The Nonduality

A Tale from the Time of Virtual Existence for 5 players

Your ship is different then the other ships in the Great Attractor Fleet. Your founder had a vision, and your ship, The Nonduality, is named after that vision. He spoke often of binaries being an illusion, of the need for greater understanding and compassion for each other. "We are all one."

Unfortunately, he died suddenly before being able to undertake this expedition. Your community is formed around the central ideals that he spoke of when he was alive. You embrace communal living, shared work, and meditation. Your ship even has a sentient AI named Source, with a lovely singing voice and a bizarre sense of humor. Of course everything is not always perfectly harmonious. People disagree, dislike each other, and fight sometimes. Still, you count yourself lucky to live amongst shipmates who share the same core values.

You have been flying towards the Great Attractor for almost a thousand years, which means you are still at the beginning of the ship's journey: there will be many generations after you if all goes well. Moments ago, there was an accident. One of your crew, Eshela was doing routine maintenance when their suit was punctured. They died instantly. This is the first death on board your ship. People are understandably shocked and upset.

That said, everyone has expected that when they die, their consciousness will be uploaded into virtual existence. The ship contains a single system for beings to live out their days virtually. Eshela will be the first person to enter that 'virtual afterlife' on your ship.

The five of you are the members of IT and so it falls to you to transfer Eshala’s consciousness. To your great surprise, after you began to prepare to copy, you realized there was no way to simply upload Eshala into this virtual world. Instead, the copy sequence was going to meld her consciousness with others that were already there.

You all started frantically poking at terminals and running diagnostic tools. H'leh was the first to realize what was going on. Source (the ship's "AI") was not simply some really good hardware. It was a collection of alien consciousnesses, who had combined to form a single sentience living in the virtual existence system. This fact had been carefully disguised, hidden in plain sight the whole time you were here.

You have two options in front of you. You can:

• Leave the system as-is, which will mean that Eshala, yourself, and all future generations will become part of a composite consciousness after they die.
• Do a hard factory reset, which will be the individuated post-mortality virtual existence you expected.

If you factory reset, it will delete Source. If you reset you could alternately try to 'differentiate' Source back out into separate beings again. This is likely to result in many of those fragments being shattered, confused, partial beings.

It is not possible to simply extract Eshala now that the upload procedures have begun.

Rahar, the head of IT, asked Source for advice on what you should do now. The answer was cryptic as usual: "Let Go." Source started running something consuming almost all its cycles, not responding to any commands, and locking out all diagnostics. It is clear that further communication with Source will be impossible.

The scene will end when Rahar makes a decision on what to do.