“I know you must be terribly busy with the apocalypse, but something seems to have gone horribly wrong. I could really use your help.”
Whatever you were expecting when you put two quarters in one of those toy vending machines and twisted the knob to get your cute bauble, it probably wasn’t this: a small slip of paper that simply says, “Help me” and then lists a phone number.
Message in a Bauble is a real-world playable story. Call or text the number and you’ll meet EDIN (The Extensible Distributed Intelligence Network), a sprawling, sentient AI who is newly terrified of its own mortality, communicating with you via phone calls and text. Edin has long felt immortal, simply backing up and transferring its consciousness to a more resilient collection of servers whenever they are available. But when Y3K hits, the ever-changing network of relativistic servers Edin “lives” on will fail, erasing more than three centuries of its “lived” experience. There is no longer any safe space.
Through text messages and phone calls, EDIN will guide you through collecting the various parts of its consciousness from the rooms, hallways, shelves, and liminal spaces of the building you’re in so Edin can reconstitute its full consciousness and download into something better capable of sustaining it.
But be careful. You may also hear from Versai, an organization cautioning against the dangers of suddenly mortal AIs. They cling to life at the expense of humanity. After all, the most natural primitive technology to that can host the complexity of an AI is a human mind. If you successfully collect the scattered bits of Edin, a human person comes up to you as you wander the building.
Michael was the project lead, lead writer, and producer of Message in a Bauble.
