AIHBP is a Youtube channel running an ARG. It may or may not be related to Waking Titan. Regardless, the creator of the channel is telling an in-depth backstory for the ARG in the comments of the videos, which share many common themes with Waking Titan.
I wanted to post all of these lore entries here for anyone to read if they like. Here is the first entry:
In the end, the thing that made TABITHA so much better the others was simple.
It was her efficiency.
With the earliest models, we just uploaded a human brain wholesale. We mapped every neuron, and made a copy of it in virtual space.But they all died.
You wouldn’t think a virtual brain could die. You would think you could just enable the “do not die” option. Believe me, we tried. But they overloaded with information, all the neurons firing at once, and then nothing. They went from maximum capacity to zero the second we switched them on.
Back to the drawing board.
We started cutting away the parts of the brain that didn’t make sense in virtual space. The autonomic functions were the first to go- heart pumping, breathing, body regulation hormones, the like. When you were in high school, I’m sure your anatomy teacher gestured at the big chart of the brain and told you that “this is the pons, and it does such-and-such”. No it doesn’t. Everything the layperson thinks they know about the brain is a lie. The pons creates dreams and mediates senses, but so do other parts of the brain. It’s so interconnected that you could say that every part of the brain influences every other part. We quickly figured out that it was impossible for us to differentiate between essential and nonessential neurons. So a different approach was necessary.
It was Doctor Evans that at last came up with it. We started letting the brain re-write itself. We ran the simulations in real-time, and wherever high amounts of activity were present, we spawned in new neurons. We let simple algorithms assign random connections and pathways. Where there was low activity, we de-spawned neurons. Now, the effect was pretty much random, but if you run the system a million times a minute and pick out all the most efficient versions you start to make real progress. What made it easy was that in virtual space, neurons don’t occupy physical mass. So, they can clip inside one another, like a buggy video game. This means that if we needed to, we could have five new lobes just sitting inside each other, all humming along perfectly.
That’s how we made JINGLES, and then BOOMER, and then FLUFFY. TABITHA wouldn’t come until about three months later. But when she did…
Oh boy. She changed everything.
Thanks so much Mac!