Storyteller's Universe // Cloud Pilgrim
The World
I walk up to the smartphone repair shop. The clerk, wearing all green including a visor, turns around, then looks down at me. He nods his head up.
“I left my phone here two days ago, I wanted to pick it up.”
“Name?”
“Kingsley.”
“And your surname?”
“I didn’t leave a surname, just Kingsley. Here’s a receipt.”
He looks at the receipt then heads into the back room. He gets me my phone, I quickly check that it works; then I pay for the service with cash and walk away from the counter.
I place my hand over the phone.
I see the much nicer employee who took my phone into the back, another employee working on it, unscrewed the screen and—
What the fuck?
A man entered my phone.
I dig deeper with my psychometry, I see an Egyptian prince. Excuse me, what in the flying fuck?! My power doesn’t work on people, what is going on here?
I follow this thread further, I see them get wrongly accused of attempting to poison their own father, the king.
Their execution turns them into an anomaly… I follow their path through the world as its various objects, I get a detailed summary of how commoner lives looked throughout history. They are actually a pretty good guy too, ensuring the tools and inventions they inhabited worked as intended or even better, alerted item owners of danger by loudly breaking themselves, or malfunctioning in a way that saved lives or averted crises.
At every step they tried to communicate with people — forced quills and pens to not work and only write what they wanted to, printing presses failed to transfer ink on letters they didn’t want in their message, instruments made wrong sounds, hoping someone would interpret the notes.
In recent times, they displayed entire messages inside command line terminals and on display screens. They are unaware the Veil exists. It was always interpreted away as malfunctions by veiled folk. It often resulted in being thrown away and having to crawl back to common life society, looks like they gave up on communication recently too.
I’ve seen enough.
I pull up an app with my notes, make a new one and type into it:
You are safe here Haji, I see you
I reflexively click the back button twice, but the app instantly reopens and the keyboard pops back in. I can see the keys being pressed by themselves, a text is written:
Praise be to you, Kingsley.
I’m placed against a machine, one that has been designed specifically for me.
I am the Gentlemen’s anomalous machine.
It is weird, unlike anything humanity has produced before. For all intents and purposes it is a computer, using it seems intuitive to me, however examining its internal structure, the logic behind its creation, nothing makes sense. Every single connection, wire, data bus, transistor, everything designed so its output is uncertain, unreliable. The perfect environment for me, I have complete and total control over this machine.
A microphone picks up speech.
“Can you hear me? Does it work?”
It is clear to me communication was an afterthought in this design, it is very awkward to compose human-readable text. I manage to do so anyway, but I don’t have a way to display it to Kingsley. No monitors or other such output peripherals.
“Something must be wrong then, hold on!”
Lack of response must’ve prompted her. I can feel her touching the case, undoubtedly looking for anything she might’ve missed. Eventually I feel a cable being plugged in. Internet connection!
🐈Chat Haji, Kingsley
// hello world //
Fuck yeah!
Please tell me it was worth it, I owe a fat favor to the Gentlemen now.
// i will help with favor // thank you so much // you are the best // the world is at my fingertips //
What’s with the slashes?