RAT CHANNEL essay by snakeappletree

The following essay is stolen from my mates hard drive and blogged here because its so awesome and  also to say sorry for stealing his computer so I can play Velcro In Silico Second Life while he has wanted to be doing stuff with it. Also because we finished the campaign now and so these ideas are spent.

RAT CHANNEL

by snakeappletree

“The future is ancient.” Rutger Haur 

That Cyberpunk was invented by;
1 Bill Gibson in his book Neuromancer, and
2 immortalized as the movie Blade Runner directed by Ridley Scott,
3 based on the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick, and
4 poetically melded with Tron by Steven Lisberger,

This is the general belief, to summarize and cut a lot of street stories short of short.

Shadowrunners know the truth, despite the computer records. FASA took all the above and threw in some Tolkein and Aztec prophecies, and thats where Cyberpunk was truly born. A lot of people still are not ready to deal with Metempsychosis and Sixth World View even if they can accept robot body parts and mind to microchip. They'll catch up.

It is the 1980s naive aspiration of futurism; silver, black and neon, sleek beautiful young people coupling for the first time in nightclubs and dreaming of being gritty street samurai owning capitalism based digitisation. In 1980 computers were the realm of nerds and fiction; by 1990 your mate had the internet; by 2000 the world can't run without them. 

Since that time, we clever Humans (not you and me, the other ones of course, the lab rats, in fact they might not be humans at all, we don’t get to meet them anyway, they might be the Zeta Reticulan Gray clones for all we know, they probably are come to think of it) have invented most of the technology involved in the cyberpunk genre, and in the next few years we will be playing with things even more sci-fi than the pioneers imagined. 

There are things in Shadowrun that have already been outmoded by innovations in real life (no not the elven cyber-brothels, I am referring to cable connections between manchines). I have wisely used up large quantities of my allotted lifespan in the activity of role-play gaming in the science-fiction genre, in every format possible. Most of it is all about sex but there is also some technology involved. 

The focus of this essay came when I realized that what we used to call Soylent Green, we now thanks to Cloud Atlas call it 'protein for the Unanimity fabricant wombtanks and the fast food they serve'. Although the names have been updated, the concept is the same as it always was; questioning of technologically ethical cannibalism. The future eats itself.

At this time I realised that cyberpunk is stagnant. Although that is a part of its charm, returning to the 1980s as the heyday of the genre, seems ironically to date into the past, something that is intrinsically involved with looking to the future. The grime of time has settles, there are mutant strains growing on the rusting infrastructure of the sky-shanty. 

I believe this stagnation is because we do not have the imagination that the early pioneers had. Perhaps we do not need imagination. Perhaps they were psychic visionaries after all. We are still within their bubble, seeking Video Game Over. Perhaps we have been dumbed down by thirty years of post-visionary reality catching up with and out-moding 'the dream'. The reality is more gritty than the fantasy, that is why; escapism. 

To avoid a psychotic episode at the stunning scope of this revelation, I did what my instincts advised and I scrawled through youtube looking for anything remotely new in the genre. The question burning through my replacement artificial lube tubes; What can be done to move it on?

What I discovered got me thinking. With having invested in nuclear fission powered steampunk cranial cogs as flashy as these ones, that’s a good thing.

I discovered a video in which MrBtongue has outlined very succinctly the very basic premise of what cyberpunk is. This is useful. This helps. This is good. 

"Cyberpunk is: Punk, Grounded in Reality, Risky."

Let’s run with this.

Punk: Mohawks and leathers, birdy finger stiff as a cat to the omnipotent corporate cctv.

Grounded in Reality: Equates to gritty realism. 

“My set is amazing it even smells like a street” David Bowie. 

Even the magick follows quantum mechanical hard science. 

Risky: This category is the leverage we need to explore. 

This, I believe, is where the much needed Progress can be found.

Cyberpunk is risky. Twenty years ago my roleplay group ran the best ever Shadowrun game that you missed out on, in which our deadbeat crew of gangster druggy cowboy bikers discovered a sinister plot involving the corporate government; controllers of the omnipresent media were also a pedophilia ring and worse. We righteously rescued the meta-human orphans, destroyed the child pornography circuit and brought the corporation crashing down with the hard evidence we stole and distributed through their own media channels. Then we got assassinated.

By the mid 20-noughties this storyline is common knowledge as the true and actual situation occurring in Britain and a pedophile bash has been subtly orchestrated by media-hype because it is a highly contentious subject invoking a famous storytelling technique that ‘all quality writing explores taboo’. Although shocking at the time, to re-run that best game ever scenario today is already old hat, it is ‘of the real world’ and not fiction at all, not cyber and not punk enough to deal with Progress. Black is the new Pink. 

This is an example, and the resolution is to keep on pushing the boundaries. As the one path explores psychosis resulting from trans-humanism, symbolized by way of reducing Empathy scored as numeric points per extra cyberwear implant (whether this is realism or not is a moot point); the other path explores ever more complex variants of storylines that have become pastiche and cliche.

Now, to make things interesting, updating the campaign for contemporary audience; we are injecting the poor little orphaned children with experimental medical vaccines that although causing autism and ADHD, ESP and meta-mutation, they contain also nano-spore which gives the victims body and mind entirely over to whoever controls the frequency remote. These frequencies can be used to cause sickness or health. Thanks to the vaccines containing experimental and mutating bacteriological genomes, these kids have now got AIDS and therefore they are not on the pedophile ring’s lust list, because it would simply be too risky catching something from the nasty little infants. Antidote will be issued in accordance with their natural willingness to obey corporate directives, although that same frequency remote can be used to program people into any desired behavior anyway whatever they decide for themselves. Anyone who makes the associations that these technologies exist and that this is happening will of course be isolated, discredited and duly processed in accordance with mandate.

In the real world the nano-dust and germ warfare is also dropped from the skies too by way of chemtrails, according conclusively to real tests that have been done by independent research groups. It is all part of the Zeta Reticulans plan. Don’t worry about this. Delusional psychotic neurosis, see isolated, discredited, processed by mandate. 

And so now a look to Neko. Felines breed like wildfire, are developing opposable thumbs (Ernest Hemmingway House) and losing their tails (Manx cats) the same way as our monkey ancestors did just a few generations ago, unless you believe the official stories (Alien origins of Human DNA). Cats are at least equally as intelligent as Humans. Truth is, they are telepathic and thanks to quadrapedal status and tails have higher kundalini than bipeds. They program us; its obvious when you think that we feed them, not the other way around. While we regard them as pets, they regard us as menial servants. They are simply biding their time.

Feline culture is a little different to ours although they are also cruel, lazy, territorial and promiscuous. In this perhaps there is hope for multi-racial mutual understanding. Their body size is a lot smaller therefore they occupy the equivalent of a larger planet than we do, size being relative. The revolution will occur; just as soon as 'we' (those Reticulan lab-rats) slip a few mind-to-machine translation devices onto their heads out of monkey curiosity. Probably people will wait for the all-in-one neural-augmented bodysuit VR headset adaptor to become available first. Bipedal bodysuits for re-engineering hip-structure. And then we are doomed.* 

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*Toxoplasmosis is a bacteria that breeds only in the stomachs of cats, 40% of humans are infected already, in lab tests it has been shown that it affects rodents by making them seek out cats. Felines are already bio-engineering virus to make their food come to them. In humans it 'causes madness' - crazy cat lady syndrome "I live to serve pussy". Neo-feminism has nothing on this.



Additional, added a bunch of years later during a brief visit to UK, for the record. I accredited this essay to my lovely mate snakeappletree, but to be honest his first draft was shit so I re-wrote it very much so and in my own style too, because that's the kind of friend I am. A little bit because I feel shitty for not letting him know where I was for a few years while he worried and I toured Europe. It's okay now, he's sleeping off the fuck of his life and I'm fixing my public image dot com on his desktop. Sorted.