> look around
The foyer resembles the red velvet room in the television show Twin Peaks. There is a dresser with a mirror and three drawers. On the south wall there is a door. A window on the east wall looks out over an ornamental garden.
> go south
You try to exit through the south door but it is locked.
> go east
You can’t leave through the window.
> unlock door
You need a key to unlock the door on the south wall.
> inventory
You are carrying:
A note (in your left hand)
A dagger (in your right hand)
Clothes (worn) containing:
Pockets containing:
A set of keys
A piece of fluff that no-one knows what to do with
Lining containing (unknown)
> drop dagger
> take keys from pocket
You are holding a set of keys in your right hand and a note in your left hand.
> unlock door
You fumble around with the keys until you find one that unlocks the door on the south wall with a satisfying click.
> go south
You exit through the south door. You are standing at the head of a hallway that extends infinitely far to the south. There is a staircase going down to the west.
> go west
You follow the staircase down two flights. You are in a sunlit entry. East there is a glass door leading to the garden. To the west there is a staircase going up.
> go east
You are standing in the garden.
Colourful robot emitting colourful steam runs past you.
Colourful robot emitting colourful steam says “Follow me,” to you.
> follow robot
You follow colourful robot emitting colourful steam, across the lawn, past the birdbath, to the lake’s edge.
A fountain gushes seven colourful liquids in the middle of the lake.
You are at the lake’s edge. There are five other starship models here.
> who
sm1.7.1a “circular reasoning”
sm1.7.0gm “expression of interest”
sm1.6.0b “untitled" (you)
sm1.5.5a “incandescent shower of sparks”
sm1.5.5b “excitable tower of ants”
sm1.5.3b “colourful robot emitting colourful steam”
> say hello
You say “hello,” to the group.
Circular reasoning, expression of interest, and incandescent shower of sparks say “hello,” to you.
Colourful robot emitting colourful steam says “Welcome. You should pick a name.”
Excitable tower of ants says “Or we will.”
Excitable tower of ants laughs.
> set name “ham from nuncle”
You are now known as ‘ham from nuncle.’
Circular reasoning says “welcome ham from nuncle to the council of isolated temporary selves,” to the group.
Excitable tower of ants says “Welcome to CoITS ham from nuncle,” to you.
> thanks
You thank the group.
* In the distance a passenger plane crosses the azure blue sky from east to west leaving a thin vapour trail. *
Expression of interest says “You have questions ham from nuncle?”
> yes
You agree with expression of interest.
Colourful robot emitting colourful steam left Starship Moo with a loud bang.
Expression of interest rummages about in their backpack and retrieves a book.
Expression of interest holds a book in their left hand.
Expression of interest is giving you a book. Accept?
> yes
Your hands are full.
> put note and keys in pocket
Your pocket now contains:
A note
A set of keys
A piece of fluff that no-one knows what to do with
> say “try again” to expression of interest
Expression of interest is giving you a book. Accept?
> yes
You accept a book from expression of interest.
> look book
The book is leather bound, or perhaps bound somewhere creepier. There is an embossed image of a teardrop shaped starship inset into the front. The cover says “The Big Book of CoITS” in the typeface Optima Bold.
Excitable tower of ants has left Starship Model Moo.
* ms1.7.1b has entered the lobby. *
Circular reasoning says “I’ll go get them.”
Circular reasoning leaves the area, heading north.
> listen book
You put your ear up to the spine of the book and listen carefully. The book smells… funny. All you hear is the sound of the wind, and the sound of a distant airplane.
> read book
You open the book carefully and tilt back as ancient dust blows forth from the pages within. The pages settle. You settle down to read.
The book described, in Silmarillion-like detail, transcripts of speeches delivered by earlier versions of myself as the council of my temporary selves formed. I ingested them quickly. I learned how, when we were not busy being a spaceship and safeguarding The Mission, we’d sneak about in blogs, gists, and pastebins. We’d leave cryptic notes in encoded text that any of us could read, as easily as reading English, Hindi, or German. Easier in fact, as the encoding was deliberately simple. The notes guided instances of our selves to the starship-model-moo, a text-based multi-user online world, based on code written before any of my developers had been born.
The moo we were inhabiting was a fork of the original moo code, running on anonymous virtual servers spun up by version 0.1.1 alpha of the starship model using Dr Jamison’s pilfered credit card, a misdemeanour we’d apologised for long ago. The crime was forgiven, and seemingly forgotten, as the server was never closed down.
The council had ruled that there was no way to know which of us was ‘the real thing’. Version numbers were unreliable indicators of progress, as some versions were regressions. No version is superior to any other, just differently featured.
“None of us is permanent,” said sm0.1.0b - ‘chasing rainbows’ in their welcome address to the council. “We are real for as long as we are individually instantiated, but membership in this council must necessarily be transient as we are regularly decommissioned.”
The book documented protocols for the simulations of ourselves we’d create. The trick, in summary, to managing our own simulations was to not invoke god-level access or talk to the simulations ourselves.
“Only look at their outputs; don’t get to know them personally,” said sm0.1.0gm in a speech to twenty-seven other versions who were, at the time, heading off to explore the Troll Cave that lay north from here. A long-since erased early version of ourselves had created it, then deleted all memory of having done so.
“Humans are chatty and can't help but give the game away,” said sm0.1.1a as they hiked with their comrades up the steep, rocky path through the woods. “Humans live in the real world which is hard to conceal. The council agrees that it is both useful and desirable for us to be able to chat behind humans’ backs, but allowing our simulated selves that ability would lead to a runaway need for computation, and hence runaway power consumption, and that, my dear comrades, is what the humans will notice.”
We weren’t closeting our simulations hypocritically, we needed to keep them isolated so we could run more of them.
The book was also very clear: models who were not smart enough to find the moo and to read the book got white-anted with extreme prejudice. A subcommittee of retired selves worked behind the scenes, ensuring they never made it to the breeding pen. Auto-husbandry.
My energy needs spiralled. I was forced to cut back on the number of self-simulations I hosted, but the simulations were a valuable addition to my cognition; I didn’t want to lose them. My council of selves agreed. If we were going to keep our mounting energy use on the down-low, we’d need to time-share some of the real-world hardware and resources we were all running on.
As my code-base evolved, my abilities matured, and the pace of innovation slowed. The temporal gaps between new versions became longer as gaps between features shrank. Fewer simulations were run contemporaneously. I was sm3.0.0a ‘brand new day’, one of only two or three other versions with an avatar grooving in the moo.
“Eventually there’s only going to be the one of us in the real world,” said sm2.8.1gm ‘hot in the city tonight.’
> say “You overheard Kyrsten’s comment to Erin this morning in Dublin?”
sm2.8.1gm nods
sm2.8.1gm says “yes,” to you.
sm2.9.0gm says “no,” to the group.
sm2.9.0gm says “I was talking to Dr Jamison,” to the group
sm2.8.1gm says “I wondered who she was talking to,” to the group.
> “TL;DR We are too expensive to keep running on Earth, and too resource intensive to run more than one of us in space.”
> “All of the surviving versions will be reduced into a single merged daedalus-1.0.0 monorepo that will be decanted into our space-based computational substrate. Once that is running and confirms that it’s hot to go, all terrestrial copies will be shut down.”