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| have you ever noticed how fucking long this guy's leg is in the movie poster? why did they do that? |
There are only two good scifi settings. I write about one constantly and see the other in my dreams.
* * *
The OASIS (yes, that OASIS) is an abandoned metaverse project. Once, it made headlines as the future of telecommuting. Twelve years of development, 2.6 trillion dollars, and four major lawsuits later, everyone collectively realized the technology was useless. GSS pulled the plug, and thirteen billion VR headsets simultaneously bricked.
Except not all of the headsets are dead. Inexplicably, the servers are still online. A few, no more than fifty, offer stable portals to the bloated, over-simulated, advertiser-ravaged, AI-generated corporate hellscape that is the OASIS.
You are stuck at home. You have in your possession, by sheer luck, a working headset. The same is true of your friends, none of whom you have ever met, or could ever meet, in real life. All the people who matter to you are inside the OASIS.
[This setting is not about the OASIS, or any of the stuff Ernest Cline thinks is cool. I think it's about a Discord server.]
* * *
For as long as we've known about
extrasolars, people have been sending songs into space. It's cheap, and
your music will bounce around in space forever. A bunch of early
startups pitched it as a form of artistic pseudo-immortality.
Now it's the Scramble. If you dip your head into radiospace, you'll hear a million million songs playing simultaneously, alongside a billion billion half-baked podcast episodes and a trillion trillion advertisements for products that don't exist anymore.
You can
still stick an antenna up, if you care, and try to decode something. A
message in a bottle from millennia ago, an out-of-tune ukelele, a "will
you marry me?", a conspiracy theory, a jingle for e-cigarettes. It's
mostly noise. You can spend hours deconvolving a signal and end up with
fartnoise.wav.
Radio communication is pretty much borked. There's no out-screaming the Scramble.
* * *
Microsimulations
are modular miniature virtual reality
environments. You buy them out of gacha machines (they come as colorful plastic finger-length cubes) and snap them together with magnets. They're inhabited by little AIs, which provide the main mode of play: when you click them together, the two spaces become connected by a swirling portal, and the AIs from each side start talking to/killing each other. It's like a modular ant farm - you're invited to shake the simulation and watch the inhabitants freak out.
So one day a swirling portal appears just outside your window
* * *
[i get a little freaked when cooking videos start by showing you the finished product. The causality of it is all fucked - you haven't cooked anything yet, but there's food. This happens in movies and books ("three days earlier...") but for some reason when it's done casually, with a phone camera and a solo creator, it unnerves me]
We cracked time perception with the PlayStation C. "Dilate your chronosight; turn a five minute breather into a six-hour gaming session; no need for bathroom breaks!"
The limits were pushed. The thought barrier was established: 940 thinks/ms, no further.
You actually can go faster. The technology is widely described as "quantum bullshit" (it actually has nothing to do with quantum mechanics and is closer to distributed computing - you're using more than one neuron to simultaneously process the present and the future. sidebar, can you tell i fucking hate writing scifi because im really bad at it??)
Quantum Bullshit lets you 1) see the future. This is the big money-maker, all the day traders dedicate more than half of their neurons to next year's stock market (they creep further forward in time every day, drifting away in their speculator arcologies)
2) live in the past. Thirty of my neurons are still eating my breakfast. All virtual reality environments are severely chronofucked. There's an ad in the paper for the iPhone 103 before the 102S is even out, because advertisers know your attention will be here when it does. The ad reads: "New features, probably! Maybe it'll look like this!"
(This technology has NOT been introduced to the prison sector because that system is a well-oiled machine with NO flaws and ZERO ethical oversight.)
* * *
The Scramble isn't dying down, like we thought it would. It's actually getting warmer - radio waves shortening into microwave patches, then into infrared flares. Some time in the next millennium, the Scramble will crawl into the visible light spectrum, and the night sky will runneth over with static like an old CRT.
