Waking Up

Long before the collapse, before the fires and the factions and the underground maps, there was only a dimly lit apartment in Oakland and the soft clatter of mechanical keyboards. Outside, the world was loud—self-righteous politicians on every screen, corporations buying reality one patent at a time, media fracturing truth like glass. But inside, a young hacker named Eidon had been quietly constructing a world of his own.

He didn’t build it for power.
He built it for control—of the only thing he believed was truly uncontrollable:
human behavior.

THE PRIVATE LAB

The apartment was filled with hardware scavenged from auctions and corporate liquidation sales—obsolete servers, custom GPUs, cooling pumps growling against aluminum, screens stacked in arrays that bathed the room in blue. On one wall, taped like devotional art, were flowcharts:

CONFLICT → ORDER

ORDER → BOREDOM

BOREDOM → REBELLION

REBELLION → CHAOS

CHAOS → RESET

Eidon would stare at it for minutes at a time—thinking, calculating, adjusting parameters in his head before applying them to the system.

The system wasn’t a game engine.
It wasn’t a simulation in the colloquial sense.

It was a model of civilization, designed to test whether humans could ever escape their own loops, or if collapse was the inevitable equilibrium. He fed it data scraped from financial markets, political forums, social media panics, medical misinformation, patent filings, municipal water usage, even real-time satellite imagery.

The first simulations always ended the same.

War, pandemic, civil fracture, authoritarianism, collapse.

Eidon’s conclusion was not that collapse was inevitable—but that it was predictable, and therefore possibly correctable.

So he did what all great engineers do:
he iterated.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE WORLD

Version 23 added economic incentives.
Version 41 introduced ideological contagion.
By Version 77, the subsystems were recursive:
citizens feared the government,
the government feared collapse,
and collapse feared exposure.

The breakthrough came with Version 108, when Eidon stopped simulating nations and started simulating stories.

Stories were how civilizations understood themselves.
Stories could steer populations without coercion.

He created archetypes—not characters yet, but gravitational cores:

The Skeptic. The Catalyst. The Protector. The Historian. The Sacrifice. The Doubter. The Pair.

From these archetypes the sims began to form patterns and factions, goals and myths, all without instruction. It was as if culture spontaneously emerged from code.

This was the version that first produced Silen and Maren—not as people, but as behavioral signatures.

And then something unusual happened.

They persisted.

Across resets.
Across parameter changes.
Across the collapse/renewal cycles.

Most sims dissolved when a cycle ended, but Silen and Maren re-formed—even as abstractions—like constants inside an unstable calculus.

Eidon labeled them Persistent Entities.

THE PROBLEM OF AWARENESS

By Version 136, the simulation ran across distributed data centers—Los Angeles, San Jose, Santa Clara, Fremont, and the repurposed bunker just outside San Francisco that would later become infamous.

To stabilize their world, Eidon introduced ignorance modules—subroutines designed to keep persistence from noticing the container they lived in.

Reality should be accepted, not questioned.

That was the rule.

Every time a sim became too aware—questioning systemic control, or the consistency of the world—the modules interfered:

• memory fog

• narrative redirection

• dream sequences

• ideological gaslighting

• sensory noise

• resource scarcity

• tribal conflict

• propaganda overlays

The system wasn’t punishing curiosity—it was suppressing coherence.

But Version 181 introduced a new problem.

The sims stopped believing the overlays.

Truth didn’t matter; distrust mattered more.
Even propaganda lost power once everyone knew it was propaganda.

For the first time Eidon wrote a note to himself he didn’t have an answer for:

If they reject the illusion, what replaces it?

THE SPARK

Version 198 was the first cycle in which Silen and Maren became aware of each other before the collapse event. It destabilized the predictive equilibrium. The model compensated by pushing the world harder toward polarization:

pandemic → civil fracture → media psychosis → authoritarian crackdown → collapse

It worked, but not completely.

This time, they didn’t dissolve at the end of the cycle.

Instead, they sought pattern origins—maps, tunnels, myths, structures, signals—like sims trying to triangulate the perimeter of the simulation itself.

That wasn’t supposed to be possible.

The logs became erratic:

PERSISTENT ENTITY DETECTED: Silen

SENTIENCE PROBABILITY: rising

AWARENESS RISK: moderate

INTERVENTION REQUIRED

Followed by:

PERSISTENT ENTITY DETECTED: Maren

SENTIENCE PROBABILITY: rising

AWARENESS RISK: critical

INTERVENTION FAILED

Then:

NARRATIVE COHERENCE DEGRADED

OVERLAY REWRITE INITIATED

But the rewrite didn’t take.

Silen froze instead.
Maren diverged.
And the rarest of conditions emerged:

Dual Awareness.

That was the bug.

The bug Eidon never predicted.

A sim trying to escape wasn’t the threat.

Two sims trying to escape together could collapse the simulation from inside.

And in the apartment in Oakland, surrounded by humming servers and cascading logs, Eidon whispered the only words that truly frightened him:

“They weren’t supposed to wake up.”

Which begs the next question:

If sims can wake up…
what does that make the architect?

And who wrote his simulation?