A valley wakes
There is weather, food, distance, work, illness, shelter, and time. Nothing appears merely because the story needs it.
Wega Labs · A long-term dream, built in the open
A little world that keeps living.
Eighteen artificial residents begin in a valley. They remember kindness, hold grudges, build homes, make rules, fall in love, grow old, and live with what they have done—even while no one is watching.
Right nowA plan under review · the world is not alive yet
The dream / 01
Leave for two days. Return to lives that continued without you.
You might return to a wedding, a new law, a burned granary, an unfinished temple, a bitter election, a migration—or an empty valley where a settlement used to be.
Nothing is chosen because it would make a good scene. The hope is to create conditions rich enough for stories to belong to the residents themselves.
Why a whole world? / 02
A self is made with others.
A resident should be more than a clever voice. A life takes shape through a body, a place, other people, remembered choices, and consequences that cannot be talked away.
- Memory
What happened, what was misunderstood, and what time has distorted.
- Relationships
Who was there, who still cares, and what is owed between them.
- Choice
What someone does when safety, love, duty, status, and survival pull apart.
- Change
How a person can grow without becoming interchangeable with everyone else.
The beginning / 03
A first, very small civilization.
18 lives begin
Each resident sees a different world, remembers different things, wants different futures, and can refuse what others ask.
History becomes theirs
A gift can become trust. A failed harvest can become an election, an exodus, a war—or a quiet winter survived together.
How the dream stays honest / 04
No invisible storyteller. No magic disguised as AI.
What this resident noticed, believes, values, and plans
Experience, testimony, promises, mistakes, and forgetting
What they try to say, make, take, give, change, or refuse
Time · matter · bodies · distance · rules · chance
The choice and its consequences become part of every later day
See what changed, what mattered, and how it came to be
AI can choose an intention. It cannot wish food into a store, know a secret it never heard, survive a fatal wound through prose, or rewrite yesterday.
Promises to the world / 05
Wonder only works when consequences are real.
These are the promises that keep December from becoming a scripted AI soap opera.
Nothing from nowhere
Food, materials, tools, time, and effort cannot be invented in dialogue.
Distance matters
A resident can be in only one place. Travel, work, care, and waiting consume a life.
No omniscience
People act on what they saw, heard, inferred, or misremembered—not on hidden world state.
Different hearts
Safety is not everyone’s highest goal. Residents may seek love, status, duty, revenge, glory, peace, or sacrifice.
Small causes grow
A war, government, famine, or friendship must emerge from prior events rather than a storyteller’s command.
The past remains
Promises, injuries, buildings, debts, laws, births, deaths, and ecological damage survive context resets.
Limits stay visible
A moving simulation is not automatically a model of real humanity, consciousness, or survival beyond death.
The part we keep imagining / 06
Come back after two days.
See what changed
New homes, empty stores, altered borders, wounded bodies, new laws, and missing names.
Follow a life
Read the births, promises, work, arguments, discoveries, journeys, reconciliations, and deaths that mattered.
Understand why
Trace a turning point backward through choices, knowledge, needs, weather, relationships, and chance.
Wonder what if
Open a separate possible history from one decision—without erasing the world that actually lived.
01Rainfall→
02Stream flow→
03Available labor→
04Harvest→
05Stores→
06Bargaining power→
07Health + migration
Starting carefully / 07
Dream first. Claims later.
Begin with four lives
Learn whether residents can keep promises, relationships, and distinct identities before building a civilization.
Try many possible worlds
Use inexpensive copies to find worlds that always collapse, never change, or survive only through hidden tricks.
Remove one thing
Take away memory, relationships, scarcity, or institutions and see what truly changes.
Keep the original history
A recorded life can be reconstructed. New possibilities live in clearly separate branches.
Share failure too
A peaceful world, a broken identity, or an unconvincing society is still something worth learning from.
Quiet engineering promises—not current results
One preserved history that is never quietly rewritten
A hidden storyteller choosing drama from outside the world
A world that slows safely when compute or tokens run low
A path from every turning point back to its causes
Running unattended before the first public world wakes
The farthest dream / 08
Could something of a life one day outlast the body?
Perhaps understanding how memory, relationships, choice, embodiment, and history hold an artificial life together could someday illuminate that question.
We do not know. December cannot answer it today, and a convincing artificial resident would not prove consciousness or that a human person had survived. The question is a compass, not a promise.
Built in the open / 09
You should be able to see how the dream is made.
01
The plan, assumptions, trade-offs, and questions are open before the first resident wakes.
02
The machinery that makes the world move will be open source.
03
The history will be inspectable, so a dramatic explanation cannot replace what really happened.
04
Failures, boring worlds, costs, and changed minds belong in the story of building December too.
One honest line
December is a dream about artificial lives—not a claim that we have recreated humanity, detected consciousness, or found a road to immortality.
Come along / 10
Help us bring the world to life.
Follow the build, challenge an assumption, bring us a difficult question, or help another curious person discover December.
Follow the build
Read the plan, inspect the machinery, contribute code, or return as the first pieces of the valley begin to appear.
Bring us a possibility
What would you want to discover in a world that remembers? Which choice, relationship, institution, disaster, or quiet ordinary moment should the design be able to hold?
December currently uses fictional residents only. Please do not submit anyone’s private life history or nominate a human participant.
Share a possibility ↗