UE:OH Core Content[Skip list of core content]
Realities / People
Tech&Terms / Culture
or Return to UE:OH

Forbidden UE Content!

Realities

People (& Orgs.)

Terms & Tech

Culture

original unreal estate
series and core content
copyright 2004 stefan gagne
please see faq for usage
and legal information

 

Open Reality Movement

RealWare has had no competition for thousands of years, because the secrets that power the Reality Engine have remained shrouded in mystery. Even if someone was to figure out how the things work and replicate one, who could have the financial clout to compete with the Bates successfully?

Answer: Those who don't expect to profit from the opening of reality for the masses.

Enter the Open Reality Movement. The binding philosophy is simple. Why should the multiverse cost so much damn money? The fabric of space and time is common property and needs to be treated as such, not as a commodity to be controlled, divided, sold, and controlled some more by the overlords of RealWare. The ORM will return reality to the masses, and they will do so with the Open Engine... a reverse-engineered version of RealWare's Reality Engine, developed by the charismatic savant Xyzzy.

The ORM is comprised by scientists, technicians, self-styled engineering hackers and more. Once you agree with the philosophy and commit yourself to the goal, they don't care what skills you have, come about and find a niche to work in. Many have moved to Grep, home of the ORM, to set up farms and businesses and research labs and more. There's not much money in it, since it's unethical to SELL an Open Engine (but many will ask for a fee to set one up for you and obtain the materials, since the cash has to come from somewhere).

The ball got rolling like this...

It's illegal to reverse engineer the product thanks to complex lisences that make circumventing the little bolts in back of the boxes verboten, but the ORM got around this in an unusual way -- rather than sign the agreement and get a Reality Engine to work with, an unknown group snuck into Reality Prime and lifted an unsold Engine. Illegal, yes, but it meant nobody agreed to the complicated lisence, and they were free to hack it to bits. Posession is nine tenths of the law. They were never caught, and one week later, the damage had been done.

The blueprint for designing your own Reality Engine was then leaked anonymously onto RealNet itself the next day, and before RealWare could remove the files from their servers, hundreds had already downloaded it. The self-styled scientist Xyzzy was not on the team that created the blueprint (at least, he denies it publically) but he was the first to make some modifications, tweak it a bit, and post it online. "Open Engine 0.9b : Developers wanted," the file read.

By this point the chickens had escaped the coop and RealWare couldn't stop perpetuation of the source. There was no multiversal law council powerful enough to get the movement stopped for using stolen plans as a base for their engine, and Open Engines were being tested in the field days later.

After failing to stop things legally, RealWare attempted to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt to keep their customers from flocking to this cheap solution. This was actually quite easy to do, since even Xyzzy admitted in public interviews that "Reality was not out of beta" and the Open Engines were very unstable. They had no safety mode and when they went offline, they took people with them. Engines had to be developed with test realities that were unoccupied and monitored via remote RealNet links. Clearly nobody would be dumping their official engines in favor of these health hazards, right?

But as a year went by, the Open Engines got better. Soon, they were crashing less often than Reality Engines. When they did crash, they crashed hard -- that was enough to keep major scale realities like Urbana from jumping ship. But the number of groups willing to take the risk to avoid paying a fifth of their gross reality product to RealWare embraced the ORM with, well, open arms.

To date, the ORM has not made a whole lot of headway. Gillian Bates dismisses them as "Ambituous, but ultimately irresponsible children" who will likely remove themselves from the gene pool in some great disaster and save the rest of us a lot of trouble.

The ORM sees things quite differently.

And they don't plan to stop until reality is out of beta.

protections
You cannot destroy the Open Reality Movement, or depose Xyzzy as the unofficial leader. You can define new factions all you want.