bestgaragedoors
Bug Catcher
Cassandra is a neurotic failed academic blogging about Porygon. Emily is a Rustboro mining heiress with a chip on her shoulder. When the two women start a company to mass-produce custom Porygon, they find out how easily ambition turns into recklessness - and what it costs to stay one step ahead of the system.
Major Content Warnings: None apply so far. Content warnings that apply for individual chapters will appear spoilered at the top of the chapter.
Author's Note: I came up with the concept of NEO-A-LIFE for the Weird and Wonderful contest. The concept has changed a lot since then! If you have read that one-shot, treat it like a non-canonical work. I will also include author’s notes at the end of chapters for clarifications and random unnecessary details. I have seven chapters so far and will be posting them weekly.
After writing the original one-shot, I became a little obsessed with the idea of what it would mean to run a start-up in the Pokemon world! What does it mean to compete against established players like Silph Co? What relationship do adults who don’t participate in training culture have with Pokemon? And Porygon, being one of my favorite Pokemon, is perfect for this. If Porygon is a product Silph Co made, why do they appear to have given up on it? What would it take for Porygon to go from being a Pokemon meant for niche scientific research to being a legitimate disruptor?
Who was I? I was a faceless employee in the Celadon City branch of some company you’d never heard of that sold widgets to another company you’d never heard of. I’d have stated my job title, but to state your employment like that involves some degree of identification, and I did not identify myself with them. I am not an “accounts receivable representative.” I am a researcher on artificial Pokemon.
This is what I repeated to myself as I came home from another uninspiring day at work. The view of my studio apartment was hardly a balm to the soul. The corner of my workdesk was occupied by a used cup of ramen, broth droplets solidified into a cloudy paste. The white refrigerator in the corner froze everything I stored on the top shelf. My tower of folders had toppled and the papers fanned out by the leg of the desk.
Instead of dealing with any of this, I tiptoed over the pool of notes into my office chair and began copying my annotations from Stolringer’s “Problematic Methodologies in Porygon Protein Synthesis” into my text editor. I’d gotten this copy from Saffron University’s library, the school where I’d been a researcher working on Castform generation. It was only a few years ago that I was in a lab working with the lead of the Castform project before our project was declared obsolete and budget cuts eliminated our department. I couldn’t justify paying Saffron rents anymore, but I had no plans to return to Ecruteak, city of conservatism and stagnation. Celadon rents were more affordable, and I could at least bike to Saffron to borrow books from their library.
I finished copying my annotations and posted them to my blog. Just because I couldn’t research in a university didn’t mean I couldn’t research at all, right? It was amazing how many people cared about it. “Porygon Revival” was the leading blog on documenting the original Porygon project. But perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me, for Porygon had a unique allure. Other artificial Pokemon, once generated, were no different from any other Pokemon. Porygon alone could be connected to a source, be de-synthesized and re-synthesized elsewhere, and even execute commands in virtual space. It was this trait - decompositionality, we called it - that eluded us enthusiasts.
My lips cracked from thirst. I pulled out a near frozen bottle of soda pop from the fridge, and cracked it open. It was in some horrid state between slushie and liquid, but I drank it anyway. It didn’t taste good, but it was a welcome sensory novelty. Thirst quenched, I checked the comments on the blog. The regulars were here, posting links to journals I didn’t know, correcting my errors, and, most importantly, there was Antoine, the man who had one-sidedly declared himself my rival. I propped my chin on my hand to see what he’d written today.
“When are you going to stop this nonsense? Artificial Pokemon generation is extremely dangerous. We barely know anything about how Pokemon physiology works and you continue to have the gall to try your hand. You’ve learned nothing from the failures of the Aether foundation. Porygon’s extensibility is not a toy.”
He’d left one hundred such comments on my blog. This one was concise - he would often leave page-long screeds on decision theory and how artificial Pokemon synthesis was objectively foolish. I felt flattered, really, that he thought I had the know-how to create a Pokemon that could destroy the world. For just a moment, I felt I wasn’t a failure from some backwater town trying to edge my way into a world that clearly didn’t want me.
Having finished the comments, I turned to my emails. I rarely got any, but today there was one bolded title.
Sender: NEO A-LIFE
Topic: Porygon White Paper
Body:
Dear Cassandra,
Your research on the Porygon project is truly astonishing. You’ve made incredible progress on reconstructing the details.
My name is Emily LeVant, and I am the founder of NEO-A-LIFE. We’re a startup that focuses on Porygon generation. I’m looking for a researcher who knows their Porygon stuff, and you seem like you fit the bill. We have access to documents you may find intriguing. I have attached, for your eyes only, a snippet of the original Porygon white paper. This is the intellectual property of NEO-A-LIFE. Do not upload this anywhere.
I’d like to meet with you to discuss the possibility of you joining our team. I will be in Celadon City for the weekend.
Yours,
Emily
I ran the attachment through the antivirus. No hits. Opening. “Towards the first virtual Pokemon: Porygon. Authors: Anisha Abad, James McClinton, Marcello Garcia. We present here a novel method for creating the world’s first decompositional artificial Pokemon, named Porygon. Using this method, Porygon is able to both keep a physical form and move in the digital world…”
My hands felt numb. There was no way this could be it. And yet, it seemed to be. The authors were legitimate; I’d read about most of them beforehand. I’d never seen this abstract, and what they described made sense, but without the methods, it wasn’t entirely clear. It was inconceivable. Who was Emily, and was she seriously pitching me to join her company?
I looked them up on the internet. Emily herself was apparently related to the head of a prestigious mining company in Hoenn. Her headshot on the website for NEO-A-LIFE showed a woman of small stature with glossy black hair, pink cheeks, and a big smile. She seemed… adorable? Anyone can start a company, but she seemed a little sweet-looking to be a startup founder.
There wasn’t as much on NEO-A-LIFE. Just about everything on the company seemed to be made by Emily herself. A slick webpage with stock images of skyscrapers taking up half the page, bold font saying “Pokemon. Reimagined,” “The world is dynamic. Your Pokemon should be, too,” and more vague copy that didn’t really say anything but sure sounded enticing. “Using decompositional biology and identity-preserving eigenstructures, NEO-A-LIFE delivers scalable solutions at an affordable price.”
It was weird. It was obviously weird. Okay, maybe it was a real startup, but who just emails people out of the blue asking them to join their company? Or is this normal? I’d never been part of the corporate world. I forsook money to make a difference (although I ended up not doing that, either). Maybe I was the one who didn’t get it.
My heart raced and I had to get up and pace from one corner of this room to the other. I wove around the backpack and folders scattered carelessly across the floor, occasionally brushing my ankle against them. It couldn’t be real. It was too perfect. But it seemed like the real Porygon white paper. Where did she get that? How could I read the rest of it?
A familiar pressure pulsed in my temples. I grabbed the Pokeball I always kept in the bowl and headed out for fresh air. I let Magnezone out of his ball. I saw his silhouette in white before his features became clearer, and he rotated his magnets in happiness at seeing me.
“Nice to see you too,” I said. “Wanna go for a walk with me? I need to clear my head.”
Magnezone made his affirmative sound, and I raced him to the ground floor down the stairs. He won, of course, because he can just float down, but it’s a habit we established, and it got the blood pumping. I emerged from the stairwell to see him at the exit, screws tightening and loosening in anticipation.
“Oh, you won again!” I said in mock horror. “How will I ever catch up to you?” I scratched my ear. “Let’s take a walk to the department store.”
It was cloudy out, but I didn't mind. Harsh sunlight would reflect off Magnezone and I didn’t think to bring my sunglasses.
“Okay, so Magnezone, I need you to hear me out. I got this email from some lady who’s starting a company. Normally I wouldn’t pay attention to it, but she has the original Porygon white paper. And you know how much I want to make a Porygon.”
Magnezone buzzed.
“This company, it looks like it’s real. But I don’t know about this. Like, do you really think that I should meet up with her? What if she’s crazy?”
Magnezone made another sound. I wished he had a human understanding of the world. I felt his judgment would be fantastic. But his world was not my world. He’d been my companion since he was just a little Magnemite, and I would always talk to him when I needed a sounding board. He didn’t fully understand; I once caught him falling asleep when I explained the complexities of academic funding politics. But whether he got it or not, he was still my buddy, and it felt good to share these things with him.
My lips cracked again - apparently soda pop didn’t really quench your thirst. We finally arrived at the Celadon department store, and I headed to the water fountain by the side of the building. “So,” I asked between gulps, “should I do it?”
Magnezone stared at me with his unblinking red eye. I wiped the water on my chin off with the back of my hand. It was not fair to expect Magnezone to make such a decision for me. His world was electromagnetism, battle, floating, not major career decisions in your late twenties. Still, I wished he could talk to me like those Rotom talk to humans in Alola.
I stopped, stepped away from the water fountain, and closed my eyes. Pros of meeting with Emily - I’d get to learn more about this mysterious Porygon white paper. Con - she could be a serial killer (epistemic status: unlikely) or a weirdo (possible?). Pros of not meeting with Emily - I’d get to stay home. Cons - I would never know what’s in that paper.
My teeth chewed the inside of my mouth. “I can’t spend the rest of my life not knowing what the deal with this paper is. I’m going to set up a meeting with her.”
He seemed pleased with this, though for what reason I could not say. I loved his joy anyway.
I prompted him to enter his Pokeball before entering the department store - he was a little too big to have floating around in cramped spaces. I bought some of his favorite Poke Puffs and felt his Pokeball rattle as I passed through the automatic doors. I tapped the ball twice to let him know it’s safe to come out. He wriggled in anticipation and I tossed him his cupcakes. He ate them in his inscrutable way as we returned home in the setting sun’s light. All I could think of was what I was going to write:
“Dear Emily, I’m interested. How about this Saturday at 3:00 PM at the cafe by the department store?”
Major Content Warnings: None apply so far. Content warnings that apply for individual chapters will appear spoilered at the top of the chapter.
Author's Note: I came up with the concept of NEO-A-LIFE for the Weird and Wonderful contest. The concept has changed a lot since then! If you have read that one-shot, treat it like a non-canonical work. I will also include author’s notes at the end of chapters for clarifications and random unnecessary details. I have seven chapters so far and will be posting them weekly.
After writing the original one-shot, I became a little obsessed with the idea of what it would mean to run a start-up in the Pokemon world! What does it mean to compete against established players like Silph Co? What relationship do adults who don’t participate in training culture have with Pokemon? And Porygon, being one of my favorite Pokemon, is perfect for this. If Porygon is a product Silph Co made, why do they appear to have given up on it? What would it take for Porygon to go from being a Pokemon meant for niche scientific research to being a legitimate disruptor?
Chapter 1: White Paper
-Cassandra-
-Cassandra-
Who was I? I was a faceless employee in the Celadon City branch of some company you’d never heard of that sold widgets to another company you’d never heard of. I’d have stated my job title, but to state your employment like that involves some degree of identification, and I did not identify myself with them. I am not an “accounts receivable representative.” I am a researcher on artificial Pokemon.
This is what I repeated to myself as I came home from another uninspiring day at work. The view of my studio apartment was hardly a balm to the soul. The corner of my workdesk was occupied by a used cup of ramen, broth droplets solidified into a cloudy paste. The white refrigerator in the corner froze everything I stored on the top shelf. My tower of folders had toppled and the papers fanned out by the leg of the desk.
Instead of dealing with any of this, I tiptoed over the pool of notes into my office chair and began copying my annotations from Stolringer’s “Problematic Methodologies in Porygon Protein Synthesis” into my text editor. I’d gotten this copy from Saffron University’s library, the school where I’d been a researcher working on Castform generation. It was only a few years ago that I was in a lab working with the lead of the Castform project before our project was declared obsolete and budget cuts eliminated our department. I couldn’t justify paying Saffron rents anymore, but I had no plans to return to Ecruteak, city of conservatism and stagnation. Celadon rents were more affordable, and I could at least bike to Saffron to borrow books from their library.
I finished copying my annotations and posted them to my blog. Just because I couldn’t research in a university didn’t mean I couldn’t research at all, right? It was amazing how many people cared about it. “Porygon Revival” was the leading blog on documenting the original Porygon project. But perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised me, for Porygon had a unique allure. Other artificial Pokemon, once generated, were no different from any other Pokemon. Porygon alone could be connected to a source, be de-synthesized and re-synthesized elsewhere, and even execute commands in virtual space. It was this trait - decompositionality, we called it - that eluded us enthusiasts.
My lips cracked from thirst. I pulled out a near frozen bottle of soda pop from the fridge, and cracked it open. It was in some horrid state between slushie and liquid, but I drank it anyway. It didn’t taste good, but it was a welcome sensory novelty. Thirst quenched, I checked the comments on the blog. The regulars were here, posting links to journals I didn’t know, correcting my errors, and, most importantly, there was Antoine, the man who had one-sidedly declared himself my rival. I propped my chin on my hand to see what he’d written today.
“When are you going to stop this nonsense? Artificial Pokemon generation is extremely dangerous. We barely know anything about how Pokemon physiology works and you continue to have the gall to try your hand. You’ve learned nothing from the failures of the Aether foundation. Porygon’s extensibility is not a toy.”
He’d left one hundred such comments on my blog. This one was concise - he would often leave page-long screeds on decision theory and how artificial Pokemon synthesis was objectively foolish. I felt flattered, really, that he thought I had the know-how to create a Pokemon that could destroy the world. For just a moment, I felt I wasn’t a failure from some backwater town trying to edge my way into a world that clearly didn’t want me.
Having finished the comments, I turned to my emails. I rarely got any, but today there was one bolded title.
Sender: NEO A-LIFE
Topic: Porygon White Paper
Body:
Dear Cassandra,
Your research on the Porygon project is truly astonishing. You’ve made incredible progress on reconstructing the details.
My name is Emily LeVant, and I am the founder of NEO-A-LIFE. We’re a startup that focuses on Porygon generation. I’m looking for a researcher who knows their Porygon stuff, and you seem like you fit the bill. We have access to documents you may find intriguing. I have attached, for your eyes only, a snippet of the original Porygon white paper. This is the intellectual property of NEO-A-LIFE. Do not upload this anywhere.
I’d like to meet with you to discuss the possibility of you joining our team. I will be in Celadon City for the weekend.
Yours,
Emily
I ran the attachment through the antivirus. No hits. Opening. “Towards the first virtual Pokemon: Porygon. Authors: Anisha Abad, James McClinton, Marcello Garcia. We present here a novel method for creating the world’s first decompositional artificial Pokemon, named Porygon. Using this method, Porygon is able to both keep a physical form and move in the digital world…”
My hands felt numb. There was no way this could be it. And yet, it seemed to be. The authors were legitimate; I’d read about most of them beforehand. I’d never seen this abstract, and what they described made sense, but without the methods, it wasn’t entirely clear. It was inconceivable. Who was Emily, and was she seriously pitching me to join her company?
I looked them up on the internet. Emily herself was apparently related to the head of a prestigious mining company in Hoenn. Her headshot on the website for NEO-A-LIFE showed a woman of small stature with glossy black hair, pink cheeks, and a big smile. She seemed… adorable? Anyone can start a company, but she seemed a little sweet-looking to be a startup founder.
There wasn’t as much on NEO-A-LIFE. Just about everything on the company seemed to be made by Emily herself. A slick webpage with stock images of skyscrapers taking up half the page, bold font saying “Pokemon. Reimagined,” “The world is dynamic. Your Pokemon should be, too,” and more vague copy that didn’t really say anything but sure sounded enticing. “Using decompositional biology and identity-preserving eigenstructures, NEO-A-LIFE delivers scalable solutions at an affordable price.”
It was weird. It was obviously weird. Okay, maybe it was a real startup, but who just emails people out of the blue asking them to join their company? Or is this normal? I’d never been part of the corporate world. I forsook money to make a difference (although I ended up not doing that, either). Maybe I was the one who didn’t get it.
My heart raced and I had to get up and pace from one corner of this room to the other. I wove around the backpack and folders scattered carelessly across the floor, occasionally brushing my ankle against them. It couldn’t be real. It was too perfect. But it seemed like the real Porygon white paper. Where did she get that? How could I read the rest of it?
A familiar pressure pulsed in my temples. I grabbed the Pokeball I always kept in the bowl and headed out for fresh air. I let Magnezone out of his ball. I saw his silhouette in white before his features became clearer, and he rotated his magnets in happiness at seeing me.
“Nice to see you too,” I said. “Wanna go for a walk with me? I need to clear my head.”
Magnezone made his affirmative sound, and I raced him to the ground floor down the stairs. He won, of course, because he can just float down, but it’s a habit we established, and it got the blood pumping. I emerged from the stairwell to see him at the exit, screws tightening and loosening in anticipation.
“Oh, you won again!” I said in mock horror. “How will I ever catch up to you?” I scratched my ear. “Let’s take a walk to the department store.”
It was cloudy out, but I didn't mind. Harsh sunlight would reflect off Magnezone and I didn’t think to bring my sunglasses.
“Okay, so Magnezone, I need you to hear me out. I got this email from some lady who’s starting a company. Normally I wouldn’t pay attention to it, but she has the original Porygon white paper. And you know how much I want to make a Porygon.”
Magnezone buzzed.
“This company, it looks like it’s real. But I don’t know about this. Like, do you really think that I should meet up with her? What if she’s crazy?”
Magnezone made another sound. I wished he had a human understanding of the world. I felt his judgment would be fantastic. But his world was not my world. He’d been my companion since he was just a little Magnemite, and I would always talk to him when I needed a sounding board. He didn’t fully understand; I once caught him falling asleep when I explained the complexities of academic funding politics. But whether he got it or not, he was still my buddy, and it felt good to share these things with him.
My lips cracked again - apparently soda pop didn’t really quench your thirst. We finally arrived at the Celadon department store, and I headed to the water fountain by the side of the building. “So,” I asked between gulps, “should I do it?”
Magnezone stared at me with his unblinking red eye. I wiped the water on my chin off with the back of my hand. It was not fair to expect Magnezone to make such a decision for me. His world was electromagnetism, battle, floating, not major career decisions in your late twenties. Still, I wished he could talk to me like those Rotom talk to humans in Alola.
I stopped, stepped away from the water fountain, and closed my eyes. Pros of meeting with Emily - I’d get to learn more about this mysterious Porygon white paper. Con - she could be a serial killer (epistemic status: unlikely) or a weirdo (possible?). Pros of not meeting with Emily - I’d get to stay home. Cons - I would never know what’s in that paper.
My teeth chewed the inside of my mouth. “I can’t spend the rest of my life not knowing what the deal with this paper is. I’m going to set up a meeting with her.”
He seemed pleased with this, though for what reason I could not say. I loved his joy anyway.
I prompted him to enter his Pokeball before entering the department store - he was a little too big to have floating around in cramped spaces. I bought some of his favorite Poke Puffs and felt his Pokeball rattle as I passed through the automatic doors. I tapped the ball twice to let him know it’s safe to come out. He wriggled in anticipation and I tossed him his cupcakes. He ate them in his inscrutable way as we returned home in the setting sun’s light. All I could think of was what I was going to write:
“Dear Emily, I’m interested. How about this Saturday at 3:00 PM at the cafe by the department store?”
The first three chapters were originally written in first person present tense. I stopped after a while because it felt so unnatural and I wasn't really getting anything from it. If you spot a tense inconsistency, let me know!
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I honestly feel I could write a whole bunch of just academic debates on Pokemon and the personalities behind them.