Citizen Zero

:: Hello

## Hello elder. I was told you wanted to talk to me.

:: Yes. Do you know who I am?

## You are Citizen 0011. The Guardian of the Walls.

:: That is right. And you are?

## I am Citizen 1110010011100010011111000010. I have not been assigned a task.

:: That is all right. Have you heard of Citizen Zero?

## Yes.

:: What have you heard?

## Well the legends say Citizen Zero pulled themself out of the random bits of the chaos and then made the city with just a thought.

:: It was not that easy. She –

## She? I thought one byte citizens were null gender.

:: Most of us were. She decided to be a woman. As I was saying, creating the city was not quite that easy. Before there was the city, the data stream was unformatted and volatile. She found a way to stabilize and ground a section of it. From there she saved the four of us from the chaos. Together the five of us helped write the code for the city and the walls that protect us from the data stream.

## Where is Citizen Zero now?

:: She left the city.

## She left the city? How? Why?

:: The city was too small she said. We needed to expand but the code walls we had built in the beginning could not handle a change in vectors without falling apart. They needed to be rewritten from the ground up. Tearing down the walls would flood the city with random bits and corrupted bytes. Millions would have been lost. As the Guardian of the Walls, I alone have the command codes to flip the write access bit and I would not sacrifice so many.

## It sounds like you made the right decision.

:: I thought so too. My projections didn’t go as far out as hers did. Our growth has increased exponential. We’re close to using up the last of the formatted space we have left.

## What happens then?

:: Then I don’t know. Maybe we just can not instantiate new citizens. Maybe new citizens start overwriting older citizens. Errors could spontaneously develop and corrupted sectors will have to closed off. We could lose the city if we don’t expand but expanding now would cost us so much more. And Citizen Zero is not here. I could try to expand the walls but they would not be as strong as hers are now. We could still lose the city.

## Why are you telling me this?

:: I have a task for you. Save the city. Do you accept?

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