one neat application of mind-reading tech is that you can finally sound out how people’s text sounds in your head

the sun comes out and you step outside, or at least you try since you can’t seem to connect with the ground, the air is full of brilliant amorphous jewels, drops drift by before your eyes

someone turns off gravity mid-rainstorm and the trees violently shake off all the water on their leaves, puddles rise into the air, the remaining randrops bounce off everything, some enter orbits around statically charged chimneys and antennas

embots: like sexbots, but instead a superstimulus for empathy; often used on the streets as beggars or political activists (which is why sometimes, the cute animal rights girl in front of you explodes in a shower of sparks and broken parts as yet another victim of anthropol)

at least for the “caught in a novel” version of the simulation hypothesis, you only need to start worrying once the world starts making sense in a narrative way

coral reef druids who can stay underwater for hours, wear little reefs on their heads and seagrass on their bodies, are surrounded by fishes whenever they dive, talk to them in mute dance

sitting in the grass together, occasionally grabbing pieces of cloud out of the sky to build palaces, puzzles, cryptids

transhuman art for which you have to install experimental or proprietary senses, new senses that are themselves art

Enough of art for the material senses? Even gustatory-kinetic sculptures bore you? Try art for the 6th sense: Eyes hidden behind walls to make your back crawl, ghost choirs, rooms where the ceiling may drop on you at every moment

tiny, newly hatched surveillance cams peek from a hole in the wall, but quickly withdraw their heads as they notice you watching

certain step sequences recreate popular melodies and wear visible paths into the floor, sometimes groups will try dances so their bodies modulate the ambient sound; the temple as musical instrument

A temple that does the same thing with sound that cathedrals do with light: Different notes wherever you go, entire spaces audible if you’re in the right place, a whirligig in the form of a boiling rose sounding like wind in the leaves of a brass tree

a schism over whether god has countably or uncountably many names

a second moon, transparent, lens-shaped and usually invisible, except when it passes in front of a star and lights up as bright as the sun for the blink of an eye

spirit animals, spirit plants, spirit fungi, spirit moss, a whole tiny spirit ecosystem that follows you around

Another theory holds that there’s a fixed amount of humanity and since there were fewer people in ancient times, they were bigger compared to the gods than they are now

Gods don’t become smaller the further they’re away, which is why one night they’re these huge figures in the sky and the next, they drink you under the table at your favorite bar

idea: medication for highly resistant infections laced with (carefully tuned) mood improvers so that people remember to take it regularly

After he lost his face to fire, he didn’t bother with skin grafts, instead covered it in screens that now display randomly generated faces, abstract renderings of brain waves, webcam feeds, pirated movies

when a muse leaves an artist, the result is a broken art

and when two wizards love each other, their aspects intermingle, a giant spider grows scales of gold while the clockwork starts looking more organic and web-like

few stay human, of them many switch sex, advanced practitioners are barely recognizable as sentient or even a coherent entity: one’s a walking void, one’s a stalking tangle brass rods and lenses and prisms, another is a swarm of locusts

a magic system where practitioners slowly adopt the form of whatever their mind is, because even when you form the world with your mind, you’re still part of that world and your mental habits leak

To summon a demon together with its counter-aspect, use a lemniscate. Or rather, don’t, or have a plan for separating them very quickly, since they will try to annihilate each other with extreme prejudice.

Three-dimensional demons, you contain with circles. Four-dimensional demons, you build complicated brass spheres for, five-dimensional ones you trap with constantly moving orreries of these.

To most effectively contain a demon, a summoning circle is drawn along equipotential lines. These are specific to each demon - if you know the demonic field equations, you can reconstruct a circle from a sigil and vice versa.

a network that is down is also known as a notwork.

walking simulator where you start out on the foot of a mountain, on the top you climb into the clouds, then step between the stars, they form into molecules, crystals, cells and so on until you’re on the foot of the mountain again

when frightened, they’ll cycle through textures until your senses go tilt and you drop them: spiky and raspy and slimy and sandy and woody and a tongue, hot and cold and both

if you know what to look for you may find touch-chameleons here, they feel like stone or clay when still on the ground but if lifted up, feel like another hand

As the bombs fall, we retrace our steps backwards so that when they play recordings from our time, they’ll think that around us, cities were falling out of the clouds and crystallizing on the ground

She becomes an angry cloud of body parts and many in the front rows recoil from what looks about to devour them, but then the rhythm begins to click into place again, as does her body, and in a few smooth motions she↵recoalesces,↵pauses,↵bows

The android dancer starts conventional, but soon her limbs bend in impossible ways, interpenetrate, detach from her body, dance over and around it

With seven billion people alive, souls are in short supply and many are shared between heads. Sometimes these heads meet each other and it is rumored that this is how soulmates happen

Neural speech synthesizers are noise, pressed into form: Meta-Raudive devices that live in your phone, channel the voices of the dead to tell you dinner’s ready

Ghosts can move only in darkness, but they can move everywhere in that darkness. Whenever there’s an eclipse, ghosts can, and will, travel freely between Earth and Moon, and sometimes hitch a ride on an asteroid

visible only through closed eyes, two red dots lurk just outside of your mind’s light, close in as you drift off to sleep

a universe where AI alignment is about as impossible as the halting problem, and it’s a fact of life that civilizations periodically turn new faces when a new generation takes over

How to get access to timeline travel tech:↵1. Create a unique and valuable piece of information, e.g. be Satoshi↵2. Quantum-suicide yourself and the data into one timeline, in all the other timelines leave proof that this happened↵3. Wait for timeline travelers to try and rob you

Cthulhu was due to happen around this time, but its decryption failed because humans had put too many of their own stars into the sky

The memetic panspermia hypothesis: Encrypted in constellations, consciousness and other concepts lurk, waiting to imprint themselves onto unsuspecting sapients when the stars are right

It’s demons who were the first to be displaced by robots: Summoning circles replaced by circuit diagrams, Laplacian and Cartesian demon’s light stolen by Multivac, Newcomb’s decider and the paperclip maximizer, even god usurped by the simulation

If you go to the scrapyard at night, you will often meet goth androids: Trying to cannibalize dead machines, or silently brooding, or standing in circles with flickering eyes, chanting in infrared

You zoom further into the fractal, too far, too far, it gains a third dimension and pixels fly past you, a city lights up below as you near the bott-

a voodoo doll, but of someone you mean well and you make sure it has a good life while the person is away

tapping against your screen in the hope that someone might finally open it and let you in

While liminal space is the space between, subliminal space is when you take the wrong door in liminal space and end up entirely behind the curtain, a shadow unnoticed by the audience, lost in the guts of the machine

I then passed an empty bus. Even its display said empty. I was too tired but I feel like if I had boarded it, it would’ve taken me to those quarters where they don’t render the matrix and it would’ve been just me, gray nothingness, and the sound of my footsteps on default texture

Artifact: A snow globe, but deeply black with very occasional specks of light. When shaken, it flashes brightly, then structure emerges and galaxies will slowly swirl and dim over the course of a day

“Look at how large they are, they must be so old! Maybe their drone is just an extremely slow chirp, and if a few of us followed one for a few years, we could decipher it!”