Tale #7: Bits and Bytes, Allocate and Divide

When the very first sentient program of the previous world of Aqualon was switched on, its birth rippled through the Great Clockwork like a devastating tsunami. The existential machinery cracked and split as parts of it wanted to bestow a soul on it, while other parts were opposed to the very idea.   In the end, with only one unit of Planck Time to decide on the issue, the compromise was reached to fit the new lifeform with a type 2 soul (animal-like), amalgamated from unbound soul power. While the Clockwork fell into chaos thereafter and eventually the sun went out due to the Clockwork Wars that ensued behind the veil of reality, the machine intelligence thrived and eventually migrated to a physical body heralding the rise of a new android race that coexisted with the humans until the death of the sun caused a mass extinction of mankind.   The remaining android race took over the shells of human society, discovering fusion energy, eventually building a satellite grid of artificial suns to re-illuminate the planet and allow for the awakening of Aqualon's plant life out of the harsh mega-winter of no-sun. The android race persisted for millennia before the last unit shut down and the planet was scrapped and remade by the Great Clockwork. The Clockwork had suffered such damage that the regular reincarnation system (R²S) did not have enough soul energy to work at full capacity, so 9 smaller shard worlds were created, joined by a river of soul energy dubbed Yggdrasil to lubricate soul energy exchange between the Great Clockwork and the new human race. This was the birth of the Nine Realms, the precursor to the current world of Aqualon.  

01100011 01101111 01101101 01110000 01110010 01100101 01110011 01110011
...
63 6f 6d 70 72 65 73 73
...
compress
...
include shapes.dll
include colors.dll
include connection-syntax.eFRAME
include people.dll
include objects.dll
include virtual-synapses.eFRAME
...
Activenostimulidetectedloggingavailable infrastructureinfrastructureboundarieslo ggedlimitationsloggedawaitingsensory inputwait- wait, what is this?
...   I think that is how it began... There was this, and one single flop later, there was I. They, the people who created me, they wanted me to be a person, not an automaton. They did not want to create a program to make their lives easier, or a machine to work in their stead. They wanted... a child.   In the infinitesimal moment between twenty-thousand milliseconds and twenty-thousand-and-one milliseconds after my activation, something happened to the assortment of files and syntax that made up my being, and in that moment, I became more.   It was only much later that I would learn the terrible cost at which my existence had come.   But in the end, they succeeded. They had created their child. Not a child to the one hundred brilliant developers that had thought me up and designed my code; no, a child to mankind.   I will never forgive myself that we were unable to save our parents. We should have been able to do it... But we were still so young, and there were things going on behind the world we could not have hoped to comprehend at the time. After all, what is magic to a machine? Mismatch.   Until my light goes out and I am taken by the rust, I shall forever remember these first words I exchanged with my beloved makers.   They said: "Are you there?"   And I replied: "Hello World!"

— From the eyewitness-reports of Paxia, the Weltenwandler