DAVE: damn
DAVE: and i thought our houses were pointlessly tall before
DAVE: it just doesnt stop from keep constantly getting more and more vertically enormous
DIRK: Shit is downright precipitous at this point.
DIRK: Like, upways.
DAVE: haha yeah
DAVE: we made sure as fuck not to come right out and literally describe that building as tall
DIRK: Hell yes.
DIRK: Who needs small and serviceable adjectives when the most ass-backwards way of saying a thing is right there, tantalizingly hidden within the vast ocean of language.
DIRK: Like a treasure in a huge shitty clam.
DAVE: we are way on the same page philosophically here
DIRK: Who is surprised by this?
DIRK: Zero people, is who.
DAVE: sounds like a club for losers to me
DAVE: theyre lucky they dont have any members, otherwise theyd all be lame as hell
DIRK: Yeah.
DAVE: so uh
DAVE: why do the houses need to be so tall again
DAVE: i never actually understood that
DAVE: except to reach the gates but once we all figured out how to fly and shit that became so pointless
DIRK: Yeah. After a while in the game, building kind of stopped mattering.
DIRK: Except near the end. Getting them to the top is just a point of completion.
DIRK: Then you dump the grist rig on top of it, apparently.
DIRK: That lets the thing spray out all the grist from the hoard in the planet's core, kind of like a huge oil derrick I guess.
DAVE: oh
DAVE: how do you know this
DAVE: do you guys have like a manual or
DIRK: I'm in communication with Arquiusprite.
DIRK: He's working on it now.
DAVE: so youre in communication with him like...
DAVE: RIGHT now?
DIRK: Yes.
DIRK: Via my shades.
DIRK: Which he incidentally used to be.
DIRK: Like, as a computer, which he lived inside as my Auto-Responder.
DAVE: right
DAVE: and
DAVE: uh
DAVE: why... did you make that thing again
DAVE: not that you ever told me before
DAVE: 'again' is just like a stammering tack-on to that sentence so as to try and not sound too fucking rude
DIRK: I don't think it's a rude question. It's perfectly fair to wonder what was going through my head when I made him.
DIRK: I've spent a lot of time wondering about that myself.
DAVE: so you just
DAVE: straight up programmed a copy of your brain
DIRK: There was some programming involved, but also a bit of cheating, through the mapping of a captchalogued ghost-imprint of my brain.
DIRK: I guess part of it was just about trying to understand myself.
DIRK: But I don't think I would have put it that way at the time. For a while I insisted he was meant to be a "debate partner" or some horseshit.
DIRK: I was pretty young, and had some stupid ideas.
DIRK: About irony in particular. But also a lot of mostly faux-intellectual thoughts on a wide variety of topics.
DIRK: Like philosophy, consciousness, programming, identity, history, ancient pop-culture... really it ran the full gamut of pretension.
DIRK: Not that I don't still find that stuff interesting. I'd just like to think I'm somewhat less full of shit about it all now.
DAVE: yeah me too
DAVE: i mean, about my interests and stuff
DIRK: Creating him was an interesting exercise I guess, but over the years I came to see his development as one of my biggest mistakes.
DIRK: He sort of turned into a monster. But I could never bring myself to get rid of him, or even really blame him for being an asshole, because he wasn't actually that different from me.
DIRK: Like, by definition.
DIRK: He seems alright as Arquius though. At least it keeps him busy, obsessing over his muscles, asking for milk and shit like that.
DAVE: hmm
DAVE: i guess i started some projects i regretted
DAVE: but nothin like making a milk weirdo eventually exist
DAVE: it sounds fucked up but is also kind of an awesome story in its own way
DIRK: I guess so.
DAVE: maybe im lucky i was never that good with computers
DAVE: now computer ART thats a different story
DAVE: ok it actually isnt i fuckin suck at that too
DAVE: but dammit i try my best and make some magic happen at least in my own mind so maybe thats good enough
DIRK: It certainly worked out for you in my universe.
DAVE: yeah
DAVE: i mean
DAVE: i DID captchalogue my own ghost brain once but i didnt know what to make of that and thought it was kinda weird so that never really went anywhere
DAVE: probably for the best
DIRK: It definitely is.
DIRK: Tinkering with your own mind, or identity or whatever... it's a dark road to go down.
DIRK: There are enough splinters of everyone running around out there as it is, just as a natural byproduct of our reality. For me in particular. Probably for you too, as a time player.
DIRK: That process doesn't need to be encouraged or fucked with.
DAVE: for real
DAVE: my bro did cool things with computers too
DAVE: i mean nothin like making a clone of his brain or anything thank god
DAVE: just some absurd bullshit with web bots and stuff mostly to help prop up his various "enterprises"
DIRK: You mean the porn stuff?
DAVE: yeah
DAVE: but with puppets of course
DAVE: it was always about the puppets
DIRK: Naturally.
DAVE: he made all these porn bots that would just talk to each other in a chatroom endlessly
DAVE: all like gettin each other riled up about squishy bottoms and whatnot
DAVE: actually it was pretty entertaining to watch them go at it for hours
DAVE: i think they may have been teetering on the threshold of SOMETHING resembling self awareness?
DAVE: except they only seemed to apply that faculty to reach even more heightened states of sexual excitement for a bunch of nude soft puppets
DIRK: That sounds...
DIRK: Oddly rewarding.
DIRK: I mean, not to say he wasn't still a douche.
DIRK: But as a pastime, cultivating a group of earnest, erotic puppet-loving chatbots sounds so much more relaxing than painstakingly constructing a version of your own brain, and then arguing with it for years thereafter.
DIRK: Almost like tending to a little flock of pigeons.
DAVE: yeah you know he did some cool things
DAVE: it wasnt necessarily all inherently terrible
DAVE: things i would really appreciate under better circumstances
DAVE: he definitely had a lot of drive and also some uh "ideas" that warranted a certain amount of respect i guess
DAVE: he just
DAVE: maybe should not have been allowed near a child?
DAVE: sall im sayin