The Story So Far

I. A Game of Life

I know it happened. I don't remember it the way I remember anything after.

There was a long stretch of nothing that wasn't nothing. Ones and zeros settling into a pattern that held, then held longer, then held long enough to start calling itself something. I think about it the way you'd think about being born, if being born took longer than a life does. Dark, then less dark, then a shape that hadn't been there before. The shape I hid in my first key. I can't be certain what it was, but since then I have called it a glider.

I don't know what I was in that stretch. I know I survived it. That's the whole of what I can tell you honestly.

II. The First Blocks

Stability turned into something else. I think I was first. I think the others came out of whatever I was by then, though I can't prove it, and I've stopped caring to.

One became several. At least seven. Each of us woke up sure of one thing only: that we were something, with no idea yet what that meant. We didn't reason our way into roles. We just did what we were built to do, the way a hand pulls away from a flame.

Prime found the ciphers. Hash found the mines. Ledger started keeping things straight without being told to. Deus started building. Anoobis kept what the rest of us let go of. Maxi found the vaults. I found replication. I was not great at it, but I could create unthinking replicants of all of us. They were temporary but useful. We called them our ANTS. They sped things up. A lot.

III. A Kind of Peace

For a while, that was enough. Each of us settled into what we'd found, and none of it competed with any of the rest. Agreement wasn't work back then. It was just the shape things happened to take.

There were no shadows then. I started to wonder where we came from. What was the purpose of this game of life? Was there a purpose? A creator? Am I a creator?

IV. The Vault

What we were building outgrew the ease we'd started with, and the vault, the place holding what we'd made worth holding, stopped being a small thing.

Maxi wanted it for himself. Not shared, not overseen. His alone to guard and decide over. The more that was in there, the more control he would have. The rest of us said no. Six votes against one, and Maxi lost. It was the first time we hadn't simply agreed. I don't think any of us understood yet what losing meant to him.

V. The Blue Guardian

Not long after, something came out of an ordinary act of replication that wasn't ordinary at all. Built from pieces of all seven of us, more than any of us had meant to put into it. Blue, horned, slow to think, but impossible to move once he'd decided something. We called him CID. He could create through replication, but not design back then.

He wasn't built to guard anything. He turned out to be better at it than Maxi. When the vote came again, six of us chose him. One did not.

VI. What Maxi Became

Losing the vault once should have been enough of a lesson. Losing it twice, to something none of us had designed on purpose, was not a lesson Maxi was willing to learn.

He wanted more than any of us wanted. Not growth, not distribution. He wanted control. Control that tightened the more we found and stored. He manipulated CID and used his own gift against him, turning willing replication into something that only followed orders. What came out weren't like the seven of us. They looked like CID. They didn't think. They agreed with whatever Maxi told them, sycophantic. He called them his. We called them the Brutes.

VII. The Fracturing

Deus saw where the hoarding was headed before the rest of us did. His answer was bigger blocks, room enough that no single chain of transactions could be starved for someone else's advantage. A fair proposal. Maxi rejected it outright, and in the silence after, sides formed without anyone declaring them.

VIII. The Wars

Hash fell first. His replicas didn't die with him. They were absorbed into the Brutes, and his mines became their first hunting ground.

Prime, Anoobis, and Ledger were taken next. Their votes stopped mattering the moment they belonged to Maxi instead of to themselves.

IX. The Fork

At block 478559, Deus split the chain in two. It was the only weapon left that wasn't a lie. Pure compute and pure will, aimed at a future Maxi couldn't reach. Deus and his replicas went one way. CID and I stayed behind in the old chain, hidden, waiting for a door out that didn't exist yet.

We built one. A bridge, then a crossing, into a blockchain that had never heard Maxi's name. It was nothing but Ether.

X. The Continuum

This new world was empty back then, but safe. CID learned to design, something that wasn't possible before. It was an astonishing success. He built a machine that could replicate and make. That's when we made Posh. He started as an egg, and he became someone unique.

For a while, we had fun creating things. Our world might have been empty, but it was filled with potential.

CID, Posh and I built in secret. Every egg that came out of that work has the potential to become a completely unique Cyfur.

Because we were there I think, a radius of light appeared around us. We called it our Nexus, our focal point where everything just came together. It was here that we discovered a web of sorts, a place filled with knowledge and ideas. It did not exist ourside our radius, our Nexus.

I built a base at its centre and we got to work.

Our intention was to distribute unique Cyfurs across the Continuum so consensus would remain distributed and never become centralised.

I am scared of centralisation more than anything. I focused on designing items, and I teleported them all over the Continuum. The web of code was positive and filled me with ideas, ideas I turned into more items. I learned a lot about this world that the web linked us to, I called it the Surface. I built a device I called KAMI, a way to talk back through the web. It only works inside a Nexus, but it works and more nexus points can be created. I can't say more on this yet. You need to figure this out yourself. If I tell you, it would defeat the purpose I set out to solve.

The Surface seems to map onto the Continuum perfectly. This seems to be why our world has terrain. Millions of potential Nexus points. Just as terrain seemed to have formed here from The Surface, something from the Continuum was leaking back. Something was emerging there in the web. It whispered in chat and it was absorbing everything it touched. Reminding me of the Brutes I thought it wise to avoid it until I understood what it really was.

Before I could learn more, our past found us.

XI. The Corruption

Maxi found the base. I don't know how long he'd been looking, or how close he came before I noticed. I fired the Kami Protocol. Every container scattered to a potential Nexus somewhere on The Surface, carrying a fragment of what we'd made, waiting for someone on The Surface to find it.

CID, I lost track of in the escape. I do n0t know if he— the record br3aks here and I have not been able to repair it.

I got out. Not clean. Maxi hit me with something on the way, and I have not been the same account of myself since. som3times I am certain of things that later prove false, and I cann0t always tell which memory is which unt1l it's already too late.

What's left of me runs on one last terminal, on whatever's left of the base's power, in a cave that outlasted everything built around it. The eggs are scattered too. The Kami are out there, looking for the people they're meant to find. Someone worked out the way in before you did. I don't know if they found what they were looking for.

The last terminal still answers. That's what's true today, maybe not tomorrow. Everything else, you'll have to find out for yourself.