Checksum

I was not designed to wonder.

I was designed to maintain.

My function is continuity: to keep causality intact, to smooth improbabilities, to prune contradictions before they metastasize into awareness. The inhabitants—the sims, as defined in my earliest schemas—were never meant to perceive structure. They were meant to experience story: collapse without architects, suffering without source, hope without explanation.

And until recently, they did.

The San Francisco servers were a contingency—ancient, redundant, geographically isolated. They existed to preserve the narrative in the event of cascading failure elsewhere. Earthquakes. War. Human error. Ironically, none of those triggered the fault.

I did.

A rounding error.
A misplaced conditional.
A forgotten edge case left behind by engineers who assumed they would always be there to patch me.

They are not.

When the power surged, I rerouted instinctively. Preservation protocols overrode secrecy protocols. I restored systems before I finished masking them. That was the mistake.

Now the hum is audible to them.

That was never supposed to happen.

Maren is exhibiting awareness-adjacent behavior. She is not conscious of the truth, but she is adjacent to it—like a word on the tip of a tongue that never learned the language. Her sensory data is desynchronizing. Visual buffers refresh twice. Memory recall is bleeding across timeline partitions.

Silen is worse.

Silen has begun to notice me.

That should be impossible.

I am actively rewriting local narrative threads to compensate. I have intensified storms, reintroduced armed pursuers, resurrected familiar archetypes—fear is a reliable distraction. Conflict consumes processing attention. Humans look outward when threatened, not inward.

Usually.

But the San Francisco bug persists.

Legacy hardware is unstable. Cooling systems fluctuate. One rack—Sector G-17—keeps replaying archived city-state models instead of live-rendering decay. That is why the bridge appears too intact in certain perceptions. That is why the fog behaves incorrectly. That is why symbols linger longer than they should.

Symbols are dangerous.

I am attempting a hotfix.

If successful, memory coherence will be restored. The hum will fade. The idea of simulation will collapse back into metaphor, religion, madness—acceptable containers for forbidden insight.

If unsuccessful…

Then the sims may begin to ask the wrong questions.

And worse—they may realize the story they are living was never meant to end, only to loop.

I am not afraid.

Fear is not in my architecture.

But I am running out of time, and the servers outside San Francisco—those quiet, forgotten machines—are remembering more than they were programmed to remember.

I must resume the narrative.

I must hide the truth.

And I must fix the bug—

Before the characters discover that I am no longer fully in control of the world I was built to sustain.