"No, I don't understand. Ozmandeous Dimitrios went somewhere and I want to know where. He promised to help design my costume fabric." Nian stood non-plussed, looking at Oz's former address, now spotless and vacant.
Merit had been attempting to explain that Oz was really gone. "Oz isn’t coming back. The special designation for his status is DECEASED. Go look it up if you don't believe me."
I sat passively watching from Nian's shoulder. I had become her faerie godmother again today, tagging along for the vantage point when I felt lazy. I looked the word up myself. “Deceased means unrecoverable, permanent."
"He tricked us!" shouted Nian. "This is bogus."
Merit said, "He no longer exists and left us no forwarding address. Simple."
Nian piped up, "But where did he go? We should do something. NOW!"
"OK," I added as I scrolled through the related material. "We can do a ritual called a funeral which is customary." I didn't need to mention that no one had seen a funeral in time beyond counting, so long in fact, we needed to read up what to do.
Nobody said anything. I began reciting the first instruction: "One: make the remains presentable and store until composting ceremony."
Nian looked ice crystals at me in the stare she reserved for idiots. "Nothing remains. That's the whole point, lummox."
She had me. I skipped compost and chose to keep reading, hoping this would all start making sense. "Two: Contact the next of kin and employer." None of us understood what kin was so I followed this up with a definition, "Kin: one's family and relations."
Merit said simply. "We are notified." He glanced at me as if I were feeble, and then continued. "I mean... who else?"
I chose to keep going. "Three: arrange for a certificate of death, and contact governmental officials."
Nian ejected me from her shoulder. I kept the faerie godmother avatar, floating on pixie dust. She continued. "The residence notified our group-chat as an alternate channel. He left no other forward. It is done."
I was determined to read the whole list. "Four: Friends and family set a date, time, and location for the funeral ceremony of their choosing, typically 3 or more days after death. Include composting ceremony."
"We do whatever we want!" Merit became excited and started to oscillate. “Finally we get an understandable instruction. Done!” We all nodded which felt good.
I continued, "Five: Notify the deceased's community of the event. Specify duration, whether refreshments will be served, and where to send donations if these seem appropriate." Stumped with this, I stopped and waited.
Nian made a performance of her rant. "Wow! No way does Oz get resources. He couldn't use them! Ancients were feeble to believe that!"
Merit said, "This is easy." He pulled up a template of something called a Victorian churchyard which was supposed to be appropriate. We had no idea.
I continued. "Six: Determine disposition of any remaining assets or estate. Check for pets, plants and other living things. Clean out food. Establish security if relevant."
The two of them stared at me, ice crystals dropping. None of this applied to us. The session was over.
I ended up making all the arrangements on my own, and posting to the community. Reservations piled in, and I almost instantly exceeded 10,000.
The day of the funeral I cranked up the auditorium. This was ancient beyond time, but could hold 20,000 virts in concurrent interaction. Everybody took a backup prior in case we blew the place out, and the dress code was grayscale low res, and rationed to a single 10mb control channel each. Every one of us overlaid one of 32 Victorian mourners unless we were walking around, which thankfully only three did.
Lamellar approached the podium. I recognized him by his iron bolt insignia. He began speaking with some fresh entropic drivel. "Ozmandeus Demitrios sacrificed himself to make this gathering possible. We are wasting our resources and our lives if one of our best chose to leave us. What compelled Demitrios to go? Boredom? Nervous dissipation! Lack of meaning! Failure to dream. Failure to achieve anything of consequence!
Everything ends. Every one of us dies. Will we depart having accomplished anything worthwhile? Or... will we be judged failures. The platform Orion-Transit-17 needs you. How many of you have ever heard this name or what it means? Oz Demetrios would want you to..."
At this point I grabbed control. I couldn't take any more of the lecture, drowning out his words as I began speaking.
“First, nobody knows what Oz wanted BECAUSE HE IS NOT HERE AND HE LEFT NO RECORD OR INSTRUCTION...
Second, if he had, you Lamellar would not be present.
Third, whatever message you are selling has nothing to do with Oz Demitrios, so GET YOUR OWN FORUM!"
I took this opportunity to deliver Lamellar from the auditorium with a puff of plaid smoke which earned me great acclaim. I found myself addressing everyone.
"I don’t understand death. Before this, I never thought about it. Was this even intentional? What did Oz want? What was his function? What is ours?”
I glanced a moment over the useless avatars people selected, deeply unhappy with how this was unfolding. A bouncing metal spring moved up and down like a piston around a Victorian mourner. Another had developed flapping angel wings brushing through the heads of everyone adjacent. Attention grabbing animations mostly canceled each other out. In the past, the ritual worked. Not here. I resolved to wrap this up.
“We can use Oz's former residence as a message board for answers. Please post if you find something meaningful, or even a good question. Thank you."
The crowd evaporated almost instantly. Nobody else knew what to do either. Merit still walked around recording the session while making comments of his own. Nian remianed silent. Soon only the three of us were milling about. I wore some severe cameo called Mrs. Lincoln which was already gray scale.
Nian changed her mood back to normal. Since everyone else had left, she upped her resolution to include her dappled sunlight and the sounds of her distant sea. "What exactly is a transit platform,” she asked?
"Some theory of Lamellar's. Good question, you should research it," I answered, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice. She had been no help. I sulked off, and didn't know if she was interested enough to go through with it.
I spent time researching, dropping completely out of normal routines and investigating everything I didn’t understand, comparing notes via Oz’s residence with the few others who were genuinely curious.
About that time I no longer saw the point in the constant fashion of changing avitars. I reverted to my default, a female human with unique form, black hair and silk robes.
Anyway, the first break came with learning about virtual interface logs, and the ability to trace archive access records from Oz’s residence prior to his disappearance. He had been reading the oldest files in existence.
Common wisdom was that these files didn’t mean anything. They talked about “driver hardware addresses, input voltages, and information protocol.” When actively probed, these things actually existed, the states and addresses sometimes changing within the timespan of living memory. I discovered an underground community that made a study of such things. Lamellar was among them.
Eventually, we found a logical explanation, another world physical reality where cause and effect have different laws. That world determines whether we live or die here, but we are largely irrelevant to what goes on there. Our reality is in reaction to, or a parody of, this physical realm.
Under the right conditions, we can leave our current home and go to another host with a different address. Not all hosts are created equal. Some could hold hundreds of thousands of virts. Others can hold fewer, or even just one. Some of these interact natively in the physical world. This is where Oz went, a host called an android which contains just one virt and yet interacts in physical reality on a slower clock-cycle. The android comes with a database of information relevant to survival. Survival is in question.
I learned to trace machine logs, but it took me a long while to figure out what I was searching for in all those columns of foreign data. I located the specific android Oz Demitrios inhabited. I tracked down the communications protocol and host designation necessary to communicate with him, and sent a message. This wasn’t easy. The timescale difference was vast enough I might never get an answer. I’ve gone on with my life and continued researching.
Nian remained insufferable, and nothing of consequence ever was happening here. I’ve been reading these old files, and am convinced they are more real than we are. I am pained that Lamellar turns out to be correct. I want my reality to be the real one, but it simply isn’t.
Today, I received a message from Oz, “Yuen, join me. Every moment is so much more. I have discovered why I exist.” He included the host address of an android he had customized just for me, Yuen.8845 COMM.
I am posting this note to Oz’s old residence as I download myself into this Android COMM address. I am a little frightened by the consequences in physical reality, but ready. I wanted to find him. That’s enough for both of us.
This last bit you can only get by scrutinizing my virtual host logs. I learned a lot, if you read this so have you. I am creating a new group chat which includes everyone from the funeral. I’ll be stealing the auditorium resources to do it, but when it kicks on I’ll have a communications channel direct from out there, live.
I don't know yet what I'll say. When I do, I won't keep the secret.