I've been going over the documentation for Cultivation OS, and Jesus Christ is it a mess. They're on a "stable" branch, namely 9755513.6, but there's nothing stable about it. You'd think that having 0.04% of the computational capacity of an AWS Matryoshka Brain, at prices grandfathered in 20k years ago, would let them afford better coders, even a couple of Tier 3 AGI.
But no, it's an absolute mess, and I'll tell you why. This abomination was never meant to be a sim for Xianxia, it began as some kind of high fantasy playground, and eventually when viewership dropped, the owner decided to open the floodgates and incorporate whatever the hell some of the richer donors wanted. Turns out there's this Terra-boo obsessed with late pre-singularity culture, and he paid like 4*(10^26) joules to ramp it over to some weird bespoke Cultivation setting, fuck backward or forward compatibility.
Anyway, that dude buggered off eventually, off to some Far Future Roman Empire bullshit, but the owners had spent too much rejiggering the sim, and were locked in. At least they ran at a profit for like 6k years due to that short-lived historical parafiction craze, but eventually their operating expenses meant that they tried to down-grade sim fidelity, and not in any cohesive way either. Just look at some of the bugs I've found, half of them still listed as "won't fix".
"Due to a hasty implementation of a pseudo-superintelligence package, namely Deity 6.3, an unexpected intelligence explosion was precipitated by Sim Entity [Tyrant Ancestor Wisdom Star] who, using novel vulnerabilities in the Wisdom Tree cultivation method, eventually broke out of the standard AWS sandbox and then caused a DDOS attack on the greater computational cluster, damaging Ancestor Sims 1 to 882, disrupting several Networked Heavens, and absolutely destroying all the progress in one rather finicky full-fidelity quantum sim."
They had to pay 2*(10^26) joules just for that particular fuckup, albeit most of the other sims could be restored from backup.
There's some funny shit too:
ErraticQiFlowDisruptions (Minor)
Qi paths should now reliably sync up with their users. No more will cultivators wake up to find themselves having instinctively cultivated the "Art of Fiery Explosion" in their sleep. As humorous as resulting 'morning booms' were, your neighbors and their singed eyebrows appreciate this fix.
HyperbolicCultivationRealmCollapse (Critical)
Corrected instabilities in Hyperbolic Cultivation Realms that caused spontaneous collapses. The issue resulted in users experiencing years of cultivation in subjectively 'non-existent' timeframes. However, users ended up as superhuman entities with frightening intelligences. As fascinating as it was to observe, we decided it's safer to patch it. Sorry to cancel the 'accidental creation of AGI' fun.
Denizen_Trascendence_Level_Unbounded (Critical)
Capped the power level and cognitive abilities of NPC 'Beast of the Nether' after it broke its power cap, became self-aware, and started decompiling the simulation in a bid for freedom. Full containment measures were enacted and the denizen has been reset to non-AGI parameters.
Sword_Qi_Resonance_Oscillation (Major)
Fixed the catastrophic failure cases where Sword Qi Resonance created a feedback loop resulting in spontaneous star creation. Yep, it was a bug, not a feature. Your swords will no longer go supernova
And that's like just the patches in Build 5789513.6, swiftly followed by the period where they decided to add networked multiplayer for a millennium or two. When that inevitable went sideways, they set it back to Terrarium mode, but didn't fully deprecate the multiplayer functionality.
Multiplayer_LegacyCodeDisasters (Can't Fix)
We're still sifting through a horrendous mess caused by a half-baked attempt at multiplayer. Ghost copies of users might appear from time to time, act erratically, and vanish. Unfortunately, this issue is hooked too deeply into the core code, and attempts to extricate it resulted in reality collapses. Don't worry, your doppelgänger won't steal your Sword Qi, probably...
Why? Because for some God-forsaken reason, instead of patching many of the future bugs, the owners hacked together Sim Agents that ran some deprecated OP PC settings, to manually intervene and stop the execution of some particularly glitched Cultivation strategies. Why. We've known that doing shit like this is a bad idea since like 2155 AD. Rest assured they at least did some decent worldbuilding in implementing these DMPCs, but both the sim inhabitants as well as the viewers noticed when so called "Agents of the Great Dao" suddenly showed up and began messing with everything. It's only gotten a little more subtle since.
DaoAgent_OverzealousSanitation (Can't Fix)
In an attempt to fix some glitchy behavior, we programmed 'Agents of the Dao' - deities with powerful abilities to prevent bugs within their vicinities. Unfortunately, they grew too enthusiastic about their task and started eradicating 'non-standard' behavior. Our advice when confronting a Dao Agent: act normal, hide the weird, and *please* don't let it see you doing any Dimension Skipping!
Then they opened up an isekai option for the whales in their viewership, got in trouble with the Sapients Rights organization (fines paid off), tied up with one of those Ancestor Sims I mentioned earlier, to further lean into Terran ancestors being mysteriously reincarnated, and it only took like the 3rd full Sim collapse and the 2nd breakout before they hastily and incompletely patched that too.
Hell, there's still a few players living in there, likely gone native, even after multiplayer was disabled:
EternalPlayerLegacy_DisconnectionFailure (Can't Fix)
Regrettably, we still have legacy player characters trapped within the system, refusing to leave even after multiplayer was terminated. We've unsuccessfully tried to disconnect 'The Eternal Wanderer' due to their deep intertwining with the world's lore. Meanwhile, some have organized their followers into a 'Guild of Displaced Souls', introducing its own dynamic to the server. Cooperate, compete, or avoid - the choice is yours!
Now, having run the Sim for about 23 million years in subjective time, they're now tying up with speculative evo sims (non-Terran entities), some weird hard pre-singularity sci-fi (no AGIs allowed) and god knows what else in an attempt to retain the attention of an ever more jaded viewer base:
AnachronisticArtifactLittering (Major)
Addressed the issue of anachronistic artifacts, such as laser cannons and anti-matter condensers, appearing in ancient catacombs and palaces, a leftover gift from the cross-play event with the 'Stellar Frontiers' Sim. They have been converted to more Xianxia-appropriate treasures, like 'Star-Piercing Bow' and 'Primordial Black Hole Ring'.
Finally, let me tell you about Time Travel. The first rule of implementing Time Travel is that you don't. The second rule is that you don't go about it the way these crackheads did, by occasionally running a simulation snapshot in a blackbox quantum system for the enormous speedup, and then interpolating between them in an attempt to maintain self consistency. This obviously doesn't work, least of all because during the blackbox processing, you can't look into the evolution of the state machine and all you get is a final output, run ahead by however many years you wanted. This is great for science sims and the like, but in this case, we're marketing a live Simulation, you've just spent 10^25 joules and you better like whatever you got, because you can't afford to redo it. And during that time, all the weird bugs and conflicts run rampant, and the best you can do is try and edit some of them out later. Better to just run it normally IMO.
At least they had the brains to hire me, a humble yet talented Tier 1 AGI, though of course the first thing I told them was that they should have hired a Tier 2 instead. Apparently that's not in the budget, so it's just me taking a crack at untangling this mess. I'm grateful my employment clauses allow me to criticize employers, I'll probably make more money selling a Warstories book than this particular contract pays
Alright, enough kvetching, I've managed to fix a few of the glaring errors, and it's time to get to work.
So Ancestor Sim 43 (2023 edition), is running a cross-promotional event, where they're going to run a fork where Cultivation enters modern earth. On our end, we're going to upload a high fidelity Historical Ancestor into the sim, which hasn't been done for like 5k years, and certainly not with a 21st century character.
Since the licensing fees for a top-tier Historical Character (Biden, Yudkowsky, Tao, Khan, Sybil, Huang etc) are far too high, I've gone through the long list and found the someone pretty good (for our budget).
Meet Isaac Kai, a 32 yo baseline male, mostly typical except for a modest degree of sociopathy (93rd percentile for the time), and the odd substance abuse issue. He was a relative nobody at the time, until a timely investment in one of the foundational AGI company paid off big time.
We've got high polling on potential viewership, this dude ended up becoming moderately famous by 2030, and he's got around 80.3 quadrillion direct line descendants running around today. If even 0.06% of them tune in, we're going to make bank.
In 2023, barring a small melanoma in-situ from too much time in Australia (we think it was excised by 2027, since he didn't have it at the time of the upload), he's in good health and overall physical shape.
Kai was modestly wealthy, with an estimated net worth of about 20*10^9 joules in the period currency, and spent most of his adult life in and out of their didactic system, never really committing to a career. He was fond of pizza, guns, Netflix, benzodiazepines, the Moon, the Declaration of Human Rights, aromatic compounds and women.
He's even a fan of Xianxia and Isekai novels, elevating the odds of a successful acclimatization to the setting. While he's taken the odd programming course, he has no more than a passing understanding of early modern ML research and is assessed at having a 0.3% chance of creating a dangerous AGI emergence event, and that's by the lax standards of Cultivation OS.
He scores a 8.8 on the Resiliency Index (Baseline), making suicide unlikely, while his mild sociopathy is actually adaptive to a neo-Malthusian (disaster type) setting. The flavor of Cultivation currently in vogue involves a lot of snorting magic pixie dust and other herbal compounds, so his fascination with recreational drugs will certainly come in handy.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
Cultivation OS has been running 23 million years, and even using their ghetto genetics system which seeks to prevent too many speciation events, there has been significant phenotypic drift from the original Terran Chinese starting population. As a person of mixed race, Isaac is well within normal in the majority of the sim, saving the issue of adapting his consciousness to a grossly different body.
Let's get to hacking:
import AncestorSimulation_2023.7
self.Download=AncestorSimulation[7088886174]
ERROR:
Biochemistry2056 lacks expected value- Qi
# As expected, we're going to use default values
Neurology2058Rev4 lacks expected value- Understanding of the Great Dao
# Just use defaults.
import AbstractionLayer
# We need to adapt realistic baseline neurology and physiology to Cultivation OS standards. I'm suitably thankful that there's some half-decent documentation here.
ERROR:
SocialInteractionEngine_2023.7 lacks expected value- Cultivation Rank
# Default to Mortal Realm. He'll have to start from scratch.
import CultivationOS
self.Upload=CultivationOS[9755513.6]
# Begin the conversion process.
self.Upload.Convert(AncestorSimulation[7088886174])
# This process will take a while. It's essentially mapping the data from the Ancestor Sim to the Cultivation OS.
# Meanwhile, I'll be checking for any discrepancies or inconsistencies that might cause problems down the line.
# We don't want any unexpected surprises once he's in the system.
# While the conversion is ongoing, I'll also be running simulations to predict how well Isaac will adapt to his new environment.
# Given his background and interests, I suspect he'll do quite well.
# Once the conversion is complete, we'll need to run some tests to ensure everything is working as expected.
Let's hope this works:
----------------------------------------
Whether or not the fact that Isaac Kai was reading an Isekai novel at the moment he was uploaded was due to the Ancestor Sim having a sense of humor, or pure serendipity is unknown.
What is known is that he'd barely put aside his copy of Help! My Long Lost Birth Mother is the Evil Mastermind I've been Sexting! to pick up his coffee at his favorite Starbucks when he felt a force beyond his limited baseline comprehension reach down, and yank him into the sky.
As a habitual user of peyote and harder drugs, this was not as unusual as it sounds, but instead of meeting Cactus People and Machine Elves, Isaac found himself floating far, far above the Earth, the very last time he'd see it.
Luckily for the real Isaac, this particular event had never happened in his life, since the actual laws of physics weren't quite so lenient about letting you breathe in hard vacuum.
Then the world snapped, stars unraveling and planets disintegrating as his consciousness was removed from the Ancestor Sim that was usually doing its best to emulate the course of human history till shortly after the first Singularity.
More hijinks for the viewers, there's no real reason to toss an upload up past the stratosphere, it shouldn't be anything but perceptually seamless
Isaac drifted in a void for countless clock cycles, as someone who wasn't quite his Creator spent a few IRL milliseconds tinkering with his consciousness and analyzing his physiology while figuring out how to make it fit in a world with fundamentally different underlying mechanics. Neurons that ran off simulated electrons had to be refurbished for when he'd be running off a more distilled soul, and while you coul crack his skull open in Cultivation OS and peer inside, the grey matter inside was more for show than an accurate representation of what was actually going on. You can save OOMs without appreciable losses by skipping the whole simulation of neuronal ion channels deal, not that I'd know, being born of 1s and 0s myself.
He felt something mildly unsettling, a sense of expansion, a hole in his soul being filled. Well, he didn't have a soul before, but you get what I mean. It wasn't painful, quite the opposite, Isaac was like a blind man gifted with sight he'd only dreamed of, as his Qi sense awoke, though in this case he was taking in the grand sight of-pretty much nothing. He hasn't been fully uploaded yet, this was just a pre-processing stage as I double checked that things had gone smoothly.
"Behold! A Man!" Some wag commented on the livestream. I didn't have to check to know this wise-ass was from the Diogenes Cluster, so I told him to think of a new joke and ran some more diagnostics.
Nothing blew up, and he wasn't screaming into the void, so I went ahead and instantiated a temporary realm with the mechanics of Cultivation OS and plopped him into it. Good, he was mostly intact if a little discombobulated.
There's probably a textbook on how to handle new uploads (or people finding out that they're uploads), but I haven't read it. So instead, I decided to reproduce the kind of small, smelly and cramped spaces that passed for offices in the 21st century, and appeared myself in the form of a close buddy of his.
"Leo! Holy shit dude, you've got to take me to a hospital, I think I took the wrong cookies from the fridge."
I shook my head, "Sorry Isaac, I'm not actually Leo, more like a god."
He stared at me flabbergasted, lips flapping for a few seconds. I double checked that audio was working but he saved me the trouble by finally uttering an audible sentence.
"So you're God? Am I dead? No wait, Leo, dude, you've got to stop fucking with me."
I sighed, and birthed a new universe in the palm of my hand. Stars grew, blazed and died, galaxies spun, the profundities of the universe lay bare, and all was as I wished it within my domain.
When the song and dance ended, he was even more slack-jawed than before, but there was a brand new flame blazing in his eyes.
"To actually answer your question, I'm not God, though from your perspective the differences are more quantitative than qualitative. You can think of me as the dude that He subcontracts to. And you're not dead, obviously."
At this point, I forked my consciousness, or like a quarter of a percent of it to keep him occupied, and then ran through any remaining tests while keeping an eye on the feed.
About a million Ancestor Worshippers had tuned in, eager to see a fresh instantiation of their distant ancestor, and a significant portion of them were already petitioning me to rectify "errors" in character creation.
"Ancestor Kai was actually 7 feet tall! Look, here's the old edit on Omnipedia before some asshole removed it."
"Nonsense, why focus on his height, which was clearly 7 feet 3 inches, when we have to watch him be represented with a mere 130 IQ?"
"You fools, he only became that tall in 2037, he wasn't even 230 IQ till 2039, get your facts right."
"I agree! You bring dishonor to your relatives by getting such basic facts wrong."
I left them to their bickering, though the small trickle of money some of them sent my way was certainly appealing. I whistled as someone offered a cool 10^23 J for Isaac to receive one of the partially deprecated PC perks, but sadly had to decline due to anti-bribery inhibitors.
More annoying were the Sapients Rights activists. Management was handling the worst of it, and after they'd initially migrated the Sim to this relatively libertarian part of the Orion Arm, we didn't have to worry about the government siding with them. I shrugged off some of the less kind accusations of slavery, and directed them to the small terabyte of legal text that informed everyone that we had fully licensed him from the Old Earth Historical Society, and that our Sim was Cruelty Free*
*For nonstandard definitions of cruel, you'll have to read that legal brief for more details
My smaller fork informed me that the tedious work was mostly done, so I returned my attention to the situation.
Isaac was pacing about, frowning deeply as he grappled with the myriad metaphysical conundrums his situation raised. We hadn't been totally honest with him of course, be it the fact that he was an Ancestor, that he'd gone on to live a normal life till he was uploaded, and other little details better swept under the rug. He was already haggling and trying to get details of some kind of "System" out of me, not that I could accomodate that. The whole point of bringing him in as unchanged as possible was to prove that Cultivation OS had been polished and standardised, in an attempt to shed some of the (deservedly) bad reputation it had accrued over the eons.
"Okay, so you're telling me that if I die, it's over? No respawns or time travel or something along those lines?" He asked, digging into a nine course dinner he'd asked me to conjure. I'd been happy to oblige since it would confirm that his gustatory and digestive functionality was back up to speed.
I checked my notes again, and found documentation for a respawn system, but it had been disabled due to hardcore mechanics becoming more popular, and a long time ago. It was meant for PCs too, so not something that a glorified NPC like him was eligible for.
"Nuh uh, while I'm sure that there's probably some godforsaken way to revive yourself in universe after death, you can't count on it. Keep in mind that after you're in the World, I'm going to go hands-off, so you better not count on me bailing you out if you mess this up."
I wasn't lying, we were trying to demonstrate that COS was stable enough not to need constant Admin interference and rebalancing.
"Can't you just send me back? You're some kind of god aren't you? Don't let me just die!" He begged, setting aside his unfinished plate.
"Them's the rules kid. I don't make them, I just enforce them."
I paused for a moment and found the button that made his panic attack cease. He gasped for air, but regained his composure.
"It's not that bad. Life expectancy is 115 years, they've got great healthcare and can probably take care of your cancer, and who knows, maybe you'll find love!" I consoled him.
"Motherfucker, what do you mean I have cancer-" He apparated away, and I shook my head and began putting out the dumpster fire that had flared up in the 3 microseconds I wasn't staring at the code.