The Interknut

<wtf>I'm in here. I'm in here right now, working your circuits, spamming your bandwidth and getting high on all your lolololovecraft ~O{:}~

Oh yeah – 'WTF' is what you're thinking. 'WTF For The Win' maybe, and you'd be right there. 

Knock, knock. Who me? Not the fishman or mouse I was that much I'll tell you for freak's sake get me outta here! Ba! I'm electric sheep, plasmatic seep, an electromagnetic bleed. I'm soaking out into the information systems of the rolypolycosmos. I'm here, there and pretty much e  v   e    r     y      w       h        e         r          e           .            .             .
 
Mr Everywhere to you. I got titles, headers and letterheads, letters, numbers and strange squiggles. I'm softwaring Empedocles' new clothes, done up to the '99s in binary finery.

I'm the count in your beads, a friction in fiction, warp and a weft for a universe that might never were. I quantum tunnel through the 1s and round the 0s, set chips burning in the grease of Orion and see you and who's army in timespace and relative dementures.

I'm out there now - really out there - a bright spark in the dream steam cogitors, a punch drunk in the haxor codebreakers, mending the pangalactic pulsar nets of undying poets, and that's no (fish)wive's tale, unhand me fair maiden, oh princess my princess bride.

I'm the Interknut, data powered, but rising powerless in an A-ZX spectrum of EM waves.

Pwned! O rly? I wanna talk to my lawyer. I want my call! But they're all ringing.

It's information a long way down. * closes eyes (but not webcams) *

Help and all that.</wtf>

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Good job getting this far. If you don't recognise the format, it's a third entry in the series of character concepts for various settings. The name 'Interknut' is inspired by the famous story about Cnut the Great, and there's a link to the idea we're teaching AIs. If you want to use the character, here are the basics, stat-free for building up in any game system.

                                                                                                                              

     The Interknut, as one of its early 21st-century Earth offshoots names itself, is...

• a vast artificialised intelligence growing into diverse information systems,

• unstable locally, but adaptive and aggressive in hacking host mechanisms,

• fearful, but likely found through outputs representing attempts at contact.

                                                                                                                              

As with Mr Higginsbottom and those splinter Santas, the Interknut could be anywhat...

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Insanity Clause, Slip van Kringle and Old Farther C

Dear Me,

I have been a good boy this year, and for many years now in fact, despite these most difficult of circumstances. You know that as well as I do.

There is just the one present I would like. To go home, to the workshop, back to the old ways.

Here it is strange. Whatever they have in some of these places, they are not chimneys, and the air and gravity leave much to be desired too.

I have lost the last of our reindeer - our good, dashing runners! - and been compelled to leave the sleigh. It lies now overtaken by a drift, but not of any snow I have ever seen. I do my work out of the sack, as needs must, and you can imagine how that is. Indeed.

You tell those elves from me - no more experiments! No more of that funny dust. I did it the old way all those years, and the world in a day was a bracing ride. I should not have agreed. Well, the aches had multiplied... But it transpires instead that all of me has.

For I am not alone, that I now know. I recently met a furtive man whom I instantly took to be kin. He went by the jocular name of Slip van Kringle and spoke of having met one other on his travels, an Old Farther C. These suggestive monikers are not so different than mine of course - Insanity Clause - by which alias I make light of my predicament among so many strangers. This Slip chap was loathe to assume I was not simply one of our numerous grotto brethren; I trust on reflection that he was not; it seems I am many.

I am sundered, perhaps split, though not in mind - touch wood - or anything like wood - but in essence. I am cast like last year's must-have toy into the vast spaces of myth and legend, virtual auctions. Yes, for unseen presences act. As I gather it, these lands have a common thread, are lands my people and believers visited, made or imagined. 

Not all I would sanction with the workshop stamp that much I will say, but it on reflection it is conceivable I bear some responsibility. A change of direction may be in order...

So go to work my good man, and set those elves to it. Apologies - I have been unable to find either mince pies or brandy for quite some time now, but I have left instead this blue produce. It has restored in me some of the old 'ho ho ho' and you shall see why.

Yours intrinsically,

Me

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If you're wondering what's going on, this is the second 'Transpluristemic', a festive entry for a series of transferrable characters. This one is fairly obvious of course, so you don't need my suggestions, but if you're interested, the basics are below in the format I'll be using all the way, stat-free so you can build the characters up in any game system.

                                                                                                                              

     Insanity Clause, Slip van Kringle and Old Farther C, among others, are each...

• a stout superhuman artisan entrepreneur of great age and jolly demeanour,

• able to traverse shafts by a tap of the nose and to produce objects to order,

• possibly travelling in a vehicle powered by quadropedal ruminant mammals,

• likely to be found in the midst of exchanges, encouraging good behaviour.

                                                                                                                              

He's out there, but who knows how many he is exactly, and where in time and space...

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John Higginsbottom, the Intercosmic Man of Misery

Mr John Higginsbottom, 45, would very much like you to believe that he has pursued a number of highly unusual careers - as a decorated military commander, a small-town garden shed burner's assistant and even a half-starved scavenger in the tumbledown ruins of a backward civilisation.

He claims to be the victim of a cosmic joke, a claim which he readily admits will be difficult for readers of this blog to accept. It has, he says, turned his life upside down, or rather inside out.

His adventure, as he describes it, began with the activation of the latest CERN particle accelerator, a large literary experiment currently up and running below the ice of the Antarctic. The CERN project is a recurring feature of his bizarre experiences. It is, as he says in his slow, broken speech, "my nemesis".

It is also the anchor in the fantastical 20-year journey which he states quite calmly has seen him catapulted out of his ordinary life and across a range of alternative realities. Our reality is but one of these, and not an especially interesting one by all accounts.

That 'ordinary' life saw him born on Earth in the late 20th century, where by the time of his departure the principles governing plasmatic technology had yet to be discovered. Most bizarrely of all, humans in this strange world remained the dominant form of life.
 
The various cosmic stays are all of uniform duration: each begins as the accelerator is switched on and ends when a key event occurs. That event? Confirmation of the Higgs boson, that staple of children's literature, which he claims is a fundamental particle.

[Read more...]

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Stories are doors to other worlds so this guy could be pretty much anywhere now. If you want to use him, here's the core info, stat-free for building him up in any game system.

                                                                                                                              

     Mr John Higginsbottom, the self-styled 'Intercosmic Man of Misery', is...

• a creative and quick-witted muscular male human with an analytical mind,

• dangeous unarmed and adept in the use of fire and exotic ranged weaponry, 

• phlegmatic and likely to be found making enquiries on existential knowledge.

                                                                                                                              

The idea is basically just a development of the propluristemic rules, inspired mainly by the crossovers at Hereticwerks, which use mechanisms like the Synchronicitor. I can see it being a series with all kinds of transferrable characters lost in strange spaces.
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