Excursus: Sim life

  Salome Einstein: Girls, I just thought of something funny weird.

  Yutten Turse: Oh you temptress. You know I love weird things.

  Olz Hap: I’ll take the funny parts and Yutten can have the weird. Out with it.

  Salome Einstein: Ok, so it’s about the Erd sims. All they know about us is what they can read in the book, right?

  Olz Hap: Yeah. And the other one.

  Salome Einstein: Right. They have these two books, and nothing else. We have created their whole universe, and all they know about us is what’s in these books.

  Olz Hap: They are not supposed to know about us. If we tell them about us, that’s interference. They can only develop naturally as long as they don’t know about us.

  Yutten Turse: Also, actually, it was the Elders who created their whole universe. Maybe not the creator gods they would have hoped for.

  Salome Einstein: Ha, that’s right. Erd was created basically as an insane experiment by a group of power-hungry maniacs. How’s that for a cosmogenesis?

  Olz Hap: That’s weird I suppose. What’s the funny part?

  Salome Einstein: Pushy, aren’t you? I think three things are funny. It’s funny that, you know, think of everything Confluence civilization is about. So many things going on, such a vastness of experiences and possibilities –

  Yutten Turse: We’re pretty cool, yeah.

  Salome Einstein: But all they know about us is what’s written in these two books.

  Yutten Turse: Which they ignore.

  Salome Einstein: Right, that’s the second funny thing. But even if they did read them, you know, they are such a strange and limited window into our world. You get such a skewed perspective on what we are if all you know about us is what you read in those books.

  Olz Hap: Yeah, but that’s true for every story. You get to know some things about the people involved and their worlds, but lots of stuff doesn’t go into the story.

  Salome Einstein: That’s true, but I was thinking you usually know a bit about the world a story takes place in because it’s set in the real world. But that’s not true for fantasy stories, obviously.

  Yutten Turse: Or science fiction. Is this fantasy or science fiction do you think?

  Olz Hap: A bit of both. There was a discussion about this when the first book was released. In Erd culture, magic is usually an element of fantasy stories, while science fiction is more oriented towards natural philosophy and technology.

  Yutten Turse: But our magic is a bit like technology, isn’t it?

  Salome Einstein: That’s obvious to us, but maybe not to them. But we definitely look like a future world to them. And the tone of the story is something you would normally find in science fiction. Anyway, since the Erd dims take the stories about the Confluence as something like fantasy or science fiction, the fact that they don’t know anything else about our world is nothing unusual to them.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Olz Hap: But since it so happens that we actually exist, the stories about us are not like the rest of their fantasy stories. It’s a pretty strange situation, I’ll give you that.

  Salome Einstein: And we are so important to them. If we stopped feeding energy into the sim, their world would just freeze. Like Soth, standing still while the rest of the world moves on.

  Yutten Turse: Everybody is going somewhere, but not him.

  Salome Einstein: I suppose we all have moments like that. Anyway, the even funnier thing is that they don’t even read the stories. They could know a bit about us, but they choose not to.

  Olz Hap: To them, the Confluence is just a silly story. They have no reason to think it says something important.

  Salome Einstein: Technically, whoever is feeding information to the Erd author is interfering with the sim’s natural development. But in reality, this info is presented in such a way that nobody takes it seriously, and so it doesn’t really interfere after all.

  Yutten Turse: It’s hidden in plain view. From an Erd perspective, the Confluence is obviously a fantasy, and a weird one at that.

  Salome Einstein: Kind of clever, really. I want to ask – if you are a clever novelist who wants to the same thing for our world, what would you write then? I mean, if you want to invent a world that is running us as a simulation – how fantastical would that world have to be?

  Olz Hap: Oh, girl. You’re setting them off now. If this goes in the book.

  Salome Einstein: Yea, sorry. But then you’re saying that this conversation is interesting enough to get in the book. The point I’m getting at is the third funny thing: the Erd sims have no way to know they are in a sim, right? So how is that different for us?

  Olz Hap: I guess on a philosophical level it’s not different. Although we have magic, which is impossible in simulations.

  Yutten Turse: At least in our simulations.

  Salome Einstein: Exactly. So let’s look at one thing. I think it is possible to understand the Erd author’s books about the Confluence as a sort of simulation in text of our world. The Erd author set up a world with some pretty strange parameters – I mean, not for us, but for him – and then tried to imagine how things would look like given those parameters. What kinds of stories would play themselves out in that kind of world. That’s probably his understanding of this whole thing, don’t you think?

  Yutten Turse: Huh. I’m getting the feeling you have been thinking a lot about this.

  Salome Einstein: I obviously have too much free time on my hands and should be set to some productive task, yes. But, you know, we find ourselves as characters in someone’s book – makes you think, right?

  Olz Hap: Yeah.

  Salome Einstein: So the question is: is there any way we can know that we are not just characters in a book?

  Yutten Turse: Shit seems real, just like it would in a dream.

  Olz Hap: Sure but, you know, we’re doing plenty of stuff that is not included in the book. Normally, we would not expect from characters in a book that they also do things that are not in the book.

  Yutten Turse: You’re talking about the harem again.

  Olz Hap: Of course! All that action, and none of it in the book.

  Salome Einstein: That’s funny. But you’re right. Unless we are to believe that every character in a book has their own capacity to wonder if they are just a character in a book, then it seems unlikely that we are.

  Yutten Turse: Unless this is a special book.

  Salome Einstein: Huh. Right. Because it is a special book no matter how you look at it. Either it’s the kind of book that is really special to the Erd sims, because it really explains how their whole universe exists, or –

  Yutten Turse: It’s the kind of book that is really special to us. And if it’s special, we can’t generalize. What you said earlier about characters in books generally doesn’t necessarily apply.

  Salome Einstein: And I suppose the only way to determine whether it’s special to us or to them is to look at the interest it generates. Now the Erd sims are entirely ignoring the book, so arguably it’s not special to them. Meanwhile, here in the Confluence –

  Yutten Turse: Well they don’t know about this book yet, but we all know the interest it will generate.

  Olz Hap: Seems to me you’re about to conclude that the most reasonable thing here is that we are just characters in a book. I resist that.

  Yutten Turse: You would, wouldn’t you? After all, that conclusion would imply that your harem pleasures are all just in your mind.

  Olz Hap: You can take anything from me, but not that.

  Salome Einstein: I suppose it’s pointless to ask what your plans are for the evening, then? Seeing that it’s all just your imagination?

  Yutten Turse: My plan is to just blank out for a while until I miraculously pop up in a future chapter.

  Salome Einstein: Cheers to that! Call it a day?

  Olz Hap: Nighty night my imaginary friends. I guess I will suddenly find myself in your company again, my mind filled with imaginary memories of how I got there.

  Yutten Turse: Enjoy your time off!