Glossary

This page offers a quick glossary of terms for the Post-Self setting. It's not intended to be exhaustive, nor particularly in-depth, but to serve as a quick reference for readers and creators alike.

ACL: Originally short for “Access Control List”, ACLs describe fine-grained permissions to access or use sims or the like. For instance, ACLs can be set such that only certain people may enter a sim, or to ensure that a cone of silence blocks sensorium messages
Apygmaliophobia: The fear of uploading (literally, the fear of becoming an artificial copy of yourself). Coined in the late 2130s as the cost of uploading began to drop. Also occasionally used in relation to taskers who fear individuation.
Artemis: An extrasolar probe bearing four races of uploaded consciousnesses. Discovered in 2346 by Tycho Brahe
AVEC: Introduced in 2350, Audio/Visual Extrasystem Communication is the means by which those on the System may communicate with Earth via audio and visual transmission, rather than just text, something which was gently discouraged over the previous years to maintain a sense of mystique around sys-side. While Castor and Pollux also have this ability in theory, the bandwidth limitations of the Deep Space Network made it such that only still images can be sent.
Clade: A collection of individuals all descended from the same uploaded consciousness through the process of forking. Clades are named after the root instance (e.g: the Bălan clade), but they can also choose their own name (e.g: the Ode clade).
Cladist: A consciousness within the System, whether the original uploaded mind or one of their forks.
Cocladist: Used to refer to another member of the same clade. Up-, down-, and cross-tree are used to refer to the relation between the two cocladists: an up-tree instances is one that is descended from the individual, a down-tree instance is one from whom the individual is descended, and a cross-tree instance is one who shares the same down-tree instance but who isn’t a descendent or an ancestor.
Collective: A group of individuals who emulate the idea of clades phys-side, doing their best to maintain a tree-like hierarchy, share common names, and so on. Many also resent the System and refuse to upload.
Cone of silence: A mechanic on the System that prevents others from hearing what those within the cone are saying. As of 2349, it is also possible to opaque or blur the contents of the cone from the outside, and to prevent the transmission of sensorium messages.
Conflict: During the process of merging, memories and ideas between the up- and down-tree instances will differ, if only by physical point of view. The more these instances diverge, the more these differences will cause conflicts, whether in how they remember things or how they think about things. During merging, this takes effort to rectify internally.
Contraproprioceptive Virus (CPV): A virus, usually used to assassinate an instance, which disrupts the instance’s sense of proprioception to the point where they either crash or quit out of pain. Usually attached to a symbolic object such as a knife or syringe, the virus must be tailored to the recipient, and the object must pierce their skin; the System works based on the collected assumptions of its inhabitants, so something that causes one to break apart must first break the integrity of the target.
Dispersionista: An individual who enjoys individuation on the System. They will fork and allow their forks to diverge from themselves without any goal of letting them merge back down.
Dissolution strategy: A set of general categories for how one approaches forking, merging, and individuation.
Forking: The process of creating a complete copy of oneself. The new instance is exactly the same as the individual up to the point of forking, when they immediately begin to diverge, even if only in their physical points of view.
Individuation: The slow process of an up-tree instance changing from a down-tree instance. The longer the two spend apart and the greater the differences in their experiences, the greater the individuation. Dispersionistas in particular encourage individuation, while taskers do their best to avoid it at all costs.
Instance: Synoym for cladist.
Launch Vehicle: The two smaller copies of the original L₅ point System launched in 2325 in opposite directions at a high enough velocity to leave the Solar System. Often abbreviated to LVs.
Merging: The process of incorporating the memories (and thus personality changes formed by new memories) of an up-tree instance after they quit.
Perisystem architecture: The infrastructure of data and tools for working within the System that serve as the foundation of life. The perisystem architecture contains the reputation market and clade listing, allows one to store information, retrieve data from libraries, control forking and ACLs, and much more.
Phys-side and sys-side: Phys-side (rhymes with ‘fissile’) refers to the physical world outside of the System, while sys-side refers to everything on the System.
Quitting: The act of an instance ceasing to exist on the System. If the instance is a fork of an individual, the down-tree instance may merge back in the memories from the instance who quits (this set of memories can be given a priority, felt as an amount of adrenaline; at a high priority, this can be quite startling, while at a priority of zero, the down-tree instance won’t even be notified of the quitting). If there is no down-tree instance — as in the case of the root instance or an orphaned branch of a clade — quitting is quite difficult, described as trying to wade through mud or push through a barrier.
Reputation/reputation market/the exchange: In order to regulate resource usage on the hardware of the System, certain things cost reputation (denoted Ŕ), such as forking, as well as acquiring sim designs, clothing, and so on. These latter are exchanged on the reputation market (sometimes called the exchange). Reputation can be gained by creating things to put on the market or simply just interacting on the System: having conversations, making friends, and so on. When one first uploads, one is provided with a chunk of reputation to get started with.
Root instance: The root instance is the original uploaded consciousness, the progenitor of the clade from which all other instances are forked.
Signifier: The full name of an instance, including the first eight hexadecimal digits of the unique tag that identifies it as distinct from other individuals in the clade (our out of it) with the same name (e.g: Ioan Bălan#5f39bccd7). This full signifier of an instance, along with all the clade information is available to anyone to check via the perisystem architecture, which makes truly impersonating someone else impossible.
Sim: Refers to locations owned by an individual or set of individuals, whether it’s as small as a single room or as large as a city. Hold-over language from the virtual reality aspects of the ’net, where rooms or worlds were called ‘sims’.
System: Used to describe both the hardware to which consciousnesses are uploaded as well as the world that exists inside that hardware. Originally chosen as a vague name to prevent leaks while the project was still secret, it stuck through the centuries until a few years after the launch project, when each of the three Systems began to be called by specific names: Castor and Pollux for the launch vehicles and Lagrange for the System remaining near Earth.
Tasker: An individual who specifically does not enjoy individuation. They will rarely fork, only doing so if they absolutely must, and then usually only to accomplish a task that requires more hands.
Tracker: Between taskers and dispersionistas, trackers fork more often and are more willing to let individuation take place as their forks track specific projects or relationships, almost always merging back down.

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