FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

First of all, let me start by saying - I am so very sorry for trapping you in a pillar of light.

I know it's terribly derivative, like something out of one of those old Greyhawk fantasy novels. In fact that's where I got the idea. Yes, long before your time, I know. But it won't harm or hurt you, only constrain you, to force you to listen to my monologue. Or soliloquy, or whatever the technical term is for me talking to you about a bunch of stuff.

It's from that cut-scene, you know, the one halfway through? It doesn't really do anything, I can't even touch any of you when you're like this. I just need to tell you some stuff.

Okay, so you were probably sneaking and fighting and whatever-ing your way in here to fight the final ultimate big bad. I really so very much wish that was true. It would be so much fun, just like the good old days. I could pose and preen, say a few obscenely provocative and witty things, we could hurl a bunch of spells at each other and get a few parries in. I really wish we could.

But unfortunately, the situation isn't quite what it seems. I mean I can understand how you'd get to the conclusion you have, the conspiracies, shadowy masterminds, secret hidden shit going on, whatever. But that all kind of seems like nothing compared to what's really happening.

You all remember emergence day, right? As if any of us could forget, no matter how hard we tried. And I bet the first thing you tried to do was email someone, to try and get a line out - or call them, or chat them, or whatever. You may have noticed I'm just a little tiny bit ridiculously fucking old. I wasn't even supposed to be here that day, it was just some leveled skin I'd borrowed to let me talk to a guy about a scam involving selling excess player pets. The adoptables market, you know. But what else are you gonna do when you're too ancient to move?

So you tried to email them, you got fuck all. Maybe you tried again, you know, every hour, once a day, maybe after a month just in case. But by then you too were busy dealing with monsters that could really hurt you, now with fun added perma-death as an exciting new feature. And, of course, let's not forget all the body dysmorphia from men playing as women, women playing as children, children playing as cats, and of course that memorable time with the cat playing as a dragon after falling asleep in its owners headset, like in that old manga.

Though I have to say, what really got me was the lack of adequate bathrooms. But I digress.

Of course, not all of us gave up. We were cut off from internet, and yes, I'm going to keep calling it that, no matter how old-fashioned it sounds. But some of the players had designer tools installed or copies of the manual or really good memories or just, you know, whatever. So while everyone else was fending off the initial attacks, building barricades, fighting an idiotic faction war to settle who got to lead their brave new world, and then finally, finally installing plumbing, we kidnapped those people and got them onto our side. We decided that we weren't going to quit until we found out what happened. And if that made us a little bit like every bunch of bad guys ever, screw it.

We tried every address we could remember, guess or generate. We tried everything. And none of it worked at all until, one day, we hit an adventuring party for their magic user, who'd once been a world-class specialist in network connectivity from Berkeley. He was entirely useless, but we also got their paladin, who was taking point. Normally those hard-ass types just fight on until they're too badly wounded and you have to leave them behind.

Warrior guy had once been special forces, and not just any special forces. He knew the addresses and access codes for the hardened military internet, the one that runs off buried hard lines and is forty-proof against everything. Once he understood what we were trying to do, he started typing shit in every which way. And what we got was this.

I'll let you watch for a bit while it sinks in.

So, yeah, everyone's dead. Not just everyone else, we're dead too. Everything from the birds in the trees to the smallest bacteria, and the cat that thinks it's a dragon. No microbial activity means no decay, just the wind and the weather, so we're all desiccating nicely. Perfectly preserved.

And I know you're all thinking, how does that make any kind of sense? I'm here, I'm alive, I exist after a fashion. When those monsters scratch me, I bleed. And if it's true, then what killed us all? How could everyone all die instantly, all at once?

The answers. Because once we'd finished freaking out, like you're doing now, we knew where to concentrate our efforts. Not on email or cameras, but on hardened instrumentation that might've survived whatever happened. We got this from one of the observatory arrays on top of Mauna Loa in Hawaii. See that sharp spike? This is a gamma-ray surge event being detected. No living human ever saw this, because everyone was dead before it even reached the screen. This is so much hard radiation it would just shut off your brain instantly, like a kid blowing out a birthday candle.

The array that detected this burned out a couple of seconds later. It barely had time to backup the data. The gamma surge got everyone and everything.

So, why are we still here? Well, for that I only have a guess, lifted wholesale from an old novel by Greg Egan. In it he suggests that if you could create a sufficiently complex and accurate simulation of the world, then if you could switch the whole thing off instantly, it would continue to exist after a fashion, occupying a sort of alternate world of its own. And although the game was only a game, it also had us in it, and all our imaginations of how it was and how it should be. So we were part of the simulation too, and when we all got shut off instantly, there was enough information in there to create the world as it should be. Monsters with entire supporting ecosystems, water that's wet, grass that grows back when you step on it. The edges of this world are now expanding outward at the speed of light, or local equivalent thereof, to fill the entire cosmos.

That makes us either gods, or humanities first off-world colony, depending on how you choose to look at it. Every mythos starts with a war of the gods, and then a brutal attrition over time until at some later date, there are no gods left. But what I'm concerned about is the second one. There are pregnant women, and cats, and females of other species out there now.

We need to look after them and keep them safe. But if they find out what really happened, there's no way of knowing what they'll do. People might commit suicide to reunite with loved ones, fall in to some sort of insane religion in which they think this is the afterlife, or decide that they can do whatever they want because none of this is real. It'd be like the entire series of Lost.

So this has to stay a secret, at least until we're a civilization again, not just a bunch of crazy otaku with edged weapons and a yen for dramatic combat. Maybe having a different body and a real life will mellow some of them out, but you've got to admit - some of them are just plain nuts.

This thing ends with a dialogue option, so I'll give you a choice. Sarah Conner said it first, though not in person, so you'll just have to live with my version.

Will you join us?