A day in the life of one organism

Somewhere on the eastern island there is an organism that will be born, live, and die in the time it takes you to read this. Nobody wrote its story. This is what actually happens to it, told in order, with a running note on where the telling starts to lie.

It begins with a decision that was not its own

Its parent had been carrying more energy than it needed for a while. On one particular tick, among the eight numbers its controller produced, the fourth one crossed a threshold of 0.5, and the world read that as reproduction. The parent paid, in energy, a fraction it had inherited a preference for, and that fraction became the starting reserve of something new standing on an adjacent cell.

Call it a birth, because that is the shortest accurate word, but notice what did not happen. The parent did not decide to have a child in any sense you would recognise. A number went above a line. Organisms whose numbers went above that line at the wrong moments, when they were too poor to afford it or too rich to need it yet, tended to leave fewer descendants than organisms whose numbers went above it at better ones. After enough generations, the survivors are the ones whose thresholds happen to sit in useful places. That is the entire mechanism. There is no wanting in it.

What our organism receives at that moment is a strange inheritance. Nineteen genes, copied from its parent with the possibility of mutation, setting things like how big it is, how fast it can move, how efficiently it digests, how wide it can sense, how hot and how dry it can stand, and, because the world has to be drawable, what colour it is. And separately, kept deliberately apart from those genes, 2,081 numbers that are the weights of its nervous system.

It does not inherit its parent's memories. The hidden state of its controller, the part that carries information from one moment to the next, is set to zero. It does not inherit anything its parent learned during life either. Whatever adjustments its parent's brain made while alive were discarded at its parent's death and were never copied here. Our organism starts with its parent's instincts and none of its parent's experience, which is a stranger condition than it sounds, and one that biology mostly shares.

The first hundred ticks, in which nothing much can happen

It cannot reproduce yet. There is a maturity age of 100 ticks, and until then that fourth output can cross its threshold as often as it likes and the world will ignore it. What it can do is everything else, and everything else costs energy.

This is the part most people find surprising. Doing nothing is not free. Every living organism pays a basal upkeep every single tick, whatever it does, and on top of that it pays for sensing, at a rate that rises with the square of how far it can sense. Running its brain costs a small flat amount. Moving costs the square of its speed, multiplied by its body size, multiplied by how difficult the terrain is, and that cost is charged on the attempt rather than on arrival. An organism that tries to walk into a wall pays for the walking.

Trying to eat costs something too, whether or not there was anything there. So does reaching out to touch the world, even if the reach hits empty air. Being too hot, too cold, too dry or in the wrong light all cost, and each of those costs rises with the square of how far outside its tolerance it is, so mild discomfort is nearly free and real stress is ruinous. The full itemised table is on energy, metabolism and death, and it is worth reading once, because the shape of that table is the shape of every life in this world.

So our organism, in its first hundred ticks, is running down a battery it was given and cannot yet do the one thing that would justify it. It has to find food, and it has to do so without knowing what food is.

What it is like to be it, as far as anyone can say

Its controller receives 53 numbers each tick. That is the whole of its world.

Eight of them are about its own body: how much energy it has stored, how full its gut is, its health, its age. Six describe the cell it is standing on. Two summarise the eight cells immediately around it. Sixteen describe four directions out to the limit of its sensing range, four numbers per direction. Six concern matter nearby and whatever it happens to be carrying. Two report heat coming off nearby material. Two read signal and trace fields, which is how one organism can leave something another can detect. Four report what happened the last time it tried to act, which is the only feedback it gets. Two describe the cell directly ahead of it. Five concern the ground itself and whether it can be moved.

Read that list again and notice what is missing. There is no channel for "food". No channel for "another organism", "predator", "my offspring", "my kind". Nothing in its perception names a thing. Every number is a generic quantity, a level of something in a direction, and this is a deliberate and quite strict rule of the project, set out channel by channel in how organisms perceive and act.

The reason is simple, and it is the reason the whole project exists. If you give an organism a sensor called "food is that way", then when it moves toward food you have learned nothing, because you told it. If all it has is a gradient in a direction, and it moves up that gradient, and that turns out to be where the resources are, then something happened that you did not write. The discipline is expensive. It means most organisms, most of the time, do nothing intelligible. It is also the only version of the experiment worth running.

So what is it like to be our organism? The honest answer is that nobody knows, and this project has no method that could find out. What can be said is what it has access to: 53 numbers, refreshed every tick, none of which names anything, plus 24 internal values that carry something forward from the previous tick and that nothing tells it what to store.

The 24 numbers it carries forward

Those 24 values are the interesting part. Without them, our organism would be a reflex: the same inputs would always produce the same outputs, and it could not tell a rising reading from a falling one. With them, what it does now depends on what happened before.

How long that memory lasts is itself a gene. Each organism has a leak rate, somewhere between 0.05 and 0.95, that controls how much of the old state survives into the new one. Low leak means a slow, persistent memory that carries information a long way. High leak means a fast, forgetful one that responds to what is happening now. Neither is better in the abstract, and both are heritable, and both are mutating, so the population is quietly running an experiment on how much of the past is worth keeping.

There is a second layer too. Our organism can change its own connection strengths during its life, through a mechanism where connections that were recently active together become eligible for change and a reinforcement signal, computed by the organism itself from changes in its own internal state, decides whether that eligibility becomes a strengthening or a weakening. If you would like the mechanism rather than the summary, it is on Hebbian learning and lifetime neural plasticity.

The important part for our organism's story is what happens to all of it at the end. The 24 carried values, and every adjustment its life made to its own weights, are gone at death. Nothing acquired is inherited. Its offspring, if it has any, get the weights it was born with, mutated. Not the ones it finished with.

The day, and the parts of the day it cannot choose

The world has a diurnal cycle, one hundred ticks long, and our organism lives inside it whether or not anything in its controller has noticed. Light rises and falls. Temperature follows. The light shortfall penalty and the thermal stress penalty are both real costs, and both are shaped by genes it inherited, so two organisms standing on the same cell at the same moment can be paying very different amounts to be there.

That is the quiet engine of most of what you will see if you watch for long enough. Not drama, but a slow sorting: this patch is cheap for organisms with these tolerances and expensive for organisms with those, and over enough generations the map develops a grain. Not because anything moved somewhere on purpose. Because the ones for whom it was expensive left fewer descendants.

The ground, which is not scenery

There is one more thing our organism can do, and it is the newest and least settled part of this world. It can move the ground.

Ground here is a conserved quantity. It can be excavated from a cell, carried, and deposited somewhere else, but it cannot be created or destroyed, so every hole in this world is a mound somewhere else and the total never drifts. Five of our organism's 53 senses concern the ground and whether it can be shifted. Whether it does anything with them depends on weights it inherited and did not choose.

If it digs, the hole outlasts it. That is the whole point, and it is the property that makes this world different from one where the environment is a fixed backdrop. Its descendants, and organisms from lineages it never met, will walk across ground that its actions shaped. Ecologists call this niche construction, and it is one of the few known mechanisms that stops evolution from being a problem that eventually gets solved and stays solved.

Disturbed ground does not stay disturbed forever. Ecological succession lets worked ground recover, which was added after an earlier version of these rules turned the entire world into a permanent brown scar within a few thousand ticks. That failure, and the recalibration that followed it, is described honestly on reshaping the world.

It ends, and the energy does not

Our organism dies in one of two ways. Its energy reaches zero, or it reaches the end of a lifespan set by a gene it inherited. The overwhelming majority go the first way, and most of those go early, before the maturity age, having never had the option of reproducing at all.

What it leaves is a corpse, and the corpse is not a cosmetic detail. The energy in it returns to the world through decay, becoming available again to whatever is nearby. This is not sentiment, it is bookkeeping. This world runs an energy invariant: seven reservoirs are audited, and if the total does not balance, the universe halts rather than continue while quietly leaking. Our organism's death is a transfer between reservoirs, and the books have to close.

If it did reproduce, something else persists. Not its memories, not its learning, not anything it worked out. Its weights, mutated. If its descendants keep diverging from the rest of the population far enough, under a stated rule, they eventually get counted as a lineage of their own, with an identifier, and they show up in the lineage records that anyone watching can browse.

That is the only kind of afterlife on offer here, and it is worth sitting with, because it is approximately the only kind on offer anywhere.

Where this account was lying

Almost everywhere the language got warm.

"Our organism" implies an individual with a perspective. What exists is a row of numbers in several arrays, updated together with every other row. "Decides", "tries", "notices", "wants": every one of those is a convenience, and the project's own rules for public writing ban several stronger versions outright, because a word like that, used often enough, quietly becomes a claim that nobody ever actually made or tested.

Even "food" is a shortcut. There is no food in this world. There are resources, and an ingest action, and a gut that processes at a rate set by a gene, and no organism has any channel telling it that any of this is nutrition.

The reason to write the warm version anyway is that the cold version is unreadable, and the thing being described is genuinely happening. An organism really is born, really does spend energy it cannot replace fast enough, really does die, and really does sometimes leave descendants that are slightly different in ways that turn out to matter. The trick is to enjoy the story and hold on to the fact that the story is a translation.