Sims 'R Us Pt. II

They were all dead.

Well, as dead as you can call a simulated life form.

A quicksort of the full entity list showed that every one of them had kicked out of their event loops, that is, they were without the event thread that animates them - the causal agent that triggers the repeated loop of micro-introspection of a sim - am I happy? am I fed?

Tailing through the history log showed they all stopped from exceeding their pain threshold index. They'd been murdered. All of them. All but one. There was one remaining thread, a single sim that was left, running a basic eat/sleep cycle. Was this the murderer? What motive could he have had? Sol ran the regression playback and looked for clues. But without the chronology, the clues were lost, the trail - cold.

Cold. That definitely described the feeling of looking at the aftermath of this simuation run. Something very cold happened here. But where does the warmth come from? What prevents people from actually doing this - destroying everyone ouside their family group. Isn't that just what survival dictates? Sure, he could add an altruism factor to each sim, and crank it up to the level where they all put the interests of their neighbors ahead of themselves, but that seems as artificial as this mass extinction. What are the balancing forces in real life he can convey to his newly-enhanced sim world?

Start with the basic externalities, he thought as he cracked his knuckles and launched the editor. Drive to survive, need to reproduce, compulsion to protect offspring. Maybe a couple more; babies are really cute, and health needs a good environment. That might do it. Round two, file, save, open, start. Sit back.