ENTITY 11: HABIT FORMER

 

Artist: Felipe Escobar Bolivar.

 

Rats were trained in a Skinner box to approach the food cup when a distinct click was sounded. Ribonucleic acid was extracted from the brains of these rats and injected into untrained rats. The untrained rats then manifested a significant tendency (as compared with controls) to approach the food cup when the click, unaccompanied by food, was presented.

- TRANSFER OF A RESPONSE TO NAIVE RATS BY INJECTION OF RIBONUCLEIC ACID EXTRACTED FROM TRAINED RATS.

It's uncomfortable to admit, but many of our behaviours are ultimately controlled by simple chemistry. Love, fear, depression, loathing. They're all born from a cocktail of chemicals bubbling away inside the brain. This is the principle exploited by the Habit Former - a small insect about the size of your fist. By injecting you with a cocktail of specially-curated ribonucleic acids, it can completely transform your personality.

ENTITY 10: INFLUENCERS

 

Photo by Ronny Young

Word of mouth is one of the most effective marketing techniques available today. In these difficult times, with consumers losing confidence in the world around them, traditional advertising has become less and less effective. The most powerful and effective messages come from relatable people who speak from a position of trust. That's why any marketing division worth its salt maintains a stable of Influencers. 

Influencers are lab-grown parasitic organisms which excrete eggs that are impossible to detect, except under a microscope. The domestic Coke™ supply [1] is laced with these tiny eggs. Each time you drink from the Coke™ supply, roll a d10. If it comes up as a 1, you have ingested an Influencer. 

ENTITY 09: THE LOST IN THE MALL MACHINE

Photographer: Simon Kerola a.k.a Johnny Keethon

Research has shown that false memories can be implanted with surprising ease. The "Lost in the Mall" experiment involves implanting the subject with the false memory of being lost in the mall as a child. Subjects not only took on the false memory, but spontaneously created their own new details to support the implant. When told that one of their memories was false, they were unable to identify which was implanted, and which was real.

The Lost In The Mall Machine has refined this process with terrifying efficiency. New models are now capable of implanting false memories into the mind of anyone within a city block. This technique has opened up new vistas of propoganda and product placement.

Remember the night you proposed to your fiance? How you both shared a delicious can of Coke™ together? Remember, after your son was born, how you ordered takeout through Uber Eats™? The Machine is programmed to tie its false memories into moments of great emotional significance. When used effectively, this technique means the subject begins to take on the lie as a core component of their personal identity. Their personality slowly grows around the false memory, like flesh growing and closing over a splinter. If someone tells them the memory is false, they react with anger, disbelief, defensiveness. They will defend their own brainwashing at all costs.

ENTITY 08: THE EXISTENTIAL THREAT

The ideal conditions for human life are between 30% and 60% reality. Below that, shapes become unconstant. You become larger and smaller based on your mood and feelings. You hands distort. Space and time bends. 

Earth is in the "Goldilocks Zone", with truth levels that are perfect for human life. Any higher and humans would never have been able to become sentient. Any lower and human life would never be able to become organised into human shape - we would exist as scattered shapes and strange resonances.

Haunted Houses. Empty Sewers. Abandoned amusement parks. These are the Low Reality Zones. Away from human influence, they warp and bend and grow carnivorous. The further you get from human culture, the more strange you become. Your body and your mind slowly expands and mutates and fractures in on itself. 

So you can see why the space program was a failure. 

ENTITY 07: CULTURE VAMPIRE

Artist: Elijah Kass.

As we have established in previous entries, reality is a weak and unstable force. So, how do our forms stay stable? How do humans keep themselves in the same shape day by day? Keep their houses and thoughts and the objects around them from twisting away and mutating into wild and terrifying shapes? 

The answer is Culture. Culture is a physical force that exerts crushing pressure on you, like gravity. It constrains you and shapes you, forming your physical and mental form into a shape that pleases it. Culture is what keeps us from exploding into twisted masses of flesh when we pass through low-reality locations. 

Culture soothes over everything and makes you unable to see the weird stuff at the edge of the world. You simply forget it as soon as you look away. Pedestrians step around the strings of drool from the beast looming over them and chatter about how rainy it is today. Loners and adventurers have built up sufficient counter-culture defense systems to be able to see things, but even they sometimes find the concepts slipping from their mind, like trying to hold onto fog. If they ever retire, they'll forget it all ever happened. 

The Culture Vampire is a weak, shrivelled thing that survives through it's ability to manipulate the Absolute Culture Field.

ENTITY 06: EXCESS REALITY SQUAD

Art by D4rk

This elite special ops unit is trained to contain hyper-real objects and persons. The world is mostly fake, so any object that is 70% real or more can cause extreme damage to the fabric of the universe. In the presence of these hyper-real objects, fictional concepts begin to break down. The fundamental storytelling instinct that humans use in order to understand and interpret the universe begins to disintegrate. Reality Exposure begins to set in.

In the first stage of Reality Exposure, subjects begin losing their understanding of basic fictional concepts - like The Economy, or Nationality. 

In advanced stages they no longer understand more important concepts like Truth, Beauty, Love, or Human Connection. 

In the terminal stage, they completely lose the concept of the "Human Being". They are no longer a Human - just a collection of organs, flesh and brain matter. The exposure continues until finally they lose even that. They become nothing but molecules, randomly vibrating through space. 

Physically, nothing changes. But no-one who looks at them would recognise them as a human at all.

ENTITY 05: HIGH REALITY INDIVIDUAL

 

Scientists estimate that most humans are between 20% and 60% real. with some outliers that achieve up to 70% materiality. Wei is different. He breaks every chart and destroys every reality sensor in a 20 mile radius. He is the only true human, and the rest of us are just figments of his imagination. 

ENTITY 04: GHOST BRANCH

 

Corporations are people. So when a corporation is murdered, it leaves behind a ghost. A vast invisible presence that slowly rolls across the country. Spectres like this commonly rise after a company has been gutted by a private equity firm. If you could see it, it would look like a rolling wave of pale corpse-fat stretching across the horizon. 

When you walk through a normal ghost, you feel cold. But these ghosts are so huge that people sometimes spend their entire lives inside them. For these poor souls, their entire life feels distant and foggy, like it's happening to someone else. They always feel cold, without knowing why. 

As it rolls through an area, a curse of decay falls upon the land. You're laughing with your friends in the mall when you hear them fall silent. You turn to find it empty, dark, and full of stagnant pond water. The amusement parks are all abandoned. The stores are suddenly bankrupt. Reality dips by as much as 20%. These are null-zones, blank spaces on the map where benevolent Lord Mammon cannot pass, and the invisible hand of the free market drags all businesses into their graves. 

These roving Abandonment Zones slowly move across the country. Elite hedge funds employ trained haruspices to track their movements, so they can buy and sell accordingly. Insiders are given tip-offs just before the ghost hits, allowing them to divest their holdings in the area. Like birds fleeing before an earthquake, the wise start packing their bags when they see the limosines leave town.

ENTITY 03: CONTAMINANT

The closer you get to it, the more you degrade. Your vision splits and blurs and corrodes. A fever breaks out in you. You go hot and cold. Your hands grow weak and sweaty. Your eyes grow red. You can't stop crying. You feel like a bag of broken glass. You cough up blood. Black spots growing cancerously through your sight. Your hearing pops and crackles, becomes distant and muffled, until finally you can hear nothing at all. Your legs give out underneath you. Everything feels slick under your touch, like your fingertips themselves are sloughing away. 

ENTITY 02: YOUR OWN SKIN

Human Resources departments across the country grow these parasites in underground labs. Seditious or subversive elements within the workforce are secretly injected using hidden hypodermic needles in their work phones. Soon, your own skin revolts against you. 

A parasite forms in the place between your skin and your muscle tissue. It roams around in there. If it isn't stopped in d6 days, it takes over your epidermis. Your skin swells and falls around you in loose folds, then constricts until you can't move without tearing it. The parasite controls it all from a knot of infected muscle at the back of your neck. Your skin will only go back to normal if you obey its demands.

After being injected with the parasite, you are now legally obligated to repay all costs associated with its care and upkeep. It's all in your employment contract. Killing the parasite or allowing it to starve is a violation of your terms of employment, and you will be fully liable for all damages.

ENTITY 01: DIMENSIONAL TRASH ANOMALY

This year, I'm going to try to make 1 blog post a week. Most posts will be monsters or elements for a pre-apocalypse setting I'm working on called NO-ONE GETS OUT ALIVE. Here is the first monster.

A small government research facility on the east coast has been experimenting with new methods of compressing 4th dimensional space. Boxes that are bigger on the inside, that sort of thing. This promises to open up exciting new opportunities in landfill storage. These hypothetically infinite spaces could store a hypothetically infinite amount of trash, allowing humanity to continue exponentially generating garbage in peace and comfort. 

Unfortunately the department was disbanded due to budget cuts and something inevitably went wrong with the machine. Now the country is plagued by hyper-dense 4th dimensional trash shamblers that lurk in the alleyways and absorb everything they touch. From the outside they appear as jittering mounds of lumbering garbage that glitches and intersects itself at impossible angles. Each one looks different, depending on what type of waste it's been feeding on. In the center, you can see what looks like a miniature black hole. 

The shamblers are programmed to detect Trash Producing Entities and will attempt to grab you on sight. Anyone unlucky enough to make contact will be sucked through into the infinite cosmos of the trash dimension. 

Your Own Ghost

 

When you start to get a name for yourself, your ghost starts to hunt you. You see it splattered across walls, on clothes, in tattoos on your friends and lovers. It shines in bright primary colours, iconic, its every movement invested with potent meaning. Sooner or later you realize it's feeding on you. People don't quite look directly at you when they talk anymore. Look behind you - they're talking to it. It's waiting, building strength until it can kill you and stride out to meet them in your skin.

Anyone who's famous is killed by their own ghost. Che Guevara throttled Ernesto Lynch to death, one hot night in the jungle. James Dean's ghost put its hand on the steering wheel and its foot on the accelerator, just as the car started to turn. It knew what was going to happen. It knew what you need to sacrifice to become immortal.

I am writing a choose-your-own adventure game based on 1950's american hobo mythology, using the structure of Tales of the Arabian Nights. The above is based on a passage I wrote for that game. I hope I'll be able to finish it and show it to you all.

Your infinite Selves

Somewhere in the multiverse lurks your Feared Self. 

They are worse than you in every way. You have spent your entire life trying to tear yourself away from them.  They cling to you, moaning and slobbering. Just being near them degrades you; physically, mentally, spiritually, ethically.

At the opposite point in the cosmos is your Desired Self.

They are the perfect representation of beauty and truth. They have thrown away fear, sloth and shame. They're achieving all their hopes and dreams. There's only one thing left to do: Kill their feared self. You.

This chain echoes to infinity. Your Ideal Self is the Hated Self of some purer Ideal Self, which has its own Desired Self. Your infinite selves hunt each other eternally.