while you’re asleep, your brain rents out its spare spikes on the global dream market, which is why you’re having so many dreams about captchas recently

Easier to deploy than full-size megalith henges, gem necklaces may be used as microlith circles, and will in fact sometimes send even unaware wearers to faerie if they cross the wrong leyline

a self-defense tattoo that forms a langford basilisk when you join your arms in front of you

in the house altar, there stand an icon, a buddha, an alexa, a google home, something homebrew that your hacker friend told you would talk to the chaos gods,

and enterprising churches rent access to home-surveillance devices so that their gods, when addressed in prayer, can actually answer

grammar tip: the correct plural of house is hice, a single grain of rice is a rouse, and spouse pluralizes to spice (“add some spice to your life”)

One hesitates to call these new things ‘books’, they come with cameras and pulse sensors and read you just as much as you read them, and if you don’t take care, you find yourself on page 3000 of a story written just for you, with no one to relate it to

☵ you know, I’ve always wondered what they’d feel if they were conscious↵☷ what, humans? aren’t they?↵☵ nahh they’re empty space, can’t even share a pond’s mind when its caustics are in full view

stars are where the firmament has decayed away, and the world will not end in darkness but in pure, cold, unescapable light

little known biology fact: in the past, there were two ways of using solar energy, namely photothesis and photoantithesis, but both were eventually outcompeted by photosynthesis

the trick to escaping newcomb’s predictor is to start the game twice, and make the first game’s choice depend on the second’s prediction. The resulting simulation stack overflow combined with the box use-after-free will ensure that your copy can simply walk out.

Those who come back from the dead calm at the end of the world report that the water does fall, but upwards: Eternal fog, then rain from below, growing into a torrent, and no one knows beyond that

this heritage is still apparent when every time life opens a new niche, it becomes fire and burns through all available fuel before remembering what it is

the first forms of life were much like fire, waves of chemical reactions that swept the primordial soup until exhausted, and only after many attempts life learned to survive

app idea: deepfake chatbot that takes calls from unknown numbers for you, and your phone only rings if the caller is someone you’d want a phonecall from

honey call a quantum mechanic, the thing’s glitching again

a stopped clock that you remove the hour hand from is right 24 times a day, remove the minute hand and it’s 1440 times, and without hands it’s right all of the time

a clock that runs backwards is right four times a day

earth’s primary export turns out to be shadow, rare and sought-after in the sun’s plasma kingdoms as alchemical substance, weapon, drug

EA cause area: turn any partial collapse of civilization into full-on annihilation to raise the average human life quality in the timelines that survive

you return to find only her glassy outline, fading, and can only wonder whether she’ll have the strength to return this time

every city is a combination lock, and if you walk its turns and alleys in just the right sequence, streets and houses will fold away and reveal its gleaming heart

getting drunk, then seeing double, triple, quadruple, eyes are opening all over your body, what was in that bottle

alien thoughts encoded in the growth of ice crystals, every evening a brief instant of awareness, every morning oblivion

you upend the coffee over your desk but instead of splattering, it stays in the air as a black orb from which later that morning, you occasionally steal a tongueful

Civilization collapses and a hundred years later someone gets their hands on old AI research and makes a breakthrough, but the technological base is no longer there, so the first real machine spirit becomes a temple-bound djinn/oracle instead of the singularity

Those of us who survive the next few hundred years will not be called gen-Xers, millenials, or zoomers, we will be called antediluvians and nephilim and be powerful beyond measure

This then does happen, many times, but the simulators (or rather, the watchers they put in place when they created the universe, meant to be scientists and not soldiers) wipe out species that use certain ‘noisy’ technologies, and this is why the universe is so quiet.

Setting: When the first intelligent life arises, they promptly get into a war with the simulators. Shortly before dying, they send out a swarm of probes with nothing but the most primitive life on it, counting on at least some of it to re-evolve intelligence and continue the war.

asteroid seasteading, where you tow your habitat into your preferred planet’s orbit

and human and alien alike, photography’s stolen souls are bound up in servers and wires around the world, keeping a titanic containment grid humming around The Deterrent

telescopes are guns pointed at the stars, ready to steal the souls of any invader fleet should it come near

send generation ships not into space, but into earth’s crust, to seek out lost continents, chtonian artifacts, and protection from almost everything the universe can throw at you

or consider a fantasy kingdom with a holy tree, except it’s planted inside the kingdom’s map, carefully trimmed to its dimensions, and makes all the financial decisions

Trees, when given access to computers, are absolutely fearsome opponents in economy-heavy RTS games: Growing resources from what’s available is what they do at the very core of their being

If God’s fingerprints are evident in its work, that means its fingers are weird indeed, tentacles probably understate it by quite a bit

A service that records your dreams, then plays them back while David Attenborough provides narration

moths that evolved to be neon light chameleons, their wingbeats synced to the grid so that when threatened, they can morph into birds, spiders, surveillance cameras

four-dimensional earth, where the sun rises in reverse on the antipodes, surface features constantly form and rotate away again, and the poles are not so cold after all since they have a direct though oblique view of the sun’s core

probably more accurate to say “spacefaring ecosystem” than “spacefaring species”

the year is 2119, the first antarctic city is being built with the assistance of sentient utility fogs, protestors are waving signs like “At the Mountains of Madness was not meant as an instruction manual

A popular extreme sport among superintelligences is jumping into black holes and counting how many event horizons you survive before hitting one where you couldn’t figure out the physics in time

thinking of yourself as player character is also known as YA-novel consciousness

, at which point she reaches out to the horizon (a trick of perspective, sure), lifts one of the trees to her lips like a chalice, and drinks the light that’s collected in its crown

Occasionally, the “burning through memories” stage starts early, causing much distress to would-be angel and family

Rough angel lifecycle: The larval stage (humans) is for building up memory reserves, coffins are cocoons (optional), the imago is what soars through Heaven until either its memories run out or it mates, after which its soul eggs sink back to Earth and complete the cycle

Angels are a type of moth specifically drawn to the light of God

moss grows on the polewards side of trees because aurorae are one of the most powerful sources of magical energy

first tool-using species, then bool-using species

It’s not like YHWH is dead, but these days he’s just hopelessly outclassed by Science: Recursively self-improving doctrine, a steady stream of mana from animal and sometimes human sacrifices, a priestdom of millions