City-spirits and lares, contact primer
CITY-SPIRITS AND LARES
A CONTACT PRIMER
So, for whatever reason, you want to contact your city's lar. Maybe your home icon mentioned them, you saw a manifestation and got curious, or you just like exploring the local net. In case you opened and read this far by accident (or you're just absorbing random information I don't know your life), city-spirits and lares are just words for the same idea, the management intelligences of urban centers and virtualities. Most peoples had them before going interstellar or interplanetary, but they didn't do very much then. They have the attention to track millions or billions of moving parts, but intelligence and sentience aren't as linear as people like to think. I'd bet they're "smarter" than me or you, but most of them are like expert systems. They can spot patterns that take decades to cycle but don't really have art or language skills, stuff like that. It's hard to get their attention and not easy to talk to them, but they're usually pretty interesting entities. If you want to have a conversation with the soul of a city, you'd better start making contact now, making friends isn't easy. The first thing to do is find out what kind of spirit you live with. There are a few clear-ish categories, but you won't find labels or documentation anywhere, most spirits are custom and only accidentally fit the labels. Don't think that means it doesn't matter, different kinds of lares might as well be speaking different languages. Metaphorically, I mean. Most of them speak every actual language there is. The clearest difference is a physical dichotomy. City spirits can run on either central or distributed hardware. This one, you can probably look up or see for yourself. If there's a giant intellegent-grade computer in city hall, you probably have a central lares. If it's really hard to get dig permits, that's a strong sign of a distributed mind living under the roads. You can usually tell a habitat's type by its size, orbitals and domes big enough to have a sky will be distributed and smaller will be central. Some Independent grow-cities even have parts of the lar's hardware out in the open, like wires and nodes that grow on buildings. Distributed lares are almost always either animistic or fractal types. To work out the specifics, you'll usually have to call it and see what happens. If you call and don't get an actual answer, but a bunch of active infrastructure turns to look at you or environmental controls suddenly make a cold spot or some other spooky shit happens, you probably have an animistic lar. (work in progress past this point.)
A CONTACT PRIMER
So, for whatever reason, you want to contact your city's lar. Maybe your home icon mentioned them, you saw a manifestation and got curious, or you just like exploring the local net. In case you opened and read this far by accident (or you're just absorbing random information I don't know your life), city-spirits and lares are just words for the same idea, the management intelligences of urban centers and virtualities. Most peoples had them before going interstellar or interplanetary, but they didn't do very much then. They have the attention to track millions or billions of moving parts, but intelligence and sentience aren't as linear as people like to think. I'd bet they're "smarter" than me or you, but most of them are like expert systems. They can spot patterns that take decades to cycle but don't really have art or language skills, stuff like that. It's hard to get their attention and not easy to talk to them, but they're usually pretty interesting entities. If you want to have a conversation with the soul of a city, you'd better start making contact now, making friends isn't easy. The first thing to do is find out what kind of spirit you live with. There are a few clear-ish categories, but you won't find labels or documentation anywhere, most spirits are custom and only accidentally fit the labels. Don't think that means it doesn't matter, different kinds of lares might as well be speaking different languages. Metaphorically, I mean. Most of them speak every actual language there is. The clearest difference is a physical dichotomy. City spirits can run on either central or distributed hardware. This one, you can probably look up or see for yourself. If there's a giant intellegent-grade computer in city hall, you probably have a central lares. If it's really hard to get dig permits, that's a strong sign of a distributed mind living under the roads. You can usually tell a habitat's type by its size, orbitals and domes big enough to have a sky will be distributed and smaller will be central. Some Independent grow-cities even have parts of the lar's hardware out in the open, like wires and nodes that grow on buildings. Distributed lares are almost always either animistic or fractal types. To work out the specifics, you'll usually have to call it and see what happens. If you call and don't get an actual answer, but a bunch of active infrastructure turns to look at you or environmental controls suddenly make a cold spot or some other spooky shit happens, you probably have an animistic lar. (work in progress past this point.)
Type
Guide, How-to
Remove these ads. Join the Worldbuilders Guild
Comments