Dwarf Fortress

“I walked blind all night to find the dwarfs, the first internet colony, a fortress 33 levels below the ground. The pumps still work and there are adequate crops above ground meaning we can hole up here for a long time.”

There are 7 dwarfs in a secret fortress 33 levels underground who say that they have built a working Turing machine. A Turing machine is anything that can do any calculation. It is a complete computer. The fortress is built inside a computer game called Dwarf Fortress by 7 dwarfs controlled by Dwarf Fortress players.

The Turing machine is a computer built inside the core of the fortress by an anonymous dwarf. Furthermore, the anonymous dwarf has translated the source-code for the computer game Minecraft and installed it on the Turing machine. The dwarfs can now play Minecraft on the Turing machine exactly as it is anywhere in the Universe.

The dwarfs build a hard-drive in Minecraft and upload all their dwarf secrets. Any information can be coded and stored on the hard drive. Several levels of security protect these secrets – an encrypted hard-drive in Minecraft, a Turing machine 33 levels down in a fortress designed to be difficult to find, penetrate, and guarded by 7 dwarfs. All encapsulated in a computer game called Dwarf Fortress.

Some dwarfs have identified a dwarf that they believe is Big Brother. BB is obviously concerned at this strange novelty – information stored secretly on a hard-drive in a computer game installed on a computer inside a computer game. Imagine the meeting – BB senior agent - “I think we have a problem with dwarfs, not real dwarfs, but dwarfs in a computer game. We think they're up to something.”

The dwarfs lead the BB dwarf down the 33 levels of the fortress. When they arrive, a dwarf is playing Minecraft on the Turing machine and the BB dwarf watches.

So this is what is happening. Big Brother is observing an undercover BB dwarf watching a dwarf playing Minecraft uploaded on a Turing machine to which dwarfs have built an encrypted hard drive in a fortress 33 levels underground built in 2006 by a colony of 7 dwarfs in a computer game called Dwarf Fortress one year before the PRISM monitoring of the internet.