Post-Self

Hunting Dogs

Krzysztof “Tomash” Drewniak

Scout By The Washes-Away-Paintings Beach — 2994

Scout By The Washes-Away-Paintings Beach was lying, half-awake, on one of the boardwalks lining that beach. The consistently mild weather of this sim made his spot — and it’s been his spot for several years, don’t even think about it — a perfect place to spend the parts of his days that weren’t occupied by other business. Business like, say, barking at the occasional person who was being a jerk. Or food, food was important. Mustn’t forget food. And pets. And food.

Thoughts of food and pets set Scout to remembering. There was this lady who came by to give him some bacon — it was really tasty bacon, too! — every once in a while. No, every week, Scout’s System-enhanced memory supplied, every single week since he’d picked this place to settle down. Every week … except the last five.

Where is she? Scout wondered. Is she okay?

Following up on that thought wasn’t his job. Scout was a dog, after all, and dogs, even dogs who used to be people-shaped, don’t conduct complex investigations, especially given their lack of usable fingers. They do, however, tell their pack-elder, their … down-tree, right … about weird things and let him handle it. That was, after all, the Job, and the Scouts had gotten good at it over their many years as a pack.

Scout stood and shook out his slightly damp fur. “The lady who always gives me bacon is missing,” Scout sent, including his memory of her appearance and her scent. “Her name might be Sylvia. Can you help?”

Then he laid back down to wait for a response. He had a very important snooze to get back to.

Tomash#2f8de111 had forked to give someone a hand with their LARP’s “talking is a free action” implementation, but he wasn’t doing that today. Today was an on-call day. The Tomashes who did systech things had long-since agreed to rotate who answered related calls and messages, as it would be unfair to himselves to stick their root instance with all the messaging just because he’d lost the coin toss. So, when Scout sent his question, it came to this Tomash, not the dog’s down-tree.

The message came with a mental ping, a sense that someone had something for him. As Tomash turned his attention to the message, he learned that it was from a Scout and his tail wagged a few times. The Scouts were good at sending messages and weren’t prone to asking for impossible things and then getting upset when they were told no.

The question seemed simple enough. Doesn’t seem like a tech issue, Tomash thought, but worth checking out so see if we can find out what happened to Sylvia the bacon lady.

He forked, creating Tomash#b7f77cb0, an instance of himself who wasn’t a perisystem technician. The new Tomash vanished, stepping out to the sim where Paintings Beach had made his home.

When he got there, there was, as befit a dog reuniting with somebody, much petting and licking and excited zooming around. Soon enough, though, they got to work.

Finding someone on the System is neither fast, easy, nor cheap. It isn’t necessarily a drain on one’s rep balance, but working out who that person you remember is necessarily involves asking for a bit of people’s time in the hopes they might know. One is unlikely to get far with such inquiries without offering some compensation, whether in rep or favors or being interesting.

Tomash (and Scout) had advantages and disadvantages in their search for the bacon lady. On the one hand, they had, from Scout, a lot of memories of this person, which allowed for the indirect method of trying to find someone she often hung out with in the hopes that they knew how to get in touch with her. On the other hand, the perspective in all their sensorium recordings of their missed connection was extremely skewed: they came from Scout, who was, after all, a dog-shaped dog. This process would’ve been easier with the sim entry/exit logs, but Tomash wasn’t going to be checking those, as this entire search was a private matter, and he took not poking into privileged information for clade business seriously.

Still, after several days of bouncing the request around feeds related to the Bay of Colors and missed connections, along with occasionally asking people who Scout said looked familiar, Tomash had a lead: the contact address for a particular Sylvia, who’d been helping out a tile-placing group in the permanent part of the Bay for a while now but hadn’t been by for over a month. “She told us she needed a break,” her friend had told Tomash, “that she needed to think about her life, and we haven’t heard anything. Where do you know her from?”

Tomash waved a paw at Scout. “The doggo’s a cocladist and he’s missing her bacon. Don’t go spoiling that, please?”

“Makes sense,” the man replied. “Sylvia’s a real good cook.”

“Right, I’ll go write a letter. Thanks for reaching out!”

“No problem, and good luck!”

Sylvia had been having a rough day. No, really, a rough week. Or was it a month by now? (It was, the System filled in, which wasn’t helping.) She’d looked at a calendar and been struck by a lack of energy. Everything she’d been doing seemed so surface-level, so pointless, so silly. She hadn’t done anything with her life, really, not before uploading and not afterward, so why bother doing anything more than lounging around in bed?

Feeling the urge to have done something today, she propped herself up and pulled open her messages, wondering what sort of nonsense people were trying to invite her to today. Then, one of the subjects caught her eye “Scout’s wondering if you’ll be by with bacon again”.

Scout … Scout … It took Sylvia a while, but she remembered the name. Maybe. She’d seen it once on the collar of that dog who hung out by the beach at the Bay of Colors. When she looked at the sender, it wasn’t one of the people from that mosaic group who’d been fun for a while, so she kept reading.

Hello Sylvia,

I’m Tomash, and I’m writing on behalf of my cocladist, Scout By The Washes-Away-Paintings Beach. Scout is the dog you’ve been giving pets and some bacon to every week for the last few years. (We’d like you to not tell everyone this fact, as it spoils the fun.)

Scout is worried about “the bacon lady” and wants to know if you’re going to be bringing him more treats. It’s fine if the answer is “no”, we’re just looking for information.

— Tomash

Before she’d fully processed what she read, she was responding. “Wait, the dog’s a cladist? I thought you couldn’t upload animals?”

“You can’t,” came the reply, “but you can fork into them if you practice that. - Tomash” The answer was near-instant, even though the original message had been sent hours ago.

Then, the rest of the message hit Sylvia. Here was a social position she hadn’t asked for. Becoming the bacon lady — something she’d been for years and just now found out about — wasn’t one of her many attempts to find a group that would fill that hole in her soul that longed for some purpose, some meaning, some community. And yet … that cute dog had gotten his cocladist to hunt down her contact info to ask about the bacon.

On top of that, she could picture Scout’s disappointed face at the lack of that weekly interaction. If she’d known he wasn’t just part of the sim, maybe she wouldn’t’ve run off on everyone. Maybe. Probably. … No, she’d’ve done it anyway, and that was a real kick in the pants. Something had to change here.

If this was anything like her previous bouts of existential despair, some radical change was called for. But … she’d done a lot of poking around the System: what options did she have?

Maybe I should ask Tomash, she thought. His dog’s nice.

She stood up and looked around her bedroom, and then the rest of her house. It was, unsurprisingly, a mess, but one she could wrangle given appropriate motivation.

Hi Tomash,

To answer your actual question, I fell into a massive funk when I realized I’d hit a hundred and hadn’t really done anything with my life. Since you seem to know a lot about how to work the System (forking into a dog can’t be easy), I was hoping maybe you’d have some ideas. Would you mind taking some time to talk about all that in case it helps? Maybe tomorrow at lunch (my place is [redacted])? I hope I’m not being too forward.

Also, tell Scout I’ll be by with bacon tomorrow evening. I didn’t realize how much he’d gotten used to the stuff.

• Sylvia

A reply arrived a few minutes later:

Lunch at your place tomorrow sounds great!

I passed the news to Scout, and his tail’s about to fall off, just look at him!!!!

— Tomash

[sensorium recording attached]

Lunch came sooner than expected. Sylvia was wearing a white-and-red floral dress, and Tomash (who, it turned out, was also a dog, but a more two-legged one) was wearing a tech person’s t-shirt and cargo pants.

The meal itself passed quietly, with Sylvia offering a soup she’d made earlier and Tomash waving off her apologies for the mess (he’d had worse at his place). The food also served as a good distraction, since neither Tomash or Sylvia were quite sure what to say next.

“Right, so …” Tomash said, once the bowls were put away, “the meaning of life, yeah?” He might as well jump into things. “I don’t think I can do a lot there? My clade’s just systechs and dogs. And a lot of gaming.”

Sylvia sighed. “It’s … I thought about it, and it’s not exactly the meaning of life it’s … everything I’m part of, it feels like I’m just sort of there, like it’s not my thing, does that make sense?”

“Kinda?” Tomash said. “Sort of like you’ve got no idea what direction you’re supposed to go next?”

“Maybe, yeah.” Sylvia said.

“I don’t think I can help there either–” Tomash said.

“–that’s fine, it’s okay, I was just hoping–”

“–but I might have an idea.”

“If you’re thinking I should try tech stuff, I don’t think I’ll be any good at it,” Sylvia admitted.

“No, it’s not that, it’s to do with the Scouts.”

“The Scouts? Right, yeah, why wouldn’t there be more of them! Who doesn’t like more dogs?” Sylvia asked, brightening a bit. She’d really liked Scout being at the Bay of Colors, though she hadn’t realized how much until recently.

“What I was thinking is, well, what’s a good way to bounce around the whole System without feeling like you’re doing it for no reason. And then I realized there’s a bunch of Scout instances, I think we’re hit at least several dozen now, depends how you count, but anyway. And they’re all around the place, with names that give you a bit of a hint about where to look … but you’d still need to do a bunch of digging and asking around to find them.”

“And you’re thinking I’ll run into my thing while I’m trying to find all the Scouts so I can make sure they’ve all met the bacon lady, yeah?”

“Pretty much,” Tomash agreed. “I can give you a copy of the clade list so you can keep track of who you’ve met, and I’m sure the Scouts will be happy to give you hints if you get stuck.”

“Right, they can do the telepathy thing,” Sylvia remembered. She paused. “But isn’t this all a big pointless quest?”

“This is the System, we’re really good at big pointless quests.”

“You’re not wrong,” Sylvia said. “But now that I’m thinking about it, how do I ask around without giving away that the Scouts are cladists?”

Tomash shrugged. “Tell them some eccentric designer hid dogs all over the place if you want or something. Really, we try to keep the whole thing quiet so people see a Scout and just give him a scratch behind the ears instead of thinking he’s part of some big conspiracy. That’d really spoil the mood.”

“I’m sure it would,” Sylvia said. “Now, you were going to get me a list? I’ll want to look at that while I fry up the good stuff.”

Tomash sat down. “Give me a few minutes to get it all set up right.”

Soon enough, Tomash passed over a small booklet, styled after a wildlife-watcher’s logbook. “Here’s an autoupdating list of the Scout subclade with plenty of room for notes. And a few special remarks here and there.”

Sylvia flipped through the book, realizing as she did so just how big this big pointless quest actually was. She could probably spend years on finding all these dogs, maybe even a few decades if she was unlucky. Finding all the dogs was a really weird temporary life goal, but … it might work. Also, those dogs were cute!

“You’re the sort of person who likes crosswords, aren’t you?” she asked Tomash, only slightly annoyed.

“Guilty as charged,” Tomash said. “What gave it away?”

“The names these dogs picked!” Sylvia said. “Like, Scout Behind Coffeeshops II — if my hunch is right I ‘just’ need to wander around Infinite Cafe until I find the dog, but what the heck am I supposed to do with Scout Among The Weird Skunks With Good Kettlecorn? Or Scout Under The Dispatch Desk? Those could be anywhere!”

Tomash smiled. “You’ve got time. And you can fork. You’ll figure the clade out soon enough, I’m sure.”

Sylvia sighed. “You’re not wrong, and this is better than lying around in a depressed funk … but now I’ve got this dog-hunting bug.”

“No problem?” Tomash said, uncertain.

“More seriously, thanks. I think I needed something like this. Maybe it doesn’t pan out and I’ll go looking for another quest. Or I’ll just be sticking ‘Have you seen this dog?’ posters up.”

“Glad I could help,” Tomash said. “Mind if I head out? It feels like I’ve handled the problem I forked for so I’m not sure what else to do here.”

“Can’t have you stealing all the bacon,” Sylvia joked.

“I would never!” Tomash protested. “… okay, maybe I would.”

“Let’s keep in touch?” Sylvia suggested.

“Yeah, you’ve got my address, I’ll make sure it updates through the merge.” Tomash said as he made his way to the door. “Good luck!”

“Bye!”

Tomash quit out and merged down.

Later that day, Sylvia stepped into the Bay of Colors. She wasn’t here to help place a tile or to draw in what was left of the sand by this late in the afternoon. Instead, she walked straight for a familiar boardwalk.

(A familiar scent on the breeze. She’s back shesbackshesbackshesback!!!!!!)

She didn’t make it halfway down the nearby street before a furry missile ran up to her and jumped, trying to get to her face, barking all the while. Said dog then resorted to hopping in circles around her. His tail was about to fall off.

Sylvia beamed. “Hi Scout!” she called out.

This didn’t have much of an impact on the doggo, who still hadn’t turned his zoomies down to a petting-friendly velocity.

“Scout. Sit.”

That worked. Scout sat. He was a very good dog when he wanted to be, which was most of the time.

“Good boy!” Sylvia praised him, leaning down to scratch him in that one spot she knew he liked. Then she remembered about sensorium messages and why she had a guide to the Scout pack on her. “Missed you too, buddy.”

“Hi! You’re back! Okay? Have food?” Scout’s tail thumping against the cobblestones was very audible.

“Yeah, I’m back. I’m doing better, at least. Tomash gave me an idea for something to do with myself.” She kept petting Scout so she wouldn’t look too weird.

Scout didn’t have anything to say there.

“I’m trying to find all the Scouts! And give them bacon, obviously.”

“Sounds like a fun chase!” Scout agreed.

“I could use a hint, though,” she said, showing Scout her list. “A lot of these names are really vague.”

“I could use some bacon,” Scout replied, sniffing at Sylvia to see where she was hiding the fried meat.

“Hint first,” Sylvia tried to insist.

“Bacon,” Scout countered.

“Hint.”

“Bacon.”

“Okay, fine,” Sylvia said, “I can’t say no to that adorable face of yours.” She offered Scout the crispy fried meat she’d stashed in her purse for exactly this purpose. He ate it slowly, savoring the familiar taste and texture.

“You’ll be back every week?” he asked.

Sylvia thought about that a moment. “Yeah. For you, I’ll do that.”

Scout replied by trying to lick her face. “Hey!” Sylvia objected.

Scout calmed down and sat for a moment. “I have a hint. Seek new arrivals.”

Sylvia squawked. “That’s barely helpful!”

“No fun if it’s too easy!” Scout replied.

Sylvia took out the second piece of bacon she’d been planning to give to Scout and broke it into small pieces, which she flung around the street. “Have fun, Scout!” she said, after she’d disconnected the sensorium message.

Scout scurried off, nose near the ground, to find all the little bits of tasty treat. He absolutely had fun. The whole incident was a good ending to an exciting day.

Sylvia went home, where she started trying to find out where new uploads often ended up and if that’d changed since her newbie days. Maybe one of those would match up with a Scout name. It sure wasn’t easy, but, in its own way, this was fun.

Sylvia and Scout both went to sleep satisfied.