Weekly Composition Post — The Login
(Poster image crop from original by "Malta Girl" used under CC 2.0 license)
This week's prompt-composition piece is called "The Login". You can read more about the actual musical composition angle of it on the track's page. For now, I just want to jump into the accompanying short fiction.
"I'm in? I think."
[Great. Going by the metrics looks like proprioception and sensory transferrence benchmarks are all green, connectivity is solid. Deploying EM-thaumatology overrides. This might take a second.]
"No, it's cool, I've always wondered what the full sensory experience of a middleware license screen would be."
[Real cute.]
A brief pause.
[Okay. Just to go over this again: we're overriding your credentials but at the admin level you're going to have to make it through a... they call it a 'PIN test'.]
"What, like I'm guessing their credit card number? Also why does this shader pack taste like peppermint?"
[Can you focus for five seconds?]
"Hey, you try having all of your thalamic functions try to decode 'Made in Macromedia Flash' without any sort of translation schema."
[What the hell is Macromedia Flash? You should start getting the PIN test load-in.]
"Before your time. Okay, yeah, it's..."
A long pause.
[What? Everything's green. I can pull you if--]
"No, no, I just hear 'PIN test' and you explained fuck all and now I'm looking at the final fight scene from Kill Bill vol. 1 as done by the people who programmed Karateka and don't know how to react!"
[Kill who? Kara-what now? Can you make some bloody sense for once?]
"Come on, you have to know some old stuff. What are you, twelve?"
A silken sound, like the rustle of cloth.
"What the F--"
[Hey. HEY. Talk to me! All I have are metrics, so you have to tell me shit!]
"Guy's Portuguese, right?"
*His dad was American, but yeah. Grew up in Colorado out in the mountains. Why?]
"Because his 8-bit mom is wearing a yīfu and just tried to kick m-- ow! Correction, just DID kick me in the stomach! Which hurts, by the way!"
Another rustle, the flipping of pages. The tapping of keys. The crunch of unreal feet on snowy concrete.
[Okay, let's... got it. His mom was a mixed martial artist, including kung fu. I got an old post on socials talking about how they used to do forms together on the back porch when he was a teenager.]
"Yeah, she's... okay. There's a rhythm to this. I guess this tech's not so sophisticated after all? One, two... one... three... one..."
[It's a dream, my dude, we are literally using a messed up science-magic hybrid to hurl you into the collective subconscious and you're complaining about the graphics of what amounts to a oneiric Captcha?]
"You know Captcha but not Macromed-- ow!"
[Hurry up. We cannot spend all night on this.]
The sound of snow crunching underfeet intensifies, becomes rhythmic.
"How will I know when... I've passed... this test?"
The voice is breathless.
[When your brain patterns sufficiently overlap with what his were at the time of test creation. I'm faking some of it, but it's... I dunno, you like video games! It's a video game puzzle! Figure it the hell out!]
"Yeah. I'm keeping... up with her now but... it's not..."
A brief pause.
"OH."
[What? Did you figure it out?]
A heavy, thudding sound. One could imagine not broken bone, but unpleasant consequences.
[Apparently so. Test passed. What did you figure out?]
"Old post on socials, you said. She's probably gone."
A beat.
"I had to let her win. When he was a kid, I doubt he ever won."
[So his dream was to have his MMA-loving mom beat him up?]
"One last time, yeah."
A silken sound, again; cloth wiping against a non-existent face.
"That's how it is sometimes."