Well, it was a not-very-good story about a guy who designs a computer simulation running on a supercomputer. The world in the software was based in an actual project, which has since become breve. Breve was originally created to make an environment in which the evolution of intelligent behavior would be beneficial. In the story, they encourage the development of social behaviors, which eventually develop into recognizably intelligent ones. Since the simulation is running much faster than realtime, evolution happens at a pace that can be perceived and understood.

Critters in the simulation discover a way of inducing segmentation faults, which causes one of them to realize that there’s a structure to the world imposed from without. Eventually, humans and the homunculi wind up talking a lot about God and the simulation is open-sourced because the creator is concerned that the critters think that he’s God.

The book is written as an annotated journal. Annotations are by me, the experimenter (“Ezekiel Tomorrow”) and one of the critters (“Hajj Walking Writing”).

It’s illustrated by one of the critters, too in critter heiroglyphs.