No dramatic sob story or anything this week, I felt bad and didn’t want to work on things much, and my main PC was down due to some upgrades being midway through and realizing I had the wrong parts

Getting second thoughts about Bevy now. It’s very unfinished in a lot of ways, and probably about a year out from being more stable and refined. I looked deeper into Godot and found that 4.0 is STILL in development. I definitely would want to use 4.0 and would likely end up in a similar situation with similar time-frames to being stable. Bleh.

I always seem to want to make new projects right when there’s brand new cool tooling that isn’t quite ready yet. Perpetual curse of being a tech chaser.

So anyways, in lack of exciting screencaps or news, have ANOTHER LORE DUMP

Ties

Rapidly advancing technology and the proliferation of “forever online” mindsets and social networks created a demand for a better interface for technology. The touchscreen had become dated, and gesture based motion controls were finicky. Nobody wanted to wear bulky augmented reality visors just to get richer displays.

The solution to the woes of the many was the Neural Tie, often shortened as just “tie.” They started as a niche luxury technology for the ultra wealthy as well as a productivity multiplier for specialty workers. Someone with a tie installed directly on to their brain stem no longer had to interface via clunky buttons and touchscreens-they could simply connect a cable to a conveniently located dermal port and be “part of the machine” in a sense. Of course, further augments would be required to fully leverage the true capability, with a basic tie serving largely as a glorified input device.

Despite the invasive installation and deep integration of ties within bodies, ties have a wide variety of differing manufacturers and proprietary technology. The exact function and specifications of the vast majority of ties are closely kept trade secrets, however most share the CTIS (Common Tie Interface Standard) allowing for anyone willing to pay a modest licensing fee to the Tie Standards Board to produce their own devices to integrate with ties or software to run on ties.

One of a kind identity numbers are baked into the unchangeable ROM data of every single one. Conveniently, this identity number can be read by easily obtained hardware and easily used by anyone needing to confirm the identity of someone or looking to hold accounts with specific people. tie IDs became a defacto standard for identification with alternative methods gradually becoming less used and slowly becoming no longer accepted as valid identification.

Your tie is everything. It is your bank account, your employment status, your licenses, your rental agreements, your property deeds, your will. 

Everyone is tied. To not have a tie would be unthinkable. Less than a citizen.

Cybernetics

Ties created a common interface for cybernetic prosthetics and augments to bind to to allow someone to control them as naturally as moving the rest of their body.

This found early adoption with those in need of prosthetics as well as people looking for addon 

Of course, the truly extreme and willing to risk a lot have replaced more than is left human. In the most extreme examples, they effectively become brains piloting fully mechanical suits. This offers a wide variety of nontraditional configurations, but even those crazy enough to give up their humanity often find themselves experiencing dysphoric sensations when their layout becomes sufficiently non-anthromorphic.

The cybernetics industry is perhaps one of the most defining elements of life in larger cities. Most find themselves working on cybernetics in some form or working for a firm that has some vested interest in cybernetics. All space travelers have some form of enhancements, and everyone has a tie, resulting in the maintenance being as essential of a service as healthcare. In some cases they overlap.

On top of this, the largest corporations behind tie manufacturing always are investing in expansion of the utility of ties. Greater usage means more licensing fees paid to them. Growth is more profit.

Of course, the licensing fees and requirements could be avoided by repurposing existing hardware. User beware if it ever malfunction.

Nanites and Bio-modding

While cybernetic enhancements and prosthetics opened a new world of augmenting one’s own body to become stronger, faster, or more beautiful, the perhaps icarian excess of cybernetics and total body replacements weren’t enough or desirable to some.

The burgeoning genetic engineering field exploded into the radical Bio-modding industry with the advent of directed gene therapies and self-sustaining nanite colonies-the latter being the more stable but less cost effective solution.

Some simply wanted minor tweaks. A better physique, a more shapely body, a more beautiful face-all only a trip to a specialized engineer away. Others more radical enhancements-for both personal and work reasons. Kevlar-like skin, overcharged centrally controlled adrenaline systems, hyper efficient physiology that generates minimal waste, nonhuman characteristics like horns, animalistic ears, or tails; all behind a pricier but similar trip to the genetic clinic.

The most radical took a view more similar to the synthetic, viewing their bodies as unsculpted clay waiting for its true form.  Via extensive surgery and complicated gene therapy processes, ordinary humans could be entirely transformed into frequently proprietary custom beings.

Some even took it to perhaps the logical conclusion; fusing engineered flesh with computerized machine. While an extremely rare sight, the metal and beast of such fusions made for a truly exotic look and function.

Stability

While Bio-modding lowered in cost and increased in availability over time, what never quite was perfected was the actual sanity of the process. Biological systems are vastly more complicated and sensitive to cascading effects than mechanical ones, and DNA is much more prone to errors than computer software.

While simple mods done by high quality providers are more often than not free of long term consequences, the more radical and invasive they get the more that the recipient risks “instability.”

Instability can manifest in strange ways. Common minor instability can be ignorable; overactive hair follicles, easily upset stomach, always feeling like you’re on the tail end of a cold, or similar. The more severe examples can suffer from psychological imbalances, severely altered physiology, muscular atrophy, or rapid overdevelopment of regions of the body. In particularly extreme cases the body can outright reject the alterations and begin attempts to purge them from the body, often with disastrous results to those with internal changes.

When large corporations require specifically augmented persons they normally go with a nanite core. Cores, being able to continually keep things in line over sustained periods, offer much greater stability and less likelihood of undesired effects on the subject. Of course, the downside is that the process of fabricating cores, installing them, and then maintaining them is dramatically more expensive than the cheaper “surgery and gene therapy” route. There also is the risk that if the subject is not well suited to a nanite colony and their body rejects the colony.

Or worse the colony rejects their body and consumes it from the inside out.

 Ok

Hopefully gonna be more back to normal on the next blog. I really want to get basic construction done, but we’ll see.

AI something something