CyberAbben @abbenm@cybre.space

A game where your genetic code gets edited. But it doesn't immediately progress through your body. When old cells are transitionally replaced with new ones, with a "compatibility layer" its made between them before fully transitioning.

Instead of your body fully replacing itself every 7 years, it's every 1 year. Cells are programmed die and are replaced quicker to "install" genetic changes more quickly.

You have higher metabolism, and your house quickly gets dusty from shedding skin cells.

This is probably bad but... I don't want to be too attached to fictional characters, lest they become imaginary friends. But, I want to be interested by them, to let them be interesting, let myself fall into the power of some good idea that I just give myself permission to have.

So I thought.. maybe my character could have an imaginary friend. I could let them have that problem

And maybe the person they could imagine... could be me

Somehow, this is definitely cheating, definitely worse

Also, love this commitment to world building: "anti-corporate protests."

Can't be bothered to think of a company name, a location, an issue, or a group doing the protesting, or even characterize any particular event in any way that lays out forces in the world.

Is it about wages? Gas prices? Debt? Were there police?

This is the worst. This is what I want it NOT to be. These are supposed to be the parts with the little golden bits that make the world deep and thoughtful.

I've never had so much whiplash about an upcoming game as I have with Cyberpunk 2077. From loving the first trailer 5 years ago, to instantly being incredibly, incredibly disappointed with its new trailer.

Everything reduced to a vulgar caricature that makes me embarrassed to have even liked the genre. Zero of the interest in what economic, political, scientific forces hold its broken world together. That wasn't a trailer for a game. It was more like a pepsi commercial.

I seem to be held together in a strange pattern that walks across contexts. Here, my left leg is a cluster of variables that predict credit scores. There, my arm is saturn's hexagon.

I replicate myself in parts across these surfaces. As circumstances change I shear off arms, entire systems and fall back to stable special cases, and germinate.

I translate poems into dogs, weapons into weather. Shoe into a literary style, frozen half way, the bricks of this bridge are my house.

#smallstories

Sci-fi idea: due to gravitational lensing, some of Earth's light that was cast out into space has been bent back around and sent back to us.

Supercomputers can predict where this light would be found, how old it is, how to cancel out distortions, piece together different fragments of light etc, and create the equivalent of satellite imagery of the Earth that can be played backward and forward.

In some places there are "livestreams" where a continuous flow of light comes back to us, uninterrupted.

I just learned that there is a Pillars of Eternity 2 and Wasteland 3 in development. That's cool! But when is inExile/Obsidian Entertainment going to get around to making a cyberpunk rpg?

The walls to my cell are called moire structures- four walls of jagged white like glinting sheets of salt crust.

At a barely examinable resolution, the walls are opening and closing in snowflake patterns. Diagonal lines and form and disappear.

I gouged a chair into the white with all my strength and it ground to dust.

There are no doors. The sequence patterns are kept secret. Guards made of the same patterns in reverse can walk through undisturbed.

#smallstories

The patient could string off associations with a speed that was superhuman, but nearly gibberish.

I looked for mutations in their cerobrospinal fluid.

The DNA was utterly scrambled, unreadable. Not even the right nucleotides. Someone far away had planned a long time for this to come before my eyes.

The only nonrandom structure was a repeating nitrogen pattern. A message in binary code.

"This brain is encrypted. Recoverable. Send payment to 1KSKrrfSMijNwJQSgxFyg9jwFHfro63Hqi"

#smallstories

Also I acknowledge that "expanded consciousness" is really poorly defined and could mean 37,000,000 different things, each and every one deserving of their very own Dali or Lovecraft. That's another problem, in terms of my attempting to think about it in a clear way. What little thread of the infinity do I try to slice off, and at least think about? Not even to write about, but just to clearly hold in my mind and covet?

The way that Lovecraft gave form to his idea of the incomprehensible, the way Dali articulated the strangeness of dreams...

I think something like that should be possible for the idea of "expanded consciousness" (I guess in the doing-drugs sense, or transhumanist sense), that (a) is really particular and precise, that really DOES something and (b) that does justice to the strangeness of the thing it purports to represent.

This is not one of my aforementioned "big ideas" btw. I'm not in that league.

But until now, I had been doing little more than going over articles, videos, books, podcasts, and musing to myself "hey! ______ would make a good idea for a fictional plot!"

And there is a lot of value to that. I have stumbled upon some (imo) incredible ideas: ideas that keep unpacking more and more and more the more you think about them. I've got at least (!!!!) two of those! Huge.

But still, the small stories has been good for me, to wrap a minimal plot around those ideas.

I'm much more ready to do that than NanoWrimo. Which I suppose makes sense.

So part of me thinks, start there, and ramp up. The other part of me thinks: some things, you'll only ever do if you make yourself do them.

I'm of two minds. One, that when I just try to write a "small story" (btw am I misunderstanding that tag? People seem to be posting non-fiction while I post fiction...), anyway, when I try to write a small story, it works, in the sense that I clearly have the energy and willingness to do it, and am unafraid of sizing up that task and doing it, over and over again.

cont'd

Trying to switch from "hey, X would be a good idea" to at least putting a bare bones of a story around the idea. The slightest presence of the perspective of some character.

Progress! For me it is, at least.

After the illness, after the most miserable three months of laying motionless on a bed, they realized I was still awake. The EEG showed I was thinking.

They connected the EEG to a screen, an operating system, and I learned to select words and say sentences. Then I made my worst mistake.

Secretly, I figured out how to get to the command line. Browsed the web through a remote computer. Downloaded the wrong thing.

Now, there's someone in here with me, and they select my sentences.

#smallstories