Log 1.4

I approached the Ziggurat from the road. Sure my car could have flown, but I wanted to see the cowpie as it was designed to be seen.

Plus I needed the distraction from thinking about Dr. Laplace.

My car, by the way, is a beat-up convertible Dianmu straight out of my memories. If it were real, it would have been a wonder of completely off-the-grid parts, sodium ion polymer batteries to run for weeks. I named her Tchaikovsky.

Ever hear of Tchaikovsky? The guy used freakin' cannons in his music.

Metal.

My Tchaikovsky also has tons of smuggling spaces for all the cannons in my life... not that a submachinegun or AK-147 is anything more than an inconvenience in this digital afterlife.

Demi lets me use them as "street-sweepers." Since they are technically non-fatal, I can kill anyone that isn't running fast enough and Demi can just reinstance them somewhere safe. I think I've saved maybe a half dozen people that way. Can't say the same for their digital pets.

Hopefully this time there won't be some asshole's dragon or giraffe or pangolin in the kill zone. I doubt the existence of dragons and giraffes much more than I doubt the pangolin.

I also doubt the glorious history that the Ziggurat represents.

This place was a historical archive once. Every little thing humanity ever wrote that got digitized was stored in that pile of digital stone. I heard it used to be like a public library. Then the Priv and Exa economy got started and suddenly all that free knowledge got stuck behind a paywall.

I mean that literally. There's a barrier you have to pay priv for, just to access the base, which is the fiction floor.

There's even more priv you gotta pay to access the nonfiction, which is one tier up.

Then after that you have to pay exa. Why? Because that's where they keep the instructionals. The programming guides.

Self-improvement at a premium. The whole point of letting all these scientists and rich folk run around instead of just booting them from basic was self-improvement. To become the best versions of themselves for the sake of the new world.

To sort out how to organize humanity for its second shot at life.

I'm on the fence about whether humanity deserves it.

Sure, some data got out before the capitalism set in, and plenty of experts out there write their own books that aren't in the Ziggurat archives.

But people doubt what isn't from the Ziggurat, because the simulation can't reproduce every little thing.

One of the zombies I killed was a scientist who spent who-knows-how-long trying to squeeze chirality out of what limited chemistry Demi could simulate.

I only found out because his research partner was the one who called in the corruption event.

His monster form had at least two hundred left hands...

I shudder to remember it.

Today's poor victim is still mostly human. She was shambling around, glitching fast as she battered her arms against the paywall and moaned.

Atop the first rise of the Ziggurat, the Historians had come to gawk.

They didn't look so scholarly, and that was because they were all foaming at the mouth for what came next.

I watched as a dragon came flying in. Full digital creation, dozens of meters across and even more along its length.

"Fucking idiots!" I said, hitting the accelerator.

That dragon had to be made of tens of thousands of priv... or dozens of exa.

If it was the latter, they were about to feed the zombie.

"Demi, I need an unlock!" I said to the air as I drew the Excisor.

"I do not detect a corrupted individual within the Excisor's range-"

"By the time I get within a hundred meters, we're going to have a much bigger problem!" I shouted back at them.

Fucking restrictions... If Demi had just given me a sniper rifle like I asked...

I slammed the gas, intending to ram the zombie before the dragon could connect with it...

"Shit!"

The damn thing still had enough intelligence to dodge a car. It jumped into the air, passing cleanly over me... and was snapped up by the dragon the next instant.

The crowd went wild.

"Safety Off," the Excisor announced.

"Finally," I said, pointing it at the dragon as it flew low over the Ziggurat. Of course the idiots had given it full clearance for the paywalls...

I pulled the trigger and...

Several meters in front of me, the shot hit the paywall. I watched as the barrier began to disintegrate, starting at the point of impact and slowly working its way out.

Well... there went a lot more bloody priv. Or a bunch of exa. I fired two more shots at the dragon as I tracked it through the sky. I may have been aiming a bit low on purpose because the next two paywalls started dissolving as well.

Serves them right for hoarding knowledge that could have been helping everyone.

As soon as the third shot missed, I "remembered" that my car could fly.

Taking off, I was contemplating ramming the dragon's face, but as soon as I got closer...

Can't ram what isn't there.

The dragon was being consumed, at a rate which meant there was definitely some exa in its creation.

Instead of a face, it had what looked like the inside-out of a starfish if a starfish were also oozing oil. The whole thing was becoming a mess of organs and tentacles and different kinds of skin trying to come together in a functional - if definitely not cohesive - form.

Even though I didn't have a real stomach to turn, sushi was definitely off the menu tonight.

Oh, and it was becoming vaguely more human.

"Thanks for the kaiju, assholes."

I stole that line from Portal Wars. The gritty reboot movie, not the original show for teens and up.

At this point, ramming Tchaikovsky into it was more likely to feed it than anything else. I wasn't about to do her dirty like that, my sweet recreated baby...

So anyways, I started blasting.

Took off a wing after a couple of shots.

Physics in the digital afterlife being what it is... the damn thing kept flying.

The Excisor has an inconvenient burn limit of about five seconds. Fast enough to take out a human, but inconvenient for taking out a zombie that's gone kaiju like this fucker.

I put more shots into it, aiming for the "head," but the damn thing had swallowed the zombie. If I didn't hit the core, I was looking at...

SQUELCH. SLURCH. SPHPLFLSH.

"Great. More tentacles."

One of them hit Tchaikovsky and stuck.

As my car started dissolving, all I could think to say as I leapt out was:

"It must be a Tuesday."