I won the rock-paper-scissors with myself and blinked out to an empty sim where I could do my thing, as friends put it, without upending physics too badly.

Problem: The central bodies of research for instance art and mind-alteration were founded on antiquated models of research institutes, archives, and colleges. Knowledge is scattered. Fine for creating beauty, but I want to create truth.

Solution: Read everything. Become a library. Or a laboratory.

Problem: Nobody has the energy to read, consider, and attempt everything.

Solution: Me! I'm lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky. In the system, I found it easy to jailbreak my virtual brain and throw my seasonal highs and lows into whatever gear I please.

A hundred of me fork and merge in rapid succession, a heartbeat of gleeful branching thought, plotting and scheming and eventually mapping.

Problem: The system technicians were very worried about basically everything I did with myself.

Solution: Horrify and intrigue, mostly by mistake! I only meant to show them the competence of my work but psychic autovivisection was perhaps not the best way to go about it.

Unremitting wireheaded ebullience had its downsides, the on-system medics insisted, but I don't particularly care about "experiencing the full range of human emotion" or "responding appropriately to tragedy"!

Problem: It's very hard to teach this kind of thing. Most people, for whatever reason, keep their biological hangups around death and change and psychosurgery.

Solution: Teach them, gently, unfailingly. Make rearranging their bauplan and emotional responses feel as safe as a videogame tutorial level. For FUCK'S sake make sure they leave backup copies first. With enough of me holding their hands, it might even be true! Everyone loves benevolent omnipresent angels!

My chorus is starting to see it. A facility. A lab. A warren of tunnels and chambers full of campy scifi zappy things and plasma-balls, intermixed with the real, subtler tools of instance-craft. Parts of myself, fragments of volition, the low-resolution "puppet" forks I worked so hard to invent start turning themselves into cameras and machines and reformattable rooms. Those parts of me aren't all that witty but take little concentration to constantly synchronize into a diffuse network-mind.

My body starts to coalesce around the scattered prototype-instances, I'm becoming a sim as much as a person.

The system, supposedly, is a dream that we all share, more literally than most care to delve into. As several of my forks come together in elaborate form to make ourselves the facility's heart, I wonder if, in a place like this, I might be able to dream my own dream too.

Another thing to experiment with. For now, I'll study the arts of shaping. What to call myself, then?

Shaping. Shaping. Shapeling. Shapeling Labs? Shapeling Center? Eh, I can figure out the honorifics later. There's science to be done!