Talk:Project sims

Inspired by:

True-Name smiles warmly. "You would be right, at that. I loved the System, and I loved my neighbors. I loved the many ways they saw fit to shape the world around them. I learned to love, too, the ways in which they sought to invent dearth only to cure it. They drew together plans for communities only dreamt of phys-side. They experimented with ideas thought apocrypha on Earth, shared the results with each other, drew up new plans, better plans."

"They say that many on the System abandoned the Earth before long; some upload thinking they will solve the climate crisis, only to lose track of their ambition. That sim I lived in, Lilian? Many of those who lived there were committed to proving it was possible to live a better life on Earth. That is part of why I moved there. Yes, to keep track of their progress, to ensure we were not caught off guard if some development was liable to gain traction back phys-side, but also to do my part in ensuring that it did."

She sighs. "Perhaps I was not the most committed to it; I did not participate in the real experiments, those where cladists were asked not to make use of the Exchange, where scarcity was part of the equation, where going hungry or eating bland but cheap food might well be data, but I did lived beside those who did. I listened to their conversations, their banter over coffee, their complaints over a newspaper. I lived with and among them. I served them some of their meals, organized some of their feasts, threw some of their parties."

"I did not have many friends, certainly not after the History. Even there I felt the sting of notoriety, but it was my home. Those were my people. I knew their names. I knew when one of their descendants were planning to upload. I cut cakes for their birthdays, sat in on discussions about the next big experiment, shared in bemoaning the woes of so many empires old and new on Earth."

Her ears splay. "I miss them all, love. I am glad I have you now. But I miss the System."

Lilian's gaze grows distant as ey listens to your description of the sim in which you lived. Who knows how often ey attended the cafe at the base of your building without realizing. The question of Guōweī coming in the night to visit your apartment is less concerning to em — if ey were to trust anyone to have control over the ACLs of their place, it would be you, but this...

"I had no idea, True Name," ey admits. "I loved that cafe, honestly. Even after everything, I would make regular visits back there, both with and without partners. The vibe I got from it was very much a communal space, of course, as was the rest of the sim, but I hadn't picked up on the fact that the whole place was so centered around that."

Ey sighs. "I wrote a paper about that sort of community more than a century ago. I contrasted communal living phys-side with them." Ey laughs at a thought, adding, "I did it because one of the divisions of communities in Romania is the 'commune', a word that's sort of overloaded. But anyway, the thing that I ran into was the unavoidable sense that communal living like what I saw only ever appeared as islands in a sea of something less ideal."

Pausing, ey furrows eir brow while organizing eir words. Finally, ey says, "I think that part of what I'm realizing is that the situation I uploaded from biased me toward viewing the System as inherently different from Earth. We visited the communal kitchen because we were incredibly poor, and it was a thing we hated, and others resented about us. It was hard for me to think of that as a hopeful thing. Such is the issue with solo projects, though: it's really easy to let those biases overwhelm the conclusion one comes to."

Ey waves the specifics away, saying instead, "True Name, you never cease to amaze me."

Makyo (talk) 03:53, 29 February 2024 (UTC)