Sorry for posting this late; some server troubles prevented me from accessing the site. At any rate, I only wrote half as much yesterday. I was coming home, and wanted a break. I’m going to write 1.5x for Day 23 to make up for the loss and hit 80,000 words.

Word Count: 75,267

Graham and Ames enjoyed a pleasant sleep inside the Equation’s apartment complex, for which they both thanked Variable greatly, and over the course of the next day, Variable introduced Graham and Ames to the city via the augmented reality glasses, and both travelers picked up the technology rather quickly – especially Graham, who had worked with alpha-stage multitouch operating systems in the past. The interface for the glasses proved surprisingly similar to these operating systems, with the exception that the entire system operated in three-dimensional space instead of on a flat screen. It was not long before Graham could even distinguish virtual objects from real ones by their pixel density. Real objects were significantly higher resolution than virtual ones, something that Ames never picked up on.

In fact, she took twice as long as Graham to figure out the glasses. Though he mastered the hand motions with ease, she failed to understand how it worked, despite her own engineering background. Her background was fueled by steam, and so she spat analogies that related the glasses to steam technology. While some were adequate, and aided her understanding of the glasses, most of her attempts to compare the glasses to Talos steam technology were useless, and she already knew why: President Ford and his cohorts across Talos had done an excellent job in making sure that Talos remained in a perpetual steam age.

While Ames was still learning, Graham reached into the air and pulled down a virtual glass screen. Upon the screen was a repository of information similar to the internet, but it was far more specialized. Variable had shown it to him – it was a repository of all current information that belonged to the greater Equation. It was their way of remaining up-to-date with The Collective, since they could not enter back into the network or risk spreading their secrets and making them public.

Graham began to wonder if the Variables were once again lying – if it was not that they wouldn’t go back to The Collective, but that they couldn’t go back, that revealing these secrets would somehow cause their ultimate expulsion from The Collective either way. Perhaps these memories would even be deleted. Which gave Graham a thought: Why couldn’t the Variables simply delete their secrets and store them elsewhere?

He interrupted Ames’s lesson to ask Variable this.

“We cannot delete our memories any more than you can delete yours, and we certainly would not force them out of our minds. The mind is far more complex than you can imagine – but the memories travel with the consciousness and are out of the control of the electronics in my fetch. Even we on Cydia are not knowledgeable enough to selectively alter the consciousness; we can transfer it, and we can combine them, as The Collective has done, but we cannot reach into one’s mind and yank out the memories we don’t prefer. But even if we could, I can guarantee you that most of us in the greater Equation would not remove what we have learned. We stay out of The Collective because we value our personal information, and because this information is, by nature, personal. Believe it or not privacy still exists in this world. It must simply be carefully guarded.”

Graham was stunned by Variable’s defense of his memories, though could not blame him for defending his personal thoughts. Yet Graham had done work for several companies for which privacy was a very bad prospect – when a user kept information private, he or she usually lied to cover up the gaping hole in their mind where the private information was held. These lies almost always ended in distress for the user, and in complications for the company providing the service to the user.

But Variable was not a customer, and nobody was providing a service – he simply wanted to keep his thoughts to himself.

“Variable, I have just one other question. What’s your real name?”

“Ah, I trashed that obsolete information long ago.”

“I thought you couldn’t selectively delete memories?”

“I cannot. But I can hide information from you, just as I do from The Collective. I am one Variable in a much greater Equation – this is what I live by, and this is what I am. In my allegiance to privacy, I protect even the most essential data. You won’t need to know my true name, I’m sure.” Variable smiled, though Graham could not see it through the man’s silhouette skin. To say that Variable was a mysterious fellow would be a gross understatement – more often than not, and especially due to Variable’s quasi-lack of a face, Graham and Ames were befuddled by everything the man said. There was no way to examine facial expressions for sarcasm, and his tone of voice was almost always dull and monotonous, yet somehow not boring in the slightest.

The inner machinations of his mind were shrouded in clouds of ash and soot, blocked from view. Graham wondered if he had even blocked them from his own view, not by electronic means – of he had clearly explained that this was not possible – but by psychological means. The mind seemed unaffected by the fetch, as if it thought the fetch was simply a normal human body. And it certainly functioned like one.

It was almost halfway through the day before Ames completely figured out how to use the glasses to their fullest extent, and though she was no hacker, she was able to use the glasses to interact with Graham from great distances.

She held up her thumb and pinky finger to her ear in the universal “call me” symbol, and instantly a glass panel showing the details of an initiated call materialized in front of her, floating in thin air. On it was an image of Graham, the recipient of the call, and several settings such as volume, hold, a keypad, and even more strange symbols Ames had never seen before. She looked at Graham, hoping he would pick up his glasses-phone as a glass panel appeared in front of him to notify him that Ames was calling. He tapped an imaginary button and, chuckling, picked up the virtual phone with his thumb and pinky finger.

Amazingly, the glasses were able to scan the 3D space around the area for these hand symbols, and when detected enabled microphones on the sides of the lenses that picked up the user’s voice. Speakers were located behind the ear on the frame of the glasses, and conducted the sound directly into the bone behind the ear of the wearer. But beyond Graham’s comprehension was the real-time video it produced of Ames and himself, for he saw no camera on the device that could capture his image. Yet somehow it was doing this, and with stunning quality.

“These things are amazing,” Ames said over the glasses-phone. Graham saw her reach out and grab the virtual glass screen upon which his video image and the rest of the phone options were placed. The reverse of the glass screen was visible from behind to other glasses users – in fact, everything that anyone did with the glasses was visible to others also using the glasses, explaining why Graham was able to see Variable working on his own glass screens the day prior.

The glasses were truly a front to a greater collaborative augmented virtual network. One could collaborate on another’s glass screen with the other person in real time, with no limitations but the limitations of their glasses model. And on Cydia, Graham imagined that these limitations were practically nonexistent on most every model, leaving the customer with only one difficult decision to make: Which pair of augmented reality glasses looked the best?

Graham and Ames, however, did not have to make this choice. “The glasses are in short supply,” Variable said. “Nobody uses them anymore; they’re quite obsolete with the advent of The Collective and fetches. Most companies that once made them have transformed into tailors and now produce fetches. But seeing as you are not disconnected from your body, these glasses are truly your only way into Cydia, and I’m sure you do not want to go through the painful process of disassociating yourself with your body.”

“No, I’d rather not,” said Ames, clutching her wrist. “And now that I’ve figured these things out, I think I know how we can use them to our benefit. Graham, I’m sure somewhere in one of these databases of information is the data we need to determine who was sending technology to Talos.”

“Hmm, you might be right. But if that information was secret—”

“The only people on the planet with secret, unknown information are those in this building and scattered around the floating islands< ” Variable jutted in. “Over ninety-nine percent of Cydians share their information inside The Collective. I showed you the Equation’s database of information, but that is not accessible to all – and it only contains information we consider public. You do have access to The Collective’s batch of information as well – and, as I said earlier, if anybody was delivering technology to Talos it is certainly someone working as a part of The Collective. Talos is something they deal with.”

“Then,” Graham said, “all we’d have to do is search for which faction of The Collective is producing and shipping technology. That has to be it!”

“No,” Variable said. “You underestimate the complexity of the task you’re thinking of.”

“I’m sure we don’t.”

“And how can you say that?”

“Because finding where the technology is coming from is the easy part. More difficult will be how to cease the shipping operations completely.” And at this Variable froze; for the first time it was Variable who did not understand something.

“Cease shipping operations? You want to shut down Cydia’s shipping operations?”

“At least to Talos. The technology being delivered to the governments on Talos is aiding them in destroying the planet – as far as I know, and I truly hope it goes no further than this, the world leaders of Talos are building cities that will acts as hyperspacial engines to jettison the planet into an alternate dimension, where it will be destroyed and made buildable for their perverted needs. Now, listen, if we can’t negotiate with someone to cease the flow of technology from Cydia to Talos, we’ll have to shut down the operations by force. I don’t know how we’ll do it yet, or if we can gather support, but must get done somehow. It will get done.” Graham’s face, stark with seriousness, clenched his fist and looked down at the floor, away from Ames and Variable. And maybe, amidst all this chaos, I’ll find my way home, too.