I am honestly writing this simply because I think it would be really cool. At the moment it holds no relevance to the story in any way (although I'll probably make it minutely relevant somehow at some point)
Also posting this now cause the chapter that's supposed to happen chronologically after the last one is going to take me a long time to write, but this chapter is done already so there's no reason I should leave you guys with nothing for the week. We'll just say the chapter is a flashback when I finally finish it.
Anyway, enjoy!
ProtectorTale, Life Above Ch.28
"Alright, so, you are either going to find this as awesome as I do, or you're not really gonna care that much." Alphys started.
"Okay…" AJ said, awkwardly waiting for her to continue as the three of them stood in her lab.
"I mean why wouldn't you though!? This is so much cooler than using your phone!" The lizard exclaimed, more to herself than to them.
"So, wait, why am I here again?" Frisk asked, confused. The monster had been very excited that day and her explanations of things kinda went over their heads.
"Because I have something for you to test, something that you guys can take with you and tell me how it works as you mess around with it!" Alphys answered with an excited smile. "I'm going to send us all into the future! The super cool future, to be precise!"
The older human chuckled at her excitement. "Alright, alright, we get it, you're excited! You need to actually explain it all to us if we're gonna be excited too, ya know!" He pointed out.
"Right, right, hehe… sorry." Alphys cleared her throat. "Anyway, I became inspired lately because you humans have vast amounts of media for me to access. Video games, movies, TV shows, books, fanfiction, and in all those different stories are so many forms of technology that you humans, and therefore all of us, don't have. So I ended up coming across an entertaining video game that made me realize, 'Wait, I have magic tech, who knows what I can make with it that you couldn't before'! And that's how I got to trying to bring us all to the cool looking future, starting with something sans and I could easily design and build ourselves!" Alphys then went over to a small white desk with a single drawer that was in the middle of the room for seemingly no reason.
There was something on the desk worth noting though, a strange device. It looked like a tan disk, flat on one side, that could fit in your hand easily enough. The flat side was resting on the ground so the device was level, and it had a very small circular black button on the top, along with what looked like a lens directly in the middle, next to the button. Alphys pressed the small button before gesturing to the desk. "Tada!"
To their surprise, the lens began producing purple light and they immediately saw letters floating above the desk. First were the words "Items Currently Stored" and under that was simply the word "Wrench".
"Whooooaaa! Cool!" The girl exclaimed, walking up closer to look at the floating letters more.
"Whoa, hey! A hologram!" AJ said, being used to seeing them in video games and such. He walked closer to it before his eyes suddenly widened and his expression shifted as he realized how holograms went in the real world. "Wait, you made holograms!?" He said, pointing at the monster of the group.
"Yep!" The lizard answered, and he was pretty sure her tail swayed behind her a bit. She opened the drawer and showed that there was in fact just a wrench in there, as well as a small camera inside that detected whatever was thrown in or taken out, and sent this data to the holographic display above.
"How in the world did you make holograms?" The boy asked seriously.
"Well, basically, I discovered that the power of human computers can allow me to use magic tech to turn magical energy into amounts smaller than the eye can see, but it can still be manipulated and controlled. Normally holograms would require manipulating light somehow, but I got the idea to substitute light for magical energy that I can easily control, and it worked! The magic moves almost the speed of light, and will gather in just enough of a concentration to be seen, without really having any mass! AND, it's not light, so it doesn't keep going till it hits a wall or something!" Alphys explained.
Needless to say, Frisk did not follow. Though at this point, she didn't expect to.
"So far I've got a hologram system that shows me where my things are without having to go through them myself, sans volunteered his phone, so I've got a system that projects your phone screen in front of you! Though what I'm really excited about is the system I'm gonna give you guys!" She then went over to a nearby table and grabbed two more small devices that looked nearly identical to the one on the table, though the lens they had was on one of the ends of it rather than the top. She handed one to each of them before pointing at her hip. "It just attaches to your shirt through, um… actually I'll just say that's magic and leave it at that. Anyway, just press the button to turn it on and the sensors on it will help it project an interactive hologram just the right distance in front of you! Just think of it like a touchscreen phone!"
"Okay…" The boy trailed off and pressed the button on the device after sticking it to his right side. He suddenly found a screen of blue magic in front of him. There was so little magic that it was practically see through besides relevant info like text. "Hehe… hahaha! HaHAHAHA!" His high levels of excitement led to him laughing maniacally. "This is AWESOME!" He shouted before he reached out to the projection and started trying to figure out how navigate through the device. Like the holograms that had inspired the scientist, it responded to when he touched it.
"There aren't many programs currently on them right now, but I did give you guys a few things to try out." The lizard said to the humans who were now both standing in front of her with their arms extended towards the holograms in front of them. "Basically I'm having you guys take these home and just play with them. See what they can do, tell me what I should change about them, things like that."
"Oh! So we're basically just testers for a program before it goes public." AJ noticed.
"Yes, actually! I'm hoping to make this a usable product for everyone, and I've already got a few ideas for how I could improve on this system and make different variants of it!" Alphys explained passionately.
The older human was busying himself with thinking of things he could do on his phone and then figuring out how to do it with this holographic system. Tap a file to open it, brush your fingers along the surface of the hologram to scroll, use both hands rather than two fingers to zoom in or zoom out. If he focused when he touched the "screen" he could ever so faintly feel that the tips of his fingers were touching something physical, but the amount of magical energy was small, and gave easily if you applied even a small amount of force to it.
"So, are you gonna keep this 2D, or expand to 3D at some point?" The boy asked.
"Oh, it actually can become 3D when necessary." Alphys responded. "Just go to the home page, then gallery, then 3D models. I made a few really simple ones to test the 3D capability."
Frisk had mimicked her instructions all the way up till the home page, because her eyes homed in on the file titled "Games". She gasped in surprise. "You have games!?" She whispered excitedly.
"Well of course! You have to have games!" Alphys answered with a light laugh.
In the time it took her to say that, the younger human had pressed on the file, and it had opened up to show five games were inside. She gasped once again. "More than one! Yeeeees!"
The monster chuckled at that. "Yep! I was able to think of a few simple concepts for holographic games. So, just take this home and try out everything you can on it. Try to, uh, keep it to yourselves until I go public about the devices. It'll be easier to work on them that way."
"Understood." The taller human said with a nod. "Not to be rude, but, I'd like to get home now so we can play with these." He admitted with a chuckle.
Alphys laughed a bit. "That's fine! Go ahead! I'll get back to work and try to make more and better holo-devices."
"Alright then, see ya." AJ said and waved as he turned to leave.
"Bye!" Frisk said, waving as well.
"I'll be waiting for your guys' feedback!" The female lizard said.
The door to their house flew open. "Aaallllright!" The boy said excitedly as Frisk walked in before him. "Let's close the curtains so people can't see…" He trailed off as the two humans closed the curtains for the windows in their living room. "And then let's do this!"
Toriel came walking down the stairs. "Welcome back, children!" She greeted before gaining just the slightest look of concern. "What was it that Alphys needed?"
"Come on, Toriel, everything that Alphys tests isn't some dangerous explosive." The boy pointed out. "In fact, what she gave us today is awesome!"
"We got holograms!" The child cheered before pressing the button on the small projector on her right side.
"Oh!" Toriel exclaimed at the sight of the magic lights in front of the girl. "Well, that does look interesting!"
"Yeah, she's going to make this a public thing eventually once she's gotten better with the tech and probably after creating some more uses for it. We're just supposed to test it and just suggest ways to make it better." He looked off to the side. "She probably should have found better people for this than us, but… oh well! I'm not turning down the chance to have freakin holograms!" He exclaimed with an excited smile.
Goat Mom chuckled. "Good. I am glad I do not have to worry."
AJ sat down on the couch before turning on the device again, producing an area he could interact with that was at least twice the size of an ipad. He quickly went back to the gallery and pulled up the model of earth. It was only as detailed as a globe model, with no words on it besides the name of the continents. He was actually able to grab the globe and turn it around in his hands, or leave it floating in place and just spin it around. He imagined what it would look like if it was much more detailed, with streets and names of cities if you zoomed in farther. He couldn't help but get all giddy at the fact that this was actually happening. He was literally holding and playing with holograms.
He looked to the reading chair on his right, where Frisk was, and saw her playing a game with the holograms. She had a flat, vertical screen in front of her, with small, random circles appearing at random intervals. The game was to tap as many circles as she could, she was only allowed to miss three before she'd lose. It was the standard game with the goal of beating your own high score, but she had to be very quick to catch each circle as it appeared.
"Which game is that?" The teen asked.
"Uh…" It took her a moment to think as her eyes rushed over the screen to keep up with the circles that kept popping up. She hit three of them over the course of a second. "The third one!" She exclaimed as she nearly missed one.
"Okay." He put his hands on the top right and bottom left corners of the magic blue particle field that the projector was using and brought them to the middle in order to close the file entirely and go back to the home page. He clicked on the square labeled "games" and opened it up to the five files labeled in a number order. "Oh, she didn't name them. Eh, I'm terrible at names, too." He decided to try out the game himself and quickly felt how quick you needed to be to keep up with this game, and he was only playing on the normal difficulty.
Frisk still wanted to try the other games, so she decided to end the current one and try out the fifth game. The menu that popped up did not explain the game, but told her that two people were need to play the game. "Oh, AJ! This is a two player game! Let's try it!"
"Which one?" He asked.
"Number five!" She answered.
He quit his game and started up the fifth one. He stood up as he read the screen that stayed in front of him no matter where he walked. " 'This game requires two players. Stand at least five feet apart, preferably eight or more, and stand directly opposite of your opponent.' " After reading that, they did as instructed, and seeing no other option, both pressed the "Next" button. " 'Now hold your hand on the circle in front of you.' "
A bright outline of a blue circle had appeared in front of both of them. They both held a hand out and pressed it against the circle. From the center of the circle, magic energy stretched out as a beam of light to the other circle. After the beams connected, a small box of text appeared slightly to the right of them to explain the next step. "Keep your hand on the circle. Now, while standing still and keeping your arm stretched out, move the circle as far to the right as you can." They did as instructed, and their opposing circles were kept connected by the beam of blue light as they reached as far right as they could. They held their arms out for a few moment until they heard a *ping* sound from their projectors. They didn't know they could make sound.
The box then instructed them to bring the circles back to the middle. After that, it said to bring their holographic circles as high, and then as low as they can. With that, the text confirmed that was all they needed to do. Suddenly, their projectors stretched out a thing veil of magic 'light'. They were used to this, and had recognized it was the boundary of where the projector would create holograms, but what surprised them was how the projectors had both produced one half of a box that stretched the full eight feet between them, and spread out the full distance that AJ could reach where he was standing, on both sides. They both took a few moments to admire the incredibly large combined-hologram.
"How freaking long has she been working on these!?" The older human said, shocked, before pointing at the projectors on their right sides. "And what did she put in these things!? This looks like it would take a lot of computing power! And it's in such a little thing!"
"Maybe it doesn't actually take that much?" Frisk guessed.
He stared at the massive hologram in awe for a moment longer. "She really is sending us into the future… geez…"
A familiar text box appeared to the right of both of them, and AJ noticed there was a "Continue" button, as well as a "What was that?" button. He pressed the questioning one, and the text changed to a long explanation.
"The purpose of what you were just instructed was to find the max range the two competitors could reach. The beam you saw kept your projectors connected so the computers inside them could share the information and use it to build a 3D arena with their combined projecting power. It is currently set to the maximum range, meaning it stretches as far as the person who is tallest, or just has the longest limbs." He clicked the "Next" button.
"The slider below allows you to change the size of the box-shaped arena accordingly. You can see it is marked with the range of the maximum reach of both individuals. You could set it to fit the shorter/smaller individual to make it easier for them, but it would be easier for their opponent as well. You could also make it even larger, so the taller/larger individual would have to move around for the game, but then their opponent would need to move even more to keep up."
The box grew in size suddenly, and the boy noticed Frisk had moved the slider on her side. "Are you sure you want to do that? Even with your arms out it's almost double your width now." He pointed out.
"I don't mind." The girl responded honestly.
He shrugged as he didn't feel that bad if she just made it harder for herself. "If you say so. Don't make it any bigger though, or it won't fit the living room anymore." He said, and they both chuckled.
"Would you like to know the how the game works?" was the next thing that popped up on their text boxes. They both pressed "Yes", and they both were allowed to separately scroll through the explanation. Basically, this was 3D Pong, and they could either play using their whole bodies, or play while moving a virtual blocker to stop the ball. They decided to not use the virtual blocker, and the game's countdown began.
Once it began, a white, holographic ball somewhat larger than a baseball appeared in the middle, and began floating towards Frisk. It floated down to her level, and she tapped on the outside of the box just as it was about to touch that point on the holo-wall. A small part of where she touched glowed brighter, and the ball was repelled. It bounced off the floor on the way back to AJ's side, and he simply raised his arm up to touch the upper wall as it reached it. It bounced back, then off the ceiling, and came in towards Frisk again. She could see where it would reach, and she simply held her hand on that point until the ball bounced off.
It seemed like this wouldn't end easily, considering they could use their hands or even their feet to quickly touch a point on the outside of the arena and make the ball bounce away. However, they noticed the ball was slowly speeding up, and the longer they went, the quicker they had to be. It got to a point where the ball was totally out of control, and instead of reaching their side over the course off three seconds, it would hit their side if they just blinked three times. Pretty soon they were shouting and scrambling to keep up. The ball began moving so fast and bouncing off so many parts of the wall that it was impossible to keep up, and it hit the wall on Frisk's side before she could reach it in time.
They both took their time to catch their breath.
"Geez… that was… crazy…" AJ exclaimed.
"It was… really fast…" Frisk said.
"We need… to shrink the arena… cause you have too much ground to cover… and it's impossible when it gets that fast…"
"No… Come on… We can do this…"
He let out an annoyed sigh. "I didn't expect the holo-games to be such a damn workout…" He commented before straightening up.
Frisk did the same. "Alright… ready?"
"Ready."
She pressed the large button on her side, and the ball spawned in, and the next round began. They had fun with that game, and there was lots of fumbling, laughing, shouting, and cheering all around. Toriel came down to watch when it was clear they were having a lot of fun, and they even got her to try the game against Frisk. She fumbled around and ended up even clumsier than they were, but the three of them had a ton of fun, and Toriel was even wishing she could get her own from Alphys, saying she planned to buy one when she could. She eventually changed her statement and simply said it seemed like a good source of fun for family and friends.
That night, AJ stayed up to keep messing around with the holograms for awhile longer. The first thing he did was go to settings and discover that this system thankfully had a brightness setting, though the nightlight kept it from being terribly necessary. He decided to check the messaging system that he figured would have nothing in it and found two contacts. One was simply the other device, and one was Alphys. He figured he should send a message to Alphys while he was thinking about it. Pressing the buttons on the screen was very different from typing on a normal keyboard, and so it took awhile to write out all his thoughts.
Alphys pushed a few papers aside and let out a content sigh, satisfied with the work she had done, and ready to finally go to sleep. She slowly walked out of her side of the lab and looked out into the dark of the rest of the lab that was going unused. She turned back around to the light coming from her room in the lab and flicked the switch to turn it off. Her quiet steps had just made it to the stairs when she heard a noise from the table behind her.
*Beep* *Beep*… *Beep* *Beep*…*Beep* *Beep*
Her eyes opened back to full when she realized that was her hologram projector system on the table, and that it could only be getting messages from one of two sources. She walked with a somewhat quicker pace to the table and pressed the button on the device. It projected magical energy upwards, and the purple light from it did little to pierce the dark of the lab. The notification on the large projection was that she had, in fact, gotten a message.
The text read "Hey, Alphys, just thought I'd say this while I'm thinking about it, even though you might have already thought about this, but… Have you considered making the projector capable of producing a hologram entirely around you? Right now there's just the one device and it can only create an image on one side of you since I'm assuming it can't just send magical energy right through you to your other side. We've already seen that you somehow made these things capable of sharing information with each other through the holograms, so have you maybe considered, as odd as it would look, giving people two devices, one on each side, and made it so they were constantly connected so they could properly create a full image around you? It would certainly make it easier to play games like that two player one if you didn't have to be always facing the projection. Just a thought, figured you might like to at least have ideas, even though I don't see too many uses for this concept for a normal person."
Alphys smiled for a moment before pressing the respond button. The projector she now had on the table was a brand new device she had just finished that day, and it had another lens on the side of it that allowed it to create an angled holographic keyboard floating just off the table for her.
The teen was jumpscared by a loud beeping that seemed to have been magnified by the lack of noise in the room a moment before. He quickly pressed the only button on the projector in hopes it would stop, and it did. The device had no problem adapting to him lying in his bed and created a screen that was still parallel to him. The message from Alphys read "Thanks. I'll make sure to add that to my list of ideas for holograms that I plan to get to. Integrating holographic systems with each other like going from one device to a different one, integrating holo-systems with normal systems, and the obvious, like finding more and better ways to make use of holograms."
In the time it took AJ to find the volume setting and lower it massively, he got another message from the lizard. "We should probably get to sleep, shouldn't we? Goodnight."
He reached up to the screen floating over him to type back "Right. Goodnight."
The blue light shining over his body disappeared as he turned off the projector and tried to go to sleep.
THE FUTURE IS NOW, THANKS TO SCIENCE!
I explained that the best I could but I'm sure most of you still didn't get the visual since I'm really terrible at those. Sorry! I'd animate or draw it if I could!
Honestly just using magic tech to satisfy my fantasies of cool futuristic stuff being just available to everyone…
I don't really know what else to say, so… have a good one!
Alphys turned off the projector and walked away with a smile. Her smile suddenly went away and she stopped walking, her eyes widening from an epiphany. "A WAYPOINT SYSTEM! WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT BEFORE!?" She suddenly shouted at the ceiling before running over to write down the thought while she still had it.
