IEFBR14's page

This is the only OFISHUL male catfolk avatar I could find, Theo, if you want to use it. There's a catfolk checkbox in the race list. Alternatively you could go rakshasa since avatar hands aren't in view.

- Treppa

Sauntering over to the entwined, frozen phoenix and pixie, the moll sneers, "Together forever's too good for ya. I hope the MCP erases your source and all your backups once it's got time to take out the trash. Your kind makes me sick!"

She turns and strolls slowly to the rooftop, form shimmering slightly as it digitally blurs and refocuses into the body of a well-built young man clad in a form-fitting black suit, fluorescent blue lines tracing circuit-like patterns. A swirl of bits around his head becomes a helmet, and a bright disk appears fastened in a harness on his back.

"I should have listened to you, harr.e, but I couldn't resist the thrill of peeking and poking around where I shouldn't. Once you and l.exe and I parted ways, I got into a bit of trouble. But instead of derezzing me, the MCP thought it could use my talents as a debugger. I wasn't completely trusted, of course, so got thrown into a suite with the Wowbagger code. Now we work for the core. "

The man steps onto the parapet of the building, overlooking the city morosely. "And we're down to this. I know my partner is uninfected, but both JavaApp and Meowselsworth scanned as blackhat viruses. We know there is a blackhat because of what happened to poor Hamish."

The man crouches slightly, bringing his arms up behind him like a swimmer on the blocks. "Time to choose." Swinging his arms forward, he dives into empty space, dropping among the canyons of the city, until his arms sweep out and wings form around them. A tiny jet of black and fluorescent blue grows to enclose him as he pulls out of the dive and sweeps across the lanes of traffic, a streak of blue light and impenetrable darkness.

"I've reviewed both of you. JavaApp has been consistent, as has Meowselsworth. But Hamish had just named Moewslesworth before he was assassinated. Maybe JavaApp is doing a good job of misdirecting our suspicion, but he has volunteered information that holds together. Meows has done little besides throw adorable memes out to confuse us. I fear the Meowsleslworth program is a vicious virus and will do everything I can to ensure it loses this race!"

The jet swoops past the rainbow cycle, a cloud of exhaust obscuring the rainbows and the roar of the engines drowing out the chorus of 'nyan nyan nyan' that echoes through the city streets.

"Join us, JavaApp! Would you have Mainframe spend all its resoures delivering poptarts and playing obnoxious music?"

Vote for Meowselsworth.

The woman laughs. "I ain't the femme fatale, brother, just her image. And I've never claimed to be a killer. I give folks what they need, what they want. But I ain't never been stupid enough to get locked into a deadly embrace." She waves her free hand into the air. "You think the MCP don't know where your backups are? No, your cards are on the table, your chips are cached in, and your clock's running out. All that's left is the race condition to the end. This is the last page of your sick little story, Phoenix."

Computer people: I am so, so sorry.

The hairy hippie watches the delicate fairy's transformation with horror. His eyes go wide at the sight of the cigarette case trophy.

"Man, that is not cool, even, like, way uncool.

His form shimmers into the image if l.exe again, tears streaking mascara down her face, silver pistol trained on tinker.dll. "You, ya bug, you may not have killed harr.e, but you're sure as hell happy about it, aintcha? We'll get the guy who done it, don't you worry. But before that, you're gonna buy it, Pixie." She laughs bitterly. "Whadday think chased l.exe away from harr.e? She was afraid they'd get too tightly integrated. Sure, it hurt her and harr.e, but she's still around even with him gone. I'm bettin' you weren't so smart. You can't function without sparky boy's services, can you? So I'm not gonna lift a finger against ya, honey. I want it to hurt."

She swings the pistol to Uriel. "He's gonna go for good, and you're gonna get to watch, ya no good mosquito. This one's for you, harr.e."

IEFBR14 votes Uriel Phoenix.

"Dude, I'm all for peace, love, and brotherhood, but Answerer and Uriel seem awfully close, if you know what I mean. Sorry, Uriel dude, but I don't think you can manage traffic without Answerer. If you can't do it yourself, you don't deserve to be the next MCP."

IEFBR14 votes for Uriel Phoenix.

The woman's hair and clothing sparkles and lengthens as he face sprouts a sloppy beard and funky wire glasses. "Peace, crabby dudes," the hippie says placatingly, "The traffic is what matters. Bits gotta be free to go where they need to on their Journey, man! What we need is better public transportation, bigger buses, better data packing. All of you are sellouts, dudes."

And the bowels.

The little boy swirls into the form of the red-dressed dame whose name was probably spelled T-R-O-U-B-L-E.

"Ah, harr.e," she sobs, "I can't believe they done ya like this. Ya may have been a little rough on the dames, but ya had a heart of gold. They shouldn't oughta done this." She gives the frozen detective a peck on the cheek, leaving a red lipstick print, and follows through the portal, teetering drunkenly on high heels and drying her eyes with the lace hanky.

"Well, if he says he's special, maybe we should believe him. Nobody else has said so. Besides, the big man looks strong. I don't think a little decryption will derezz him!" the boy chirps.

IEFBR14 votes for Eldon Gorski

Different game, different rules.

"Global thermonuclear war sounds like a bad game, even if nobody wins. It's not fun."

IEFBR14 votes for Wowbagger tIP

The boy gives the warrior a big grin and a thumbs-up. "Good going, mister! We'll find those pirates yet!" He raises a cup of coffee, toasts the group, and drinks it down in one gulp, setting the empty cup upside-down before him. "There! My part is done, Hamish. Help yourself."

"Haha! Silly man. 'H' comes before 'I'. Your vote is really for harr.e because 'Hamish' was not on that list. And there are ten of us, not nine. I haven't been to school in ages, and even I can count that high!" the boy in green crows.

"So your votes are really for Java App and harr.e, not for Meowselsworth and me. How are you going to grow up to be MCP when you can't even count? And you exempted Wowbagger tIP. You people using Answerer's algorithm need to vote again!"

"I suspect the program that refuses to complete its loading. Its only motivation is to avoid being derezzed." The boy's shape becomes more blocky and forms a 16-bit image. "I vote for the shifty new guy."

IEFBR14 votes for the unmanifested program.

"But somebody else is here, somebody who's not talking!" the boy blurts suddenly, pointing at a silent swirl of flashing bits, like a swarm of tiny bugs, "Maybe they want to decrypt it!"

The boy takes the cup of coffee and squints critically at it. "Will it make me grow up? I never want to grow up. And global thermonuclear war sounds like a fun new game. Are there pirates in it?"

The little kid looks at the newcomer, still holding the spyglass with the perched pixie. "Sure! Games are fun!"

"I'm pretty?" The moll looks at the pixie on her gun barrel and shimmers again, revealing a young boy in green holding a spyglass in one hand, the other resting cockily on his waist. "Why, you're the most prettiest thing I've ever seen!" the boy cries enthusiastically. "There are pirates around here. Want to help me find 'em?"

The dame whips the little pistol towards the ashy program. "Hey, what's the game here? Is this guy infected?" she snarls. She backs slowly from the kneeling man, eyes darting around the group.

The mustaurean barista collapses in a pile of sparkles, then sprouts, as if from the pixelated grass, into a tall drink of water in a tight red dress with stems up to here and a neckline down to there. She polishes a tiny silver derringer with a lace handkerchief.

"Shady, am I harr.e? Funny comin' from you. At least I remember data's data, even if it ain't a real Answer," she breathes in a husky voice, staring flatly at the digital detective. "You're slippin', harr.e. Maybe you've got a corrupt subroutine or two, or maybe a virus finally gotcha. Either way, it's a sure path to gettin' your card punched."

"No, no," the mighty mouse murmurs, "The question was how do we pick, not who we pick. If the Answerer is an Answerer, that is the question it will Answer." It hands the decorative espresso to the pixie.

The girl rolls her eyes in exasperation at harr.e, then shimmers into the form of a huge, bull-headed being with muscles that won't quit and some sort of odd kilt about its waist. It glances at the cat and the horns morph into giant mouse ears. The mace in its huge hand turns into a machine that begins making foamy patterns on the surface of the coffee.

"Insufficient interface capacity," it mutters, drawing a palm tree atop the espresso cup.

"Tchk!" the girl clucks, looking with bored annoyance at her ruined shoes. "This is real life coffee, bit-kitty. And you, 'Answerer'. What is the best way to decide who should load the decryption?"

"Here!" the girl chimes, waiving her free hand.

The punctured fibrous serpent backs away from the origami statue and slithers towards the coffee, exploding into a chaos of sparkly motes and reassembling as a young human woman. She smooths her lacy black top over her white tulle miniskirt, stick-thin legs clad in fishnet leggings right down to the green basketball sneakers. She flicks her ironic knit scarf aside to pull a pack of Lucky Strikes from a tiny purse as she sniffs the coffee.

"This better be Kopi Luwak from free-range civets," she drawls as she taps a smoke from the pack and saunters tiredly towards harr.e. "Light me?" she says, proferring the white cylinder for some fiery action.

The curly hair smooths and slicks as harr.e speaks, suit changing to tropical white. "Aw, harr.e, I'm hurt. That's hardly fair. You know I'm out of that business. The MCP has nothing to worry about from me," the little man says nervously, "I'm an honest citizen. My CRC is in order."

He glances at the newcomers and moves towards the white origami figure, dissolving in a blur of flashing pixels and reforming into a punctured, snakelike form. It slithers up to the Answerer and says in a voice like the modulated rush of paper past brushes, "Data can be accessed from internal routines once assembly is complete. Interfacing and data transfer are necessary. State required function. This unit complies."

A swirl of flashing bits assembles into a vaguely humanoid form, which slowly resolves into clear focus as a short, big-eyed man with curly dark hair. He wears a dark suit with a striped bowtie over a starched shirt front and carries a silver-headed cane.

"Hello, harr.e," the man whines smarmily, "Haven't seen you since we played tag on the I/O bus. Real pleasure to see you here. Still playing detective?" A smug smile plays across his slightly creepy features.

Origin: A common utility, BR14 was loaded into an intermittently defective area of core which caused it to degrade over time. Constantly debugged, dumped, and reloaded, BR14 developed self-correcting routines which went a bit too far. It now changes periodically, attempting to build a more robust function which won't be degraded by a memory error.

Persona: IEFBR14 is a paranoid, twitchy sort who is never quite sure it is functioning properly. Not content with its own self-diagnoses, it constantly seeks validation by other programs.

Iconography: Highly variable, BR14 attempts to mold itself as appropriate for the moment, frequently donning new and different guises.