your thought crystallizes and becomes regular, symmetric and repetitive↵you desperately look for a heat shock to break the lattice again

They build radiant hexagonal cities, forge and lose entire empires spanning the void between the snowflakes, while you sit inside and read.

The secret golem stays out of sight of anybody but those that know its name. To the uninitiated, it appears as a swirling mass of rumors.

The police had major difficulties drawing a chalk outline of the necromancer’s body - every time they finished one, it ran away.

As the ontological vampire goes unfed, it loses quality after quality, fades into a concept. Mathematicians have resurrected it so often.

The ontological vampire feeds on your specific qualities, leaving only an abstract husk. Freshly sated, it appears painfully hyperreal.

He could’ve ruled us, but his only edict was that we stop bowing to him.↵When he died, we buried him in the kings’ crypt under the school.

We used to pull pranks on him, secretly declared him king and guide star. Fanfares heralded his arrival, but he only got angry and confused.

Merfolk fortresses float against the ocean surface, exposing their bottom to the air. At times, from below, air rains on the fortifications.

lullaby:↵take your crown and sceptre, the blanket is your ermine coat↵from your throne rule dreamtime, extend its reach to the most remote ♫

macroscopic kingdoms of life: animals, plants, fungi, protista, roboti, mechals, fire, golems, storms, religions, stars, …

The real trouble came when it figured out how to float and started obscuring the sky: We had to flee into virtual reality to starve it out.

Kudzu that literally feeds on attention: It prospers in public places and on billboards, famous tourist destinations are nearly overgrown.

Cockroaches so large that we use them as tanks, hunt them for their shells and build houses out of them.

Atlantis didn’t sink. The ocean just eroded its foundations until it started floating like a giant raft. The pieces ended up everywhere.

Open the door and see a huge page blocking the frame. Read it. Turn it over. Another page. It seems you will have to read them all to pass.

dreams are the world that travels you

One time it had hidden in my closet overnight and I had nothing to wear that day. At least it doesn’t rain on my electronics anymore.

I caught a cloud in the park this one foggy morning and took it home. Still shows no signs of dissipating and follows me around the house.

It’s done the same to sleeping persons but the screaming puts me off.

I put my hat on a mannequin and my pet slime mold creeps out, engulfs its head and vanishes into the joints. The mannequin shudders to life.

Being a stone is peaceful. As I’m slowly ground into dust, ever lighter currents carry me around. Not being life, I’m content to watch.

They let it into their cities while they make their homes waterproof and repurpose balconies as doors. Their children may leave, they won’t.

Even though the dikes have stopped being useful, people are still too stubborn to leave. Some have accepted the sea, are even welcoming it.

I left my copy of Ficciones unattended near one once. Babel’s library has been overgrown by a jungle and its inhabitants are now farmers.

Don’t place seed books in your library without adequate quarantine. Or do you want the plants to spread and Asimov’s robots to become mossy?

Fictional plants can germinate in minds, so books about them are special, more akin to seedbanks than books. Other books provide the soil.

If asteroid mining takes off in my time, I may claim a medium sized asteroid and build a lichen garden on it.↵http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Human_Spaceflight/Lichen_survives_in_space

tumblelichen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrant_lichen↵potentially extraterrestial lichen: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0032063313002055↵chthonic lichen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endolithic_lichen

It’s like Solaris, only with an endless desert instead of an endless ocean.

lichen scientists altering Earth’s orbit just enough to stay within habitable range of the dying sun

These are a very slow form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belousov%E2%80%93Zhabotinsky_reaction ↵So, arguably the far future has lichen thinking at a glacial pace under the red sun.

Image

status: reading about lichens growing on various metals↵(lichens are so cute)

She opens her mouth and smiles at you radiantly. Her teeth glisten, red.↵They’re rubies.

webs that catch musical notes drifting by↵the spider will eat them to sing in stolen voices↵shake the web and they will all fall out at once

She is of all ages at once↵Look at her and see toddler, woman and crone↵Hear a baby crying, a rousing speech and a story at the fireplace

Attempts have been made to travel the river, but it ignores most ships. The only vessel that works is a small paper boat from old books.

We are now weaving one of the most sophisticated webs of all. Not long until the star spiders notice and come down to build their nests.

The zodiac signs were originally spiderwebs, but the minds they caught were heavy. The webs were pulled down to Earth and became part of us.

tiny spiders of light that draw threads between the stars to catch the eyes of those looking up

impossibly intricate heirloom webs passed down the generations that catch even cosmic rays and refract light to dazzle predators

vegetarian tree colony spiders that still weave webs because they serve as memory, ears and calculators now

a living web that traps spiders that attempt to mate with the decoy in the middle

a spider that leaves its web between timelines to feed on its alternate selves

a spider so large that it needn’t weave a web - it just spreads out its legs in every direction and the threads unfold between them.

Spiders, but seen as an organ of their web.

You can bathe in the river if you don’t care much for your mind - it’ll be washed away. Reforming it takes days, but for some it is relief.

What we didn’t know about hollow Earth: it was a great resonator. When the comet struck, the crust rang for days like a cosmic bell.

The river’s waters flow through everything, unimpressed by mere matter. From space, it enters earth and exits somewhere yet undiscovered.