The 42nd Version

Below, it is here that lies a world of the past. Life no longer remains, but something quite different, quite twisted, a formation of all our sins, all of these bad decisions. Through the rubble, the ruins of the civilization that once stood, a man can be picked out. He is but a shadow of a figure, clutching two large bottles by his worn sides, both full, with some form of murky liquid that curls and billows at the plastic. He wears a ghost of a face, an expression that has hung on him for months on end, ever since the war for the most basic of needs began, in this pint-sized apartment that he constructed himself out of scraps. He is not alone in this room, the man crafted something to keep him mobile in this ever-changing world that does not stop for a second, indeed, he had to adapt, in order to keep himself safe, the thing had taken him years, carefully calculated, but he had done it, at long last. Standing across from the broken man was an object that looked much like a rugged ATM machine, dressed in a metropolitan blue, yet smeared with all kinds of stains. While escaping from the rioters that had stormed the city in the beginning, getting their hands on all of the goods that they could carry, the man had searched for electricals, chips, he knew that he could make it work if he just had enough time. And now, before him stood the product of his long decades of struggle, his sleepless nights. A portal valve, a simple one at that, although he had been working on similar technology during his previous employment, the necessary materials were scarce, and this was one advanced project, even for someone of his profound experience.

The portal valve, as its name clearly suggests, is not a weapon, not something to ward off the swarms of murderers, but a transportation device, one of quite extreme capacity. These pieces of new and sophisticated technology allow the user to access a whole new world, Indra’s Net, to be exact, an escape from the world that now lies below. He had envisioned It for years on end, he would never get his family back, the rabble outside had caught up with them, taken them. The memories of his sons and daughters now live in procedurally generated Ai. However, he knew one thing, technology is no longer futile and weak, there are possibilities, ways to walk from hell. The portal would leave him to a place where he would not have to worry about his tortured past, all of the struggles, just blank, a fresh horizon. And yet, despite his creation, despite his crafting, the man could not bring himself to make the upload of his own being. His shadow of a body, a slight figure now cut in the moonlight, shivering with the thought of what could go wrong, the brow of his broken face had crumpled, furrowed into a mangled expression. What was he to do?

Slowly but surely, our friend makes the steps to his contraption, his feet peel slowly from the grimy surface. Linking up the router, he places a hand at the base of the valve, this is the moment. A flicker, a burst of light, the man has stepped from earth...