Alternate Reality Building

Role of these notes

This is where I'll collect notes for a psychedelic science fiction novel that is set in the 2060s and is rooted in an alternate past that diverges from our timeline in the early 1990s. The goal is to have an absolutely bonkers world built up for the story - bonkers, but made coherent and consistent in these notes. This way I can tell the story in a world that's been fleshed out without feeling the need to explain every little bit of backstory on the page just to make myself feel better about coherence. 

Scope

The complete story will take on the scope of an epic world-saving endeavor, but without an emphasis on defeating evil. The forces working against our heroes are interested in ruling the world, but not because they believe their self-interests would not compromise the world order. Over the course of six decades, the influence of the state, capital, and religion have all been reduced to close to nothing. They have, however, been allowed to persist as concepts that provide some with comfort in a rapidly changing world. Many believe they drive and regulate world affairs, wield power through their bank accounts, or shape lives through spiritual teaching. But they don't.

Those people are made aware of how little power they hold when Anchor declares independence. In an effort to reestablish their influence, they seek to stop Anchor and others from rejecting the ideas of capital and government  

Overview

In the novel's alternate past, a small group of people have learned to tap into abilities derived from their expanded perceptions of reality. Using these abilities, they work to change the trajectory of the world, motivated by a desire to stop the environmental destruction of Earth, root out the systems that oppress individuals, and establish permanent human settlements in space. 

The Mystics were informed by a blend of the anarchist philosophy of Emma Goldman, the outreach efforts of the Black Panther movement, and the path to revolution taken by Thomas Sankara. They work to develop a world where the powers of the state, capital, and religion all dissipate, leaving only autonomy and mutual aid in their place. These Mystics deviate from Goldman in one key way: They do not see violence as a legitimate means to achieve their ends. Instead, inspired by the Black Panthers and Sankara, they facilitate the creation and strengthening of alternatives to the state, capital, and religion. They replace those institutions with systems that elevate the quality of life for people and dismantle power structures.

Unlike Goldman, the Panthers, or Sankara, the Mystics worked to do all of this surreptitiously. They knew that the powerful would resist if they recognized that their power was losing its influence.

By 2052, the results of these efforts include the following: 

• A solar system with a sustainable population of 17 billion humans
• 16 megacities on Earth with excellent housing for all
• Older cities and towns with improved infrastructure
• Reestablishment of wilderness across every biome
• Free, clean, and fast ground transportation
• Food in abundance
• Free clean energy
• A series of space elevators linked by 4 deep-orbit rings that support 7 low-orbit rings for rapid transcontinental trips
• 7 permanently inhabited space stations
• 8 lunar industrial and research sites
• A floating megacity in the atmosphere of Venus
• A thriving asteroid mining industry
• A network that delivers information tailored to each individual's cognitive abilities and personal contexts
• A culture focused on creativity, scientific curiosity, and personal fulfillment.  

There's also a few figurehead governments that take credit for everything, a tolerance for religions that are tolerant, and a class of people who think they own everything.

Plot (with some setting notes)

The plot of the novel will be set in motion when a space station declares independence from Earth. The Anchor Space Station was the first equatorial anchor for a space elevator tether, making it a famous landmark in the development of a global society (also a popular tourist destination). The station became fully self-sufficient in 2037, and its solar array provides 35% of the energy that gets stored in the structural batteries held in the eleven orbital rings' that supply the majority of power to the global electrical grid. 

Its declaration of independence explicitly cuts ties to the terrestrial financial bureaucracy, leading many to realize that "capital" is no longer a meaningful concept. The people who believed themselves powerful because they had accumulated massive amounts of capital (the Capitalists) work together in an attempt to discredit this realization by attacking the station's defenses and reputation simultaneously. The Capitalists use what little influence they have left to corrupt the global information network and launch a preemptive military attack on Anchor.

The remaining members of the group of Mytics who engineered this future have to 1) recruit a team that is able to defend Anchor from the attack and 2) counter the smear campaign in order to avoid the destruction of a peaceful global society where the needs of all are met. 

A major challenge the Mystics face is that in order to counter the smear, they will have to reveal that a close-knit group of powerful individuals has been working in concert behind the scenes to shape world events, oftentimes using mysterious powers to do so. This feeds into a conspiracy theory narrative that has adherents in a number of odd corners of society. These groups start to amplify the messages being shared by the Capitalists. Meanwhile, the military defense of Anchor takes on a Trojan War-like feel with a siege of a well-resourced city-state and a tireless military force at the gates. 

Story Telling

The way the story gets told is part of the plot. One of the Mystics is Kendrick who developed a way to deliver "actual messages," information transmitted to people in such a way that each individual will best comprehend the message as intended. 

Kendrick is tasked with releasing a secret history in such a way that will lead to a rejection of the Capitalists and a global embrace of anarchy.   

Kendrick does this by deciding the order in which to feed classified historical documents into the global information distribution system he designed. That system will then convert those documents into actual messages for public consumption. 

The novel will move between the narration of events associated with the military defense of Anchor and excerpts from the historical documents Kendrick uses to defend Anchor's reputation. 

Each time Kendrick shares something, the texts impact the military campaign and public support.  

The Alternate Past

Helena Rodriguez left Wisconsin in 1989 to double major in anthropology and horticulture at New Mexico State University where she wrote a senior thesis on hallucinogens used in shamanism and witchcraft practiced around the world. 

Shortly before completing her studies, Helena found that she was able to harness energies through the practice of rituals rooted in Hungarian witchcraft she learned during a semester abroad in 1992. These energies help her to grow an exceptionally powerful hallucinogenic strain of heritage psilocybin mushrooms originally found in Oaxaca. 

After graduating, she founded a woman's support group she dubbed the Nine Wind Collective (NWC) in a nod to Mixtec heritage on her father's side of the family. The NWC endeavored on psychedelic explorations in an effort to empower women. The goal was to break down the social barriers that cause women to believe themselves inferior to men and other women. It evolved into a multicultural spiritual community with a profound impact on many women in the region. 

Helena eventually rejected the name Nine Wind Collective because her work was leading her to believe that enlightenment meant seeing beyond the "ordering of the world," an ordering represented by the name Nine Wind. She pushed the group to adopt the name Tloque Nahaugue, which led to conflict and a breakdown in the collective. A group of women felt excluded because they believed Helena was pushing the group to adopt an explicitly non-white identity (also, they couldn't pronounce the new name). 

The divisions in the group led Helena to leave New Mexico. The NWC would continue to operate without her guidance and eventually become a foil.

Helena returned to Wisconsin in pursuit of a self-designed graduate degree in shamanistic horticulture. 

She was secretly followed to Madison by Mary Hertz, a young woman who became a member of the NWC just months before Helena left the collective. 

Mary had been planted in the NWC by Young Minds Incorporated (YMI), a corporate research group composed of psychologists and behavioral scientists who splintered away from an ill-conceived government project to investigate the utility of cognitive diversity. The government project was a dead end - the brainchild of a congressman from California who had seen Rain Man and couldn't get over the scene where Hoffman counted the toothpicks. The congressman, with help from the outgoing Regan administration, got some money appropriated to the DoD for research into (his words) "how retards might be able to help the military." 

A few researchers on the project, however, saw real profit potential in what they could do without government oversight getting in the way. They founded YMI and started studying the way cognitively diverse individuals approached problem-solving and task management. One of the proposed directions was psychedelic therapy. So, when one of YMI's directors heard about Helena's work from a colleague, he and his team sent Mary, a new research assistant, to join the NWC and determine if anyone in the collective could provide insights into the potential of psychotropics. 

After joining, Mary became obsessed with Helena, believing Helena was on the cusp of unlocking a window into reality that would change the world. She hid this belief from YMI because it wasn't exactly what they had asked for. She instead filed unexciting reports with the office as she read and reread everything Helena had ever written: her senior thesis, NWC zines, a short story, journals, a childhood diary, meeting minutes, even margin notes in old textbooks. 

Mary was crushed to learn Helena was leaving New Mexico because she believed the land itself was key to Helena's progress. She followed Helena, hoping to develop a plan to eventually get them both back to New Mexico.

But in Madison, Helena found old friends from Milwaukee, one of which was Theo Tilden, a philosophy student in his sixth year of undergraduate studies who was halfheartedly trying to establish an anarchist co-op with his ex-roommate Casey. 

When Theo consumed Helena's mushrooms, he would say and do things during his trips that opened new ways of understanding for a sober Helena. All of her spiritual and metaphysical work started to click into place. Theo could not remember anything useful when he returned from a trip. Helena told him he was something short of a shaman, more like a lens into the world where shamans worked. She told him she intended to use him to better understand the workings of the universe, and he thought that sounded pretty fucking cool.    

Mary tried to convince Helena that there was no need for Theo, that Mary herself could serve as a kind of conduit to expanded perception. Mary's attempts, however, led to a catastrophe when her tinkering with the fabric of perception pushed hundreds of people at a massive annual block party to become violent and destructive. A riot ensued.

Mary was able to de-escalate things with a group of dangerous rioters, but she did so using information that Theo had provided. Mary accepted that Helena knew what she was doing. This was the beginning of a group that would become the Mystics. They sent Mary back to YMI with a plan for her to rise up in the ranks of the company and eventually take over and steer the company towards goals in line with the Mystics.

[More to come]

The Science

Through psychedelic experiences, the mystics in the 90s see that reality is infinite and infinitely varied. The unified perception of all living things is what shapes our shared experience. That unified perception, however, is limited to that which is traveling under the speed of light from our vantage. In the empty spaces between those objects and interactions, however, entire other universes are moving together at speeds we cannot perceive. Every variation that can be imagined happens and is happening at all times everywhere, and parts of our universe regularly interact with other universes, governed by a set of rules beyond our comprehension. By expanding or limiting our perception, we can catch a glimpse of this. Some can even harness the energy or matter from the universes closest to our own.

The Mysticism 

Because most lifeforms have their own individual perceptions, they find it difficult to understand how their view is just a sliver of the shared perception of all living things. For some, psychotropics allow an individual to see how all of the individual perceptions are woven together to shape the universe we inhabit. For a select few, these moments of clarity provide incredible insights into how our universe functions and even interacts with the other universes that surround us.  

Mary's NWC Zines break down what can be experienced on these trips:

• The Cast is what allows perception. It exposes the world. Its limit is the speed of light. People who can perceive the Cast, like Theo, can focus the intensity of perception and see other features of reality.
• The Mesh is the interwoven drives, motivations, and intentions of all that can perceive. 
• The Hold is what keeps the physical world in order so that it might be perceived. 

These experiences allow the Mystics to predict the future and how different choices will impact that future. They allow the Mystics to manipulate the choices of others. They even allow for some manipulation of the physical world, although only to push around elementary particles like electrons or stuff that is smaller still. 

The Economy

In the early 2000s, Heather Knox inherited a building in Chicago from her wealthy uncle. The building included 3 storefronts, a hostel, and 4 apartment units. While managing the building, Heather started tinkering with how she paid the employees who performed maintenance and repairs. She wanted to pay a living wage in an expensive city. One of the areas where she had some unexpected success was with restroom attendants on the ground floor. The building had three restrooms that were supposed to be "customers only" but were regularly used by tourists and locals. Heather placed a restroom attendant in the building to work during busy times of the day. To the surprise of many, business improved in all of the shops quite quickly. In cooperation with the retail renters, Heather extended the hours of the attendant. The results were dramatic. Foot traffic increased in the stores. Spending per customer went up. The impact was even felt in neighboring buildings. 

Heather developed a business plan to place attendants in bathrooms throughout the city. Part of her business plan involved two-year contracts with both clients and employees. She guaranteed work for people at a fixed rate with the potential for a raise based on performance. With clients, she asked for a base rate with the potential for a rate adjustment after one year based on fluctuations in the clients' business performance. She saw a dramatic increase in revenue that far outpaced the increases in compensation. But she did not pocket the profit; she invested everything into employee training and benefits. Her clients saw more growth. 

Heather got an idea. She worked with an investment group funded by Theo to develop a financial tool called a "labor-backed security." She pooled the contracts she had with all of her employees and allowed investors to pay for five years of labor at today's prices. If, after five years, the value of the labor exceeded the value of the initial investment, investors received a portion of the earnings. The tool took off very quickly. While part of this was through the help of Theo's investment group, the main reason was that the labor-backed securities created a space for investors to hide the bubble that was growing in the real estate and mortgage-backed securities markets. Banks and hedge funds poured money derived from inflated assets into five- and ten-year labor contracts. This spurred an enormous leap in the number of middle-class workers who could suddenly access traditional borrowing for home buying. The investing community worked hard to keep these circumstances from becoming too widely known, and succeeded for a time. However, by 2008 the news got out that labor-backed securities were the instrument that saved the economy from a corrupt network of banks. 

Part of the reason Heather's idea attracted attention was some drama that occurred within her family. When Heather inherited the building, her two brothers also inherited real estate. Her older brother and his wife sold an apartment building to buy and renovate a theater. They threw everything into the production of a variety show that failed spectacularly. During the brief run, the theater contracted Heather's restroom attendant service (at a steep discount). In the aftermath of the show's failure, Heather's sister-in-law was first looking for someone to blame, and then later looking for a way to recoup the losses. She went after Heather's growing business. She claimed that the company's success was due to the publicity generated by the variety show (which did get some major local coverage in the "so bad it's good" reviews). She worked to undermine the company after it gained some media attention. This attracted the attention of an investigative reporter who started recording a podcast that looked into the sister-in-law's claims. When the sister-in-law realized she was going to be made to look foolish, she kidnapped the podcaster. The entire debacle became a cultural sensation and became jet fuel for Heather's rising star.

Labor-based securities became a wildly popular way to invest money. Economists found that a large diverse pool of labor that included people from a variety of industries was a safer way to invest. Investors started to see that increased worker productivity was tied to training, safety, security, and job satisfaction. Investment groups started hiring people to protect workers and workplace environments. When there was still more money to invest at the end of each cycle, investors went looking for more people to bring into labor pools. Artists, entertainers, students, and entrepreneurs were offered salaries along with accountants, factory workers, and food service employees. 

Eventually, a large part of the global financial system was working to ensure a living wage, job security, and job satisfaction for anyone who wanted those things. Productivity kept growing, and the investors saw their accounts grow along with it. Productivity soared, leading to the development of global-scale projects such as the orbital rings and the space elevator.

In 2012, the system turned into a guaranteed basic income for everyone on the planet. All labor was seen as valuable - even labor we would not consider valuable today. There was a vast bureaucracy behind all of this valuation, and a small group of people saw themselves as extraordinarily powerful. Interestingly, their power and wealth were all tied up in the generous guaranteed incomes of the rest of the world.

Information Technology 

    Kindrick was born with a strong predisposition for obsessive compulsion.  That's what got him the scholarship at Young Minds Incorporated - the western hemisphere's most prestigious professional training school.  At YMI, his compulsion was honed into a need to innumerate the various ways information can be interpreted.  He was an excellent student.  At eight years old, Kindrick used elementary learning software to craft his first variable-audience message; he utilized school records to make the "Global Federation's 2018 Education Priority Statement" understandable and contextually relevant to every literate student at YMI.  Outside of the research sector, no one person had ever crafted such a complex variable-audience message for such a large readership.  At fifteen, Kindrick taught the YMI computers how to customize the weekly school bulletins.  Within a month of implementation, every student, parent, and employee reached a 98% comprehension rate.  The day after that project was unveiled, DFT took over Kindrick's tuition fees and increased his parents' credit rate. 

The work Kendrick did off drugs was stunning, no doubt, but it was the senior thesis he wrote while on drugs that brought Kindrick interdisciplinary renown and then a brief bit of celebrity.  His paper demonstrated "computational communication systems that reduce types of uncertainty unrelated to Shannon entropy by integrating systematic human interface into the channel."  It was a breakthrough in information theory, effectively creating a new field of study, connotative computation.  

Various scientific communities dug into his work with great excitement, but it was the ensuing battle between human rights groups and education firms that pushed Kendrick into the public spotlight. In order to tamp down his obsessive compulsions enough to reach a state in which he could write a paper and argue about his theories with the YMI faculty, he had to take a tremendous amount of psychotropic drugs - many of which were still in experimental trials. To come down off those drugs, Kendrick had to endure a dreadful physical state that lasted the better part of a day.  The photographs of this process were brutal, and many were deeply disturbed when those photos went public. There was a fleeting moment of public outcry, but then the pharmaceuticals caught up to the problem, productivity training went mainstream, and the world went on to worry about other things. 

Since taking over the Connotative Editing Unit at DFT, Kendrick had dramatically increased the comprehension rates of readership worldwide. People have access to information that they can understand about nearly every facet of the modern world.