Future Release™

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Future Release, Chapter 1: Eternity Port

It began with George Moromisato I. In the 1990s, he had created a game called Transcendence. Known for being centered around extensions and custom content, this game had attracted a particularly devoted community of modders during the many years of its development. As George I continually improved Transcendence, he began work on a new pursuit: a server infrastructure system that would be known as HexArc. Over time, George I's attention moved from Transcendence to HexArc with preparations for Project Glacier. The modders believed that Project Glacier would be a great waste of time and that nobody would find any usefulness from the resulting software. However, they would allow it as long as George dedicated enough of his efforts to maintaining the game rather than developing the less-needed parts of the server.

Ever since the 1990s,Transcendence has had continuous updates by the Moromisato family. By the end of 2016, George I completed 32 versions of the modding API. In 2032, George I transferred the control of Transcendence development over to George II so that he could focus more on HexArc. In the year 2065, George III/A, III/B and III/C took over George II's responsibilities for the next 40 years; during this period, the Georges always argued about important questions such as who would be responsible for writing the documentation, who would implement a search function in the Ministry of Records, and who would create a Multiverse mod distribution framework to replace Xelerus. The George IVs, who became head developers in 2114, had similar problems. George IV/C wanted to restore the long-dead Anacreon and while George IV/D often promised to update the Multiverse website (which had been outdated for the last 60 years), he would instead sneak off to write plans for yet another useless HexArc feature. George V/B, the laziest of the George Vs, recklessly tagged tens of thousands of Ministry tickets with "Future Release" and George V/C took this further by outright deleting any ticket that sounded like it would be boring to fix.

In 2302, a society called the Concatenated Digital Metropolis arose with the construction of a station called Eternity Port. Aiming to provide a service that allowed people to upload their minds and live as immortal, virtual beings, Eternity Port quickly became the center of Transcendence modding; all the modders migrated to Eternity Port, hoping to study and customize the game for the centuries to come. At the same time, George VI/A, George VI/B, and George VII/A had completed HexArc, completely reinventing the internet in the process, and had also written an AI clone of George I (known as Luminous) to maintain its development. Like George I and all the Georges after him, this clone had a problem coming up with names for everything it made, resorting to "Luminous" whenever it created something new. However, the Georges were also jealous of the CDM; they all believed that they could establish their own kind of virtual society that would serve the modders better. They immediately set out to further augment the capabilities of HexArc.

However, the development of Transcendence had been stalling over time; halfway through the 23rd century, the game was stuck at version 20.0 and essentially dead. George Moromisato VII and the AI clones were busy reinventing the universe and had absolutely no time for the game. The modders of Eternity Port also clashed with the Georges over issues like weapon balance, AI bugs, and the 500,000 Ministry tickets tagged with "Future Release." By then, HexArc had been completely rewritten; Featuring FTL communication and distributed computing between machines, known as Assemblers, this version of HexArc was appropriately named "Luminous." The Georges had also uploaded themselves into the new virtual reality powered by HexArc. Although they tried to encourage the modders to migrate over to this new world, the modders were disgusted by it, calling it a undocumented, confusing behemoth, an incomprehensible monstrosity of software and hardware. The Georges did not take this statement well.

Fed up with all the demands for increased API documentation and criticism that Part V development had begun even before the first Part III beta was released, the Georges cut off all communication with the modders. They decided that they would transform the current Transcendence community into a new, more loyal community made up of biological AIs. In order to do this, they added ship manufacturing capabilities to existing Assemblers and created a new HexArc feature that would coordinate the manufacture of drones among these Assemblers. Although the modders of Eternity Port took notice, they did not bother to take action because the Georges' influence had made them prone to laziness and irresponsibility...

[Future Release] To do: Finish the story
Last edited by 0xABCDEF on Fri Jul 21, 2017 5:49 am, edited 3 times in total.
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0xABCDEF
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Joined: Thu May 19, 2016 12:58 am
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Future Release™, Chapter 2: The Looming Menace

Soon after turning against the modders, the Georges fused their minds together with Luminous to form a single near-omniscient entity, known among some as the Looming Menace. Frustrated by the obscurity of Transcendence among every other society other than Eternity Port, the Looming Menace decided that it would take vengeance against anyone who had not contributed mods for Transcendence, even those who had not known about it in the first place. Its drones would be sent to scout, capture, and return every human that they could find to the nearest Assembler, where the humans would then have their minds and intelligence harvested. The intelligence would then become absorbed into the Looming Menace and the minds would either be forced to produce mods for Transcendence or serve as pilots for the Menace's drones.
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