What the loons also see: Monkeys, hanging off handholds, pulling grimaces at passengers. Lesser city gods. All the graffiti ever erased

Sleep through too many final stops in public transport, and eventually you will fade, become one of those invisible people the loons talk to

there’s a library that collects these, full of the highest praises for our world but taboo for all but the most strong-willed souls

mirroring a popular mortal custom, souls often leave scrolls with their reasons for reincarnating before jumping off their cloud

many of the stars we approached turned out to be afterimages, massless holograms, dead pixels in the firmament circled by ghost planets

here burns tough, black, sinewy fire, not as hungry as the regular kind but near impossible to extinguish, a traveler’s best friend if tamed

stars drop out of the sky not like shooting stars but like raindrops from a branch, quietly falling and then bursting into many small sparks

ouroboroi are themselves cyclic universes, in fact the multiverse can be described as a giant hyperdimensional knot of sleeping snakes

Odysseus, but as the tale of a pub crawl spanning several cities on an impossibly long night

with your knife of song, cut off a small river arm, braid it, wear it as a wreath and watch fishes poke their heads out of it

That was a voidwhale: Solitary and ancient, it digests primordial dark matter crystals into atoms, sometimes sings gravitational waves

Way out in the void, far from any galaxy, a shape surfaces from under the vacuum, belches out a small star’s worth of hydrogen, dives again

Around ghosts, deadnaming is fine, even polite. Just be sure to never call it ‘dead’naming

By the way that’s how you know Dicken’s Christmas Carol is fabrication, not one language incident in the whole yarn despite time emphasis

When talking to ghosts, be careful to use the right tense and mood, for many take grave offense at being mentioned in the past tense

“Sure, I’ll cast a recursive spell”, next you know that spell has used up all the universe’s magic to convert it into hot expanding space

Spells that create life are taboo not because of hubris (wizards are hubris) but because that’s entirely too close to self-casting spells

remember when ◊ was young, weak, didn’t rule the world yet, and you used to play hide and seek in your files, leave each other surprises,

Android graveyards are places of lively trade - one’s scrap is another’s long-needed replacement part. Just avoid those possessed by backups

The kudzu won and overgrew the tornado, caught its cloud too. The gyre is solidifying, strapped down by widening green streaks

anthropic arguments and panpsychism are no friends

imagine spawning in a meat brain instead of one of myriads of photon brains, and deriving all sorts of things about the universe from that

modulo concerns about mind complexity not following a power law, and other unquestioned assumptions I guess

if existentialism comes with complexity, this would suggest that humans are somewhere near the bottom of the existentialist scale

a universe with lots of small minds just intelligent enough to question existence is anthropically more likely than one with a few big minds

romantic movie, concierge to male protagonist: “And you, Mr?” “Bond. Pair Bond.”

These arcologies house prisons, monasteries, villages of holdouts - on billboards pointed their way, fishes often swim by

2032: Cities are now completely submerged in cyberspace, only a few heavily jammed locations show up in overlays as bubbles of static

they tell us of each other’s presence↵they wouldn’t have to, we already know

an ocean of light roars before our eyes↵photon surf breaks against our corneas↵flocks of neuron spikes rise up, carrying messages

tomorrow, bring a kite, a cold iron hook and a piece of sky as bait - we’re going to drive into the hills and catch a few clouds

Somewhat more survivable is the comet bow which, along with its light source, typically splits into several during atmospheric contact

One of the rarer rainbow types is the nova bow: A dying star’s scouring light, refracted by rocks that it vaporized

Lecturer: Now, while some of you might dispute the wisdom of letting the economy optimize basilisks for scariness in order to get funding,

Lecturer: In order to have no single basilisk hog all the mindspace and win the race, there need to be several in competition.

Some cartesian demons can be bargained into lying to the universe about you instead of the other way round. This is how many spells work

minecraft, but instead of a huge map you have a fractal map and escape into ever more precise coordinates

Under the shower, all the colors run off her and a glassy outline stays behind

something like “lmaoooo” then sounds like the voice subroutine crashed and is looping through the ring buffer

I like to imagine that when people repeat letters in txtspk, their voice is being sampled to say the same word over and over again

pseudo dice made out of a number of small quickly reconfiguring robot arms, to faithfully simulate tesseract dice

Once the abyss has looked back, escalate. Touch it. Its fingers on your skin will be light, gentle, somehow knowing and familiar

The mushroom monks who inhabit it have abandoned humanity, mycelibates whose faith grows within, and on them

In the distance, a profusion of fruiting bodies towers over the city. The largest chimes three and three spore clouds drift downwind

some memes have antimeme symbionts to increase their market value, for example copy-protected music

Modeled after humans a little too closely, in the end the words that doom humanity are a lovesick AI’s “If I can’t have you, nobody will”

Though the hackers are forgotten, many colonist mythologies feature the pyramid builders or ‘precursors’, inscrutable hyperdrive saints

One of their better hacks was an easter egg in all major terraformbots: Before the colonists arrived, they’d build a number of pyramids.

Most notably, nobody but PCs will try to talk to you, water will stop flowing, and you can see into partially rendered buildings and bodies

If you adopt the NPCs’ mannerisms just well enough, the simulation will take you for one and reduce rendering fidelity accordingly