Audience Participation Time

A snippit of a story follows that I banged out the other night. The idea is you tell me what the ending should be, short and sweet, a sentence or two, nothing complicated. (Actually, I have one picked out, but why should *I* have all the fun? Besides, since my idea pretty much came out of a Jack Daniels bottle, yours is probably gonna be better.)

It was the same motel room, really. Different city, different time, different bedspread. Nice enough, clean, which is pretty much all you could ask.

Boring.

I was drunk, watching the same stuff as always on the same TV. Even the paintings on the wall were the same. There must be some WalMart for motel chains where they all go to buy the same crappy art. Actually, if there weren't, there ought to be. Money to be made there... I scrawled a note to myself that I'd never read and stuck it as a page-mark in the book on the nightstand next to the bed.

It was a popular physics book. Popular, as in "written for a popular audience," not as in "everyone's heard of it." It was essentially an introduction into some of the more esoteric realities of reality, the size of the universe, and deep time, and quantum fluctuations, and the question of the granularity of the universe at insanely small scales.

That one, the granularity one, was where I'd finally drunk enough Jack Daniels to realize that it was time to switch over to a less taxing exercise. Ergo, the zero-effort observation of the same old shit on the same old box.

A small movement on the nightstand next to me, right next to the discarded book caught my eye, and I jumped. I thought at first it was a cockroach, and I was going to be saying horrible things and yelling at desk clerks. But it was only a small, almost miniature green grasshopper, about as harmless a bug as one can imagine, and one I'd very likely brought in myself on my shoe or attached to some piece of shirt or pants after tromping around the field behind the motel trying to get enough exercise to sleep.

The grasshopper calmly watched me with its dark oval eyes, antennae twitching, neatly folded rear legs, banded in a darker green than the dirty-emerald body, ready to spring on the instant.

For a moment, I had the notion that it was truly watching, interested in what I was doing. I snorted at the conceit. It was a very small grasshopper, and if its entire body mass were made up of nothing but brain, if it were the chief genius of grasshopperdom, there would still be barely enough neural connections to keep track of threats and eating and whether it was breathing, never mind taking an interest in something it probably only saw as a large wad of moving light and shadow.

"Actually," said the grasshopper, "we can see pretty well."

"Pardon.” I said, vaguely annoyed at the interruption.

"It’s the eyes. Compound, you know. We have compound eyes. They aren't as good as yours for detail, but they take in a lot of universes at once. Sort of like a kaleidoscope, y’see."

“Yeah, I'd heard that,” I said. “Wait, did you say universes? You meant 'views,' right?”

“No. It's universes,” the insect replied, turning slightly to examine with some interest my near-empty whiskey glass towering over him.

“Excuse me,” I said sharply, picking up the glass and firing down the rest of the golden liquid in a single gulp. Probably not the best idea.

The whiskey fumes roiled up through my brain and collided with the part of me that was about to rebel over talking to a grasshopper, and both were skewered into place by that particular kind of horror-show thrill that only high-definition hallucinations produce. The practical result was a deer-in-the-headlights lockup.

I sat on the edge of the bed and the grasshopper and I stared at each other as I tried to come to grips with the the implication that, at least for the moment, I was going to have to be comfortable with having a conversation with a bug, and there wasn't much to do about it that wasn't going to make it worse.

I just hate this kind of crap. It's why I'd given up on hallucinogens back in the 70s. At any rate, the bug seemed to be pretty comfortable with me, so there was that.

The number of impossible things I was having to accept suddenly sloshed over the dike.

"Really?" I said, addressing the empty glass. "A fucking talking grasshopper? That's the best you've got? This must be some kind of joke."

"Not at all," the grasshopper replied, which rather surprised me, since long-term conversations with figments were not the norm in this sort of episode, at least not for me. "You caught me here. Wasn't on purpose, you know, but here I am."

"Ah," I said, "I see."

Which was pretty stupid, since I clearly didn't.

"And just how did I catch you?" I asked.

"Well this is our simulation. This universe, I mean. I'm just here checking code, tweaking it a bit." The expressionless brown oval eyes regarded me for a moment, letting me absorb the information. "You seem to have run a bit off the tracks," it explained helpfully.

"No shit," I said. "I'm talking with a bug. And it's talking back."

"Yeah, well, that's my fault I guess," said the grasshopper, although he didn't sound regretful. "For what it's worth, you won't remember it in, what for you will be, the morning. But when I have to get into the simulation to make a fix, I like to interact a bit with the sims. You, for example."

He crept over to the edge of the nightstand in order to get more eye-to-eye with me.

"Y'all are interesting," he said. "I've never explained this to any of you before - I just wanted to see what would happen, where you go from here. Of course, I have to adjust everything when I'm done, reset you back to where you were and whatnot before the boss finds out I've been diddling around in his project. But it's just fascinating, really."

"Uhm...glad to help, I guess," I said. I'd never been grasshopper-talking drunk before, but based on lesser episodes of Jack Daniels poisoning, I had no reason to think that things were going to improve. Being barking mad and drunk in a motel room in a strange town never seemed to end well.

"For the simulation to be even remotely useful, you see," the bug continued, "we have to give the elements a considerable degree of randomized freedom, which means that they create elements and details of their universe as they go along interacting with other code. You were reading some esoteric physics, which caused your mind to move a certain direction at the same time you were drinking, which made it rather more likely that certain patterns would emerge, at the same time you were in a position and had enough background and curiosity to begin noticing our tiling. A very small probability combination, really, but these things do happen from time to time. I'm here to fix it."

"Tiling?" I said, totally lost.

"Yes. You were noticing the fact that this room looks a lot like any other motel room you've ever been in, for example. It makes for a much simpler code if we reuse snippits. This kinda IS the same room you've ever stayed in, or at least one of a pretty small number of templates we build them on."

In Our Next Episode: I dunno. We'll see what y'all come up with, assuming any of you fall for writing my story for me decide to participate. Hopefully it will involve my code nuzzling a code snippit shaped like this: