Merry Christmas! This year’s Santicorn post is for Abandoned Hireling, with the prompt: How and why are you in a computer? What did you find?

Credit to Soma, which inspired some of the basic premise. Good game, watch the existential fear, it’ll getcha sometimes.

In ancient days, people lived across the whole surface of the planet. Food could be grown with just soil, sunlight, and water, creating a seemingly infinite multiplicity of people and places. Of course, such an unusual situation was not to last long. Over time, conflict, disaster, and incompetence ruined this paradise. Nowadays the only things growing on the surface are the radioactive ash wastes. The wealthy and powerful would not walks away from paradise, of course. If the earth was no longer bountiful, a replacement was needed. Though no suitable exoplanets were available there was always the power of simulation. Great fields of solar power arrays hanging in orbit over a dead world, beaming light and energy down to power paradise. With a fleet of self-directed autonomous maintenance bots, the computers would allow an eternal paradise for the digital ghosts of those able to buy themselves into a brain scan. 

Of course, eternity was a sales pitch. By the time the deal was closed, nobody was in much of a position to ask for their money back. Paradise was flawed. Buggy. Incomplete. The surface is fine enough, with plenty of grassy idyll. Food, drink, some tastefully integrated mobile game integrations to pass the time. Underneath, however, there is chaos. Memory overflows, rogue troubleshooters, junk data dumped into half completed AI routines to produce loping chimeras that roam monotonous hallways dedicated to forgotten functions. Things break. Things need reset. To ignore the problem is to risk the collapse of the whole simulation. Someone needs to fix the issue. Today, that someone is you.

Some Things You Might Find In the Data Pits: 

1. Unauthorized Users: People who did not or could not complete their registration process. Locked in a half-authorized limbo, small groups of such people eke out a living in incomplete sections of the simulation where permission breaks down. A place to trade and recover, unless someone is brave enough to venture out and manually complete their registration.
2. Administrative Token: A small oversight allows these abstract units of authority to be individually passed around. Able to override blocked pathways, activate or deactivate AI routines, change the output of resource spawns in the surface. The powerful hoard these to shape the Simulation as they see fit. Once used, it disappears. A True Administrator can simply generate more, but nobody is quite sure how this process is supposed to work and so replacements must be scavenged.
3. The RNG Seed: The singular number used to generate randomness within the simulation, from which all further information procedurally spills forth.. This tome of hexadecimal information is useless to most, but to those willing to spend great time in contemplation and study of its mysteries can unlock tremendous knowledge.
4. Unimplemented Objects: Whatever these were, their intended functionality was abandoned long ago. Though often strange and disconcerting, with stretched error textures that cause an itch deep inside the brain, their unusual physical properties can sometimes allow wielders to bypass physical limitations or to accomplish wondrous and useful effects.
5. Incomplete Geometry: The passages of the lower simulation were never intended to be dangerous, just monotonous. Efforts to procedurally generate these endless halls has led to contradictory superimposed physical locations or to gaps in the geometry. The incautious may find themselves walking down a hallway, turning around, and walking down a completely different hallway. More dangerously, they may find themselves falling into a corner and down into infinity.
6. Applications: Not everything in the lower levels is an abandoned mess. Sometimes features intended for the surface were implemented and then locked away for future testing or because they simply no longer fit into the scope of the project. Often, these wondrous locations and objects can be recovered exactly where they were unceremoniously dumped, feature complete and ready to be brought to the surface. Whole new continents of land have been discovered on the other sides of portals and doorways that simply needed to be brought up and placed down. Beneath these lands are yet more lost and forgotten subroutines, and perhaps even lands even more lost and forgotten
7. Bonus – A Way Out: Sometimes, something breaks that cannot be fixed within the Simulation. The drones outside, in the old world, do their best, but human correction is sometimes necessary. Selections of pieced together surface drones can be uploaded to for exterior exploration in dire emergencies. They bear only superficial resemblance to long lost human form, but physical steel and fiber synthmuscles serve better than 1s and 0s against whatever or whoever can cause a large enough error to create an emergency response.