A Continent of Banalities

Ogham are the masterminds behind The Detectives. They have studied the murder mystery genre, along with every cop show, morality tale and redemption story known to humanity. They invented The Detective, and people are lining up to get a persona into an iteration of it. But someone once said that every wave is new until it breaks. How long can Ogham stay relevant with this one?  Ogham are not a single person, but a thirteen-person group-mind of dataforms (scanned human beings run in computer simulation). Centuries ago each mind was a human being who was scanned, and then gravitated towards each other, due to a shared interest in narrative and entertainment, justice and murder. They exist in a virtual world full of crime scenes, relationship maps, and set pieces. In theory each constituent individual remains a fully realized self, but in their virtual nerd cave, the observer might wonder if they weren’t simply parts of one personality playing superficial roles (the Leader, the Contin...

Grondep is a young criminal from the League of Independent Worlds. The League began as a loose conglomeration of colonies from Old Earth, and has ended up as a very tightly knit civilization. It only recently made contact with other civilizations, but has done reasonably well on its own. The population is generally urbanized, and various shades of strong-government liberalism pervades throughout. Religion exists, but is relegated to the status of hobby.   Grondep grew up in a middle class family. Her mothers worked in banking, and she grew up with a healthy understanding of economics. Her can-do attitude and communication skills, she was a great asset for organized crime. Advanced biotechnology is a recent import to the League, and while it is not illegal, treatments that grant functional immortality are heavily regulated and expensive. The thinking is that widespread immortality will lead to overpopulation and a workforce without any upward mobility. All of this is a bit above Gro...

Once again I'm a bit behind. Today I'm starting on a new series of characters taking part in a form of serialized entertainment for a posthuman audience. In the posthuman, post-scarcity civilization called the Tivoli Aggregate, novelty is worth more than gold. Actually gold is just another transition metal, but novelty lifts the spirits to new heights. A novelty on the verge of becoming a tradition isThe Detectives, a flash mob murder procedural happening without warning. An Aggregate persona will have ‘died’, and the titular detectives arrive on the scene. Members from other civilizations are invited to be detectives, lending the event some authenticity (“encounter entities from other polities and see their genuine values and reactions in REAL TIME!”) Let us meet the current stars of the Detectives bullpen.  Owain Prosser is from the Agrarian-Socialist Family of Ysbaddaden IV. This civilization believes in the uplifting quality of manual labor, the revolution as a continuous p...