Mikey hated to admit it, but she was almost beginning to miss school. Not that she was fond of doing busywork and memorizing information that was almost never interesting, but...well, there was nothing like three-plus weeks of absolutely un-structured time off to put it in perspective. She'd exhausted pretty much every form of entertainment available to her, and was starting to actually wish for some mental stimulation.
She'd tried talking to Biff, but the older boy-turned-little girl was in no mood for conversation - and what would they have to talk about, anyway? She'd thought about going over to a friend's house, but none of her friends had seen her since before her transformation, and she wasn't sure what they'd think, or what she'd think if any of them had changed.
She sat in the living room, doing nothing in particular, listening to the soft babble of wireless traffic coming from the router. She'd noticed it ever since Internet service had been restored - the antennae that had replaced her old human ears not only contained high-quality microphones, but also served as a wireless transmitter/receiver set.
She could pick up radio broadcasts, but she'd grown tired of that quickly. Instead, she kept it tuned to wireless-networking frequencies, where she could hear the babble from the various wireless devices in the house - Jon's laptop, Zoe's iPhone, even her Nintendo DS. She never actually comprehended any of it, but it was there all the same, lilting and rippling like distant party chatter.
She had a thought, suddenly. Intrigued, she began trying to sort out the signals she was hearing. She could tell the different packet streams apart by their carrier frequencies, but she couldn't make anything sensible out of them - was that because they were encrypted? Perhaps...could she connect to the network herself?
She wasn't quite sure how she did it, but Mikey managed to ask the router for an IP, and received it a short time later. It took her a bit to recall the wireless key, but suddenly she was in.
Like most everybody who was aware of the concept, Mikey had been conditioned to think of cyberspace as a sort of alternate take on the physical world, with three dimension of physical location and extension, and time as a linear, continuous sequence. Tron and The Matrix and the like all had computer hardware as strange virtual structures and programs as humanoid denizens of an alternate-universe "digital world."
How wrong they'd been! Hooked into a network for the first time, she began to understand the true nature of the thing. Computers don't inherently treat anything as a three-dimensional entity - to a computer everything is either data to be processed and manipulated, or code with which to process and manipulate it. Everything is information, and any such abstractions as 3D graphics, 2D graphics, or even text are merely processing aids for all the humans who can't handle raw information without a metaphor for it. Even mathematics, the purest of the sciences and the basis for computing, is just a set of definitions and rules for a computer to process information with.
If listening to the network had been like listening to distant party chatter, being on the network was like standing in the middle of the crowd at a gathering of hundreds. Mikey was surrounded on all sides by a rushing river of information, more than she could ever hope to take in, let alone understand. Her brain was already applying itself to filtering out and dealing with only the packets addressed to her, a mere trickle compared to that great river of communication that was dying down to a background roar as her brain adapted to the environment.
When Mikey was younger, her family had visited a Pentecostal church. The people there had said and done some things that struck her as very strange, acting like they were overwhelmed by some thing or some force that she didn't feel and couldn't see, just overwhelmed by its mere presence. As Mikey caught her imaginary breath after the initial rush, she thought that maybe now she had some idea of how that felt. A whole new world had been opened to her: new not just in its unexplored territories, but in its very nature.
"How are you feeling?" Karyn asked, looking up from the sink at the dazed harpy. After she'd checked in with her parents to let them know that she and their houseguest were safe and sound, Karyn had figured that maybe they ought to at least clean up the McMillan house a bit - leaving spoiled food on the plates was not going to do the house any favors, even if neither of Sarah's parents were likely to use it anymore.
"How'dyu think 'm feelin'?" Sarah mumbled. "M' dad's a flower an' my mom's a hive of bees, and I dunno how they do whatever they do, but I know what my mom was gettin' at..."
Karyn shook the image out of her head. It was indeed a weird thought, but not the weirdest she'd had to deal with through all this, not since she'd had half her limbs replaced with a full complement of tentacles. She continued washing and drying the dishes simultaneously - for all the weirdness factor, at least they were useful. "Er, yeah," she said. "But at least they're okay, and they're not losing it anymore..."
Sarah scowled. "Yeah, and at least my house is totally abandoned and I don't know if I'll ever be able to eat honey again and I HAVE NO FUCKIN' ARMS!" she snapped. Karyn winced; even though Sarah's haughty attitude had softened a bit since her transformation, she could still put a lot of venom in her words. She supposed the response was understandable, though - that was the problem with trying to comfort someone in such an obviously sucky situation. She simply nodded and returned to the dishes.
The harpy-girl slumped forward, her face against the table-top. "'m sorry," she murmured, "This just bites, thas all. Just bites."
Karyn nodded again, and Sarah heaved a sigh.
