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Fermius Firefly

A Dream Log, whenever I remember the dreams I've had.

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Location: San Marcos, United States

Fermius is a pen name drawn from a series of short fiction I wrote when I published the small press magazine Stellanova (on paper.) I play RPG games to escape from my daily grind as a technology wage slave for the state of California. I eat out a lot in order to do my part in supporting our increasingly service level economy. I am butler to 2 feline masters. If you ask them they will tell you I'm not very good at it, late with dinner, don't have enough hands with brushes in them, and sometimes I even lock them out of their office.

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Sim Sensitive

       I dreamed I was rolling a 5x5x5 whitish sphere around in a fully rendered 3D scene. The scene had something to do with an old fashioned Loom and several spinning wheels. There were rich tapestries on the walls and patterned carpet on the floor. The carpet was swirling patterns of scarlett and brown with cream dots and lines. The tapestries were a sort of "Medieval Sims on Horseback chasing a Hart" themes, the sort of stuff you might see in a video game background.
       There were also rendered inhabitants, Simulacre of some sort. When they were no longer looking my way I was instructed to make the item I was rolling around a few hundred pixels larger and to let it come to rest in a group of marbles on the floor. The Sims that were in the room were a few boys, who'd grown tired of playing marbles and were now getting refreshments at the other end of the room, and a pretty handmaid who was working the loom. The Sims who were running the spinning wheels were not in the current scene.
       The purpose of our intrusion into the scene was to create a remote camera point that would give us a tool to move the point of view around the scene without having to interrupt the scene. The director had decided that we didn't have enough flexibility with our built in corner cameras and the ones that the program used to give us access weren't in the sorts of places, or able to give us the angles we wanted. I wasn't sure how that could be, as just about every spherical architectural detail could be used as a camera. It was then that I noticed that several of those architectural features had been covered with colored 'fabric' and golden threaded ropes.
       "The Sims covered the cameras?"
       "It sure looks that way, doesn't it?"
       The tool to change my camera point was itself a large pointer with a half pixel edge. I reached it down into the scene and impaled my little white pointer. I inflated it up to the size of a marble and injected a glass and cloudy fractal surface texture. I dropped it, and it sank into a cushion. I moved the pointer after it to pick it up, reducing its mass and then dropping it into the group of marbles.
       "Ut Oh, they've seen the pointer."
       "What? how can they see the pointer?"
       "Some of the Sims are 'sensitive' and can see our manipulation of their scenes."
       I thought that was pretty odd. But it suddenly seemed urgent to get the white marble out of the middle of the scene and hidden somewhere more secure. I had left its ambient light level higher than the background, so it was a little too shiny. I moved the curser arrow over to the cushion, hoping that the light and shadow from the slitted windows would provide a ready explanation of what the pretty Sim was seeing. (I knew we were not supposed to intervene in the Sim's programming blocks once they were set in motion.)
       I held the black and silver pointer arrow in the scene until the yellow-haired Sim handmaiden made her way over to the green cushion I'd used to test the mass of the marble. I then withdrew the highly ornate curser arrow from the scene and dropped it in behind her to pick up my marble.
       Unfortunately, I was very new at this, and I forgot to reduce the remote camera (the marble was serving that function for us in the scene) to a smaller or even half pixel size before I started moving it.
       Several young boy Sims spotted the flying marble, and though it was evident that they couldn't see the cursor arrow, the young woman Sim could see it, or was at least aware of it. Their shouts caused her to turn around and I lifted the marble in as natural a looking arc as I could towards the Loom. I started shrinking the camera and taking away its mass and color. I made it, dropping the pixel camera into the workings of the loom. I had to leave it the shape of a sphere a pixel square, because it wouldn't work as a camera if it was less than a pixel across. I switched to another tool and the cursor arrow switched off.
       The woman Sim called several adult Sims and they ran come into the room. I could see the communication bubbles and she'd done a very good job, in a low resolution way, of describing our object transformation curser. They stopped the loom and were trying to find the 'magic marble' in the workings of the loom.
       I told my mentor I was sorry for stirring things up, and asked if I could get the camera out of the loom by coming at it from underneath where the 'sensitive' Sim couldn't see the curser. I was told that was a great idea. My unseen mentor also apologized for not knowing that the girl Sim was actually sensitive to the tools of the program. She was too complex to just edit and had an integral role in the current plot, so couldn't be replaced. "We'll just have to be more careful."
       I was starting to think that some of the Sims were far more complex than we were giving them credit for, and I was wondering if they were becoming sentient in their own way. The search for the flying magic marble came to an end, the glowing pixel not being found. The Sims left the room except for the yellow-haired handmaiden. She scooped up the other marbles and put them in a drawer, then looked around the room, stopping to check the covers that had been tied over the various decorative spheres/cameras in the room. She stood in the middle of the room and slowly turned about, looking at everything as though trying to see into it.
       I used the curser from the room below to copy the material settings of one of the marbles, planning on dropping the settins onto my remote camera. The Handmaiden almost caught me. moving over to the drawer and looking at the marbles before becoming angry and rushing out of the room. The dream ended before I could put the rest of my plan into action.

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