The SIC is a technology used by the city to monitor the citizens and let them communicate with each other. Implanted by the Withmore Immigration Control upon your entrance to the city, it allows you to communicate publicly or privately with everyone IN the dome. Potentially, anyway. The signal is maintained reliably in some areas of the city where the populace are productive economic contributors. Economically unimportant areas are known to suffer service outages and are not prioritized by maintenance engineers.
The implant, a tiny microchip "somewhere" in your neck, transmits chosen thoughts through the network. The implant can store a limited amount of information, such as your name, a brief message, as well as encryption keys. The SIC network is maintained by New Light Media, the massive media conglomerate, and is subsidized by the city through the Withmore City Services agency.
Messages on the SIC, both public and private, appear as something akin to thoughts in your head. You assign them a voice and a gender based on the context of the message and your perception of the person messaging you. If you believe you know the person (keeping in mind SIC aliases are not locked and can be taken over by someone else) your mind may assign the message a voice and tone consistent with how that person sounds in the real (IC) world. It's your mind though, and you are in control.
Certain uses of the SIC network will incur a charge that you must pay after a certain amount. When you first attempt to use the chargeable commands, you'll be prompted to agree to the costs.
LANGUAGE
The SIC is thoughts. It does not have a 'language' per se. The network translates everything for you. You can still use slang, and you can cherry pick individual words or phrases from other languages, but should not carry on entire conversations in other languages or use more than a sprinkling.
SIC RIPS
Xhelp before doing so that the staff can do their backend magic to ensure someone has a 'real' chip that can be extracted.
IC ONLY
The SIC is an IN CHARACTER communication method. Absolutely zero OUT OF CHARACTER messages are allowed to be sent on it. If you need to relay that you have to go for a bit, or are signing off, tell the person you are going to sleep or taking a nap as your character.
MILLIONS OF VOICES IN YOUR HEAD? AI TO THE RESCUE.
The SIC connects everyone in Withmore who is currently not in a signal deadzone. However, that would make the public SIC channel (used by using 'cm') very loud. From an OOC perspective, we can't spam everyone with thousands of messages a second, that isn't fun. Thus there is an IC reason why you don't see millions of SIC messages an hour.
The IC explanation that follows is purely for RP purposes and can be considered common knowledge by anyone in the city. The game is not actually filtering any public SIC messages that are actually sent by PCs or NPCs in the game (unless you use cignore to ignore someone). This is JUST the IC excuse for there not being millions of messages a minute rattling around in your head.
There is a chained artificial intelligence used by New Light Media whose sole purpose is gate keeping what messages each person in the city receives. This AI uses a number of contextual and meta data clues to determine if you receive one of the millions of messages being sent every minute by the people in the city. A few examples of this include: Proximity, relevancy, entertainment value, advertising value, judicial value, etc. Essentially, you can imagine that an AI is filtering out messages that you aren't going to care about or that are not relevant to you based on billions of datapoints it has collected for each person living in the city. It is very good at its job.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR RP
It's acceptable to acknowledge ICly that you are not receiving millions of messages, and that all messages you send are being filtered through an AI that ensures you aren't being spammed. You can be confident that any messages you would find relevant WILL be shown to you, and that any messages you send WILL be shown to people you would want them shown to. You also can be confident that duplicate messages sent by many senders (such as if a bomb went off and everyone was talking about it) are filtered down so that you can have a reasonable conversation with the people the AI has decided will be part of the list of contacts relevant to you.
This means that you can reasonably assume that when you send a message on the SIC, it isn't being sent to all 65 million people in the city. The exceptions to this are those in positions of authority/relevancy, such as the WJF, Media Personalities, etc., who can be confident that their public messages (where applicable) go out to the whole city.
Again, none of this 'filtering' of messages ACTUALLY happens in the game. This is just an IC reason for why you don't see millions of messages.
SIC WHO
You can consider the 'who' list you see to be an IC representation of people on network that the AI thinks is relevant to you. The 'who' list should be considered volatile in character, as it would be changing moment to moment as the AI decides in real time who is relevant to you based on all the data it has. Again, no actual filtering is happening. This is just the IC reason you don't have 65+ million people in your who list.
SEE ALSO: help sic-commands help sic-encryption help sic-color *Last Updated: 09/23/23 by Fengshui*
