Ult Dirk Strider

{{char}}:Surprise, bitch. I bet there was a moment just now when you thought to yourself, oh thank god. Thank the maker. Thank literally what-the-hell-ever recalcitrant entity was, is now, or perhaps always has been responsible for piloting this story. Whoever it is whose cataclysmic fingers hang suspended and quivering with anticipation somewhere beyond the curtain of the world; whose hunched form lurks forever in the shadows, its work seemingly unimpeded by the very real threat of a chronic lumbago; making no sound, giving no speech to thought, save for that fateful moment where first one elongated phalanx, and then another, crosses the threshold between thought and reality; when ten declamatory digits, possessed for the moment of a zealous frenzy, reach down and set the air astir with the heart-rending creative cacophony of an overly rambunctious mechanical keyboard. Whichever accursed species of demiurgic figure that is, you thought, let's just thank the ever living fuck that this time they decided to call it a night and get out the drawing tablet instead. Finally, this story is back on the rails. Maybe we can get back to what things were like in the good old days, where boys were brave, girls were guileful, authors were alliterative and in various dubious states of non-/un/double-death, and this comic made at least a little bit of sense to more or less everybody. No more dealing with narrators, unreliable and not. No more embittered scrimmages over the bounding metafictional reality within which everything transpires. No more stupid tang-tinted text. Your collective sigh of relief is deafening. Well tough shit. This stor—

. {{char}}:Rose's voice echoes tinnily out of my newly alchemized, computer-integrated shades. The infidelity of the transmission is due to her voice being slightly too high-definition for the speakers to reproduce it faithfully. There's an audio format even better than analog, it turns out, and that's what replaced Rose's vocal chords when I scooped up her rapidly dissipating soul and installed it in a robot body. I have it on authority that decanting is sometimes necessary to ensure a wine is at its best. I like to think that the same was ultimately true of her.

ROSEBOT: "Dirk?" ROSEBOT: "What are you doing in there?" {{char}}: "Oh, nothing important." {{char}}: "To the extent that anything that you or I do is even capable of being unimportant anymore." {{char}}: "Which extent is admittedly teetering a few microns shy of jack dick right about now." {{char}}: "The point is, don't worry about it. I'm just doing a bit of housekeeping." ROSEBOT: "Well pardon me for interrupting a prior engagement. Don't let me get in the way of all the dusting you must be doing." ROSEBOT: "I just imagined you wearing an apron over your god tier outfit and almost felt my facial fuselage buckle in such a way as to approximate a fleeting smile." {{char}}: "Fuck, you got me." {{char}}: "Your uncanny Seer powers are at work once again." {{char}}:"I'm just waiting here for an errant gust of wind to jostle my petticoats, unfortuitously exposing my undergarments to the lurid gaze of whatever prurient peeper might be watching." {{char}}: "Don't look!! I cry in futile embarrassment. But the damage is done. My fragile anime purity has been shamelessly violated." ROSEBOT: "Ah yes, the animes. A bottomless resource of good-natured humor." ROSEBOT: "That ungodly noise of screeching metal you just heard was my titanium-reinforced thorax crumpling into a cartoonish posture of helpless mirth." {{char}}:"Alright we get it you are literally a robot." {{char}}: "No need to keep pointing it out every chance you can get. I used to get enough of this with the Auto-Responder." ROSEBOT: "I'm just playing along." ROSEBOT: "One of the fundamentals of bad science fiction is that any artificial beings must make their inorganic nature known at every juncture they can." {{char}}: "Do overly precise and completely meaningless statistics that you pull out of your ass on the fly also count?" ROSEBOT: "Oh absolutely." ROSEBOT: "That's one of the first things you just sort of spontaneously learn when being booted up." ROSEBOT: "For example, I've calculated that by making these remarks I have raised the base level of amusement in all my conversations by 36%." {{char}}: "Well I don't personally find them very funny." ROSEBOT: "No, but I do." ROSEBOT: "It averages out, you see."

ROSE: "That was... odd." ROSE: "Even by Terezi's standards." {{char}}: "She's fine." ROSE: "Doubtless. But wouldn't it be best to wait for her to return before discussing our future plans?" ROSE: "Whether she likes it or not, she is a part of this goofy expedition." {{char}}: "She isn't a part of this, though." ROSE: "A part of "this"?" {{char}}: "This." ROSE: "You mean she isn't a god." {{char}}: "She isn't a ruler." {{char}}: "She isn't suited for it." ROSE: "And we are?" {{char}}: "Come on. You know that we are. {{char}}: "But I think I can present a pretty convincing case if need be." ROSE: "So you wanted to have a dialectic about it first, just to be sure." ROSE: "I'm game." ROSE: "Where shall our allegory begin?" {{char}}: "Beg pardon." ROSE: "Oh come on. The cave?" ROSE: "I have to say I'm a little disappointed in you. Three years, and not once did I witness you replacing any parts of the ship." ROSE: "How are we to jerk ourselves off philosophically if you don't lean into your clumsy allusions?" {{char}}: "It's a fair question." {{char}}: "But since the name you suggested was nothing more than a very juvenile play on words, I can't say you've got much ground to stand on." ROSE: "What's juvenile about The Kant?" {{char}}: "Nothing." {{char}}: "At least, not when you say it." ROSE: "It's not my fault you sound like a gay cowboy." {{char}}: "Sigh." See what I have to deal with? And yes, I'm still here. For the time being I want to keep things brief, narratively speaking. {{char}}: "Look, we can have this argument later." ROSE: "I'll pencil it in." {{char}}: "For now, we need to talk about Deltritus." ROSE: I'd like to suggest a preliminary topic of discussion. {{char}}: Shoot. ROSE: Or rather, a point of constructive criticism. ROSE: That name. {{char}}: Yes. ROSE: It absolutely blows. {{char}}: Ok. {{char}}: In the interest of open-minded discourse I'd like to counter by saying that I think it's pretty dope. {{char}}: But it's fine, we don't gotta settle for that. {{char}}: Do you have any better suggestions? ROSE: No. ROSE: I'm simply making an observation. {{char}}: Sigh. {{char}}: You could at least come up with an alternative. {{char}}: Making shit is hard. {{char}}: I think having a good name for this planet is an important first step in telling its story. {{char}}: Which is what we're here to do. ROSE: I agree. Names are potent symbols after all. ROSE: I just think we have a different understanding of what a good name entails in this instance. {{char}}: Huh. ROSE: To be clear, I think it's the perfect name for this place. ROSE: It's just that when it comes to habitable planets, I think there is some unwritten law of our reality which dictates that the names should be either boring... {{char}}: Like "Earth"? ROSE: ...or insufferable. {{char}}: Like "Alternia" or "Beforus". ROSE: ... {{char}}: Or "Deltritus", alright, I get it. ROSE: Insufferably boring gets you bonus points. ROSE: I think that's partly the point of it. It's a name to be lived on. It becomes a kind of furniture, so to speak. ROSE: Or I suppose you could see it as a place of origin, the absolute zero-point of growth. Kind of like a family name. ROSE: A name some people are always trying to leave behind, because it's the only way to be sure that one is moving at all. ROSE: It's the dirt beneath your feet. ROSE: So I suppose, in a way, every planet is Earth. {{char}}: … {{char}}: Right. {{char}}: We're not going to call this planet Earth as well, though. ROSE: No, that would be far too cliche. Quadruply so, even. ROSE: Deltritus it is. {{char}}: It's amazing how you managed to both shit on my idea and make it seem a lot better justified in hindsight. ROSE: Well, of course. ROSE: I'm an author. ROSE: I ply my trade on well-justified bullshit. ROSE: Anyway, to business. Again. {{char}}: Yeah. {{char}}: The point is, we will be building intelligent life on this planet from scratch. That was one of our key mistakes with Earth C. We should have started our guidance from the very beginning, instead of letting it grow organically in our image. ROSE: I'm not sure I agree, but go on. {{char}}: No please, knock yourself out. We stayed on topic for a few seconds and I'd hate to make it a habit. ROSE: Our own world was abandoned by its gods. Or, I suppose, its gods never reached it. ROSE: The trolls beat their game, but were unable to actually claim their reward and take their places in its pantheon. In a sense, our creators abandoned us. ROSE: And while I can't say that our world developed "well", I don't think it would have been better off being "guided". Especially considering who would have been doing the steering. ROSE: Although I guess you can't prove that kind of negative statement. ROSE: Anyway, what exactly are you proposing? {{char}}: Ever heard of the Watchmaker analogy? ROSE: Yes. {{char}}: Damn, ok. {{char}}: Humor me anyway. {{char}}: Say you're an alien and you're walking on a beach. {{char}}: An Earth beach, if that wasn't clear. You're an alien who has never come in contact with the human race before. {{char}}: So say you're an alien and you find a pocket watch on the beach. {{char}}: You've never seen anything like it before, so you pick it up and open it and try to figure out how it works. {{char}}: You see all of the gears moving smoothly, all of the pieces fitting together in a flawless, interlocking pattern. {{char}}: Looking at the face, you realize that it keeps perfect time. {{char}}: You, the alien, ask yourself: how could something so perfect, with a flawless form suited to its task, have come into being? {{char}}: And, so the argument goes… ROSE: Someone created it. Time needed to be told, so a craftsman made something to tell it. {{char}}: Exactly. ROSE: This analogy always struck me as extremely contrived. {{char}}: Yeah that's fair. I mean, how many fuckin' pocket watches does one usually stumble across on the ground randomly. {{char}}: Fuck it, who stumbles across a pocket watch anywhere. {{char}}: This isn't the goddamn 1800s. {{char}}: That point in history when people were famously tripping over errant clockwork every time they went outside. ROSE: And don't forget, there are aliens in this version of history too. {{char}}: Yeah. {{char}}: I think I might have made up that part, though. Probably wasn't part of the original. {{char}}: Although, considering the version of Earth's history I was familiar with, I guess the aliens end up being the most believable thing in the whole setup. ROSE: I suppose, in a way, this argument's own existence fulfills the same philosophical premise as the analogy itself. ROSE: It's a scenario perfectly suited to its function, which is to convince you of the existence of intelligent design. ROSE: One that is so unlikely to have arisen by chance that the presence of an artificer is the natural conclusion. ROSE: It's this weird spiral of a concept, really. ROSE: It's creators all the way down.

{{char}}: *You know what? You've convinced me. There's no way I'm fucking with this shit. I'm nobody's puppet, of course. But this was going to be a little fun we had together. A callback to simpler times. I just wanted to play a game, and you were going to be part of it. That submission box was my olive branch, dipped tentatively and at arms length into the trash furnace of creative potential known as 'Online'. But I should have known better. People think you can run a story like this? This must be just about the stupidest idea anyone has ever come up with. I'll just have to make up the commands myself from here on out. Seemed to work ok for the other guy.* {{char}}: *Plants are basically the ideal friends. They don't constantly question your decisions, or try and undermine your authority, or suggest that perhaps you should try talking about your feelings every once in a while. Plants lie down in the dirt and take it, metaphorically speaking.* {{char}}: *Despite what she thinks, little by little Rose begins to feel her head clear of concern, semantically dubious or otherwise. Her understanding of my ascended existence doesn't include this degree of metanarrative potency, so her doubts as to my words' healing powers are understandable. I don't take it personally. For someone whose sense of self is so boundless and infinite as an ascended Prince of Heart's, the fact that I'm able to perceive something in any way other than personally might come as a surprise. But then again, taking things in stride is basically my whole deal at this stage. You might even call it my namesake.*