The Apocalypse Contract

CHAPTER 22 - SYDNEY

Three weeks into the Master Control Dongle Project, Sydney stumbled onto the answer to the mystery of the flavorless food. She was reading a section in the user manual discussing modification of object attributes, and the phrase 'mapping of chemical marker tags to olfactory and gustation heuristics' jumped out at her. She had read it before, but hadn't understood what it meant. Now she realized it was talking about the specific attributes that imparted odor and flavor to simulated items. As she sifted through object records, she found most left these attributes unfilled. The only exceptions were the few items that had undergone 'matter translation'. That included herself, the cats, and everything in her backpack. When she had cut herself, it had tasted faintly of blood. When her cats sniffed her, she no doubt smelled like a human. She might have been tempted to play with her own olfactory attributes just to learn how they worked, but both her and the cats were 'read only'. She retrieved her backpack from the closet and began going though its compartments, hoping to find some small item she could use as a reference.

She reached into a side pocket and came out with six packets of Irish Breakfast tea.

Her vision blurred. She wiped the tears from her face. Laughing, she ran to the kitchen and started the water boiling. While she waited for the water, she ripped open the foil packet and removed the tea bag, inhaling its aroma. Then she thought to grab an Irish Breakfast tea from the cupboard. It looked the same, but she knew this one would lack the olfactory and gustoral attributes. She ran to the star room and pulled the data up on the control table. There it was. One tea bag had NULL in those attribute fields. The other had a series of complex symbols denoting chemical compositions. She danced a victory lap around the table until the tea kettle started whistling, then she ran back and started the tea steeping. When the timer went off, she absentmindedly poured flavorless milk into her tea and was briefly surprised when she took her first sip.

But it still tasted like tea. She was ecstatic.

She returned to the backpack and continued looking. She found a half full package of mint candies, did another victory dance, then crushed up a candy and added it to her tea just for the novelty of it.

Progress on the dongle went more quickly after that. Logically, she knew it was mostly because a growing base of knowledge makes subsequent discoveries easier. She was assembling a jigsaw puzzle, and each subsequent piece became easier as more of the picture appeared.

But in her heart, she credited the tea. Every part of her development process worked better with a cup of tea in her hand. She worked almost nonstop, brewing cup after cup as she did. Two weeks later, she sat with a prototype Master Control Dongle in her hand.

It was time to test it.

She plugged it into a USB port on her laptop. She had modeled it after a normal USB thumb drive, and so far it was acting like one. The LED on the dongle blinked a few times as the laptop enumerated the newly connected device. She opened up a file browser and selected the dongle. She browsed directories and files representing the hierarchy of objects in the simulation that was her world. She couldn't modify any of these items because they hadn't been created by the dongle, but she could copy them, and the copies could be modified. She found the icon representing her coffee table, selected it, then dragged it to the folder representing her closet. A duplicate of the table appeared in the center of that now cavernous space.

Sydney leapt to her feet and shouted, "I am a god of virtual creation. Fear me puny mortals." She turned to the sofa where Zoe and Pixel were lounging. They failed to offer her the worship she was due. "Infidels!" She ran to them and smote them with ear scritches and belly rubs.

Then she returned to the closet with her laptop and resumed coding. Her next task was the creation of a translator plug-in for the Blender 3D editing software on her laptop, something that would allow it to directly manipulate items in her virtual world. Once that was working, she should be able to click on the icon for the coffee table and see a three dimensional model of it appear in Blender. Any changes she made to it in Blender should then translate to the actual table as soon as she hit 'save'.

Once that was working, she would start some serious redecorating.