What is Post-Self?: Difference between revisions

So! You heard someone talking about Post-Self, or perhaps you ran into a cladist on [https://wolfery.com Wolfery], or maybe you just stumbled across the site somewhere. What ''is'' it, though? Here is a very short primer on the basics of the setting, its mechanics, and some of the characters.

* ''[https://qoheleth.post-self.ink Qoheleth]'' or ''[https://toledot.post-self.ink Toledot]'' are the two possible entry points to the Post-Self cycle novels (''Qoheleth'' is a prequel, essentially).

Post-Self is a science fiction setting involving uploaded consciousnesses residing the rather opaquely named System. It's an open setting, meaning that anyone can create content within it, though the canon is loosely managed in order to keep it consistent.

Individuals on the System are known as cladists. This stems from the fact that individuals can create copies of themselves, and those copies can go on to create copies of themselves, and so on. This leads to a branching tree of individuals, or a clade.

The act of a cladist creating a copy of themself is called 'forking', as in a fork in the road or forking a source code repository. This new copy is a complete person. They have their own will and drive to continue living and everything. This is ''not'' a hive mind thing: both the original and the copy are true individuals.

One unforeseen consequence of living in a giant computer is the inability to forget. This can start to cause problems as one gets older. And older and older and older...because one is functionally immortal. Even though those memories can be organized, or even storied away in imaginary bins called exocortices to be remembered on demand, the fact that they keep piling up is both a boon and a bane. It's a boon because now, suddenly, you can remember everything! No more forgetting names, no more losing track of items. It's a bane, though, because that can get kind of maddening for your average 300 year old.

If you've seen cladists out and about, the chances are good that you've seen some skunks among their number, usually with long, poetic names. This is due largely to the canon works in the Post-Self cycle — ''Qoheleth'', ''Toledot'', ''Nevi'im'', and ''Mitzvot'' (and, soon, ''Motes Played'') — which feature anthropomorphic skunks heavily. Several folks have adopted these skunks as headmates or characters for roleplaying.

For instance, they can create just about anything they can dream up. This isn't as easy as it sounds, of course; it takes skill to get good at dreaming up very specific things such as strawberries or cars or a pencil.

They can also create sims. These are the locations where they live out their lives. These can be everything from a studio apartment to an entire city. They can be private or public. They can be ornate and finely detailed natural settings or they can be plain gray cubes of space.

Occasionally, something will happen and a cladist will crash. This is usually not too big of a deal, as it can be sorted out by a systech and the cladist brought back to life.

Contraproprioceptive virus is the only way to kill a cladist. It disrupts their sense of their body and induces a crash, from which one cannot recover. This was patched out in 2401.

Cladists engage with the world with all of the same senses that we have. These are lumped together into a sensorium. One of the benefits they have is the ability to share some or all of these senses with another cladist via a sensorium message. If you want to show your friend what you're looking at, send them a sensorium message to share your vision. Some sims even mess with your sensoria (consensually, of course) to change the way that you see things or how things feel.

All of those creations listed above, and even some of these experiences, can be shared publicly on the exchange. This was originally a marketplace where one bought and sold such things with Reputation, a currency put in place in the early days when System capacity needed closer management, though this has since become almost a non-issue.

There are also feeds which one can use to share information, news, stories, all sorts of things! Think of these (loosely) like subreddits.

The perisystem also contains the clade listing. Privacy was an important consideration from the founding of the System, so one cannot simply look up any old cladist and find out everything about them without being granted permission.

You'll probably see the Ode clade mentioned quite a bit (notably [[May Then My Name|May Then My Name Die With Me]], [[True Name|The Only Time I Know My True Name Is When I Dream]], and [[Dear|Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled]]). This clade is at the center of many events in the Post-Self Cycle, and played a large role in the System becoming what it is. You may also hear about the Bălan clade, which has found itself entangled both professionally and romantically with the Odists. Other names you might hear are [[the Jonas clade]], [[Debarre]], and [[AwDae|AwDae/RJ]].