* The DeLorian *
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Captain's Log: Stardate 0000 0002
Clone Code: 0
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Once Me, Myself, and I embarked out to our journey we ran into an issue very
quickly. With there being three of us who were (as far as I can tell) all the
same person, we ran into the communication issue of what to call each other.
After some discussion, we came to the agreement that I would be "Captain", the
version of me that was created from the universe where the coin landed on heads
would be "Heads", and of course for the same reason the other would be "Tails".
After that was agreed we decided to take inventory of what we have to work with
within Boaty McBoatface while we wait for the autopilot to take us to the
rendevous point with the client. Heads and Tails went to search opposite ends of
the ship, but I decided I might try to make use of my new time device (which
according to The Elder is called the "Deus Ex Machina") to save myself some time
(ha, get it?) by trying to find some more exploits like the coin trick that
created Heads and Tails. I set a checkpoint and decided that I would go search
the ship, and after doing so I would return to that checkpoint and give myself
the report so that I don't need to do all of the work! With the checkpoint set
I immediately received a tap on the shoulder to find a slightly exhaused version
of myself standing behind me. They informed me they were going to go take a nap
since they have completed taking inventory and left towards what I can only
assume the location of the sleeping quarters were at. A bit miffed that my plan
backfired I asked them why they would not simply tell me what they found so I
could skip the boring chore. They informed me that when they were me they were
not told anything either and their future version simply left to go take a nap
as well, so if they did not get to skip doing the work than neither do I. With
that, they completed their journey out of the room and left me alone again. The
nerve, I cannot believe I would be such a jerk to myself! ...Well, on second
thought, this is not too shocking. My first experience meeting my time clone was
being punched in the face by them. At least when I am done with this I can a nap
and get back at myself by making the previous version of myself do all this work
too. That will surely teach myself a lesson from being so stubborn.
After going back in time to enjoy my nap I decided to go look for Heads and
Tails since they should be finishing up with their search of the ship by then.
Finding Heads was easy enough since they were on their way back, so we decided
to head out together to find Tails. We each took notes in our respective copies
of the book we received from The Elder, so I just copied down Heads's notes into
mine and then swapped so they could do the same. By the time that was done we
found Tails, but also a lot more. Apparently I was not the only one who decided
to try more time shenanigans since we stumbled upon a large crowd of time clones
all arguing with each other. After it was clear from watching the chaos unfold
for a few moments, I decided that since I am the captain of Boaty McBoatface it
was my job to try and get to the bottom of what happened here and try to restore
order. With a sustained, high-pitched whistle I drew the attention of the Tails
clones and requested for the audience of the original Tails. This seemed to
trigger the same arguing from before so I let forth the same whistle again and
this time just grabbed the closest one and asked them to explain what is going
on here. Apparently Tails discovered that we have a weapons system aboard the
ship, but not enough crew to make effective usage of it. So, the logical
conclusion was to create perform the same experiment that created the initial
clones a few times. However, since I forgot how quickly exponential growth can
get out of hand, this very quickly created way too many time clones. It was
suggested that we can fix the problem by ejecting the extras into space, but
that meant that there needed to be some sort of system to determine who would be
getting ejected. Since no one wanted to volunteer another suggested that they
could flip coins to decide, but the others disagreed since that is what
originally got them into this mess. The last suggestion of removing the clones
in order who who was created last and working backwards is what triggered the
fighting since the newer clones found this unfair since this system was not
agreed upon before their creation, as well as the older clones had no way to
determine who was the newest clones and none of them wanted to identify
themselves.
It is moments like this that are quite humbling as you realize just how much of
a moron you can be. Fortunately, from what Heads found during their search of
Boaty McBoatface we had a better compromise for the Tails army. Aboard the ship
are some cryostatis pods, so instead of needing to evacuate the excess clones we
can just have them sleep in there until they are needed or we are in a better
situation for having that many clones of myself around. After some murmuring it
looked like the clones were find with agreeing to this plan. Before Heads guided
the excess clones to cryostatis chamber I called forth for a meeting since we
really needed to sort out this time cloning business to make sure something like
this does not happen again. This meeting went on far longer than I would have
expected since we are all the same person, but the previous threat of death via
ejection into space and not being a good team player with other versions of
myself was enough to already begin splintering off differences in the
personalities of the clones (definitely something to think about later and
probably keep me up at night). Eventually we all agreed to the seniority system
where older clones will get to make the final decision on any disagreements
along with creating an identification system using our books. The identification
system works as follows:
Since I am the original DeLorian, on the last page of my book I will right a
zero. For each clone that follows, if they were created with a heads flip they
will append another zero to their sequence and if they were created by a one
they would instead append a one. Since we did not do this originally, each clone
had to manually catch up by writing in their sequence from their respective
memory. However, for all future versions they need only append to the end of
their sequence since their book should be a copy of the version that created
them. Then, to handle if additional sets of clones are created (e.g. if I
decided to make additional clones from myself) we simply use the next pair of
digits (e.g. in the previous example this would be 2 and 3 instead of 0 and 1).
We were all fine with this until one of the Tails clones, who identified
themself as "01019", asked about what we plan to do if one of us makes a 6th set
of clones (the set after 8 and 9 are used). This had us stumped for a bit and we
almost decided on a rule to never make a sixth pair of clones to avoid this
(which left a few clones with a nervous look in their eye), until another Tails
clone brought up something The Elder wrote in their original notes. Across the
bottom of the page the following was written:
01234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ-_
At first I (or should I now say we?) throught this was just some weird way of
testing out their penmanship on the page, but upon further inspection it looks
like this would be the perfect solution for continuing on our clone code
sequence past six sets. Now, we could make a full 32 sets of clones until we ran
into a "roadblock" again. Since we all felt far more comfortable with the idea
of having 32 as the hard cap on clones, we agreed to using this system moving
forward and finalized our agreement by all writing down these rules into the
last page of our books as our formal way of acknowledging our consensus. With
that out of the way the extra clones were filed to the cryostatis chamber and
order seemed to be restored at last. I met up with Tails (now also known as
"01") to get their notes for the inventory of the ship to add to my notes. Once
that was done Heads (now also knowns as "00") returned back from escorting the
clones to complete their set of notes as well. It was after doing so and
reviewing everything together that we came to a concerning revelation: we did
not have enough food for all of the mouths we now had to feed. However, from my
own search of the ship I found a hangar filled with lesser crafts and came up
with a plan. I explained to Heads and Tails my plan of sending out some of the
remaining Tails clones in one of the vessels to acquire more supplies and meet
back with us at the rendevous point. They agreed with this plan so we tracked
down "0100", "0110", "0101", and "0111" to do handle this mission for us. The
four were not thrilled with the news, but they liked the idea better than us all
starving to death so early into our life among the stars. With that we sent them
off on "Mini Boaty McBoatface I" and the rest of the DeLorian time clone crew
continued its journey to meet with our first clients as smugglers against the
Federation.
gemini://cosmic.voyage/The DeLorian/0001.txt