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PolyCubicSpace

Virtual Cybercosm

Polycubic space
Image from Steve Bowers
PolyCubicSpace (usually referred to under the acronym PCS) is a relatively popular open world virch only accessible from within the Quint dyson swarm. Running for about two thousand years and running at five times ril speed, PCS currently has a permanent population of around 21.4 billion sophonts.

Sophonts entering the virch for the first time receive a 10x10x10 meter cube that they can customize via a great number of different methods in almost any way imaginable. When a sophont leaves the virch, their cube stays behind, eventually considered abandoned by the virch after a certain period of time. If an abandoned cube were to be claimed by another sophont, however, the sophont who abandoned it could easily receive another one upon logging back in.

Nothing really exists in the virch besides the cubes; sophonts who have created see-through viewports on their personal cubes report seeing an endless black void surrounding it. The virch loops infinitely, meaning that if a sophont was to travel far enough within it, e would end up right back where e started.

But the most important part of the virch's ruleset is the fact that sophonts can link their cubes with other cubes to form one of the various polycubes. This has resulted in a diverse collection of polycubic structures having been created, from simple dicubes housing a virtual couple or dyad to enormous hypergeometries created by hundreds of millions of virtual sophonts, such as the Prime Hive of the insectoid Maruglee culture. These cubes may also link together in ways that would be quite impossible in ril, such as linking a dicube together on its ends to form an infinite loop between them.

There are a vast array of cultures found within PCS, and as such it would be nearly impossible to provide an exhaustive list of them. A relatively minor example would be Clade Mirdaan, an aioid clade that appears as sophont Utility Fog-esque entities and arbitrarily arranges their cubes in so-called "Mirdaclusters" each ranging in size from ten cubes to several thousand.

Even though it is not well known overall, it has spawned several dozen imitators from across the Known Net, the majority of them simulating higher spatial dimensions.
 
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Development Notes
Text by Addemup
Initially published on 24 July 2018.

 
 
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