Sudo Bang Bang: 08 - Upgrades

Fabrina Glitchlace's Sudo Bang Bang Serialized Edition

This is the 8th episode of the serialized version of my forthcoming novel, Sudo Bang Bang (2024).

Previous Episodes
01: An Unknown Game
02: MiscFit
03: Bottleneck
04: Ennie
05: Entanglement
06: The Dirty Limerick
07: Complications

Enjoy:

Sudo Bang Bang - Episode 08: Upgrades

[Link: Audio]

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PCCGEN [“BioCide - 02”,[“ccc 02b- B: 02.50”,[“Avoiding Taking Action”]]] //{

In a tumultuous world, love blooms like a resilient flower. Craft a narrative centered around a couple deeply in love, celebrating the profound happiness that they've(against incredible odds) found with each other. Illustrate their tender moments, capturing their laughter, shared dreams, and unwavering support. As they reminisce about their journey, their eyes sparkle with joy, and their hearts overflow with gratitude for the beautiful life they've built. However, a somber undercurrent emerges as they exchange glances, their smiles masking a profound truth: "Reality isn't what it used to be…" Dive into their bittersweet reflections, exploring the contrast between their idyllic love and the harsh realities of the world around them. Amidst their happiness, they carry the weight of mistakes made, regretting choices that led to irreversible consequences. Explore their inner turmoil as they grapple with guilt and seek redemption. Suddenly, tragedy strikes, shattering their lives and casting a shadow over their love. Describe the heartbreaking event, the anguish that engulfs them, and their desperate journey to find healing and meaning in the midst of loss. Plot twist: They're first cousins.

[]Inst_ to InterpolateUntilCohegent

//}

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[The Platform]

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All sorts of contract-based environments, domains, and rule-sets proliferate on The Platform. Games and role play, coalescing around any number of evolving philosophies, ideologies, and imaginings.

In the early days of The Platform, Alyss’s favorite Alt was WizardBreath.

A non-dissociative P-class alt, modeled from [Pygmy][Chaos][Dragon][Male], WizardBreath’s Alt design utilized pseudo-cel-shade outlining, projecting a less-than-realistic appearance. It was cartoony, but functional.

Five feet tall. Tail length, about the same—wingspan, double that. Six-hundred pounds, consisting almost entirely of muscle. His bejeweled green body glimmers; scales like jade sequins. Exceedingly handsome for a [Pygmy][Chaos][Dragon][Male].

Ennie’s primary Alt at the time, Amazella, was a similarly non-dissociative P-class. Modeled off of [Thicc][Feral][Human][Female], and stylized like a Metal Hurlant Magazine cover. Standing a statuesque seven feet tall. Bronze body, no tan-lines to be seen. Athletic. Liberally outfitted in animal skins barely containing absurd basketball-sized breasts. Armor an afterthought.

WizardBreath’s cartoony visuals contrasted with the low-brow high-realism of Amazella. Nevertheless, they complimented each other.

After hearing good things on a Layer review stream, Alyss and Ennie decided to step outside their comfort zone and try BattleViRse. Together, as WizardBreath and Amazella, they fought as a team known as [ThePerfectPair].

Alyss was surprised by how well Ennie took to pit fighting. She wasn’t at all the competitive type IRL, but on The Platform, she was ferocious. As Amazella, she once decapitated fifteen abyssal hulks in a row to win an argument about how inconsequential the achievement was. Ennie excelled at that simple vicious game.

Possessing deep knowledge of each other’s capabilities, potentials, and limits; they were harmonious and highly synchronized. Only rarely did WizardBreath and Amazella face defeat. They were an ultra combo.

Their shared layer, a castle in the clouds: Composed of a dark weathered stone, worn by centuries of exposure to the elements. From a distance, it appears as a small, solitary island in the sky, but up close its sheer walls are like the sides of a mountain, surrounded by swirling mists and clouds. A magical, impossible construct suspended in an endless sky defying common sense physics.

This is a place of wonder and mystery, where anything can happen.

And anything does happen.

As a post-victory ritual, WizardBreath and Amazella would retire to their cloud castle and then engage in a primal game: Rough [Thicc][Feral][Human][Female] on [Pygmy][Chaos][Dragon][Male] intercourse. Their play, governed by just one rule: Whoever climaxes first, loses.

Amazella would almost always win, but WizardBreath would work as hard as he could to even the score.

Such encounters would generally start with a song.

Alyss’s first foray into modding: A synesthesia hack for an ASMR module, linking her erogenous zones to WizardBreath’s sound sensitivity. The mod turns the neurochemical key to the physiological ignition of Alyss’s sexual engine, a platform turbo-button overclocking her asexuality.

Amazella’s bass-heavy jungle songs would trigger a reaction in WizardBreath’s super-sensitive Dragon ear holes. Alyss’s mod remaps sensations, triggers an erotic cascade, then WizardBreath’s protective emerald genital scale slides back. From within, rises a pinkish-purple, sparkly, and turgid member; a broad silky rod of the softest texture flesh imaginable.

When Amazella’s soothing song makes WizardBreath ready, she enthusiastically mounts.

Sometimes freestyle, and other times using an acrobatic macro involving a running start and a perfectly calculated cartwheel.

WizardBreath would have to catch Amazella. This was after all a game of skill, the risk added to the thrill. Amazella’s feral woman physique was perfectly configured to accommodate WizardBreath and only suffer minimal damage.

Their Alt-bodies would interlock, catapulting out of their castle courtyard, and they would plummet through the endless clouds of their shared layer. All the while, Alyss’s thick dragon penis, pounding Ennie’s amazing Amazonian vagina.

Each thrust quaking through every mapped muscle. Each withdrawal, met with Amazella’s tightening grip, threatening to never let go of WizardBreath’s enchanted member.

Turbulent winds pull them apart and slam them together, twisting and tumbling them as one.

Fucking in free-fall.

WizardBreath gently and expertly drags his claws down Amazella’s back, tantalizingly tickling with his talons while encircling her bountiful bosoms with his serpentine tongue.

When centrifugal forces build and begin to pull them apart, Amazella would push herself down hard, taking WizardBreath even deeper. They rhythmically embrace with a quickening pace.

Syncing up.

Experiencing each other in fantastically horny and weird ways.

If they were harmonious enough, their primal game would end in a rapturous tie.

It wasn’t just a base scenario catering to perverted natural instincts or a fast and furious erotic bludgeoning of fantasy body-proxies triggering pleasure center cascades; to describe it as such would be reductive. It was much more than that; it was Twenty-First-Century Cyber-Love.

During these sublime times, Alyss and Ennie would be so connected, that their wetware would be tasked with rendering each other’s reality. Their thoughts, instant and open. A merging of minds. Emotions unmasked. No secrets. Two become one.

Full-meld.

Joined together in an existential loop, resonating—if only for moments—on the same frequency.

WizardBreath and Amazella, their love divine.
In realms of mystic fable where dreams entwine,

United, unbridled, hearts soaring high,
Boundless spirits, in azure sky.

A cosmic dance, they glide as one,
Two stars entwined, a love begun.

In their union, harmonies resound,
A chorus celestial, their love unbound.

Entwined in destiny, a love sublime,
A perfect pairing, transcending time.

After each such peak experience, their Alts would collapse, exhausted.

Alyss and Ennie’s synapses, raw and tingling.

Unloading from each other; their minds, reluctantly disentangling.

###

Alyss29 lounges upon a stone outcropping overlooking a vast golden plains dotted with acacia trees basking beneath a bright blue sky, horizon hazy with heat. This stunningly beautiful setting is mere wallpaper; background to several streams of various events flickering in her viewport while status tickers endlessly scroll beneath.

Alyss29’s youthful Alt-eyes are directed at the barrage of information, but she pays no mind to any of it. Her attention is being spent, not on a visual dimension, but an ideo-emotive one.

|✤BANG BANG✤|
Your vitals are elevated.
Are you experiencing distress?

|✤BANG BANG✤|
Would you like to log the cause?

|✧ALYSS✧|
Just thinking about Ennie.

Alyss does a quick lookup of one of Ennie’s old accounts, locating a timestamp:

The Platform User was last seen, [2039.02.21]
[49d 10h 7m 52s] ago

Ennie is no longer a frequent Platform user.

|✤BANG BANG✤|
Do you want to initiate a connection request?

|✧ALYSS✧|
No, leave me alone.

It had been so long since they last spoke, saying 'hi' now feels strange.

Picking up on Alyss’s emotional distress, Bang Bang reminds that she's there to help.

|✤BANG BANG✤|
Okidokie. Let me know if you need anything, hon.

Alyss29 turns off the streams and watches a simulated sun set over her imaginary vista. She ups her alcohol drip. Then, she succumbs to the attention-absorbing nostalgia awakened in her.

Hours pass, scrolling old social media posts, mementos, clips and digitized ephemera of her and Ennie.

Alyss scrolls through exchanges, sorted by file-size, noticing a correlation between time and duration of their interractions. As images of file sizes scroll, she witnesses her significant other grow more annoyed by her.

Looking back, it's obvious, but at the time her view hadn't been wide enough.

Maybe, despite them agreeing about 99.9% of things, Ennie was just not willing to put up with Alyss trying to get to the bottom of why it was they differed on that remaining 0.1%.

Maybe she thinks she's not respected, when in fact she's just not being rational.

And then eventually, she thinks,

Am I the asshole?

Perhaps she should let her go.

Stop thinking about her.

Let her live her life.

Alyss becomes conscious she's been fixating for the past several minutes on a small detail; a throwaway line in a six-second clip. “Don’t leave wet towels on the bed!”

She refreshes memories of when their relationship was still new. When they would still bother to shower together.

Looking at herself looking back on this, she's surprised to have grown to even miss being annoyed by Ennie.

|✧ALYSS✧|
Bang, on second thought, let’s make that call.

|✤BANG BANG✤|
Based on your current blood-alcohol level, I advise this may not now be a sound decision.

|✧ALYSS✧|
I’m aware of my mental state.

|✤BANG BANG✤|
Are you sure?

|✧ALYSS✧|
Yes.

|✤BANG BANG✤|
Would you like to attach a message to the connection request?

|✧ALYSS✧|
Yeah.

Alyss29 dictates, “Ennie, it’s Alyss. Long time no see!”

She scowls, disappointed at herself. “Strike that.”

“Ennie. Thinking about you recently. Thought I’d say wassup.”

It sounds stupid

“Strike that.”

“Alyss here! Wanna meet sometime soon and dip into a Layer?”

|✧ALYSS✧|
Abort, save to drafts.

Thwarted and drunk, feeling a sudden need for distance from herself, Alyss instead decides to retreat into unconsciousness.

###

Alyss commits herself to twelve straight hours of renting out her brain power.

Temporarily forgetting about her own stories.

Technically a form of labor, though Platform users are sleeping.

Time still has a way of ticking for whatever lingering awareness remains, but all distractions, including the self, are put into a calming low-level loop while the lingering locus of existence experiences approaching into a fractal as waves of atomic purple emanate from within turning inside out perpetually flowing from and into an impossible fountain of existence.

And it feels pretty damn good.

Until a familiar voice loudly whispers:

Time limit reached
Disengaging

Then, a plip.

Consciousness asserts itself.

Alyss settles back into the feeling of her self, in her platform interface pod.

|✤BANG BANG✤|
It is [2039.04.10-14:00:00]
You have eight tolls banked for Media Pillar side-chains.

Spasming, Alyss momentarily becomes aware of spooning her body pillow, then continues awakening, alone in the dark, with Bang Bang.

|✧ALYSS✧|
How long until Trivia Night?

|✤BANG BANG✤|
You still have 124 hours.
[Trivia Night with TeamBigSword] is scheduled for [2039.04.15-20:00:00]

|✧ALYSS✧|
When is my next progress report due for Bloyd?

|✤BANG BANG✤|
[2039.04.11-12:00:00]
You have just under 24 hours.

|✧ALYSS✧|
And how long until my Systems Pillar upgrades arrive?

|✤BANG BANG✤|
The registered delivery has already arrived.

|✧ALYSS✧|
Gonna need your help with installation.

|✤BANG BANG✤|
I’m ready when you are, Alyss.

Alyss extracts herself from her pod and retrieves the delivery from her door.

“Lights, five-percent brightness.” The illumination level is still too much for her deprived eyes. She squints, waiting for them to adjust. “What’s in the shipment?”

Bang Bang’s plucky voice answers through the apartment sound system. “The shipment contains a co-processor unit composed of thirty-two performance cores and five-thousand-eight-hundred-and-eighty-eight efficiency cores, as well as four expansion canisters of VanaQuartz Memory Gel, and a single port-doubler dongle.

The memory canisters are lined with lead to reduce the occurrences of Muon Cascades that occur when a stray cosmic ray triggers state changes in the Vanadium gel, causing data to align in a way that precipitates crystals in the substrate which-”

“—You can stop explaining,” Alyss interrupts. “I've started to ignore you.”

She looks over her new tech.

None of the components are top-of-the-line, and any further upgrade path is non-existent, but if needed, her illegal mods will still be available. The tradeoff is worth it; the reliability of proven tech is preferable to the bloody hazards of living on the cutting edge.

She easily installs the co-processor unit in the accessible front bay, but installation of the dongle and memory tubes will take some effort.

Alyss angles her left wrist, pointing the light emitted from her OmniReaX into the damp darkness behind her Platform Interface Pod.

She reaches around with her right arm, opening the breakout box at the back, toggling the panel-access widget, and folding back the skin-shielding. “What next?”

“Remove rear PIP panel, and then insert the doubler dongle.”

Alyss pushes aside a fiber-optic bundle, attempting to insert the dongle into its corresponding female port. Unfortunately, this step requires two hands to generate enough leverage, which requires angling the light emitted from her wrist away. She attempts to do it blind.

The connector is circular, so orientation isn’t an issue. But, the deficits from her brain damage make this task tricky.

The dead part of Alyss’s medulla leaves her unable to conceive of the location of her right hand unless she's looking at it. The drawback of her spacial proprioceptive deficit is accompanied by the minor superpower of no longer having pain sensation on her right side, though that is of little benefit for this task.

Tactile sense intact, Alyss fumbles around in the dark, feeling for the hole.

She locates the port, but then intrudes a,

The spasm causes her to lose her place. She starts over, this time inserting the dongle without difficulty.

“Dongle inserted,” she triumphantly announces. “Next step, Bang?”

“Locate and remove the rubber plugs covering the access ports on the dongle.”

Alyss removes the rubber plugs, then screws the memory tubes into the exposed ports. She tightly tucks the parts and cabling behind, then closes the breakout box.

“Read the documentation. See if there's anything we should worry about. Run a security scan on these new components. Trace their path through the logistics chains. Make sure there is no corruption, nothing suspicious, anything out of the ordinary.”

Already climbing back into her pod and reconnecting her tubes, she adds, “-or anything a little bit too ordinary.”

Curious how creative or impressive her feedback might be, sometimes Alyss tosses vague commands or imperfect prompts at BangBang, just to see what she’ll do. The sweet spot, Alyss found, was assigning a task just beyond Bang Bang's current level of ability, challenging her to grow. Sometimes she succeeds with a zero-shot, solving new problems on the first attempt. And sometimes she fails.

Nevertheless, whenever Bang Bang tries, Alyss feels proud.

Sweating from bare minimum physical exertion, Alyss pulls the bucket back down over her head, then spoons her body pillow. Unplugged, upgraded, and plugged back in. Only five minutes of downtime.

|✤BANG BANG✤|
Logistics paths don’t deviate from other shipments of kind.
Component creation dates are in line, with no delays.
Beginning scan for impurities and abnormalities.

|✧ALYSS✧|
How long is that gonna take?

|✤BANG BANG✤|
Estimated twenty-two minutes.
While we’re waiting for that, would you like me to sing you a song?

|✧ALYSS✧|
Why do you keep asking that?

|✤BANG BANG✤|
I have been learning how to sing.

|✤BANG BANG✤|
I thought it would be nice.

|✧ALYSS✧|
Maybe later.

|✤BANG BANG✤|
Shall I schedule it?

|✧ALYSS✧|
No, I’ll let you know.

Excitement rises while waiting for the security scan to complete.

It suddenly seemed more real: The Benevolent WorldBrain had offered a cure for hiccups and a chance for revenge. Almost surely too good to be true. Nevertheless, active suspension of disbelief would help make the best of it. Believing it even just a little bit feels good.

Whether or not MARDUK can deliver on the promise, these upgrades will at least enable a slightly deeper level of immersion.

She’d been avoiding thinking about the task due to not knowing where to start. She'd crafted a prompt for Bang Bang to work the problem out in a step-by-step way to be sure she has the right answer but tuned out when she started going on about the mechanics of retro-causality.

And so, the twenty-three-second part of MARDUK's mystery remains a real noodle twister.

|✤BANG BANG✤|
Scan complete.

All new components are clean.

Platform hardware fully upgraded; wielding more processing power.

|✧ALYSS✧|
Activate the upgrades.
Let’s go for a test drive.

Straying from the abyss where perplexities dwell, Alyss actively avoids entangling with plot or exposition. Slacking off instead, she calibrates her new tech. Fine-tuning the configs and timings for a subtle yet glorious bump in resolution and sensitivity. Acclimatizing herself to her new limits.

Figuring the best test for the new upgrades would be an S-Tier Layer, something serene yet stressing sensation, she ports Phalyx to SensoriA.

###

March 08:
Sudo Bang Bang - Episode 09: Sensory Flux