Feed Icon RSS 1.0 XML Feed available

Bathroom Layer Depraved

Date: 17-Apr-2006/8:41+3:00

Tags: , , , ,

Characters: voice, me, man, woman

I was fearlessly walking around in what seemed like a dormitory, despite everyone else being very upset about the police coming. A man was so off the edge that he held a shotgun to my head--but I was indifferent about it, so he ended up shooting himself.
Very purposefully I entered a specific room where people were hiding. My first impulse was to approach an unoccupied bed, but somehow I knew that the bed had an identity detector in it that I needed to avoid. There was a comic projected onto the wall where a window might be, and I laid my hands upon it--permitting me to page around the entire graphic novel. A voice was instructing me.
voice: "Okay, read whatever you can off of this. We need to find the title and author information...see if you can get to the first page somehow."
Note I inferred that this comic was the back-story for the world I was living in--it was about a guy who traveled around in a hot air balloon and used gestapo tactics and price controls to oppress people. They were all kept living in dorms, under threat of violence.
After much panning around, I found the title page.
me: "Okay, here I've got it. The original author's name has been whited out, and in place it's...uh...'Amir'? No, 'Aaari'."
voice: (with exclamations in background) "There we go. Now we've finally caught him."
Note I understood this as some sort of hack, a little bit like going through the Bible and changing all the references to "Jesus" to the name on your drivers license in order to get power over a Christian world.
At that point, the building dissolved and I was hanging around with some people who I understood to be members of my team. Somehow I trusted them.
man: "The museum director is going to be very pleased that we found out where this went wrong."
me: "Ok that's great, glad to help. But hold on--I'm dreaming. Where is this museum? Is my world based on some kind of comic book, too? Can I get out of it?"
man: "Well, we can run a scan on you if you want..."
me: "That would be great!"
I rattled off everything I could remember about what year it was, who was president, etc. They held some devices up to me and looked on a screen which was displaying numbers. Then they looked in some kind of book. I looked over their shoulder.
woman: "It's been turned down from 16 to 18 Hulls. That's unusual, nobody uses that range anymore."
Note
Despite its application to boats or ships, the term "hull" applies to geometry and computer graphics. Some documentation for Quake says:
Version 2 of MCBSP... the format supports up to 16 hulls instead of Quake's 4. Hulls are customizable by the mapper like so: put 'hull1mins' '-16 -16 -24'
...so it's perhaps applicable to a virtual reality, too.
man: "Look, it's set up with two layers. One is labeled 'Bathroom Layer Normal' and the other is called 'Bathroom Layer Depraved."
Note
Though I don't personally find trashed and disgusting bathrooms to be a good form of entertainment, clearly some people do...as they are incorporated into many modern video games:
...and Maxim magazine peddles the 12 Greatest Video Game Toilets Of All Time:
...as if making a cosmic statement of about arbitrariness of aesthetics. Still, I'd prefer bikini models.
Currently I am experimenting with using Disqus for comments, however it is configured that you don't have to log in or tie it to an account. Simply check the "I'd rather post as a guest" button after clicking in the spot to type in a name.
comments powered by Disqus
copy write %C:/0304-1020 {Met^(00C6)ducation}

The accounts written here are as true as I can manage. While the words are my own, they are not independent creative works of fiction —in any intentional way. Thus I do not consider the material to be protected by anything, other than that you'd have to be crazy to want to try and use it for genuine purposes (much less disingenuous ones!) But who's to say?