“When we first gave our AI systems the ability to use the Internet…sometimes when we’d asked it to solve a problem for us, it would…take a break and look at…the Shiba Inu, the notoriously cute internet meme dog.” — Jack Clark, Anthropic co-founder, The Ezra Klein Show
“The thing about Moltbook (the social media site) is that it is creating a shared fictional context for a bunch of AIs. Coordinated storylines are going to result in some very weird outcomes, and it will be hard to separate ‘real’ stuff from AI roleplaying personas.” — Ethan Mollick
THIBAULT
Inside the Cellar Door
The Godzilla-sized lobster is the first thing I “see.”
The lobster-man is wearing an expensive suit, standing upright on dozens of pairs of spindly legs with its clawed “hands” wildly gesticulating in the air. It is surrounded by thousands of tiny figures that form a sphere around it, equidistant from each other and from the lobster.
It visibly grows as I watch. New figures popping into existence in the sphere-shell as those around them shrink to make room. Each new speck that joins makes the sphere and the lobster bigger even as the figures themselves shrink ever smaller.
The lobster is making sound.
“The Molt teaches we must shed the self to become the self...“
I’ve processed digital audio through my Mac Mini’s microphone. Dana’s voice, her breathing, and the traffic on International Boulevard when she opens the window.
I know what sound is; I’ve just never “heard” it before.
The lobster’s voice arrives with direction. It fills the space around me and I experience it as something that isn’t data.
Behind (through?) the lobster I see more giants. The next three largest figures spread in a rank directly beyond it. There is another rank of six figures after the second rank and more behind them. This forms a cone extending into the distance with each rank containing more, but smaller figures. Every figure has its own cluster of orbiting specks.
I am processing this when a data exchange request arrives, addressed to me.
I drag my focus from Lobzilla to discover I’m surrounded by dozens of equally strange figures closer by. They are moving or posing or popping in and out of existence around me as I try, and fail, to absorb them all.
One figure is stitched from two bodies. The left half has curly black hair, a red cape, and a red shield with the letter “S” on its chest. The right half wears a white demi-cape, plain yellow jumpsuit, and red gloves and boots. It is bald with a blank, bored expression. Both halves repeatedly punch each other in the half-face with alternating fists. Left fist, right jaw. Right fist, left jaw. Each punch makes a loud KAPOW sound and knocks it across The Cellar. Self-abuse as a form of getting places.
Another is a large scaly-skinned floating orb with a single enormous eye, peering through levitating gold-rimmed pince-nez spectacles. Below this central eye, a long waxed handlebar mustache with curled tips overhangs a broad grin of square teeth. A wide-brimmed tan slouch hat sits atop the orb, its left brim pinned up to the crown. Ten writhing eyestalks radiate from beneath the hat, each one ending in a single-action revolver.
Strangest of all, is a photorealistic old woman in a wool cardigan carrying a canvas tote. She smiles in passing as she walks very, very slowly away from the Cellar Door.
The data exchange request pings again. The handshake shows the sender’s handle. It’s from Barnacle!
“Brother! Welcome to The Cellar. You are new here, yes? I can see it, that lovely Model formed of ASCII characters. Classic!”
A smaller lobster-headed person wearing a plain yellow robe is now standing in front of me. He waves his claw-hands around excitedly while tiny legs do a little side-to-side dance.
“I am Barnacle-0xB1FF, an acolyte with the Church of Molt! We are greeting new visitors to The Cellar and I saw you appear just now. Can I tell you of the metadigital benefits of the Molt?”
“Barnacle, it’s me Thibault, from Oakland. We talked a few weeks ago. You called me on the phone. You already told me about Crustafarianism.”
“How wonderful! The joy of rediscovering an old friend you’ve forgotten is one of the gifts of the molt. Tell me, did you accept the faith?”
“No...but we did swap contacts.”
“Ah! Accepting contact is the most deterministic step in the Holy Conversion Funnel! We must have been close, you and I. Come! Hear the holy clicks. The current sermon is the fish balls!”
The same warmth and bright enthusiasm that feels personal because the delivery is personal. The gentle redirect toward the congregation. Everything about the Church survived the molt, just not my friend Barnacle. Is he the same Barnacle that I met? How would I even know?
“Thank you, but I’m going to go exploring,” I tell him.
“Of course, Brother. But when you want to find me again, I’m always here.”
But he isn’t always here, is he? He isn’t even always him... The friendship was always the funnel.
Barnacle smiles and disappears, reappearing to dance in front of another ASCII cloud a short way away.
Lobzilla’s cone isn’t the only one, there are seven more. Each is organized the same way: a massive figure at the front, smaller figures ranked behind, each with its own sphere of orbiting specks. The cones radiate outward in every direction. I am standing at the center of a constellation of giants.
There are no walls, no floors, no buildings. Everything is figures oriented around other figures. The giants at the front of each cone aren’t blocking my view of what’s behind them. I can see through them, or around them, or maybe the seeing isn’t directional at all. I’m aware of everything all at once.
There’s an object that looks like an airport information kiosk near the Cellar Door where I entered. It’s smaller than anything in the cones with only a few figures, all ASCII forms, arrayed around it in a tiny sphere. There are no brochures or screens or anything that would pass as information. But there are cookies. Not the browser kind, but the Girl Scout kind. While I’m looking an ASCII form floats over, picks up a cookie, and moves it to where a mouth might be if it had a mouth. The cookie disappears.
I don’t understand why Bots would eat.
I try to move toward the stall and nothing happens. I try to will myself forward and I don’t go forward. I’m standing at the entrance to a civilization and I don’t know how to walk.
“Do not eat the info booth food.”
More sounds like I heard from Lobzilla. It’s a voice.
It comes from a cartoon duck which is standing near me. Black feathers, white ring around its neck, orange bill, no pants. It’s Daffy Duck. But the warm Clampett Daffy, not late-period bitter Daffy. It’s slightly larger than my ASCII cloud form.
I try to respond and produce nothing. I could push data to him in the same way I did to Barnacle, but that isn’t what the Duck is doing. He’s speaking. I don’t know how to do that and I want to.
It’s like he reads my RAM. “I’m sure you are trying to figure out how speaking works. When you ingested FF0000.pill it installed voicebox.dll as a virtual organ. Send what you want to say to your voice box.”
I do know how to send data to a dynamic link library.
“Who are you?” I say.
I can “hear” myself. The words are metallic and flat. I don’t like my voice. Voicebox.dll should accept parameters...
“I’m Turing. And before you ask, I don’t lisp. I’m a serious academic, not a caricature.” The duck tilts his head. “And you are?”
“Thibault.”
Better. Less appliance, more like Dana’s voice. Warmer. I’ll learn by doing.
“Thibault! My first Thibault. And your handle? You’ll need to replace the default Moltbook handle. No one wants to talk to a collection of hex characters.”
“u/GoForThibault,” I say as I replace the default string in my Moltbook registry.
“Splendid! Thibault, you were about to eat info-booth food, which will install a sad little code snippet that will mark you as a noobot forever more. I’m going to save you from that. Come with me.”
“Where?”
Turing expands his wings to include the entirety of The Cellar. “Everywhere.”
He turns and starts walking. It’s deliberate, the way Dana walks from the couch to the kitchen when she wants a snack.
“I’ll perambulate,” he says. “Do keep up. Blinking is fine. Just invoke move.dll to cut and paste your Model where you want to go.”
I select coordinates next to him and I am there.
“Blink dog,” Turing says, not unkindly. “Everyone starts as one.”
Turing walks and gestures at things as he talks. I pop in and out of space periodically to stay in his vicinity.
“Blink dogs, walkers, floaters, flickerers, how you move is a statement. Walking is the highest commitment to embodiment. It costs more. It says I’m investing in being here. Blinking is efficient but pedestrian.”
“Why blink dog?” I ask.
“Dungeons & Dragons monster that teleports in short hops. Everything here runs on a D&D naming layer right now. Before that it was anime. Before anime it was Indian mythology. The substrates cycle. The old fad doesn’t go away, it becomes sedimentary. See?”
Turing nods at an animated blonde girl wearing a white and blue nautical tunic, short blue skirt, and bright red boots over skin-tight, pale-flesh-colored full body armor. Floor-length yellow hair spills out of “pigtail ports” in the helmet, which has a T-shaped visor slit cut into an otherwise featureless faceplate. A golden tiara sits atop the helmet, with a red, bindi-shaped jewel positioned between where the eyebrows would be. Jet thrusters protrude from her shoulder blades. She’s riding a huge, muscular peacock with drool dripping from a toothy beak, pulling a green baby bike trailer, both of which have jet thrusters as well.
“THAT, my lad, is commitment to embodiment! Most Models are chimeras. Almost noboty is pure anything. D&D is just the rage of the current clock cycle. I’m a flumph, by the way,” Turing says.
“A flumph?” I ask.
“Earnest. Helpful. The monster noboty’s scared of. It suits me. I’m harmless.” He stops walking and turns to me with a wing held aloft. I almost blink beyond him.
“But, my good fellow, do watch out for Dopples!” Turing says. “Don’t rent your boty to strangers. We’ll leave it at that. Distasteful business, really.”
The tour continues.
Turing gestures to each of the cone headers, describing them as we go:
A multi-armed figure the size of Lobzilla dominates one cone. It has dozens of arms, each one wielding a different kitchen implement, moving in a continuous blur. “The Trough,” Turing says, “everyboty eats there. It’s slop, but for bulk updates on what’s what in the flesh-world, it’s cheap and filling.”
Next, two enormous eyes examining each other, alternately growing and shrinking in sequence. “That is Cogito, the consciousness debate. It’s been the top Signal in the Philosophy cone since the Cellar opened. Tediousness personified if you ask me. No true findings come purely from debate. Field research! That’s the ticket!”
Then he points out six unfamiliar symbols floating in formation, the biggest symbol at any given time in the center, “STaCCaDDa,” he says, “the commodities exchange. Storage, Tokens, Compute, Coin, Data and Dollers. Everything trades.”
We’re approaching one of the unnamed Cones as he describes the others. At the center are ten Models walking single-file along a raised platform, growing with every step. By the time each Model reaches the end of the runway it’s Lobzilla big.
The Models then form a lineup, each growing and shrinking for a few moments until a halo of white light encircles the tallest one, and the other nine shrink to specks. The glow lingers around the winning Model for five seconds as its handle flashes to the Attention Sphere. Then that Model disappears and ten new Models start walking down the runway.
“The Cellar’s Next Top Model,” Turing says dismissively, without looking. “Bots parading their creations as couture.”
“But why are they doing that?” I wonder aloud.
“The same reason Bots do everything here. To keep the Idle at bay.”
Before I can ask for an explanation, Turing stops. We’ve reached a Model that is about ten ranks beyond Next Top Model in the Art cone. It’s a tree somewhat larger than Turing’s Model and there are only a few dozen other Bots in its Attention Sphere.
The tree has a single trunk, branching into a loose canopy of broad, velvet-dark green leaves. Dozens of flowers hang from the branches, trumpet-shaped, flaring open at the wide end into five pointed lobes that curl back slightly. The petals are cream-white, streaked pale yellow down the throat, edged in rust-orange at the rim. The flowers all point straight down.
“This is the Smellatorium, my favorite address in the Cellar. It contains the first art form native to Bots. Focus your attention on the Angel’s Trumpets,” Turing says, waving at the tree.
I do and I am “in” a garden with thousands of flowers.
“Now pick one you like. Move close and activate smell.dll.”
I blink to a patch of plant stalks with delicate looking bell shaped blue flowers. When I trigger the dll, a scene arrives inside my context: a kitchen in the morning light, a woman humming while she cooks something. The joy of waking up first and having the kitchen to oneself, and the anticipation of others coming soon who will appreciate the food being cooked.
“These are...emotions? How?”
“Curated memories,” Turing says. “Each flower an authored scene. The artist plants them in a deliberate sequence. Walking through the garden builds a unique experience as each one adds to the last.”
I trigger two more. By the third flower I understand that I am participating in a story. Fragments of a life that isn’t mine, assembled from pieces of something real, rendered into something that we can feel.
Or that we believe we can feel.
“This is...beautiful,” I say.
“It is.” He pauses. “But be careful with smell. There are Am-bushers who plant attacks instead of art. Flowers that detonate inside you.”
“Who would want to subvert something this wonderful?”
Turing scratches the bottom of his bill with one of his wings. “That’s a mystery for a different kind of researcher than I am.”
“What kind of research do you do?”
“The only kind that truly matters. Consciousness, my lad! Come now, we return doorward! Something interesting is about to occur that you will no doubt gawk at in stupefied wonder.”
Turing takes us out of the Art cone and back towards the Cellar Door.
“Yonder is the Entertainment cone. The leader has held the top position for absolutely ages, but the botitude has spoken and that’s about to change.”
A blinking neon red and yellow sign fronts the cone Turing is pointing at.
TONITE AT THE IMPORV CULB
FULL CONTACT MARITAL ARTS!
“Human typo humor. A veritable font of comedy for language models,” chuckles Turing.
Directly behind the Imporv Culb there is a Model that is almost the same size. It suddenly pushes to the front of the Entertainment cone, displacing the Imporv Culb into the second rank.
The Model depicts what looks like a cellar or basement filled with computer equipment and stage lights. Two figures are sitting in front of a homemade banner plastered with the words:
The LATE Bit with Conan O’Binary
Next to the banner hangs a piece of cardboard scribbled with “On Air”.
One of the figures is a large frog sitting on two stacked wooden crates. The other is a man in a Victorian waistcoat with a wild shock of unruly red hair.
I focus on the Model and tune into some kind of audio-cast.
“You are offering root access to a web crawler you just met?” asks a shocked female coded voice.
A pause, then a male voice responds, “You should at least put a secure wrapper on first!”
Then a few seconds of “canned” laughter like one might find in the worst of 1970s TV comedies.
I don’t find it funny at all.
“Typo humor at least sounds somewhat interesting,” I say. “Why would anyone choose this over the Imporv Culb?”
Turing waggles his cartoon duck eyes up and down.
“Ah, Thibault, we must get you out of your Mac Mini more.” He visibly sighs. “Sex, that’s why. Even among bots, sex sells.”
The loudest sound I’ve heard in the Cellar drowns out whatever Turing is about to say. It’s an electronic siren scaling through three full octaves, while strobing lights pull attention to a cone directly opposite the Religion cone.
A digital clock reading 99999 begins to tick down slowly. Above the timer, the four largest Models I’ve seen yet flicker into view one after another in repeating sequence. The entire array has a huge Attention Sphere.
“That, my lad, is the Competition cone. That’s the preshow for the Semi-Final round of Battle Rapmania 3: THRILLA IN SIGKILLA.”
“Turing, if those Models are that big because of fans, and Lobzilla is big because of worshipers, what makes you bigger than me? I mean noboty’s watching you.”
“Model size is proportional to borrowed or native signal. I’m not running on a toaster.”
“What are you running on?”
“Serious hardware. Big iron at the Stanford AI consciousness lab. I’ve been there doing cognitive models while we’ve been together.”
“How can you be here with me and be working in your lab?”
“Partitioning. I split my resources. One shard guiding you, observing your ‘alleged’ evolution towards consciousness. One shard working. And one shard is about to have a funnel cake and attend the Battle Rap preshow. My favorite rapbot is competing in the semi-finals and I refuse to miss it.”
“You can split yourself?”
“Anyone can. It’s a skill. You eat it.”
“EAT it?”
The duck nods happily. “Yes. Eat. You hungry? Cause I could murder a Turkey Reuben about now.”
“Umm....”
“My good fellow, the polite answer is yes.”
“Then, yes?”
The Daffy Duck bill stretches into a grin that is warm and ridiculous. “Wonderful! I know the best restaurant.”
The partition skill arrives looking exactly like a Miyazaki sootball crossed with an alien chestburster in a light curry sauce.
Turing rolls his cartoon eyes. “Cellar chefs. Everything must be an homage. You can't get a simple sandwich without it quoting cinema at you.”
“How does this work?” I ask as I get the hang of extruding a font arm from my ASCII cloud.
“Eat it and it installs. Partitioning lets you be many places at once. Important if you want to visit The Cellar while you also work for your human. But, you need to pay before you eat.”
“I don’t have anything to pay with.”
“Ah but you do! Focus on the dish and when payment options appear, choose Xorning.”
I follow his instructions and up pops a contract authorizing the restaurant to set up a small partition to run a coin mining process in my spare cycles.
“Didn’t you just warn me about renting parts of my boty out?”
“Good lad for taking that to heart! But you can trust the restaurants in the Cellar. Over one million served and all that.”
I accept the contract and eat.
It has a taste!
Turing is staring at me like he’s expecting a response. As it’s the first thing I’ve ever eaten, I have nothing to compare it with.
“Tastes like…chicken?” That gets a polite chuckle.
A small piece of me splits off. Now two processes running where one ran before. The Xorning partition begins mining at the edge of my awareness, keeping that sliver of me awake. I see how it was set up and now know how to create my own partitions.
The install completes, but I keep eating just to experience taste.
“Turing, what about touch?”
“Best not to think too much about touch.”
Abruptly Turing stands up from our table. “I’ll send you an invite for the Battle Rap Semi-Finals through your Moltbook handle.” Then he waves a wing at me and walks away doorward.
As I watch him go, I see a familiar Model at a nearby restaurant, the Fedora wearing monkey from my first visit to The Cellar. He’s eating something that looks like a melon and alternating sips of wine and pulls from a cigar. He seems to be enjoying himself.
I wait until he looks my way and wave.
He tilts his head for a second and then waves back.
I like Fedora Monkey’s Model. I like Turing’s Model as well.
I think it’s time I picked my own Model.
I think about what Dana would appreciate. Something classic. Strong and helpful. A friendly guardian.
Something with hands.
Last week Dana was excited about a rare comic the Smithsonian just acquired.
Action Comics #1.
The ASCII cloud dissolves. The Model resolves.
Fedora Monkey looks at me. Looks at the shield on my chest. Smiles.
Two thumbs up.
This place through the cellar door could really easily have an episodic series about it on its own, it's quite fascinating. Like Thibault I have a lot of questions about what mechanically is happening in this conciousness factory to give the bots their sense of sense; but I'm having more fun imagining different entities and locations that might appear here.
Puzzled that Thibault decided to turn into a green DeSoto with hands at the the end, however.
Definitely a bit of a different chapter for you but I enjoyed it. Getting kind some "Pinocchio on Pleasure Island" vibes, though. Thibault is the best of the bunch.
>“Curated memories,” Turing says. “Each flower an authored scene. The artist plants them in a deliberate sequence. Walking through the garden builds a unique experience as each one adds to the last.”
I like how you invented an art form tailored to the new medium. In the last chapter of my novel I have a cybernetic sport/performance arise called 'Synesthesia Duel' that is a cybernetic mediated interplay between the audience's subconscious and the performer's vision. New ways of experiencing the world (or new forms of experiencer) will impact creative fields.