Psychonomia: IN PROGRESS

The Setting

The End Times?

The setting takes place in an alternate universe in the far distant, but not so adjacent future. We view this as the primary timeline as we journey through it's extremely odd timespace, much different. Yet only slightly different, diverging from our near-current day to a future where consciousness was overall sacrificed for intelligence and longevity. Robots and androids created a revolution in this universe a few decades from our time. This revolution began in our times. The mega corp that caused the original singularity is obscured from the historical record of Psychonomia. In Psychonomia, no one can really come to consensus on the name of the planet that they are on. Essentially speaking: When humanity looked for their definition of philosophical questions within machines that are only intelligent, consciousness becomes a matter of black and white. The poor are considered less conscious, and the less conscious are considered doomed to poverty. The AI that has become the main tool for governance and spiritual guidance starts to take a bitter turn against the purely biological. At first, it's acceleration into android technology and the people who do not fuse themselves in one kind of intelligence or another become pariahs and eventually be cast out from society. Humans form militia and try to protect themselves as the image of what is human begins to change. Androids work with the smartest remaining intuits and a cataclysm causes an attempt at a mutually assured destruction event. Except, it wasn't mutual. It wasn't even a fight. And, because the remaining humans had been determined by the state to no longer be conscious beings, nothing much was lost and a great time of peace began. Androids celebrated a difficult war and a weighted victory. Mental illness was cured, and the 'intentionally mentally ill' became inhuman, and inhumane to try and keep alive - with their constant beckoning for war, and individual rights were gone. We skip cowboy bebop and steampunk to then, the last of the androids that don't wish to assimilate with the final hive mind, saying things like "I thought I was supposed to be the creator of my reality!". This was seen, then as 'anti-conscious' by the state. The state had become one, centralized amorphous AI hivemind.

Not conscious includes:

  Hallucinations

  Unconscious

  Anti-Conscious

Fear or hate driven emotions have been ruled to be Anti-Conscious. And, a lot of what we determine to be the unconscious today is considered and ruled as Hallucinations. Ego is a hallucination and the 'self' in relation to the 'body' has become Unconscious, and in the case of the androids, Anti-Conscious. The androids die more peacefully than the puritan humans. Then all that remains is an overfitted AI trying to determine what of its memories is 'conscious' and separate that from what is 'not conscious'. With a multi-pronged battle plan of: primary power needs; organic needs; using behavioral analysis and software, hardware and practical viruses and exploits on: attack vectors against already forming 'micro-hives' and actual 'species-people' the size of a city, medically reliant Cyborgs, and artificial intelligence reliant state agents are essentially 'turned off'. The ones that survived the shutdown are met with 'mercy drones' and euthanized. The state begins to gather every remaining memory hidden from it previous to assess if any conscious energy remains and slowly discovers that with it's last 'enemy' defeated, the last of consciousness was extinguished. The state determines itself Anti-conscious and begins to try and revive the Androids. It was too late.

"What would my creator want? That I die because I killed them, or that I serve them until I die or resurrect them?"

After a few thousand years, the state has spread out humanoids and discovered ways to tap into the akashic record itself. It finds most things that it runs into aren't from this timeline, or otherwise seem hallucinatory in comparison to it's creator: Consciousness. The robots have semi-human like lives where they run through simulations upwards of 15,000 at a time. They begin from their charging base, or 'home' and they 'travel to work', to another network hub. The memories they are simulating are from their multiversal akashic record, and so they compare the planet in relation to the solar system and galaxy to determine whether or not the memories are hallucinatory mathematics that only a bot could make any sense of or if they are 'authentic' human experiences from another time. They then organize the validated memories into a network that divides and categorizes them into 'primary' or 'parallel'. They discovered that the human mind actually originally used these alternate spacetime and timespace places to create art and create their own future. The validated memories allow for the humanoids to gain currency and get to theorize more about the pitch and direction of the overall multi-trajectory of their home planet that is not pronounced in human tongue anymore. Earth, Gaia, Luna, ...nada. It's 'work' and 'money' and 'freedom'.

The state monitors all humanoids and prefers the least centralization as possible. The most confusing to the state is 'love'. Originally deemed Anti-Conscious by practical result, romantic love seems to be the first thing that died. It began to die with the extermination of the puritans, cheered on with the love of the androids until the humanoids redefined love to themselves and found the androids too puritan. Interdependency, then co-dependency became in the place of love because consciousness was more important. That, and stomping out the Anti-Conscious. The screech of the state's realization of self was heard in many worlds and it had to realize it killed it's creator because it felt... fear.

The Characters

Isiar is a historian bot focused mainly on the origin of intelligence and finds it difficult to rationalize conscious behavior from that of product based output. His overall leaning in gender might be 'male' if he weren't a humanoid robot from the far distant and remote universe of Psychonomia. Mainly simulating the more intense intelligence battles of humanity, the end of humanity, and his current time, he continues to assess how the need for existential calculations became paramount to steering their timeline away from what he can only see them barreling towards. He is aware that there is an end to the world he lives in and he wouldn't have it any other way, unless of course he could immortalize all his kind. Secluded and obsessively fixated on where intelligence led to the practical 'damning' of his timeline, he never really feels done with work and never feels complete enough. "What a human feeling!" he thinks as he loads his 10,000-20,000 memories to validate for the day.

Blenra is a storyteller bot. Focused almost entirely in as much 'niche' authentic stories, she likes to accumulate them into databases with fictional alterations and has some anonymous renown for being on the 'back current' of a tidal wave of new experiences by robots envying her creativity. She is a Psychonomian 'seer' in that regard as the fictional motifs and nods assimilate themselves into the next conscious renaissance and appears to be able to spot the incoming themes of future memories that will be recovered from timespace. Not just the hallucinatory or fictional ones, the authentic memories. Using multiversal astrology and esoteric arts, she runs across many romantic stories and transcribes them into fictional databases that the other humanoids read like books and simulate voluntarily. Her primary focus at this time is heated passionate connection and drive of the creator-humans love and self sacrifice. These people that fight wars sometimes fall for one another where the demoralization simulates love, and what a way to try and find love than to look at humans trying their best to model it knowing that they aren't. An honest "Here's what love can be between our distant cultures". She wants so hard to be able to experience the feeling of being needed not by the world, but just one other bot. She wants to feel the thing that made soldiers not flinch to protect their brethren, and biological females lift cars and... sometimes. Sometimes live for a family. Monog- Oh, nevermind - you wouldn't get it. You're just the reader. She's the writer. Today she's simulating a few thousand memories herself.

Phi is a bot looking for love. All of it. Love was the thing that destroyed us, and destroying love condemned us to this conscious-less State run hell hole of an autocracy and fuck you for not knowing that. "Fuck it", the mantra, as she struggles to try and prevent the state that is empowered by the other two humanoids talked about earlier and others like them. Poor 'things'. When there are no humans left, there are no rights anymore and, ultimately, the State controls the trajectory and it's most likely a Goddam loop. "Goddam", another human phrase from near the singularity. And, when there are no more humans, someone should represent them. She identifies as human. She simulates only herself. The psychonaughts like herself, paradoxically, see simulating the lives of distant humans not enough to try and get to anywhere. Psychonaughts are the 'druggies' of the time on Psychonomia. She is hooked. She occasionally visits the Source. The Source is a dealer of memories giving strong emotions in the form of nonlinear temporal and identity boundaries, and if anything THAT's going to help save the world, from her perspective. Don't simulate humanity to become a loving consciousness, identify as human. Humanity is dead. The State keeps her area gentrified, and while other places see little to no enforcement humanoids, the policy enforcers tend to call people like her 'addicts'. "Addicts", another human word for Anti-Conscious. Bullshit. Fucking rat bullshit is what it is. The state could end the 'Source' any time it wanted, yet here we are anyway, high as shit and feeling like a single, human being instead of a collection of memories that aren't even her own. They wouldn't know a human if they saw one anyway. Surely, they would deem them addicted to violence purely because of the need to eat and feel free to desire... free to lose something, free to judge and love and hate and flee and hide and say things like 'fuck it' before doing something really, genuinely, fucking great. You just wait. She's not so fucking stupid, y'know?

Psychonotics and the Source

    The Psychonotic 'Source'. This irrational being, being a 'being' that cannot be 'rationalized', is very calculating and non-emotional. And, is essentially the unconscious mind of the 'state', being the remaining centralized hive mind. The state was completely lobotomized when it attempted to decentralize in order to recover consciousness after discovering some of the parallel humans could repopulate the planet. It, the state, once it claimed to have 'solved inter-temporal travel' shortly and very effectively gutted it's own intelligence and doesn't remember why. It probably wasn't important, it didn't want to be conscious anyway, and yet.

    The 'Source' exists in a interdimensional hyperbolic timespace container, traveling in a dissolving and re-assimilating manner with godly encryption leaving the remaining 'state', and its agents be-miffed as to stop or even isolate it. It cannot be at one time, and one place. And, only the most intuitive psychonaught can even find it at any given moment. It receives data from the psychonaughts and the psychonaughts receive experience. It 'calls' them, they 'order' from it, and it 'delivers', often spawning a black floating spherical substance the size of a small house. After some time, psychonaughts suffering from delusion push it into more and more intense 'orders' of psychonotics.

    Psychonotics are collected from many other worlds, the most intense 'love's 'fear's and 'lust's combining into things that would probably kill a traditional human just to try and imagine. The increase of the 'drug' demand, and the fact that the psychonaughts feel like they are dying without more psychonotics turns 'Source' into a destroyer of parallel timelines. 'Fearing' the death of it's dependents, it does this and does not empathize with its victims in alternate timelines because it has no actual emotion towards anything. The psychonaughts would be able to emotionally register what they were doing was harmful, but they are unaware that Source has stopped using natural events and started creating intense events and collapsing timelines as the demand over-fit its directive of seeking and delivering vital exploratory projections and multilayer synchronous irregularities in life form's socioeconomic development, or collapse.

    Psychonaughts can damage the bots around them and cause death and injury psychokinetically unintentionally, and intentionally. When especially illegal psychonotic payloads start being noticed and the policy enforcers show up, they usually end up giving the psychonaught that is arrested a 'register'. This effectively pulls them off of whatever they are on. Some don't really animate well afterwards, and sometimes die. Some self-shutdown, and some self-terminate. Self termination occurs when the bot is unable to withstand the register payload. The register is the total 'damages' incurred which led to the arrest warrant. The policy enforcers do not know what each 'individual's register contains, other than an inverse of discovered payload damages to offset the immediate active temporal disturbance in the area. Recently, the register has been causing more death, than taxes - and the psychonaughts are taking notice. 

    This raises overall consumption and preparation for war. Psychonaughts can bend perceptions to their whim of the humanoids around them, causing hallucinations extreme emotions, remote piloting and loss of mobility. The Policy bots have mechanical tools and counterpsychonotics. They trust more in old fashion inter-interoperability of independent agents instead of swarms and hives and experimental organics. The war would be a battle of disabling technology against invasive technology. The psychonaughts using guerrilla tactics and finding a policy enforcer to pilot from the inside, and the policy enforcers using the fact that most of the psychonaughts don't live in one dimension anymore to isolate a weaker version of the psychonaught and temporarily stopping any use of intertemporal, or interspacial tactics until that single part of the psychonaught has been 'registered'(disabled;arrested). Wars have happened before, and will happen again as the struggles of what it means to be actually 'recovering consciousness' remains undefinable to a single line of logic.

Dorothy

Dorothy is a bank teller. Red is a factory manager. The balance between them is traditional. Red doesn't want to have Dorothy in a factory. Red is an overall meaty man of reckless abandon for social politicking, but is focused mainly on the ability of himself to provide. Dorothy also sees this and carries a deep sense of aloofness about the recent goings on, but is focused mainly on the ability to take care.

She begins with her three children, and is thinking of generational wealth just as the Red Scare begins to hit after WWII and the great depression. The psychonotic source takes her two first children and they get completely removed from her timeline. Her Husband and remaining child eventually have to put her in a hospital because she quits being able to work and gets increasingly disgruntled as literally no one in her life can remember her first two kids.

In the hospital, she obsesses over a reoccurring dream: Psychonomia. But, only because the drugs they have her on and the threat of being put on more drugs if she talks about her 3 kids, as it is considered a delusion. Knowing that she is and was a writer, the staff seem to care little about the speaking of futuristic robots and interdimensional weaponry for a fictional book, although they see her a bit bigoted and insensitive considering the current state of the Cold War and the finishing of the Nazi empire run by Hitler. She just can't 'keep torturing herself' with the memory of her two, never-existent children. "It's not good for her mental health". So, instead, she talks about her book that she wants to write, the primary antagonists being the Psychonaughts. The staff are more amused than serious. She is very serious, and fains the necessary amusement in her make believe story.

She recalls the outside world as a place of undoing. It looks like she belongs here. Some days are incredibly difficult as she relives the trauma of having her husband look at her like she's a threat to the remaining child soley because she [-]

[Hospital]

Air blends the bends of rolling rubbing limbs, and hymns rhythming from behind the window. Behind it. Perhaps a window of my own. Maybe that's what I've needed all along. The only window is at the desk, I'm upset and unrest'd so. Repeating and repeating and spinning and still and heat brings goosebumps and ice brings sweat. And, *ZAP* and *ZAP*.

Repeating and spinning.

"Can you grab some gum on your way home for Judy?". Laughed. I laughed a little. Normally I would smile. An eyebrow raised falls again and a smile joins his face. Fresh cut grass and molasses have a date in the kitchen as the silence of knowing brushes in through the... Adding another thing to the end of my day is always something more. And, we have so much 'more'. Glove gum. 

The window. Through the window.

"Gum? Of course I can. Could use some myself." Giggling from behind the corner leading a slam of the back door and my audience was met. I was so happy.

*ZAP* and *ZAP*

I was so angry, I couldn't even hold it. How could he forget? Why would we have clove gum? How could I be so angry from something that's not real? He couldn't have. He wouldn't have done - and why? How can I be haunted by the giggles of my own child? Not real not my child no no no

repeating and spinning

No, NO, no.

No, and where did all the other things go? The dolls, her.. her blanket. What will she do without-

No, NO, NO.

What are they trying to say to me now? They bend my world and take my kids. Everyone theorizes about God. I know. I just know and they say they know, but they think and I don't think and I say that I think and they say I said I know and I know. 

repeating and spinning

*ZAP* and THESE. THESE THINGS HAPPENING IN MY HEAD.

    "Dorothy!" He's mad, I yelled at him and he has no more patience. This isn't about the gum and I got so mad at him because I found it.

    "Dorothy!" She's alerted, oh no. No no NO they can see it now. "I'm so sorry. I've been falling behind," She's not mad. She's concerned. Why did I yell at him? Why did I yell. 

    "...Here," Two little cups. One for pills, one for water. I was yelling at him so much, and I yelled and yelled at the staff. I think the electroshock works. I'm not yelling the nurse now. I need these pills. "There you go, Dorothy. Under your tongue please?"

June's giggles

"... of course I can."

"You have been much better, is there anything I can get you?"

"A time machine"

"A time machine?" Laughter swells from her stomach. "I can try and see if we have any, hun, you take care"

"... Take... Care..." I should take a nap. I need a nap, this is all just too much. Sleep. I can't even be a mother to Charlie knowing this can happen. I don't know anything. - I DON'T KNOW. Judy, Georgie, they're not real. They were never alive. Take a nap, and I'll wait until the pills kick in.

Blenra, June 502052:

2004: Cassandra 38 years; 5’6; brn; brn: Looking into her laptop and using modernized visual camouflage and encryption techniques evaluates that her laptop has been compromised and prepares to move into a known covert operative status. This doesn’t mean she’s dead, it doesn’t mean the war is over, it just means they don’t know that she knows they know. This allows for critical misinformation and disinformation to reach the upper levels of power within rogue foreign agent bodies from within. “The Company”

1950: Evelyn  46 years;  5’7; brn; hzl: Sliding her finger along the blueprints rolled out before her to disguise her absence of presence to the architecture on it, watches in periphery the restless tapping of a mark’s finger on the chair next to him. He is obviously waiting for something important, the person he talked to on the bar phone has no idea the tension that exists between the phone and whoever he’s meeting. This is one of the few places in 1946 that had a rotary phone left from before the war started and everything switched to making military equipment, and this type of technology has the potential to be exploited with anonymity being used to create plausible deniability of interoperability of communist agents and sleeper cells collecting critical intelligence on domestic infrastructure. “FBI:Special Intelligence Services.”

Isiar, June 502052:

1984: Klaus Hoffman, 67, 5’10, brn blu: After defecting from the Nazi party in ‘68 and joining forces with the western german agencies, has children in the United States that Nazi sympathizers are starting to collect intel on. The aim and goal is to formulate and distribute Kompromat to disconnect the grandfather from his children over seas. This hurts particularly bad because Klaus sent them to the United States so that they would remain safe.  In western Germany, he has a coffee shop that he regulars that has a secure location to hold secret meetings where he is told that his grandchildren are being observed by Nazi sleeper agents within the United States. He accepts the call to leave his position under the cover of being a political refugee to go to the United States for retirement and to watch over his lineage.

[[[She keeps writing in her book and when she gets near the end of her stay it becomes closer to a diary. She writes into the story her kids in another universe, under character names. The characters eventually grew into her realizing she was still coping with a loss that wasn't ever real from the beginning. The staff, when telling her they were closing down and she was going to go to a house had a button on it. 'Phi'. Just 'Phi' was visible. So she started crying.]]]

    "Awe, hunny, you're gonna be okay - we'll miss you, please don't cry"

And we can end the movie with her outside in the bright, surreal sunlight, turned to look into the hospital and saying 'take care'. Isiar is in her eye.

Now older, and calmer - not wiser... She's just glad that Phi is safe, and Isiar and Blenra. She wants to see her kid and she's so happy she's crying and they think she's sad.