“They’re dead, accept it, this has been the way since life began” vs “Ghosts now serve an important role in society, some even as judges”

2040: Contracts that bind ghosts to their loved ones for eternity are banned, a decision criticized by both ghost industry and many bereaved

After your death, a simulacrum generated from your surveillance data will clean up after you. A digital ghost, bound by past duties.

cut reality to see if it bleeds: it does↵liquid time flows out, traps you like amber↵reality’s skin heals over and you’re caught under it

Two lightning bolts chase each other, outside, across the meadow, do not heed what is around them, leave scars like writing on the ground.

A puzzle has been solved. Dormant connections light up, sparks fly, the mixture touches off. A new world blooms into being explosively.

They rest their foreheads against each other’s but meet no resistance: Skulls glide into each other, mindscapes interlock, mutual completion

the steganosaurus has transparent scales, flesh and bones, when you see its teeth it’s already too late

A tale of caution, citizens! Remember to dispose of oneiroactive waste! Don’t leave it around, turn it in, lest it sprout or reactivate.

She finds an old dreamcatcher in the attic and accidentally drops it. Dreams scamper off into the shadows and she has nightmares for weeks.

You open the book to wind up a music box attached to its back. With every chapter, a new soundtrack slides into place and plays.

Oh yes they still remember how they pacified the lumberjacks. But it’s them who rule now. If you come for sex, be reminded that you’re ｐｒｅｙ.

When the lumberjacks left, the dryads quickly turned feral, having lost their protective function. Their woods are empty of animals.

We radioed a few, no answer, no signs of life. But the stars… stirred. Something large was moving. Whatever it is, it’s now on its way to us

He built a telescope. Used a mirror of amber and silver, the better to see ghosts with. Found them: entire nebulae. Eurekamen.

“You’re looking for life in space, but doing it wrong! You should be looking for signs of death, not life!” We thought his claims wild.

In old times, rainbows were in pythagorean, not equal scale. You see the colors bleed into each other slightly differently on old paintings.

Cloud providers struggle with haunted circuits until they find out water cooling helps: Running water.↵They’re now hiring psychics.

Some of the newer AIs qualify for having souls: Their merciless evolution in datacenters makes these hotspots of necromantic energy

a wave of rock is on the horizon, closing in, grasslands and forests break on fresh mountain faces that push through the ground like teeth

But, unnoticed by human supervisors, a previously intractable class of solvers is cracked: Data entry clerks.↵Seizures sweep the globe.

Solver crashes are local, but sufficient for fingerprinting. Trained on solver reactions, anti-solver fractals grow more and more effective.

Advances in image recognition show certain classes of captcha solvers to be vulnerable to Langford inputs. Antispam quickly weaponizes this.

Books of lost knowledge materialize in the secret library every day. Their pages vanish under the reader’s eye as their secrets are un-lost.

run two instances, let one watch and project its relief of not being the victim into the other’s thoughts

instrument a mind with debugging hooks to catch all “at least they didn’t come up with […]” thoughts

upload torture chamber:↵the snip, which steals cherished memories↵the mace, which corrupts them↵the graft, which adds horrible fake ones

She cries soap bubbles that float upwards, each containing an unhappy memory, darkly iridescent like oil slick

“Then graverobbers, now saverobbers: Watch our report on how a shadow industry adapts to changing circumstances”

Old school liches store their souls in crypts, modern ones encrypt their minds and make backups. The rules stay the same: don’t touch that.

Error correction algorithms proved curiously effective against magical corruption. A game changer for black magic, now nearly respectable.

A house hangs from the underbelly of a cloud, anchored by a few orphaned naiads whose desperate thirst pulls them against their cages.

wax rain from a cloud of floating candles coats the landscape and suffocates plants and crops

Propaganda is essentially eumemics, luckily not the kind that breeds stronger and healthier memes but only useful ones.

He’s so tired that as he sits down, his head and limbs detach and roll across the room (some mornings, he puts on the arms the wrong way)

Those who can afford the hardware have plots in the high resolution quarters of Polygon City, while low poly is synonymous with poor.

mirrored glasses that let you see your own eyes and nothing else

fill me with useless data just like one of your terabyte externals

I was once bitten by a radioactive idea and now I shoot them out of my fingers

A museum exhibiting the artifacts of past cultures: the dust of movie reels, snow of VHS cassettes, blur of overcompressed JPEGs

reverse sleeping beauty, in which she stays up day and night and the eerie light of her experiments shimmers through the rosebush thicket

You fall asleep in a movie theatre, wake up: Everybody has gone home, the sun shines through the collapsed roof, birds nest in the ruins

Your sleep takes longer and longer: Last time a prince woke you (how rude), this time you find the ruins of a tiny civilization on your body

The bridge spans the whole planet, never once touching ground, ending nowhere, connecting nothing but itself

It takes a skilled tailor but the fabric of reality can be cut up and refit. How about that hatcrown of luck, Midas gloves or plot armor?

a flock of raindrops, hesitating to fall, circling over its prey

you cannot see him naked since he has no skin, he just becomes world at some indefinable point

Some, in search for the far realms, kill themselves the moment they arrive. Others simply because it’s quieter a few thousand restores out.

When you die, they give you a choice to restore from a savepoint, however you will share a realm with everybody else who has restored once.

we feed the reconstructor networks with noise to get eigendreams, the semantic skeleton of the oneirosphere