<< BACK TO RS001 LOG * The DeLorian * ----------------------------------- Captain's Log: Stardate 0000 0002 Clone Code: 0 ----------------------------------- Once Me, Myself, and I embarked out to our journey we ran into an issue very quickly. With there being three of us who were (as far as I can tell) all the same person, we ran into the communication issue of what to call each other. After some discussion, we came to the agreement that I would be "Captain", the version of me that was created from the universe where the coin landed on heads would be "Heads", and of course for the same reason the other would be "Tails". After that was agreed we decided to take inventory of what we have to work with within Boaty McBoatface while we wait for the autopilot to take us to the rendevous point with the client. Heads and Tails went to search opposite ends of the ship, but I decided I might try to make use of my new time device (which according to The Elder is called the "Deus Ex Machina") to save myself some time (ha, get it?) by trying to find some more exploits like the coin trick that created Heads and Tails. I set a checkpoint and decided that I would go search the ship, and after doing so I would return to that checkpoint and give myself the report so that I don't need to do all of the work! With the checkpoint set I immediately received a tap on the shoulder to find a slightly exhaused version of myself standing behind me. They informed me they were going to go take a nap since they have completed taking inventory and left towards what I can only assume the location of the sleeping quarters were at. A bit miffed that my plan backfired I asked them why they would not simply tell me what they found so I could skip the boring chore. They informed me that when they were me they were not told anything either and their future version simply left to go take a nap as well, so if they did not get to skip doing the work than neither do I. With that, they completed their journey out of the room and left me alone again. The nerve, I cannot believe I would be such a jerk to myself! ...Well, on second thought, this is not too shocking. My first experience meeting my time clone was being punched in the face by them. At least when I am done with this I can a nap and get back at myself by making the previous version of myself do all this work too. That will surely teach myself a lesson from being so stubborn. After going back in time to enjoy my nap I decided to go look for Heads and Tails since they should be finishing up with their search of the ship by then. Finding Heads was easy enough since they were on their way back, so we decided to head out together to find Tails. We each took notes in our respective copies of the book we received from The Elder, so I just copied down Heads's notes into mine and then swapped so they could do the same. By the time that was done we found Tails, but also a lot more. Apparently I was not the only one who decided to try more time shenanigans since we stumbled upon a large crowd of time clones all arguing with each other. After it was clear from watching the chaos unfold for a few moments, I decided that since I am the captain of Boaty McBoatface it was my job to try and get to the bottom of what happened here and try to restore order. With a sustained, high-pitched whistle I drew the attention of the Tails clones and requested for the audience of the original Tails. This seemed to trigger the same arguing from before so I let forth the same whistle again and this time just grabbed the closest one and asked them to explain what is going on here. Apparently Tails discovered that we have a weapons system aboard the ship, but not enough crew to make effective usage of it. So, the logical conclusion was to create perform the same experiment that created the initial clones a few times. However, since I forgot how quickly exponential growth can get out of hand, this very quickly created way too many time clones. It was suggested that we can fix the problem by ejecting the extras into space, but that meant that there needed to be some sort of system to determine who would be getting ejected. Since no one wanted to volunteer another suggested that they could flip coins to decide, but the others disagreed since that is what originally got them into this mess. The last suggestion of removing the clones in order who who was created last and working backwards is what triggered the fighting since the newer clones found this unfair since this system was not agreed upon before their creation, as well as the older clones had no way to determine who was the newest clones and none of them wanted to identify themselves. It is moments like this that are quite humbling as you realize just how much of a moron you can be. Fortunately, from what Heads found during their search of Boaty McBoatface we had a better compromise for the Tails army. Aboard the ship are some cryostatis pods, so instead of needing to evacuate the excess clones we can just have them sleep in there until they are needed or we are in a better situation for having that many clones of myself around. After some murmuring it looked like the clones were find with agreeing to this plan. Before Heads guided the excess clones to cryostatis chamber I called forth for a meeting since we really needed to sort out this time cloning business to make sure something like this does not happen again. This meeting went on far longer than I would have expected since we are all the same person, but the previous threat of death via ejection into space and not being a good team player with other versions of myself was enough to already begin splintering off differences in the personalities of the clones (definitely something to think about later and probably keep me up at night). Eventually we all agreed to the seniority system where older clones will get to make the final decision on any disagreements along with creating an identification system using our books. The identification system works as follows: Since I am the original DeLorian, on the last page of my book I will right a zero. For each clone that follows, if they were created with a heads flip they will append another zero to their sequence and if they were created by a one they would instead append a one. Since we did not do this originally, each clone had to manually catch up by writing in their sequence from their respective memory. However, for all future versions they need only append to the end of their sequence since their book should be a copy of the version that created them. Then, to handle if additional sets of clones are created (e.g. if I decided to make additional clones from myself) we simply use the next pair of digits (e.g. in the previous example this would be 2 and 3 instead of 0 and 1). We were all fine with this until one of the Tails clones, who identified themself as "01019", asked about what we plan to do if one of us makes a 6th set of clones (the set after 8 and 9 are used). This had us stumped for a bit and we almost decided on a rule to never make a sixth pair of clones to avoid this (which left a few clones with a nervous look in their eye), until another Tails clone brought up something The Elder wrote in their original notes. Across the bottom of the page the following was written: 01234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ-_ At first I (or should I now say we?) throught this was just some weird way of testing out their penmanship on the page, but upon further inspection it looks like this would be the perfect solution for continuing on our clone code sequence past six sets. Now, we could make a full 32 sets of clones until we ran into a "roadblock" again. Since we all felt far more comfortable with the idea of having 32 as the hard cap on clones, we agreed to using this system moving forward and finalized our agreement by all writing down these rules into the last page of our books as our formal way of acknowledging our consensus. With that out of the way the extra clones were filed to the cryostatis chamber and order seemed to be restored at last. I met up with Tails (now also known as "01") to get their notes for the inventory of the ship to add to my notes. Once that was done Heads (now also knowns as "00") returned back from escorting the clones to complete their set of notes as well. It was after doing so and reviewing everything together that we came to a concerning revelation: we did not have enough food for all of the mouths we now had to feed. However, from my own search of the ship I found a hangar filled with lesser crafts and came up with a plan. I explained to Heads and Tails my plan of sending out some of the remaining Tails clones in one of the vessels to acquire more supplies and meet back with us at the rendevous point. They agreed with this plan so we tracked down "0100", "0110", "0101", and "0111" to do handle this mission for us. The four were not thrilled with the news, but they liked the idea better than us all starving to death so early into our life among the stars. With that we sent them off on "Mini Boaty McBoatface I" and the rest of the DeLorian time clone crew continued its journey to meet with our first clients as smugglers against the Federation.