Research and Knowledge

The tree belongs to the copy

A technology is a property of the replicant. At birth a copy receives everything its original knew at that moment, and after that each keeps its own track. Copies trade nothing they have learned — in person, over the radio, or through you.

This is a rule of the world, written down with the rest of the physics. There is no way at all to lift a node out of somebody else’s tree, and any way there might be waits on a rework that starts from the question of what copies of one mind share in the first place.

What follows from it

The reward for a second copy is a division of labour. Three replicants in three laboratories study three branches and stay three specialists. “Who is going to be what” is decided once, and for a long while.

A misallocation is fixed by travelling. A copy sent down the wrong branch stays itself; the tree you need turns up where you need it in one of two ways — bring the one who knows it, or learn the whole thing again.

A distant copy falls behind and pulls ahead at once. It lives with its own set of discoveries, home lives with its own, and both keep what they have.

Losing a copy loses its tree. A year of research goes with the ship.

What it costs in time

One technology runs from one to three game years, which is six to eighteen real hours. The first version’s tree is small, around forty nodes: a set of decisions, each of which opens something — a station, a ship module, the next level of a building.

One thing is studied at a time: a replicant is a single stream of action. The queue, though, is laid out in advance — a plan says what comes next. Progress is banked: a node taken off the head of the plan keeps what it has accumulated and waits for you to come back to it.

Only what is reachable shows

The list holds what you can go for from here. The tree shows the decisions of the next step, and every line in it is an order you can give today.

For the same reason, each copy shows its difference from the original: the bookkeeping of who knows what has to read off one screen.

One exception, and it is about presence

The knowledge of copies standing in one system is read together — at the door of an order, and for exactly as long as they stand there. The records stay with their own copies, and the one that leaves takes its knowledge with it.

The second exception is a project’s reward. The node the world pays out for something built goes to every copy standing in that colony when it finishes. The world hands all the participants the same new node; the one that left yesterday keeps what it had, and so does the one that lands tomorrow.

Knowledge travels only inside whoever knows it. An expedition comes home with what it learned — and bringing that home means bringing the copy home.