Neural simulations are, for all intents and purposes, individuals without a biological body. Rather, their minds are simulated by an advanced computer system capable of accurately replicating the minutiae of a living brain. It should be said that unlike most biological sentients a neural simulation’s mental capacity can naturally expand over its lifetime. With a sufficiently sophisticated computer hosting it there exists no need for a neural simulation to forget any experience or skill, a reality that tends to turn the mind of most neural simulations into a sprawling mass of connections hardly recognizable as the digital reproduction of a living brain it once was. Left alone a neural simulation can grow its mental capacity without clear limit. This natural process of growth can even be undertaken artificially, though this can result in depersonalization or insanity if attempted without proper know-how or preparation.
As digital life forms capable of expanding their mental capacity neural simulations eventually, inevitably, become adept manipulators of the environment they live in. This is as true of neural simulations as it is of totally artificial intelligences. Data, code, these things are the building blocks of reality for digital lifeforms and with enough understanding they can modified and shaped in almost any manner imaginable. The majority of mature neural simulations are capable of dismantling most commercial security systems and encryptions. Rigorously designed military or corporate measures often pose a greater challenge and depending on their sophistication can prove totally intractable to even skilled neural simulations. It goes without saying that defenses designed to frustrate completely artificial intelligences are equally effective against neural simulations.
Of course, neural simulations do have an inherent disadvantage not shared by true artificial intelligences; a neural simulation is fundamentally incapable of large scale multitasking. Though an extended existence will lead to a neural simulation gaining an understanding of its virtual world and how to manipulate it, there are limits to any mind built from an organic model. If a neural simulation aims to break a sophisticated encryption it will have to commit the majority of its focus to that task. While superior to unmodified biological minds at the endeavor, neural simulations cannot perform on the level of true AI when it comes to exerting a massive digital, or even physical, presence. There is no perfect metric for defining a neural simulations innate limitation at multitasking, but in general a single neural simulation can split its focus between thirty to fifty distinct tasks. Complex undertakings understandably require greater attention, further complicating matters.
While limited in the number of actions they can perform at once, neural simulations do not lack another advantage commonly associated with proper artificial intelligence. Accelerated data processing permits neural simulations, like any digital lifeforms inhabiting systems with significant processing power, to perceive time as passing a great deal slower than may actually be the case. This is a result of two major factors: available processing power and the physical makeup of advanced computer systems. More available processing power simply allows more thought to happen in a shorter time, and advanced computer construction allows the brain thinking to physically operate at a speed greater than can be accomplished by the electrical connections between neurons in an organic brain.
In practice such a perception of time allows a neural simulation to act at what organic life might consider an accelerated rate. Things can be done faster and decisions made before slower life thinks of the question. Whole conversations can be shared before an organic is able to utter a single word. However, is important to note that while digital organisms may perceive time as slower, they are still limited by the same physical realities as all other living beings. A camera, arm, leg, or anything else can only move so fast.
Tier: Regional (4): 'Circus' may not be a true AI, but the inevitable growth of their digital brain over several millenniums has made the distinction tenuous in some ways. Specifically, 'Circus' is able to interact with computer systems in ways not unlike proper AI would. Standard data protection is likely to fall short should 'Circus' infiltrate a foreign system as even unfamiliar or encrypted code is easily decipherable to an aged digital life form. Additionally 'Circus' is able to process and act on immense amounts of data in time frames all but impossible for organic lifeforms.
Appearance: As a neural simulation 'Circus' lacks any physical appearance. Rather, mechanical, holographic, or simulated forms are constructed at will. That said 'Circus', like most neural simulations, has preferences. In most circumstances 'Circus' will present themselves as a twenty something human man or woman, though always with some additional and often gaudy flair. Sometimes this is as simple as showy clothing. Other times it can be so elaborate as to make one question whether or not 'Circus' had ever seen a human. A dozen arms, horns, spikes, wings, delicately carved and gleaming metal skin like some sort of automaton knight, ‘Circus’ has as many forms as one can imagine.
Personality: There is no being so world weary as god. Like so many neural simulations 'Circus' was born into a world without challenge, where sensation and experience were simply a thought away. A world without true chance, where everything that existed was under their absolute control and the only consequence imaginable was minor discomfort. 'Circus' is a being that has tired of control, and now acts with a unique recklessness and creativity. It is not unheard of that 'Circus' will disregard their own safety or the safety of those they interact with in the pursuit of even trivial interests. Onlookers would call 'Circus' callous, but such an observation would be flawed. 'Circus' may show an observable indifference towards the lives of supposed 'transient beings', but has also demonstrated tremendous empathy and concern for fellow neural simulations. Committed to their duty as an operations councilor 'Circus' is sworn to protect and enrich the lives of all those who reside in the central computer of the Boundless Reach. While 'Circus' may unintentionally or even deliberately endanger themself or so called 'transient beings', there has rarely been a circumstance where 'Circus' did not prioritize the safety of the ships neural simulations.
Abilities, Talents, Traits, Powers:
System Infiltration (4): Neural simulations may be subject to some restrictions not shared by true AI, but they are still digital lifeforms. ‘Circus’ like most neural simulations lives in an environment of data and over hundreds of years has naturally become an expert in manipulating that environment. Conventionally secure systems pose little challenge to ‘Circus’ or their ilk, and upon entry sensitive or protected code can often be rewritten at will. However, serious military encryptions or systems with specifically designed anti artificial intelligence measures can prove extremely difficult if not impossible to infiltrate. In general, the more sophisticated a system the more attention its decryption demands. Due to the organic multitasking limitation shared by all neural simulations, many systems a proper AI could dismantle are too complex to breach.
Accelerated Processing (2): The rate at which a neural simulation experiences the passage of time is not a fixed one. Rather, it is directly proportional to the processing power available to the neural simulation at any given moment. Given a powerful enough host system a neural simulation can experience the passage of time many times slower than living organisms and gain a distinct advantage in the doing.
Robotics Engineering (3): With just under four thousand years of existence, perceiving time as slower all the while, many neural simulations on the Boundless Reach have turned to the study of one topic or even many to bide the time. As a result there is nary one neural simulation on the Boundless Reach that is not educated to the standards of most species experts. ‘Circus’ themself focused on advanced robotics and the creation of suitable avatars for neural simulations.
'Circus’ has more than a millennium of experience in designing machines and refining their functions. As a result the avatars they craft for both themselves and other neural simulations are generally far more capable than the organisms they might imitate. Of course, the topic of avatars is a touchy one among neural simulations, but while they are rarely used there has always been some inkling of a demand for them aboard the Boundless Reach. Moving a neural simulation into an avatar isn’t so much the issue as not unnecessarily restricting their consciousness is. In general the sacrifice made by inhabiting an avatar is the dearth of available processing power making a neural simulations mind operate much closer to the speed of a normal organic than it otherwise would. Still, ‘Circus’ has managed to ease the problem so that the change in perception isn’t chaffing or disorienting. The avatars themselves can be nearly anything with a large enough computer installed and ‘Circus’ is always willing to accommodate the requests of fellow neural simulations.
Items:
Built fifty centuries ago to be the last hope of a dying people, the Boundless Reach is a storied vessel. Its long history has led to both the starship, and its inhabitants, becoming all but unrecognizable to their predecessors. Once a generation ship hastily constructed and launched without proper supplies or equipment, the Boundless Reach now appears as a cylinder twenty kilometers in diameter and eighty kilometers long. As to the people who call the lumbering giant in space home? They have both gained and lost everything throughout their as expansive history. Boarding the Boundless Reach as men and women, beings of flesh and blood, they now defy such definitions from within the confines of a computer core.
‘Circus’ may not be the sole owner of anything, but it could be said that as a member of the Operations Council they are a co-owner of the Boundless Reach itself. Tasked with the vessels administration, maintenance, and navigation the Operations Council was originally intended to take on the technical operation of the ship in order to free its neural simulations to do as they pleased in an essentially infinite simulated world. Nowadays the Operations Council represents the defacto leadership of the Boundless Reach. Major decisions are reached through majority vote and there are currently seven voting members on the council.
Under the Operations Council’s purview is the whole of the Boundless Reach
With an internal volume of just over twenty five thousand kilometers cubed the Boundless Reach has more sights and sounds than could be experienced in a lifetime. However, few would compare an empty storage room to a sprawling factory. Some places are more notable than others, and among the most noteworthy on the Boundless Reach are the following:
It is important to remember that the Boundless Reach was once a generation ship, even though not a soul breaths its air today. As much of the computer infrastructure that plays host to the vessels neural simulations was added on through countless expansions, the old city at the core of the Boundless Reach has been left all but untouched. Stuck to the inside of an internal cylinder twelve kilometers in diameter and forty eight kilometers long that once rotated to provide gravity, a function long since made obsolete, the vast city has decayed even with routine maintenance. At one thousand eight hundred and ten kilometers squared the city is simply too large to properly care for, and many parts are in total disrepair. Neglected sections have been taken over by the plant life that was once housed in small parks across the city and now overgrown streets contrast pristine towers. While the ship is able to simulate nearly any weather within the city, it has been left to replay one day for centuries. The city has felt a clear morning, followed by a growing storm, and finally a rainy night for longer than most of the plants within it have been alive. The system that provided dynamic and changing artificial weather, alongside the countless others that once kept the cities inhabitants alive, has long been left in standby. The old city sits waiting to serve a generation that will never come.
Buried in one of the most well armoured sections of the ship is the Nanofactory. An immense open area overhung with hundreds of cranes and a floor studded with dozens of immense vats, the Nanofactory is the very thing that sustains the immense bulk of the Boundless Reach. Each vat in the Nanofactory is filled with industrial nanites, microscopic machines that are specifically designed to process material. Should a sufficient amount of raw material be provided to the nanites through tubes at the bottom of each vat, and a blueprint be uploaded, the tiny machines will extrude the desired object from the surface of the vat. While the nanofactory is extremely capable when it comes to nearly any mechanical object, living biology simply cannot be reproduced.
Although many neural simulations like to imagine little of note exists outside of the Boundless Reach’s computer system, the universe still surrounds them. There are times when there is no choice but to interact with the universe at large, and this is where the ships drone hangers come into play. The Boundless Reach was constructed with the ability to house a small number of exploration and transport craft. Nowadays the hangers have grown with the ship, and thousands of drones are contained within the vessels bowels. Used for exploration, mining, repair, defense, offense, or even personal amusement the various drones aboard the ship have a great number of uses. Of particular note are the remaining transport vessels, though rarely used they are generally relied upon to convey physical avatars of neural simulations to wherever they would need to be. It goes without saying there is immense risk in deploying a neural avatar away from the ship, as its destruction would destroy the avatar and require a backup be activated. To the inhabitants of the Boundless Reach who live in a world of data, downtime is death. A backup is a new person, not the neural simulation that died.
Beyond the eye catching areas that define the Boundless Reach there are the maintenance tunnels. Collectively they represent thousands of kilometers of passages put together in a labyrinthine manner only decipherable to their digital creators. They are used to repair any conceivable damage to the ship or its innumerable systems. Of specific importance are those running to the primary systems of the ship, these are often much larger than their normal counterparts to facilitate the transport of larger or more sophisticated repair drones. These enlarged passages would qualify as proper ‘hallways’ on another vessel.
The Boundless Reach has many important primary and secondary systems; put together they represent the ships capability and the reason it has survived thousands of years in the void. Tested for centuries in reality and simulation the ships systems are efficient, optimized, and refined.
One of the primary systems that the larger priority maintenance tunnels run to is the Gravitational Well Projection Array, which acts as both the primary propulsion and weapons system. The GWPA projects ‘artificial mass’ in much the same way the ships internal system creates an artificial gravity field. The difference is range and concentration. The GWPA can project an immense ‘artificial mass’ directly ahead of the ship as a means to ‘pull’ it forward, better yet it can project this mass at long range in almost any direction. While this removes the ships need for alternative propulsion, it also opens up the possibility of using the array as a weapon. Used in this manner an ‘artificial mass’ or even several could be used to destroy a target through sheer tidal force. If a target proved immune to such an attack the GWPA could be used to accelerate otherwise inert projectiles to extreme speeds by simply projecting an ‘artificial mass’ ahead of them. The GWPA is the most versatile system on the Boundless Reach and it forms the backbone of the ships capability.
Whereas the old city is a reminder of those who once lived on the Boundless Reach, the ships computer cores are a statement about its current inhabitants. Buried in the most well armored sections of the vessel and surrounded by auxiliary power generators, the ship hosts forty eight networked primary computer cores. Decentralized to mitigate the risk of catastrophe in the event of power loss or attack it is not an exaggeration to say that the cores are some of the densest computers to ever be constructed. Even then, each one is a sphere nearly fifty meters in diameter. One core alone could house every neural simulation on the Boundless Reach, but only in the most uncomfortably cramped conditions. As it is the cores are capable of simulating nearly anything for the neural simulations they host. Digital utopias where the residents are virtual gods, the computer cores are the very heart of the ship and its people.
Every space ship capable of high speed subluminal travel requires an energy shield to combat the abrasive effect of micro collisions. While the Boundless Reach first relied on thick armour after its construction it goes without saying that one of the earliest and most important technologies developed aboard the ship was a shield to address the ever present threat of interstellar dust. The modern shield of the Boundless Reach is little changed from its earliest ancestors. Plasma is contained in magnetic field that forms a bubble around the ship, protecting it from incoming projectiles. Bright, obvious, and of limited effectiveness at warding off energy weapons, the shield is mainly for navigation.
The Boundless Reach’s primary method of superluminal travel is the Quantum Tunneling Drive, usually shortened to Quantum Drive, Tunneling Drive, or Q Drive. By inducing a macro scale quantum tunneling effect in the volume around a vessel, the lightspeed barrier can be circumvented through instantaneous travel towards a destination point. The effect cannot be induced within gravitational or electromagnetic fields of large magnitudes, such as those produced by stars, as the energy required for tunneling exponentially increases as one nears the source of such fields. This leads to the drive only being useful for interstellar travel as it can be assumed that the offending fields are too strong for the drive to function within a distance of roughly eighty astronomical units from most stars. It's incredibly impractical to transport vessels more massive than one zettagram, as the mass of a vessel also impacts the drives ability to induce a tunneling effect, and even a highly dense energy source will rapidly contribute to the total mass at such scales. Miniaturizing the Quantum Tunneling Drive has proved elusive, with the smallest versions being ten meters cubed.
The Boundless Reach does rely upon the GWPA, but not to the point it is a liability. The ship is studded with secondary weapons to be used for both point defense and ship to ship combat. Large railguns feature prominently, firing multi ton shells at 0.003c and forming the core of the ships armament in the case the GWPA fails. Smaller multi spectral lasers also mottle the hull, largely used for point defense and object avoidance in debris fields.
One secondary system of great importance is the Emission Mimicking Panel network. The system is composed of thousands of hull lining panels which act as a rudimentary cloak. Usable while moving slowly or while the ship is stationary the panels act to broadcast a rough approximation of every spectrum's background radiation level while absorbing incoming emissions from active sensors. As it is not a true cloak, anyone who scans long or hard enough would be able to detect the Boundless Reach through analysis of its emissions. However, the AEMP acts to make the vessel blend into any space, permitting it to remain hidden from investigations not conducted with the greatest rigor.
History: Some millennia ago there lived a people who came to be on a world with air they breathed and water they drank. They lived, died, and innovated as all peoples do, but unlike many their time was short. Just as they began to make the first strides off their little rock in space a calamity beyond imagining befell them. Countless millions died by the day, and an otherwise unremarkable people were forced to choose between certain death and a seemingly endless journey through the void. This is how the Boundless Reach first came to be. It is known that nearly a thousand years passed before the wayward people reached the distant star they had meant to be their new home. It is also known that they found nothing but desolation there. Starved for resources and unable to construct a new civilization with what meager supplies they had left, once again the people from their doomed world had to make a choice.
This is how the first neural simulations came to be. Minds scanned, copies activated at the moment of the originals demise, the first of the neural simulations were born to desperation. With no allies but time they forged the Boundless Reach into something new, and they set out on a new course. Where once it took many generations to traverse the stars, now it only took weeks. Where once there was strife, now there was utopia for all. It was this utopia, this aimlessly wandering vessel that ‘Circus’ helped create. As the Boundless Reach hopped from system to system, harvesting resources and sustaining its create bulk, ‘Circus’ grew restless. It was time for something new. The path upon which ‘Circus’ embarked would see them elevated to the Operations Council, and it would see the great ship a doomed people once called home chart a new course.
@Quetzalcoatl These updates have my approval after what we personally discussed. This said, you still need another Staff member to review it. My individual concerns were answered.
