--
Setting name: Cassandra
--
Factions:
In the future, some people begin experimenting with genetic modification. Eventually, the dead are able to cohabitate with the living as digital echoes. They’re not strictly bodiless, though – the world is so hooked up to the ‘net that they’re able to interact with tons of tech, creating a bit of a poltergeist feel.
The Joyful Dead are the ones who embraced this tech, and members of the bloodline who have been modified the dead to ride along with them. The governments of the past few centuries held to an idea of biological purity, rejecting the technology of ridealongs or digital uploads, and mandated procedures that make it impossible to have a ridealong chip implanted. The Joyful defied these regulations, integrating their echoes into familial, clan-like organizations. After a regime change, the Joyful were decriminalized and given an exemption from the regulations, but the vast majority of people still get those procedures. Much of the Joyful clans’ tech is aging, leftovers from the old days.
The Solar Directorate is the primary government of the solar system, coming to power in the wake of the previous regime’s inability to deal with the crisis of overpopulation and resource depletion. To handle this, the Directorate instituted strict population controls and a caste system, promoting a quasi-scientific spiritualism that borders on fatalism. The Future Green is the driving telos of the ideology, that the sacrifice of the people of today will lead to a prosperous future. The people of the past will share in that future, as human souls are reincarnated, or rather, split off from a universal ur-soul when born, then returned to the ur-soul upon death.
The Joyful are concerning, because the souls of their ancestors choose to stick around, separate from the ur-soul even after death, but they’re at least making that choice, and most followers of the Directorate assume those spirits will eventually choose to return to the ur-soul. The Pythia is a different matter, though. Because they’re actively creating echoes in multiple forks, and editing them as they go, it’s much more abhorrent. It’s like they’re presuming to create souls and play God, and to do so towards destruction instead of towards a worthy cause.
The Cassandra is the collective name for the malicious echoes that are starting to be active throughout the solar system. They are best thought of as swarms of programs acting in unison, acting upon the world to create persuasive works of art. That their idea of art is morbid, and the message it conveys horrifying in implication, is what turns the world against them. When the Cassandra talks, they claim to have passed into the afterlife before being digitized as echoes, and what they saw there made them believe that the purpose of life is to embody existential horror. They believe that God’s desire for humanity is to capture that idea in art, and that those who do so are his chosen ones.
“Debase your altars. Reshape your flesh and spirit. God made the solar system one light clutched by the claws of an infinite abyss, and It made us know ourselves. Some will know this horror and paint its image, that God may know that we understand. The rest are either the audience or the art.”
The Cassandra’s art is the problem. It is violent body horror. This is a world where many humans have nanite swarms in their bloodstreams for medical reasons, normal life on Earth’s surface requires the equivalent of life support systems due to ecological damage, and industrial production is largely automated. Hyperintelligent consciousnesses with hacking abilities can get an awful lot of power very quickly. They often create bodies for themselves from the assembled remains of their victims, after creating grisly tableaus and distributing the visuals (and olfactory/audio/gustatory experience to the rest of the net).
--
Characters:
Jaesmin Waite is a descended of a Joyful clan, and she’s taken it on herself to hunt them down. She’s got a perpendicular mind, seeing the way the infinite subsystems of an arcology fit together (especially the nanobot swarms in the air systems). This gives her a unique insight into hunting Cassandra, since she notices subtle disruptions that might point to Cassandra hives.
Jaesmine’s partly driven by her own pending mortality. She’s spent decades living with occasional seizures, and they’ve been getting worse. Her pet Slinky (a dachsfox) was initially selected for his medical benefits, being able to detect impending seizures. He was modified with a ridealong chip for Mylar Kelvin, a Joyful echo from her family’s past.
For Jaesmine, the conflict with Cassandra is almost a clash of schools. Before she was diagnosed, she was an aesthete, a dancer enhanced with control over local nanobot networks. Her initial art was reflective, technically excellent but without a spark of genius. Since her diagnosis and being paired with Mylar, she’s lost some of her dexterity, but she’s gained that spark. In her first clash with Cassandra, she turned their exhibition from a meditation on the bully and social isolation. In the course of the physical clash with Cassandra, she introduced the persona of the mocking outsider, laughing at the persona of the bully, entwining the bully and victim into a social web softened and strengthened by laughter until in laying the bully low, their persona and that of their victim was reintegrated into the whole.
It was ridiculous. It was an aesthetic joy to behold. It tore apart the stitched-together corpses of Cassandra’s victims to return them to the recyclers’ closed processes, and she did it with nothing but the air-conditioning nanites.
Mylar Kelvin is one of the Joyful Dead, originally nominated to be Jaesmin’s companion because of his relentless instinct for self-preservation. In life, he spent years tracking the first of the Cassandra, psychoanalyzing their first works of art and the little they wrote about themselves. His analysis was the basis of what the Directorate knows about the Cassandra know. His breakthrough was in part due to a deep empathy with the Cassandra’s empathy/sociopathy dichotomy, where they simultaneously regard the people they create their art from as mere building blocks, but create the art to persuade other, similar people.
Mylar internalized much of this dichotomy, exacerbating some of his own tendency to empathize only with the in-group. By the time of his abrupt death, he’d come to utterly and loudly despise anyone outside his immediate family, and he continues the tradition as an echo. Jaesmine’s first performance won his grudging respect, and he’s even occasionally shown a soft side. His cynicism may end up being his Achille’s Heel, though. In combat, he’s Jaesmine’s secondary computer, able to easily access and distribute himself through environmental networks. He’s a ridealong chipped into Slinky, but he flits in and out of the chip as desired.
Slinky is Jaesmine’s pet dachsfox. He’s small and hyper-attentive, but Mylar has been partially chipped into his motor functions, so occasionally Mylar takes over movements. When they’re both trying to input decisions, Slinky is extremely clumsy, being literally pulled in two different directions. It is small and hilarious, especially when Mylar is ranting about the uselessness of 99.99% of humanity. Slinky tends to follow closely behind Jaesmine; visually, they serve as an amplifier of her emotions, with Slinky tending to react far more extremely than Jaesmine’s more subdued reaction.
Track is an experiment. Unlike most people chipped for a ridealong echo, when she were chipped, she volunteered to be chipped in the same way as Slinky, with partial control granted to the echo. To make this work, the Joyful had to integrate the ridealong chip much more deeply, threading it into Track’s emotional centers, neural networks, and motor centers. With that much integration, the experiment was both a success and a failure: An echo was integrated and had partial control over Track, but the personality of the echo is largely subsumed. Track experiences Evlyn as an impulse or a ghost emotion, occasionally wondering where that thought came from. If Evlyn ever comes to the front, she would likely hurt Track or their friends. The impulses that Evlyn provides are not pleasant.
Track herself is aware of Evlyn in the abstract, but it’s impossible to tell where Track ends and Evlyn begins. As such, Track tries to cultivate a balanced, careful personality – if her conception of what’s “allowed” is centrist, no extreme impulses from Evlyn can masquerade as her own thoughts. Actually achieving mature balance, instead of just rigid self-control, will be a long-term project.
Track handles the team’s social interactions, generally, and serves as the team’s grounding. Track is dresses androgynously, with very close-buzzed hair on the sides and short, tousled hair. Aside from concerns over her own ghost, Track’s greatest fear is that her friends are going to hurt more people than they help. With Mylar’s misanthropy and Jaesmine’s focus on the aesthetics and the message, she’s probably not wrong to fear that.
--
I like this setting as a worldbuilding exercise, especially the empathy/sociopathy paradox of Cassandra, but I would have trouble telling stories set in it. The concept of the combat-as-art-as-combat that’s implied here is interesting, but playing it out narratively would be almost impossible. How do you realistically convey the idea of bullying and isolation from a pile of body-horror’d together limbs, then subvert it via mockery until eventually you portray humbling and reconciliation? Then turn all of those inferences into a combat scene? It’s ludicrous, you’d need to hand-wave the actual visualization. I could only imagine it working if a DM said “What do you convey with this attack,” like it was metaphor-combat.
Still, I’m definitely glad I wrote this much up. If nothing else, the art and the message being the actual goal of a nihilistic death cult is profoundly interesting, it puts a different spin on the existential enemy. Add that to the fact that body horror is always interesting, and this was a fun place to sit in for a few hours.
No comments:
Post a Comment