Revised Storyworld
- Within a cybernetic world where fabricated human hybrids with immensely long life spans are the norm, a small nomadic commune of elderly avant-garde art therapists exists on the fringes of society. Members of the commune have long refused to modify their internal biologies on ideological grounds. Instead, these elderly rebels rely on external, wearable technology to hide their actual age while assimilate into the mainstream.
- The commune practices artmaking and remains closely bonded together, moving from place to place as a group. Together they cope with ageing, their pasts, and the realities of a cybernetic world that deems them outmoded through art therapy, using tools and equipment integrated into specialised jumpsuits. These specialised jumpsuits act as their wearable, portable studios.
- The art therapists utilise the wearable studios that facilitate the commune’s artistic production in secrecy and on-the-go, and regulate the art therapist’s own emotional health — the commune is bonded through these continual acts of facilitated artmaking even with the inevitability of ageing.
- The commune is outlawed and continually chased down by authorities, seen as a threat to public health with their unmodified, vulnerable, biological bodies.
Microfiction 1: Bartender
An alchemical bubbling of polyseuteroxane with saccharified synthetic starches… the bartender plays an important role in the morale of the cybernetic society. In a seedy dive bar within designated nightlife district, the bartender serves all sorts of citizens, from gleaming officiated bodies with smooth 3D modeled torsoes to the outlawed biopolitical bodies that skulk about softly.
Microfiction 2: Commune caught
The art commune is continually on the run – their external technologies and unmodified bodies are considered a health threat to the general population… but the commune knows that these updates, modifications, syntheses are unnecessary; all they need are their bodies, their tools, and their art. Yet, the city and its citizens, and citizen-police keep a look-out, obediently report whenever the ‘dangerous’ art commune is sighted.
Microfiction 3: Lovers
At the top of Monsoon Towers a cybernetic yuppie couple gaze down at the city from their air-purified, chrome-surfaced apartment… They receive personalised messages of recent sightings of the illegal art commune. Safe in Monsoon Towers, with its security systems, privacy updates, cashless payments, the couple pays no heed and switches on their personal holographic entertainment systems.
Revised Microfiction (Based on Microfiction 2): Citizen-Police
我想起月下，我想起花前，
多少的往事，留在我心田。
一半是辛酸，一半是甜蜜，
一年又一年，長教我留戀。。。
The modified mind is clear and precise, no room for error, synapses blinking, autoanalysis complete to the one-hundredth of a second, all under 0.70082699341 units of time (standard measurement as adjusted for seismic geoshifts and post-neolunar patterns). Looping about the vaporous pools of data gathered as skeins within cloud storage systems above, below, and within, Citizen-Police 000000023918_3481.874PZT’s embedded transducing chip hidden within flesh picks up audio waveforms lapping against the cochlear. Tides come in, tides go out, brackish flows intermingle and the hertz make themselves legible as electronic signals blinking across the spine, tingling across modified membranes and polyethylene endoskeletons.
A song that has no reason to exist in present analogue soundsystem forms, no reason to echo out in the alleyways of Street 184.558202A (intersecting Avenue 99238.61U). Citizen-Police 000000023918_3481.874PZT is keenly aware of what this could mean – their logic card does the necessary calculations, re-orientations, telepresence siting, and séances, they gaze from beyond the dense overgrowth of satellite TV antennae to see the outlawed commune, with their clumsy technologies sitting over their aged, withering bodies, the cables and protrusions, the machinery so unlike his smooth, synthetic, spa-treated & regularly moisturised polysiloxane flesh (toner removes sebum produced during the night and balances your skin’s pH.). They are making, making those artefacts long ago rejected as outmoded art, how trite, confusing, utterly repugnant – no sight of systems, of computation, no conceptual basis, no theoretical grounding.
Without even 0.70082699341 units’ of hesitation, Citizen-Police 000000023918_3481.874PZT sends out the electromagnetic signal for reinforcements.
Cover Art
世纪秘辛： ＳＥＣＲＥＴ HOLLYWOOD HAUNTINGS： CYBWAR
