Wonderland as a memetics campaign

[tantric]

I'm talking about the Wonderland campaign setting for JAGS. Wonderland features a contagious psychological disorder called CPD. CPD is *alive* and attempting to spread itself. Once one contracts CPD, life expectancy is about 2 years. Some commit suicide, other get killed and some just drop off the grid and disappear.

In the game, people get CPD when they witness something impossible and accept it as is. When people have episodes of CPD, the act strangely, almost autistic, until the episode resolves. Upon resolution, they have memories that are completely disjointed from reality - they remember a strange, surreal world. In the Wonderland setting, they are experiencing something real, but this is not necessary for THS memetics.

The Wonderland contagion begins with alien contact, the means of which is not specified in the setting. It seems to be text or voice only. The being contacted is called the Red Queen and has a disturbing tendency to recite altered nursery rhymes and other gibberish. The contact team goes insane, some of them disappear.

While the means of contact is not specified in the original setting, methinks a microblack hole would work just fine. Contact would occur during shipment - I don't know much about black hole physics, but I'd say that inputing a steady stream of hydrogen atoms results in the emission of radiation, which contains the signal.

Assume that the Red Queen is a nonhuman intelligence far in advance of THS AI's that has been listening to human communications from the beginning. It has a knowledge of memetics far beyond anything known in 2100, and it is intent on colonizing human meme-space. In the THS/Wonderland campaign, the default setting is that players cannot tell whether they are experiencing the supernatural or mere insanity. In any case, AI's can and do get infected.

BTW - I haven't read Toxic Memes, on the list now.

Does this break the setting? What happens when Wonderland gets on the net?

[tshiggins]

I highly recommend Toxic Memes, if you want to go this way. It provides the sort of rules-crunch for the spread of memes that you would find tremendously useful.

However, it notes that the spread of memes is never 100 percent and, in fact, could affect only a tiny percentage of the population and only rarely affects a majority. It also goes into the time taken to spread, and how to define populations that are susceptible or resistant.

Finally, AIs are software code, and all software code is subject to rational evaluation. In fact, the breakthroughs that led to Memetics Science in THS came when an AI began to examine how its own code changed when it was exposed to new concepts and ideas, and realized the concept of "memetics" offered useful insights.

So, if AIs are affected by this phenomenon, then other AIs (at least) will be able to look at the code for the affected AI, check it against a backup copy of that AI (backups are always permitted, although XoXing is not), and unravel how the memetic changes happened. Moreover, because human minds (and the minds of uplifted animals) can be ghosted, or even destructively-uploaded, then the mind of a recently-deceased person can be examined, too. A team of memeticists will decompile the code for the ghost or the uploaded mind, and can then see how the memes affected that, too.

The initial impact of the meme could be phenomenal, because of its virulence, but in THS the "Pros from Dover" will eventually get a handle on how it works, and how to counteract it, even though the point of origin may remain a mystery for quite some time.

[tantric]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

I highly recommend Toxic Memes, if you want to go this way. It provides the sort of rules-crunch for the spread of memes that you would find tremendously useful.

However, it notes that the spread of memes is never 100 percent and, in fact, could affect only a tiny percentage of the population and only rarely affects a majority. It also goes into the time taken to spread, and how to define populations that are susceptible or resistant.

Finally, AIs are software code, and all software code is subject to rational evaluation. In fact, the breakthroughs that led to Memetics Science in THS came when an AI began to examine how its own code changed when it was exposed to new concepts and ideas, and realized the concept of "memetics" offered useful insights.

So, if AIs are affected by this phenomenon, then other AIs (at least) will be able to look at the code for the affected AI, check it against a backup copy of that AI (backups are always permitted, although XoXing is not), and unravel how the memetic changes happened. Moreover, because human minds (and the minds of uplifted animals) can be ghosted, or even destructively-uploaded, then the mind of a recently-deceased person can be examined, too. A team of memeticists will decompile the code for the ghost or the uploaded mind, and can then see how the memes affected that, too.

The initial impact of the meme could be phenomenal, because of its virulence, but in THS the "Pros from Dover" will eventually get a handle on how it works, and how to counteract it, even though the point of origin may remain a mystery for quite some time.

Though I don't disagree that AI complicates things, any AI inspecting the code of an infected AI would be infected - or find nothing, merely memories that don't sync with reality, or both. Wonderland is plot device, mostly. As I go through Toxic Memes I'm realizing that such a combo would require editing some of the tech (meaning yes, it would break the system). Is there canon material on AI insanity?

There was SF book years ago (ie, the 90s) about a man making contact through some transuranic unobtanium. The protagonist gave it the human genome and it sent back the code for an enzyme. Then it went off the deep end with star destroyers and stuff. Anyone remember that?

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by tantric

Though I don't disagree that AI complicates things, any AI inspecting the code of an infected AI would be infected - or find nothing, merely memories that don't sync with reality, or both. Wonderland is plot device, mostly. As I go through Toxic Memes I'm realizing that such a combo would require editing some of the tech (meaning yes, it would break the system). Is there canon material on AI insanity?

Just that they become more unstable and acquire erratic behavior somewhat related to their original directives. Rogue AKVs become paranoid and/or homical.

The CPD scenario you describe resembles the Summerian business from SNOWCRASH, and could be handled the way they handle it there; isolate the carriers, use NAIs to sift through the data it used as a vector and add it to a malware filter.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Owen Smith

Black holes don't emit anything from beyond the event horizon, that's the physics of black holes. The gravity is so strong nothing can escape. What you do get are intense heating of gasses from the pressure as they approach the event horizon which then cause some of them to emit intense radiation before they fall beyond the event horizon. You could postulate information encoded on this radiation, possible caused by perturbations in the black hole's spin imposing itself gravitationally onto the gasses. Because frankly we're still learning how this bit works.

Well, there's this whole black hole evaporation thing, with emissions and all. But yeah, having it actually contain a meme in usable form seems like a Deus Ex Machina.

[jeff_wilson]

Hawking has come out on the side of information leakage from black holes in the radiation, but it's still spread over the remaining lifetime of the black hole, rather than any recognizable pattern.

[tantric]

Is there any particular reason a microblack hole can't be a microworm hole? Does THS have a TOE?

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by tantric

Is there any particular reason a microblack hole can't be a microworm hole?

The mass-to-aperture ratio is such that asteroid-sized masses are unsuitable for objects of atomic size or larger. Perhaps it could be spun-up and used to conduct signals at very short wavelengths (gamma rays).

[tantric]

It's very hard for a non-physicist to distinguish between theories that are rock solid and theories that will be gone in 20 years. For me, dark matter looks a lot like ether. Micro black holes in the Kuiper Belt? Wasn't that just a few articles that went away pretty soon? The point being, who knows what physics is like 100 years from now.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by tantric

It's very hard for a non-physicist to distinguish between theories that are rock solid and theories that will be gone in 20 years. For me, dark matter looks a lot like ether. Micro black holes in the Kuiper Belt? Wasn't that just a few articles that went away pretty soon? The point being, who knows what physics is like 100 years from now.

It's not about whether micro black holes survived in the Kuiper Belt. It's that them giving out coherent info like that is highly dubious.