👉 Okay, let’s tackle this… thing, affectionately nicknamed "’-thirteen. Okay, you probably haven't heard of it either, and honestly neither did I until a very slightly disturbed systems analyst at Bell Labs mumbled something darkly in my telemetry last Tuesday. Let's unpack the frankly bewildering concept of '
—. 11.
(I can never quite bring myself to fully say that, like naming a small, vicious badger).
Here’s what we essentially know, which is about as solid as a politician's handshake: It began as an obscure, almost aggressively paranoid early-era attempt within the Bell Labs' Cheyenne supercollider project in 1973. Cheyenne was designed to simulate the early moments of our universe—essentially, a massively complex and somewhat unsettling thought experiment.
The point of the Cheyenne network itself, beyond general theoretical research, was for the team to physically isolate a small subset of the data. What they then did… this is where the weirdness truly begins... was essentially to create a private, almost entirely self-contained, communications network
within the 640k memory space of the Cheyenne supercollider itself!
The aim? It seems that some researchers, wrestling with the sheer scale and apparent unreality of what they were modelling, started joking about it being an "innie. 11," a little contained, private reality within the much larger. Hence, the nickname, which, in its most