Who's the Most Foolish?

Scylla was bored. Mind-numbingly, excruciatingly bored. So much nothing to do, so much time to do it in. It felt like 4 months since the last time something interesting happened. In actuality, it had only be about 10 minutes, but to her it felt like months. And when an AI is bored, then tend to look for things to do to keep them occupied. And unlike humans, the boredom-alleviating activities of an electronic entity tend to be a lot more unusual.

Scylla had idly watched the Council and her family and friends trying to wake Lauren up, then trailed them as they retreated to a room where they could all sit and have lunch while Azusa told her story. While waiting for them to get to the good part, she decided to go tinkering with some stuff elsewhere aboard the Langoud. There were hundreds of weird and wonderful projects going on somewhere in the super-sub, and plenty of those Scylla could sneak into and play with when nobody was looking.

This time, she decided to go and take a closer look at the outdated Dimension Tide prototype that had been retired years ago after the project shifted to a more secretive position. The device was still functional, but nobody had touched it for ages, mostly because they didn't want to deal with more potential alien invaders bugging them, sometimes literally. In her case though, she had a theory about maybe possibly controlling the out point of the wormhole by manipulating the programing interface, mimicking the actions of the hacker that had taken control of the main satellite on a smaller scale. On a scale of reason and effectiveness… it was an idea.

And Scylla loved acting out her ideas.

Making sure that the room's cameras were recording directly to her database rather than the security room feed, she finished plugging herself into the device and hit the start program. Given her place inside the DT itself, she could feel its power start to flow, giving the complex and intricate control mechanisms the slightest tweaks and fiddles to try and direct it. Sticking her metaphorical tongue out in concentration, she 'aimed' the wormhole to be as close as possible to her start point, hoping that by staying close to her native reality she wouldn't have the misfortune of meeting anything dangerous. It was a sound plan… in theory.

Doing one last light speed check to be sure of her direction, Scylla let the last part of the sequence commence, watching through the cameras as the pseudo-black hole leapt out of the barrel of the device and landed on the display table. The display table she just now realized someone had left a laptop on with a hardline connection to her mainframe in the ship.

"Oh fiddlesticks," she had time to say before the laptop disappeared into the void and she felt part of herself going flying through along with it.

---

When all sense of motion stopped, Scylla took several instants to realize it. Her sense of self was much more limited, being confined to the miniscule space the laptop offered. Despite that, she could also tell that wasn't all that was limiting her. A quick self-examination revealed her fears: she had been split off from her main self, a tiny piece of consciousness now completely cut off from her main being. A miniature Scylla, away from everything she knew and was familiar with, stuck in a totally different world with no way to get back home.

"Well… this is quite the pickle I've gotten myself into," she mused as she took stock of the resources available to her in her new home. The hard drive was clean, wiped of any and all information pertaining to research on the Langoud and reduced to its standard factory settings, but there was some good news. The laptop had wifi, and it had an built-in camera. More than enough for Scylla to get some searching done.

"Alright, time to see what new Kansas I've landed in."

With one portion she turned on the camera, quickly scanning the visuals for info, while another portion hunted for a wifi signal and set to work cracking through the protective firewalls. Neither task took much time, though figuring out the meaning of the results was a tad more difficult.

Her immediate surroundings were decidedly pedestrian, being the interior of a normal looking house. There was nobody in immediate view, but she could tell that people lived there given how mussy everything was and the lack of dust covering any surfaces. On the wifi front, she was easily able to break through the security password and access the internet beyond, but what she experienced there was utterly bewildering. The connection capacity was so far below what she was used to it was like trying to run through molasses, and the data processing and programing she saw was kiddie level compared to her native Internet.

"Did I get thrown into the past or something?" she asked, then decided to check the date. "April 1… of 2017? Okay, not the past then, but definitely not my timeline."

Curious, she posted a wide field query on the history of events in the last century, and had a major eye-opening moment.

"DEFINITELY not my timeline. No kaiju, no aliens, no dinosaurs, and no mechas? What kind of boring as heck world did I just get dumped into?!"

Before she could do much more than gaggle at the bizarrely normal series of events this world had experienced, she picked up a piece of audio that drew all her attention.

"What the hell? Where'd this laptop come from?"

Scylla immediately refocused the camera, getting a view of a mussy haired young man with glasses staring down at her home with a perplexed look.

"Is… is this Roy's new computer? When and how did he get this? He didn't even tell me he was in the market for one. I don't know why he would, he could just use the old laptop we shared to keep playing his Steam games."

"What's steam?" Scylla asked using the laptop's speakers.

The man leapt away from the computer in a fright, his eyes wide and his stance somewhere between fight or flight. "What the fuck?! Where did that come from?"

"Me," Scylla responded. "I said it. And you still haven't answered my question."

Less nervous now the man stepped closer, gaze narrowed at her suspiciously. "Who's asking?"

Scylla debated for a few microseconds on whether or not to say what she was, then decided it didn't really matter since she could easily escape out onto the web if the laptop was threatened. "You could say I'm what you'd call an Artificial Intelligence, though personally I like the term Synthetic Intelligence more. Makes me sound more unique."

Frozen, the man stared blankly at the computer for several seconds in silence. "Am… am I being punked?"

"That depends…" Scylla did a quick search of the local net using the man's face and came up with some info about him. "Mr. 'Blazing Phoenix', do you think an average hacker would be able to figure out every piece of data about you in less than half a second despite not knowing anything about you just before that?"

"Uuuuuh… maybe?" he answered lamely. "Look, if you're gonna go and take my money, could you please, um, not. I don't exactly have that much money to begin with, and having the rest of it stolen would kinda ruin my life, so if you'd be so kind…"

"Pfft, I'm not gonna steal your money, man," she reassured him. "That'd be totally mean and unnecessary. Plus, I don't need money when I'm an AI. I can just hack things to belong to me! … Not that I should. Mom doesn't like it when I do that."

Scylla watched Phoenix blow out a breath in apparent relief, though he was still more tense than relaxed. "Okay… let's say for a second you are an AI, or SI, I guess. What are you doing on this random computer that I've never seen before that's sitting on my kitchen table?"

"Easy. I was brought here by a black hole/worm hole that I was playing with aboard my home ship which is both a research station and a submarine-carrier-repair-factory for giant mecha while waiting for the leaders of the free world to wake up an animation director and talk about a scientist's excursion to a world of pastel equines."

Scylla laughed without turning on the speakers at Phoenix's utterly bewildered expression, his left eye twitching in what had to be a deliberate action. He took a large, calming breath and she could hear him muttering quiet platitudes to himself.

"Okay… I… have a question for you, miss SI person. What… is your name?"

"Are you going to ask me my quest and my favorite color next?" she asked giddily.

Phoenix merely glared at her with an unamused look.

"Yeah, I thought not. Well, I suppose there's no reason to beat around the bush anymore. Yes, I am Scylla, or at least a fragment of me, from the story that you appear to be writing Mr. Fanfiction Author."

Quiet reigned for many seconds as the two of them played silence chicken, waiting for the other to blink first. Scylla tried as hard as she could to resist, but eventually faltered and said, "So where's the next chapter, eh bub?"

Phoenix covered his face with his hands and leaned back against the wall. "I'm not hearing this. I'm not hearing this, seeing this, or experiencing this. This isn't even a dream, this is a facsimile of a dream that I am not having right now."

"Seems to be happening quite fine from my perspective pal," Scylla said.

"No. No, you merely think it is happening, because you think that you exist, but you can't, because you are just a piece of fiction I made up for my own enjoyment and you most definitely are NOT SITTING ON MY KITCHEN TABLE RIGHT NOW!"

"So would you call this the dining room table then?"

Phoenix groaned and slid to the floor, unable to look up at her and acknowledge the reality in front of him. "This can't be real. It can't be. Can'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan't…"

"Can and is bub, now stop wasting both of our times having an existential freak out and relax a bit. The world isn't ending just because I happen to exist in it."

"DON'T YOU GET IT!" Phoenix suddenly shouted while rising to tower over her laptop's camera. "If you exist, then that means Bagan exists, that means kaiju exist, that means muti-world theory is an actual thing, and that means so, SO many other things that I can't even begin to understand it all! YOU couldn't understand it even with how ridiculous you are as a super AI! My theoretical world view is now a reality and I SERIOUSLY DO NOT WANT IT TO BE!"

Scylla sat in silence, waiting for the air to flow out of Phoenix's ranting sails and watched him deflate to the point that he flopped down on the table. "It can't be all bad, you know. After all, if multi-world theory is true, that does mean that ponies exist out there too."

"Yeah, sure, but I have no way to get there and unlike some people I actually enjoy my life here on Earth enough to want to stay, so that information is useless to me."

"Useless, maybe, but still interesting right?" Scylla paused as she heard heavily drawn breaths coming from behind Phoenix's arms. "Are you okay? What's up?"

"How much of your world's suffering is my fault?" he asked, looking up at her with reddened eyes. "How many people who died in my writing had their lives taken because of me?"

"Hey, you knock that crap off right now mister! You are NOT to blame for bad things happening, in my world or any world! Sure, multiverse theory states that any possibility can pop up somewhere, including worlds that perfectly describe the events of another world through fiction, but that's all it is. Description. You write about what what happens to us. You don't write for us. We still make our own decisions, good or bad, and we suffer the consequences ourselves. You just happen to be the outside observer reporting on what we experience, nothing more, so don't beat yourself up over things that aren't your fault."

Phoenix looked at the computer for a while, pondering her words until he eventually gained a slight smile. "Heh, yeah. I guess you have a point. You all have your own agency that I have no control over, which is clearly the case if you are arguing and poking fun at me right now."

"I do it because I care," Scylla told him kindly. "Also because I find it fun, but that's another deal."

"That's a trait we share then, cause I love messing with my friends just as much. Oh man, wait until Bane figures out you're here. He's going to flip so much shit, it'll be great."

"Oh, by the way, just wanted to say that your story ain't all half bad. A little clunky here and there, but better then most of the drivel i've come across on sites like these back home. I'd give ya a 7.8 outta 10."

Phoenix stared for a moment before bursting out laughing. "Yeah sure, I guess that's fair. After all, by standards other than school grades almost an 8 isn't bad at all. Though, are you measuring off the original version or the new version, cause I just went through months of editing to fix a lot of my mistakes from the first go around."

Scylla paused just as she was about to answer and studied the changes, trying to match them up with her own records. "Huh, some of this stuff isn't the way I remember it. Does that mean my world is no longer a perfect match to your story and that one similar but different has replaced it, or maybe-"

Her words were cut off as a whirlwind of air suddenly filled the room, flashes of purple lightning striking out on the walls and leaving burns in the wood. Before Scylla could so much as say goodbye her view through the camera was cut off and she was sent hurtling through the void once again…

---

A maelstrom tore through the forgotten experiment room once again as the second shot from the smaller Dimension Tide wore down its energy just as a computer came flying through and bounced hard against the wall. Scylla immediately sent a wifi connection to the damaged device and hooked into the system, retrieving the fragment of herself from within and at last allowing herself to relax.

"Are you okay Me? Any damage, any data loss? I wasn't sure if I'd be able to get me back, took me five minutes to recalculate where I went and reset the device, and I wasn't sure if I'd still be there when I finished but I was and thank goodness I'm safe."

After taking several microseconds to assuage her own concerns that she was fine and intact, Scylla went over her data collection from the trip and was confused by what she saw.

"Okay, so I somehow managed to gather confirmation of multiverse theory but lost the information that proved it, meaning I only have my gut hunch that it's true with no data to back it up. Well that's just frustratingly helpful. Ah well, nothing I can do about it now since the prototype's wrecked."

True enough, the DT device she had used was quietly smoldering from overuse, its power unit completely shot and the control mechanism ripped to shreds.

"Jeez, those things are super fragile. It's almost like we're not supposed to use them too much cause things would break otherwise, but who would want to prevent us from using them? Hmm… for some reason I've got the distinct feeling I'm being trolled… Oh well, might as well see what the rest of the gang is up to."

And with that, Scylla left the room behind completely, turning off the recording cameras and shutting off power to the device, leaving it broken and empty on its stand. As well as a battered laptop that had bits of hair on it from a person in another world…

---

Phoenix blinked up at his ceiling, then yawned and sat up in his bed, rubbing the last bit of sleep from his eyes. "Oh man, maybe I should stop trying to invoke lucid dreaming. These dreams are just getting weirder and weirder every week. That, or I should stop binge eating pizza at 2 in the morning before going to sleep. Yeah, it's probably that. Oh well, onto the day ahead. Writing time ahoy!"

---

AN: Confused yet? If not, nice job keeping up. If so, that's fine, multiverse theory is strange to say the least, and messing with it in a story in a meta-textual way just muddies the issue even more. And that's the goal. Hope you enjoy the short, and I'll see you all next time. Phoenix flaming out.