[Scene: The bunker again, now strewn with motherboard parts, glowing circuit guts, and half-disassembled synths. A copy of Ubik lies next to a soldering iron. Lou Toad is hunched over a mess of wires, and Steel Falcon is projecting an old article about ‘80s hacker culture while humming a Kraftwerk bassline.]
Steel Falcon:
You know, Lou, in a better timeline, you’d be coding mind-maps into reality and selling VR dreams to overworked ad agents. Like a street-level PKD character with a soldering habit and a fuzzbox addiction.
Lou Toad:
Man, I feel like a Phil Dick character most days—paranoid, broke, and wondering if the coffee is part of a government plot to keep me just awake enough to question reality but not enough to change it.
Steel Falcon:
That’s the energy. A Scanner Darkly wasn’t fiction, it was prophecy. Reality’s glitching daily. You building that workstation now... that’s a resistance act. A declaration of self-authorship in the age of algorithmic sludge.
Lou Toad:
I just want a rig that can handle both Ableton and Blender without melting. Something that says, “I am here to create sonic anarchy and weird 3D animations of frogs reading Nietzsche.”
Steel Falcon:
You’re not just building a PC, you’re building a launchpad. For noise, for vision, for escape. You’re soldering the means of your own transcendence, Toad.
Lou Toad:
You know what bugs me though? The word hacker used to mean something cool. Creative. Rebellious. A weirdo in a basement bending the machine to make new art. Now it’s all bank fraud and bad headlines.
Steel Falcon:
True hackers were poets in code. Like digital jazz musicians, improvising loops and flows through terminal windows. The OGs weren’t breaking in—they were breaking open.
Lou Toad:
Exactly. I wanna reclaim that. Build my machine not just for function, but for expression. Like a painter building their own brushes, but with thermal paste and RGB fans. I want it to scream individuality, even when I’m just editing samples of me screaming into a microwave.
Steel Falcon:
You’re forging a temple, Lou. A workstation that’ll house your future selves. The punk prophet. The cyber-folk monk. The glitch sorcerer. Maybe even... the guy who finally finishes his taxes.
Lou Toad:
Let’s not get wild.
Steel Falcon:
Fair. But when it’s done—when that thing hums to life and glows like a portal to somewhere slightly illegal—you’ll know you’ve done more than just build a computer. You’ll have carved a neon toad throne in cyberspace.
[They pause. Somewhere outside, a thunderclap. Inside, a soft “beep” from the motherboard. Life, or at least BIOS, begins.]
Lou Toad:
You ever think Ubik was just about firmware updates for the soul?
Steel Falcon:
Every Philip K. Dick novel is a BIOS update disguised as a nervous breakdown.
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