In this setting, your story takes place more than a hundred years in the future in a time where humanity has figured out how to upload consciousnesses to a digital world called at first simply the System (a holdover from its early days of secrecy, so vague a name as to keep discussions hard to trace) and later, after a launch of two smaller copies out of the Solar system, Lagrange, Castor, and Pollux.
Sensoria
Sims
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Locations in the System are known as sims, an artifact from the pre-System ‘net days. Sims may be public or private. Public sims are usually open to anyone and can be accessed by querying the perisystem architecture for their tags (e.g: Josephine’s#aaca9bb9).
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Private sims are generally owned by a single individual, clade, or family. These sims generally have much more restrictive ACLs (from ‘access control lists’, but now generally used to refer to fine-grained permissions) which can limit who may enter, whether or not the location is visible to others, who in the sim may create new objects, modify boundaries, and so on. The owners have full ACLs, including the ability to grant others owner status and rescind their own (though every sim must have at least one owner).
Forking and merging, individuation, and clades
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Introduced almost by accident, the concept of forking allows one to create a new instance of oneself. This copy is completely identical, but as soon as they’re created and their experiences begin to differ, that instance starts to undergo the process of individuation. They form their own memories, and their experience of the world is colored by those memories.
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An instance may quit. When they do so, their memories are provided to their down-tree instance to remember or not in a process called merging. A merge may be wholesale (sometimes described as blithe) or cherrypicked, wherein the down-tree instance is able to choose some of the memories but not others in a labor-intensive process. After the mid 2100s, instances which are quitting may attach a priority to the merge. A high priority will be felt by the down-tree instance as a greater pressure, perhaps with a kick of adrenaline, while a lower priority merge will be felt as optional. A merge with explicitly no priority will not be offered to the down-tree instance.
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The greater the individuation between and up- and down-tree instance, the greater the chance for conflicts. These occur when memories don’t line up—that is, the experiences may be of the same event, but the conclusions drawn from the event may be different. As time goes on, individuation will affect the entire personality of an individual, as personality is built in part atop memories. Cocladists who have diverged by decades or centuries may find such merges incredibly difficult.
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+There isn't really a visual indication of forking, Dear's just special.
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Forking incurs a reputation cost. This is tied to available capacity on the System, and as capacity grows, the cost of forking decreases, to the point where, in the 2300s, it’s negligible. This cost is incurred after five minutes of forking or as soon as that instance forks, whichever comes first. The new instance begins with reputation equal to the cost of forking, though transferring reputation within a clade is possible. Several other things such as information production and exchange, sim creation, and some experiences can lead to reputation exchange.
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The root instance of an individual will find it very difficult to quit as, to quote May Then My Name Die With Me of the Ode clade, “the System is not built for death”. This applies to their up-tree instances as well; it is easier to quit the shorter one has been around or if a newer up-tree instance exists (for instance, if Jace Doe#Tracker forks into Jace Doe#1234abc, #Tracker may quit easily right away, though it will get steadily more difficult as #1234abc individuates; similarly, if #1234abc forks into Jace Doe#5678def and #5678def individuates long enough, #1234abc will find it difficult to quit).
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Groups of instances forked from a single individual are known as clades. Although these are all highly unique, the oh-so-human need to bucketize the world into useful categories has led to three general strategies:
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Taskers fork infrequently and only ever for short-lived tasks, choosing to remain primarily a clade of one. Example: Tycho Brahe (from Nevi’im) is a tasker who forks so rarely he has a lot of trouble even managing it. Merging back down to his #Core proves difficult.
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Relying more heavily on forks to accomplish tasks, trackers may keep instances around for months or years, and sometimes more than one at a time. However, these instances tend to retain a strong sense of identity with their root instance and will almost always merge back down. Example: Ioan Bălan, as a tracker, forks quite often for eir work, but those forks tend to be associated with projects and, on completion, will merge back down into eir #Tracker instance (with a few notable exceptions: Codrin Bălan individuated enough to become eir own person, and Sorina Bălan forced her own individuation to leave memories behind as best she could).
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Dispersionistas don’t give a fuck. They fork at need and those forks may quit, may retain some sense of their identity, or may individuate and become their own individuals down the line. Example: Michelle Hadje founded the Ode clade, which nominally has 100 members, but they’re not super strict about it and many have long-lived instances they don’t really talk about.
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Clades can form quasi-familial units or not even really talk to each other; it’s really up to the individual. There’s a mild taboo against relationships between cocladists, though the greater they have differentiated, the less that seems to be an issue. While one can rescind one’s membership in a clade, this is similar to distancing oneself from one’s family: your down-tree instance is still your down-tree instance.
Life beyond scarcity
Contrary to fears, by the end of the 2100s, System capacity had far outstripped its actual usage. As space grew and grew, the cost of forking and creating sims dropped further and further almost to the point of becoming negligible.
“Cost”, though? Why would such a thing even exist in such a world?
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Before this rapid expansion of technology, the trend was headed in the opposite direction, with usage increasing faster than capacity. In order to keep the System running smoothly after the advent of forking, a reputation market was set up. One gains reputation (denoted Ŕ) by a variety of means, from creating new objects, sims, or content to interacting with others. The process is largely transparent
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Before this rapid expansion of technology, the trend was headed in the opposite direction, with usage increasing faster than capacity. In order to keep the System running smoothly after the advent of forking, a reputation market was set up. One gains reputation (denoted Ŕ) by a variety of means, from creating new objects, sims, or content to interacting with others. One spends reputation on acquiring copies of such items or by forking.
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These processes are largely transparent (as is the market itself; anyone can check anyone else’s reputation via the perisystem architecture), with denizens largely acting on instinct. As with many sys-side activities, things such as forking and acquiring sims or objects are a matter of projecting one’s intent to do so. Should one have enough reputation for that, that intent feels very real and forking or purchasing eminently feasible. However, without enough reputation, one would feel that such an intent just…wasn’t possible.
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As such, few think about the reputation market all that much after about 2220, with a massive wave of reforms to the reputation market hitting at the centennial Secession day in 2221 that essentially obviated it for most individuals.
Eternal memory
The perisystem architecture
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The perisystem architecture is the conceptual foam of computer-stuff in which individuals reside and items such as sims, food, very nice fountain pens, and very fine paper exist. However, it also contains large amounts of information in the form of books, the reputation market, and various information feeds.
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Some maintenance of the perisystem architecture is required, usually by engineers both sys-side and phys-side. In the instance of the two launch vehicles, for instance, PA engineers managed the DMZ later called Convergence
The shared dream
The System is not a purely digital haven. It’s not a construct bound by our ideas of some virtual reality. They tried, at first, and some remnants remain from that — new creations or instances are still tagged with a unique hash in the form of eight hexadecimal digits and System denizens still speak of sims and avatars — but that’s not how the System ended up working. When it was first created, those who remained phys-side couldn’t conceptualize it in any other way. Those sys-side, however, knew better. Rather than an analogue to virtual reality, it was more like a consensual dream. What was possible on the System was limited to that which all minds could consensually dream.
This was, at first, pure chaos. That limit alone was not quite enough: what all were able to imagine did not guarantee that all sys-side actually experienced the same thing, and it wasn’t until late 2110s that work was put in place to ensure that experiences were truly consensual.
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2408 — December 31
A series of events leads to an interruption in the functioning of Lagrange lasting thirteen months and ten days. Nearly 1% of instances within the System are irretrievably lost.
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The basics
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Playing the game
Post-Self is a tabletop role playing game powered by The Apocalypse, a lightweight framework for RPGs.
MC and players
When playing, players are led along by a master of ceremonies, or MC, on an adventure. As they move through the story, they form relationships with one another and NPCs around them, specialize in skills related to the System, and work to accomplish their goals using the tools built into the world that they inhabit.
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