Knux's Misc Writing Pile

[knux400]

Sore Loser - 2023
[CW: DEATH, UNREALITY, PERSONALITY LOSS]

We get a lot of letters at the TCPDex research facility. A lot of it is junk or hyperbole. "Cactus types can shoot needles from their arms and can hit an apple from a distance of 500 yards!" (No they can't, and nothing is that accurate. You're either seeing things or making shit up.) Occasionally we get things we already know sent to us by people with an outdated edition or who just didn't bother to read the entry before mailing us. "Did you know paper types can turn stuff into paper?" (Yes. Literally everyone here knew this.) Some of it is fan mail. "I want to be a researcher just like you when I grow up!" (Hate to break your heart, kid, but it's actually pretty boring most of the time. And when it isn't boring, it's usually life-threatening. Not a lot of in between.) A good portion of it is utility bills. (Turns out housing and analyzing over a thousand different types of TCP gets expensive after a while.) But on rare occasion, I do get a letter passed along to me that piques my interest and that I do feel a genuine need to respond to.

One such letter was a simple one, probably written by a youngster, given the handwriting. But it posed an interesting question nonetheless.
"What's the most dangerous TCP?"
Now, see, most people's knee-jerk response would be antimatter type or black hole type, but Wax has done a pretty good job so far of making sure TCP abilities can't instantly destroy the planet. How do I know? Well, first of all, the planet's still here. Secondly, even with conditions, modifiers, and anomalies in play, there's still no way I know of to convert a TCP into a planet-destroying weapon, and I have the second most knowledge on them in the world, tied with Hellrazer. Personally, I think Hellrazer comes in third, but they feel the same way about me, so we compromise. Number one, of course, would be Wax himself, but he doesn't talk about TCPs much. At least not to us mortals.

But I'm getting off track- the most dangerous TCP that we know of isn't one that a lot of people know about, and probably not one you're ever going to see in your lifetime, even if you're an avid player. It only shows up in TCP sessions- never on Morbit proper- and when it does, the whole session is shut down immediately before it can do any damage. It's also not really a TCP anymore, but it's close enough.

Let me back up a bit.

As you may or may not know, the game of Tiny Cat People is a program as well as a real, physical plane. I have no idea how this works, probably because I'm not a high god, but it just does. It's some kind of god-code that runs on the fabric of reality itself, which is why typically only gods can modify it. But it's still code. Like code here on Morbit, it's susceptible to errors and oversights that make the game do things it's not supposed to do. Even Wax has to release patches every so often to fix bugs here and there, or to add something new because of a moral conundrum he happens to be having, but that's a story for another time. Point is, it's programming, not unlike the programs we're familiar with.

You may have predicted that I'm hinting at glitch types being my pick for most dangerous TCP type, but no, Wax thought of that one, too. Glitch types aren't able to access the code the game itself runs on, only machines and computers within the game. But our reader here didn't ask for the most dangerous TCP type, they asked for the most dangerous TCP. And while glitch types are just as safe as any other abstract type TCP, there is one extremely specific circumstance in which they aren't.

Now, most of this story is hearsay. The exact details of this session are lost to time. All we know for sure is that somehow, a glitch type managed to activate their ability at the exact moment a session ended, thus circumventing the game's normal protection against a glitch type's abilities. The prevailing story is that the glitch type was the last member of their team and that they were in the process of being killed. They were already in their ascended form, but in one last burst of desperation, fear, and anger, they activated their ability indiscriminately at the exact moment they were killed- which, since only one team of TCPs was left standing, was the exact moment the game ended. This extra-powerful burst of energy hit the game itself in the one fraction of a second when it would be vulnerable to such an attack, and bad things happened.

First of all, the session itself ended abruptly with no winner and an error message, so no points for whoever actually won. The plane of existence all the TCPs were on disappeared entirely with no chance of saving the winning team or anything else in that session. Wax, of course, immediately updated the game so that in the future, it would end one second after the last TCP was killed, removing the vulnerability. Everyone else just shrugged and moved on. But the glitch type itself somehow survived. Again, I have only a basic understanding of how the game actually works, so this is pure speculation, but my guess is that it subconsciously dumped all the data pertaining to itself into the upload feature normally used to transmit winning TCPs to their players. But without a destination to go to, it ended up just floating between dimensions.

Whatever the case, the entity that made it out of the game wasn't a TCP anymore. It was an amalgam of TCP data and garbage data that was haphazardly scraped from the dying world at the last possible moment and clumped together into some kind of digital lump. Its actual name was lost to time, impossible to recover because of some very special circumstances I'll cover later. The biggest piece of real information we have on it is from an extremely old-fashioned printing computer that managed to print a string of gibberish before it died. For the record, it was SR15RH9OAN46LDY492NG05NG9503MV0394NG3G4D68TE9D8FH9S7QT8GA5SF9. Make of that what you will, but we just call the thing Sore Loser, since the first five digits look like the letters SR LSR. It kind of fits, given the supposed circumstances it was created in.

It's impossible to say whether it was sentient, or what its intentions were if it was. The only thing we do know about it is that in programming terms, it both is and isn't a TCP. But as long as it wasn't in an environment where magical god-code was specifically counting the number of TCPs in existence, everything would be fine.

Let me take a brief aside to talk about the number NaN. NaN, or Not A Number, is a result returned by a machine when the result of an equation is impossible to compute. The easiest way to get NaN is to divide something by 0. Since NaN isn't a number at all, doing anything to it can only return NaN. NaN plus NaN is still NaN. NaN minus NaN is still NaN. NaN divided by NaN is still NaN. It just doesn't cooperate with any mathematical expression at all.

This TCP, being both a TCP and not a TCP at the same time, counted as NaN TCPs. And so when it eventually drifted through nothingness and found its way into a session, that session now had NaN TCPs in it, since NaN plus any number will result in NaN. Many things in the game depend on how many TCPs there currently are, so this caused a cascading effect. The TCP limit, for instance, changes depending how many current TCPs there are. If there are NaN TCPs, the TCP limit is also NaN, meaning all players are both able and unable to spawn a TCP. Trying to spawn a TCP during this time will just create a bunch of garbage data.

More importantly, once all possible TCPs have spawned, the game enters its second phase, where the teams have to fight each other and no more spawning is allowed. To do this, the game checks the number of players, the number of TCPs per player, multiplies the two together, and compares that number to how many TCPs are currently present. You might be able to see where this is going. There are NaN TCPs present, which both matches and doesn't match the maximum number of TCPs possible, hence instead of the game state being 0 or 1, it's now NaN, which means a number of factors related to progression are now happening and not happening simultaneously.

But you'd only be noticing any of this for a fraction of a second before it becomes a moot point. The moment any object interacts with Sore Loser in any way, its variable properties all become NaN. How tall is it? NaN inches. How slippery is it? NaN. It becomes a pile of garbage data. Any object, then, that interacts with that object in any way will also have its properties set to NaN. And any object that interacts with that becomes NaN, and so on and so on. In less than a second, the entire dimension a session takes place in is a pile of volatile garbage data.

Okay, so the whole session gets eaten. No big, at least it doesn't affect any real people, right? Well, first of all, session TCPs are real people, so shame on you. And second of all, not quite. The data from the dimension the session is in has to be delivered to whatever machine the players are playing from, and this garbage data cannot be processed by any device. Any arcade cabinet, any personal computer, anything you're playing on gets instantly bricked if you happen to be in one of these sessions. Completely useless. Throw it out. But what if you're a god, and you're connected to the game through godspace? Or worse, you're a new god who hasn't been put in Morbit proper yet and you're tangentially connected to the session itself?

Short answer: Your brain gets fried and your body gets weird. Just the same as any computer, your head gets filled with garbage, and your mind is just gone. Your physical body stops working, and then stops existing shortly thereafter. I've only seen this happen once, and I can only describe the process as confusing yet frightening. Every single aspect of the person just flickers and dissolves, from their texture to their shape to their size. For a few moments, they become glitched as fragments of everything and nothing ripple across them before they disappear entirely. It's probably something to do with the biology of a god and being a living embodiment of motifs and those motifs being a subconscious part of a god's mind, but it's freaky as hell. I don't even want to know what happens to a mortal under the same circumstances.

Now, with all that in mind, remember that this just happens the instant Sore Loser even touches an active session. It's not even a conscious act on its part. What does seem to be a conscious act on its part is its path through interdimensional space and its ability to sort of absorb any garbage data it creates. The main "core" of it, the bit that was originally the glitch type TCP, seems to function as a sort of brain for the creature, and all the data it subsequently accumulates serves as its body. It seems to actively seek out sessions to absorb, drifting aimlessly until it finds one. Why exactly it does this is completely unknown. It might be some primal desire to grow and thrive, it might be the TCP reaching out for help, or it might even be some subconscious instinct it's not even aware of. There's no way of knowing, since there's no way of communicating with the thing. To even perceive it in any way is a death sentence either for you or the computer you're seeing it through.

Even Wax can't kill the thing. The best he can do is prevent it from absorbing any more sessions and growing larger. Four years ago there was an update to the game that got a lot of complaints from people on less powerful machines, saying that the game was running too slowly. Someone even poked their head in and looked, and apparently there was an arbitrary process checking every value in the game on every single frame. The purpose of this code, of course, is to detect immediately whether any value has changed to something that isn't a number. If it detects NaN anywhere, at all, it shuts down the entire game instantly before Sore Loser can get to it. Everything is still gone and impossible to recover, and false positives do happen on occasion, but it's a small price to pay to stop Sore Loser getting any more powerful. There are also a series of empty, redundant "sessions" that serve as barriers to more important places such as the gateways to Paradise and Morbit proper. They don't actually stop Sore Loser, but if they go down, it serves as an early warning for Wax and he can just move everything away. That's the best anyone can do, at least for now.

It's impossible to stop Sore Loser or even slow it down when everything it touches, everything that sees it, everything that interacts with it in any way whatsoever becomes a part of it. The best option is literally just to run. We don't know its original name because every device that could possibly have kept a record of it is destroyed and every individual who could've possibly known has had their brain turned to mush. Wax probably doesn't even know. Every bit of knowledge we have on the thing has been scraped from the dying moments of thousands of old computers, their last moments dedicated to providing us with a hint of a clue of the nature of this beast.

Have fun sleeping tonight, bud! Thanks for the letter.

-Lens