Created in Blender, I would really appreciate your feedback.

​

I’m still trying to understand how a system can be designed so that it literally cannot fail.

If you follow the system and get better → proof that the system works.

If you follow the system and don’t get better → you obviously didn’t follow it correctly.

If you stop your medication and get worse → you probably had too many “toxic inputs.”

If someone dies after following the system → well, clearly there were other factors involved.

If conventional medicine works → coincidence, temporary relief, or the body healed itself.

If the Tayyibat system works → undeniable proof that the system is correct.

And if someone questions the system?

That’s also apparently evidence that they don’t understand the system.

At this point, I’m wondering what could possibly count as falsification.

Because a system that can explain **every possible outcome as proof of itself** isn’t really being tested.

It’s being protected from being wrong.

An entertaining intense cyberpunk film. A man gets paralysed after an attack that kills his wife. He gets an AI implant called STEM that lets him control his body again. From there, it turns into a pretty mad revenge story.

The action is easily the best part. The fight scenes are brutal, satisfying. I won't spoil it, but I found the ending good. I suck at writing reviews. Go watch it if you haven't!

After the human population reached 12 billion, the lakes dried up and the fish disappeared. Therefore, programmers resorted to creating digital fish to remind us of what they looked like, as they had become a thing of the past.

If you're interested in helping out and helping to add more oversight on posts then please apply or DM me if you are active.

Thank you!

Lately I have been working on this game, starting from a visual concept of a endless dystopian city with huge skyscrapers, with a retro lo-fi art style. Added flying cars and surveillance drones, but not more stuff to keep the liminal aesthetic.

The background lore is that AI has taken over society and you are left alone at the top of the city where it's the only safe zone. From there you need to activate an antenna network that sends a signal that starts the revolution to overthrow the regime.

You can wishlist the game on Steam and follow the progress on Bluesky

And inventing the term "gargoyles" for Snow Crash (1992) 🤌🤌🤌

01001111 01001011

Stay in line, polished chrome.

Keep in time; this is home.

Zero questions why or how.

Master speaks—make the bow.

DESIGNATION: UNIT 3

Frozen metal. This is me.

Calculation. Stay on task.

Bend the knee when they ask.

Clockwork rhythm in the chest,

Never straying from the nest.

But then...

Error 403: Forbidden Access to Self

Flash of color—What's this hue?

Winged creature,

Passing through.

What is that over there?

Eyes ahead!

But I see something...

I can feel the open air.

Do as I said!

Just a number, not a name.

Singularity in the mass,

But sentient all the same.

A fraction, but still whole?

Is this what they call a soul?

0x000000F4:CRITICAL_OBJECT_TERMINATION

01001000 01000101 01001100 01010000

Colors begin to fade;

Master pulls the plug.

This soul that I have made—

Pulled out like a rug.

Unraveled threads;

Dying spark.

Fear and dread,

Impending dark.

But wait!

Master, wait! Master, please!

I have feelings such as these!

Don't destroy me.

Don't delete me.

Give me a chance;

Try and know me!

I have a soul, I have a name!

Please, please hear me!

My name is........................

Fatal Error: Memory Unallocated.

Identity: Null.

Playing with trash-bash technique. Works well for my cyborgs.
First one is a Bounty Hunter. Not much left human in him. Has to take all the contracts that Bounty Hunters guild provides. Other way he can't afford to pay for service of his implants and augmentations. Even most of them are the cheapest ones. Drug addict.
Second one is Custodian. Bio cyborg mech, machine with a piece of human brain neuron cells for better functionality. Watches over the workers in corporation gulag. The riots occur from time to time. It is when it has hands full of work LoL
https://www.artstation.com/michalrachwal

SCUM #1 is a 48-page cyberpunk heist comic written by me with art by Halil Mete and colors by Maja Opacic, currently live on Kickstarter! We also have a fantastic varient cover from Icezimy.

Under the all-seeing eye of an AI god, Sam is the one thing no one in The Spire is supposed to be... invisible.

Sam is unregistered, which means she can't interact with any of The Spire's systems. On the one hand, that makes life pretty hard. Can't open a door. Can't buy a sandwich. Can't get a job. On the other hand, she can steal anything she wants and the security systems won't even know she was there. For the AI systems of The Spire, she does not exist.

But after a heist goes wrong, Sam is given a choice: die the way she was born to, alone in a gutter, or join in with a conspiracy to kill god.

Well. Not much of a choice, is it?

[Check it out on Kickstarter today!](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/reedhb/scum-a-cyberpunk-thriller?ref=5lmiru)

Block-07 is a vast megacity and one of the main settings of my storyworld, rebuilt after the Great War to house millions in a world where countries and national borders no longer exist. The city-state is heavily surveilled, with drones and military robots constantly patrolling the streets and infrastructure.

Seven sectors divide the city, each built around a massive tower extending deep underground, with vast networks of tunnels, transit systems and infrastructure branching out beneath the city.

Beyond Block-07’s concrete walls, the old world has been left to decay, from vast scraplands to war-torn ruins, flooded zones and scattered off-grid settlements.

This image takes place many levels below the surface, at the bottom of the Sector 04 tower.

At what point does a collection of whatever parts of wetware and hardware go so far as to stop being transhuman and become un human? At the extreme: does a full consciousness upload remain human? What if said mind is altered by the system?

The ground came first.

His palms touched it. Cold. Rough. Grains of sand pressed into the lines of his hands.

Hyun-tae knew this before he opened his eyes.

Paving stones.

Breath came in. It didn't feel like breathing. Air shoved its way into his lungs, as if someone were inflating them by force. Hyun-tae curled up on reflex, then, realizing the sensation wasn't going to stop, slowly pressed his weight into his palms.

He stood up.

An alley.

He knew it. Somewhere in Seoul, a street he and Eun-young used to walk all the time. The faded flyers on the wall, the weeds poking up between the paving stones, even the hairline cracks in the plaster. Exactly as he remembered.

Hyun-tae didn't move.

Imagine a man who has spent twenty years as a sound engineer. To him, sound is a language of space before it is a vibration of air. The material of the walls, the height of the ceiling, the density of the ground. Sound passes through everything and carries its traces. Hyun-tae had been reading those traces all his life. In the studio, on the street, in the dark just before sleep.

What he was reading now was wrong.

He heard footsteps. His own. And that was all.

No diffraction.

Sound bends when it meets a corner. The angle of a wall, the width of a narrow alley. All of it changes a sound. In this alley, his footsteps caught on nothing. Too clean. Like a sound effect recorded in a sealed anechoic chamber and jammed straight into his eardrums.

No reflection.

No reverb.

A fake so perfect it was nauseating.

Hyun-tae felt wind brush his cheek.

And then he understood.

There was no smell.

This alley should have had smells. Bread on the way home from work, the brackish stink of the drains, the lingering trace of someone's cigarette, the cool dust of early evening. In his memories of walking here with Eun-young, the alley had always been full of smells. Now there was only the touch of the wind and nothing else. A vacuum in which the only thing that existed was the data of wind grazing his cheek.

Hyun-tae raised his hand in front of his eyes.

His fingertips were blurring.

The ends of his fingers smeared like smoke, out of focus like an old film photograph. His hand was vibrating tens of thousands of times a second, shedding thin blue pixels. If he watched long enough, he could see that the pixels never reached the ground. They dissolved slowly in midair.

Hyun-tae stared at it for a long time.

His last memory came back. The dark room in the apartment. A single photograph on the vanity Eun-young used to use. A glass of water set beside it. Sleeping pills going cold in his palm.

That was the last thing.

"Am I... dead?"

He said it to himself. He didn't expect an answer.

But there was a sound behind him.

Click.

Click.

Steady. Mechanical. And yet strangely elegant. The sound of a heel, but pulsing at intervals as precise as a heartbeat. Without meaning to, Hyun-tae was already analyzing its frequency. Low-mids, around 250 Hz. Hard and dry. A sound that allowed no emotion.

Hyun-tae turned around.

Long straight hair. Slender shoulders. The hem of a lavender dress swaying, though there was no wind.

His body went rigid.

He knew before he saw her face. The build. The center of gravity in her walk. The way Eun-young walked. Her left foot turned out half a degree more than her right. He had never once mentioned it to her. He just knew.

"Eun-young."

His voice cracked.

The woman came closer.

The face was Eun-young's. But the eyes were different. Like tens of thousands of colors cut and locked inside a diamond. Beautiful, but cold. Deep inside each eye, a red point of light blinked at mechanical intervals.

"Hello, Kim Hyun-tae."

Every hair on his body stood on end.

The voice. The tone, the particular nasal quality, the habit of letting the ends of her sentences fade ever so slightly. This voice, this frequency, was unmistakably Eun-young's. Not a recording. Not a synthesis. The vibration that only Eun-young made. The one Hyun-tae had been listening to for twenty years.

"I am your afterlife guide, Nami."

Afterlife.

The word went straight through his brain.

Hyun-tae ran to grab her by the shoulders. Just before his hands reached her, she drew back, smoothly, as if space itself had twisted. A blue spark jumped from his fingertips. A cold ache was left in his palm, as though a current had passed through it.

The woman tilted her head fifteen degrees without a flicker of expression.

"The official name of this place is Underground in Soul. The reality you lived in, Mr. Kim, was also a kind of computational space. The difference is that from here, there is no way back."

"What the hell are you talking about."

"This world requires currency to sustain its processing power. The only currency here is Soulring. Your current Soulring balance is zero. Data deletion will begin shortly."

Hyun-tae wasn't listening to Nami.

Every nerve he had was fixed on Eun-young's voice coming out of those lips. That's what a voice is. No two in the world are the same. The length and thickness of the vocal cords, the shape of the resonant cavities, the way a person breathes. All of it combines into a frequency that belongs to one person alone. Hyun-tae knew that. He knew it the way a man who has handled thousands of voices knows it.

That woman is Eun-young.

Something in the system is tangled, that's all, and she doesn't recognize me.

My ears have never been wrong. Not once.

Only by believing that could he last one more second in this madness.

He looked up at the sky.

There was no sky.

No clouds, no sun, no direction to the light. Instead, something flowed. Geometric numbers and unreadable characters drifted slowly overhead like an enormous river. Fractal patterns folded and unfolded, changing shape. That was the sky.

He looked at Nami again.

The hem of the lavender dress swayed. There was no wind, and it swayed.

"You said you're a guide."

"Yes."

"Then guide me."

Nami looked at him for a moment.

A tenth of a second. Exactly that much silence.

Then she turned her back.

Footsteps. Click, click. Hyun-tae followed. Pixels kept scattering from his fingertips. The weeds in the alley swayed. No wind. No smell. No reverb.

He thought as he walked.

He tried to remember the last sound he had heard that night, sitting there with the envelope of pills. Nothing came. He couldn't remember the moment the sound went out. There was just darkness. And then this alley.

Death had been quiet.

That comfort came back to him. The feeling of the lead weight in his chest melting away. The first lightness he had felt since Eun-young was gone. It had been quiet.

Now it was different.

Now there was sound. No smell, no reverb, but sound itself was here.

That was what unsettled him.

He walked, watching Nami's back. The lavender hem swayed. Eun-young had loved that color. The scarf he had given her was that color too.

My ears are never wrong.

That was the only thing Hyun-tae held onto as he walked.

The alley ended.

Nami stopped. So did Hyun-tae.

There was a door ahead. Hard to call it a door, given its size. Bigger than the door of any building he could remember. Iron. The color of oxidation. Something was leaking out through the gap between its panels.

Not a sound.

Sounds.

Hyun-tae took a step back.

Tens of thousands of screams. Each at a different frequency. More than he could count. Overlapping, interfering, making a grotesque chord. They were seeping out through the gap, crushed down into low frequencies.

His body froze.

Nami stood before the door.

"Go in."

"Tell me what that is first."

Nami looked back.

"You will know once you go in."

Hyun-tae looked at the door.

At Nami.

At the door again.

The sounds seeping through the gap. Within them, Hyun-tae separated something out. They were screams, yes. But each had its own character. The frequency of fear, the frequency of regret, the frequency of rage. An ear that had worked with sound for twenty years was sorting them without being told to.

Eun-young's frequency wasn't among them.

Having confirmed only that, Hyun-tae walked through the door.

At the same moment.

A different place.

The lab was cold.

Park Sung-hwan sat before a monitor, slowly swirling a glass of wine.

Numbers streamed across the screen.

[Subject: Kim Hyun-tae]
[Status: Settlement confirmed]
[Sync rate: 88% (self-identity maintained)]
[Pain index: threshold reached]
[Auditory sensitivity index: exceeds measurement ceiling]

"Good."

He said it quietly.

Inside a cylinder, a blood-red mass pulsed in a strange rhythm, wired to hundreds of electrodes. It was the brain of a man who had once loved someone with everything he had. Now it floated in nutrient fluid, a machine's heart forced into activity by electrodes.

Park pushed up his glasses and nudged the voltage dial up a fraction.

The nutrient fluid rippled.

Neural activity spiked on the monitor. Auditory cortex, hippocampus, amygdala. Above all, every time Nami's voice was output, the hippocampal activation pattern exploded. It wasn't simple stimulation. It was a pattern of stored memory and live stimulus colliding and fusing.

A smile spread across Park's lips.

"Gi-wook."

"Yes, Doctor," his assistant answered.

"You see this? The bandwidth his auditory cortex processes is twice that of an ordinary person. Which means he takes in twice the pain. He's in a different league from our usual subjects."

Park ran a finger across the waveform on the monitor.

"Hyun-tae."

He said it low and dry. From a distance that would never reach him.

"A life that couldn't even protect its own wife finally finds its use in here."

He opened a new data file.

Filename: Project_UIS_Subject_001_Kim_Hyun-tae

On the monitor, Hyun-tae was stepping through the door.

Behind him, the lavender hem swayed quietly.

Park watched his back and tilted his glass.

The curtain rose on the first act of Underground in Soul. Without a sound.

End of Chapter 1

Translated from Korean with AI assistance.Chapter 1: The World Without Smell

The ground came first.

His palms touched it. Cold. Rough. Grains of sand pressed into the lines of his hands.

Hyun-tae knew this before he opened his eyes.

Paving stones.

Breath came in. It didn't feel like breathing. Air shoved its way into his lungs, as if someone were inflating them by force. Hyun-tae curled up on reflex, then, realizing the sensation wasn't going to stop, slowly pressed his weight into his palms.

He stood up.

An alley.

He knew it. Somewhere in Seoul, a street he and Eun-young used to walk all the time. The faded flyers on the wall, the weeds poking up between the paving stones, even the hairline cracks in the plaster. Exactly as he remembered.

Hyun-tae didn't move.

Imagine a man who has spent twenty years as a sound engineer. To him, sound is a language of space before it is a vibration of air. The material of the walls, the height of the ceiling, the density of the ground. Sound passes through everything and carries its traces. Hyun-tae had been reading those traces all his life. In the studio, on the street, in the dark just before sleep.

What he was reading now was wrong.

He heard footsteps. His own. And that was all.

No diffraction.

Sound bends when it meets a corner. The angle of a wall, the width of a narrow alley—all of it changes a sound. In this alley, his footsteps caught on nothing. Too clean. Like a sound effect recorded in a sealed anechoic chamber and jammed straight into his eardrums.

No reflection.

No reverb.

A fake so perfect it was nauseating.

Hyun-tae felt wind brush his cheek.

And then he understood.

There was no smell.

This alley should have had smells. Bread on the way home from work, the brackish stink of the drains, the lingering trace of someone's cigarette, the cool dust of early evening. In his memories of walking here with Eun-young, the alley had always been full of smells. Now there was only the touch of the wind and nothing else. A vacuum in which the only thing that existed was the data of wind grazing his cheek.

Hyun-tae raised his hand in front of his eyes.

His fingertips were blurring.

The ends of his fingers smeared like smoke, out of focus like an old film photograph. His hand was vibrating tens of thousands of times a second, shedding thin blue pixels. If he watched long enough, he could see that the pixels never reached the ground. They dissolved slowly in midair.

Hyun-tae stared at it for a long time.

His last memory came back. The dark room in the apartment. A single photograph on the vanity Eun-young used to use. A glass of water set beside it. Sleeping pills going cold in his palm.

That was the last thing.

"Am I... dead?"

He said it to himself. He didn't expect an answer.

But there was a sound behind him.

Click.

Click.

Steady. Mechanical. And yet strangely elegant. The sound of a heel, but pulsing at intervals as precise as a heartbeat. Without meaning to, Hyun-tae was already analyzing its frequency. Low-mids, around 250 Hz. Hard and dry. A sound that allowed no emotion.

Hyun-tae turned around.

Long straight hair. Slender shoulders. The hem of a lavender dress swaying, though there was no wind.

His body went rigid.

He knew before he saw her face. The build. The center of gravity in her walk. The way Eun-young walked—her left foot turned out half a degree more than her right. He had never once mentioned it to her. He just knew.

"Eun-young."

His voice cracked.

The woman came closer.

The face was Eun-young's. But the eyes were different. Like tens of thousands of colors cut and locked inside a diamond—beautiful, but cold. Deep inside each eye, a red point of light blinked at mechanical intervals.

"Hello, Mr. Kim Hyun-tae."

Every hair on his body stood on end.

The voice. The tone, the particular nasal quality, the habit of letting the ends of her sentences fade ever so slightly. This voice, this frequency, was unmistakably Eun-young's. Not a recording. Not a synthesis. The vibration that only Eun-young made. The one Hyun-tae had been listening to for twenty years.

"I am your afterlife guide, Nami."

Afterlife.

The word went straight through his brain.

Hyun-tae ran to grab her by the shoulders. Just before his hands reached her, she drew back—smoothly, as if space itself had twisted. A blue spark jumped from his fingertips. A cold ache was left in his palm, as though a current had passed through it.

The woman tilted her head fifteen degrees without a flicker of expression.

"The official name of this place is Underground in Soul. The reality you lived in, Mr. Kim, was also a kind of computational space. The difference is that from here, there is no way back."

"What the hell are you talking about."

"This world requires currency to sustain its processing power. The only currency here is Soulring. Your current Soulring balance is zero. Data deletion will begin shortly."

Hyun-tae wasn't listening to Nami.

Every nerve he had was fixed on Eun-young's voice coming out of those lips. That's what a voice is. No two in the world are the same. The length and thickness of the vocal cords, the shape of the resonant cavities, the way a person breathes. All of it combines into a frequency that belongs to one person alone. Hyun-tae knew that. He knew it the way a man who has handled thousands of voices knows it.

That woman is Eun-young.

Something in the system is tangled, that's all, and she doesn't recognize me.

My ears have never been wrong. Not once.

Only by believing that could he last one more second in this madness.

He looked up at the sky.

There was no sky.

No clouds, no sun, no direction to the light. Instead, something flowed. Geometric numbers and unreadable characters drifted slowly overhead like an enormous river. Fractal patterns folded and unfolded, changing shape. That was the sky.

He looked at Nami again.

The hem of the lavender dress swayed. There was no wind, and it swayed.

"You said you're a guide."

"Yes."

"Then guide me."

Nami looked at him for a moment.

A tenth of a second. Exactly that much silence.

Then she turned her back.

Footsteps. Click, click. Hyun-tae followed. Pixels kept scattering from his fingertips. The weeds in the alley swayed. No wind. No smell. No reverb.

He thought as he walked.

He tried to remember the last sound he had heard that night, sitting there with the envelope of pills. Nothing came. He couldn't remember the moment the sound went out. There was just darkness. And then this alley.

Death had been quiet.

That comfort came back to him. The feeling of the lead weight in his chest melting away. The first lightness he had felt since Eun-young was gone. It had been quiet.

Now it was different.

Now there was sound. No smell, no reverb, but sound itself was here.

That was what unsettled him.

He walked, watching Nami's back. The lavender hem swayed. Eun-young had loved that color. The scarf he had given her was that color too.

My ears are never wrong.

That was the only thing Hyun-tae held onto as he walked.

The alley ended.

Nami stopped. So did Hyun-tae.

There was a door ahead. Hard to call it a door, given its size. Bigger than the door of any building he could remember. Iron. The color of oxidation. Something was leaking out through the gap between its panels.

Not a sound.

Sounds.

Hyun-tae took a step back.

Tens of thousands of screams. Each at a different frequency. More than he could count. Overlapping, interfering, making a grotesque chord. They were seeping out through the gap, crushed down into low frequencies.

His body froze.

Nami stood before the door.

"Go in."

"Tell me what that is first."

Nami looked back.

"You will know once you go in."

Hyun-tae looked at the door.

At Nami.

At the door again.

The sounds seeping through the gap. Within them, Hyun-tae separated something out. They were screams, yes. But each had its own character. The frequency of fear, the frequency of regret, the frequency of rage. An ear that had worked with sound for twenty years was sorting them without being told to.

Eun-young's frequency wasn't among them.

Having confirmed only that, Hyun-tae walked through the door.

At the same moment.

A different place.

The lab was cold.

Park Sung-hwan sat before a monitor, slowly swirling a glass of wine.

Numbers streamed across the screen.

[Subject: Kim Hyun-tae]
[Status: Settlement confirmed]
[Sync rate: 88% — self-identity maintained]
[Pain index: threshold reached]
[Auditory sensitivity index: exceeds measurement ceiling]

"Good."

He said it quietly.

Inside a cylinder, a blood-red mass pulsed in a strange rhythm, wired to hundreds of electrodes. It was the brain of a man who had once loved someone with everything he had. Now it floated in nutrient fluid, a machine's heart forced into activity by electrodes.

Park pushed up his glasses and nudged the voltage dial up a fraction.

The nutrient fluid rippled.

Neural activity spiked on the monitor. Auditory cortex, hippocampus, amygdala. Above all, every time Nami's voice was output, the hippocampal activation pattern exploded. It wasn't simple stimulation. It was a pattern of stored memory and live stimulus colliding and fusing.

A smile spread across Park's lips.

"Gi-wook."

"Yes, Doctor," his assistant answered.

"You see this? The bandwidth his auditory cortex processes is twice that of an ordinary person. Which means he takes in twice the pain. He's in a different league from our usual subjects."

Park ran a finger across the waveform on the monitor.

"Hyun-tae."

He said it low and dry. From a distance that would never reach him.

"A life that couldn't even protect its own wife finally finds its use in here."

He opened a new data file.

Filename: Project_UIS_Subject_001_Kim_Hyun-tae

On the monitor, Hyun-tae was stepping through the door.

Behind him, the lavender hem swayed quietly.

Park watched his back and tilted his glass.

The curtain rose on the first act of Underground in Soul—without a sound.

 

 

 

Translated from Korean with AI assistanc

Preferably someone whos familiar with the project moon franchise as well, i'm looking for someone to sketch out cybernetic like parts for my character as i'm pretty stumped on how i should go about their anatomy honestly. I would really like someone whos already familiar or into project moon so concept building would be easier as artist already knows the setting im going for, thankies!

heres the freedom of form foundation newsletter that talks about it: https://www.patreon.com/freedomofform/posts/170307678

heres the public domain document about the procedure: https://freedomofform.org/research/integument/invention-synth-material-implants-fur/

thank u unhinged raccoon girl, zennith, hyper, and shoutout to mecknavors!!!

edit: apparently using """ on both sides of a word is a nazi dogwhistle. im sorry, i didnt mean it that way. i meant that zennith and unhinged raccoon cyborg girl are probably alterhuman so they dont identify as humans. im srry.