Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone
Jun. 22nd, 2019 12:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Ian McDonald - Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone
(This is repost from LJ)
Ethan Ring, a former art student has become a pilgrim that wanders around the temples of Japan. This Japan of 2020 is dominated by business and Shinto temples and even the ancestor veneration has been computerized. You can keep your ancestors in the simulations in the computers of the insurance company (not so far-fetched, because there at least was a Japanese site to remotely pour virtual water for the memory of one's forebears in the internet). Akiras, violent street gangs, clash with security guards. This Japan is not realistic but a very strange, stereotypical metaphor based of apocalyptic manga.
And Ring has a secret - fracters, fractal images named after cabbalistic entities that can directly affect the minds of people who see them. They can make people feel anything, cure them of mental maladies or destroy their minds on the spot. Ethan has tattooed two of them onto his palms and can print more out of his laptop.
And Ethan flees - himself, trying to escape his own past into the gadgetized religion in a foreign land. Thought in occasion he cannot resist a temptation to help someoneā¦
Fracters are effectively fantasy technology - many of the MacDonald's items are effectively just metaphors - but the sugar-powered energy sources are more realistic - biobattery research is apparently real thing.
(This is repost from LJ)
Ethan Ring, a former art student has become a pilgrim that wanders around the temples of Japan. This Japan of 2020 is dominated by business and Shinto temples and even the ancestor veneration has been computerized. You can keep your ancestors in the simulations in the computers of the insurance company (not so far-fetched, because there at least was a Japanese site to remotely pour virtual water for the memory of one's forebears in the internet). Akiras, violent street gangs, clash with security guards. This Japan is not realistic but a very strange, stereotypical metaphor based of apocalyptic manga.
And Ring has a secret - fracters, fractal images named after cabbalistic entities that can directly affect the minds of people who see them. They can make people feel anything, cure them of mental maladies or destroy their minds on the spot. Ethan has tattooed two of them onto his palms and can print more out of his laptop.
And Ethan flees - himself, trying to escape his own past into the gadgetized religion in a foreign land. Thought in occasion he cannot resist a temptation to help someoneā¦
Fracters are effectively fantasy technology - many of the MacDonald's items are effectively just metaphors - but the sugar-powered energy sources are more realistic - biobattery research is apparently real thing.