time travel regulation organization where it’s not official policy, but it’s common practice for field agents to keep a binder at their desk with the names of their family and friends, their address, their anniversaries, their schedules, their passwords. everything you would need to steal an identity—virtually anyone who’s been a field agent for more than a year has had to steal their own identity at least once. the timeline they all work to protect is concerned with wars and presidents and major motion picture releases. some margin of error is allowed, and it’s not uncommon to find agents walking around dazed, coming back from a mission to find their best friend unexisted, and a wedding ring on their hand that matches the ring of a stranger. some give up on all relationships, not even letting themselves love their siblings. some wear lockets on their missions, so that if the photo on their desk has shifted in its frame on their return, at least they have something left of the timeline that now never was. agent zhang, who works hebei-shandong-jiangsu AD 1850-2000, has eighteen different family portraits. in some some agent zhang has a wife, in some a husband, in some have neither. three portraits have one child, one has four, one has seven, most have none. some are in courtyard houses. some are by white picket fences. many have parents, but the newest one has none. you ask agent zhang if it wouldn’t be easier just to let the alternate timelines go. agent zhang points at a child four portraits back, a little girl with a missing front tooth and a goldfish bowl clutched in her arms. “i never learned what that goldfish was called. i took her out for ice cream as soon as i knew she existed, and i didn’t even get to see her come home from school the next day.”

I love fictional robots learning and growing as characters. Though sometimes people like to present this as a robot’s speech gradually growing more “natural” and “humanlike,” and while that can sometimes work, consider:

Robot character who learns to speak more “naturally” and “eloquently” and all their human friends talk about how much they’ve grown and so on… but when they’re not around humans, they go back to their robotic speech (be it speaking in a way humans consider more stilted, or using a more limited vocabulary, speaking in a completely different robotic language entirely), or just don’t speak at all and communicate in a different manner entirely (through text, through motions, through different colored lights), because that is what’s natural to them. They only speak like a human for the benefit of humans—not for their own benefit.

love scifi stuff assuming madness follows disconcerting or lacking embodiment when looking down and not seeing your body is the most normal thing ever. Consider maneuvering a laundry basket down the stairs. What feelings does this engender in you? Urgency and focus, attention to orientation, a receptivity to the immediate relevance of any new stimuli, maybe. Not catastrophe. Looking down and not seeing your body is totally fine! Close your damn eyes and try it! It’s such a funny meme to me when it crops up in scifi, after playing in VR. Please trust me that if you astrally project somehow and freak out about it it will be because you are a nervous person, and not because sensory dislocation is intrinsically incompatible with human sanity.

humans adjust very quickly to such bizarre embodiments as having wheels on their feet or donning a gigantic carapace that goes eighty miles an hour. humans can operate cranes the size of skyscrapers and jet skis and hang gliders. there is no shape or set of capacities you can drop a human into and not have them figure it out real fast.

i mean holy shit look at portal, a very popular videogame. in a matter of hours you can learn to think about space and distance in a way that's utterly impossible in the entire rest of your life. you can learn, within a single day, to navigate by tesseract with very little forethought. several puzzles require you to chain multiple portals together and create new ones while you're in motion. reality doesn't work that way, decades of your lived experience are spent in a world where this is impossible, but with an afternoon of practice you can get the hang of teleportation and do it for fun.

i really don't think there's an embodiment out there that humans can't adapt to and then play around with.

Yeah. I've yelled about this before: humans are naturally cyborgs. If we weren't, we couldn't use utensils or pencils. Changing our internal body map to include the tools we're using is one of the many mental adaptations we have as a tool-using species, and I don't see why we wouldn't be able to adapt to weirder things.

Minecraft Steve is kinda a cosmic horror if you think about it.

Terraforming can be a big part of the game and most people do it to achieve a more “natural” look. The generated landscape follows the minecraft universe’s “rules” and you’re essentially reshaping the world to be more like your universe (real life)

Those giant hyper realistic mountain builds is essentially an entity (us) outside the minecraft universe completely rearranging the shape of the world to be more “natural” to it.

Like you know what a tree looks like but imagine it being remade by something outside your universe to look familiar to their universe which is beyond your comprehension.

That’s what happens when the player makes custom trees and it goes from this to this.

If people were too mean to you when you were growing up, a newborn animal will materialize inside your brain and it’s so so scared and shivering and it will stay there for years. Decades, even. And whenever you say something kind of weird but true to your heart the animal will tell you “Noo! You can’t say that! If you say that, everyone will hate you!”. The animal means well. It’s so so small and everything is so scary for them and it’s just trying to protect you. But listen to me. Listen to me. Whenever this happens, you can’t do what the animal says. You can’t. If you do, you’ll become as scared as the animal. You have to keep saying weird shit. You have to keep doing things the animal wouldn’t approve of. If you do enough things that scare the animal, maybe one day it’ll go to sleep.

girl what?

Special Item Drop: Dorito's Diaphanous Dust - A Neon Orange dust that (somehow) turns mice- and maybe you!- transparent.

Sneha Solanki  ‘The Lovers’

Two networked machines, one infected with a virus, slowly infects the other through the interface of classic romantic poetry.

A breakdown in the relationship was inevitable once the virus had seeped into the memory of one machine and then into the other through a singular network cable affecting the poetic text files. Communication between the two deteriorated, leading to irrational & at times odd behaviour. Each machine reacted with equal confusion and conflict. The interface text became an illegible poetic mutation of itself.

[ID: Two computers facing each other, connected to one another, on rectangular platforms. The room is backlit in red. End ID.]

l%ve

You've heard of Earth is space australia now get ready for: Earth is the space Amazon Rainforest. Aliens land on Earth and they are losing their goddamn minds because every square inch of the ground is absolutely PACKED with life like there are hundreds of species just in this one site, there are winged animals flying through the sky and multiple colonies of sophisticated social insects just in the shadow of their ship, this ONE ROCK is covered in MULTIPLE SPECIES OF ORGANISMS that are themselves MULTIPLE ORGANISMS LIVING SYMBIOTICALLY, the tall, woody autotrophs look so different from each other because they're...holy shit that's like 5, 6, 7???? different species on this one site???

they start talking to a human and the human is like "haha yeah that's a crow!" and the alien researcher is like "you called it a 'bird' earlier, is that a different name?" and the human is like "oh a crow is just one species of bird, there's like, 10 others out there"

"On this planet?"

"No, in the back yard right now."

imagine aliens that come from a tidally locked planet where only a thin band of the planet is habitable, or a planet life was only able to develop in small areas at the poles, or in the few pools of liquid water on the planet's surface, or just in isolated areas where geologic activity causes geysers and springs, visiting Earth. They seem completely unprepared for the shock of realizing that Earth's continents appear green because the continents are absolutely covered with green organisms.

The alien biologists are so uncomfortable because there are certain protocols for maintaining certain distances from life signatures to avoid harming unfamiliar organisms, and groves of plant like autotrophs and pools where aquatic life dwells are carefully protected and respected, with very important rules for approach

On Earth, the inhabitants are just. Playing and walking LITERALLY STEPPING ON CARPETS OF ORGANISMS the whole time. the aliens are like "it doesn't hurt them??? Can't you just...move them to a place where you don't have to step on them?" and the humans are like "no of course not, grasses evolved to tolerate being stepped on, and besides, more plants would grow there if we tried to move the existing ones"

It then must be explained that humans would need to regularly spray poisons on the ground to prevent any given area of bare soil from filling up with plant life, and that "regularly" means "multiple times within a single solar cycle." And that the poisons stop working within a few decades because the plants evolve to resist them that fast.

Human: yeah solar is the dominant energy source these days but some of the recent solar farm projects are pretty controversial because they're in reclaimed strip mining sites that others argue should be restored as best as we can to their previous ecological state

Alien: I don't understand...why would you not place the solar farms in an area of the planet with no existing ecosystem?

Human: ...what?

Alien: You have rather sophisticated protective gear and have done some space exploration, surely you could establish them in an area of the planet to which life is not yet adapted?

Human: ...there isn't one.

Alien: ...what do you mean there isn't one

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU 'DON'T KNOW' HOW MANY SPECIES THERE ARE"

"Our biologists would love to collaborate with your Earth scientists to draw up a definitive listing of Earth species and resolve any inconsistencies in the records."

"I don't think you understand what I'm saying. Only 25% of Earth's species have been formally described, at most."

"that's...that's most of them."

"Yes?"

"Well...I suppose the ocean trenches and abyssal plains must be difficult for you to reach...where did you have to travel for your discoveries?"

"Travel? I moved here to Alabama in the first place to study its aquatic ecosystems. The crayfish I discovered live in that creek I showed you earlier."

This is so sweet and happy!

a story with that cyberpunk theme of “are you really human if you modify your body to gain power“, except the body modification is just strength training.

parallel storyline with “these cognitive enhancements are making you INHUMAN and OUT OF TOUCH” but it’s just an education in statistics

humans stop being “truly human” and become “cyborgs abominations never intended by god or nature” the moment we pick up a fork or pencil.

… are you some medieval pope?

I actually am a pope but not a medieval one.

But my point is that humans have an ability to modify our internal body map when we pick up a tool. Try to think about how you make movements with a pencil or fork, or how you drive a car. You don’t think “I need to move my fingers this way so it’ll lever the fork that way to pick up the noodles”, you instead just move your fork, just how when you pick up something with your hand you don’t have to think about how you’re using muscles in your arm and shoulder, you just do it.

When you’re holding a tool or operating a device, at a certain point it stops being about manipulating the tool/device, because you’ve internalized how it moves. Your body map now contains that tool as part of you, and you move it just as automatically and fluently as you do your biological body parts.

It takes a while to get to that point the first time, sure, but it takes humans a long time to just get the hang of walking, too. But once you do, it becomes second nature.

So my point is that we’re basically set up to be cyborgs, to be more that human. We’re a tool using species, and one way that manifests is that we’re really good at using tools, because we treat them as part of our body, so we don’t have to think about how we manipulate them. We instead think about how we use them to manipulate external things.

So because we can have pencils in our body map, we can write, because we think about making marks on the paper, not about moving fingers.

Because we can have knives and chisels and hammers and saws in our body map, we can build and cut and manipulate resources by thinking about the changes we’re making, not about the way we handle the tools.

The base of my argument is that “unmodified humanity” doesn’t exist (except maybe the tiniest of newborn babies) because we change ourselves to be better at what we’re doing. That’s how humanity works. There is no “pure natural state” to get back to, we’re built to change and adapt and people worried about “losing humanity” because of implants and prothesises and drugs and gene therapy are missing the point: of course they’ll change who we are as humans… Changing our form IS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN.

Like, I’ve talked about this before, but you can spot a London cab driver on a brain scan easier than you can tell male brains vs female brains, because learning how to do that changes the form and function of your brain to such a degree that you can detect it just by doing an MRI. You can tell if someone was an archer or a ballet dancer by the shape of their bones. You can tell what language a newborn’s parents speak because they babble in the same cadence and pitches as their soon-to-be-first-language, just from hearing it in the womb.

If you’re ever worried that something you do or become means you’re “less human”, don’t be. Becoming less “human” is the most human thing you can do.

I’ve been trying so hard to explain this to people ever since I got promoted to forklift driver. How quickly my body map integrated this five ton machine into a natural extension of my being. I’m actually better at guessing the battery charge on my truck by the minute sluggishness in my lift actuators than I am at assessing my own hunger. I can clear turns around shelving units within an inch of my sideboards easier than I can avoid tripping over my own feet out of truck.

It doesn’t just make me stronger, faster, able to reach higher, it also makes me more graceful, more agile, more aware of my self and my surroundings.

Perhaps even more human.

Exactly! Getting forklift certified makes you the next state of human evolution!

I have been saying this about motorcycles for years: Ie, what does it mean to “be” a “man” or a “woman” when by mass three quarters of my body as I experience it (and as it would be seen by a passer-by) is made by Kawasaki and I am getting more useful sensory information from my front tyre (hot, slipping, near the limit of my grip) and my engine (struggling to breathe, pounding too fast) than from my arse or feet (numb)?

This says some really cool and somewhat emotional things for me about people who work closely in working partnership with individual animals. Cattle and sheepdogs, horses, that sort of thing. Also about things like dancing, cheerleading. The teamwork at the top of an oil rig, men throwing chain, deadly work done together. To be human is to be part of something else, and thus to be not entirely human, or entirely self, at all.

Alien: So you’re saying that human brains sometimes just… malfunction? And see threats that aren’t really there?

Human: Yeah basically?

Alien: And then the human keeps living and doing things anyways???

Human: Yup

Alien: Woahhhhhh. Woahhhhh. Humans are badass.

Aliens would probably have fundamentally different responses to trauma than humans would,like- their brains. would be so fundamentally different. at a basic chemical and structural level we’d have to relearn everything, in this scenario the alien species is REALLY BAD at continuing to function with even a slightly impaired brain, and deals with it with LOTS OF BABIES, Oh yeah great grandpa died three years back when he got really surprised and WHAT DO YOU MEAN,THAT A HUMAN GOT STABBED THROUGH THE HEAD AND CONTINUED TO LIVE I DON’T BELIEVE YOU THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE, I bet they are all pregnant all the time and when they randomly die the baby eats their way out of the corpse, they are insectoid and look a lot like praying manti and they REALLY FREAK OUT THEIR HUMAN FRIENDS THE FIRST TIME IT HAPPENS, there is a sort of generational memory that happens which is how they managed to develop tech at all being so fragile, so when the creatures get depressed or homesick or manic and die it’s not like their human friends have lost them forever, except for how it sort of is, (via @songofsunset)

PLEASE IMAGINE THE FIRST TIME AN ALIEN HAS ONE OF THEIR HUMAN FRIENDS DIE

‘so hey, that was a great funeral, cool outfits, always glad to learn more about your culture and stuff. So, when is she coming back?’

‘She- she’s not coming back’

‘Yeah, not as Megan, but when is her replacement coming back?’

‘We’re- not hiring anyone new for a couple weeks???’

‘no no no, you’re not getting what I’m saying- I want to ask her about that book she lent me- can I keep it for another week or two, or does her new version want it back?’

The humans stare at the alien and just. slowly start to figure out what the alien is saying. The alien shuffles nervously, their six spindly legs making a skritching noise that echoes in the cold chapel. Finally, the kindest of the humans takes the alien aside and-

‘hey. so. Us humans don’t come back when we die. Not like you do.’

‘what? No, but you clearly talk about reincarnation, and-’

‘Those are just stories, Six. When humans die, we’re gone. We don’t come back.’

The alien laughs ‘No, see, cuz that would mean that- that would mean. That Megan- Megan is-’ The alien cuts off the hissing noise that is their equivalent of a sob. ‘I have to go.’

The alien spends a week in their spaceship, the only place they can send communication to their Mother. When they come back, their carapace is a glistening new shade of red, and they’ve ended up as a different gender. When the lab adviser asks them how they are feeling about Megan-

‘Megan? Oh, yes, my previous version was very fond of Megan.’ The alien cocks their head, like a particularly thoughtful bird. ‘I suppose that I regret her loss. She was a valuable member of the team.’

The lab adviser lets this be- they are aliens after all. But later, when lab hours are done, the adviser notices Six double and triple-checking all the lab equipment, especially- well. The accident that took Megan will never happen again.  

The book is never returned.

Now imagine the flip side: Sevan finds out his human friend is due to have a baby in six months. Six months! He asks, and finds that no, there’s no way to delay a human birth. In six months, a new version of his friend will emerge. Will they still like space operas? What about visiting that smoothie place in quadrant 6? Will they even still want to be friends? His friend asks him to be visit the baby, after it’s born. Of course, of course he will. It’s the least he can do. There’s always that vulnerable phase after birth when you haven’t got the hang of the new motor controls, and everyone needs a helping palp for the first few months.  The night he hears that the new baby has been born, he wails quietly and recites the qualities of his friend that he will miss the most. Three days later, he gathers his resolve and knocks on the hatch of his friend’s place. Strangely, the access panel hasn’t been lowered - rude. He’ll make sure that’s one of the first things changed. His friends partner opens the door and lets him in and there - there is his friend,looking tired but well, a miniature copy of herself held in her arms. Imagine his joy when he finds out that not only will he get to spend longer with his current friend, but there will be another friend to get to know!

woa

good bug stories tbh 

Excellent bug stories

I am crying over space bugs don’t touch me

I’ve said this before but I think all sci-fi and fantasy adventure needs a little bit of horror as seasoning. It doesn’t need to be full sci-fi horror or fantasy horror but a little bit of scary adds flavor. Build a world and then explore the fucked up implications of that world a little bit

Robot disabilities. Robot who charges slowly and loses power incredibly fast and is always tired. Robot with malfunctioning lenses and can’t process visual information properly. Robot that can’t process anything too large and at a fast rate or else they’ll shut down. Robot with limbs screwed on too loose/just can’t attach correctly, so if they’re not careful they fall out. Robot disabilities,,,

Robots with cracked screens that they can't afford to fix. Robots with bent limbs. Robots who's cables are wonky and need to be particular about where they sit so they can charge. Robots who's vocal box is messed up so they have to use sign language. Robots who's fans are old and make a lot of noise. Robots who have malfunctioning chips and experience mental illness symptoms since they don't process the world the same as others.

dark science beyond belief

Hey, so--we cooled your boyfriend down to a hundredth of a kelvin above absolute zero. Yeah, it was so cold that all of the chemical reactions in his body ceased. Sorry. We, uh, yeah, we used him as a dielectric material in a tiny qubit. And then we quantum-entangled him with another qubit, just to see if we could. Sorry. Yeah, anyway, we thawed him out after two weeks and apparently he's doing fine now. Didn't really teach us anything about how quantum processes work in biological systems, but it sure was, uh, cool. If you'll pardon the pun.

this is literally Schrodinger's cat. Like, the whole premise of that thought experiment is that quantum superpositions are stupid because they don't make sense when you apply them to complex systems, but apparently you can actually do that.