I texted someone inside a simulation. She had to go upstairs and find her phone before she could text me back. The video model didn’t decide what happened. This is Argos, my stateful simulation engine, rendered through H3 using Fal Director. Thanks to @fal for the generous credits helping me bring it to life. Underneath the video is a persistent world: characters, objects, locations, and systems. The characters have their own cognition, memories, and goals. They choose actions; the simulation determines what actually happens. Her phone has a location. Messages have delivery and read states. Typing a reply takes time. If I move the phone before she gets there, it’s gone—even if she remembers leaving it there. Argos turns those changing world states into instructions for H3 to depict. You can also see her character thought stream. The video currently trails the simulation a little; I’m working on aligning the two. Next: connect this to SMS, so you can text someone inside the world and receive their reply. Or whisper an impulse into her thoughts and see whether she follows it. The bigger ambition is a world that keeps growing while its characters inhabit it—with agents writing and maintaining the simulation’s systems. I’ll be building more of this in public. Not just a video that looks like a world. A world that keeps existing underneath the video.