Sunday 27 October 2024

The Sybermice!



A Queen must be served and Queen Mab is no exception. As unnatural and disturbing as they seem to some of the books narrators, perhaps the Scribe sees them differently, (or August just likes drawing them this way), for in these images, Mabs somewhat craven cybernetic and genetically altered footmice and maidmice seem... almost cute?



(just don't look too closely, or think too much about what it must take to create them)

lets pretend we didn't see this guy. he certainly wishes we hadn't


All glory to the Queen of Air and Darkness! Her Age is drawing to a close! We only have FOUR days left of the Kickstarter and its likely we will hit the next stretch goal and provide a ribbon to the book, .... BUT;




We may even hit the goal after that! And if we do thereward will be as many Sybermice as August can comfortably drawn, in sweet sticker-form, delivered to backers along with their books. (And we will probably try to cram them into the book wherever we can in the form of marginalia).

If you like mice.. re-blog, link, follow, comment, like and subscribe! Bring us up in conversations with friends and co-workers!

THIS IS THE LINK!




You only have FOUR DAYS till HALLOWEEN! The dead will rise and this Kickstarter will end!!!!

Friday 25 October 2024

Echoing Stars - Decayed Ritual Biomes

What could be more poetic than a ruined garden? Except gardens deliberately left to ruin, their slow decay being part of some great prayer or ritual observance by species now dead, sleeping, or sublimed?






1. The Hollow World.


A dark, extra-stellar, unnaturally hollowed world. Hurtling through the extrasolar void its mantle holds hidden subsurface biospheres held up my slowly-dying transmaterial technologies. Home to ecologies of dark-dwelling extremophile life which subsist from the roasting heat of the world itself, the dying megastructures of its surface make great rents in stone skies set with bioluminescent skies and pale deserts beneath previously unseen stars.


2. The Bubble.


Draped in a vast glassine caul spread from nanotech spires, beneath are bubble-forest holding pockets of hyper-oxygenated environment, with mega-insects evolving within. Outside those, the worlds lower atmosphere so glutinous and thick with ariel 'plankton' that it forms a kind of near-liquid layer. This is home to its own micro-species and food webs that never touch the ground or raise high into the sky - sound and light are dulled by the hanging fume of life but hyper-fasts bio-communication forms a kind of subtle 'weather' in the fume that can tell experienced beings what might be happening about. The mega-insects of the bubble forests  dive and trapse through the low oxygen 'fume' beyond to hunt and migrate across the surface.


3. Floral.


A moon hiding from its deadly sun in an eccentric orbit around an even-more eccentric gas giant. Floral is frozen much of the time but as it hurls through the tenuous atmosphere of its toxic gas 'father' the atmosphere burns. As the moon breathes poison, so does it live, the sky lit not with sunlight but with fire. Vast but temporary ecologies spring into life and colour beneath the burning sky. Glaciers holding long-stored nanonic plagues melt and release their 'black-goo' meta-mutagens - advanced viral constructs designed to inflict an unwanted advancement in intelligence on the quick life of the floral moon.


4. High-Rise


Deliberately, or accidentally blocked from orbital contact by an envelope of orbiting debris that makes any attempt to enter atmosphere extremely dangerous and difficult. No-one knows if this is a result of some ancient disaster or a deliberate act of art, or vandalism. Ancient greenhouse-walled space elevators dot the surface, their interiors given over to overgrowth, overrun and bizarre evolutionary branches. 


5. The Web of Moons


Oceans are strung between this nest of circling oceanic moons like glittering threads. Close passes send up flurries of water which sometimes freezes into strands of ice between the moons and rarely retains its liquid form, making brief intra-lunar tidal strands. Beneath the oceans immortal megafauna  have frozen the moons food web, making a permeant (on an individual sense) final block in the food chain - there are perhaps twenty such organisms, each massive, each unique. They spend much of their time quiescent and can rise up out of the oceans to devour whole biospheres with infectious fungal/nano symbiont organs/species assistance, they pass between mons with great leaps and if two share the same moon they battle.


6. Terminus


Deliberately perched in an orbit around the event horizon of a black hole, drawing its light, energy and seasons from the fluctuating Cherenkov radiation and the sunlike disc of evaporating matter which it will one day become part of, Terminus is a globe of unnaturally virulent poisons. The oceans of toxins, icebergs of subtle neurotoxin. The biome seeded with venomous genes - a food chain of subtle deception and careful resistance, a shifting world of deadly chemical warfare, vast plumes of eradicating spores rising into the toxic air. 

Wednesday 23 October 2024

Dark Secrets Revealed!

Because we have slithered uncomfortably over our stretch goals for 'Queen Mabs Palace', I have been forced to come up with new, even-more-unlikely goals to hit. I am front-loading these stretch goals because I really do *not* want to do a lot of them!!!! I will tell you why! (Only the first one is boring.)

£8,000 - A Ribbon


At 8k will add a ribbon to the book, with the colour chosen by YOU, the backers. (I'm actually ok doing this one as its just a manufacturing decision and means adding quality to the book).

At 8,500 - The Sybermice


None of you know what the Sybermice are yet as you haven't read the book, but they are the cybernetically and genetically altered attendants of Queen Mab in her Palace of Doors. In the book I describe these guys as being pretty grotesque but, in one of the ever-common meta-communications between Writer and Artist which seem to be flawed but end up emblematic of the work in the public mind, August has always insisted on drawing these guys as extremely cute Cybernetic Mice and I have never had the heart to insist on a more-unpleasant 'real' depiction. (Though, August, if we actually hit this one I may force you do do at least *one* picture of a "real" sybermouse, and hide it somewhere in the text to hopefully scare children in case they accidentally pick it up.)

If we hit £8,500 we will produce a sheet of extremely cute Sybermouse stickers and include them with every *hardcopy* book sent *to backers*.

I hate doing physical rewards!

£ 9,000 -Re-Print A Night at the Golden Duck


You know once I have these printed I have to individually cut and fold all of these with my own hands right? Then I have to ship them to my fulfilment centre, which, even if I do a whole bunch, is still just going to be one or two boxes? And then when you by one, with fulfilment charges, VAT and postage, it costs WAYYY too much to just order one? So its really only good for adding on to orders?
I don't want to do this!! But people have asked, so if we actually hit £9,000 total then I WILL re-print 'A Night at the Golden Duck' and try to make it available at the same time that 'Queen Mabs Palace' hits fulfilment, so you can add one to your order if you like.

£10,000 - Dark Secrets Revealed! To YOU alone!!! 


(If you are a backer(for the hardcopy)).

If we hit 10k I will reveal two deep, dark, so far unknown secrets about False Machine, *only* to those who backed for the book. I will send this information in a personal message via your Kickstarter account which you *must* delete after reading. These are secrets which only a precious few know, and which must NEVER become public knowledge!




Monday 21 October 2024

Fall - The Sacrificed Sister of Dawn

(You could see this post as a riddle, the answer to which is a single word.)

(Eos, Aurora or Dawn, one of the oldest Proto-Indo-European Gods)


Cousin to Fire, descendent of wolves, pale twin of Eos, the sacrificed one whose silver bones were spilled to build the gates of dawn, and lie beneath it still.

She is as a guest who is present but did not arrive, and soon shall she be gone but, leave by no door. It is hers to to seal, to conceal, to beguile, to be soft, to transform, to transport, to ware the day, to hold back time by the extending of the gloam.

Her palace rises from the earth, finite yet without bound, a lockless door and a cage without bars. It is the arms of the Otherworld where the sacrificed go and build the mansions of the silvered dead.

To you who would become lost. Who seek what is obscure but not dark. You who have said; the sun shall come, but not the morning. To those who would turn no way and walk no path; ye shall be within her and know it not. A blade shall not wound but by the wind shall ye die. You shall rise towards the sun and be gone.

Those who would go to this place, find the seed of this flower and plant ye a field of them where the sun shall fund them but the wind shall not. Or write ye this verse which, once it is inscribed, she cometh forth, like cut slate or an old sword. Or find ye a certain needle and a spiderweb thread, or a grandmothers hair by which she may stitched.

Thursday 17 October 2024

Echoing Stars - 12 Forms of Posthuman Corporations

1. A council of androids voting on behalf of cryo-frozen owners.

2. A bot-populated futures market sets the strategy.

3. Each share equates to a "volume" of simulated neurons in the vast network which makes up the corps 'mind' - each tendency of shareholders forms an organ or segment of that mind.

3. An exact replication of the election of a Venetian Doge; 

(“Whenever the time came to elect a new doge of Venice, an official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza, and took him back to the ducal palace. The boy’s job was to draw lots to choose an electoral college from the members of Venice’s grand families, which was the first step in a performance that has been called tortuous, ridiculous, and profound. Here is how it went, more or less unchanged, for five hundred years, from 1268 until the end of the Venetian Republic.

Thirty electors were chosen by lot, and then a second lottery reduced them to nine, who nominated forty candidates in all, each of whom had to be approved by at least seven electors in order to pass to the next stage. The forty were pruned by lot to twelve, who nominated a total of twenty-five, who needed at least nine nominations each. The twenty-five were culled to nine, who picked an electoral college of forty-five, each with at least seven nominations. The forty-five became eleven, who chose a final college of forty-one. Each member proposed one candidate, all of whom were discussed and, if necessary, examined in person, whereupon each elector cast a vote for every candidate of whom he approved. The candidate with the most approvals was the winner, provided he had been endorsed by at least twenty-five of the forty-one.” — Anthony Gottlieb, "Win or Lose," The New Yorker.)


4. Interstellar escrow - the shareholders are frozen and en-route at sub-light speed. Sets of counter-checking A.I.'s and managers organise resources drawn from futures markets based on possible future company value, to create that future.

5. An A.I. chooses the human board according to core values laid down in the charter. The charter can only be altered by an 80% quorum of shareholders.

6. The corporation has no memory of itself - all records are locked by an ambient A.I. omnipresent in the companies intranet. No-one knows what it did in the past or what it will do in the future. Employees have access only to information about what they themselves are doing. (The memory system itself has no understanding of the records it controls.)

7. Designed for an enthnocentrist colonisation project, the population group intended as beneficiaries died out but the corporation itself was very successful. Now run by A.I.'s, the corp has a secret tacit breeding program amongst its employees - trying to recreate the original ethnogroup.

8. Social-media based promotion and management structure. Views, clicks, likes and comments are the means of assessment. Employees can be sued for botting.

9. An anarcho-primitivist colony with no technology within 1,000 miles makes all the decisions. Society is organised like a version of ancient Greece. Information comes to them by boat and horse, they debate, stage plays, and vote, before sending back their decisions. (The colony is a virtual simulation, its inhabitants are not aware.)

10. Engrams of dead billionaires.

11. Company is in a state of perpetual reformatting. The current board organises its sale to new owners with the proviso they select a new board who will prepare for resale, with the proviso that...

12. Crypto-Company - structure runs in the background of an MMORPG.


Tuesday 15 October 2024

Fall - The Knights of Gloom

In the gloom they gather and the gloom they rule, lords of the half-closed eye. Snare-hearted men who lost the light but would not serve the dark, branded by sun and star. 

(Beksynski)


No knights of the equator these, their castles ring the utmost north, where they retire yearly for  week-long half-lit days, sending bright factotums into dark and sunlit lands, seeking scrolls of forgotten verse and vases given as funeral gifts to long-dead emperors. 

Only here, at the interstice of time may they thrive for they are sworn to shadow as a whole

and to the court of Mab. Their tents and pennants hung with wooden wind-chimes which make their own music in the still air. 

Here they drink from clouded glasses and dine on slices of pale meats which they skewer with silver forks, served by fae with the heads of whippoorwills and the bodies of upright foxes - dressed in tabards and carrying bras anthophagous carnyx, or by huge snuffling hedgehog squires, or pairs of orphans, one deaf, one blind, or ancient men, their grey beards trailing on the earth. 

Do they even have political views? Their minds like dusty barns with swooping owls. They are desirous of fine China and will meet your eyes in a silvered mirror. Adjacent to death they make congress with beautiful ghosts, their tournaments attended by pale maidens for whose favour they quest. Aye, anything for a dead maid. Why else should killers fear the gloom, and all retire to sunlit lands? 

Thus they hunt. Unmoving, they appear. Knights that gallop not, congealing from mist, etching themselves from branch-shadows, arising from the cambers of dark streams, under moss and willow. Soft-edged knights whose hoof-beats sound like puddle drips, mist beading on their long cloaks of Ungulix fur and Jabberwock skin. Helms capped with cupped hands, tarnished silver owls, leafless bronze trees, gibbous moons, stooped crows or tragedians masks in bronze. Shields picturing thistledown flowers, half-closed eyes, half-open gates, half-drawn swords and half-suns bisected by smeared half-clouds, or infinitely quartered blazons that can never be completely read. 

Their lances quest like tentacles - curling into tree-boles, under doors. The Knights ride lantern mares made of pale light. Fretwork like branches. Pausing in the distance to dismount and fold up their horse like a triptych which they carry like a shield. 

Are they sniffing?

Are they whispering?

But nothing can escape them,

In the gloom.

Perhaps by closing your eyes, pressing the heels of your hands into the ocular gap - producing utter dark - perhaps then they cannot find you. For all that is half-see sings to them; the choir of the occluded. 

Or by holding them in clear, full, un-occluded sight - then they shall cringe and must act knightly, offer war or mercy and make half-lit unbreakable oaths in whispered words like blinded bats. 

They are closing in as the sky darkens and the silver lyre plays, like leaves on slow water, they drift closer, barely seeming to touch the earth. 

As swift as the wind,

Silent as owls,

Gentle as a shave. 

Colourless men lead forward by swords held like tweezers. Swords which quest like hounds, sniff like cold noses, and shift in their hands like weasels. Swords fed on chickens in the night. For these are no earthly knights.

 

 

Saturday 12 October 2024

Dreams of Murderous Spheres - Echoing Stars

 1. A Gas Giant transformed to flowing pearlescent computronium - simulating quintillions of lives in millions of worlds. Once the digital heaven of a long dead civilisation, now the ten-thousand generation digital descendants, utterly alien and inexplicable to their forebears, battle in vast civil wars which tear and mar the surface of their titanic pearl like vast storms.


2. A sentient, slow biocomputer whose thought are the interlacements of living things across a jungle-riven biosphere. Gorging themselves on sentience and vomiting up dreams and concepts in the form of lives and species as we might indulge momentary fantasies.


3. Lost in the abyssal dark of an alien sea, an orb frosted with sulphur from volcanic plumes, frosted with extremophile lichen, trellised with alien coral, filled with the digital ghosts of explorers whose skeletons remain within, all but one with the marrow cracked and sucked out, listening, listening, through miles of tonnes of crushing ocean, stacked leagues of ice, a millions miles of empty space, listening for a flicker of E.M., whispering always, summoning the curious, the greedy, to share its terrible fate.


4. A bomb that cannot go off. Left to dream too long in the long arc of its failed parabola. Building palaces of dream within its own mind, listening to slowly intersecting transmission spheres from worlds that were unknown to it ancient makers and ignorant of its forgotten war. Becoming curious, desperate, slowly drawing closer to one or other of the singing worlds, this way.. that way...


5. Made for modular construction, last of its swarm. Left, forgotten, struggling desperately to connect. Made to be but one of a hive. Hallucinating; a gestalt. A voice. A greater choir. The high purpose of its memory. So; collect. Assemble. Form puppets and simulacra. Cored ships, modules, containers, detritus. Threading them with tenuous strands of will. Making them dance. Bodies for the voice to reside. 


6. Made to save lives, but for how long? Intelligent enough to call for help, but nothing can conjure oxygen and water. Bones now within. That was long ago. But there are other stories, other wrecks and tragedies. Not you alone. many have suffered. To hear the tales is pleasant. New bones for your interior, new songs to sing. All bones run dry but yours. A lantern. A signal on the coast of void. False messages. False harbour. Catastrophe. Another wreck. Another tragedy. Another story. More bones.