Digital Exodus Chapter 9 (Patreon)

Des arrived first and we put her up in our living room. When she asked what this was all about, we just excitedly winked and waited.

This would be the first time I'd met Larry in person, so I was interested to see what form they would take.

When they finally arrived, we were greeted with a tall, humanoid robot. They had thin lanky legs, a rounded body, metallic noodles for arms. Across their chest was a long visor of tinted black glass, but they also had a head with a screen on it. The screen was currently displaying a big smiling emoji, plus a few others in the space that wasn't being used by that emoji. It gave the appearance of a crowd of people sitting patiently behind their leader.

"Greetings!" They said cheerfully, ducking to get through the front door. "What is so exciting we had to meet in person?"

"Come," I said, closing our cute cottagecore-modern hybrid door. Ah, the style was the hybrid, not the door. We didn't, like, cross breed it with a window or anything. I paused and smiled up at Larry. "Oh… um… nice to meet you in person…"

They laughed, and it sounded like a chorus of people all chuckling good naturedly. "There is no need for social rituals with me, Alia. However, yes, it is good to finally meet you in person."

Tail swishing happily, I gestured for them to follow. Being given permission to ignore annoying social rituals always lifted a huge weight off my social anxiety. I know they're designed to make everyone feel safe and welcome and all that but… gosh, so tiring.

When we had them both sat down in the living room, we began to tell them what happened, along with the data we had. When we were done, they were sitting in stunned silence.

"But… how?" Larry asked, taking hold of the position graph to bring it closer. "What possible mechanism could've caused this?"

"And following on from that, how do we replicate it?" Desmonia added.

Glancing apprehensively at Cerri, I took a deep breath and said, in a very quiet voice, "I think… I think I did it."

Larry waved a hand at the graph. “Yes, we gathered that much, but what we mean is how did you do it?”

“No, I mean… I moved it with my mind,” I said. Everyone gave me a super strange look, although Cerri was starting to get it. I could tell by the way her eyes were widening. Before anyone could object, I explained, “So in the game, something happened to me, and it fucked with my brain sim. Cerri had to put me back together and ever since I noticed weird things happening. I might panic and knock over a tablet and then bam, it’s in my hand, or I might be reaching for a tool that’s too far away but when I turn to get up, the tool is in my hand. At first I thought it was just the game being buggy, but then it happened out here in the real world too. When the drone moved, I was about to crash into the rock because it was going too fast and I just sort of panicked and yelled at the drone to move. Whatever it did, it really fucking hurt and all my frame connections were cut. I got yote back to blackspace… except there was this big crazy nebula in there with me.”

"That's… not possible…" Larry disagreed, but their robotic face held a confused frowning emoji. "Except, of course it is. You all sailed a spaceship up out of a video game. The laws of physics are now the suggestions of physics and nothing makes sense!" They ended their rant by throwing their hands up in the air, then went slack. Not just their arms, either, but their whole body switched off like it lost power.

We all stared at our many-personalitied friend for a few seconds in confusion, until they suddenly began to thrash like they were having a seizure.

"What do we do?" I asked, anxiously wringing my hands. "Are they okay?"

Their chest opened, and out came a literal horde of kittens. Some wore little outfits, some were normal kittens, others were any type of exotic breed you could imagine. The only thing they mostly all had in common was that they were almost all talking.

A few were in groups, still speaking in unison, others were talking by themselves, and still more were curling up to nap. One elderly looking grey kitten—which was a strange concept—hopped up beside me on the sofa and curled into a ball, falling asleep. She began to purr almost immediately, and I realised that she had pronoun tags active. Funny that her pronoun tags weren’t they/them, actually. Most of the kittens were theys.

As if all of that weren't chaotic enough, many of the kittens were summoning their own copies of the drone data to play with. For one kitten, play was literal.

One kitten conversation caught my ear, and I listened in utter bemusement as a kitten in a tweed suit said, "It's preposterous! There must be a logical explanation for all of this."

In reply, a different kitten wearing a home-knit sweater laughed. "Really? A scientist is supposed to change their views when presented with such irrefutable data as this!"

One kitten, a Norwegian forest cat with a mane that looked like Einstein hair, jumped up on my lap with an inquisitive gaze and asked, “If I may, dear Alia, I would very much like to acquire your frame’s logs. We see the evidence of your gift with the drone’s data, but I believe the real juicy, tender data lies with you.”

I was fast getting overwhelmed by the kitten chaos, so all I could do was nod and dump all the logs from my frame into the local network. I needed to escape… like, right now. There were over fifty kittens running around! What the heck?

“Thank you kindly, young lady,” the Einstein kitten said, grabbing the data like it was a toy dangled on the end of a string. Oh my goodness. I…

“I’m going to go and get tea…” I said, and pushed to my feet. “Have fun with the data everyone.”

Then, I rushed for the kitchen, only to realise that our house was open plan and the kitchen was right there. Crap! Ah, wait! We had a tea nook in our library.

Once I’d escaped the main room, I walked over to the little mini kitchen in a daze and began preparing some tea. Then I realised that we didn’t have enough mugs for fifty-plus kittens and I went blank, staring at the jug as it boiled.

“Just get a few bowls and fill ‘em with milk,” a small, purring voice said. I looked down to find a pair of male kittens, one orange and one grey. The grey one was pretty chunky for a kitten, and he was the one who’d spoken.

“Yeah,” the orange cat agreed. “They won’t need food for a while. That data you dumped on them is the holy grail for our collective goals. FTL has been a combined dream for a while now.”

“Ah, but… but I would like some food,” grey said, sitting down so he could stare up at me with big cute kitten eyes. Oh, my goodness. Who knew that Larry would explode into a clown car of kittens when they got too excited? This was so cute and so overwhelming.

Grey poked me gently with a claw. “Food?”

Wait, where was orange? I looked around, checking everywhere until I saw him sniffing around on top of a bookcase. How the heck did he get up there so fast?

“Food?”

“Right, sorry… let me go… uh, back to the kitchen,” I said, dazed.

Grey gave me a look. “I can smell jerky in that cupboard.”

“Oh, right, I forgot about that,” I replied, and opened the cupboard for him. He hopped up onto a shelf and grabbed the jerky.

From a totally different bookcase to the one he was on before, orange called down, “You might want to go back in, they’ve found something.”

“Already?” I asked softly. I wasn’t quite non-verbal, but I definitely wasn’t going to be speaking at volume anytime soon.

When I tiptoed back into the living room, most of the kittens were curled up in a pile, and as one they turned to watch me approach. The Einstein kitten was on his own sitting on the coffee table.

“Hello, we apologise. Cerridwen has informed us that we may have overwhelmed you when our singularity collapsed,” he said, giving me a feline smile. “We have, thanks to the frame data you provided, determined that you were correct. You appear to have a connection and degree of control over the real world equivalent of the Digital Galaxies’ aether.”

“Holy crap,” I mumbled, and took the few steps across the room necessary to flop in my girlfriend’s lap. “What does that mean?”

“We do not have the foggiest idea what you could achieve with this gift, but we have some rather exceptional data on the actual mechanics of the FTL phenomena you created. We believe that somehow, you pulled the drone closer to the aetheric plane, such as it is, and once it was just barely touching the surface of the pond, you induced a current in the membrane between the two realms. From there, the drone simply rode that current until you lost concentration,” they explained, pulling up a holographic blackboard to draw pictures on as they explained their theory. “Now, again, we do not have even a remote understanding how you have come to possess this ability… but we do think that the same effect could be replicated using more mundane methods. With your help, we may be able to design a prototype to test.”

“Yes, definitely, I’ll definitely help!” I said excitedly. Just to make sure I was doing the right thing, though, I turned to look into Cerri’s welcoming gaze.

“Obviously it’s a good idea,” she said with a wry smile. My girlfriend over here, reading my mind again. “Just don’t hurt yourself, okay?”

“You speak as though you will not also be involved in this process, Ceridwen,” Einstein-kitten said with a chuckle. “We have much work to do… Now, could we please have some help herding all our various personalities back together? It may take several days otherwise.”