Spiritual Malaise

Someone winning the grand prize at Royce’s Casino always drew a crowd, and this time was no exception. Some lucky Pokemon had just won it big on a slot machine, but not just any slot machine, this baby had its own special nook in the middle of the casino, complete with dramatic lighting and your very own waitress. At 10,000 Poke a pull, it was by far the quickest way to flush your money down the drain and be entertained while doing so. The waitresses usually bickered amongst each other for the right to attend to the Pokemon playing at that machine, for the patrons were (usually) very well off and tended to tip an awful lot, one could easily make a couple of weeks worth of income off a slightly inebriated roulette player.

You need not be told that the winning Pokemon was very lucky indeed, and that he was also very happy. He was both of those things, but the former was for a reason you wouldn’t normally think.

This was the second jackpot he had won in a row, and someone winning that twice in a row never happened. It wasn’t supposed to, it wasn’t programmed to do that. Something was very, very wrong, and Royce had an idea of who the culprit was: that blasted Porygon system they installed to oversee the mundane electrical and computational tasks that were required to actually run a casino of this size and grandeur. He never trusted that Porygon, and for good reason. She was moody, and prone to lashing out at the employees of the casino in very annoying (but generally non-lethal) ways, such as showering them with sparks and turning off the lights in the basement when a Pokemon was down there, leaving them to feel for their way out.

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to find another game of ours to enjoy, it seems this one is malfunctioning. If you’d like to collect your winnings at the register, we’ll see to it that you receive your payouts and-” The Clefairy attendant was interrupted by the (now mildly annoyed) gambler.

“I most certainly will not! You never stop when you’re in the middle of a winning streak, and unless really are as ignorant as you look, you would know this, my dear. The only thing seeming to be malfunctioning right now is my sense of charity, and if you’d like to see any tip at all you’ll leave me be and keep the drinks coming! Some Pokemon just don’t know their place.”

Royce frowned. He did not approve of such treatment of his employees, as the gambler would soon figure out. He snapped his fingers and one very attentive Machamp ran in front of him, standing at attention. He was waiting for orders.

“Bill, see to it that that man over there makes like a tree and gets the hell out of here, will you? Close off the area when he’s gone, too.”

“You got it, Boss! What about his winnin’s? Want me to wait until-”

“Bill, we offered him a chance to collect his winnings, and he chose not to take it. Make sure he knows he has forfeited anything he may have won here tonight. Make sure he knows we don’t tolerate that kind of attitude towards our employees.”

“Righto Boss! I’m on it!”

Royce smiled and watched the Machamp go about his business. Bill wasn’t very bright, but he certainly was imaginative and very creative when it came to fulfilling orders. He would usually watch and take delight in the scuffle that was about to come, but he had other, more important business to attend to.

It only took him a few minutes to get down to the basement of the casino, where all the sensitive electronics and that blasted Porygon were held. What was her name again, Vendetta? Whatever. She almost lost him a lot of money today, and he wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again. Wind and Eve were already there, seemingly having a difficult time in dealing with her.

“Mind telling me just what the hell that was, Vendetta? I’d hate to see you abandoned again. We have no use for malfunctioning equipment, you know. Takes up space that could be occupied by better, newer things. Things that don’t attempt to give away all of our money to anyo shmuck who pulls a lever. Get it?” She didn’t respond.

He never liked talking to her, mainly because she was always holed up in those damned contraptionss. He couldn’t get inside there like she could, and that took a bit out of his attempts to intimidating her. He didn’t like that.

“You. Wind. Make sure she gets the picture, or you’ll be out with her.” He pointed a single claw towards him. “You hear me? Out.” He pronounced out as if he was implying something, and he probably was. Best to just nod and look like you understood. Wind was smart, and did just that.

“I’ll be back in an hour, and I expect to see some results, boy. Remember what I said.” He left as quickly as he came in. He didn’t need to waste time with threats or bodily harm, it was a given that being on his bad side would bring the latter.

Wind waited until the doors leading to the basement were closed, and turned his attention to the machine containing Vendetta. She considered him an acquaintance at best, and an annoyance at worst, but she usually responded to him. Not today, though. Today, she was silent as she stared blankly at him, or rather, at the space in front of him.

“Vend, what’s going on? I just replaced the wiring in this thing yesterday, is it loose? Let me take a look..” He bent down to remove a panel from the wiring, and as he did so, his companion came out from his collar and ran into the interior. She was much smaller than any tool Wind could ever hope to hold, and much smarter, too. The Joltik scurried about the inside of the machine, searching for any sign of disrepair. There was. The jacketing of the wiring Wind and Eve had so carefully installed earlier in the week had somehow melted, creating a faulty ground. No matter, such things were easily fixed. They just needed some more wiring and she’d be good as new..

“Wind! We just need some more rubber, there’s a bad ground here that I think is causing the-”

The lights in the basement flickered, then went out. The only remaining illumination was from the screen that Vendetta currently inhabited, an eerie greenish-blue glow. It made Wind and Eve’s eyes hurt. Squinting, Wind got closer to the screen and tapped on it, trying to get Vendetta’s attention without success. Was she sick? He didn’t know how to take care of her kind, they were extremely rare.

“Vendetta, are you all righ-” He stopped speaking as Vendetta herself flickered in and out of view on the screen and stared right at him, not at the space in front of him.

“Paging all test subjects. Paging all test subjects. Paging all test subjects. Paging all test subjects. Paging all test subjects. Paging all test subjects. Paging all test subjects. Paging all. Please enter verification for user Ze-KR.”

Wind wasn’t sure what to do, he had never heard Vendetta ask for a password or code of any kind before, so he simply asked her what she meant.

“Error. Verification incorrect. Test subject not found. Test subject aborting. Test subject paging, test subject paging, test subject paging.”

“Vendetta! What are you going on about? What do you need? Tell me so I can get this fixed so Royce will leave both of our asses alone!” No luck. Vendetta was staring at him, but she didn’t seem to be aware of him. Text appeared on the screen below her.

User ROYCE not found on this level of the tower. PleASE specify a different USER.

Wind knew Vendetta communicated via text when she couldn’t speak for some reason or another, so he brought his hands out to the keyboard located right underneath the monitor, and began to type. He’d bring up his account, and instruct her to reboot, sometimes she just got lost within the machine’s circuitry and needed a restart to find her way out. It had happened a couple of times before, when they first got her.

User: WIND
User WIND not found on this level of the tower. PLEASE SPECIFC=Y A D19IFFERENT USer.

He frowned. Installing his account was the first thing he’d done when he finally managed to get her to cooperate, did she delete it? He decided to try his partner’s account.

User: EVE
User EVE no19t found on this level of tHW TOWERS. PLEASEspecify a difnrerent USER.

No luck here, either. Maybe something shorted out the memory banks of the machine and left only Vendetta’s account left. He didn’t know the password for it, but he’d try anyway.

User: VENDETTA

USER VENDETTA19 NOT f19ound on this level of the tower. PLEASE a DIFFERENT USER.

NUMBER OF IN19CORRECT ATTEMPTS REACHED. ENABLE ADMINSTR=ATOR ACCOUNT?

An administrator account? Vendetta had never told him about this, why had she kept it from him? It’s possible even she didn’t know about it, but that seemed a bit improbable - she supposedly knew the ins and outs of this system like he knew the back of his hand - she grew up in this machine..

YES

ADMINISTRATOR ACCOUNT ACTIVATED. PLEASE19 ENTER PASSWORD.

Great. Why ask to enable something if it was just going to ask him for a password he didn’t have? Unless Vendetta was trying to communicate with him..

19

ACCESS GRANTED. ONE. FOUR. ONE. FOUR. FOUR. FOUR. FOUR. SEVEN. EIGHT. FOUR. ONE. SEVEN. NINE. ONE. TWO. ONE. FOUR. FOUR. NINETEEN. NINETEEN. NINETEEN. NINETEEN.

The numbers scrolled for what seemed be forever, and Wind could only watch the screen, mystified. He’d had to fix a few glitches in her system before, but nothing was ever like this. Was this even a glitch? It had to be, but he wasn’t aware of what could be causing it. He decided to pull the plug on the power source. It’d annoy the hell out of her and she’d get a good jolt of pain because of it, but at least she’d be able to come out of the machine.

He pulled the power, and the machine remained on. It had no battery backup, so he was bewildered as to why it wasn’t turning off. The text kept scrolling, and he became aware of the presence of whispering coming from the machine screen. It was Vendetta talking, but it didn’t sound like her. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to tell what she was saying, but then realized the text on the screen had changed from numbers to words.

THE PASSWORD YOU ENTERED was NINETEEN that is NINETEEN for THE PASSWORD you have VERIFIED as NINETEEN is a GOOD number to VERIFY AS NINETEEN you have DONE WELL PLEASE nineteen VOLT VERIFY as FORT NINETEEN. I 19 HAVE BEEN 19 FOR AN ERA.

THE END IS NOTHING. it is N19INETEEN.

With that, the power to the machine and the entire casino went out. Wind and Eve were left in total darkness, and the only sounds were from themselves. Vendetta wasn’t in the room with them. It would be days before the system (and the power to the Casino) came back online, and Vendetta was completely unaware of what had transpired during that glitch. As far as she was concerned, Wind, Eve, and Royce were making the whole thing up. She did feel a bit under the weather though, or at least, as under the weather as her type could feel. She couldn’t quite put her finger on the source of her malaise, but it probably wasn’t important. Just a glitch in the system. Wind would fix it.

---

It was just past 1:30, a remarkably bright and cheery afternoon. Steel City was bustling (as always), with Pokemon running to and fro to catch buses, elevators, and trams in order to meet appointments, go to work, get lunch, or get home. There were many levels to the city, many indeed, but most of the creative and inspirational work happened on the upper floors. This also happened to be where the wealthier citizens lived and where a lot of the food was grown. Steel City was not a place of imports. Exports, sure, but they rarely took in from outsiders. This suited most everyone within the city limits just fine.

It wasn’t at all a day during which you’d expect a great disaster to occur. Disasters rarely occurred in Steel City, you see. Everything was automated, controlled by these amazing Pokemon called Porygon. There were scores of them, their functions all varying wildly. There were Porygon for every light system in every building block, there were Porygon for controlling which rails were open during which hours, there were Porygon for ensuring the multitudes of elevators all worked correctly and took everyone to the right floors. These tasks were generally very simple to allow for a single Porygon to manage many of a single task at once. It worked out quite well for the most part; a Porygon only ever malfunctioned under specific circumstances, both outlandish. Not to say they never glitched... but Porygon spent most of their time in machines, and it wasn’t often that anyone would douse these gadgets in water. (You could say this never happened, actually, and no one would be able to correct you, for it had been really quite a while since the last time anyone spilled anything on a Porygon’s machine. It was beyond everyone’s memory, only briefly mentioned in the instruction manuals left behind.) The only other way that anyone knew to cause a glitch in the system was to physically maim a Porygon, and there was simply no desire to do so on anyone’s parts. They seemed so devoid of emotion, they were even worse conversation than Magnemite and Voltorb. They had personalities, sure, but they just didn’t seem to have any humanity built in, whereas at least Magnemite seemed to feel... something. (It was up for debate how much the machine-like Pokemon actually could relate to those of flesh and blood, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

To Pokemon outside of Steel City, the idea of Porygon was always a bit hard to grasp at first. Most Pokemon who got a temporary passport usually ended up not liking the city very much and moved out after a month or two. This wasn’t always the case, no, but a great deal of Pokemon felt too uneasy with the idea of emotionless machines running the place. It hardly made sense to the residents; there was no reason not to trust the Porygon to function exactly as they had been programmed! And besides, they all listened to Blaine, who was a bit more personable than the rest of them. Blaine was simply a Porygon2, a fantastically updated version of all the others. He had been around and ensuring every single Porygon functioned without error since... well, for centuries now. Blaine was rather intelligent, too. On top of being able to run thousands of tasks at once, he could actually hold multiple (meaningful and helpful!) conversations with Pokemon across the city via an ingrained speaker system. Even if all Porygon were said to have an ‘artificial intelligence,’ there didn’t seem to be anything artificial about Blaine. He was even funny, and liked jokes, puzzles, and riddles; what other ‘artificial’ intelligence could be said to like things? Or seem genuinely delighted at them? And maintenance was easy. He always had multiple networks he could hop into at a moment’s notice and rarely spent time outside of the machines. They weren’t just any machines, but... ones with fancy electronic panels and wiring and whatnot. It was always hard for an outsider to grasp, but that was okay. The engineers in the city had been running things smoothly for ages, always making sure the machines were rebuilt, parts were reinstalled, and Porygon were maintained.

So, it was with incredulity that Jules regarded the message from a student on her receiver.

8388388381919julestramrun19ng pleasestop itgoingwrongway

jules tram is notslowing pleasejules

838

It... aside from the weird numbers, it didn’t really make sense. The trams would not go the wrong way. Blaine knew the schedule. He always had the trams running the right way at the right times, so it was ludicrous to consider anything else. He had been free of errors this morning (and she was always conscientious about running error checks each and every morning across the few dozen Porygon, as well)...

So.. what?

She sent a message back.

Hey Jean, can you please be a bit clearer? Your last message seemed to have some junk in it, and I think probably part of the sentence got messed up.

She hit send, and to her annoyance saw that it had become slightly garbled as well. It had become:

H99y Jean, c/////////clear838er? Your las&&&&&&&message se/ probably99got flglllllll.?./

This would not do. Something was amiss. Was it one of the Porygon? It had to be. One of the messenger Porygon had to be interfering with it. One of the lesser students, maybe, or perhaps a jealous boy--

But before she could finish her thought, her receiver dinged and showed a series of messages. One looked like it was probably from Jean again, but the rest was an error code she had never seen before. Jean’s (supposed) message was too cluttered with extra letters and numbers to read, but the error message was intact enough.

ERROR 99
Please assist test subject to the train station. Assistance is needed. Please assist test subject to the train station. Assistance is needed. Please assist test subject to the train station. Assistance is needed.

It scrolled on further, dinging her several more times. It would be a lie to say she wasn’t slightly perturbed at this point, because she was. However, errors were best dealt with swiftly and calmly. She quickly scurried from the balcony of her workplace back into the dimly lit room and through the door leading to one of the many server rooms throughout the city. This wasn’t the main server, but she would be able to directly access Blaine from here and get control of the malfunctioning Porygon in no time. Maybe then she would be able to see Jean’s message.

She ran to the terminal and talked into the microphone imbedded in one of the blindingly bright screens. “Blaine? You there? What’s going on with that Porygon?”

Silence. Static flickered across the idle screens. She wondered if perhaps he was already busy dealing with the problem and as such would take a moment in getting back to her. Sometimes that would happen, and he’d be back within seconds, making jokes about how he had thousands of things to finish first. She gave it a few moments.

With each tick of the old-fashioned Pikachu-themed clock on the wall, Jules grew more anxious. A full half minute had passed, and her received had beeped at her several more times with an array of messages that she couldn’t bring herself to check.

Blaine never took this long to respond. Blaine was never this tardy. She tapped on the screen (something she was loathe to do under normal circumstances, and something she would never be caught dead doing in the presence of a student)... to no avail. Her heartbeat started to erupt in her chest, in her head. Something had gone wrong. Or had it? She was entirely unsure. This “error 99” was never mentioned in the manuals. Perhaps someone was playing a horrible trick instead. That wasn’t entirely unlikely, either -- boys had been known to try to pull terrible tricks on Jules. This was just another tick on the long list of reasons for why they were not allowed to work with the Porygon. Why, just look! This was the type of malfunction that could very well happen if a boy had any part in messing with her machines in her city! She was protecting everyone by stopping them from learning the engineering the city required to keep chugging along... It had been good so far, so why the error now? What had gone wrong?

In her panic, the minutes seemed to stretch out a great deal longer, in that funny way Lord Time has of slowing down during terrible moments and horrible disasters. Her tapping on the screen turned to frenzied pounding.

“Blaine? Blaine? BLAINE?!”

Nothing, there was nothing! The screen kept at its idle state, static flashing here and there, until numbers started to pour across the screen. Jules didn’t recognize them at first, until she realized that they were schedules. Schedules for the elevators, buses, platforms... and trams. And trains...

To a normal Pokemon, the problem with the schedule wouldn’t have been very obvious. In fact, most Pokemon might have ignored the schedule as meaningless garbage. Jules might have had she not received a message from Jean. Jules didn’t even believe it possible for Blaine to behave this way until a few minutes prior to the schedules scrolling. This was behavior expected of Patricia, the thing that wasn’t a Porygon or a Porygon2... but not Blaine. Blaine was controlled, predictable, and dependable. Blaine wasn’t full of anomalies like Patricia. But now...

The thing that caught her eye was two 1:39 trams in the DEPARTED category, ones she took quite frequently to and from her workplace. Jean often took the same ones with her, and in fact, Jules would have been on that very same ride had she not stayed behind instead of grabbing lunch elsewhere.

The problem with this was that there was only one tram that departed at 1:39pm. The other, tram 19, crawled along the same path, but at 1:39am. And... Jean’s message...

Jules had to double check the receiver’s text messages. Bile crept along the back of her throat as she reached Jean’s first message, threatening to break out and cause retching, but she managed to hold on for a bit longer.

Among many other things going wrong, two very full, very fast trams were headed right toward each other. Not only that, but if Jules was correct in her calculations, they would meet at a point where there was no real flooring beneath -- so debris would simply shower down upon Pokemon minding their own business below. She was taken by paralysis caused by this revelation. What to even be done? Blaine was simply not responding.

No... there was still something she could do. She hadn’t tried pulling him out yet. If she pulled the plug on him, all the other Porygon would stop their functions. Sure, it would put the city to a halt for a while, but it had to be done. It was the only choice.

She bounded out of the room, a brown blur, confounding a few Pokemon left in the maintenance building during their lunch break. She had to make her way to the main server room in time. There was no other option. This was it.

---