You wore a pair of glasses that showed that the land was the ocean and a head rose from the water, it was your head, it was sort of like your head, it opened its mouth and you received a backpack. A RAD backpack, now in your RAD backpack you can store all the RAD things you find.
You walk a little to the left, you see a glimmer. It is a smartphone camera! RAD. You hold it up and everything wobbles. You consider all the wobble you've been seeing lately, and continue on. Wicked!
You might encounter a mirror at some point but since you haven't the slightest idea of what you look like, you don't pay much attention to the RAD object moving opposite you. You walk the ocean to the left, in great strides you end up at a beach. Your legs wobble a little. You love the beach.
You keep walking, a little further when you hear a simple hum. As you approach it you notice layers of harmonics and nuance beneath it.
If only this RAD backpack could hold everything! Wouldn't that be nice. Your RAD backpack can hold 9 things at a time.
You are walking along the ocean when a fish, a silvery carp floats by, a bit above the water. it asks you to please push it back into the water, it picked up a RAD flying power up but it really needs the water. You put the carp in your RAD backpack.
You ignore the carp's genetic mutations that have been used to soften your lips and make your eyelashes less likely to fall out; a side effect of the changes that occurred a few updates ago. You don’t remember how long ago this update was made, it was a RAD update though. You don't actually remember what came before this change.
You lean forward a bit and look to the ground as you think about the sky. A moment of clarity, in the shallow water simulating through your toes you see a glimmer, a RAD diamond, you’re sure its synthetic but you can't wait to show it off to the company back at the bar. You put it in your RAD backpack and continue on.
The bar was just that. it was a bar. Like an I-beam, not metal though. Your right ear hums, and hears that there is a famous photo of constructioneers sitting on an I-beam eating their lunch.
You don't know what a constructioneer is. It sounds unpleasant because you have to stop being, so you can eat lunch. Your ear whispers to you about lunch. It tells you that a long time ago, time was scheduled with extreme rigidity. You had to close your eyes for a portion of the time you spent.
During this period of ‘eyes-closed’ time you had to stop doing all things. This was enforced by a darkened sky.
This eye closing marked the beginning and end many times—similar to the updates you experience now, though not quite the same. In these updates, very little changed
You have heard at the bar that during these periodic ‘dark sky’ updates of the past, you could remember old versions much more clearly. Your ear assures you that contemporary updates create such progress that the old versions aren’t worth remembering the details of.
You sometimes think it would be nice to remember many updates into the past.
LUNCH, you remember why you started thinking about these updates. The times to close your eyes weren’t the only periods that you had to stop doing the thing you were to always be doing. Most people stopped doing the perpetual thing two to three times during the eyes-open period to put food in their mouths. It it seemed like a waste of a mouth. You shudder at the thought. How would you whistle or hum during those feeding periods.
You tap your neck, gracious that you no longer must deal with such inconveniences.
You are facing the sun, and you squint your eyes. (that is something they were never able to fix in the update cycles—squinting when you face the sun, remnants of a bygone era.)
You amble towards the sun sometimes, despite the inconvenience of the squinting. You only walk this way sometimes though, more often you prefer to always keep your eyes all the way open and look at the RAD scenery as it passes by.
You notice that with these thoughts of past inconveniences, you have stopped whistling. You decide instead to hum along to some Radio, and you retrieve it from your RAD backpack.
Oh boy! It is your favorite song! You will tell your company at the bar about how glad you were when it came on the radio, while you continued on.
You don't know where it comes from, but a troubling thought enters your head. Not so much a thought but a phrase: "As for the one who does not know how to ask, you shall tell him." comes into your head, or maybe your ear. Your thoughts and voice blend together.
A few updates ago these two processes were used for separate things, but they have since streamlined the system.
A dot at the bar tells you your thought came from an extremely old version. He rambles about it for a bit and then trails off. He tells you about some “source” he had gotten from a line that he wouldn’t link you too, but this gave him access to version 22.84 revision B where people occasionally still had itches.
HA! you say. The dot blinks with seriousness. "it was wild" he said, “I kind of liked it.”
You say that you couldn't imagine what good itching would be. It seemed like such a waste of hands. You couldn't pick up RAD things while you scratched. And even when you weren't pickup up rad things, if you had to scratch, you couldn’t hold your hands at the tips of the tall tall grass.
It seemed like a silly waste of time, LONG time, to be interrupted by a surface signal that made you occupy your hands.
You snicker at the dot, then retreat from the bar as you realize that during your diatribe on itches, you forgot that the dot doesn't have hands. He must have been making the story up. You briefly remember that you see the dot at the bar every time you go. You were pretty sure it had stopped perpetuating entirely. It was nice going to the bar on occasion, but you didn’t want to leave your perpetuum on PAUSE for too long, because you couldn’t use any of your things, RAD things, at the bar.
At the bar you could talk a bit about your RAD things, and hear of other RAD things people had found along their way. This helped with your descriptor skills.
Some chose not to go to the bar very often, and in the absence of interacting with other perpetuates they had lost their ability to describe entirely. Why bother describing when you could be whistling or humming while you collect RAD things and place your hands at the tips of the tall ocean waves.
The ocean, the mighty ocean, the grass, the tall grass.
A vivid sound, or memory, hits you. Or maybe you said it aloud. You even curled your fingers a bit, as you hadn't remembered this vividly in a while. You remembered the ocean, the water, the waves, you remember that you had abandoned a RAD wall-screen for a pair of RAD headphones a while back, and the RAD wall-screen showed you RAD images of the waves and the water.
You sometimes fancied yourself a bit of a designer, and when the radio played the water song, you liked that the sound matched the screen. This match gave you a much stronger grasp on your descriptor skills. Having multiple ways of knowing something was a very powerful way to boost these skills. And, (although you would never find this out), this is why they had you give up your RAD wall-screen for a RAD pair of shoes. When descriptor-ability got too strong in perpetuates, it introduced jealousy at the bar. This was fixed in an update.
You think for a bit, or maybe you just whistled.
You keep on your way, perpendicular to the suns constant angle , with one eye slightly squinted. It almost a occurs to you to think a specific thought, or say it aloud. The thought lies on the precipice of existence but you don't have the exact descriptors to realize it. You almost had the thought:
"I have not, in a while, seen something that I have heard, or heard something that I have seen."
Though you don't remember this, they eliminated taste and they eliminated feel from you a while ago.
They couldn't properly eliminate bees. They removed feeling when they realized it was too much of a challenge to eliminate only itches and stings.
They removed taste when they realized keeping audio and visual entirely separate for every perpetuate was going to be challenging enough. Keeping a trio of inputs separate would be far too expensive to maintain. Even though perpetuates didn’t eat, they still could taste the air, taste the inside of their mouths.
In a fit of furious research many updates ago it was disproven that scent had any sort of linkage to memory, and so they left that in, but mostly you just smelled a very pleasant smell now. Intentionally, it smells unlike anything you have seen before.
A few whiles ago you found a RAD thing that gave your world a new fragrance. You couldn’t wait to tell your company at the bar. Once you arrived at the bar you realized you hadn't a clue what to tell them. You told them your perpetuum smelled good and they all nodded in agreement, disinterested. All of their perpetua smelled good too. You couldn't even think of a bad smell to contrast it with. You follow up, “I found a RAD thing! It changed the smell!" Some nod in agreement and others wander off.
The dot approaches you. You don't know this but he has a much more profound descriptor-ability than you. He tells you he found a new smell once. It smelled like apples. It smelled like eyelashes. It smelled like rain. It smelled like kettle corn. It smelled like thunder. You laugh and leave him, wondering what rain was. The dot frequently used descriptors you hadn’t heard of.
Lately, when you encountered a new RAD thing, it wouldn't come with a descriptor. You didn't remember this but many versions ago, every RAD thing came with a descriptor. You didn't know this but you used to go to the bar and spin tales to the others about the RAD things you collected in your RAD backpack. They would share descriptors of their RAD things too. You all would disagree with each-other about what things were and what they were like. This would make your temperature rise and in an excitable frenzy you would keep collecting RAD things. In these times you were most methodical. You discarded the RAD things you were most familiar with. You discarded the ones whose descriptors you felt you knew best, and could best describe to the others at the bar. You discarded these RAD things to make space in your RAD backpack for new RAD things and more descriptor stories to share at the bar.
You don't remember this, but many updates ago, perpetuates knew each detail of each update. However, this was eschewed in favor of a general sense of progress.
You don't remember this, but you only recently received your RAD backpack. You used to pick up RAD things with your hands, one at a time. You had to pick up an object with your hand and inspect it, you would carry an object in one, or both hands, until one or both hands got tired of carrying this object and its trail of descriptors (There were many more per object back then).
A few perpetuates would pick up two objects, one in each hand, and stop moving. This was rare but the early monitors found that some perpetuates would find a second object, pick it up in their second hand, and their temperature would spike. They would stop walking and hold these objects and never move.
There were hysterics when it was discovered that perpetuates could fall in love with a pairing of two objects. When they fell in love with the pairing, they stopped training, they didn't want to find any more RAD things, they loved left object and right object so much. They couldn't report object descriptors. They wouldn't let them go. They wouldn't go to the bar to tell any others about this. They just stopped. That was many versions ago. The introduction of the backpack has solved that problem for many clock cycles. Perpetuates will keep collecting RAD things until training-error is within threshold or until we lose funding.
You wonder about the dot, and others who never return to their perpetua. Your ear explains, we set a few perpetuate's ears to receive far more externa than others. They usually spend more time in the bar, and cause Confusion. This, believe it or not, helps perpetuates train more accurately. If you'd like, I will tell you about that, but it is a story for another time.
Perpetua (Rad Backpack Script)
