Inspired by a website I read... and suggested to post it here by BA.
Quote:TITANIC hummed away, working along in it's own dumbly intelligent manner. Anika began...
“Jet, I was thinking. I’ve got these two virtual machines here, each one running a Linux install, on top of a hypervisor,”
“Yeah,” the cyber's eyebrow rose, before she took a gulp from a mug of teat.
“So, each one of those, as far as it’s concerned, is running on it’s own dedicated processor. It’s in it’s own self contained bubble running away, serving up data to other computers, unaware of the existance of the hypervisor or the computers it’s on. As far as it’s concerned, it’s the only computer in existance. As far as it can tell from testing within it’s bubble, this is true.”
“Yeah,”
“And inside each virtual machine, I spawn processes which can exist only in memory, they can never save their state to the disk. These processes run and interact with each other. They spawn and fork and die or occasionally become zombies or get swallowed by daemons.”
“Yeah,”
“And when the processes die, all the data they contain is lost forever, it just poofs away into the void, gone forever. Eventually, when I shut down the machine and delete it, all the data it contained is just erased. Irretrievably gone. As far as it’s concerned, it’s dead.”
“Yup,”
“Now, through the hypervisor, without the machine or any of the processes realising it, I can save the state of a process, and then immediately transfer that state and process to another virtual machine where it will continue running quite happily, even after the original machine has been killed”
“So?”
“But, as far as the process on the original machine was concerned, it just died and all it’s data was annihilated. It just went poof. But at the same time, it still exists. I can also go in to the protected physical memory the virtual machine is using, and alter it’s state manually, affecting the rules of the system the processes operate under, without them really noticing the change, or knowing where the changes came from..”
Heh,”
“And, I can even give processes a limited ability to access the protected parts of their own memory and alter themselves and their running environment, through the hypervisor by making them aware of it on some small level. Give them some small power to alter the rules at a local level.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“I was thinking. Maybe God might be some sort of hypervisor, and the concept of the immortal soul is him saving our data, and transferring it to another virtual machine, without our knowledge or ability to detech. Stuff like miracles and the like might be god playing around with the back end of the system, and the handwavium is what gives us the ability to tinker through the hypervisor, and violate the usual system constraints and alter the data as we see fit,”
“Eh?”
“So, effectively, we’re all living in a giant virtual machine,”
Jet finished her tea. “Yeah... I’m going to go. Class time”
Oh and...
"So, you waved an android to have the personality of Shinji Ikari.... then introduced him to End of Evangelion, That's just *cruel*"
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And in showing that to me, Dartz essentially dropped the apple on Newton's head. It suddenly hit me that it's all too easy to say that these virtual machines are all running on the Yggdrasil Mainframe. When you stop and think of it, it really is an old idea... although I've never really heard it told in such a way before.
It's been hinted at in the OMG manga - one story had a change to Yggdrasil's clock speed affecting the flow of time on Earth - but I've never seen it flat-out stated in any work of fiction.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
Yggdrasil.... outside of DW7 i really amn't that familiar with OMG.... and wasn't really thinking about it when I scratched that up. i just copied
This really and gave it a slight fenspace spin.
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Another one. A minor brain dump while writing some Shinji Ikari raising project.
Quote:2022, and six waved goodbye to the capsule, knowing none of them would be alive when it came back. It roared off riding a fusion torch, blasting towards the edge of the Solar System
-------
The six were long dead when it came back, sunlight striking it’s power source once more, bringing it to life. It announced its presence within the system with an unignorable blare of radio noise. Curious eyes fell upon the object snaring it up for study. It had been battered by centuries in the Oort cloud, but by all accounts had weathered it’s soujurn well.
Printed on it’s hull in the old tongue “From the year 2022. OPEN ME!!”
Ignoring those who thought it should be preserved in stasis in a museum as-is, one did so.
Inside. Images of people long lost to history. Hundreds of them. Models of old spacecraft, aircraft.... wheeled vehicles. Figurines of human beings. A well worn T-shirt. A handgun. A star-shaped medal engraved with ‘For Great Justice’. There were genetic samples. Hardware schematics. Samples of wave. And a ancient computer hooked up to an atomic battery and a soft-light holographic display unit.
An image flickered for a few moments, before finally turning clear.
An image of a red-haired woman in white/blue armour, smiling at the across the gulf of ages.
“Hello everyone,” she spoke in a softl, husky voice. “The drawback of a time capsule is that the contents inside lack context. They’re just trinkets in unusually pristine condition. A time capsule is little more than a time delayed museum telling little about what life was actually like.”
Blue eyes were directed by tracking sensors to all present.
“So, alongside the objects you see here, we’ve included ourselves. To provide context. To provide a face that can tell what the past was like. And to ensure that, on some level at least, all the people we knew and cared about will still live on within us.”
It didn’t take the scientists long to complete their work. The recordings were in remarkable condition. The formats were old, but were little trouble to recover. The building blocks of life were easy enough for them to assemble.
And so it was, a thousand years after bidding goodbye to the capsule, one of them awoke to a face surprisingly familiar, and the words:
“It’s good to see you again, Jet. It’s been a long time.”
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I wonder which of the Immortals (or very long lived, take your pick) new!Jet woke up to.
Cobalt Greywalker Wrote:I wonder which of the Immortals (or very long lived, take your pick) new!Jet woke up to.
As soon as upload/download tech became available in Fenspace (which will most likely happen before any Fen will die on old age) everyone can be immortal if he or she wants. Its more a matter on how careful you were with your backups and what kind of accidents happened.
I'd like to think that Sora will outlive humanity in her universe, but it's more likely they woke up to see Dee...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
For certain values of the phrase, absolutely. But Dee will be omnipresent, and there's probably also somebody with whom Jet is more directly familiar, should any be available. (Unless I've missed a development that makes Jet and Dee buddies, in which case nonsense talks nonsense.)
I'd prefer to leave it open to interpretation..... it can be anyone Jet knows, and was made intentionally so.
Jet herself doesn't exactly lead a lifestyle conducive to a long and healthy life.
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I have a story planned which will explain my idea about how to answer this... but I am busy with another one.
And another. Random Catgirl training.
Quote:“You’re all dead.”
All five catgirls grimaced as they shared glances. Their fur was already matting into the drying chocolate.
“Care to guess what you did wrong?”
Jet popped her helmet, looking entirely too pleased with herself.
“We used the wrong type of grenade?” one of the catgirls, a tabby ventured.
“You threw a grenade at someone who has faster reactions than you. That got it thrown back at you.”
The remains of the chocolate grenade sat in the centre of the group, burst open. It was a stand-in.
The tabby tried to glare. “We were trying to slow you down. You do need to see, right? And even a lethal grenade should’ve slowed you down.”
“Yeah,” a grey furred catgirl with a white heart on her forehead weighed in behind her.
Jet offered a conciliatory smile. “It was a decent idea. But you need to be perfect with your timing to even have a chance of getting it to work. Get it wrong and you either blow yourself up, or get the grenade kicked back at you.”
A third, almost coated with chocolate spoke next. “But without slowing you down we had no chance to reach the exit in time!”
“Stand your ground. That was your only chance. You stand your ground. Running away from someone who’se faster than you doesn’t work.”
All five catgirls shared glances with each other. “Then what are we supposed to do? Run and die? Stand and die? Or prey on their sense of cuteness?”
One of them giggled.
“If there are five of you, you split the cross section of the corridor into four corners. Top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right. The fifth member of your team targets straight down the centre.”
She indicated each direction with her arm out straight. The blade on her elbow shone in the overhead lights.
“You switch your weapons to full automatic. Then you each fire along the length of the corridor, in a straight line, and fill the air full of lead. It’s like suppressing fire.”
“And within a few seconds we have no ammo left,” the tabby replied.
“it’s better to use it and live, than keep it and die.”
“Alright,” the chocolate coated one said, looking entirely uneasy about the concept.
“Now, the real hard part is that you don’t even try and aim for your target.”
“Why?”
“Because if you aim at me, I’ll just move to wherever you aren’t shooting. Remember, I’m always able to react faster than you. I can see you aiming.” She pointed to her eyes. “Your only chance is to leave me nowhere to go but through somewhere where there’s a stream of bullets.”
None of them said anything. This had clearly been a bad idea.
Jet continued. “You won’t have more than a second to get this right, so you have to work out how you’re going to do it in advance. How you organise each other, how you decide who shoots where. You work that out in training now.”
“It still seems crazy,”
“It’s the only chance you have. If you get lucky, you might just find a chink in the armour. The more lead you get in the air, the more hits you’ll get, the more bites you get at that cherry.”
“And if we don’t? If we don’t get a lucky hit?”
“You die anyway.”
“That’s bad...” one catgirl said,sighing.
“That’s what happens when you’re facing this level of opposition. You can’t outrun, you can’t outfight, you just have to dig in and hope for a lucky shot.”
“Guts, luck and sheer rate of fire.” Jet counted all three out on her fingers. “That’s what’ll save your life.”
“That sounds totally Civil War!”
“What Civil War?” the quietest of the five - a small siamese - asked. Her voice barely rose above a whisper.
“Are you sure it’ll even work?”
Both catgirls tried to loom over the cyber. Yellow eyes were glowing.
Jet’s gaze was hard and cold. “I lost two friends to Boskonian mooks armed with hyper-penetrator rounds who used just this tactic. It’s a fucking scary thing to blast through.”
That took the wind clean from their sails.
The catgirls nodded wordlessly. One of them plucked at a solid mat of fur and chocolate. It was almost becoming a composite armour.
“Can we get a shower now?”
“Not until you can do this and score solid hits.”
All five scowled, baring their fangs. Nobody who would stand between them and a hot shower would go unpunished.
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