LonelyJournal15 – the sequel and conclusion to the LG15 saga

by ireactions, suze900 and renegade15

blog archive 41-06895 – identitag alexis capshaw 19 e04

intelligence transfer protocol PM6 via ydp-brother

tachyon-rjv confirms receipt

initiating infostream

POSTED BY ALEXIS CAPSHAW

21 December 2008 09:35 pm

visitors pay a call

By half-past noon yesterday, I was still feeling pretty awful. I decided to find a quiet, empty part of the wall in my living room and rest there with a pillow. Technically, every part of every wall in my apartment is quiet and empty, but this was under a window. I decided to stay there and ignore the occasional knocks on my door.

I left my computer running, downloading some software updates.

I ignored the first knock on my front door. And the second, more insistent knocking. The third attempt to get my attention was a determined double-rapping on the door. I ignored that too. Every time I'd dealt with anything outside my door, the results had involved bodily fluids. No way. I was in no condition to handle any more of either.

Unfortunately, the fourth assault on the entrance to my home was impossible to ignore. Someone kicked the door so hard that the doorknob dislodged from the door and landed on the floor. Then the door swung open and Jonas burst in with a gun.

My body wanted to scream, but my nauseous state didn't allow more than a terrified gurgle. Jonas shouted my name, aiming the black pistol left and right. I was dimly aware that my crazy neighbor was apparently going to murder me with a Glock.

Jonas saw me huddled against the wall and he lowered the gun. "Alexis?" he said, rather gently for a home invader. "Are you okay? Did something happen?"

"Yes," I answered weakly. "A deranged lunatic charged into my home wielding a gun."

As if to level off the tension, Daniel appeared behind Jonas, holding a clear pitcher of some nutritious looking orange liquid. He had a glass, too.

"Oh God," said Jonas, lowering the gun. "I'm so sorry, Alexis − we were wondering if you were okay after Sarah's night out and you weren't answering your door but we could see you were connected to our router and − "

"ARE YOU COMPLETELY OUT OF YOUR MIND!?" I found myself snarling at him, rising to my feet and brandishing the pillow, although I realized it wouldn't be a match for the gun.

Jonas looked alarmed, and I saw his fingers tighten around the gun. I flinched. He noticed.

"Ah," he said. "Sorry. I'll go."

And he did, leaving me alone with the juice-carrying Daniel.

"I'm really sorry," said Daniel. "Uh, here, it's a hangover cure." He indicated his pitcher and poured me a glass. I nervously sipped at it. It tasted like orange, pear and pineapple.

"Why." Sip. "Did you." Sip. "Do. THAT?" Sip sip sip sip sip. He poured me another glass.

"Gina has really intense parents," said Daniel, his eyes darting left and right slightly.

I wondered if Sarah was going to pop in to provide the air-quote gestures.

"We were worried," Daniel continued, "that Gina's parents might have come after you for helping her."

Sip gulp choke gasp cough. "Is that − likely?"

"No!" Daniel said, in a tone that was completely unconvincing. "Of course not. We were just worried about you. We'll fix the doorknob, I promise."

I glared at him for a minute. Then I stormed to my recycling bin, and pulled out a scrap of paper. I scribbled my cell phone number on it.

"Just call next time," I said wearily.

He left me the juice and the glass. It's nice to have one drinking glass in the house.

POSTED BY ALEXIS CAPSHAW

22 December 2008 03:12 pm

the bareness of my walls

Ahh, accomplishment. What a crisp, crunchy apple it is to sink your teeth into. I am a talented professional who provides tidy, detailed work in a reliable and responsible fashion! Thank you, managers at work!

I never received this sort of approval at home, you see.

I was so pleased with myself that I really felt the need to visit the place where it all came together for me; the school where I truly honed and developed my talent. I've never actually been to the UCLA campus, ever, but it really looked nice in the photographs on the website. I decided to head out there and pay my respects.

Surprisingly, the place wasn't deserted, even though it's two days to Christmas. There were bunches of students on the grounds. I guess, like me, they didn't feel the need to go home and celebrate. Well. There actually haven't been any Christmas celebrations for me. Mom and Dad treated Christmas like a normal day. I suppose, given that I didn't go to school much, there wasn't anything to take a holiday from. And I guess Mom and Dad didn't want to strain my social anxiety by taking me on a trip anywhere.

I would have thought venturing out to a university campus might have been too disturbing to contemplate. However, I didn't expect many people to be there, and staying in my apartment is starting to be more terrifying than venturing out of it.

I was really impressed by the UCLA campus. Not the computer sciences wing; that was just a collection of rooms filled with computers and a projection screen set-up at the front. No, what stunned me were the arts-oriented areas.

Outside that collection of buildings were snow sculptures. Well, not real snow; this is LA after all. It was fake snow made out of foam and held together with some sort of adhesive. There were snowmen, naturally, but also cars, spaceships, castles and children's playgrounds − all made out of fake snow. I was amazed. The galleries inside weren't locked. It was the digital art that impressed me most. One piece showed a table at a coffee shop, set for two with donuts and mugs. It was drawn entirely with tiny dots. Another image was a collage, each section made up of tinier pictures of faces, flowers, cosmetic products, trees, sunsets − all of them shaded so that the overall image was a picture of the human eye.

I wonder why I never did something like that with my friends and then remembered that I'd never had any.

Looking around the colorful gallery made me feel bad that the walls of my apartment were so bare and undecorated. But it wasn't just my apartment. My room in my parents' house had no posters or pictures, not even family photos.

Being in this place of creation made me feel so blank.

And when I went outside, I saw groups of students, some of them playing with fake snow to form more works of art. I could see some through the windows indoors, reading books or spooning. How do you find people to sit down with you and read a book? Do you wander around the city, and randomly ask people to build fake snow sculptures with you?

I pulled out my cell phone and looked at the contacts list. It listed exactly one phone number − for home. But that wasn't home anymore, was it?

I drove home. I came out of the elevator to find Daniel replacing my doorknob , screwdriver in hand. Jonas was there too, handing Daniel each part and fastener from the package containing new doorknob.

Gina briefly poked her head out of her apartment to mouth, "I'm so sorry," at me. Jonas handed me my new keys.

I asked Jonas and Daniel if maybe they, along with Gina and Sarah, would like to get some dinner on Christmas Eve − I passed by a nice looking steakhouse on my way home just now.

And they all said yes.

POSTED BY ALEXIS CAPSHAW

25 December 2008 04:07 pm

dining disaster

Dinner with the neighbors took up two hours of my time. One hour and fifty minutes of that was lovely; it's the last ten minutes that seem to have ruined the previous hour-and-fifty. It's baffling; one would think that a 91 percent score of being pleasant would cause the 9 percent unpleasantness to be dismissed. But my mind is stuck on the 9.

It seemed alright at first. Jonas, Daniel and Sarah sat on one side of the table. Gina sat next to me, which was really nice. Daniel and Sarah were whispering a lot and it looked like they were finally settling whatever their problem had been. Jonas and I had a chat about simulated realities.

Jonas told me about this theory about how humans are likely to eventually create highly advanced simulations of the universe and its civilizations. He explained the theory that once this tech exists, it's likely that an infinite number of these simulations will be produced. And if one accepts the probability that the technology will exist, and that the simulations will be run, then the probability is extremely high that all of us presently exist in one of those very simulations.

It was kind of creepy, but then I remembered an old astronomy book, which talked about how given the number of chance factors involved in producing a universe containing any planets that can support human life, the odds of this planet actually coming into being are incredibly small, yet here it is. One explanation is that there are an infinite number of universes, and we merely exist in one of the universes where life was successful among an infinite number of others that weren't.

Caught in hopeless rambling now, I mentioned the theory where the computational ability of human beings would eventually allow humans to create a simulation of their civilization, resulting in a virtual afterlife where anyone who ever existed would be re-created in this environment, and one in which the length of time would exceed the lifespan of the computer housing it. And we may be living out one such simulation right now.

Jonas thought about that, and commented that in that existence, no one would actually be dead, and anyone we've lost would still be around, so that didn't seem terribly likely right now. He seemed a bit sad at that.

That seemed to get Daniel's attention − the talk of the afterlife − and he was rather downcast at that too. Sarah cast me a sympathetic look, and I thought maybe I could raise everyone's spirits by ordering cheesecake for all.

I'd just ordered five portions when Gina turned pale − as pale as she'd been when I first met her. Daniel asked her what was wrong and Gina pointed at the entrance. Framed in the double-set of doors was a man in sunglasses, wearing a black T-shirt and with an odd and quite frankly sloppy tattoo of the Greek letter Tau on his forearm.

For some reason, the atmosphere at my table turned chillier than a meat-locker. I couldn't understand what the problem was, and I especially didn't understand why Jonas told Daniel to take Sarah, Gina and me out the back while he dealt with "the Shadow."

Shadow? Sunglasses and a fake looking tattoo make you a "Shadow," now, do they?

Daniel protested he didn't want to get me involved, and I was bang alongside that arrangement, but Jonas gave him a look. Daniel and Sarah got up and pulled me out of my chair, pulling me towards the restaurant's back exit, while Jonas rose from the table and started walking towards the restaurant's front door.

Just as Daniel, Gina, Sarah and I were at the back exit, I pulled away from Daniel. Ignoring Gina calling my name, I rushed back into the heart of the dining area.

I was treated to the sight of Jonas yelling nonsense at a table where a nice couple were seated. Jonas was ranting incoherently about tuna fish sandwiches in much the same way Sarah had ranted in the taxi last week. I think he was pretending to be drunk.

The man at the table got up and shoved Jonas away. Jonas deliberately spun his fall to collide with another table, disrupting another pair of diners and dumping their bottled mineral water into their laps. They got up to protest. Four waiters rushed towards Jonas, who was spinning towards me and the exit behind me while the diners argued about what constituted the borders of a brawling ring.

The Shadow, trying to advance towards us, was barred by the diners and the waiters in a commotion, and Jonas and I managed to slip around the bar, climb over it and run for the front exit.

Jonas and I were just outside the restaurant when a beefy arm clapped a hand on Jonas' shoulder. Jonas spun and threw a punch at the Shadow, but before it even landed, Jonas was struck firmly in the chest and sent falling to the ground.

The look on his face stunned me; he wasn't hurt, but he looked cornered and defeated, as though a 'Shadow', a man not much burlier than Jonas himself, was like Death incarnate having appeared outside an LA steakhouse.

The Shadow advanced towards Jonas. Jonas remained limp on the pavement like me with my hangover.

I realized I was standing next to a stand-up wooden signboard, advertising the steakhouse's prime rib special. I picked it up and brought it down on the top of the Shadow's head and he went down instantly.

Jonas was on his feet just as Daniel drove a van around the corner and in front of us, and Jonas pulled me into the van.

"Thank you," he said.

"You're welcome," I answered. It was an automatic response. And then: "Oh my God! We didn't get our cheesecake! We walked out on the bill! What was that all about?!"

Instead of answering me, Jonas, Daniel, Sarah and Gina started talking amongst themselves. Daniel kept driving, taking us towards our apartment building.

Jonas said something about how the Order knew his being trait positive was a scam − positive for what, being prone to random acts of needless violence? Did he have some sort of bipolar disorder? That wouldn't be a scam. Except then he said that Gina wasn't trait positive anymore, either, which left me very confused. Gina struck me as a fairly positive person.

Sarah suggested that maybe "it's revenge", saying something about how the last YouTube video she'd been told to put up had been to scare off any "rescuers." Then she pulled out Jonas' MacBook Pro from his shoulder bag and loaded up a display. I couldn't quite get a good look at it, but the display showed certificates and driver's licenses; like the program was drawing them up. Sarah started talking about how they'd used "their own software" to draw up the fake IDs for the title deed and the car, and how, with "the FBI on our side," it didn't seem likely they could be tracked.

The program looked really familiar, and then I remembered. One of my first jobs was programming some low-grade encryption for an Alternate Reality Game company, which was suppose to provide simple puzzles and hacking exercises for roleplaying gamers. "Is this about a roleplaying game?" I demanded.

Jonas, Daniel, Gina and Sarah stared at me.

"Yes?" said Daniel. The question intonation at the end confused me for a moment. Then −

"So," I started, "we started a fight in a restaurant, skipped out on a bill, and I knocked a man unconscious with a signboard and missed out on dessert − because the four of you play an alternate reality game?"

There was a brief silence, and I erupted.

"How DERANGED are YOU people!?" I screamed at them. "Stop the car! Stop it now!" Daniel obediently braked the van, and I pulled upon the door, bounded out and ran. I would walk home. I wasn't spending another second with these lunatics.

Half an hour into my walk, it occurred to me that it might be best to hail a taxi.

And during the ride home, I decided that the next time I was lonely, I would ignore the feeling.

POSTED BY ALEXIS CAPSHAW

27 December 2008 04:36 pm

olive branch?

Someone knocked on my door. It was the politest door knock I'd received since moving in here. The furniture deliveryman had a rather demanding knock on Thursday. Today's door-knocker had a much more patient, unintrusive rap; a single knock followed by a silence before a subsequent double-knock. In door-knocking terms, it was a, "Hello" followed by a very well-mannered question mark.

I thought about ignoring it, but I realized that the polite door knock might be followed by a curly-haired dysfunctional kicking my door in again. Reluctantly, I opened it. There was no one there. However, lying on the floor was a small plate. On the plate rested a slice of cheesecake and a fork. The plate had been thoughtfully covered in plastic wrap. I picked it up.

Taped to the side of the plate were two tickets to an art gallery a half-hour from here. A post-it on the tickets read, "Bring a friend? Or you can bring me, if you want." It wasn't signed, but I knew who it was from.

Was Gina asking me out on a date?

Um...

What should I wear?