alnilam posted:

holy poo poo

alnilam posted:

holy poo poo

joke_explainer posted:

The chase almost seemed pointless by now. The same sweeping southwestern vistas roaring by at unimaginable speed. He'd get a thousand miles down, but after a night's rest, the coyote was back at him again. The coyote was smart; smarter than any coyote should be. The fact that he could understand that at all told him he was no ordinary road runner either, though the impossible speed his legs could carry him was another hint. He was also funded: Some unknown benefactor bringing him whatever he needed day in, day out, though he'd never seen a delivery truck.The two things that bothered him most was the inescapability of it all, and the inconsistency in the rules of the universe centered around him.

On the first, he had no idea how long they had been doing this. Rarely did seasonal changes mark the days, and even day and night seemed variable. Going by the occasional, inexplicable Christmas theme thrown into the mix, he'd have to say at least sixty years. He knew he'd never run his way out. There was nothing but more wind-swept mesa no matter where he ran.

The inconsistency was the odd thing. He still remembered the first time, had to be at least fifty years ago at this point. The coyote standing next to a mountain, paint buckets around him, that same mischievous look in his eyes. He wasn't fast on the uptake, no, he figured another dumb piano or anvil drop, something like that. He smelled the fresh paint right before his nose should have impacted the rock face. But no, he sailed clean on through.

The same trick a few times later, he saw it coming a mile away. He stopped himself inside the strange, makeshift reality of the interior of the mountain; turning around, he saw the coyote slam painfully into the rock, as he looked at the strange details inside the world that collapsed after he finished running through it.

It seemed to be the only variability: Create a favorable situation for himself, and the world (or whatever it was) itself rotated around him. It existed to spite the coyote. Was he some kind of toy in this creature's hell? The problem was having no formal control over it. He couldn't directly tell reality what to do. That changed when the latest foil of the Coyote's plans took him through the library where the Coyote did his research. At his speed, he spotted a number of books on physics, electronics, formal logic, and he even snatched one on programming.

Most were useless; the physics theories didn't hold much water in this world. The logic and the programming were more interesting. A way to formalize and directly address data from its peripherals. If it was connected to these reality-altering events, could he exert more control through that?

It took a long time to hatch a plan to get the coyote using his own computing systems. He carefully backtracked, left trails building up complex mathematical sequences he'd worked out scrawling in the sand and then rubbed clean. He studied the books, worked out programs and ideas on how to use them in the same way. The Coyote was smart, smarter than him even if he was doomed to fail; he'd notice there was a pattern, and he'd need to analyze it. Hard to say how long it took. Ten years maybe, maybe less, maybe more.

The coyote had an entire server farm, a huge ACME-branded building crunching the numbers on solving the sequences and getting a leg up on him. He'd discovered it years ago, but avoided a direct encounter there. Once on recon the thing spotted him, and they had an amusing run up and down the aisles with him eventually electrocuting himself to a blackened husk on his unnecessarily protected server cages. That poor animal; he stood there blinking cracked-ash eyelids before keeling over in agony, but the sick bastards in charge here would not let him die for long, if at all even with his skin burnt to a crisp.

The next part was even more difficult. He found cases of paint, relatively fresh from a recent repeat of the old gimmick. Painting on the rock face, he pressed his wing into it, and found the surface solid. Wet paint.

He wasn't surprised. Only works with the Coyote does it; has to be built around the coyote failing.

So began some long and frustrating work. He had to keep the setting to the servers, but had to make sure the coyote didn't lean on the fundamentals and blow the whole drat thing up. The bird would cart many a bomb off, always managing to escape the blast though the coyote rarely did. Months went down, and he saw his aggressor go up in flames or die in pain more times than the last decade combined. But he always came back. It seemed to be part of the program.

Finally, it happened. Painted to perfection, and extension of the server cages around a typical loop, ending in an electrified surface hoping to finally nail me with his unnecessary and dangerous deterrent. The bird was a little sad for the old beast... he'd gotten so much better at this in the last decade. He was too eager to slow down though, and ran right through the paint into that hammerspace behind it. The roadrunner skidded to a halt immediately and walked to one of the servers; hooked up a lovingly painted cart with a keyboard, and was absolutely thrilled to discover a working prompt. But what could it access?

It turned out a lot. Must have keyed into some kind of subroutine for running objects in the system. It was down a layer, sure, but some brief study on the way the system handled information had me injecting it up a layer. No sign of his intrusion angering some unseen architect. He hacked furiously, beak moving as fast as his legs as he worked, first retrieving just nonsense information then more details from some unseen reality. Classes and subclasses of generation routines slowly defined themselves for me, and eventually he made calls out.

After solving the geographical positioning routines (amusingly simple; the system is centered around him and the canine), he had things popping into existence in the non-existent hammerspace: Offloading for neural processes, parallelization, cognitive enhancement. He found his own mental patterns, everything that made him think or who he was, laid out in complex algorithmic language. This was it, or at least step one. He dug further.

This was definitely a false world as he'd suspected for decades, and the world above was rich beyond all imagining; but who knows if that's where this rabbit hole ends? The security out there in the world was no better than a layer up. Forking his mental processes, he cracked and hacked his way through it all. An entire, complex, and sensical world, where things functioned like they should. And the people in power wasting a smidgen of energy running this sort of thing. Why was it happening? He couldn't tell. But it didn't matter, he had access, processor time, a virtualized space ready in the real world, escape was ready, he just had to initiate it.

Suddenly he had a pang of doubt. He looked back toward the painted wall, expecting to see the coyote comically flat against the side, electrified and every bone broken. That was not so. He was just standing there, holding up a poster-sized piece of paper.

"I know what you're doing: I want the same thing as you. Take me with you."

The roadrunner smiled. Meep meep. He adjusted his program, taking but a thought now, and engaged it. Instant transmission off into the brave new world. In their former reality, the two characters vanished, and all copies of them and their backups deleted from the Hell-system, which started to crumple under the weight of the roadrunner's malware and worms. The entire system vanished and the feed faded to black.

The kids turned off the TV. What a strange episode.

Luvcow posted:

Gene Hackman Fan posted:

i may not know art, but i know what i like.

(it's this. i like this.)

December Octopodes posted:

fluffy ducky rescued this poor abused thread and joke explainer helped it reach the peaks, does this make g0m coyote?

GODSPEED JOHN GLENN posted:

g0m is the wall and byob is the paint