Link to We Are the Monitoring. You shouldn’t read the rest of this post unless you’ve read the short story.

I think that the tale for how this most recent short story came to be could be interesting. As some of you might know, ever since last April or May, I’ve been working frantically on a programming project that allows the user (for now, just me, even though the repository is public) to set up complex scenarios involving locations, characters, items, etc. The actors can perform a myriad of contextual actions. The app is mostly moddable (all actions, rules, conditions, components, etc. come from optional mods). My main goal with this app was creating fictional scenarios that I would find interesting.

A couple of weeks ago or so, I thought of a scenario that seemed intriguing to me: two isolated guards tasked with monitoring a rift in reality, only for something to go wrong in a way that would jeopardize their morality and even turn them against each other. However, the original idea was quite different. Although both Elena “Len” Amezua and Dylan Crace ended up being exactly the same as the original conception (one a compulsive documentator, the other an ex-military corpo), the turning point of the story would involve a mutated version of Len walking out of the rift in reality. Mutated as in tentacles and such. In the original vision, both Len and Dylan had weapons (Len a sidearm, Dylan an automatic rifle), but they were both prohibited by HQ from discharging their weapons unless they received authorization, which they couldn’t get because the comms didn’t get through. And this mutated version of Len claimed to be from the future, that she had come back to prevent whatever disaster had corrupted her. Was she telling the truth? Would Dylan shoot her? Would Len herself shoot her? I didn’t know myself, and exploring it would be part of the fun.

One of my interests in setting up scenarios are the opportunities for creating new systems for the app. For The Cock and the Compendium, I had to create components and actions related to beverages (due to them drinking tea). That was relatively simple. It also relied on the work I did weeks earlier to introduce readable items into the app. To set up a scenario featuring non-human anatomy and weapons, it meant I had to enhance the anatomy system of my app, by far the most complicated part of it, as loading an anatomy recipe builds a node-based graph with auto-generated descriptions. And it only supported human beings. Fortunately, I’ve made the anatomy system far more reliable and competent now, to the extent that a simple call to ‘npm run validate:recipe’ on a recipe tells you exactly why it’s valid or not. Previously, creating any new recipe was a sequence of trial and error, not knowing in advance whether a recipe would fail to build because you forgot to create a nose entity with a scarred texture.

To test the recipe system, I created non-human recipes for a giant forest spider, a kraken, a red dragon, and a centaur warrior. All of those recipes were far less complex than what I attempted later to test the robustness of the anatomy system: an eldritch abomination. That very same eldritch abomination ended up being the third character of this short story.

I have yet to finish implementing the weapons system. In fact, it has barely started. It will feature ammo handling, jamming, aiming mechanics, etc. Much more complicated than I envisioned in the beginning. But after I finished creating a very detailed character definition for Len Amezua, I figured I could entertain myself doing a test run of the scenario, not knowing how I was going to play it. Initially, I had all characters at the same location (the salt flats), but that meant starting with the confrontation. From the beginning, I intended for the non-human entity to come out of the portal, which meant having to implement dimensional portal traversal that regular actors shouldn’t be able to perform. That wasn’t too complicated to do, and now, everything an scenario needs to allow dimensional travel is for an exit blocker to have the is_dimensional_portal component, and for an actor to have the can_travel_through_dimensions component. This actor will get the action “travel through dimensions” as available, and the rest of the actors won’t even know that’s possible.

So, I started the scenario, playing it mostly straight. Of course, I thought that the eldritch abomination breaking expectations would be far more interesting, and potentially funny, as simply playing it as a threatening or at least indifferent visitor. As ChatGPT pointed out some time ago, when I fed it a summary of my favorite stories of mine and told it to figure out the commonalities, I’m always interested in putting characters in awkward situations in which things don’t go as they’re supposed to, often pairing characters that normally wouldn’t even engage, or it would be impossible for them to do so. A hulking intersex duchess taking over a medieval world. A young musician being conscripted by aliens to train hybrids. One semi-deranged narrator getting intimately acquainted with a sasquatch goddess. A Japanese salaryman getting a personal cat-girl for joy and love. Three kids rushing to see a landed UFO only for the cranky alien to be pissed that his property rights have been violated. For whatever reason, this is the stuff I gravitate to. All of them also have the potential to be funny, and I believe that experiencing fun is one of the most important things in life. It’s usually common for comedians to be depressed. When you have been at the end of your rope, not even wanting to live, what comforts you is laughter. And often the sole response to the absurdity of life is to laugh.

Anyway, during this test run of the scenario, when I realized that Len would continue compulsively jotting down notes even though it was pissing off both her partner and the interdimensional visitor, I realized this would turn into a story. And somehow, these stories always resolve themselves. Dylan’s background as a military vet now turned corpo believer made him likely to boast or at least speak casually about the stuff he did overseas, and the clash regarding such activities with an alien who mainly seemed to be interested in the weather was the kind of conflict I enjoy.

Len’s background is elaborate, but only the top of it shows up in the story, in an iceberg fashion. I had conceived her as a former technical inspector for the same corporation, who detected a massive liability only for HQ to dismiss her and eventually even fire her and threaten her with lawyers when it turned out she was right after several people died. But Len returned to work for the same corporation, at another branch, because she needs to keep paying for her younger sister’s medical bills. That has turned her, in her late thirties, into the kind of calm like “I’ve screamed out all I could and nothing changed for the better.” So now she just documents, because she knows that if something goes wrong, the powers-that-be will bury it, but the truth needs to survive if only for some sort of cosmic reckoning.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the story. If you didn’t, screw you. And if you’re reading these words without having read the story first, you’re a really stupid person.