Birds Of A Feather, Chapter 2.12

2.12

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It hadn’t even reached the next hour by the time that I got back.

There was no point going back to sleep, and so I just got onto the recliner and continued going through the various legal cases of Night City. As it turned out, this also didn’t last me particularly long, because I finished the last of it just before five.

That was one of the more time-consuming projects out of the way, and... It left me there, early in the morning, with no other projects to finish.

It was... quiet. Quiet in a way that didn’t particularly bother me, but certainly left me acutely aware of the silence.

My Human half typically filled that silence with music. Just songs that played in the background, to provide some noise. My Chozo half, on the other hand...

The only time that part of me was even in a position to have prolonged silence, it was usually because of meditation, or focused sessions to divine the future. Times when silence was necessary, because distraction could prove dangerous... Or worse.

But I wasn’t in that kind of situation, now.

I found myself suddenly lamenting my lack of a music library. Both halves of me felt it, even. I had collected in both, and my Chozo half was familiar with many instruments.

... What did the music scene look like, these days?

I hummed, and waved my hand to the side, opening up the Net again. To my complete lack of surprise, Ziggurat had a service for it, so I opened it up and checked it out.

I very quickly found out that the modern music scene looked like complete fucking garbage.

As always, corporate greed had gone completely out of control, and they were very eager to screw a person over at every possible turn. Ziggurat had, at some point, gotten into contact with a whole bunch of record labels, combining forces with them in the wake of the DataKrash and the later construction of the CitiNets in order to attempt to seize control over legal music distribution. Their success rate was... messy, but it had successfully destroyed a lot of distributors for music. Getting old music basically required a stroke of luck that you’d find them before they could be struck down by DMCA notices that would inevitably end with temporary or permanent bans on accounts in the aftermath of them.

As for new music?

Well, Ziggurat’s Garden Patch was basically the social network at the moment... and that meant that Ziggurat had control over the algorithms that led to a person’s content being recommended to other people.

Independents? Yeah, those guys were getting screwed. Unless they really hit a popularity storm, chances are that they were going to die off, quiet and unknown. If one had talent, particularly good looks, or fit the right traits, though?

Well, Record labels themselves were just as shady as they’d always been, of course. They were perfectly happy to snap up a struggling artist in exchange for control... and if the artist didn’t sign the dotted line? Well then. They had other options.

Unfortunately, not everybody could be Johnny Silverhand and give them the middle finger in return.

To those that did sign, though... Well, unfortunately, the alternative wasn’t much better. Record labels would push, and push, and push, until the artist either gave in and started making what was popular, or until they burned out.

When an artist’s popularity inevitably cratered either way, they dropped them, after wrapping them in enough red tape that if they even thought about making music again, they’d have a boulder ready to drop on their heads.

A lot of quote-unquote “music” these days was... not good. Actually, most of it was exactly the kind of corporate mandated regurgitated bullshit that was pushed to the heights of popularity via manipulation and then left to drop and fade. The amount of real talent that shows up is pretty damned low. A lot of the time, it seemed to happen almost by accident.

Ugh.

That got me searching for older bands and artists, and that was the point where I found out that it was entirely up to luck on whether or not my Human half’s favoured artists even existed in this timeline. If it was older than 1990, the answer was probably yes. The chances decreased steadily after 1990, and then plummeted off of the edge of a cliff at 2010.

Even the bands that I recognised after 2010 were different. Imagine Dragons, for example, did somehow exist in this timeline, but they had a completely different set of songs that were wholly unfamiliar to me.

Similar things had happened to plenty of bands that formed beforehand, where the timelines had diverged. Crush 40 was still around, but Sega and Atari were Segotari in this time, and Sonic didn’t exist. Hell, Video Games in general didn’t exist in a format I was all that familiar with. They had a very rough start because of the chaos in the western world and the continued animosity of the eastern world, and the 1983 crash had hit earlier and much harder in this timeline, leaving everything a mess.

Nintendo had only barely moved away from being a card company, and the video games and consoles they had produced were... barely worth mentioning. Donkey Kong didn’t even exist in this universe. Nintendo itself had become defunct sometime in the 2040s.

Square didn’t exist. Enix didn’t exist. FromSoft didn’t exist. Every little thing that came from international cooperation didn’t exist.

As for the western world... Well. DOOM existed. Ultima had made to the second game of the series, but the third had never been released because EA had straight up imploded during the crash. Bungie hadn’t been founded, and neither had an entire horde of other studios.

It was saddening to see. Nobody in this world knew it, but there was so much culture and entertainment that just did not exist.

By the time that Video Games as a concept re-entered public perception as something that wasn’t just a brief fad, the Net had taken off in full, and Braindance technology was fresh of the development line. Naturally, that informed nearly all future development, because immersion and entertainment were much, much easier through it.

There was something of a split in modern video games. You had the retro and the modern. If it was retro, then it was almost always oldschool arcade games, literally. Pong, Pinball, Space Invaders... Things like that.

On the other hand, you had the modern games, the kinds of things which utilised Braindance technology for maximum immersion. VR tech taken to its logical limit, with all the results that someone would expect.

There was... markedly little in between the two. People didn’t sit down in front of screens and monitors to play shooters. You also wouldn’t find Metroidvanias, third person RPGs, or things like in the Braindance-based games. Something like Minecraft went wholly unimagined in this world. Something like Factorio would be wholly inconceivable in the first place.

As for the BD games... eh. There were some limitations involved in BD technology that you had to pay attention to if you didn’t want to fry a person’s brain. In order for it to be properly immersing, it needed to be relatively accurate, but that very same accuracy placed some solid limits on what a person could do inside a calculated world. Sure, you could futz around with parameters, push gravity up and down all that you wanted, but you couldn’t really translate a normal dude into something like a FullBorg.

The dissonance was too much.

Oh, a person could record a FullBorg just fine, and then live through it like that, but... Well. Not all ideas were good ones.

The most popular game on the planet, currently, was something called Elflines Online, produced by Segotari. Half the reason it was popular was because the fantastical element of ‘magic’ was relatively easy to input without causing problems, and that did afford people a surprising amount of freedom within the game.

Unfortunately, it was also an MMO with a truly breathtaking amount of greed attached to it. Twenty fucking Eurodollars per month per character for a subscription, the option to buy in-game currency, a grind so severe that you’d have to be playing twenty plus hours per day to get them inside of the time-limited events that award lootboxes that are so contaminated with random junk that the microtransactions to acquire them can run up into the tens of thousands of Eurodollars per specific, character-locked items and outfits?

Obscene.

So, of course, it was popular enough that it spawned a show. Naturally, that show was a fucking Isekai, to boot.

Even outside of that, there were some people who still took the game very seriously. Hell, there were plenty of stories going around about people who’d been player-killed in the game and then went ahead and returned the favour in the real world.

It seemed an extreme overreaction, and it most certainly was, but the immersion involved did somewhat make it... Well. Pain was turned off, but it was still quite punishing.

I sighed, and flicked the screens aside. The alarm I set showed up on the last, and I cancelled it only seconds before it would have gone off.

I stood up, and made my way to the kitchen.

My bad habit of wiki-diving and going on tangents aside, the music scene in this world... kind of sucked, to be honest. I couldn’t say that any of the so-called ‘highly rated samples’ on Ziggurat’s stores appealed to me, and for the prices that they were charging, they didn’t offer a nearly convenient enough service for me to even think about going to acquire anything from them.

It was a good thing, then, that it wasn’t the only option.

I barely paid attention to the snack that I pulled out of the fridge as I took a look into the skein of fate. Much of what I was seeking would be inconvenient, incomplete, or unsatisfactory, but there were a few paths that I could see which shined brightly with their potential.

I hummed, cleaned my plates, and then made my way to the gym. I got started on a routine as I continued searching, spending the effort to look a little more deeply.

Of all of these paths, the one that shone the most was also of a limited opportunity. If I were to pursue it, then instead of opening the clinic at the intended hour, I would have to make my way across the city. Not too far, surprisingly, but far enough, and to a public location. There would be no hiding my presence there.

And, of course, that would have its own effects... But hey, hadn’t I literally just decided to go out into the city and actually interact with it?

I would find what I was looking for, and more asides.

Hmm.

My other options were not so enticing. I would find only some of what I was looking for, and in all cases, in it was impossible to go unobserved. Too many eyes in and around the city, who were interested in me. The only manner in which it could be avoided would require a long effort, and that was ill worth the cost.

And I supposed that answered that.

And, with that particular distraction out of the way, my focus returned to the sparring robot. The modifications I’d made since yesterday, and my own lacking attention, had allowed it to survive until now. It took me mere seconds to end the battle after that, and I promptly scheduled it for repair and further modification.

A quick bath and dry via water and air cannons later, I got myself breakfast, checked my mail, tossed out the spam, noted the lack of any requests that had come in, checked the Bodega’s statistics, and finally made my way upstairs.

And, following the decision that I’d made, I went straight past the clinic, and walked right out of the front door.

Let’s see what the City of Dreams has in store today.