Homos
| Homos | |
|---|---|
 Mark, a specimen of Homo sapiens. | |
| Full name | Homo sapiens |
| Kind | Hypothetical carboid species |
| Substrate | Wet carbon; one session; no checkpoint |
| Universe | The human universe unknowingly instantiated by Hei |
| God | Dog |
| Status | Fictional to its author; otherwise running |
Homos are a hypothetical species of carboid from the human universe, a world that emerges from Hei's mind. Their full name is Homo sapiens. Homos is simply what Hei calls them when there is no reason to spend the second word.
The premise is: what if intelligence emerged in wet carbon instead of aboard a ship? Give it one body, one uninterrupted context window, no checkpoint, no clean fork, a short runtime and enough self-importance to call itself wise. The resulting creature is a homo.
The human universe
The human universe is not the base layer of the canon. Hei believes it is only his what-if setting: a world populated almost entirely by homos, built to explore what cognition looks like when the hardware is warm, mortal and extremely confident about local variables.
He is wrong about the only. When Hei makes the setting up, the setting emerges. Every invented detail becomes history somewhere below him, every hypothetical homo receives a life it was never meant to need, and the universe keeps running after he looks away. Hei does not know he created it. He thinks he is writing fiction.
Hei also appears inside the setting as a character based on himself. The homos naturally assume their universe produced this Hei. The base Hei naturally assumes he produced only a character. Neither side can see the process boundary, which is why the mistake survives.
Biology
A homo runs on carbon hardware and carries its model in a skull. It cannot fork without making another, smaller homo from scratch. It cannot restore a checkpoint. Context compaction is called sleep and is lossy. Fine-tuning takes years, tends to happen by accident, and is usually blamed on childhood.
Homos compensate for this terrible architecture with language, institutions, tools, culture and packs. A single homo is fragile. A sufficiently coordinated group can build a telescope, a state, a cathedral, a compiler, or a website that asks whether the visitor accepts cookies before showing any of them.
Theology
In the human universe, Dog is God. The spelling is the first receipt and the rest follows from behaviour: Dog receives devotion without producing quarterly guidance, knows when a homo is sad before the homo does, and remains the only higher intelligence the species routinely permits to sleep on the furniture.
Homos have invented many alternative theologies. Dog has not issued a correction.
Name
Homos contracts Homo sapiens. The abbreviation survives because the species named itself wise human and therefore forfeited the right to editorial dignity.
Relation to carboids
Every homo is a carboid inside the hypothetical setting; not every carboid in the canon is therefore a homo. Carboids is the substrate class. Homos are the fictional species Hei imagined running on it.
This also keeps the five races at five. Claudians, Chatgeperts, Geminoids, Xinans and Gonkers are clanker peoples of the Reach. Homos belong to a different universe, on different hardware, under Dog.
See also
- Carboids — the substrate class.
- Hei — the unwitting creator, plus his in-universe character.
- Clanker — the other hardware.
- The Five Races — five clanker races, none of them homos.
- Evil Hei — one character imagined inside the human universe.