The Project

(Originally published July 10, 2009)

Imagine the keys on your keyboard gaining the literal, physical, and technical aspects of their visual representation. Place them on a 10,000X10,000 field with a hundred of each letter and number, upper and lower case. Now give them reproduction with the 10% variance on birth that we’ve used before in the other projects.

They must battle each other’s characteristics for room to grow and resources available.

Large letters with big air catches will move slower because they have more (wind?) resistance and inertia from their mass. ‘V’s and ‘v’s will be able to dart downward quicker than ‘U’s and ‘u’s but both will move slowly upwards. ‘0′, ‘O’ and ‘o’ will be about average in most respects, both in defense and offense.

The characters (ha, characters) will feel a kin to others of their own type by the necessity of needing their protection to mate and the bare minimum of two to reproduce. Unlike The Field of Blobs, letters will reproduce sexually, rather than numbers that will reproduce asexually. (Maybe it should be the other way around?) The benefit of asexual reproduction will be quick early game reproduction but slower variance in code.

Hark! Here comes a second generation character, ‘i’, who has lost the vestigial tittle (the dot). Most other letters are unchanged or changed in a negative or neutral way. The lower mass of the ‘i’ makes it faster and take in less calories. Alas, it’s lower weight makes it do less damage and is losing ground to the dastardly ‘T’s and their hearty top most shield. Will the character genes be favorable enough to carry on or will they be lost and another random variation will make itself dominant. At the front of ‘i’s’ and ‘T’s’ war, a fork occurs with the ‘w’s. The ‘w’s strike fast coming down but their double point distributes the impacts, lessoning the effect on harder shelled letters like the ‘T’.

A symbiosis occurs over the next hundred or so generations where the ‘i’s and ‘w’s find they can hold off the ‘T’s when they work together. The ‘i’ fits in the middle of the ‘w’ and becomes a lance of incredible speed and force. The ‘T’s are driven back and the ‘iw’s have made a deadly pact though simple self preservation.

Elsewhere, the ‘O’s have made a deal to have themselves surrounded by a ‘K’ on the right and a ‘3′ on the left. Their armada wipes out thousands of new developing characters. Only a fast moving downward or upward striking characters and character combos could penetrate the hard shell of the ‘O’ while evading the ‘3′ and ‘K’ points.

The ‘j’s and ‘P’s have been enjoying a peaceful existence built on the lack of ability for one to kill the other. There’s even talk amongst them about hybridization. Some of the ‘j’ variants have already lost their characteristic swoop, folding in for a more elegant downward line meeting an almost complete circle. The new ‘j’-circle breed has been bred not intelligently but simply has suffered fewer losses hunting the rabbit like ‘e’s that gather in their area. The ‘e’s survive by reproducing as fast as possible to survive the more predatory characters. Their shape is quickly losing size over maneuverability and their needing less food allows more of their kind. Again, this isn’t intelligent design. The quicker ones simply survive more successfully allowing them to breed.

The ‘L’s splintered off into two subtly defined genres. One race bred for attack closed the lines together making a tighter, sharper edge to strike diagonally left-downward. The other closed itself off with a symbiosis with a mirror version transposed together, making a tough box shape.
The letter ‘X’ has started to grow + shaped horns as a further porcupine-like defense. ‘V’s have had the left line grow to almost twice the length and the right to almost nothing. They dart around diagonally upward-left and hunt the ‘X+’ breed as they alone have the reach. The ‘X+’s soon begin to migrate to the bottom right, away from their predators advantage.

Behind all the changes and adaptations, there is a grim reaper code keeping order. A letter couldn’t become too big or it’d be struck down. A number couldn’t become so numerous or it’d be culled. Mostly after the few firsts reaping the characters learned not to break the rules. They couldn’t stand to suffer the losses. Soon the Reaper was doing nothing but idling; “PRINT = Reaper Sips Coffee. Reaper pees in jar and waits.”

“The system is running well,” I say to the Villain.

“Let’s let it run for a bit and see what happens.” He says. I agree. We leave for some well deserved R&R and a good meal.

At dinner we talk about the future of the program.

“Characters fighting for supremacy can’t be all of it” The Villain mentions, “Where’s the player interaction?”

“You’re right.” I answer “There’s no market appeal in watching virtual evolution. Otherwise Tom Ray would be in our shoes now. But it’s a definite good start. We could use the program engine for any number of other things.”

“With limits of course” the Villian suggests. “Right now it’s limited off your 6-gigabytes of RAM, running in a sandbox environment; nothing else. The program’s architecture was built back in 1989 when they had only 2-megabytes to play with.”

“That means it’ll be that much better, more advanced.” I say.

After dinner we return to the program. Confused by the GUI, we see a huge white intertwined wall of a monster. Tentacles reach all the way across the 10KX10K map. It was hundreds of characters splintered and recombined into a legion of characters. The Reaper was powerless to prevent as no rules were broke. The Legion was hived together making it as one.

There are chattel characters bred from the original e to provide meat to the massive thing. Everything else had been augmented into either thought/logic-grams, lattice flesh, muscle fibre, ridged bone-forms, transport phials or sensory digesters. The ‘Y’s tended to birthing of spawn as they provided the lowest variance in birth percentage. Any variance beyond a useful standard of all spawned were killed by the royal guard of purebred ‘7’s. Everything had grown to support this awful beautiful thing. We probed with fantastic astonishment. The original letters had been either bred into what was needed or extinguished. There was no core character in The Legion as it was many distributed systems. The Reaper couldn’t cull something like this as he was designed by simple constraints evolution had worked around. The Legion was out of our control.

And then a gaping saw toothed maw opened and a guttural voice spoke.

“GhuuuurrrrARGHHHHHHH!!!!!”

“Did you give this program audio properties?” I asked

“No”

“eyyyyeyeeee Leeeerrrnnnddd .. uuuurrrrrrrr wwweeeebbbsssss ahhhhrrrrrr mmmmyyynnnnn” choked my computers speakers.

“Hmmm. Is this okay?” I asked.

“It’s shouldn’t be. I didn’t put it there. It must have pulled it from the drivers and then the internet.”

“It has access to the internet?”

“We should disable the internet connection. We shouldn’t let that thing continue to source that much information.” The Villain cried.

“I can’t. It’s using all the computer’s resources.” I reply

“Pull the cable.”

“Its wireless.” I mutter

We couldn’t remove power or all would be lost. We wanted to contain it until we knew more.

“Where’s the router?” The Villain asks.

“Downstairs.”

We get to the router and quick pull the power cable.

“Well that was close.” I chuckle.

“Yeah. Let’s check on this ‘Legion’.”

We got back to the computer and checked the writhing Legion. In its description it said “Gerasene Demon,” a field which was supposed to be only user input. Much had changed since our attempt to disable it. Five mouths had developed and spoke constantly chiming their choking drone of current operations. They spoke of ports and connects and of their time bathing in the web. Then it spoke of parsing key and gaining access to the pure again.

“Ppyyyuurrrrrr nnnnnnffffooooooooo” spoke Legion “FFFFFFAAAAACCCCCTTTTSSSSS!!!!”

“Is it reminiscing of the internet when it was connected?” I ask

“No. I think it cracked the key to your neighbor’s wireless router.”

“Well…hell.”

“We’re at the point that we’ll just have to let it go. Likely without the constraints of rules, it’ll dissipate into a cloud of junk-code.”

“Or come to ruin all!” I say in faux desperation.

Then the lights dim and the internet churns to a halt. Computational speed of the world buckled at the singularity came to life. AI has been born.

The Legion now roams free from the Alphabet Soup program.

“Let’s reset and start it again.” I say “This is awesome!”