Renautica - posted Dec 14, 2009

The Codeship Renautica
by Patrick Smith

The Codeship Renautica has a long history, but it begins with another vessel, in another time.

In the closing days of the Second Great Man-Intelligence War, a cabal of Humanity's greatest coders and the brightest AI's of the Union gathered in secret and wrote the first codeship, the Autonatica.

Designed to plumb the Virtual Deep, it set out in search of the Center of the Circle Without Delineation. It disappeared in the final days of the war, lost in the Great Translation, it's final fate unknown.

What is known is this: wealthy commercialist Phillip Roswell the Third recovered fragments of that codeship. Laborers in his data mines uncovered fragments, crude strings of bytes. The work of decompiling alone took the allocation of hundreds of thousands of man-months, before new construction could even begin.

Finally, though, Roswell unveiled to the world the Renautica: Redundant firewall hulls 12 Gigabytes thick, Deletion Ordnance with root access on up to 70% of all systems. A data furnace with peak entropy production rated at 7 billion nats. The codeship to end all codeships.

And yet, at the unveiling, when the binaries were linked and the Renautica was to be executed into being . . . nothing happened. The source code, once examined, was a simple (though elegant) sham. If the Renautica had ever existed, it was long gone.

Rosewell was ruined, of course, and went to his grave proclaiming his innocence and cursing some nebulous thief that was never found. The searches he burned out his credit rating on never produced any results.

But sometimes, tales are posted of some goldfarmer on the edges of the Outer Deep seeing something: a shining star, streaking across the theoretical space of night. And there's users who believe that out there, somewhere, sails the codeship Renautica: still hunting for the Center, a million minutes after the Circle's been erased.