Battlecores
Jan. 4th, 2007 02:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackIn a virtual universe, when people are defined to be self-aware programs, several normal terms take on different connotations.
A catatonia is always psychological, and often voluntary. Some people become incapable of social interaction. Some people freeze themselves, stopping processing themselves, until -- possibly -- some stimulus occurs. Some continue generating the same living scapes, games, etc within themselves, but eschew all contact.
Is it possible that I'm better at writing synopses than stories? :)
A catatonia is always psychological, and often voluntary. Some people become incapable of social interaction. Some people freeze themselves, stopping processing themselves, until -- possibly -- some stimulus occurs. Some continue generating the same living scapes, games, etc within themselves, but eschew all contact.
And of course either way, you can leave non-sapient or sub-sapient parts of yourself running. A semi-sapient mail client to automatically process responses to messages, and maybe wake you if it judges it worthwhile. You can leave publicly accessible scapes that other people can visit. If you don't object to a thousand simplified clones of you living for a fraction of a second each, you can have a normal fully-sapient mail-client, and decide "for yourself" when to awake.
From the outside, they all look the same and have the same name. Cracus had retreated from the world leaving the most beautiful static scape, a frozen ice-plain, that many people chose to come and walk through, admire, and was unchanged by it all. At one place a glyph of Cracus was shown frozen in time, half way through leaping down from a small cliff, cloak endless frozen in the act of billowing out behind him. People speculated that the right word would awaken him again to complete the endless leap. Minute changes in spare processing capacity suggest that some semi-sapient program was processing events and speech there, but nothing ever responded.
A demon is a sapience people hesitate to call a person. Especially one disproportionately malevolent, and with the hacking skills necessary to cause massive disruption. In world of billions of souls living at high speed, every combination of events came up sooner or later, and failure modes of normal life that involving suborning other people's personalities or scapes tend to spread and draw attention in the way that a thousand other small personal disasters don't.
The normal response if a demon-person manages to spread is for the local Council to suspend processing of everything suspected of contamination, and mass-overwrite from the most recent backups, and then stage an intervention of some sort on the original source with foreknowledge of what was likely to happen. A few people complain at having lost a few minutes of their lives; most people don't even choose to notice.
A game is any interactive scape where people try to achieve some sort of goal. Sometimes completely minimal -- 2d games, typically action/puzzle of some description, are just like in our universe, except that you can experience them directly instead of needing a computer monitor. Sometimes simulating a complex world, like a part of our actual universe. Sometimes somewhere in between, as if Quake Arena were *actually* totally immersion, where you can switch weapons with an instinctive thought, but the physics is still abstracted to make the game fun.
However, however immersive we might consider something, you can still multi-task to another scape to do whatever you please at the same time. Some games might be violent, but when you can turn sensations on and off at will, and be having a conversation with your aunt's house at the same time, it doesn't have the same frisson as Quake -- or paint-ball -- which makes them so controversial and interesting to us.
A battle-core has the same aura of danger to them. A dozen people move the processing of their core personalities into an enclosed data-scape. There is no simulation of physics, no pretty visual scapes. But the can talk to each other, and attempt to exploit flaws in their basic code, until all have been overwritten, and only one survives. Everyone else continues from a backup made immediately previously. It's an almost unique example of involuntary non-continuity. Even a mail client clone, if it so chooses, can generally be set up in it's own scape separate from the parent -- and also, the loss of a fraction of a second's diverging conciousness doesn't count as a person in the same way.
Cracus was a veteran, retiring to catatonia after defeating an eerie warrior Grond in Battle-core. Many people speculated that he had discovered something disturbing in Grond's experiences, and perhaps that the battle-changed Cracus had been mutated too much and he should have chosen to revert to the pre-battle clone rather than re-integrating the two versions.
Now, a nasty demon hatched accidentally by the hacker Magnifioso was rumoured to use some of the same exploits Grond had used in the battlecore. And that the Council wanted to recover some data from a corrupted scape before overwriting it. Johnny, the security expert recently amused by Magnifioso's Rainbow Cicada Bombs, was asked to enter Cracus's ice-scape and see if he can persuade him to wake.From the outside, they all look the same and have the same name. Cracus had retreated from the world leaving the most beautiful static scape, a frozen ice-plain, that many people chose to come and walk through, admire, and was unchanged by it all. At one place a glyph of Cracus was shown frozen in time, half way through leaping down from a small cliff, cloak endless frozen in the act of billowing out behind him. People speculated that the right word would awaken him again to complete the endless leap. Minute changes in spare processing capacity suggest that some semi-sapient program was processing events and speech there, but nothing ever responded.
A demon is a sapience people hesitate to call a person. Especially one disproportionately malevolent, and with the hacking skills necessary to cause massive disruption. In world of billions of souls living at high speed, every combination of events came up sooner or later, and failure modes of normal life that involving suborning other people's personalities or scapes tend to spread and draw attention in the way that a thousand other small personal disasters don't.
The normal response if a demon-person manages to spread is for the local Council to suspend processing of everything suspected of contamination, and mass-overwrite from the most recent backups, and then stage an intervention of some sort on the original source with foreknowledge of what was likely to happen. A few people complain at having lost a few minutes of their lives; most people don't even choose to notice.
A game is any interactive scape where people try to achieve some sort of goal. Sometimes completely minimal -- 2d games, typically action/puzzle of some description, are just like in our universe, except that you can experience them directly instead of needing a computer monitor. Sometimes simulating a complex world, like a part of our actual universe. Sometimes somewhere in between, as if Quake Arena were *actually* totally immersion, where you can switch weapons with an instinctive thought, but the physics is still abstracted to make the game fun.
However, however immersive we might consider something, you can still multi-task to another scape to do whatever you please at the same time. Some games might be violent, but when you can turn sensations on and off at will, and be having a conversation with your aunt's house at the same time, it doesn't have the same frisson as Quake -- or paint-ball -- which makes them so controversial and interesting to us.
A battle-core has the same aura of danger to them. A dozen people move the processing of their core personalities into an enclosed data-scape. There is no simulation of physics, no pretty visual scapes. But the can talk to each other, and attempt to exploit flaws in their basic code, until all have been overwritten, and only one survives. Everyone else continues from a backup made immediately previously. It's an almost unique example of involuntary non-continuity. Even a mail client clone, if it so chooses, can generally be set up in it's own scape separate from the parent -- and also, the loss of a fraction of a second's diverging conciousness doesn't count as a person in the same way.
Cracus was a veteran, retiring to catatonia after defeating an eerie warrior Grond in Battle-core. Many people speculated that he had discovered something disturbing in Grond's experiences, and perhaps that the battle-changed Cracus had been mutated too much and he should have chosen to revert to the pre-battle clone rather than re-integrating the two versions.
Is it possible that I'm better at writing synopses than stories? :)