Neurofinancer

In the grip of a recurring dream, Jayce saw the neon unfolding origami trick reveal it's coming shape, creasing and folding, a paper airplane. Smoke billowing from two towers, parachutes the color of Visa cards, woven of strands of fine print, and tricks more subtle still. From the black hearts of square pyramids, giant squid burst forth, escape the raging mob in a cloud of shadow economics and CNN apocalypse babble. Below, hordes of mindless zombies, their eyes glazed orbs filled with television, shamble in waves through the streets of New York. They follow the Zombie Master, wrapped in a flag, pointing the way with a cross, as he leads the zombies into a red white and blue factory. Inside, the zombies are chopped, ground and made into wafers the color of money, then piped into the dark pyramids, war machines in distant lands, and into the mouth of the Zombie Master and his cephalopodic brethren. The few remaining humans still with brains intact scream desperately upon deaf zombie ears, plead for them to stop and think, to realize the doom they are blindly stumbling into. But the zombies only groan and eat the brains of the humans, carry their bodies along into the factory. The squids' tentacles strangle Jayce's mother, tear her from the IV in her hospital bed, rip her worthless home off its worthless foundation. They eat her alive as he stands there, doing nothing. Willing his feet to move, his hands to reach out, his vocal chords to scream 'no', her name, something, anything. But his body remains silent. "Eat me, you fuckers!" Ignoring even his attempts to cry.

The city is quarantined; bridges out of the island are mined and walled off, the surrounding waters hum with fatal electricity, radar-armed helicopters circle continuously, and officers with night vision are posted at towers, ordered to shoot on sight anything attempting to escape. Snake Pilskin crawls out of Lady Liberty's empty eye socket, covered in blood, grime and scars. "This is your boom stick, Jayce."

"What do I do with it?"

"One of them tries to eat you? You stick it in their mouth, pull the trigger."

Read the rest of the episode...

All Tomorrow's Neuromancers 1: Cyber Community Organizing

In the first episode of All Tomorrow's Neuromancers, Twi does some cyber community organizing.

All Tomorrow's Neuromancer's site

Make your voice heard on the Forum

Or at the William Gibson Board

All Tomorrow's Neuromancers Intro Video

Getting back in the groove with this Neuromancer revis thing, re-green-lighting it. (Re-green-screening several bits as well.) I decided we're doing an "All Tomorrow's Neuromancers - starring the WGB" video, or frying a dual-core processor trying. I'm thinking that the reduced "80's" color palette and animating the static character images in After Effects will give the whole thing a cool anime-esque feel, like something churned out by a tweaked AI instantiation of Shirow Masamune and Mamoru Oshii.

Not sure yet how jacked in and involved I'm going to get into this, but I'm liking what I'm vizzing. My Twilight Maze webseries thing I have pretty much left sealed away in its own convoluted timestream to collect entropy for the past seven months, and I may just start this ATN thing into its own series, with it's own set of episodes, depending on how many people cast their retinas upon it. Also, the amount of time, talent with After Effects, Photoshop, actors, and other help I can pull out of somewheres. But either way, I like to keep as many sides of God's quantum computing dice available, as many alternate futures open, as possible.


Here's some reference on the Neuromancer Revis I posted a while back

"Calling all neuromancers, cyber-iKids, myspace idorus, razormoms, mirrorshaded tech support wizzes, interzonal neverwintermutes, guitar anti-heroes, starving locative Youtube artists, and professional Azeroth expatriots.

Photo-actors for spooky Chatsubo reconstruction wanted!

The next episode(s) of the Twilight Maze web series will be centered (territorially and thematically) in a sort of... "collective hallucination" of the Chatsubo; the bar that Case shoulders his way into beneath the dead-channel sky at the beginning of Gibson's Neuromancer. The core idea is: Imagine all the characters that inhabited the "cyberpunk" (in it's loosest possible semantic) worlds in all the books, movies, anime, and minds of the 80's and early 90's tore away into a closed "Dark Net" of sorts. Then imagine that all of these characters were jacked into reality circa 2005 and had to deal with the "alternate future" shock up to present day (2008). How would they adapt? Would Tally Isham start a Youtube cam? Would all those chromed-out hipster cyberpunks pick up iPhones and get strung out on WoW? Would all those AIs be running WoW farming / international WoW cyber-crime operations? Would all those cybernetic limbs be converted into super-enhanced Guitar Hero and Rock Band playing devices?

Keep in mind all of this is metaphorical and the tone of the series is highly surreal, so we don't need a literal, completely realistic scenario. Creativity highly encouraged."

Another way to think of it is as an APPF - Alternate Present of a Previous Future*. That is, an alternate reality of the collectively imagined cyberpunk future of the 80's. A 21st century that is neither and both our 21st century and the 21st century of vintage cyberpunk. The present (and near-future to an extent) as seen from the vantage point of the ghosts of an elder, imagined cyberspace. Hopefully resulting in much comedy, illuminations of the present, edification, pleasure, and other such good things.

(*Because no self-respecting part-time futurist can get through a Gibson Board or blog post without punting at least one two-second flash-wizz neologism!)

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