beings that aren’t entirely benevolent, being overshadowed by their sheer scale... i’ve literally gotten vertigo from the website I linked, I cannot explain why, but I have a deep seated and irrational fear of that particular fractal. that’s all.

[godslayingenthusiast]

https://qgpennyworth.com/portfolio/the-strange-times/

The Strange Times was originally published in the Et Cetera Discordia, by @cramulus. This formatting of The Strange Times is from Holy Nonsense, a Creative Commons project. View Holy Nonsense 2020 here.

Each entry (single page or multiple pages of the same work) is released under an individual CC: Attribution, Non Commercial, No Derivatives license. That means you can repost this work as-is anywhere for any non-commercial purposes.

Image descriptions, including transcriptions of text, are expressly allowed, but just make sure you include the credits that are baked into the image when you do them. Transcript after the cut.

The Strange Times – by Professor Cramulus –

This morning I looked out my window and I saw an unsettling and surreal painting sprawling out to the edge of the sunrise.

Jedi and zombies, vampires and ninjas, cat suits and kings, robots and chameleons, prophets and the profane, and everybody’s together, eyes match forward, getting on the train.

We call it the Strange Times. This is the state of modern living.

We live in a world way weirder than any realm any explorer would ever hope to map. This is a world where your nervous system, tangled with fractals that are creeping like vines, extends its tendrils into the modern jungle.

Rule 34: if it exists, there is pornography involving it. There are lollipops with bugs in them. People get surgery to look exactly like Barbie Dolls. There are humans that have become lizards and tigers. The guys in suits have all become cyborgs. Children don’t play Cowboys and Indians anymore, now they play Self Aware Intelligence versus the Benevolent Plutocracy.

It’s the Strange Times, and every human being – even the boring ones – is unspeakably, unknowably weird.

Everybody used to be into the same stuff, you know? Everybody was at cocktail hour, everybody was into the Beatles, everybody was bathing together in the mainstream. But something happened and the stream got quicker, it forked out into a million little tributaries. The mainstream isn’t a river anymore, it’s an aqueduct and sewer all at the same time. It’s underneath us, always moving, carrying along all these images and symbols and the familiar sound of the ocean. Ideas bump into each other, and sometimes they STICK, and that’s how we get things like a music gadget you can masturbate with, or Japanese game shows dubbed with slapstick comedy banter. It’s not because these things are good ideas in of themselves, it’s because the mainstream keeps juxtaposing these bits of shrapnel in new ways. It’s all being churned up, and the whirlpool keeps getting faster.

Nothing has prepared us for the Strange Times.

If you think you can study history and make some educated guesses at what’s going to happen next, you’re dead wrong. Yeah, humans are still humans irrational poop-flinging apes. When you zoom out they’re not individual drops of water, they’re the swell and pulse of a wild ocean. That hasn’t changed in six thousand years. But these times are different. There’s wholesome sex in bathrooms and righteous violence in the high schools. Kingdoms make war upon each other not by sacking cities but by cutting deep sea internet cables. Super-memes collide and bounce off each other like sumo wrestlers, every single cell in their bloated bodies contains a lonely and confused human being. Our language is not evolving quick enough to keep pace. Words like “Good,” “Evil,” “Know,” “Learn,” and “To Be” are woefully inadequate to describe the modern world. These are the Dangers of Modern Living.

We spent thousands of years living in caves, working the fire and the rock. Then we caught the City Virus and the city spirit used us to build hundreds of temples. We spent generations in the sun, tilling the fields for the Nobles. Then we fled into darkness of the factories, air choked with the din of industry. In hindsight, it seemed to happen in a predictable way. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Build, destroy. SUnrise, sunset. Now we’re in the world that doesn’t sleep. If it’s light here, it’s dark somewhere else, like a snake biting its tail. People on the other side of the world are your neighbors, but there is an interminable distance between you and the guy next door (who you’ve never actually met). You see them every day, but the people on the train will remain strangers, and stranger still.

Odd juxtapositions are the sign of the Strange Times. Comedians are doing impressions of the King. The Catholic Pope looks just like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, and then retires and is replaced by and Argentinian who thinks maybe atheists and gays aren’t so bad after all. We sit in the dark around a flickering campfire and listen to the news man tell us stories about the Dangers of Modern Living. The news man knows that when you juxtapose an image with the story, it creates new meaning which is somewhere in between the ear and the eye. And if we zoom out a tiny bit, the story is juxtaposed with the house that the TV is in. And if we zoom out, that house is inside your head, next to all these other symbols and squiggles and values.

And then at some point, someone thinks it’s sexy to dress up like a cartoon cat. (oh, fuck.)

Nobody’s prepared us for the Strange Times, and there are literally billions of humans that can’t cope with it. They could deal with being serfs, they could deal with being soldiers, those are simple lives with simple choices. Now it’s come time to make a new story for themselves by assembling all these weird symbols into a lifestyle, a personality, a set of values. And they just don’t know how to do it. They look to culture to get clues for how to swim and be happy and break even in this weird world, and all they see are porn models and ninja turtles and humane terrorism and the extreme left and the extreme right and nothing is centered. If it was as simple as dealing with the sun and the crops, however hard that might be, people would pull through and maintain. But there are a million choices and complexities ad nuances and shrapnel flying at you like throwing knives and pillow fights and semen and banana cream pies.

We think it’s best to laugh.

[adastraperfortuna]

I Played Cyberpunk 2077

Ultimately, Cyberpunk 2077 is an excellent video game. It’s hard to talk about it without acknowledging the backlash that it received around its launch, but the backlash was directly proportional to the amount of marketing that it got. This happens to a lot of games – and frankly, a lot of my favorite games. If I were working at CD Projekt RED and I was responsible for the kind of marketing that resulted in the kind of expectations that they built for themselves, I’d have to take that sort of stuff into deep consideration. But, as someone who bought the game, enjoyed the game, and desperately wants to talk about the game, I’m not sure that it matters. So, to reiterate: Cyberpunk 2077 is good.

There’s so much game to Cyberpunk that it might be easier to start by talking about my favorite part of it that isn’t a game: the photo mode. I’ve joked before about my favorite gameplay loop in Star Citizen being “taking screenshots,” and that’s not my intent here, but some of my favorite games in recent memory have made it easy to look over the memories I made during their runtime. Interspersed within this review will be some of my favorite screenshots that I took – the inclusion of precise controls for things like depth of field, character posing/positioning, and stickers/frames helped to make my screenshot folder feel less like a collection of moments in a game and more like a scrapbook made during the wildest possible trip to the wildest possible city.

And what a city it is. Night City is my favorite setting in a video game in recent memory. It’s not incredibly difficult to make a large environment, but to make a meaningful environment where every location feels lived-in and the streets are dense with things to see and do? That’s a challenge that very few studios have managed to step up to. More than that, Night City feels unique in the landscape of video game cities – whereas a city like Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos is rooted in a reality we’re familiar with, Cyberpunk’s retro-futuristic architecture (and overall aesthetic) help lend it a sensibility that we’re unfamiliar with. It really feels like stepping into another world - fully fleshed-out, fully envisioned.

The environment is obviously beautiful and unique, but I was surprised by just how ornate it was. The thought and consideration that went into details as minor as the UIs you’ll encounter in and on everything from car dashboards to PCs and menus both diegetic and otherwise helps the entire world feel diverse, detailed, and cohesive. While everything feels of a kind and everything is working towards the same design goals, the sheer amount of variety was shocking.

The biggest thing that stuck out to me about Night City itself within just a few hours of playing was how vertically oriented it was. Not just in the “there are tall buildings” sense, though there certainly are tall buildings – I’m talking about the way that Cyberpunk uses verticality to tell stories. The first time that you end up high enough above the skyline to see rooftops will inevitably be during one of your first encounters with Night City’s elite. The hustle and bustle of street life fading away as an elevator climbs up the side of a building and you emerge into a world you aren’t familiar with was astounding. That claustrophobic feeling of being surrounded by monoliths isn’t only alleviated by attending to the rich, though – for similar reasons, my first journey out of the city limits and into the “badlands” will stick with me. Cyberpunk successfully manages its mood and tone by controlling the kind of environments you’ll find yourself in, and while that may seem like a simple, sensible, universal design decision, its consistent application helped ground the world for me in a way that made it feel more real than most of its contemporaries.

Something else that makes Night City feel real is how Cyberpunk implements its setpieces. In a decision that reverberates throughout the rest of the game, CD Projekt was clearly all-in on the notion of immersion and seamless transitions. While it was consistently surprising and exciting to find bombastic moments embedded in the world’s side content (one standout involves Night City’s equivalent of SWAT descending from the sky to stop a robbery in an otherwise non-descript shop downtown), it never took me out of the world. And, on the other end of the experience, the number of memorable, exciting story moments that were located in parts of the city that you had wandered by before helped make the world feel almost fractal, this idea that every building and every corner could house new adventures or heartbreaks.

One thing that did take me out of the experience, unfortunately, were a few of the celebrity (or “celebrity”) cameos. While I think that the core cast was well-cast, with Keanu Reeves as Johnny Silverhand in particular being an inspired choice, the game, unfortunately, wasn’t immune to the tendency to include recognizable faces just because they were recognizable. Grimes plays a role in a forgettable side quest that felt dangerously like it only existed because she wanted to be in the game. There are also an almost concerning number of streamer cameos (“over 50 influencer and streamers from around the world,” according to CD Projekt), and while most of them completely went by me, the few that did hit for me only served to disrupt the world. The only perceived positive here is that most players won’t have any idea who these people are.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only thing that broke immersion in the game. Due to what I can only assume are particularly harsh memory restrictions imposed by the game’s release on last-generation hardware, the game has some of the most aggressive NPC culling that I’ve ever seen. While NPCs don’t strictly only exist in screen space, it often feels like they do, as simply spinning the camera around can result in an entirely new crowd existing in place of the old one. This is obviously rough when it comes to maintaining immersion in crowded spaces on-foot, but it gets worse when you’re driving. Driving on an empty road, rotating the camera, and finding that three seconds later there was an entire legion of cars waiting for your camera to discover them, far too close to slow down, was always a deadly surprise. It doesn’t help that your cars take a while to slow down.

Cyberpunk’s approach towards cars in general is interesting. While I certainly had trouble with them when I began playing, I eventually began to get into their groove. If you want to learn how to drive effectively in Cyberpunk, you have to learn how to drift. After the game’s latest substantial patch, the team at CD Projekt finally fixed my largest problem with the game’s driving – the minimap was simply too zoomed-in, making it difficult to begin to make the right decisions on when and how to turn when traveling at speed. Now that that's resolved, however, whipping and spinning through the streets is fun, and the cars feel appropriately weighty. I’ll still occasionally boot up the game just to cruise around its streets and listen to the radio.

Speaking of the radio, did I mention that Cyberpunk 2077 has one of the greatest game soundtracks that I’ve ever heard? The radio is filled with great original songs from some pretty great musicians, but that’s not where the soundtrack’s beauty starts and it certainly isn’t where it ends. The original soundtrack (composed by P.T. Adamczyk, Marcin Przybylowicz, and Paul Leonard-Morgan) was consistently beautiful, moving, and intense. The world feels gritty and grimy but ultimately beautiful and worth saving, and a great deal of that emotion comes from the soundtrack. While the heavy use of industrial synths could’ve lent itself towards music that existed to set tone instead of form lasting memories with memorable melodies, the sparkling backing tones and inspired instrumentation helped keep me humming some of its tracks for months after last hearing them in-game. I’m no musical critic, I don’t know how much I can say about this soundtrack, so I’ll just reiterate: it’s genuinely incredible.

It certainly helps that the encounters that so many of those tunes are backing up are exciting as well. I was expecting middling combat from the company that brought us The Witcher 3, and while the experience wasn’t perfect, it was competitive with (and, in many ways, better than) the closest games to it than I can point to, Eidos Montreal’s recent Deus Ex titles. Gunplay feels tight, shotguns feel explosive, and encounter spaces are diverse and full of alternate paths and interesting cover. My first playthrough was spent primarily as a stealth-focused gunslinger, using my silenced pistol to cover up the mistakes that my feet made when trying to avoid getting caught. Trying to sneak into, around, and through environments helped emphasize how complex the environments actually were. While it’d be easy to run into a wealth of the game’s content with your guns loaded and ready to fire, that may contribute to a perceived lack of depth in the game’s world design. I’m trying to write this without considering what other people have said about the game, but this particular point has been something of a sticking point for me – there are individual, completely optional buildings in Cyberpunk that have more interesting, considered level design than some entire video games, and the experience of evaluating and utilizing them was consistently mechanically engaging and exciting.

The sheer number of abilities that the player has can be almost overwhelming. While leveling does encourage the player to specialize into certain traits, especially when said traits can also serve as skill checks for the dialogue system and some traversal opportunities, every trait houses a bundle of skills that each house a sprawling leveling tree. Far from the kind of “three-path EXP dump” that you’ll find in a great number of AAA titles, Cyberpunk’s leveling experience can be legitimately intimidating. It’s difficult to plan the kind of character you want to play as when you’re trying to project eighty or a hundred hours forward for a character that will be constantly encountering new kinds of challenges. I certainly didn’t begin my playthrough by wanting to be a stealth-focused gunslinger – in fact, I was originally aiming for a melee-focused hacker build. While I was drawn to what I was drawn to, hearing stories from other players about the kind of builds that they ultimately considered to be overpowered made one thing exceedingly clear: Cyberpunk is a game that rewards every kind of play, possibly to its own detriment.

Cyberpunk’s main story is notably short. I wouldn’t consider this to be a problem, considering the sheer amount of engaging, exciting, heartfelt side content, but it might be the core of the difficulty scaling plateauing so early on. As you progress deeper into the game you’ll find that almost every build, as long as you are willing to commit to something, is more than viable. Look around long enough and you’ll find people saying that every single build is overpowered. For me, that fed into the central power fantasy in an exciting way. By the time that I rolled credits a hundred hours in I was more or less unstoppable, walking into rooms and popping every enemy almost instantly. For others, this was a problem – it can be frustrating to feel like all of your work to become stronger wasn’t met with an appropriate challenge when the time came to put it into practice. This is a difficult problem to solve, and I don’t have a solution. I’ll fondly remember my revolver-toting, enemy-obliterating V, though, so I can’t complain.

Regardless of the scaling, however, the content you play through to arrive at that pinnacle of power was consistently, surprisingly robust. While the differentiation between “gigs” and “side quests” is confusing (word for the wise: gigs are generally shorter and more gameplay-centric missions that are designed by CD Projekt’s “open world” team while the side quests are made by the same team that made the main quests and are generally longer and more narrative-centric), both kinds of side content are lovingly crafted and meaningful. Of the 86 gigs in the game, every single one of them takes place in a unique location with a hand-crafted backstory and (almost always) a wealth of different approaches. These don’t exist separately from the rest of the game’s design philosophy, even if they are made by a separate team, and you’ll often find that decisions made outside of gigs will reverberate into them (and, sometimes, the other way around). I’ve played a great deal of open world games, and never before has the “icon-clearing content” felt this lovingly-crafted and interesting. While the main quests will take you traveling across the map, the side content is what really makes it feel dense and real. You’ll be constantly meeting different kinds of people who are facing different kinds of problems – and, hey, occasionally you’ll be meeting someone who has no problem at all, someone who just wants to make your world a little bit brighter.

It’s surprising, then, that one of the most obvious ways to integrate that kind of content in Cyberpunk is so sparsely-utilized. “Braindances,” sensory playback devices used to replicate experiences as disparate as sex, meditation, and murder, play a critical role in some of the game’s larger quests, but they almost never show up in the side content. You would imagine that the ability to freely transport the player into any kind of situation in a lore-friendly way would’ve been a goldmine for side content, but its use is limited. This isn’t even a complaint, really, I’m just genuinely surprised – I wouldn’t be surprised if they used them more heavily in 2077’s expansions or sequels, because they feel like an untapped goldmine.

Another thing that the game surprisingly lacks is the inclusion of more granular subtitle options. While the game does let you choose the important stuff – whether or not you want CD Projekt’s trademark over-the-head subtitles for random NPCs, what language you want the subtitles to be in, what language you want the audio to be in – it doesn’t include something that I’ve grown to consider a standard: the ability to turn on subtitles for foreign languages only. As the kind of player who avoids subtitles when possible, I went through most of Cyberpunk with them off. Unfortunately, a tremendous number of important cutscenes in the game take place in languages other than English, and I didn’t know that I was supposed to understand what these characters were saying until I was embarrassingly far into one of the prologue’s most important scenes.

NOTE: I was pleasantly surprised to discover after replaying the ending of the game earlier today that they've fixed this issue in a patch. Nice!

I can only complain about the game’s language support so much, because there’s something important that lies between the player and the story they’re there to experience: a fucking incredible English localization. Ironically, it’s so good that I can’t help but imagine that most players won’t even think about it. It’s easy to notice and talk about an excellent localization when it’s from something like a JRPG, something with a clearly different style from what you’d expect from a work made in English, but never once in my entire playthrough did I even briefly consider the idea that it was natively written in anything other than English. I knew that CD Projekt was a Polish studio, but I just assumed that they wrote in English and localized it backwards. The language is constantly bright and surprising, the jokes land, the characters have memorable quirks, everything feels natural, and the voice acting is legitimately some of the best that I’ve ever heard in a video game. Both versions of the main character’s voice were damn-near instantly iconic for me, landing up there with Commander Shepard in the upper echelon of protagonist VO. I can’t praise it enough.

That said, even if the localization was incredible, it’d be hard to appreciate if the meat of the story wasn’t up-to-snuff. I was ecstatic to discover, then, that Cyberpunk 2077 has an incredible story. Every great story starts with a great cast of characters, and Cyberpunk hit it out of the park with that. The core cast of side characters are some of my favorite characters in years. Judy, Panam, River, and Kerry are all memorable, full, charming people. Kerry Eurodyne in particular is responsible for my favorite scene in a game since the finale of Final Fantasy XV. The quest “Boat Drinks,” the finale of Kerry’s quest line, is quietly emotional and intensely beautiful. He, and the other characters like him, are more than the setting they’re in, and the way that the game slowly chews away at the harsh and bitter exterior that the world has given them as it reaches to their emotional, empathetic core consistently astounds. Night City is a city full of noise, violence, destruction, and decay, but you don’t have to participate in it. You don’t have to make it worse. You can be different, and you can be better. You don’t get there alone, you can’t get there alone, and Cyberpunk is a game that revels in how beautiful the world can be if we are willing to find the light and excitement in the people around us.

Of course, Cyberpunk is a video game, it’s an RPG, and the story is more than a linear progression of memorable moments. Something that struck me while making my way through Cyberpunk’s story was how expertly and tastefully it implemented choice. I’m used to games that give you flashing notifications and blaring alarms whenever you're able to make a decision that matters, so I was initially confused by how Cyberpunk didn’t seem reactive to the things I said and did. The game would give me a few options in conversations, I’d select one of them, and then the story would progress naturally. However, as I continued, I began to notice small things. One character would remember me here, a specific thing I said twenty hours before would be brought up by someone there, an action that I didn’t even know I had the choice to not take was rewarded. The game slowly but surely established a credibility to its choices, a weight to your words, this sense that everything that you were saying, even beyond the tense setpiece moments that you’d expect to matter, would matter. It was only after going online after completing the game that I realized just how different my playthrough could’ve been. While nothing ever reached the level of the kind of divergent choices that The Witcher 2 allowed, there were still large chunks of the game that are entirely missable. Three of the game’s endings can only be unlocked through the completion of (and, in one case, specific actions in) specific quests, and multiple memorable quests were similarly locked behind considerate play. This isn’t really a game that will stop you from doing one thing because you chose to do something else, most of the choice-recognition is simply unlocking new options for the player to take, but it always feels natural and never feels like a game providing you an arbitrary fork in the road just for the sake of making it feel artificially replayable. CD Projekt has already said that they made the choices too subtle in Cyberpunk, but I deeply appreciate the game as it is now – more games should make choices feel more real.

It helps that the dialogue system backing up some of those choices is dynamic and the cutscene direction backing those scenes up is consistently thrilling. The decision to lock you in first-person for the entire game was an inspired one, and it resulted in a bevy of memorable scenes made possible by those interlocking systems. There are the obvious ones – being locked in a smoky car with a skeptical fixer, getting held at gunpoint by a mechanical gangster with his red eyes inches away from your own and a pistol’s barrel just barely visible as it presses against your forehead, having to choose between firing your weapon and talking down someone with a hostage when in a tense, escalating situation. There are also a million smaller ones, situations where the scale of the world becomes part of the magic. The first time that I sat down in a diner and talked with someone I had to meet or the first time that I rode along through the bustling downtown of Night City as a politician sized me up will stick with me because the perspective of the camera and the pacing of the real-time dialogue interface combine to make almost everything more powerful. There’s so much effort put into it – so many custom animations, so many small touches that you’d only see if you were staring intensely at every frame. All of that effort paid off, and the controversial decision to strip third-person out of the game was ultimately proven to be one of the smartest decisions that CD Projekt has ever made.

Another decision that helped power an exciting, engaging story was how the game freely manipulates the time and weather during key story moments. It’s a small touch, it’s one that you won’t notice unless you’re looking for it, but every once in a while you’ll walk into a place during a crystal-clear day and come out five minutes later to discover that it’s a cold, windy, rainy night and you have a city to burn. Along with the first-person limitation, this initially feels like something that could only harm immersion, but when it’s backed up by a story that motivating and scenes that thrilling you’d be hard-pressed to notice it outside of the flashes of telling yourself that this scene or that scene is the best that you’ve played in a long time. This also helps avoid a problem that games like the Grand Theft Auto series consistently face – instead of letting scenes happen at any time, compromising direction, or doing something like a timelapse, sacrificing immersion, Cyberpunk manages to always keep you in the action while also presenting the action in its most beautiful and appropriate form. There are moments where it truly feels like it’s meshing the kind of scene direction that’d be at home in a Naughty Dog game, the gameplay of Deus Ex, and the storytelling of the WRPG greats, and in those moments there is nothing else on the market that feels quite like it.

I sure have talked a lot about this game’s story, considering the fact that I have barely brought up its central hook. The early twist (unfortunately spoiled by the game’s marketing), the placement of a rockstar-turned-terrorist-turned-AI-construct firmly in your brain after a heist goes wrong and your best friend dies, helps establish a tone that the rest of the game commits to. Johnny Silverhand starts as an annoying, self-centered asshole with no real appreciation for how dire your situation is, but by the end of the game he had more than won me over. Reeves’s performance was really stellar, and the relationship between him and V is incredibly well-written. More than that, his introduction helps spur on a shift in the way that you engage with the world. The first act is full of hope, aspiration, the belief that you can get to the top if you hustle hard enough and believe. After you hold your dying friend in your arms and are forced to look your own death in the eyes, though, things begin to turn. Maybe the world is fucked up, maybe it’s fucked up beyond belief. But there Johnny is, telling you to fight. Why? Every time you fight, things get worse.

But the game continues to ruminate on this, it continues to put you in situations where fighting not only fails to fix the problem, but it makes it worse. Despite that, it’s positive. For me, at least, Cyberpunk’s worldview slowly came into alignment, and it’s one that I can’t help but love. Cyberpunk 2077 is a game about how important the fight is, how important believing in something is, even if you’re facing impossible odds, even if there’s no happy ending. It’s a story that posits that giving up is the worst ending of all, that your only responsibility is to what’s right and to the ideals that you and the people you love want to live up to. The game uses every story it can tell, every character it can introduce you to, and every encounter it can spin into a narrative to drive that home. And, when the ending comes, it was phenomenal. All of the endings were powerful, effective, and meaningful to me, but I’m more than happy that I went with what I did.

Cyberpunk 2077 is an excellent video game. It’s not flawless, but no game is, and at its core it's one of the most fun, beautiful, narratively engaging, and heart-filled games that I’ve ever played. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough, and I sincerely hope that everyone who has skipped out on it because of what they’ve heard is able to give it a shot someday. Maybe they’ll love it as much as I do. Wouldn’t that be something?

[dootsnaps]

haven't done any fractal art in years, doing some mandlebrot dives now [image: deep-zoomed image of the mandlebrot set, showing the center of an embedded julia with 8-way rotational symmetry]

[olbaid-st]

Deep Mandelbrot Set No.147 Mag=1.83x10^965

This is a fractal zoom video of Mandelbrot Set. This pattern, which looks like an electron orbiting a nucleus, is often used in the Deep Mandelbrot series and I like it a lot. I hope you like it. 

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The full size image(4096x4096px) of the final location is available on deviantArt. https://www.deviantart.com/olbaid-st/art/Deep-Mandelbrot-Set-147-Mag-2-88x10-965-927314100

[aviul]

abstractober day 2: infinity

fractals make me very uncomfortable, which is why i like them. there's something about the fact that they just go on forever no matter how deep you zoom in.

my favourite bastard is the mandelbrot set. it awakens some deep, primal fear in me. a weird eldritch butt shaped black void surrounded by these extremely intricate little shapes. whatever spot you pick to zoom in, somewhere, deep inside the ornate wiggles and mystery shapes... at some point, the same brot shape void appears. it's everywhere. infinite. forever.

i think the universe is just a big fractal and we are but tiny squiggles of colour that pass the camera by in an infinitely long mandelbrot zoom video.

i could have made an actual real fractal with like... apophysis or something, but i wanted to draw it with my own hands so i could really feel it. so it's like... not technically a fractal, but fractal fanart.