This is Part II of a series on the Cartesia project. Part I can be found here.
Cartesia is a virtual place made out of rooms that are connected in a hypercube structure. Each room is connected to the others through six exits: north, south, east, west, up and down.
(I'm not sure if I want to use cardinal terms like north, south, etc.)
Rooms
Rooms are also directly addressable using an address format of w.x.y.z. x, y and z are traditional Cartesian coordinates, w is the "world" address.
The number of rooms limited only by the available hardware resources* however the w portion of the address allows Cartesia to span physical machines. The w portion is translated to (or can be substituted for) the IP address of the machine a portion of Cartesia is running on.
Examples Addresses:
0.0.0 - origin room on current World (shortcut)
1.10.0 - The room ten rooms north, one room east on the current World
0.0.0.0 - origin room on localhost World
6.0.0.0 - origin room on World 6
10.4.4.1:0.0.0 - origin room of a World running on IP 10.4.4.1
Cartesia rooms can contain items and people. The people in those rooms can interact with eachother (primarily through text chat) as well as the objects in the rooms. The discussion or chats that happen in a room are similar to the discussion at a party or a meeting: individuals can be addressed directly but all of this is mixed into the general conversation with no expectation of privacy (a private discussion is best had in a private room). Conversations are ephemeral and a person entering a room will only hear what is said after they arrive (Cartesia keeps no records of conversations). A person in a room could record what they hear, but they cannot record anything that was said when they are not present.
Rooms are created by the people who occupy Cartesia. There are no administrators, no authorities. When a room is created it is the responsibility of it's creator**. Creating a room requires little more than selecting an unused address and giving it a name, in fact leaving an existing room through an exit that leads to an unused address will prompt you to create a new room.
Rooms can be locked, but they can only be locked or unlocked by their creator. When a room is locked a key object appears in the inventory of the creator. The creator can share this key with another person or leave it in another room. Keys, like any object in Cartesia can be duplicated. The room's creator can also remove the locks from rooms they create or change them, rendering the original keys (and any copies) essentially useless.
The creator of a room can also change who is responsible for it. This requires that both the creator and the person who responsibility is being transferred to agree to this, and of course it is reversible.
Rooms have other properties in addition to a name. A room can have a description as well as a set of rules. The description is displayed the first time a person enters the room, but the rules are displayed when someone look at the door to a room, akin to a sign on the door. If rules are present, they must be positively accepted before someone can enter the room. If the rules change in the future, the new rules must be accepted before entry as well.
Objects
Objects can be created by anyone, anywhere and require nothing more than a name to be created. Objects can be examined or used (the results of these actions vary from object to object). Objects can be taken or duplicated.
In addition to a name all objects can have a description and an open-ended number of stats and attributes. Stats are named numeric values that can be referenced or modified by usage of the object. Attributes are another open-ended list of names, but in this case the values are text values and can only be modified by their creator***. Objects also have a programmatic nature, which can be used to make them do things when they are used by a person.
It's worth pointing-out that Object properties can store encoded binary values**** as well, allowing an Object to represent non-textual things like images, audio, etc.
People
A person is you, a real human person. There can also be what might be referred to as "non-player characters" or "bots", but these are simply another type of object in Cartesia.
To be clear, people in Cartesia must be living people, not scripts or programs or any other non-living thing. All those things can exist in Cartesia, but they must exist as objects. Any non-living thing masquerading as a person in Cartesia is a fundamental violation of Cartesia's definitions and anyone operating a Cartesia world who allows this to continue will be shunned.
People in Cartesia are created via invitation. An existing person generates an invitation which can be sent to another person via any means, but there's no way for someone to "sign-up" without an invitation. The only exception to this is the first person that is created when a new Cartisia world is created.
Minimally, people have a name and ideally, a description. Other attributes and stats like those discussed above in the objects section can be added which are useful for games or other activities. There are also several automatic things that each person has that the system maintains like inventory and a map.
When you take an object it is added to your inventory and removed from wherever it came from. Alternatively, you can duplicate the object, leaving the original where you found it. Your inventory is limited only by how much memory you are allotted, and the number of objects you can carry depends on their memory size, not their physical dimensions, etc.
Your map is automatically maintained of the rooms you've visited, indexed by name. This makes it easy to teleport to a room you've previously discovered. You can also teleport to any room's address but the map makes it easy to find your way back to places you've been.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026