As K-Rox walked out of the exit to the Empires game he looked up at the sky, checking to see if it was the correct colour and that the clouds were moving as they should.
Sky design was something of a competition between the different networks; powerful quantum processing allowed for the design of elaborate, virtual weather systems.
Principia's sky was designed by Jayzzorn29176e, she was one of the most famous designers on the Qblock; she specialised in hyper-real weather systems. These systems couldn't exist in the real without a serious tweaking of physics, however all of the maths in her systems were completely accurate.
Jayzzorn had based Principia's sky on the bands of Jupiter, she had used the same mix of hydrogen to helium atoms, and had encased the entire upper atmosphere in a layer of frozen crystals of ammonia, infused with trace elements of ammonium hydrosulphide. This gave the skies over Principia their distinctive and beautiful marbling effect.
The challenge for the sky-designer when creating Principa's system, was how to achieve a similar cloud movement to those of the ones on Jupiter. Not only did Jazzorn29176e have to recreate movement that was influenced by dense layers of metallic hydrogen, and even denser layers of supercritical, fluid hydrogen, under extreme pressures. She also had to adjust the speeds of the storms so they moved at speeds as viewed from earth, as opposed to their actual, bone-stripping, velocities.
Principia was one of the autoreal cities, meaning its reality rating was 4 and so any changes to physics, had to be at least theoretically possible, if not yet completely applicable in the real.
In the end Jazzorn had used a series of nanoforcefield generators, to change the atomic weights of ammonia, benzene and some other trace hydrocarbons. She had even managed to recreate the helium and neon rain which precipitated near the core region of Jupiter.
Because of Principia's Class Four reality status, the atmosphere had to be breathable for non-augmented biological life. So a huge semi-permeable, diffuse, forcefield encased the sky, from the top of the exosphere, down to the bottom of the mesosphere. The force field was adjusted at the bottom so that it allowed the neon-helium rain to bleed through, giving Principia it's unique upwards glowing rain.
K-Rox would never chose a system because of how the weather system had been designed, however many did, and Principia's sky brought admirers from far and wide.
The sky took up huge amounts of nonessential processing power in Principia, so any upgrades showed there first, the clouds would stutter, and at times you would see lighting bolts, frozen as they scratched across the sky, piercing through the exosphere. However today, the clouds were moving as they should be.
K-Rox's gaze drifted idly upwards as he watched the nanofield-adjusted chromophores waft gently through the upper mesosphere, into the ionosphere, mingling with wispy tendrils, of long milky-grey clouds of second phase hydrogen. As they ambled towards the stratosphere, the hydrocarbons were lit by the ultraviolet rays of the virtual sun, causing them to glow their rusty brown and dull orange tones.
Whatever caused the game-wide shutdown of Empires, had not effected Principia in any meaningful way. K-Rox was keen to find out what Ziper wanted, he decided to forego a few reality rewards and use a teleport booth.
As K-Rox made his way across the walkway he was on to a booth, he accessed his N-Link and checked his messages.
He had 100s of messages across his various inboxes, as was typical of him, he ignored all of them, swiping them to the side before opening up his Empires message box. Inside there were a number of requests for help; he quickly filtered out all the ones that were requesting for non-Steem related help, which left him with just three messages.
The first two were practically the same, both were from minor regamers who felt they had come up with the killer Steem/BTC app that would win them the game, and wanted to know if K-Rox could put them in touch with devs who wouldn't rip them off. He got at least 5 or 6 of these requests every few weeks, he always deleted them, as they were extremely low paid, or worse the re-gamers wanted to pay him with future "profits".
K-Rox almost deleted the third message, based on the subject line alone, it said; STN: 50,000 available for skilled individual.
The message had spam written all over it, however his curiosity got the better of him, fifty grand in STN coin would change his life; the message was very short and to the point.
Greetings: I am aZorl_291, and I am interested in securing your services, I understand you are an advanced level Grey, and are also an expert in the subject area of Steemit. I am looking for the bot named Isaac.Asimov, if you can find him, I shall pay you STN: 50,000 directly into your Principia wallet.
Please reply to message confirmation to accept the job, at which time full details shall be released- time limit: 2 days (StayTel Network subjective).
End communication.
K-Rox had once accessed a file about the Silent Bot War, he remembered the name Isaac.Asimov. He was fairly sure it was a work of fiction. Was this aZorl character talking about that file?
After reading the message a few more times, he left the message confirmation unanswered, and closed it down, he searched the Principia membership manifest for aZorl_291, and Isaac.Asimov. Next he checked the StayTel manifest, and finally the Qblock records, all to no avail. K-Rox thought that the message sounded like it was from a bot, albeit one that had gained machine sentience, but it was hard to tell from such a short missive.
He entered Ziper's sidechain address; Pandomonium3, K-Rox mentally braced himself, teleportation always made him feel slightly nauseous. The booth swirled to black around him, when the dark veil lifted, he found himself standing in a small, bare room. K-Rox stepped forward a pace and stuck out his tongue.
A small dark rectangle appeared on the wall in front of him; within an instant a thin band of green and pink filaments shot out of the space and attached themselves to his tongue.
Ziper's odd sense of showmanship was one of the first things that K-Rox had liked about his friend. Around a subjective second after the filaments attached to his tongue, they changed colour to gold; and a female voice spoke the word:
"Nano-identifier, confirmed and approved, K-Rox_7892_AlphaOne, you are clear to enter"
The four walls dissolved away to leave him standing in a bar, it was a full recreation of Charlie's Place, one of Ziper's favourite hangouts on the Nugoyen Network, he had added holographic customers and sound recordings to make it feel like they were actually at Charlie's.
Sat right in the middle, was his old friend, sitting next to him was someone K-Rox didn't recognise. Ziper stood and smiled as K-Rox approached the two.
"Hey Kay, what's up?"
K-Rox opened up his and Ziper's private empLink, and then a public one for the stranger, as he did this he received a wash of emotions over both channels, mainly ones of trepidation.
"I guess I should be asking that question; what's with all the nervousness guys?"
Ziper turned and gestured to the woman who had been sitting next to him, she rose and stepped towards K-Rox.
"Sorry, you guys haven't met; Kay this is Reikomon5, Reik, this is K-Rox."
The invitation was superflous, they had both received each others profiles the moment they had connected on the empLink channel.
K-Rox had been flicking through her profile notes, and saw that she was a freelancer like Ziper, she had a fairly decent personal coin, and... his heart skipped a beat, she was also a Youtuber; maybe she knew Jemima.
"Pleased to meet you."
He sent a bunch of pleasant emotions down the empLink and received back similar warm greetings. K-Rox smiled and turned to Ziper.
"So what's with all the cloak and dagger stuff Zip?"
He was still trying to work out the mix of emotions flowing from Ziper's empLink to his own, he didn't know why, but something about them made him nervous.
"Is everything OK?"
"No, it's not; there are a couple of things you need to hear about."
"Uh-huh."
"Reik here is a Youtuber, and she's recently got into Empires."
Reikomon spoke up.
"Yeah, I've been into the files since they came out, but recently I felt like I should try and view them from within Empires. I thought since the files have finally been written into the game, I should check them out from that perspective. I guess I just felt like... like I'd be viewing them in their original context; and they might... I don't know...make more sense."
Some of her embarrasment leaked through on the public empLink they still had open between them. K-Rox guessed she had made the same speech before, and had been ridiculed for it. K-Rox wanted to reassure her that he wasn't the kind of person who would make fun of her, so he said:
"That makes sense I guess, I mean the game's not perfect; there's plenty about Empires that is total guesswork. Especially the socioeconomic stuff, there are huge gaps in knowledge for most of the Great Confusion; I mean, we don't even know what Youtube looked like, and we can only guess to the video responses."
"I know, I realised that; however I felt that it was worth a go, and it did kind of work for me."
Reikomon glanced at Ziper before carrying on, he gave her a nod that would have been imperceptible in the real, not so in their current virtual environment.
"The main reason I wanted to go into Empires was because of a set of videos I've decoded from the Youtube pile; have you heard of the Mandela effect?"
K-Rox shook his head, before Reikomon continued.
"Well, like most of the stuff we find on video, it's pretty hard to tell truth from fiction. However it would seem that people really did believe in it. Basically, the Mandela effect was something that affected certain people. Where they swore blind that the past was being edited, they claimed that they were living in a parallel universe."
K-Rox found it hard to stop his skepticism leaking down his empLink, Reikomon, paused and gave him an open handed gesture and look that said, I'm-just-reporting-the-facts. K-Rox performed the empLink equivalent of a blush. Reikomon carried on with her story.
"Anyway, I'm plowing through these videos, and I come up with one that is fairly intact, it's twenty one minutes long, and it sounds like it was made by an A.I. The video is pretty standard stuff as far as the Mandela effect is concerned. But then at 17:29, there's a story about a man travelling by air in the mid-twentieth century.
Apparently he landed at Tokyo airport and claimed to come from a country that didn't exist. Showed them passports and other documents. Then the guy just disappears, and is never seen of again. So I flew to Tokyo airport in Empires just to look around and get a feel for the place.
After my flight landed, I sort of wandered off where I was supposed to go, there weren't many people on the flight. Anyway, I found myself away from the main airport, in a long corridor with a few rooms right at the end.
I don't know why, but I walked to the end and tried the doors, one was open and I walked in. I was quite curious as to the level of detail Empires had gone to, I guess I was kind of fascinated to find such redundancy.
I was about to leave the room, and I noticed something glowing behind an antique filing cabinet. I walked over and pulled the cabinet aside, and there was this weird hole."
"A hole?"
"Yeah, it was almost like a glitch, though that would have registered on my Nplants, even in Empires. Anyway, I decided to throw something in it to see what would happen, if it was a glitch then nothing special would occur. The only thing I had on me was a paper napkin I had been doodling on earlier. I was interested to find out whether I'd be able to take it out of the game."
K-Rox interrupted her briefly.
"You can't, any objects that you have on you as you leave Empires are automatically coded to your inventory, ready for you to use should you return. Sorry, go on, what happened then?"
"Uh yeah, well, I scrunched up the napkin and threw it at the hole and it just disintegrated right in front of me. Though that wasn't all, it seemed to enter the hole, I saw a kind of weird outline, just before it disappeared. I wondered briefly what would happen if I put my hand into it; however I decided against it. I didn't fancy finding out what would happen to me in the real, if my Empires avatar was destroyed. "
As Reikomon got to the end of her story, K-Rox moved to one of the chairs near where they were standing and sat down.
K-Rox had studied the Empires game since it first debuted on the StayTel Network six real-subjective years ago. He was also a dedidcated grey, and lived at a high reality setting whether in the Empires game or not. Contrary to much advice, K-Rox had spent many game-subjective years inside the virtual environment, within a virtual environment.
The game of Empires was a marvel, the jewel in the StayTel Network, the thing that had put them into the top 10 of all sidechain networks on the Qblock. In all his time in the game, K-Rox had never even heard of a glitch, let alone seen one. At least not one that affected the graphics in such a drastic way, the only time your Nplants worked in the game was if there were any graphical glitches; they would simply compensate, and fill in any visual gaps.
Empires could still claim to be one of the 9 wonders of the Quantum Blockchain. Even now, it was still impressive to witness an entirely autonomous, virtual environment, or EaVe, working so smoothly right down to the nanoscopic scale.
He had no answers, maybe it was something to do with the shutdown, though Reikomon's glitch happened a few game-subjective years ago.
"Well I'm stumped, obviously I want to see it; can you take me there as soon as they reopen the game?"
"Ah yeah, sure... we should all go."
She gave Ziper a look that K-Rox couldn't quite decipher, and the public empLink channel they had open between them was too standardized to let any meaningful emotion slip through. Ziper came to sit opposite K-Rox, as he sat down the public empLink closed, leaving just K-Rox and Ziper empathetically linked.
Immidiately he knew something was wrong, it was like he had been holding back his emotions. But now Reikomon was no longer linked with the two of them, the empLink was awash with negative emotions, most strongly felt by K-Rox, was one of foreboding.
"Listen Kay, I've got some bad news..."
K-Rox glanced over at Reikomon, she had gone over to the bar on the far wall, and gave the impression she knew what was to come. A small floatila of butterflies embarked on a fluttering dance inside his belly.
"Go on then, spit it out."
"Malcraft has gone"
"What do you mean gone? Has he been deleted? It's pointless if he has, its his nano-identifier that's marked, not the avatar."
"He hasn't been deleted; apparently he left his dwelling last week for the first time in two objective years and entered the Empires game."
K-Rox blood ran cold, the butterflies in his belly had been killed by the icy waterfall running through his veins, from the pit of his stomach to the ends of his toes. He didn't want to hear what came next, but he knew he had to. When he spoke, his voice was a worry-laden whisper.
"Go on."
"Well, that's it, he went into Empires and never came out. The game manifests show that he had never played it before, so when he entered he chose a new avatar. He then flew to Tokyo, and vanished. The manifest has all his movements, right up until the moment he got off the plane, there is no record of him leaving Tokyo airport, or for that matter the entire game."
"That...that can't be possible, this isn't happening..."
K-Rox got up from his seat, he was looking into Ziper's eyes, the empLink between them was a symphony of grief. K-Rox was breathing hard, he felt unsteady on his feet, he could feel there was more.
"What else is there?"
"It's the name of the avatar he chose; he called himself; Taured."
"So what? What does that even mean?"
"It is the name of the country that the character from Reikomon's story is supposed to have come from. The country has never existed, and as far as we can make out, there's no other reason for him to use that name, especially as he flew to Tokyo. No matter how oblique, we have to assume that he was making some reference to the Mandela effect"
If K-Rox had been in the real, or even in Principia, he would have been sweating and breathing hard, as he tried to grasp the magnitude of what his friend had just told him, instead he snapped his empLink shut, as he spoke, his own voice sounded strained and oddly distant to him.
"I need to go, right this second, let me out of here."
"Kay, I..."
"Now!"
The bar floated away from his view and he was standing back in the featureless room once more, the filaments that had shot out from the wall earlier, were still attached to his tongue. He sent a thought command and they went shooting back into the wall, less than 14 microseconds later, K-Rox had teleported out of Pandemonium3.
Cryptogee
All artwork, original works by 
