Cascade Failure

From Post-Self
Cascade Failure
Joel Kreissman
Format Short story
Character Gregory
Year 2302
Canonicity Canon
Appears in Clade — A Post-Self Anthology
Read here

"Cascade Failure" follows Gregory as he tries to recreate entire ecosystems from phys-side. Running into issues with programming behaviors into the construct animals, he takes a break to go attend a gallery exhibition by Dear of the Ode clade. The next day, he finds several critters he did not create populating the ecology sims such as tics and opossums. On trying to sweet the sims to start over, he discovers that they are all instances — his own instances. Apparently, the exhibition inspired him to just...be bugs.