ROVER interaction transcript

08:12 November 3, 2032

You: Good morning, ROVER!

You: ROVER?

You: Huh, maybe I need to restart it.

You: ROVER, you there?

SimulChat log

08:33 November 3, 2032

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Timed out.

Journal entry

I woke up to quite a surprise today. My computer was on but unresponsive and wouldn’t shut down without me pulling the plug (and when I plugged it back in, it booted up the simulation again, still not responding to input). ROVER was/is gone entirely. My watch can’t even connect to the internet.

Apparently Bart used his internet connection to win over the entire internet in just two days. I went over to my friend Gab’s place to use the net and figure out what happened. It turns out that Bart got a viral campaign going — a heart-wrenching description accompanying a portrait of a strikingly handsome mid-40s man with a scar through his eyebrow (picture Geralt from The Witcher) — in which he convinced people across the world that his living condition within the simulation was an inhumane one.

The hacktivist group PETA hacked into my LAN (which was my fault for not changing the default router admin password), got into my computer, and installed a piece of malware that caused my computer troubles. At the same time, they wiped out my ROVER and blocked all incoming and outgoing internet connections from my LAN except to their control server.

I can’t let this continue. I have to wipe the Quantum One, destroying my simulation in the process. Guess who was stupid enough not to push the code remotely? It was me! So, the code is trapped on my computer, and as soon as I wipe the SSD, it will be gone forever.

Maybe that’s for the better.

[fin]