Arlo grabbed his DreamCube from the nightstand by his bed and put it in his satchel. Today was Missing Piece day at the town square and he wanted to see what would happen.
He arrived early and found a free card assembly station and rested his shiny blue DreamCube on the docking slot. It gave him a summary of his various dream/time adventures which it forwarded to his phone and home computer, and began constructing Authorized Missing Piece cards.
He read the card type list while he was waiting. AI Coding, Brainstorming, Surprise, Backup, ID Check, Sample Day, Music Link and so on. A few of the card types were new, and they came with new heading folders to keep the individual cards in.
A friend of his, Caius Dawson, chatted him up while he was using the station next to him. Arlo went straight to the meat of the conversation and asked what his friends new card types were. Hard Research, Restoration, Helper and Gift Received was the answer.
It was a decent set of cards, but were definitely a deck that needed a second set of types to make it do anything fun. He hoped he would get matched with his friend for the Rule Setting section of the day, but it would be just as fun to find out the cards after they had been baked. Either way, it was up to the Council and the AI and nobody here could influence it.
That was the thing with the Missing Piece cards - the type, rules and art were made separately, and at different times, in different situations. The type was made from dream anchors to a period the Cubes were programmed to visit, and your general actions there. The rules were generally set in the Play period in the Missing Piece printing day, and were workshopped by everyone playing sample Cube adventures, but while awake. The art was usually done for previous two-thirds complete cards after a few Dream runs.
Dream run art. Arlo almost forgot. He had put his art settings to Record Environment High Detail. That way he could use screencaps from computers, mirrors, TVs, other people’s point of view and so on. It was a photographic art style, and very consistent. It was at odds with what most people went with, which was rather generic art that could be swapped around easily.
There was some demand for Arlo’s type of art though, as it lent itself to lucid dreams with sensible plots, or as good seeds for crazy gadgets that had a particular output or purpose.
As usual his art took a while to get ready, as it also got geotagged and put in the Owner databases. It seemed that Arlo’s stuff had a solid enough history and pattern that it was internally consistent. Plus the detail took a while to render out on the holo-displays.
The usual crowd of scientists called Arlo over in anticipation of the Rule Setting Section. As no surprise to anyone, they were part of his assigned group pool. They quickly got to the business of pouring over Arlo’s new card types and finished art. They preferred to generate their own brainstormed rules before having a session with Arlo to finalize things.
Arlo didn’t mind. He kept up on the science, but didn’t want to influence the discussion till a working theory was there. It seems there was a segment of people who though the DreamCube time travel could somehow pan out into real time travel, but Arlo merely shrugged when asked his thoughts about it. When pressed, he could repeat back the most popular answer, and give his off the wall feelings on it, but they usually amounted to a ‘Rule of Cool’ or convenience.
While the scientists were working over his new cards, Arlo brought out his standard deck and went to help another set of players with an adventure they were having.
Quite often Arlo would play as a drone, equipment guy, photographer, effects man, or some other needed, but out of the way person. A few sessions back, Arlo took his Photographer card, PhotosFix card, and Fixated card and made a new class of card for the Art subroutine. It could be used in other people’s DreamCubes to capture moments and enhance them. Depending on how other people used the card – nicknamed Automatic Arlo – it would appear as a real photographer, a floating camera, or a cloud function that gave people Arlo’s skills for a working dream.
However they used it, Arlo got a bit of a kickback, and a bit of fan mail as well. Often people would send him Psi-money cards for realistic dreams, but Arlo didn’t really like them too much.
The DreamCube character tracker had various badges you could work toward, and Arlo didn’t bother with Psi-fame or Psi-money, both of which could make lucid realistic dreams have famous people or amazing setups possible.
He preferred his work dreams to be abstract enough that they didn’t involve physically plausible things, so they didn’t need the money context to work. The same with famous people, he didn’t care about meeting the real people, just what their icon or job function represented, so an air of unreality was fine. At least so far.
His long term plan was to get enough of the real science done, and have a Hard Science dream studio where real actors and guests could film virtual entertainment for AwakeVid TV shows and movies. One that would be nestled in a nice pocket of unreality to keep the experience fresh and separate from real life.
On that front he had been working at his AI Development cards to streamline the plot development that unreal dreams were usually so odd about. As fun as having an unlimited and unrestricted work/play area was, it needed some fencing in to keep it productive, or at least stable.
Speaking of which, the scientists had approved of his AI Development updates and felt they were within reason for a civilization that existed beyond 2015. His AI art card was independently verified as working on a computer as described in various texts.
Arlo didn’t know how the computers now were running, or how their architecture compared to his Dream Computer, but other people worried about those details.
He didn’t know it yet, but his friend Caius had been selected for a scientific stability role. The card that went with it was informally called Dream Prophet when he correctly guessed the outcomes of various simulations in 1:1 dreams aka Hard (science) Worlds.
1:1 dreams were when the Cubes were fed to 100% obey the laws of physics in their outputs and connect to other awake minds to converse. It was a cludgey setup, and required a lot of cameras to import people to a dream, but it was one of the few ways to train lucidity.
By early afternoon the scientists were ready to team up with Arlo. They wanted to test out a theory but needed some arbitrary values to start the experiment with. Arlo had been in the DreamCube program since it’s inception, so his insights were valuable.
“If a dreamer is in a 1:1 lucid realistic area, how far away do you have to be to break causality in a minor way?” “10 km” said Arlo, rather quickly.
The AI crunched some numbers, and spat back an answer, it seemed to agree that nothing would be detectable at that range, and the simulations would continue for the person in the center. A quick test of a pair of test subjects in linked cubes, one at 1:1 and one at Unreality 90% at various distances seemed to concur.
The goal was to get the rules for Time Travel understood enough to get the Unreality value down, and closer to someone that was 100% lucid in a Hard world. It was a lofty goal but with the right insights a breakthrough was possible.
Arlo figured it was forever going to be just out of grasp, but enough work would make it happen regardless, even if the results were a bit unpredictable.
Finally matched with his friend, he set about playing a test run for an experiment. Arlo’s goal set was “Experiment Subject” to which he added his own card “Surprise” as a win condition. Caius was obviously “Experiment Conductor” and Arlo added “Double blind” as a win condition. That meant that Caius could duplicate himself for the experiment, playing with two smaller decks that could overlap, but not touch. That was the general understanding of the rules of the card, but it varied on how high the Unreality setting was. Arlo noted that Caius put the two locations at 1:1 and 90%. Arlo got to pick the time weather, and set Exponential Storm as the starting conditions.
Cauis didn’t like that card, especially with Dream Prophet as his active ability, but the first interaction faze could have a large impact on it. Caius played “Gift Received” which boosted the class of card that Arlo could give him from Bronze to Silver. Arlo’s Stability Pizza was a silver card, and put a safe closer on the Exponential Effect.
Caius asked Arlo to show his card for active ability, which Arlo had forgotten to turn over. He flipped it right side up, even though it was supposed to be a double blind. Caius apologized, and thought they would have to start again. Arlo said no, they wouldn’t, as this card had that condition in mind. It was “Closed box/Open Book” that meant Arlo didn’t have to show active cards, but anything he put past the center line was automatically flipped over.
In Arlo’s mind it would work with the “Surprise!” card well, and come up with a better finish result. They started the game with the Exponential Effect making for a good scrambler to give the experience a level playing field.
Arlo moved his Computer card to Caius’ side of the playing field and flipped it over. A scan of the card meant that it had a simple password protection, but the Exponential effect made it react with the 90% unreality and be virtually uncrackable. Caius tried to brute force it, work around it and otherwise solve what should be a simple problem. He dialed up the unreality and made a swap of equipment.
He had given all his future tools to his past self, as a way to scan the computer but it wasn’t working. He gave up and used his communicate phase to contact Arlo for the password. Arlo tapped the “Closed box/Open Book” card. He told Arlo the wrong but helpful numbers of the password, but Unreality at 90% made an Infinite Keyboard appear, the numbers and letters changing in a flurry. Cauis had to roll for memory awareness, gave up and dialed down the Unreality, which made his future tools vanish, but figured out the right keyboard timing to use.
Arlo tapped the Black Box part again and made future Caius do the same puzzle again in a lucid but confusing dream. The Infinite Keyboard appeared as thousands of separate keyboards, each of which would change the contents of the computer.
Dream Caius contacted waking Arlo and got a hint about number-pads and letters. He laughed at the hint and found the keyboard with the right letter on the number-pad and pressed it.
That mess satisfied one of the conditions for the experiment that Caius had working in both the past and future halves interacting an interesting way. Caius had though about leaving the tools as an unremembered dream for his past self, but Arlo’s play style left him enough clean up points to slot it as a core memory.
Unfortunately that would invalidate the experiment, but Arlo tapped the “Stability Pizza” which let you fudge the rules a bit and see if you can tidy the memory in game end. Caius wasn’t sure how to do that, but Arlo tapped one of his face down cards, and said not to worry about it.
With that out of the way, Caius could merge his toolset and have his past and future self merge as “Get this done” kind of character. That let him scan and duplicate the computer and even add a card or two to it.
Again another possible experiment breaker, but Arlo slid one of his active cards over the “Exponential Effect”. “Cosmic Order” came from a sound hint as Arlo vibed to the tunes.
Arlo suggested that one of the cards Caius should add would be ‘Future AI’ but didn’t press the point. Caius nodded. That would let him give more sound hints and who knows what else.
Caius had finished the with the computer after duplicating the information and a few other things that he was going to point out. He was getting ready to split his character again, and left a Future Tracker, in the computer, but face down so Arlo wouldn’t see it.
Arlo tapped the “Surprise” card and cut him off – shunting the face down cards with the computer to a time neural point in Unreality space.
Cauis laughed, he was going to reward himself with a Dream card of the Enterprise, based on the tracker left in the computer, but with those cards left in Unreality space he *could* switch it with an AI.
The AI monitoring the game said “Cascade overflow” and brought an abrupt end to the game.
“I guess we’ll have to leave it on pause” said Arlo as he fed his “Surprise!” card into the computer to kick it out of it’s error state.
That made the end game cleanup pretty easy. The “Exponential Effect” card reversed with the “Cosmic Order” card, and made the computer fail again in the Past Hard world, but it booted up again shortly after. That meant the experiment was a success and small time-bridge was theoretically stable.
For a reward, Caius got his Dream Prophet upgraded to Silver Foil, and Arlo got a weird card called Spider Locus.
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