In the hotel room before the border, she undresses, sits down in your suitcase, then one by one removes her limbs and carefully places them around her. One leftover hand runs around, makes sure everything’s in its place, then hops in as well

a contest for the most layers of simulation, with entries like “tetris in minecraft in a vm in a vm in a vm submitted by some dude wearing a mask who’s a sleeper agent in real life which btw isn’t real anyway but that’s the free level everyone gets anyway

Did you know that maps are voodoo dolls? When you draw a line on one, people will often try not to cross it in real life

Scaling Dunbar’s number up to billions of people is hard even with augments, so you can lend your voice to an Übermensch: A meta-person that represents you and thousands of others, which talks to other Übermenschen to get person-years of communication done in mere minutes

Inflation is a nerf for overpowered civilizations, the universe stays mostly playable even if one civ colonizes (or quantum-foams) their entire hubble sphere

the cave’s stones light up in response to your steps, flicker when you talk - you kick over a large stone and the thunder runs along the walls as luminescing wavefront

people are telepaths by default, it’s just that most humans are p-zombies and lack thoughts to be read

She lets the motorbike fall left and you already prepare for a crash, but it rotates smoothly through the ground and you’re driving on the underside of the street

1. humanity both outpaced and too poor to be useful anymore, non-symbiotic humans reduced to vermin, forced out of more and more habitats↵6. eventually exterminated as a side thought during some house cleaning

1. wealth continuously extracted from human economy into machine economy, human economy shrinks, wars among humans over what’s left↵4. humans still occasionally useful as sources of telos, will organelles inside corporations, or maybe gut bacteria

1. companies figure out that humans are expensive security risks and start doing without↵2. machine economy does not turn on humans, it just increasingly ignores them, humanity watches at the sidelines/bottom of the gravity well while the solar system lights up

comets are exiled rivers

sitting in one of the windows together, immersed in a game of spotting the animals before they disappear again, only the engine’s hum in the background

Temples spring up all over the country for a new breed of memetically engineered gods, furiously picketed by established religions: “your gods are unnatural” “artificial religions are unsafe” “what if your doctrine mutates in the wild” “at least quarantine them”

international waters, but for stuff that takes place on no specific server / in distributed environments

volcano naiads, dancing along lava streams setting fire to things↵gravity well naiads, near-imperceptible ripples in the void↵comet naiads in cryosleep

maintain a steady infohazard diet like those animals that eat poisonous plants, so that your mind will poison those that try to eat it

sentient clouds earthgazing, hallucinating clouds into the movements of animals↵↵the same clouds stargazing, waiting for the night the nebulae out there would contact them

one night ~ the distance your mind could wander in a full night’s worth of REM sleep↵↵a useful unit in dreamtime, though large, think “lightday”

Unicorn fiber in your pillow taps into your brain at night, sends your dreams to dreamtime’s Utah Datacenter, a memory fortress guarding dungeons many cubic nights large

In the machine quarters, they make their trees out of silicon and rust. Under their canopies, many-legged mechanical druids commune with andryads, bodies covered in verdigris glyphs

again, an egregore sighting, and again, it was just a bunch of humans in a very elaborate trenchcoat

rivers as water trees growing out of the ocean↵trees as rivers flowing into the earth

She logs on, quickly advances from stick figure to default model, then keeps mutating for seconds while textures and mannerisms load

Atlantis didn’t sink, it floated away and formed the Moon

Heaven schisms over whether to allow robot souls in, now it’s Heaven Classic™ and CyberHeaven (which among others has internet speeds measured in hard drives per second, self-recharging batteries, the best electronic music

Their message reaches us just as they slide behind the Hubble limit, a promise of contact eaten by the cosmic event horizon mid-greeting

the game map is all of wikipedia and you move around by following links, also the main page is full of campers, avoid

when you click away wikipedia donation banners quickly enough, you’re dumped in tournament mode where you run around as sentient banner and must click your opponent’s [X] before they click yours

occasionally a piece of the arches falls from the sky, passes lichens and human settlements clinging to the walls, kicks up a mighty cloud of dust and flattens a kingdom or two - yet the area is quickly resettled, the starstuff must be mined

a cathedral that contains a world, its mountains leaning against pillars dozens of kilometers high, sun weaving around the pillars in a complicated pattern

if you’re worried about your paperclip maximizer escaping, why not wrap its box in an experience machine: infinite simulated paperclips that serve as tripwire and lightning rod

the inflationary phase has begun↵soon the vacuum itself will pull, rip apart sentences , wor d s , int o at om i z e d l e t t e r s wa i t i n g f o r h e a t d e a t h

that unnamed quality of moving water, busy anthills, cellular automata, weather reports, convection patterns, grass plains in the wind

like twitter, but instead of infinite posts with finite length, you get finitely many posts with infinite length

like twitter, but you can be followed by 280 people at most

An electricity grid but for light: Light plants where small suns illuminate entire cities, mirror houses for local distribution, an infrared grid for cooking, orbital mirrors and power lines that glow at night

Stripmining a gas giant for its hydrogen, dumping the rest of its atmosphere in neomoons: Helium moon, oxygen moon, silicon moon (wafer quality

The player isn’t all that interested in us, she’s somewhere underground carving out beautiful caverns and building arcologies for nobody

Human skulls have five orbits: L4 and L5 contain the eyes, L1 occasionally a spare, the rest are empty but can hold crystals, birds, drones

In 10000 days, or roughly 27 years, you have time to get really good at 24 things, 8 of which are sleep

Grounding problems are absurd to Jovian philosophers - everything’s in flux, turning, boiling, the only constants are the eyes of storms

Slowly eggs and sperm grow inside them and they meet the jungles, hungry maws tear them apart, release the clouds and the cycle begins anew

As they grow older and larger, they sink again, undergo several metamorphoses, accrete and shed symbionts to adapt to ever-deeper layers

Vast clouds of buoyant eggs emerge from Jupiter’s floating jungles, to hatch far from the predators of the deep and grow fat on algal blooms

A world where far-away things become transparent instead of indistinct, caves visible inside mountains and clouds, a hollow in the sun

From hiding, you install a safety net over the abyss, defuse paradoxes and lure away monsters, all to make their dreams last a little longer

You greet the other, they startle and the dream ends - again. You begin to wonder whose dreams these are, it’s never you in that abyss

Deep in the royal archives is a dorian map. The kingdom’s long been existing outside of time, history advances only on this parchment

The air is heavy with exhaust and shop smell. Subway trains peek out from between the roots, curl lazily around the trunks