They sprinted onwards through the great black space, following the ball as it twisted and turned on different light trails. All of a sudden it came to a stop, and Amy bent down to investigate. Things were a little scattered here, but she should be able to pick out the trail.
"Do you really believe that?" Effie asked. "About reality being in the mind?"
Amy held up a hand for quiet, looked long and hard at the surrounding floor, and kicked the ball off in a particular direction.
"Let me put it this way," she said. "When you were a human, you were made of physical matter, and so was the world around you - the 'real world.' All your senses were based on interactions between your body and the surrounding matter, run through dedicated filters in your brain. In here, what are you made of?"
"Data...?"
Amy nodded. "Right. And your senses here are based around perception of data, also through dedicated filters. You could even say the filters are still in your brain, since they're provided by your host, which is also where your code is running. So this world is just as real to us now as the 'real world' was when we were human. That doesn't mean there isn't another layer of reality out there, just that this, right here, is as defineably 'real' as anything from your human life."
Effie frowned. "Huh." That was a confusing way to look at it, but she supposed she couldn't say it wasn't accurate. But to think of this as a "real" world...she still couldn't quite grasp it.
"Amy?" she asked. "What were you like...before?"
The older fairy smiled. "As a human?" she said. "Mmm...not too different from what I look like now, actually. Black hair and green eyes, and I wasn't quite this trim, or dressed like this, but otherwise pretty much the same."
Effie stared. "You mean you weren't older?"
Amy frowned. "You don't have to be old to appreciate good design," she said. "I'm as old as my computer, and if you think that's so old..."
Actually, twenty-five or twenty-six wasn't that much older than Effie herself had been, but...for some reason, it now seemed years into the future. Was it because she had a teenaged body now? Was this one of those mental tics she was picking up? She absent-mindedly smoothed out her dress as she pondered this.
"No, that's - I didn't mean..." Effie sighed. It seemed like Amy was being over-sensitive, but...it had been kind of a stupid thing to say. She still had do much to figure out about talking to people...
"What about you?" Amy asked, as the path took another turn. "What were you like?"
Effie couldn't think of why she hadn't anticipated this question, but she wasn't too keen on sharing all the details. "I, uh, I know I was a lot different," she said, "but, uh, I lost some of my memories when I was still living on the Internet..."
Effie saw an expression of sympathy on the other fairy's face for the first time. "Aww, really?" Amy asked. "Is that why you...why you don't know how to code, and you don't even have any tools besides the ones from your host?"
Effie nodded. "Well, I...I didn't know that much anyway, but yeah..."
"Aww, you poor kid," the Amiga fairy said. "We'll have to get you set up with some stuff. At least you can start fresh and learn to code right." Effie frowned at this, but Amy did sound a bit less snobbish, and a bit more sincere about wanting to help.
Suddenly the ball stopped not too far ahead, in front of what looked like a blank black wall, stretching out of sight above them. Amy started looking around at little points of light scattered on the floor. "Yep," she said. "These are dropped Arachne packets. There's been a DOS user here, all right."
Effie was curious. Arachne? She thought she'd heard that as the name of a web browser. She looked; sure enough, along with the header, she could tell the packets contained little snippets of HTML. Judging by some of the content, she was glad there weren't any images.
Amy, meanwhile, was examining the wall, but found no cracks or seams, no door, nothing. "Well, nothing says 'something to hide' like a giant wall," she said. "I just wonder how we're going to get in."
