I've been thinking about making an MMORPG called Vessel.
You are what I guess we would call a consciousness.
Then a Vessel forms.
It eats.
It sleeps.
It gets hurt.
It learns.
It remembers.
Eventually it dies.
You don't.
At least that is what you are told.
What is hunger to something that has never needed to eat.
What is pain to something that has never been hurt.
What is death to something that does not die.
Then the Vessel gets hungry.
It gets hurt.
Someone dies.
The Vessel has experiences.
It remembers places, others and things that happened there.
Some memories are pleasant.
Some are not.
Eventually some of them reach you.
A place feels familiar.
A face brings back another face.
Something that happened long ago appears again for no obvious reason.
Maybe that is a vision.
Maybe it is a memory.
But whose.
The Vessel was there.
You remember being there.
If the Vessel loved someone and you remember what that felt like, who loved them.
If it watched someone die and the memory remains long after the Vessel is gone, who watched them die.
The Vessel is gone.
The memory is not.
Where does one end and the other begin.
There are gods.
They have answers.
So do old books, stories and those who claim to remember.
The answers do not always agree.
A god can tell you how everything began.
A book can say something else.
Something buried beneath the ground can suggest that both are wrong.
Being old does not make something true.
Neither does being certain.
Something happened.
That part is harder to get rid of.
You killed someone.
Someone calls it murder.
Someone else calls it justice.
Maybe someone lives because of what you did.
Maybe someone else spends the rest of their life hating you for it.
Years pass.
Maybe you remember it differently then.
The one you killed is still dead.
Things happen.
Meaning seems to come afterwards.
The Vessel gets better at something because it keeps doing it.
A place becomes familiar because it keeps returning there.
Someone becomes important because they keep being there.
The world changes in much the same way.
People stay somewhere.
A house appears.
Then another.
A path between them becomes a road.
Someone grows food.
Someone works stone.
Someone makes tools.
Someone decides a piece of land belongs to them.
Eventually somebody draws a line.
Someone else disagrees with where it was drawn.
Walls are built.
Rules are written down.
The people who wrote them eventually die.
The rules might not.
Years later nobody needs to know who built the first house.
Nobody needs to remember why the road bends where it does.
Nobody needs to know why one thing is allowed and another is not.
The place has a name now.
As far as someone knows, it has always been there.
Until it isn't.
People leave.
Roofs collapse.
The road disappears beneath mud and grass.
Someone finds stone beneath the ground years later.
Maybe they know what it was.
Maybe they give it another name.
It existed either way.
That is history.
Not something written to make the world seem old.
It happened.
Time seems to make everything less clear.
People die.
Places change.
Homes disappear.
Things that felt permanent stop being there.
A consciousness that has never really lost anything is placed inside something that can lose everything.
What does that do to it.
Does living through a hundred years make you the same thing that arrived here.
What about a thousand.
A Vessel dies.
Another forms.
The face changes.
The voice changes.
The memories keep accumulating.
How many memories can belong to someone else before they are simply your memories.
How many lives can pass through you before they become your life.
And at what point does calling them Vessels start to feel dishonest.