Server Extant

‘Boredom is just the universe’s way of telling you it sucks.’

Epsilon server simulated a planet-like sphere of terrain, approximately fifty kilometers in diameter. There were almost a thousand servers running Knet source, each generating a ‘planet’ like Epsilon, more commonly called ‘surfaces’. A server surface was formed, at the point of creation, by a random terrain-generation process that set its climate, erected then eroded its contours, and established its precursor resources. From that point on, it would be developed by the human and AI-controlled entities that colonized, developed and defended it. After a period of anarchy and barbarism, and assuming it wasn’t assimilated by some hegemon, it generally evolved a distinct cultural personality (kultura) linked to its history. At the 0.0.0 grid center-point of the Knet universe was a single sun, producing the the same illumination for each surface, regardless of distance. Once an object accelerated to ‘server-extents’, the maximum diameter of space the server generated around its ‘planet’, it would cross to the space of its neighbor. Those were the basic rules.

Epsilon had long been under the Player Federation’s heel, its original kultur destroyed. As a link in Motor’s empire, its function was to serve as a military staging point for his fleets and to accrete density through process. Approached from ‘space’, most of its terrain appeared to be coils of red, congealed rock, as if it had been born in some volcanic spasm, interrupted by delicate traceries of salt pan and desert. At the equator, a green circle, like a bloom of mold on a Petri dish, broke the arid russets and ochres of its surface. Growing closer, our observer would soon recognize this disk to be a vast plain of horticultured fields, tended by countless machines and workers, laboring like yellow-overalled ants. These were cims, fast-breeding AI ‘people’ that displayed highly complex, human-like behavior. cims were essential to server monopoly, their vast concentrations controlled so much of a server’s processing power that dislodging its rulers became almost impossible. In an effort to establish stability, empires like P-Fed used numerous techniques, but dominating servers with some sort of hegemonizing procedural, like a giant cim concentration, was an old tactic.

The circle of green fields accounted for fifteen percent of the surface, but concentrated most of the server’s detail. Traceried throughout, like veins on a leaf, were roads, combining like tributaries, into highways and super-highways, until they met in the center, in the rise of a single, great metropolis, which had been named, by its creators, in a fit of indifference that they’d subsequently regretted, ‘Big Cock City’, the linchpin of Epsilon’s subjugated status.

To understand how server monopoly worked, one had to grasp the central idea animating the weirdly brilliant algorithms, that constituted Ksource’s mathematical soul. There had been countless online worlds, MPOLGs and forms of virtual escapism created over the years. But they all understood the mechanics of their universe as arbitrarily distinct form the computational processes that maintained and rendered it. Knet was different. It made them one and the same. The computational processes involved in rendering a physically consistent virtual reality were made into into commodities in their own right. In doing so, Knet created a natural economy, a natural scarcity, and a field of competition between entities, human and non-human, who wished to grow, evolve and exploit more server power. The Ksource’s key innovation was to link the ‘virtual’ mass of objects directly to their vertex count and density, density being the proximity these vertexes were allowed near each other. Higher density created smoother curvature in rendered surfaces, it was also directly linked to ‘prop’, the degree to which any object (because the rules were the same for all non-icon entities, AIs and human-inhabited Ids) could be modded and express abilities that made them able to effect their environment. Just as living creatures struggled for food, resources and space to grow, the Knet’s denizens were forced to contend with each other. Ksource capped these processes by mathematically logarithmic limits and a law of diminishing return, and they fed back on each other, like natural processes, creating unfathomable complexity out of relatively simple starting principles. The only exceptions to these logarithmic barriers and feedbacks was the only known instability Ksource exhibited, the SYSup-delay exploit that allowed the creation of super-compressed objects, monstrous anomalies that exceeded the maximum compression limit. These existed on the other side of the logarithmic barrier and were thus able to be modded with extreme, engine-breaking properties.

Free states like Kys-1 stabilized server control by having a vast and diverse population of ‘real’ citizens, humans occupying Ids, a fractious citizenry with individual agency, who would fight to resist invaders. Hegemons like P-Fed had a natural advantage over such anarchic polities of real people. Their own strongholds, dominated with AI processes, left their human players free for organized military depredations while supplying a constant stream of accreted density for bribery and war. They also had a natural disadvantage. Hegemons, by their nature, had to be rigidly hierarchical in order to function. That left them vulnerable to the preference cascade process known as ‘implosion’.

Amongst ‘gamers’ the barbarians at kultura’s gate, conquering a server was considered some of the best fun you could have. Guarding it, once conquered, however, was a different matter.