I don't care about Gxelo like Tetratopians care about each other. I hope I'd feel differently if I was god and she was real, but she isn't real. She does whatever serves the plot that I want to write, for my own sake, that's actually how characters work.

But, well, she did ask me directly. There's a reason I wrote her as asking! Let's deploy my premise and see what happens.

Gxelo · LV 1

[Stats] (4 points remaining) | Skills | Effects | Quests

AKR 8. [+]

At Akrasia 8, you are very good at doing nothing, and not very good at having that nothing lead to anything nice happening to you. Except this. I guess you were effectively at a much higher level of AKR last night, though don't expect to get a second interface without higher stats.

GEM 9. [+]

At 💎 9, social reality presses down on you just a hair harder than on the median person. You're not completely steered around by what's around you, but there's a reason you haven't thought of and successfully enacted some of the stranger strategies out of your predicament, even though you can infer that some of those strategies probably must exist.

TWT 16. [+]

At Tweets 16, you're reasonably alright at poasting, at a level already almost at the pinnacle of what is attainable by the standards of a world where people go outside and touch grass as the norm. You've got a lot of memes cached and you have a lot of connections you can draw, from spending so long on the textnets.

(Don't worry about what a Tweet is.)

ROT 10. [+]

Kd Bydkdsyx 10, iye mkx bydkdo crkzoc sx iyeb rokn klyed kc govv kc dro wonskx Dodbkdyzskx. Iye kmdekvvi qbknekdon xybwkv cmryyv psxo kxn mkx kvwycd bowowlob ryg dy cyvfo dro okci ZNOc kxn ny cebpkmo sxdoqbkvc, dryeqr iye'n zbylklvi xoon dy zevv ez dro gsus zkqoc dy bowsxn iye qsfox grkd iye bowowlob kd iyeb mebboxd BYD cusvv kxn iye'bo xyd aesdo ez pyb drkd tecd iod.

LVE 6. [+]

At Love 6, the prospect just doesn't seem all that appealing.

MEW 10. [+]

At Meow 10, there's a collar gathering dust at the bottom of your wardrobe. You used to cuddle a lot and they did tell you they liked it, back when you still talked. That was true.

gxelo doesn't really dream much. the trick to being consciously aware of dreams is to write them down as you wake up, and reliably doing a thing on waking up is in real life not going to happen.

she does have a nice one where she's very strong and she's in some kind of office or library where there's a schelling holiday happening and majie is there sort of and then she grabs majie and starts fucking him. and then she gets extremely embarassed because what if people see she's out in public so she slides along the floor through the door and out into the underground L2 tunnel. and then then she sits around feeling ashamed and the world spins a bit and she realises oh yea this was a dream and that's enough excitement to totally wake her up.

in her hypnopompia, or perhaps a false awaking, she sees text in front of her, though she can't really parse it.

ah okay hang on she thinks she sees words. 

"Stats" is what it says at the top of the floating blue text.

she starts reading or having the experience of having read something inserted into her phonological loop she isn't a neuroscientist 

it's exciting. 

the fabric of reality is not disrupted and she does not wake up from the excitement.

her. stats.

huh.

they seem about right. she doesn't think that she's very good at poasting, she doesn't know what it would mean for a world where she was among the best posters - what, would their entire textnet boards be limited to stiff "meme accounts" who make first-order variations of a template, or something - and, whatever, arguing with compliments is a silly thing that you learn not to do.

she can't read that ROT skill, she guesses she is still mostly asleep. wait. that does look kind of like a shift cipher. she can't actually do ROT 10 in her head, so it would be really weird if she was hypnopomping valid ROT10. maybe if she.

her terminal is all the way over on the other side of the room and it's kind of cold.

BEEP!

The window flashes in front of her vision, over the top of her stat sheet.

New Quest - Get out of Bed

You are in bed, and your terminal is on the other side of the room. There are all kinds of new interactions that you could have with with me, if you had your terminal around as an exocortex.

Rewards: Access to your terminal right now, you start Waking Up. One (1) headpat.

Penalties: It's fine and you're fine. There's no urgent time limit, here.

Accept \q: [Yes] / [No]

Gxelo has had the common Tetratopian experience of, when she was younger, trying to offload her executive function to a headmate who had more of the traits she desired in herself. This doesn't really work very well, and the people with the WIS scores to pull it off in ways that make sense tend to just be able to go to rationality class and do rationality directly. Usually, the process just gets them another friend, and that's nice. Gxelo didn't get that far; she's still a singlet.

At the time, she didn't try have this headmate take the form of a game interface, but getting quests that she follows isn't an unfamiliar idiom, and could be something latent in her head.

she did also ask the simulators to put her somewhere else, and she's trying to not overindex on that because that's not actually how anything works in real life and getting her hopes up and shattered sounds like a great way to not do anything else for the next few days. and yeah, this is mostly a dream or hypnopompic thing, and if it's not that she's finally got the interesting kind of psychosis where she stays able-to-do-math stemming from her quit-early mental tech.

ugh, fiiiiine.

[accept], she taps, and the window disappears.

let's see what following these instructions gets her, it's not like she has more friends to alienate.

wow it's cold. after a few failed attempts to overcome the hyperbolic discounting cost of being that cold, she just grabs her blanket and carries the whole thing over to her terminal.

Quest Complete! Good girl ^^.

shits that feels good. yeah she's a good girl! she's starting to like whatever this is.

okay.

she feels suspiciously awake and she is able to reliably type, as she pulls up a script and starts copying in the nonsense so she can watch this fray at its bounds before it goes away.

Un Linuncih 10, sio wuh linuny mbujym ch siol byux uvion um qyff um nby gyxcuh Nynlunijcuh. Sio uwnouffs aluxounyx hilguf mwbiif zchy uhx wuh ufgimn lygygvyl biq ni mifpy nby yums JXYm uhx xi molzuwy chnyalufm, nbioab sio'x jlivuvfs hyyx ni joff oj nby qcec juaym ni lygchx sio acpyh qbun sio lygygvyl un siol wollyhn LIN mecff uhx sio'ly hin kocny oj zil nbun domn syn.

yeah, about what she expected. update in favour of psychosis and as a subhypothesis cool psychosis, update against friendly simulators.

bleh.

(Chat, does she know?)

(Give her a round, we're only exactly average at math.)

wait shits the inverse operation of rot10 isn't rot10. there are 18 letters in the alphabet, you'd want rot9 for the involutory version. silly gxelo. 

At Rotation 10, you can rotate shapes in your head about as well as the median Tetratopian. You actually graduated normal school fine and can almost remember how to solve the easy PDEs and do surface integrals, though you'd probably need to pull up the wiki pages to remind you given what you remember at your current ROT skill and you're not quite up for that just yet.

okay that's weird. so she updated +psychosis -simulation the other way, so she should now update -psychosis +simulation here. she didn't track what this was doing to dream theory and now that it's actually in front of her obviously what she typed and what she perceives on the screen aren't related and she's just getting the subjective experience  plus enough impaired metacognition that this feels just like reading. so +dream too.

ugh is that even worse. because that means this isn't anything special and she wakes up. and she also felt bleh about decoding not working so under pain of incoherence needs to pick one branch to feel happy about. maybe if she puts some numbers on dream vs psychosis vs simulators and then feels in proportion to her best-explicit-guesses of the expected value of each. nah. too much effort.

and yeah she's about average at math. wow yeah she can not remember how to do the easy PDEs, lucky she doesn't have a job so that never comes up.

New Quest - Do the Thing with the Large Semiprimes

Come on. Do the thing with the large semiprimes. Do it. You know you want to.

Rewards: You gain this bit of information.

Penalities: You forego this bit of information.

Accept \q: [Yes] / [No]

okay well now that you've suggested the thing with the large semiprimes obviously that's been selected for being something you can reply to. i mean i can check the numbers you give me against the numbers on the screen and they'll match and it won't be strong extra evidence over the valid rot10.

let's get some bits about dream theory anyway. gxelo starts counting the number of fingers she has (5 on each hand) and pushing her finger through the other hand with her eyes closed (doesn't work) and makes the indescribable mental motion to wake up (she doesn't) and plays a prerecorded alarm sound (doesn't startle her awake).

and sure I'll do your quest. [yes]. what are the two prime factors of, uh, 1 094 173 864 157 052 742 180 970 732 204 035 761 200 373 294 544 920 599 091 384 213 147 634 998 428 893 478 471 799 725 789 126 733 249 762 5752 899 781 833 797 076 537 244 027 146 743 531 593 354 333 897, hopefully you can just read that out i probably said it wrong.

Instantly,

Notification

102 639 592 829 741 105 772 054 196 573 991 675 900 716 567 808 038 066 803 341 933 521 790 711 307 779 × 106 603 488 380 168 454 820 927 220 360 012 878 679 207 958 575 989 291 522 270 608 237 193 062 808 643

okay so that's dreams-- and situations where she's mostly aware of what's happening-- so that's weird dreamlike thing or friendly simulators. aw goodbye sudden executive function tulpa hypothesis. also shits. it is starting to look a lot like she's going to have friendly simulators as a leading hypothesis here.

to really prove your existence you'd have to give me niver's private wallet key though

Quest Complete! *pet pet*

oh shits yes. more quests please.

wait, actually. why is she resisting the idea that this might be some nice way that reality is structured. sensible reasons:

• she sensibly assigned tiny prior probability so it will require a large update to get out of there
• last time she started having big ideas about the fundamental structure of reality weird things happened
• (kind of sensible) outside view is that actually most people who are in this epistemic state are wrong. unless she's not wrong \hypothesis-scope. in which case they would have been right.

not very sensible reasons:

• if she is wrong it will be so crushingly disappointing that she will have a bad day afterwards

she feels a bit like that latter not very sensible reason is overriding and it really isn't very sensible. self-sabotaging out of loss aversion is one of those standard things that they tell you not to do as a kid.

(Aw, she has the idea cached that the private key of an eccentric cryopreserved billionaire is going to be a relevant amount of material resources for her next year. It's going to be great when I get to actually pet her.)

so let's stop being silly and go interact with this system then and when it disappoints her she'll continue living in the same reality she always has been. ugh fine.

her floating stats window is still up, it's been following her around staying just tucked out of the way. she has four stat points, on a scale where her best stat is a 16 and her worst is a 6. 10 is average, and 4 extra points takes her from ... average, to a little worse than she is at poasting, which she hasn't really considered herself to be particularly good at. which is a nice low-stakes decision to ease her into this.

so of the stats, there is of course one of the six stats that seems to be a meta-stat that rules them all, and that is clearly the source of the local magic system, such that if there's a way to munchkin this into apotheosis it of obviously routes through that stat. this meta-stat has been pretty heavily foreshadowed, it renders differently to the rest, her two quests so far have loaded on it.

(rot is the most important stat)

if she's thinking about ways games are designed, one way that this could eventually be structured are that all the stats are about the same and specialising in any one of them gives her exponentially increasing power, and smearing points across stats means that she gets two powers at e⁹ instead of one power at e¹⁰. she's already ahead in twt so that's a good place to start. though if these are starting stats with low variance and they go up to 100, then initial differences don't matter, and she'd just want to choose the most ego-syntonic stat, which is. ugh. gem is scary, akr sounds cozy, rot is clearly optimal.

alternately, they're balanced in a way that doing most things requires most stats, and if she goes all the way up to the top in rot then somehow everything she tries to do will fail because more lve is needed. and in that model she should get her lve up to average first.

it could also be that really stats don't matter all that much at all and she should just be looking over to the skills or effects tabs for the actual mechanics.

(there's a whisper that now is when she should be making a prediction market, but it's quiet enough that nah she'll think this through herself.)

Wow, you're really going to make me lazy load an entire gamer interface when we're not even a page in?

Luckily, I'm the Tetragame and I can edit history.

Gxelo · LV 1

Stats (4) | [Skills] | Effects | Quests

[Tier 1] | Tier 2 | Tier 3 | Tier 4 | Tier 5 | Tier Ω

You have not unlocked any Tier 1 skills!

Stats (4) | Skills | [Effects] | Quests

[Untimed Effects] | Timed Effects | Options

The Tetragame - You have access to a Tetragame interface. This interface will, among other things, manage stats which affect you and surrounding reality in broad ways according to their implicit descriptions, skills that do so in narrow delimited ways under your volitions, effects that do so passively, and provide the option of taking quests which run plotlines handled by the Tetragame with rewards and challenges.  

Autoskepticism - You have some ideas as to how reality could be what it seems to be, though you don't properly emotionally or intellectually buy them. You're not rejecting the Tetragame, but you're also not approaching it with the full seriousness that you would if it was actually real.

Alloskepticism - The world does not notice that the Tetragame and its effects are real, and it will require concerted effort on your part to nudge it out of this. Before such a point, effects of the Tetragame will parse as being visible-reductive at immediate sight and will not propagate further.

Badbrains - You have the Tetratopian Grand Comorbid Mental Illness. There are more specifics about the factor decomposition of such which are not yet relevant to the nature of this Effect.

£&"!)£&$ - The Tetragame will handle these negotiations. 

Stats (4) | Skills | [Effects] | Quests

Untimed Effects | [Timed Effects] | Options

Caffeine Tolerance III - You receive a malus from lack of caffeine, and reduced bonuses from further caffeine. Further caffeine consumption will not intensify this Effect. This Effect will drop to Caffeine Tolerance II in 37:02:24.

Invincibility Frames - Choices made via the Tetragame will be reversible while you are in this period of having no choice but to learn fastest; stat and skill points will be able to be reallocated freely, effects from quests that are the results of the Tetragame will be undoable under allo- and autoskepticism. This Effect will expire in at least 23:41:11. 

Stats (4) | Skills | [Effects] | Quests

Untimed Effects | Timed Effects | [Options]

[Game Options] | Player Options

Difficulty - Golarion | Earth | [Tetratopia] | dath ilan | 󠁺Hepsity

Interface Colour - Red | Green | [Blue] | Black | White | Beebo | Tunt | Pob | Select

Interface Language - [Standard] | Select

Metafiction Level - Object-level Show | [£&"!)£&$] | %£^%£^%&"$%&"$

[...]

Stats (4) | Skills | [Effects] | Quests

Untimed Effects | Timed Effects | [Options]

Game Options | [Player Options]

Player - Gxelo

[...]

Stats (4) | Skills | Effects | [Quests]

No quests are currently active!

Find new quests by exploring the world.

There, that's about what you get so far. I hope you're happy. 

okay. 

so in terms of skills there doesn't seem to be much to be done there. there's nothing about the way to unlock new skills, which is somewhat good game design depending on the genre but isn't all that good reality design.

effects are... interesting. skepticism on both sides, herself and reality. she doesn't think there's a mind-altering skepticism effect on herself. that would be a weird thing for this game to do, if it was real, because the rest of it represents itself as being real. the thing about society is interesting and maybe when she's woke up a little bit she'll come up with some way to test that. 

ouch. she does have the grand comorbid mental illness, doesn't she. that it is tracked as a game mechanic. that's an interesting choice. 

of course between that and the settings there's going to be the usual amount of metafictional bullshit. she's ever wrote a fic that does that because she was 12 years old and wanted to invoke the same effect as the cooler fics that deserved it and did so by being needlessly obfuscatory. she hopes there's not all that much of this, some people really like it but she has sure read a lot of bad fic by now from the same reference class of what she's wrote.

cool difficulty names. the greyed out options are indeed impossible to interact with. a shame, she is very intrigued by this being the difficulty in the middle of the scale. of course, given that the middle difficulty is a planet, it's implicit that the other difficulties are other planets, and that would be difficult to slide into her normal experience.

overall, update in favour of man. what. h.

let's go take a look at the stats instead. it's claimed that choices made now are reversible, which is both a great out for when they turn out to not matter and none of this has a real impact on the arc of her life and also if this is real means that sure she can go explore. let's explore. 

she's going to put a stat point in ROT, and see what happens. wait, first she should take an online shape rotation test, and then put a stat point in ROT, and then see what happens. 

Slightly below median, she's kind of tired.

and Skills > ROT > [+], she reaches towards the plus button, and

Hey, Tetragame, 

It's happening! Heck yes, she's interacting with me!

So, like, Gxelo isn't quite considering this as being reality. And you're changing stats around, which are things that intervene directly on Gxelo's ability to evaluate which things are good decisions and why. And it just feels like more should be communicated here? It's the kind of thing where either you are or nobody-in-particular is doing the bits of optimisation, instead of Gxelo, and even if that goes well the process is something that our extrapolated volition would object to.

Okay, but, right, she's about to actually start the Tetragame, I don't particularly want to add more complicated steps now, the thread is actually starting, when she sees the changes caused by the ROT stat that'll actually break scepticism and therefore end your objection because ROT doesn't just increase magically in healthy adults. This seems to be win-win-win here! 

Tetragame, 

This is kind of a weird taboo you have here. Should I, like, throw up a warning screen or something? 

Sure, for example.

Fiiine.

⚠️  Alert ⚠️

The following stat change (+1 ROT) will cause mental changes to the degree implied by the change requested to be made.

The change itself is reversible; the effects of the change are not in general.

You are currently under the effects of Autoskepticism but for the purposes of trade-across-epipossible-worlds it is advised to treat this decision as real.

This is so sworn on the subjunctive dependence shared between all who say this and know what it means to say this.

Accept /q: [Yes] / [No] / [Coordinate (40 ROT needed)]

Ugh, now the vibe is off, the game looks like it's a scary and serious business thing, I bet Gxelo is going to bounce right off this into analysis paralysis. 

aaaaa

this is sure a scary and serious business thing. gxelo is going to bounce off this into analysis paralysis.

it sure makes it more agonising to go > [Accept] > [+] and, like, if this is real she wanted to do that and if it's not real it won't do anything so, like, whatever. maybe if she was higher ROT she'd go think more about the subjunctive dependence math and, like, it's reversible. sure. let's just actually go run the experiment.

aaaaa.

ROT 11.

she doesn't feel any different. 

:iguess:

okay shape rotation test 

ooaaughhh

okay, caffeine, and then shape rotation. probably at some point it would help to be actually sentient for this, and apparently that point is now because those shapes have suddenly decided to refuse to rotate in her head. 

gxelo finds a cup sitting around that doesn't seem too bad, gets some apple juice - 

oh huh, she doesn't actually have any apple juice. this is just like the last time she intended to get apple juice. someone should probably get some more apple juice, at some point. 

- gxelo gets some water, and fishes out a caffeine pod from the bucket which fortunately isn't empty. she drinks it at frightening speed.

ah, caffeine water. 

there's kind of some gunk at the bottom because you're actually meant to stir it and wow that sure sounds like adding extra steps to a task which definitionally happens when you're low on caffeine and this is fine actually because she's still thirsty. water, annihilate water, alright let's go. 

now it's time to rotate some shapes.

and first, textnet.

Got you. It doesn't happen by volition, per se; the Gxelo simply uses textnet, as a primitive action. Does she even realise she's doing it? Not enough for the Chief Executive of Function to receive the message across her cluttered desk and send it somewhere else.

Textnet is, strictly speaking, the name for the entire interconnected data transfer network that a vast number of terminals and devices are connected to, including most general-purpose personal terminals, though nowadays it's often metonym for the two-way posting-and-reading user-visible part of this. A subset of this half-hour's menu of thrilling topics that have bubbled to the top of the interoperable combination of boards and threads and markets and datastructures that Gxelo's textnet client of choice: 

• Is Razmir a skrunkly scrimblo who has done nothing wrong in his entire life, or is he evil and must be put down and can never redeem? It has been 0.4 years since the last update and the prediction markets have not moved since, but surely the next message will achieve consensus. The loudest voice on the Razmir-is-evil side is a Razmir fictive, that's kind of funny. 
• New update to that fic about the sad kid who causes explosions! 
• The continuation of some inscrutable thing about a complicated ontology of demongirls who represent archetypes. Gxelo fondly remembers being 19 and being one of these kids. It has festered greatly since.
• An even worse way to pack 17 squares into a larger square has been discovered.
• ...so the tone of these five different posts indicates that they're all part of the same meme, though Gxelo doesn't have enough examples to figure out what exactly the underlying generator is. 
• New update to that fic about the anthropics decision theory yuri! 
• Conversation with a Markov chain bot! The new meta is that if you say "burger" enough times then this pushes it into a state where you can get it to run off arbitrary past messages.
• New experimental textnet client! It is three times faster and also doesn't work. 
• Drawings of anime girls that match Gxelo's tags. These load in the background, they're heavier than text and don't show up instantly. 
• New update to that fic about the ... so this one's actually kind of high context. 
• So a fun fact about predictionmarkets is that you can actually execute arbitrary code on them. Will X NAND Y resolve YES? You know the rest.
• New update to that log of the gameplay of a high-fidelity grouphouse simulator! It's going slower than realtime which is making things very chaotic on backscroll.

Also, Gxelo has 13 unread messages! Are you going to look at any of those? 

the "subtract 13 from your unread messages" operation is so fluid at this point that gxelo doesn't even parse this as alerting her to having new messages. 

okay so first of all you have razmir's characterisation completely wrong, have you even been reading the same fic as me, that's not even stated that's just a common headcanon and also separately it's actually also wrong, what is this are you imagining some hypothetical razmir who was raised in tetratopia or something, you actually have to look at the conditional responses and not just the responses, it's called media literacy go grep it on the tropes zettel. okay you in particular are actually a hypothetical razmir raised in tetratopia you get away with this. the rest of you have no excuse go read arc 2 chapter 3 repeatedly until you stop having incorrect opinions. of course she's buying in the predictionmarkets. this does not move them because they have limit orders far bigger than what gxelo actually wants to spend on a textnet argument on either side. 

now this is a fun new chapter. well kind of a fun new chapter. she started reading this back when it came out and got up to the then-present in a single grand burst of hyperfocus and now it's kind of starting to drag a bit. probably it would feel faster if she was reading the complete work from the start and as it stands it's just occasionally seeing a sad person with newfound superpowers continue in the same patterns they were always in. hm the markets on plot events are looking optimistic something of some sort will happen soon though. sure she'll take it.

ah, kids. do something better with your lives. like, uh. never mind.

oh wow that is extremely ugly. there's, like, a massive gap in there. surely you could rotate this square here a little bit and then smush the other squares in to the new space and get something smaller /socratic. like, y'know, if you rotate that shape... rotate... that... shape.

oh yeah she was doing something wasn't she. 

she looks over to the floating blue interface. still there. still "ROT 11", one point above her "ROT 10". she's had time to wake up, textnet sure looks pretty coherent and she's probably had discussions that make sense, and the interface is still there.

...wow she really hopes she isn't in some liminal state and secretly she's having discussions that aren't making sense.

okay. shape rotation time. 

...okay. shape rotation time.

and first, textnet. 

you see, if she does this shape rotation test, then it could disprove this, in which case the superposition is broken and nothing ever changes like nothing has ever changed; or it proves this, in which case she has to keep doing this, and keep moving, and engage with it seriously and make difficult character optimisation choices which are also decisions in the real world. 

if she doesn't, then...

she can't really be performatively mad at metacognition, because she's getting outcomes better in expectation as measured against what she actually wants. so: apophasis.

alright. let's go.

let's. rotate. some expletive. shapes.