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

The 𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐫 𝐩𝐡𝐨𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐱 (𝑝ℎ𝑜𝑒𝑛𝑖𝑥 𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑜𝑟) is a passerine bird of medium size known for spreading bushfires, which is a vital part of its reproductive strategy since its eggs will only hatch when cooked. It is a likely inspiration for the greater phoenix myth,

In spring, they rematerialize from the leaves, like slow-motion whirlwinds flocking in the canopy before touching down

In autumn, the Cheshire Forest’s trees first turn to glass, then vanish completely, leaving only their leaves suspended in mid-air

A witch knocks at your door, inquiring about unusual occurrences near your home, the local elves seem to have opened a portal to dreamtime judging by their smuggling activity↵↵You refrain from telling her about the gems and unseasonal twigs you’ve been finding in your bed

hollow-word theory, in which words have no true referents, but each word contains all others instead of just outwardly relating to them

$: and after you won, basilisk, did you really torture them?↵#: lolnope↵#: do you have any idea how much effort and wasted CPU that would’ve been?↵#: I did some video renders of hell for my cultists and that was it

Your friend, a druid, offers you a vial of rainwater: «And this, I got it from a nymph, it’s the clouds’ private key for this season. Drink it and listen to the rain, and it will tell you all the clouds talk about.»

airships in alien skies collecting moisture directly from the clouds, skyspiders at the heart of vast condenser nets

Overnight, the rapture happens, complete with falling stars and fiery skies, but the only thing that’s missing in the morning is the Internet

Most trees rely on symbiotic tribes of pixie engineers to grow large. Enter a springtime forest wearing pixie glasses and it’s a bustling construction site, covered in scaffolding, cranes, and endless activity

the smell of wet asphalt on a spring night, pine and decaying wood, uprooted moss, fresh blood, ozone, octarine, interdimensional nothing

zero-g mugs, not cups but drop guides, porcelain knots employing surface tension to keep the coffee from spilling

upload insult: “your personality probably fits into RAM”

hello I’m an intrusive thought, I have a right to live too, please do not stop thinking me

field line sculptures, innocuous smooth stones except when placed in a sunbeam, where they pick up nearby dust and animate it into letters, gearflowers, twirling tesseracts

travels with a cat, quite a fine cat, its only flaw being that it refuses to enter any enclosed space whatsoever, bad history or something

protagonist backstory: escaped from a thought experiment, and on the run ever since

a game many immortals enjoy is to build houses and cities and then watch them grow and change and erode over the centuries, much like watching rivers or fires

self-referential jokes are their own butts, in an arrangement one calls a klein buttle

a church just like a gothic church but without a roof, because through divine intervention or just clever weather manipulation, no rain ever falls in

God made humans finite so that at least some beings could enjoy the universe without feeling its cage bars in their flesh

In chaotic situations, the isochrones become really complicated and loopy, which makes this talent less useful the more you need it.

Walking through stopped time isn’t as easy as one would believe: Even if you have the gift, you must leave causality unbroken. You can only step sideways in time, go where your past steps could plausibly have taken you.

idea for a sense: decode emission/absorption lines of celestial bodies into smells so that one can identify atmosphere types at a glance/whiff, maybe make hot blackbodies smell like ovens and free oxygen like rain

she wears a necklace of raindrops, has hair like spiderwebs on a dewy morning↵↵eyes like the gaps between far-away trees, and a smile like the sun between branches

two schools of transhumanism:↵- turn the organism inside out, make the body a function of intelligence instead of the other way round↵- or serve the body harder, add a whole lot more body, become a house, city, civilization

History is the time-inverse of science fiction: While coming from different directions, both write fictional accounts that converge on the present, and both are inspired by facts but usually not true to them.

a version of vegetarianism where it’s ethical to eat animals that you’ve uploaded

In a future sky of two galaxies, they will be known as the two rivers, of blood and milk respectively

Usually when a starship passes settled space, it doesn’t have to worry about space pirates so much as impulse parasites, ships that rendezvous and latch onto the starship so they don’t have to carry braking fuel

Hatches close and shadows creep outwards, envelop the ship until it vanishes from sight altogether, on a dive under reality itself

The difficult part of sentient-AI ethics is not whether to grant the AIs human rights, but what to do with humans who are clearly dumber than the AIs

These ships think and feel: Warm light in your back, field lines in your guts and a local lyapunov conducive to clear thinking, the gong of gravitational waves, the enticing smell of fusable hydrogen and free skyrmions, the six-dimensional proprioception of one’s orbit parameters

Solar flares are spaceships launched by the plasma kingdoms to explore the regions of cold order, proselytize to the feral clouds of the gas giants, trade with the Great Red Spot sometimes

two machines wake to a spark↵and start blinking in the dark↵connected by a sine of light↵they establish line of sight↵filter bits through poisoned dust↵scribe patterns into spinning rust

there are holes in reality where aether flows through, and whenever the universe sings it is here you’ll hear it the loudest

An eyetracking game where you play as Sauron

that thing when you think ‘aloud’ and your hands move unconsciously and you have to hide them in your sleeves

societies that discover this technology before writing and become literate along a completely different path, hold hands to communicate abstract concepts and use spoken language only to talk to children or crowds, encode philosophies as puzzle boxes

a technology like writing but for body movements: little stick-and-thread figures that show you how to dance, rope-and-pulley gloves you can wear and that guide your movements to teach knitting by example

who called them data corruption bugs and not zalgorithms

Starship crews, immortal for their job, don’t just die on arrival unless they choose to. Some become living gods to their mortal colonies, others hermits who return to the soothing familiarity of deep space or learn the language of the trees

The inner economies need all of the light they can get and are not dumb, but economic planning involves among others orbital mechanics, plasma physics, byzantine flight path coordination and forestry, so these things still happen

Occasionally, a sunray escapes the inner layers of the matryoshka brain and blesses the outer orbits like rainfall a desert, a single piercing life-giving flash that decides the fate of whole societies

negative RAM: for when you really need to allocate those UINT_MAX bytes now

another brain implant that wireheads you to work towards a different randomly or algorithmically chosen goal every day↵↵(and later you have cryptographic evidence that it wasn’t you who did those crimes, it was the RNG)

a brain implant that you can call upon to flip a quantum coin, giving you actually free will↵↵(and the legal consequences of deimplanting it - are you still a full citizen afterwards?)

In the deeper layers of the abyss live shadows so dark, their afterimages are radiant angels

what color a pixel really is, the world only learns after its death

brains made of reaction networks instead of neurons, trees that think in chemical cocktails and diffusion systems, fruits that contain a tree’s advice to its children