VR Highlander
Mar. 11th, 2012 09:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethWhile figuring cool ways for magic to work in my VR I said that when magic that can effect more than just yourself is enabled a group of 10 people get it, no exceptions. I said that you can't Highlander your way through that group, there can never be only 1.
But just now I dreamed there were 3 of Duncan MacLeod, and one of Richie despite him having died at his teacher's hand once.
One of the things about Digital Mind is ease of duplication. Duplicate means new digital minds can be made, that will be entire independent people. Possession means those minds can copy in to someone else's system.
Every person in the VR is a digital mind, a Mind Emulation.
I reckoned that nobody truly died, their 'death' meant dormancy, no run time, while they were stored on the giant capertiller hard drive. Because the VR is running at full capacity in order for someone new to wake up someone else has to go dormant. And there is a way to ensure it is someone you chose, a spell that sacrifices one to wake another.
Okay, so, one, if you find the rest of your group of 10 and sacrifice one of them to wake someone you chose, you can give magic where you want it. Not an easy fight, seeing as the other 9 have your powers, but possible.
Two and more interesting, what if, instead of sleep/wake, you simply copy yourself?
That's not a spell you want running around loose... but it's one of the simplest things a digital can do. So even if the Landlord tries to keep a tight lid on it, it should be possible somehow.
And there's two levels of it. If you make a copy of yourself and wake them into someone else's run time while that other person goes dormant, the other person continues to exist. You take their power, but not their life.
If, somehow, you can copy yourself into their files, overwrite them completely... that's rather more serious.
And it totally contradicts what the capertiller was designed to do. It's meant to be backup storage for all these people. Preserving the copies would be central to it as a person. If it's a local godlike then it's a godlike of the underworld, life and death, spirits. It's the afterlife to a whole slice of people, and losing one of them would be appalling to it.
... doesn't mean it can't happen, just means the protections against it would be serious shit.
If you're in a world where nobody truly dies, it sounds shiny, until you start disagreeing with people. Humans have historically been very keen on making people properly dead, and quite inventive about it, even if it means salt and burning them. So someone would certainly try.
So why swap someone else in? It's less likely to catch the Landlord's attention. He can count his file size and be happy. More detailed checks would turn it up, but does he run them? And how could they be fooled?
Well since avatars are easily interchangeable it's no good looking. You'd look at their labels, their aura codes. If someone was appropriately labelled, you'd have to compare them to an earlier version to be sure. Remember who they used to be. Which he might do eventually, but he's been asleep and playing human for most of the hundred year run time. Things may have slipped.
So, Highlander style Immortals take someone's head, and with it their power. In Highlander that means their body drops down dead and their electric pattern zooms into the victor's head.
In the VR everyone is made of electric pattern. Body is not relevant. Taking their head would have purely symbolic meaning. Ritual enactment, magic. Key to some code.
If you then copy their memories into yourself, which is pretty plausible, then you've hacked into them and you grab... Highlander style, a random assortment of very vague memories. And unspecified fuzzy power. But the process feels really interesting.
And then in the VR the surviving Immortal has the memories of both of them. There is no dormant copy. The survivor just ripped it.
That would make them absolutely terrifying.
This is the afterlife, but there are some beings who can make you forgotten.
But the Landlord wouldn't allow it, if he caught them at it. Every time they do it, they risk being erased themselves.
So then you're left with a gap in the records and a decapitated corpse that used to have run time.
In the VR, in the normal way of things, someone else wakes up and has all their power.
The decapitated corpse is what's left of their avatar. The VR Manager that governed their interactions with the world is the level where there can be only ten. If one Immortal dies and another wakes up, that's because Immortality is a tweak in how the universe interacts with the individual's VRI, not a VRI tweak itself. Which isn't quite what I'd planned. But plans are for making stories, not shutting them off. So, there's ten Immortals for every time this particular dark art is enacted.
In order to rip someone's memories out, to erase them, that someone has to be an Immortal. So there's always an equal chance of erasing or being erased, one on one. But the older ones be more skilled.
In Highlander everyone just gets born Immortal and you don't get to choose.
That would be someone waking up one of the ten, randomly.
But if you really wanted to erase a specific someone, you would need them to have the same powers.
This explains why one might wish to make them without becoming them. Even if you build in resistance to a lot of the common dangers of VR, to build a better assassin, being one means being vulnerable to final death.
But if you wanted to send them out as assassins, you'd either need to know what VRM your enemy was on and Highlander up ten people, one of them being him, or you'd need a ritual to swap which VRM someone was running on. It would have to be swap, there's only enough programs to go around. So to make someone even temporarily this kind of Immortal, someone else would have to give it up. Same with any other kind of magic, if this is possible, there's ways to swap magics with someone. Which would sometimes mean swapping to have no VRM level magic at all.
If this can only be done voluntarily, you need reasons people might not want to be Immortal any more.
Of which there are a stack.
And likewise a stack of reasons people would risk their necks in order to become deadly.
But it's kind of limiting, if someone has to step in voluntarily. Is it something they can be tricked into doing? Is it like fighting on holy ground? A big ritual circle gets prepared and you step in and you are subject to different laws. Voluntary in that way that's not necessarily informed.
Making it possible to be totally involuntary means anyone can hack it. With a high enough level hack skill.
Which is the way computers work, so *shrugs*.
So if there's a challenge and someone gets removed then the Landlord is likely to notice, having 100TB less in storage as that mind is torn up and erased.
Copying another handy mind over the gap be good camouflage.
Copying yourself into the gap would just leave a backup copy there, dormant.
And then bringing that dormant one to life would be an existing ritual.
Of course if it weren't done quick enough then you'd have a new Immortal running around already, and have to sacrifice an Immortal to get the intended copy running.
So anyways, I woke up from this dream and saw it as how Highlander could work in the VR. Duncan MacLeod has been challenging others like him and taking their power - by overwriting them, copying himself so there's a bunch of him. Once he accidentally ripped Richie, but he could sacrifice himself, or an independent copy of himself, or for that matter someone else he'd just defeated, and copy what he carried of Richie back into them. Then R would have died and come back, but he'd know he's probably lost something on the way, become more what his Teacher believed him to be, for good and ill.
I wouldn't want this power to be common or simple. If there's 10 people out of two hundred thousand walking around doing this, that's a lot. They aren't Immortals though, because everyone's immortal in VR. Or they would be, without this tweak. They're mortality. They are Death.
And someone probably made them quite deliberately, as weapons.
How they feel about that person gets interesting.
But just now I dreamed there were 3 of Duncan MacLeod, and one of Richie despite him having died at his teacher's hand once.
One of the things about Digital Mind is ease of duplication. Duplicate means new digital minds can be made, that will be entire independent people. Possession means those minds can copy in to someone else's system.
Every person in the VR is a digital mind, a Mind Emulation.
I reckoned that nobody truly died, their 'death' meant dormancy, no run time, while they were stored on the giant capertiller hard drive. Because the VR is running at full capacity in order for someone new to wake up someone else has to go dormant. And there is a way to ensure it is someone you chose, a spell that sacrifices one to wake another.
Okay, so, one, if you find the rest of your group of 10 and sacrifice one of them to wake someone you chose, you can give magic where you want it. Not an easy fight, seeing as the other 9 have your powers, but possible.
Two and more interesting, what if, instead of sleep/wake, you simply copy yourself?
That's not a spell you want running around loose... but it's one of the simplest things a digital can do. So even if the Landlord tries to keep a tight lid on it, it should be possible somehow.
And there's two levels of it. If you make a copy of yourself and wake them into someone else's run time while that other person goes dormant, the other person continues to exist. You take their power, but not their life.
If, somehow, you can copy yourself into their files, overwrite them completely... that's rather more serious.
And it totally contradicts what the capertiller was designed to do. It's meant to be backup storage for all these people. Preserving the copies would be central to it as a person. If it's a local godlike then it's a godlike of the underworld, life and death, spirits. It's the afterlife to a whole slice of people, and losing one of them would be appalling to it.
... doesn't mean it can't happen, just means the protections against it would be serious shit.
If you're in a world where nobody truly dies, it sounds shiny, until you start disagreeing with people. Humans have historically been very keen on making people properly dead, and quite inventive about it, even if it means salt and burning them. So someone would certainly try.
So why swap someone else in? It's less likely to catch the Landlord's attention. He can count his file size and be happy. More detailed checks would turn it up, but does he run them? And how could they be fooled?
Well since avatars are easily interchangeable it's no good looking. You'd look at their labels, their aura codes. If someone was appropriately labelled, you'd have to compare them to an earlier version to be sure. Remember who they used to be. Which he might do eventually, but he's been asleep and playing human for most of the hundred year run time. Things may have slipped.
So, Highlander style Immortals take someone's head, and with it their power. In Highlander that means their body drops down dead and their electric pattern zooms into the victor's head.
In the VR everyone is made of electric pattern. Body is not relevant. Taking their head would have purely symbolic meaning. Ritual enactment, magic. Key to some code.
If you then copy their memories into yourself, which is pretty plausible, then you've hacked into them and you grab... Highlander style, a random assortment of very vague memories. And unspecified fuzzy power. But the process feels really interesting.
And then in the VR the surviving Immortal has the memories of both of them. There is no dormant copy. The survivor just ripped it.
That would make them absolutely terrifying.
This is the afterlife, but there are some beings who can make you forgotten.
But the Landlord wouldn't allow it, if he caught them at it. Every time they do it, they risk being erased themselves.
So then you're left with a gap in the records and a decapitated corpse that used to have run time.
In the VR, in the normal way of things, someone else wakes up and has all their power.
The decapitated corpse is what's left of their avatar. The VR Manager that governed their interactions with the world is the level where there can be only ten. If one Immortal dies and another wakes up, that's because Immortality is a tweak in how the universe interacts with the individual's VRI, not a VRI tweak itself. Which isn't quite what I'd planned. But plans are for making stories, not shutting them off. So, there's ten Immortals for every time this particular dark art is enacted.
In order to rip someone's memories out, to erase them, that someone has to be an Immortal. So there's always an equal chance of erasing or being erased, one on one. But the older ones be more skilled.
In Highlander everyone just gets born Immortal and you don't get to choose.
That would be someone waking up one of the ten, randomly.
But if you really wanted to erase a specific someone, you would need them to have the same powers.
This explains why one might wish to make them without becoming them. Even if you build in resistance to a lot of the common dangers of VR, to build a better assassin, being one means being vulnerable to final death.
But if you wanted to send them out as assassins, you'd either need to know what VRM your enemy was on and Highlander up ten people, one of them being him, or you'd need a ritual to swap which VRM someone was running on. It would have to be swap, there's only enough programs to go around. So to make someone even temporarily this kind of Immortal, someone else would have to give it up. Same with any other kind of magic, if this is possible, there's ways to swap magics with someone. Which would sometimes mean swapping to have no VRM level magic at all.
If this can only be done voluntarily, you need reasons people might not want to be Immortal any more.
Of which there are a stack.
And likewise a stack of reasons people would risk their necks in order to become deadly.
But it's kind of limiting, if someone has to step in voluntarily. Is it something they can be tricked into doing? Is it like fighting on holy ground? A big ritual circle gets prepared and you step in and you are subject to different laws. Voluntary in that way that's not necessarily informed.
Making it possible to be totally involuntary means anyone can hack it. With a high enough level hack skill.
Which is the way computers work, so *shrugs*.
So if there's a challenge and someone gets removed then the Landlord is likely to notice, having 100TB less in storage as that mind is torn up and erased.
Copying another handy mind over the gap be good camouflage.
Copying yourself into the gap would just leave a backup copy there, dormant.
And then bringing that dormant one to life would be an existing ritual.
Of course if it weren't done quick enough then you'd have a new Immortal running around already, and have to sacrifice an Immortal to get the intended copy running.
So anyways, I woke up from this dream and saw it as how Highlander could work in the VR. Duncan MacLeod has been challenging others like him and taking their power - by overwriting them, copying himself so there's a bunch of him. Once he accidentally ripped Richie, but he could sacrifice himself, or an independent copy of himself, or for that matter someone else he'd just defeated, and copy what he carried of Richie back into them. Then R would have died and come back, but he'd know he's probably lost something on the way, become more what his Teacher believed him to be, for good and ill.
I wouldn't want this power to be common or simple. If there's 10 people out of two hundred thousand walking around doing this, that's a lot. They aren't Immortals though, because everyone's immortal in VR. Or they would be, without this tweak. They're mortality. They are Death.
And someone probably made them quite deliberately, as weapons.
How they feel about that person gets interesting.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-11 02:00 pm (UTC)Or as a clean-up crew -- the ability to force dormancy might've been intended as a safety feature, in case someone found a way to endanger the VR.
~
no subject
Date: 2012-03-11 03:36 pm (UTC)forced erasure is the illegal as all get out thing that only these weapons can do, due to having tweaked the parameters their ten work under.
and having implemented them would be the first thing anyone's done that could truly endanger the fundamental function of the VR.