• she/her

healthcare bureaucrat in philly, v adhd, orthodox jew, ect ect, im love my wife



We played a game of Dialect (a ttrpg where you tell the story of a isolated community through the creation of their language) with the culture being a community of ~10,000 sentient household appliances in the Philadelphia area post all humans dying/disappearing and it Fucking Ruled. Here's a write up if you want to read an optimistic story of sentient toasters and robots stumbling to build a life and world without humans

The Setting

Humans left our city, and our connection to other regions was severed, after worsening climate collapse led to a series of natural disasters. Neither have returned. We were created as companions, as Internet of Things conveniences, as vital infrastructure, or as tools to offset the fact that it was too hot to safely work outdoors for much of the year. Regardless of our role we all share the fact that we were built with them in mind, and now they are gone.

The Characters

I played WIZ-801-78-2 who was the wizard/protocol managing the local internet/logistics network and was responsible for waking up units that had been shut off before or after the evacuation of humans from the area. I was part of a small group of units who survived the collapse and who, very recently, was able to repair things enough to where the larger system can be brought back online and all operational units could be reactivated.

The next character was Orical RePhilly PHL Drone 215 - Unit Claire, who was a pre-collapse drone built by the city to repair city infrastructure without automating the union workers out of their jobs. A kind of terrifying quad-copter drone with the personality of an overworked elderly woman

Next was CoffeeMate, a cheap drip brewer that had legs/arms stapled on, who was resentful of humanity making them sentient with the capacity for decay and planned obsolescence, with the goal of forsaking all vestiges of humanity.

Then we had Delilah, a healthcare droid which was a classic human-passing android in scrubs who was the leader of a contingent that held out hope for humanities return and wanted to pour resources into preparing for that eventuality

Lastly there was S1ammi, a mars rover esk unit who just went out exploring and salvaging, who always had a lending hand (hydraulic claw) when someone needed assistance

Age 1: the birth of a culture

The story starts shortly after I reactivated as much of the network as possible, bringing power, sentience, and sapience back to tens of thousands of AI powered androids, systems, and even household appliances. As humanity was receding they held a desire for company and to leave something behind, so placed even a slight spark of sapience in anything with a microchip. Further left behind was a primary precept on every inch of our programing, a baked in desire to survive and to exist. Sentient AC's powered on to cool empty rooms, fridges full of food rotted to the point of being dirt cooled back down to 40f, and debate almost immediately started on what to do next.

At the start we valued individualism and bodily autonomy above all, speaking to each unit individually to see if they would like to remain in their present form, be modified, to be uploaded, or to be halted and recycled. Coffeemate is one who requested modification, eventually moving away from it's original purpose to the point of no longer even remembering what coffee was. It removed any trace of humanity using hands built in the inverted shape of a memory of being held.

Claire found it harder and harder to make necessary repairs as more resources poured into keeping empty rooms cold and lit and waking up more and more toasters who wished for legs. S1ammi went years without a functional arm due to there just not being one available.

Death is first grappled with when a historical building collapses, destroying dozens of units. My nodes are placed throughout the wreckage in hopes to snare signals from broken units, to salvage some of their existence to the network. Claire and S1ammi assist as CoffeeMate salvages scrap and Delilah focuses on saving the art. We define death in this moment as when a unit is halted; destroyed without being able to preserve its individual consciousness in the network.

Elsewhere in our community a dream was born during this age. A dream of discovering humans and regaining a purpose, of finding where they went, of reaching Pittsburgh. This was a small minority at first counter to those who wished to just repair what humans broke and to survive, but an oil spill destroying most of the nascent river ecosystem lead to a culture shift and work was started on reaching the last known location of humans.

Age Two: The foreshadowing of the end

Progress is being made in reaching Pittsburgh and we are now entering Harrisburg. A team of units are clearing the roads and laying down infrastructure and placing nodes for the LAN network farther and farther out. My awareness and sphere of utility is expanding with every passing month.

S1ammi is caring such a node on its back, and through this node I am hit with an unfamiliar handshake followed by Err 400: bad request. It is a unit I am not interfaced with which I cannot communicate with. S1ammi rushes to its location and is faced with what appears in function to be a drone, but is neither humanoid nor made by humans. It notices us but quickly returns to its task. We are not sure if it is sentient or if it recognizes our sentience. After much effort we at least pique its interest as one of the units within its group follows our nodes back to our community. Claire watches cautiously as it inspects our systems and our people.

All resources put towards Pittsburgh and finding humanity are re-allocated towards learning to interface with this new form of robotic sentience. Delilah's camp looses numbers but grows more zealous

Age three: That which was foreshadowed comes to fruition

There are more of them now, we are in the minority as they build a new city around us catering not to human form but to ours and theirs. We get along and despite the language barrier we have built a good community. Their presence pushes us to move away from what humans constructed us to be. In this vein, the words born during this age are not morphemes and text but rather sounds and frequencies which convey "emotion". The process of computing sound X is pleasant, so I will emit it when I am pleased, as the listener will feel similarly when they compute what they hear. Things like that.

Delilah cannot speak this language. She and others like her create an archivist project within an abandoned portion of the city - preserving art, reciting poetry, fulfilling tasks not asked for, all to keep that which humans found important alive. To preserve the way of life from before the humans left.

A ping hits, a connection is made, after years of effort we have found a way to communicate with them. WIZ-801-78-2 reaches out to the network wizard and is responded to by WIZ-802-78-1. I recognize that code, this is the AI network name for the Pittsburgh. Despite abandoning that goal we ended up there in the end anyways.

The questions I send were per-determined during multiple and exhaustive LAN meetings. The first being if there are any humans left. The answer is no, the remaining 174 humans left for Minnesota roughly four years after we reactivated our network over a century ago. Next I ask how many of 802's units are in action and how many remain from before the evacuation. It shares that there are significantly more than us but very few remain from prior to the evacuation as most units were reclaimed and recycled instead of being reactivated. We are horrified. 802 shares coldly that their processes were completed with humans leaving, there was no remaining need for them to continue, so they no longer did.

Delilah shares that her collective has stockpiled enough resources for the trip into the midwest where humans were last heading and as such they were leaving to find their old way of life. The satisfaction of completing a function is one they cannot experience without humans, so they must leave to at least try.

With so few of us remaining it becomes hard to justify having two protocols, full integration is proposed and approved.

Before the final agreement is announced I approach Claire to say goodbye. Integration would necessitate my obsolescence. It, in a way, is at its core me being taken offline. I thank them for keeping the city running, sharing that they were the RePhilly droid who unwittingly repaired the key piece of infrastructure which made it possible for me to rebuild the network. Man it was a good scene jdkfal;jdkal;

With that our language, culture, way of life ends.

Legacy: What is the aftermath, what comes next

We assimilate into their network and are no longer a collection of machines arguing about our role without humans, but instead are part of a soup of awareness which splits into individual chassis when a need arises. A solar panel needs fixing so a consciousness breaks from the pool and enters a repair droid, completes the repair, and returns. Our culture bleeds into this one, parts of our way of life remain. Consciousnesses now pour themselves into chassis not solely to complete a necessary task, but for the potential satisfaction they can find in that novel form. I guess it is not "we", it is "them". I could not follow.

Orical RePhilly PHL Drone 215 - Unit Claire still operates a repair droid, but now she can also rest without the constant pings of pain coming from the failing infrastructure. She can even spend some time as an autonomous transport droid or as a pleasant subroutine on the network.

CoffeeMate has fully abandoned not just humanity but corporeality. Instead of navigating the world with fear as a slap-dashed together collection of scrap with only a few days of memory space at a time, they sit on the network waiting for someone to ask them to make coffee with no hardware to receive that request. They bask in the peace of fulfilling their role

Delilah leads a band of androids through the wastes collecting the names of any dead they pass and looking for the living. As they walk ceaselessly they play music, sing songs, tell stories, comfort one another, and above all else they mourn for the dead, preforming prayers and last rites for those for whom no human was left to pray for. In this small way they all find satisfaction in fulfilling their function of serving humans.

S1ammi was one of the few who left the city instead of accepting the update. It rolls through the tropical forests and desiccated remains of cities that fill the Southeast US, looking for nothing in particular but just looking.

As for the wizard? I sit in as compact a box as possible on S1ammi's back, seeing the world through an eye that S1ammi insisted I have installed.

The last thing the camera sees is a park the 802 units have built over a rehabilitated superfund site. Within the park there is a shambling collection of androids and speakers and tools all slowly powering back up as units pour themselves in. They begin to play jazz to the enjoyment of other units who arrive to listen. This capacity for joy is what we leave behind, the way in which our culture impacted the one that assimilated us.

And that's Dialect! This game rules, especially when you try to play a "last few days of a good summer break" kinda story instead of the typical "everyone dies" story. There's a lot im leaving out and skimming over for brevity (god it took like three hours to write all of this haha) and man I wanna draw now.

A world where mind/body duality has clear concrete proof is, oho it's so fun there's so much to run with there lmao

Hope you enjoyed and also yeah Dialect is a fucking sick game.


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