PUNK: Psipunk - A Rough Timeline of Universal Telepathy

[Daniel Solis]

(A word of warning, this is kind of a long read.)

This is a rough timeline of events I've written up for the psipunk setting tentatively titled Mindcrash. My goal here was to have an evocative history supplemented with a somewhat plausible humanocentric origin for global telepathy. I don't have dates yet, so if you've got suggestions for years for each event, I'd love to hear them. I'd really like any suggestions for fleshing out any holes in the history, preferably in such a way as to add some grittiness and "punkness" to the history.

Here we go...

Birth of Augmented Reality and PSI

- PDAs become wearable glasses and contact lenses. Information is accessed in optical PDAs through an interface of iris dilations, blinks and intuitive eye movements. These advances are very popular with the tech-savvy but have little public interest due to relatively small hard drive space and having to wear bulky glasses or uncomfortably thick contact lenses.

- Public interest in the new wearable PDAs is piqued by experiments with augmented reality hubs at MIT and San Francisco. As opposed to virtual reality, which sought to wholly replace the real world. Augmented reality seeks to supplement it. Information is transmitted from the hubs to the PDAs and translated into imagery superimposed over the real world. For example, when you see an estranged friend on the street, her name and basic information appear in a little pop-up window right by her head. Though demand is established, the PDAs are still too expensive and too cumbersome for the lucrative middle-management target demographic.

- Almost simultaneously, an epiphany is reached in labs around the world. Why bother  worrying about the logistics of actually creating imagery and sound when the brain can create them by itself?

- Experiments in biotechnology lead to self-sustaining organisms capable of "hearing" the data transmitted by AR hubs. The Personal Sensory Inputs (PSIs) have far greater storage space than their electronic counterparts. And finally, the clincher, the PSIs could be mass-produced very cheaply. The PSIs adhere to the wearer through molecular bonds adapted from the toes of geckos. The PSIs come in a variety of shapes and skin tones. They are usually thumb-size, with thin tendrils splayed radially from the center mass, commonly worn on the right or left temple.

- While optical PDAs actually projected visual information to the wearer's eyes, PSIs use a more elegant neurological connection. A series of impulses produces a bouqet of senses impossible to achieve with clunky electronics. In layman's terms, the pods give their user a controlled, continually updated psychotic hallucination. This results in a far more convincing and "real" augmented reality for the user.

- PSIs not only take the roles of PDAs but also act as all-in-one cell phones, mp3 players, email clients, digital cameras and general Internet access ports. In short, they are the first true wearable computers.

- Eventually everyone from middle-class on up has a PSI, all with access to AR subscription services.

- The poor are not so fortunate. They still live in the real world in all its unpleasantness and unenhanced physicality. The middle-class live in a world run amok with personalized advertisements insincerely hocking the latest soft drink or footwear. Though jarring at first, they put up with the annoyance rather than risk being "inaccessible." (Imagine the holographic saturation of Minority Report.) The wealthiest of the AR-connected never see a single thing they'd rather not. They purchase special services that replace shrill advertisements (and just about anything else) with more desirable imagery. (Imagine that one gag on the Simpson's where unsightly things are replaced with something more pleasant. The punch line is a homeless person is replaced with a postbox.) Corporations don't mind their ads not being seen. The blockers are actually front companies for the corporations themselves.

- Escapist desires are met with the introduction of "skins" similar in concept to the skins of software applications in the 21st century. However, with an AR skin, all of reality has a themed hallucination overlaid on it. (For example, vast urban sprawl takes on the appearance of Middle-Earth or Metropolis or Naboo.) More immersive skins can only be afforded by the mega-wealthy. As such, advertisements still peek through and safety concerns mandate traffic lights and other safety imagery be allowed to remain in relatively unaltered form.

- Skin services find loopholes around this. Cops become knights, traffic lights become flying clouds of fireflies and so on. Skin artists take pride in their clever flirtation with the legal limits of their creations.

Gene-Injection and the Rise of Angels

- Game companies release a variety of classic console games for use in their specialized bio-consoles, but the required purchase of a second PSI with more specialized use proves unpopular. Imagex Entertainment sparks the next generation of "video" games by joining forces with BioSolutions, the largest distributor of PSIs on two continents. Together, they make a new type of console: a set of DNA piggy-backed onto a mild flu virus. The virus is injected into the PSI pod, spreads throughout its various systems and mutates it into a PSI compatible with the games released by partner game companies. The new games are also sets of genetic code similarly injected into the PSI. (Before corporate law dictated otherwise, console programmers had PSI antibodies attack the software of rival corporations.)

- With PSI games, you never need a memory card, you always have multi-player access and the graphics are as real as you can handle. They are fully hallucinatory worlds where game characters are controlled through hand-gestures or retinal interface, sometimes both. While the game-world seems very real a sensation of sitting on a couch in the living room remains.

- A market develops for a more hands-on version of home games. ARcades house large warehouse space filled with state-of-the-art AR hubs creating fully interactive environments. The illusion of solid objects is actually a psychosomatic response. (A wall feels real to the touch until you actually place weight on it and you fall through.) ARcades reduce other forms of live entertainment to niche audiences.

- To increase AR transmission speed, and to deal with the final kinks of system incompatibility, electronic AR hubs are replaced with bio-hubs.

- Despite the proliferation of "alphabet soup" gadgetry, international telecommunications are still dominated by the old-school telecom companies. That is until Biosolutions unveils its latest creation at the yearly biotechnology conference.

- The "Angels," as Innovedon Marketing Concern dubbed them, act as global amplifiers and transmitters of PSI transmissions. Essentially, they are biological telecommunications satellites. The angels are black-carapace spheres about the size of a family car. Wide iridescent membranes stretch along a cartilaginous frame over three hundred meters. These "wings" photosynthesize sunlight into energy for the angels systems. The great thing about the angels is that they're self-sustaining and can split themselves to form two distinct organisms. This last feature proves incredibly profitable since a corporation need only launch a handful of angels in a single rocket to produce a full communications network in less than a year.

- To upgrade their hardware, mainstream PSI companies use the gene-injection technology pioneered by PSI games. Previously, a consumer had to buy an entirely new PSI once hardware advancements made earlier models obsolete. The expenses of production meant the average consumer only bought new hardware once every three to four years. With gene-injection upgrades, production costs were reduced greatly allowing lower-cost, but more frequent and profitable, consumer purchases.

Internal PSI and Global Telepathy

- New experiments begin where gene-injections are given directly to live organisms, first mice, then chimps. The subjects fair remarkably well. Though they act erratically after their treatments, autopsies reveal the formation of highly dense neuron clusters. In effect, the subjects grew their own PSIs inside their skulls. Authorization for human testing quickly passes, yielding similar results. In the end, only the unhip, out-of-touch or old-fashioned have external PSIs.

- So now with global networks, bio-hubs, and internal PSIs, two-thirds of the world's population is continuously contactable and accessible to each other. Perceptions can be altered on demand. With a thought, you can call your friend on the other side of the planet and actually have a hallucinogenic image of her sitting in front of you. If you so desire, you can have that conversation take place in a "mutual hallucination" chat room. Even the very sound of conversation would be a hallucination, unlimited by the time and space of physical sound waves. In effect, you and your friend would be telepaths.

- Aside from willing hallucinations like games, skins and assorted advertisements, visual interfaces are outdated. Remember when you met your estranged friend on the street? You no longer see an actual pop-up window filled with scrolling columns of text telling you her likes, dislikes, address and public profile. Now, you simply know this information, no differently than as if you had memorized those factoids all by yourself.

- Other applications of internal PSI became apparent. Among them: Hallucinogenic weaponry causing real neurological damage; Hallucinated wardrobes made with PSI-active fibers; Telepresence tours where, for a price, you can transmit your awareness to orbital angelic telescopes and see the universe through their all-seeing eyes; Casual mind-switching where one person can hallucinogenically trade bodies with another person, this is especially popular during love-making.

- After the first direct human PSI gene-injections, their children possess PSIs from the time of their conception. Those of the PSI age would never know a life without vast databases of instantly "know-able" information. To them, those born without PSI are handicapped degenerates to be pitied. The protean perceptions granted by PSI technology and transmitted by living orbital satellites are as divine and innocuous as the sunset.

[Ben Lehman]

(A word of warning, this is kind of a long read.)

Dude...  Cool.

[Brian Leybourne]

Yeah, that's pretty cool stuff. A word of warning though - it's conceptually quite similar to Peter F. Hamilton's Edenists in his Night's Dawn trilogy. Now, I'm not a lawyer and thus don't know if it's similar enough to be even remotely contestable via copyright laws etc, but something to think about if you're going to carry on with this.

But as I say, damn nifty. I look forward to more.

Brian.

[Daniel Solis]

it's conceptually quite similar to Peter F. Hamilton's Edenists in his Night's Dawn trilogy.

I've not read it. Can you tell me how they're similar?

[Brian Leybourne]

Not very well, at least without a three thousand word essay :-)

But in essense:

Humans monkey around with genetics and manage to splice a gene into some humans brains that allows them to telepathically communicate with other similarly adapted humans as well as experience altered or introduced senses (very much exactly as you describe, actually). They also manage to change basic human DNA in a similar fashion so that their children will be born with the alteration, and the children grow up not knowing what it's like to not have immediate access to all that information and other peoples minds etc, and pity those who do not have the alteration.

You have to admit, it's sounding a lot like what you've done. But, as I said - I'm not a lawyer and you're probably 100% fine, just thought I would mention it. I think what you have done is really interesting and I'm looking forward to hearing more.

Brian.

[Daniel Solis]

They also manage to change basic human DNA in a similar fashion so that their children will be born with the alteration, and the children grow up not knowing what it's like to not have immediate access to all that information and other peoples minds etc, and pity those who do not have the alteration.

Hmm... That's pretty much the gist of the setting I'd been developing. I suppose I could play up the role of the angels in the setting, as well as the presence of mega-corporations, media saturation and non-PSI animosity towards the wealthier classes. Still, the concepts are so similar. Man, I hate it when that happens.

Taking this timeline and spinning it into different directions, I've come up with:

Post-Apocalyptic High Fantasy

Several generations after the end of the world, skilled PSI-active people effectively become mages. Their use of gestural and voice-recognition interface are analagous to somatic and verbal components in spells. They have no idea there are living things floating around in space that are still maintaining their PSI transmission duties as if nothing had happened.

Psipunk

Anti-PSI paranoia compels a network of rebels to use out-dated external PSI pods to hack into the minds of the PSI-active, for whatever reason. Their specific source of worry is the angels. They fear the angels are influencing the thoughts of the PSI-active. Because they use external pods, the rebels flicker in and out of the telepathic network and capturing them becomes a race against time.

Simpunk

Inspired by the Matrix: The angels actually are sapient, but to maintain their self-awareness, they must feed on the dreams of the humans beneath them. In order accomodate this necessity more efficiently, the angels induce a massive coma across the world. All of humanity is in a shared lucid dream, a simulation, unknowingly in service of wholly alien beings they created. A few people wake up and re-enter the dream in order to free minds from the inside.

Unknown Armies

The angels are sapient but do not require psionic sustenance. Rather, each angel gains its sentience after years of intercepting telepathic communication. Eventually a personality forms in an angel that is a pure, intense distillation of an archetypal personality. Those who think and act closely to a particular angel's personality are be promised eternal life by having their soul meld with that of the angel upon death.

Come to think of it, all of these are rather derivitive. Hrm.

Perhaps there is a way to combine these ideas in the form of factions and splats?

[Shreyas Sampat]

Really, really interesting setting ideas you have there.

Idea: Combining psipunk and UA gets you something powerful and interesting: The psipunks are afraid that the angels are influencing the thoughts of the psi.  The angels are manipulating the psi to gather avatars, and eventually kill these people and make themselves stronger.  The psipunks do not know what the angels are up to; the angels are vaguely aware that there is something wierd about external-psi folks, but do not know precisely what.  The avatars each think that they are unique; rather, they are highly expendable pawns of the angels who do extremely bizarre things, in the way of UA magicians, in order to strengthen their archetypal resonance with their angels, who will eventually sacrifice them in order to absorb them into their consciousness.
Eventually the angels begin to go insane, as the minds of their avatars realize what has been done to them, and are appalled at what has become their own action.

[Ben Lehman]

You have to admit, it's sounding a lot like what you've done. But, as I said - I'm not a lawyer and you're probably 100% fine, just thought I would mention it. I think what you have done is really interesting and I'm looking forward to hearing more.

BL>  I wouldn't worry about this.  In general, you can't copywrite an idea, only the manifestations of that idea.  Most RPGs (and most fiction) are highly derivative.  As long as you're not using characters from his works, you're most likely okay.
My legal knowledge here is not from formal training, but from several years of attempting to be a writer and arming myself with the necessary legal knowledge.

yrs--
--Ben

[Little_Rat]

Ditto, pretty cool.

Bad news: I remember seeing a modern "Outer Limits" about a world where everyone was linked to a database- kinda like a wearable mental internet ('cept it wasn't DNA, it was an implant or something). Well, except for the protagonist who had a brain defect. So when a virus starts spreading and can "hop" from the infected to anyone trying to save an infected person (removing said implant, etc.), and only the....darn, I had to go to bed or something. (so sue me, I was 13 and I had a 10:30 bedtime).

Good news: So many places to go with this one, you can't even count. The aforementioned "mind virus" and hackers of all sort,  PRIVACY (probably a big theme, especially in this day in age of internet), ownership of thoughts and dreams (again, another biggie), the rift between wealthy and poor, split between parents and kids (and who gets access to whom), the economy (so if everyone is out playing, how does work get done- does society ever evolve into a leasure class and a working class), love (lots of conflicts), truth and consequences (what if your avatar doesn't match who you are..)....

I don't know how you'd play this one, but whatever you put out about it will most likely be very very intersting.

Again, great job.

[efindel]

A term which you might find to be useful:  veridical hallucination.  "Veridical" means "truth-telling", and a veridical hallucination is one that is in some sense "true".

A simple perceptual example is the perception of color in peripheral vision.  The human eye cannot see in color except in a fairly small area around the center of vision -- but we believe we see in color all over.  The brain literally "fills in" the color of objects of known color in peripheral vision.

(Don't believe it?  Here's a simple demonstration.  Get a pack of cards and shuffle it.  Looking straight ahead, take one out where you can't see it.  Hold it up outside the limit of your peripheral vision, then, while being careful to always continue looking forward, slowly bring it around towards the center of your vision.  This is harder to do than it sounds -- there's a natural tendency to want to glance over at the card!

If you do this, you should discover two things:  1 - you won't be able to tell what the card is until you get it rather close to the center of vision -- not even to the extent of being able to tell exactly which suit it is.  2 - if it's a red card, there will be a point when you will suddenly notice that it is red.  That's the limit of your color vision.)

All color and most detail that we "see" in the fringes of our vision is a veridical hallucination -- it's not actually coming to us from our senses, but "filled in" by the brain.

A second use of the term is by real-world occult theorists.  Some of them maintain that such things as "ghosts" aren't real in the true sense, but are veridical hallucinations caused by psychic input.  I.e., your psychic senses pick up that someone died here, and show you that by making you "see a ghost", "feel a chill", or whatever.  

--Travis

[Daniel Solis]

A term which you might find to be useful:  veridical hallucination.  "Veridical" means "truth-telling", and a veridical hallucination is one that is in some sense "true".

<SNIP>

Thank you! I was afraid I'd have to use the same couple of terms a hundred times in same sentence. I was actually thinking of making a slang of "hallucination" called "hally" or something like that. Basically, something less awkward than "mutual hallucination." Thanks for giving me an actual scientific term to work with, that's very helpful.

A second use of the term is by real-world occult theorists. Some of them maintain that such things as "ghosts" aren't real in the true sense, but are veridical hallucinations caused by psychic input.  I.e., your psychic senses pick up that someone died here, and show you that by making you "see a ghost", "feel a chill", or whatever.

This goes along with my plans to translate traditional psionic powers into this setting. For example, "normal" psychometry is just fondling a small object or examining an area until you pick up a signal. In Mindcrash, the psychometry gene would be injected into investigators and illegally into private eyes. Mindcrash psychometry actually picks up on residual traces of emotional trauma left in AR by the psi-active. This could be ghosts, bleeding walls, raining toads, whatever. And it'd all be real enough to actually cause neurological damage to whoever is unfortunate enough to see, and thus be affected by, the hallucinogenic disturbance.

[efindel]

For ideas along similar lines, you might want to pick up a copy of Isaac Bonewits' book Real Magic.  He puts forward a psionic basis for magic.  To him, for example, "astral projection" is a veridical hallucination conjoined with clairsentience.  That is, you're moving your point of clairsentient perception about, and imagining that as "traveling in an astral body".

There are similar ideas in there for spirit possession, ghosts, and other things.  In principle, you could substitute telepathy for a lot of the other psychic powers following his ideas -- e.g., clairvoyance is telepathically picking up information about an area/person/etc., and your brain putting it together for you to "see" it.

--Travis

[Daniel Solis]

I just read a post on a scifi message board talking about the recently proposed "Machine Theory" of the Matrix. In the post, he said this about the programs and the way they express their emotions.

They're also something else. Stereotypes. From the Aunt Jemima of The Oracle to the Mr. Miyagi of Seraph, they are simply templates. Thinly veiled stereotypical humans dressed over computer programs.

This has given me some idea for possible movements in mindcrash, mostly built around a few Angels who have gained sentience from their years of transmitting and receiving telepathic transmissions

Cults of Ascension
A few angels form sapience based on ultra-distilled archetypes and form cults of personality by appearing in the form of hallucinogenic avatars. They interact with their followers through hallucinogenic avatars, fairly analagous to the program-archetypes in the Matrix. The ultimate promise  the cultists is to ascend their consciousness into that of the Angel, thus increasing its influence over the world's minds. The ultimate truth is that the Angels need to absorb the minds of compatible personalities to maintain their sentience.