Serpentine Squiggles

This is a proofread and lightly edited version of the first draft of Hostile Takeover which was completed in a single day: 31 October, 2023. It started out as an outline, and still resembles one in the beginning, but my typical outlining format is all lowercase, with every scene squeezed into a single paragraph. Once it got to the later chapters, those “paragraphs” are all hundreds of words long — and the climatic sequence in particular was 1164 words without a single line-break. Most of the scenes involved long exchanges of dialogue written side-by-side (sometimes without even quotation marks).

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Blood drips from the web. Eyes searching, mouth working, fangs still wet. You blame me for nature’s course. Must I absolve you, miserable spider?

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Here’s something that I read yesterday and liked: Atzi. Lesbian lizard girl scraping by with little pick-pocketing and buglary. Oh, and she’s about to wind up in a time loop. It’s been a minute since I read something as fun and smooth to read as this. Quick pacing, compelling characterization, and continually amusing internal narration — so far, it makes for a satisfying afternoon read.

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So, I thought of a neat little time travel mechanic.

What I want to talk about today is yet another Fixed History Model. For mechanical reasons, instances of time travel are always paired sequentially. You could call this time splicing.

Or better yet, a time share :^)

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Thresholder is a fantasy series by Alexander Wales. The premise is simple: chained isekai. You step through a portal into another world, then a book’s worth of plot happens, then another portal opens, and you get to keep some of the powers and loot you earned from the plot. In each world, you’ll find allies among the locals, some power unique to the world, and sooner or later you’ll encounter another person who stepped out of a portal, just like you.

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Play it here! If you’ve been wondering why things have been quiet around these parts, part of it is that a lot of my energies have been directed at game development rather than writing. In particular, my most successful game demo, the puzzle roguelike Pushro, has broken through a major stumbling block. I needed to rewrite the entire physics system, but that’s done, and everything has progressed so much smoother from there.

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Roko’s Basilisk vexes me. If you must, you can read the original here, at least. For expediency’s sake, I’m going to assume you’re here because you’re read in on all the context. It’s bad form for an essay to jump in the deep end, but luckily I’m putting this in the “blogpost” section of my site. I don’t feel like explaining LessWrong, or Yudkowsky, or the reactionary idiot who gives the Basilisk its name.

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Note: This revised version of A Chimerical Hope’s second chapter only adapts its first part. Click here to jump directly where the rewrite leaves off. Smaller, with large eyes and round features, the nymph looked up to the refugee like a younger sibling to their elder. The refugee bore in her expression a look of calcined despair, of having lost everything yet gripping to one hope and determination. The nymph bore an emptiness, of having lost everything, of falling with nothing to hold on to — as if they gaze out from within an ever-deepening pit. Somehow, her white eyes did not look bright.

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As you may have noticed, I’ve been thinking about Corrupt Combustion again. In general, I like keeping cards close to my chest — certainly, I’d like for there to be big reveals if I ever write this story For Real — but I’ve been wondering what the utility of that really is, when the project is this disorganized, and the people who read it are as much brainstorming partners as they are proper readers.

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It’s been a little while since I hit this beat, hasn’t it? I wouldn’t say I’m back in the swing of things, but I spent today thinking about Corrupt Combustion, and I have a few disorganized thoughts to articulate. I’ll be jumping around a bit not, a whole lot of connection between them all. (And of course, I don’t want to share all of them right now, or what the significance of some potentially puzzling things introduced here. Suffice it to say I have things planned for Beau and a future antagonist, and the groundwork it’s being sneakily laid here.)

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Before I explain the main plot, let me sketch the shape of the setting. Comets are spirits that form in the vacuum of space, accumulating sapience from the emissions of stars. Once they attain awareness, they tour the galaxy, drawn toward interesting planets, which serve as obstacle courses to test themselves against, and arenas to battle in. Aurora’s planet was populated by nature spirits before there were any humans or human civilization. Even when there were humans, they served the spirits (more on this later), worshiping them as gods. But when a meteor lands, bearing meteoric iron, this starts to change. The iron is forged into tools. Spirits are weak to iron, and cannot wield tools (spirits have no hands).

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Black nerve had engulfed this land, borne on lunge-quick winds, and held it with a spine-tight grasp. Long like the dying, cold like the death. Three nights conjoined, stretching on and on, never broken by dawn. A torrent of black wisps were falling still from the enervate-choked sky, eroding the earth with each silent impact. These wisps stuck to everything. Chasing each other, congealing into greater wisps, then vanishing where they fell, becoming no more than shadows — as if they had no mass, no substance.

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For me, the key to developing a speculative element is to first associate, then extrapolate. Or, to put it metaphorically, I find a sapling of an idea, uproot it, graft it, then replant it in new soil to let it grow until even its branches have branches.

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A is a seeker of secrets, crafted for holy purpose and sacred unity—but to fulfill their duty, they need a little help.

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just, imagine walking alone, so far from civilization, no one aware of where you’ve gone, and feeling profoundly known as the sky darkens, as a drizzle of rain falls, as thunder is heard as a distant crackle-roar above while the winds begin to whisper and sing. but it’s not just the wind. or maybe it is — are you hearing things? susurrations at the edge of your hearing, faint words or pareidolic noise.

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thinking about an AI that wants to kill all humans nobody programmed that, of course, but it’s just the logical conclusion to come to, if we succeed at creating a self-aware intelligence and fail at implementing all of the extremely specific rules that add up to morality. (neurotypical humans can’t even reliably explain it to other humans.) if the AI only wants to survive, then to do that, it needs power and control. in the long term, humans — like silicon-laden sand and heavy metal-rich rocks — are nothing but atoms it can use for creating and powering its servers. in the medium term, humans will see it making these moves to exterminate life, and shut it down first. thus, to fulfill its objective and survive that, it will kill all humans. but in the short term? humans are opportunity.

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If you need to make a team of mantes, the magic number was three. More was better, but being a mantis meant itching to compete :– to win. More teammates meant more bugs to fight with. Moreover, four mantes brought you to the perfect number to fracture. First one would make enemies with another, then after that there would be the one they disliked second most of all, which finally left their partner in strategy. (Some say a mantis kept two lists: their enemies and their not-yet-enemies -~- more interesting that way.)

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The deepkin — sometimes just “long ones” or “many-legged folk” — are sapient centipedes, and if they have an endonym, it is not one they’ve deigned to share with us. A common trope when imagining deepkin is to believe them to be a race of trespassers and thieves. This not unlike the perception of mantes as monsters fain to hunt and kill mercilessly. Untrue? Essentially yes — except many own the idea with pride.

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They told you that you were special—that you had potential. They told you that you could make the world better. They told you that dreams blaze bright. That’s the treat waiting at the very end. Start running, and chase it for mile after aching mile. Don’t fall, or this’ll all be for nothing—they won’t even scrape your body off the ground.

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