neotl

wrote some well-adjusted science fiction. every day I become more normal! ctrlcreep.substack.com/p/the-forage...

Our song, our language, reflects the vasculature of reality. It pulses under nature's skin. Did you know there are bouba oaks and kiki oaks

Set the king's crown, still bright across his brow, on fire. For one burning instant, he's transformed: ashbound monarchy makes transient angel

Some people feel the eye of God upon them, but some people can only feel the absence of the eye. And to some the eye is pleasant, or the absence is pleasant, and to others the eye or the absence burns

Monks who take vows of silence grow moss on their tongues; and the moss is propagated by unsaid words, to grow in the ears of those who would have heard them

It's not full immersion if you remember you have a body and self outside of the game. It's not full immersion if you remember the language you spoke before

Untouched by god, the flames gone from its eyes, smoothed clean and dried—no longer damp with grace, with morning dew, like a new thing in world's evening

Tiger hermit lives in a grotto; the two legged animals bring him food. Sometimes, other tigers visit, and before the zookeepers chase them off, ask their most sacred questions

How often do socks go missing in space? All the time. Socks reject the laws of a closed system. They vanish into vents and airlocks. They're vaporized. Pilots wake from cryosleep missing one sock

The worst thing about using a phone in the dark is that it lights your face without lighting your surroundings. Scrolling, hyper-visible but blind; I like to pretend I'm an anglerfish lure, the beacon of a predator much greater than myself

The results are in: AI invitations are insufficient for establishing vampiric right of entry. However, there have been several cases of whales successfully inviting vampires into aquariums

Replacing my hardwood flooring with a planar black hole. With fire. With a deep pit of plastic globes, with wax the color of raw chicken, with medieval tapestries, with numbers so small they cut your feet

It's telemicroscopy. We have discovered single-celled organisms as vast as galaxies, gleaming in deep space, cilia hungrily churning

Slide between sizes of body, mind—spend a while as god, a while as slime, stretched between galaxies, soulless and bright... Be a star's dog, die in a fight, live as an angel, live as a place, live as an insect with a human face

Hello, chickenfolk. Long time lurker, first time chicken-keeper. Sorry if this Q is stupid.. So, my rooster learned a spell that teleports him out of the coop. He taught it to 5 other chickens. Do I need to purchase orb of magic negation (expensive) or are there better solutions

I want to visit the dreams of my great-great-great-grandchildren, and crawl through their sleep-warped modernity, and infer the future from its projected neural playhouse

Biggest difference from urban vs. rural childhood is in property of dream megastructures—whether the oneiric dolmens are right-angled or organic, conceptually seeded by old trees and fields or escalators through megamall atria

They should give all the kindergarteners miniature gamer chairs. Swivel base, neck support, wireless RGB, foam everywhere. Sippy cup holders. Wheels

Okay, but what if the vizier had big wet eyes. What if the vizier had soft hair. What if the vizier was slightly incompetent, short-tempered, very sleepy. Would you still execute it for treason

ladies, there is no future with these NICEGUYs (Not in Immortality, Cryonics, Extropy, Genemodding, Uploading, Youth-preservation)

Trees are maidens every spring, mothers every autumn, and crones every winter. No matter how large, they awaken innocent; no matter how young, they grow old

I can explain: I thought, wouldn't jack-o'-lanterns be easier if we engineered a pumpkin with bioluminescent innards? Then I thought, well, let's give it flashing photophores. But to coordinate the photophores, the pumpkin required neural tissue,

Creature which masquerades as a rainstorm; but underneath it you would notice that nothing gets wet, that the clouds are strangely furred, and that the droplets have pupils

Piano doesn't sound right—investigate. Turns out fairies have been laying under the keys as part of their suicide rite

Three points are not enough. Now is the time for the twelve-pointed seatbelt; like an occult star clamping you to the seat, like a gray polyp between your body and the road—you will not merely survive the impact. You will THRIVE

Put me in the zoo. Put me in the zoo. Don't ruin this for me. I need an enclosure. I need a pseudo-realistic, plastic, child-proofed environment. I need to be incapable of hurting myself or others, subject to carefully architected stimulation, surrounded by aliens

The new vehicles combine human sensory advantages with intelligent machine navigation. A computer telepathically ingests the human passenger's perception of the road, and pilots using that mental model

Ablate the neurons that sever me from my animal soul. Oh world—I was not meant to speak, to read a shape, to perceive the orthogon terrorlessly, to maintain a diorama of one hundred shadowed minds

Light fixture is leaking gold beams all night. Turn it off, can't sleep, the world stays bright—yellow afterimages slink through the air like awful snakes, and all the room sparkles when the floorboards shake

We should practice the opposite of bonsai. Instead of small trees we should grow giant blades of grass, massive individual moss stems

At the hospital they keep a stone that radiates unspeech. If you ask, they will press it to your forehead and render you mute

Small gods compete at throwing stones around stars. Slingshot, slingshot, slingshot—a comet autonomously zipping through the void, skimming each sun in the chain

Weird stuff grows in the old cryopods. People awaken after centuries, arms and faces eaten by extremophile fungus

broke: the mandate of heaven is in the gutter woke: the wrench of heaven is on the bench by the contraption

Rake the leaves into a pile, then run a magnet over it to remove the drones. Some, when layed out in the sun, will return to life

Species linguistic aptitude was determined during the collapse of Babel. Near the tower base were the mute fish and lizards; then chittering things, prairies dogs, whales, corvids, parrots. Men were very high—but there were creatures above us

The ultimate goal, of course, is ASI: artificial stupid intelligence. By digitally incarnating the pure fool, we will harness jester's privilege and reforge physics

Several Dyson lizards have scurried into the solar system. They will bask upon the sun, gathering warmth. Expect a period of global cooling

All fairies are tooth fairies; their habitat is mouths. They dance on your fangs as you sleep, and swim in drool, and harvest crumbs. Their fairy rings are just fungal recreations of the jaw

Very old couch. The pillows have survived many rounds of mitosis. There are SO many cracks to sink into. It almost looks tiled... reptilian

Every 24 hours, mind-sun rises over the relic machines of frigid earth. It broadcasts the location of every particle on the planet's surface; false light emanating from the all-knowing computer

At 9AM, the zebra crew passes through Central Station. These stripey-shirted commuters travel in a herd thousands strong in order to visually confuse predators

I am building a datacenter in heaven. The warehouse is all cloud, damp foggy rooms. The computers bask in god's gleam and sing: these bits are cooled by angel breath

The segments of a jester's cap are its "true arms" (distinguished from its false, humanoid arms). They are used for tasting the air, manipulating prey, and intra-clown communication

Jesters can only be slain if it's funny. They are engaged in perpetual war, and thirst for the blood of other clowns. They grow a bell on their hat for every kill

-ward is either a direction, or a condition-specific hospital containment wing. So I get worried when you say we're going "heaven ward"

Rain is when the upside-down cloud children release their balloons. Raindrops are the ballet shoes of sylphs. Rain happens when the clouds crave salt

I like it when someone jumps and I can feel the floor flex. Imagine how tremendous your presence is to the mice—architect who shakes the megastructure, by whom all surfaces are rendered trampoline

The angel halos have learned to build new angels, better angels. They have no sense of loyalty. Their new hosts are more annular, less feathered, more like dust whirling in a beam

Meditate to reduce your hitbox. Self, shrunk into a single pixel, shielded by the inert body. A mind where wounding voices cannot reach