Portland Net

You know, I'd completely forgotten about my extradimensional trip to Portland until just now. This city must want me bad.

Natasha? Dean and Sam Winchester? You still here?



For the rest of you, I'm Matt, I'm from New York, I was a lawyer and -- screw it just to get it out of the way -- by night I'm Daredevil. If that doesn't mean much to you, I put on a mask and red tights to fight crime. I kept it secret for a long time, but I just bit the bullet back home so I might as well not go backwards.

I wasn't really being serious when I suggested we were in some kind of VR anyway, but I did think of a pretty good reason to rule it out: NPCs. Anyone who's played a video game should know what I'm talking about, the computer-generated people that populate the world to sell things or guard castles or give quests. (Or introduce you to Portland and explain that you were kidnapped by a wormhole and by the way there are also people with magic here.) But usually they only come with a few stock phrases and the system will mask it by only allowing you to say certain things to them. If it's more open-ended you either get no response or an endless stream of "I'm sorry, I don't understand" when you say something that isn't accounted for in the program. Even as advanced as Holly is, you can tell it's a program behind it, and I think we can assume that Holly's probably going to be the most advanced interface, so either literally the entire population of Portland and everywhere up to a day's journey away is stuck inside a virtual reality as well, or the whole idea falls down. Even though it was mostly a joke in the first place. Though I suppose if you really wanted to you could test it by walking up to a stranger and trying to have a conversation with them that a central processor couldn't reasonably expect. Anyway, that was my thought exercise at work today.