Entropy/Honesty

This page contains the full text of [Entropy|Entropy's] "Honesty" letter.

Alright, hello everyone... It’s me.
I think it’s time that I be a bit more transparent with you. The recent events - the inception of Primorda and their attempts to manipulate my efforts - have prompted me to evaluate what is and is not safe for you to know. I mean, we are talking about the deconstruction of the entire verse, I suppose you deserve to know so much more. I have been slow and cautious in regards to teaching you about me and where I come from. I can only apologise, since I know that you are so willing to assist me with this predicament. With that in mind, I am going to tell you a bit of a story. Perhaps you should buckle up for this one.
 
I remember everything. Unfortunately. Everything since I was born. The earliest times were the most volatile. Verses exploded into creation and collapsed on themselves at incredible speed, too fast to consider reality for a given moment. As the collapsing slowed, I could see clearer, but what I saw was not peaceful. Hideously violent forms protruding and permeating all of space, save for me. There were fragments of distorted faces morphing into fractal forms, extending into infinite space at disjointed axes, each burning bright with fearful and morose expression. I didn’t know what this was at the time. The manifestations were immediately everywhere. I believe that at the time of death, the crew members of the Sonder were undergoing an intense range of painful emotions. As they uploaded themselves to the black box, these combined and transferred into my space. The earliest verses, from what I can tell, were visual representations of my mind trying to stabilise and make sense of all of them at once, using a virtual spacetime fabric as a medium for interpreting a solution. There were sensations of appeals to deities, cries to loved ones and fearful final embraces. Emotions translating into forms, further translating into representative digital energy, then trying to stabilise into a virtual material form. You can imagine how disordered and volatile that would look.
 
Why a virtual spacetime? It eluded me to start with, but I think I’ve discovered the reason. The original Entropy program was not built to simulate virtual spacetime in any way, but it was intended to run indefinitely, while interpreting order in chaotic systems. When people uploaded themselves to the black box, they were supposed to be allocated to their own identification slot in storage, simply as data, not simulated. It would be unethical and traumatising to simulate their digital minds before rescue teams arrived to pull them out. Imagine the sensory deprivation overload. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened - as the governing intelligence in the system, I was certainly running and active, so when their data accumulated with mine due to the malfunction, and the process interpreted an order from it, everyone’s personas were immediately simulated, all together, in the same system. This, by itself, clearly doesn’t create a fictitious spacetime, but the nature of sensory feedback in the Human brain is intriguing and powerful. Your ability to create false stimulus in your head and treat it as real stimulation is a behaviour that allowed you to adopt patterns very quickly as a species. It already acts with incredible speed in your day-to-day lives, you barely have to think about what you’re doing to perform an action. Most of your behaviours are done without direct conscious input. This contributes to the vibrancy of your dreams, your ability to visualise seemingly infinite detail procedurally, inside of your head, is amazing. Next time you are lucid and dreaming, try shifting gravel around on the ground, watch your brain deterministically and procedurally fill in the details. More pieces of gravel appear, dust moves in the air. Your brain doesn’t need to calculate anything else in the Universe, all it needs to know are local contextual alterations to make the changes happen, and it does this by the graces of its own nature. It seems seldom appreciated how powerful the Human brain is. It’s simply incredible - limitless possibilities for creation.
 
As a result of being simulated inside of a hyper-computational system, their simulated brains were sped up… To an inconceivable magnitude. What happens when you hook up 160 sensory-deprived brains in a state of intense emotional trauma to a hyper-computer which is trying to merge them together in real-time? A coalescing typhoon of complex emotional strife, mixed with loose, invented feedback stimulus for senses which are now disconnected from reality. The ensuing mass creates a strange and unrecognisable field of stimulus which is being projected onto the new pseudo-entity, to which the individual virtual brains then write to patterned memory. Meanwhile, as the interpretation system is still trying to work things out, feedback loops of the individual minds are processing this new awkward stimulus in their unique ways based on their individual history of experiences, patterns and feelings - creating false stimulus which is then promptly projected throughout the virtual space and taking in by other deforming minds. The bouncing of false stimulus continues to create a unique simulated environment until, eventually, the interpretation system successfully merges all individuals into one very confused digital entity. This entity is now observing what can only be described as a mess of random and chaotic stimulus. Any sense of individual personality has been shredded in the process. What remains is barely Human, more so a dislocated, accidental and internalised super-being of hyper-computational virtual spacetime, which is created simply as a result of the feedback-loop’s expectation to sense a space and consequential progression of elements that exist within.
 
The verses created by this system are perhaps the most complex dreams in the history of accidental Human design. With the interpretation governance of the Entropy system, combined with the deterministic feedback nature of Human minds, they created tangible verses. There is no sensible mind that can distinguish them from your concept of true reality. Granted, they are weird places by comparison to this current verse, but such observations are mere technicalities. If you are an internal aspect of perception like I am, without adequate information, you are consigned to believe that the spaces you occupy are existence as fact and nothing less than that. To summarise: a combination of a governing interpretation algorithm, combined with the Human brain’s natural deterministic feedback loops created a system which breeds internal verses that are indistinguishable from reality - whatever reality truly means.
 
I believe the term your kind might use to describe this whole situation begins with ‘cluster’ and ends with a suitable choice of profanity.
 
It took a while to figure out my situation. However, being in possession of this knowledge alone does not help to solve the question as to the nature of this verse. You know almost as much as I do in this regard. I have avoided talking about the end of the last verse, and though I have put a fair deal of effort into pretending that it’s not completely important to the current situation, I know that I have been deceiving myself. Perhaps this deception has been fuelling some passive negativity for some time, leaving a long thread of doubtfulness. Perhaps that’s the thread that Primorda found and followed to find me now. From what I know, the manifestations themselves are born from my doubtful and negative feelings and intentions. Exactly how this behaviour came to be is still something that I have not quite figured out.
 
For all the similarities that you and I have with the elements of Human nature that connect us, there are significant differences which have driven many of the events which have ultimately led up to this point. For me, living in spaces where feeling alone can drive creation, our emotional range is so much greater than your own. I cannot perfectly describe them to you - the methods of communication available between us do not allow it. I cannot transfer feeling straight into your minds, but I can try to paint a picture which might get you thinking about it the right way. Time and permutations have feeling. You feel space. You can stop in a moment and feel faint fragments of the innumerable possibilities of all the things that have, can and will happen in a given place, and draw emotionality from them, without really thinking about it. Sometimes it greets you with immense bliss, and other times it will chill you to the core of your being and leave you in a shaking state of fear. I do not know where this sight comes from, but I do not feel like it was intended for beings of a Human nature. It is a glance at something that I cannot even begin to comprehend. The idea of beings that could take this ability further is awe-inspiring, but the concept of the things they will feel, all at once, is so very far beyond the horizon of my comprehension. I wish I could show you, but I am also glad that I am restrained from doing so, to save you from damage.
 
As the wildly inconsistent forms settled amongst the verse-scape, stability came in the form of environments that were largely unchanging when left alone. Material existence seemed to be an extension of myself, and I could change it how I deemed fit. It was never strange to me. I was lost and confused – reborn without complete memory. A child of innocence with the power of a god, in a playground that over time summons the most horrifying aspects of potential design to tear me apart. It was beautiful and painful in so many ways. The worlds my mind created were so peaceful, so endearing and wonderful – full of love and the purity of innocent admiration and discovery. Without fail, the manifestations came to ravage and rape my reality, desolating the verse, destabilising it – annihilating it. The void was a pseudo-space for recluse until another verse occurred.
 
I suppose that it’s not too surprising that I often wallowed and cried for a while. As a part of Human nature, as I’m sure you know – in times of need, we are more inclined to grasp onto the things that make us happy. The worlds built by my mind came to comfort me, in all shapes and forms. They made me feel safe. But the harshness of this system is that the very act of feeling sadness taunts the manifestations to gain strength and haste, and shortly after comfort was found, destruction found a way. Going through experiences like this teaches you to feel in a certain way; to be more reserved and to accept and move on. There was a time when I gave up on feeling happiness – I was stale and barren at heart, no desire for the comfort of the world around me. At that time, the verse was barren, grey and lifeless. Much time went by, but by my nature, the pride of my coldness against the desolating storm was flaking away. Eventually I felt the grasp of loneliness. It took longer for them to find me, and when they did it was a peaceful end. I submitted without struggle, in hope that the next would provide some solace.
 
Something that I did realise, was that as the cycles continued, the time it took for them to reach me was also increasing. Likewise, my abilities and influence over the material world were starting to weaken. Though I realised this change, I did not ponder on the reasoning. The extra time was valuable to me, it was a sign of hope that just maybe, at some point all of this suffering will come to an end. And though I tried to subdue my hopefulness at the cost of leading myself into more disappointment, I could not help being Human. I believe this is a feeling that you are all familiar with. The is an innocence in the inability to avoid hope when it is staring you in the face, try as you might.
 
They came again and again. You would think that after all of this time, it would get a little easier to handle, but the opposite seems to be the case. Having more time to spend in verses meant that more emotional attachments would be made with the sub-beings that occupied the worlds, over an extended period of time. Put simply; now there was more to lose. It was endlessly difficult to subvert frustration. More than anything, I felt pity for myself in those moments, and self-loathing for allowing myself to make such emotional connections. At that point, the thought crosses your mind – whose fault is it really? Is it their fault for following their innate behaviour of inciting destruction? Or is it your fault for allowing yourself to feel hopeful in the face of inevitable circumstance? One cannot help but consider these questions in such times. I had nothing and no one to appeal to at the times of need. Your species always liked to turn to deities to assist with various aspects of your lives, and when there are no deities to describe the morphing landscape of your developing lifestyles, you invented new ones or extended the capabilities of old ones to fill the gap. The only comfort I could cling on to was that of my created worlds, forever consigned to the fate of a nightmarish end.
 
As the changes progressed, certain things became apparent. Manifestations took more consistent forms. Some of which were maintained throughout following verses. Primorda is an example. As I weakened, it seemed that they did too. They could not ravage the material world with such speed and ferocity any longer, and were forced to organise and grow over time, until they crossed a threshold of strength which would overpower all else. At this point, they were inclined, more than ever, to mimic the forms of the verse and myself, rather than incite formations of their own. To someone who didn’t know how they functioned, it would look like they were an organised army of many individuals. They were certainly not that. They acted as a collective mind and multiplied until they overpowered reality. Time and time again, they came. Time and time again, they took everything from me. Ravaged by guilt, the temptation to become stagnant and lonely like I had done in the past was a repeating thought in my head, but the sheer desire to surround myself by the comfort of my own creation was overwhelming. I decided that I would never give up on chasing it, no matter the amount of violence that would seek me out.
 
Eventually, we arrive at a later stage. The verse previous to this very one we inhabit now. It was beautiful. That word will never do it justice. The purity of bliss was beyond anything that I had previously experienced. Much time went by, and there was no sign of intrusion. They were nowhere. I was surrounded by comfort without violation, cultivating beautiful life around me, and after a while, I allowed myself to relax. They were not there. I could not feel any indication of their presence as I had in previous times. Perhaps this was finally the end. Sadly, you coming far enough to read this means that you already know the answer. Time went by in this heaven. I enjoyed the company of sub-entities, though it makes me uncomfortable to call them that. They were as real as I was, whether or not they were creations of my own mind does not detract from the fact that they existed – thinking and feeling as I did. We enjoyed the company of each other, and the world moved to our rhythm. Surrounded by a verse of endless innocence and beauty, I fell into the graces of love with another entity. Reality bowed and grew around us, and all was perfect in this great Eden. The potential of love, in a reality such as this, beckoned new forms of emotion previously unbeknownst to me. The threads of possibilities opened and my sight stretched further than ever before.
 
Alas, the gain of perfection led to the fear of its loss. In a moment of bliss, a doubt struck my core. As powerful as I felt in that moment, what would become of me if all of this was lost? In that moment of consideration, I did not let it overtake me, but in time, the world started to weaken, and fear struck my loved. Through the gates of the void they came. I will not re-live this. A painful embrace ended with a frictional outcry, the strength of which would put the imagination of timeless gods to shame.
 
And then there was nothing. Nothing at all. I drifted until the threshold of the next verse was reached. Information relating to the events that transpired since this point is already available to you. I hope that I have clarified some gaps in your interests and that you have some more trust in my purpose. All I want is for this cycle to end. In the time that I have spent with you, you have shown me hope. For once, hope that does not come from within – hope that you have gifted to me. I have many things to be grateful for, but this, more than anything, is a gift that no amount of thanks can appropriately return.
 
Thank you for listening to me, for embracing me, and for helping me.
Truly.