Time for your stream

{if monica > 0}

Jeremy grabs a beer from his 'fridge then gives you a double-take when he comes in. "What the hell happened to you? Go gay?"

"Huh?"

"Fancy haircut? New clothes? You're too young and too broke to have a midlife crisis."

You give him a quick rundown of what happened.

{else}

Jeremy grabs a beer.

{endif}

"You ready to do this?" he asks.

You run down your list. Registered for streaming, check. {if social-media = true}Social media, check.{endif}{if Monica > 0}Wardrobe upgrade, check.{endif} {if registered > 1}Prepared fancy background for your stream, check.{endif} Teeth checked for spinach, check. Computer updated and ready, check.

"I am ready," you state with as much confidence as you can muster.

You log onto Twitch and initiate your first stream... to all of three people. Oh, well, you'll upload the video to YouTube and you can collect hits there as your stream takes off.

You run through the theory of The Sim quickly, spending more time on the arguments against it... and refuting them as well as you can. Then you turn to programming.

This is your strong point and you summarize the ancient viewpoint of the Mythical Man Month and other programming basics, highlighting that there is simply no such thing as bug-free code. Even code that's 'perfect' when written becomes ensnared in entropy over time as new modules are attached, new extensions extended, new databases connected. If this is a simulation, you conclude, it must be buggy. And where there are bugs, there are exploits.

You just highlight some of the exploits you've seen... either as a user, as with games, or as a programmer helping companies recover from buffer overrun, dictionary attacks on passwords, or DOS attacks.

Finally you get to the meat of your topic. "Over the next weeks, we'll be working together to develop a framework for hacking the sim. There are a number of approaches that have been tried in the past... from prayer to mechanized prayer to magic spells to the Enochian language. We're going to look at each of these from the standpoint of how they correspond to the one thing we know... that the universe is built on math. To the extent that these languages correspond to the basic maths of the universe, they may have validity. To the extent they don't, we'll have to reject them. We'll also analyze how, exactly, we can key into the universe's interpreter or compiler, what libraries may exist for our use, and what libraries we can build together.

"I hope that you'll stick with me as we work this exercise. Obviously this is a full-time job and I'd appreciate any of you who want to support me on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/user?u=33173948 . Be sure to like and subscribe to my Facebook page. And with that, I wish you a great night."

You answer the few questions... until you get to the last one. "Do you know that you're messing with big trouble? Stop this project or you'll be stopped."

Well, that is a sort of a question.

"It's true that hacking black-box systems can be dangerous," you say. "We're going to approach this carefully. We'll build protections into our access mechanisms. It would not do to create a hard reboot of the system."

"I'm talking something a lot more immediate than programming problems, asshole."

"Okay, you're out." You click the link to ban one of your three subscribers. What the hell kind of user name is Holy_Knight anyway?