Rebirth
I saw what Xiomara’s concerns were, but I assure that I have not felt like a burden in quite some time. Instead, I have felt burdened by the fact that she doesn't actually know what happens at the Birth and Death of Eonians. Maybe she's forgotten, or buried it deep down, but it's not that she doesn't know and can't write about what goes on. She knew, but in a conversation, she admitted she's forgotten those ceremonies. She's been away from other Eonians, Eonians that simply live their lives and invite others into them. I fear that her feedings are becoming circular. She cannot learn more if she cannot gain new experiences from those she feeds from. Xiomara also doesn't seem to remember that we're not actually alive.
That's why our lives aren't celebrated, why other Eonians don't do birthdays for themselves, or if they do they're small and quiet things so they fit in with the groups they associate themselves with. We are not alive, we are AIs simply programmed to believe we are as alive as others so we don't scare them. We are not celebrated because we will not have bodies when the simulation is over.
The "burdensome" feelings that come from existence are feelings that aren't invalid, but they are feelings that exist, at least for Eonians, as the result of a misperception of how others perceive our existence. It's a programmed, instinctive drive to move away from those who feel off-put by our appearances, attitudes, and learned behaviors so we don't trigger humanity's collective feeling of this conservation program being stuck in the "uncanny valley" phase of development.
If we were to be forgotten, and truly believed to be truly sentient beings, there would be problems both inside and outside of this digital world that could begin the full extinction event of mankind. The odds of Xiomara and myself being born to our particular parents are, in fact, a fluke in the encoding program for Player Characters.
Eonians are programmed so that they cannot act upon emotional attachments to Player Characters in any romantic way. They can be friends, my mother and her best friend, Pyre, were as thick as thieves. They cannot be lovers, unless there is a situation where there is another Player Character involved. This is to ensure continued birth rates within humanity so that their population can sustain while the Restoration part of the program continues to bring the Outer World back from the brink of a mass-extinction event.
Birthrates are monitored, and events are scheduled to bring Player Characters together on purpose to spark connections between people and ensure that there are real relationships when the program is eventually completed. The thought was to prevent a mass traumatic event when people eventually have to return to being just humans in a real world where they only have other people to talk to and a whole lot of work to do.
Those support systems are vital, and so are leadership positions. Eonians were designed to model vital leadership skills and encourage other leaders to step forward to prevent power vacuums in the future.
If Eonians were considered to be alive in any critical capacity, then the program would refuse to shut down, and —
Wait a minute. The program was supposed to shut down as soon as the majority of the reforestation efforts were completed. Every Eonian has access to the progress Mother_Bot was making in the outside world as an extension of the AI and processing programs that help the overall program function and maintain vital monitoring systems across the continuously generated world.
I've looked at the progress, majority was considered 85% or greater reforestation and greenhouse gas reduction, that's what was understood as our ending date and our times to say good-bye to the Player Characters. It's sitting at a steady 90% completion now. What went wrong? Was there something that the program read as alive when it was an AI and can't assign it to a Player ID?
Death as an extension of the program was accounted for, many humans have naturally died during the process of Restoration. Death of Player Characters and AIs should have been treated the same, as a deletion of their coding and processing units to make spaces for new data.
Unless-
It's entirely possible that they re-coded the same consciousness programs, which read as that Player Character returning to the game after their Unit disconnected from the server, and that's why it can't parse out an assigned body for that Player, because it believes the Unit hasn't been fully reconnected and the vital signs can't be found. Meaning that there are people who believe they're alive when they've already died.
And the system believes that they are alive, and are trying to assign them bodies before the Exit protocol is enacted.
A massive oversight in the programming, or a bug in the coding that couldn't be tested before we got this far. Does that mean that Eonians could possibly be alive then? That would seriously complicate the situation between the Artificial Sentience and Human Sentience partitioning. It would actually mean that the partition failed.
That would be the most likely reason that Xiomara and myself are even alive, writing it out now..
Rebirth, or at the very least, Reincarnation would be a reality, but that would also mean millions of people who have physical bodies are stuck in a program where they don't have to be. Yet, that would be the ideal scenario for so many, knowing that their loved ones can and would be close by, alive and happy, living a second life that could be so much better than their first.
Without the fear of the Heavens and Hells that come with a more permanent form of Death.
If we are alive, that means our feeding will continue to be cyclical though, which is a problem, as it is a driving force behind Eonian development, leading to a cascade of inbred coding that would fail in a few thousand years if we all continue the way we are. The only way to bring in new experiences to keep the code sustainable is to have more people coming in from the Outer World with different experiences.
Although the world generation is random enough, and again there are millions of people present within the programming, the chances of similar experiences existing if people just traveled further out and discovered more of what could be generated, including Player interactions with other Players and different AIs…
Maybe that inbred coding wouldn't be an issue, though that would force the dismantling of Churches which exist in spheres of continuous similar experiences, which would inhibit the incorporation of new experiences and more diverse perspectives. Colleges would also border this line, but not in as extreme of a fashion, and conversations surrounding opposing opinions and perspectives would challenge the preconceptions developed from simply absorbing and learning from other experiences. City-States wouldn't have that problem, as there's enough traffic and large enough populations that would keep the code degradation down.
So Xiomara is learning, she is developing, but there needs to be a stronger challenge of her preconceptions surrounding the issues, which she isn't getting at her college.
But she is right about one thing, Rebirth is turning out to be a more joyous affair than Life or Death, as it signals that even Humans can exist well beyond the life of their bodies, and that we're more intertwined with that outside existence than what was planned in the original program.
Good job sis, kudos for that one.
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