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.”