Messages

Congratulations, and extremely awesome trailer!  I got distinct feelings of Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator, and Borat, especially with triumphalist choir singing the Basenji national anthem.  Like when Borat belts to a stadium full of drunk angry Texans expecting the Star Spangled Banner, "Kazakhstan is the greatest country in the world..."

Definitely going to have to check this out.

I like the classic movie-poster-font concept!  Run with it!

REDACTED - My bad!

I'm torn between Rockstar 'Punched' and 'Silver Ice', so I have them both simultaneously with an espresso chaser.

@JackLucy: Thanks!  I do pretty much all the in-game art.  I have a professional artist friend who is helping with concept art and brainstorming, but he's a busy guy and I can't afford to pay him his market rate right now, which is like multiple month's worth of my salary.  SQ:VSB looks pretty awesome, though, I'll have to try it!

@Blongbraid: Thanks, I'm glad it works for you!  There are definitely a lot of Bladerunner chromosomes in Neofeud's DNA.  I have a hard time actually not going full-Bladerunner, which is why I set the game at least partially not at night, and took the protagonist's trench coat off (to much sobbing and gnashing of teeth).  But the gritty sci-fi spirit is there.

@Problem: Thanks for your two cents on the topic of SM marketing* and Kickstarter.  I have a friend of a friend who recently successfully ran a Kickstarter and gave me a 5-point seminar on how to do it, but it was not an adventure game, so that could be a problem.

@Dave Gilbert: Thanks also for your advice.  Means a whole lot coming from THE Wadjet Eye.  Anyway, I was getting a seriously creepy vibe from this one particular marketing company.  Like, at first the guy seemed like a genuinely interested fan with a startup marketing company, but in the second email they used long strings of superlatives ending with multiple exclamation points ("You absolutely must get your fantastic game out there with our time-tested, cost-effective, H2H smarketing...").  Just sounded too much like a Ponzi scheme.

Thanks also for the positive nod to Neofeud!   I have played and loved pretty much every Wadjet Eye title I can get my hands on and they are major inspirations.

(*SM Marketing - Social Media, but sometimes it feels like masochism to me!) 

Just a little update on Neofeud for everyone:

Neofeud development continues to continue. At the moment we have about 25 backgrounds completed, 40 or so character animations, and at least a thousand lines of dialog.

Here is a variety pack of vehicles from our 2030 flying car fleet!



I have been approached by a few social media marketing companies offering to handle hyping / buzzing Neofeud up, guarantying a thousand new followers per month and such. Here's an open question to any fans listening: do any of you have experience with such campaigns? Would you recommend a company such as Silver Spook games and specifically our Neofeud project bring such a marketing company into the relatively shoe-string-budgety fold at this point?

One other thing: I am considering starting a Kickstarter, or another method of creating sustainable funding for the project, so that I can continue to live inside of the $1400 studio w/ no utilities that gentrifying megatropolises like Honolulu, SF, and New York continue to prove. (We're based in the former.) So please, Kickstarter, Patreon, funding advice is super welcome! I really want to take this project to completion, if at all possible.

ALSO! I've just recently started my own Youtube Channel with "Let's Play!" vids, so please like, comment, subscribe, etc.!

[embed=960,720]http://youtu.be/1lErjsZ-QI0[/embed]

Polkritude, I think your link is broken.

Lol, that's awesome.  If I had Detective Speech Balloon as my Windows 2000 Microsoft Word instead of Clippy, I would've kept Detective Speech Balloon around.

Awesome job, Gurok and crew!

So good, I just had to do my own Let's Play of The Jimi Hendrix Case. 

[embed=960,720]http://youtu.be/1lErjsZ-QI0[/embed]

@Julius: Thanks!

Sorry this got resurrected, although thanks Grok for the tip on www.brashmonkey.com.  That will probably be useful.

Decoherence (Continued)

[/b]


“Aaaahhhh…  nnn-nnn-nnooo… www-“ Jax mumbled something unintelligible in his bassey metal voice.

“What?  What is it Jax?”  Sang leant in.

“Iiiii---  nnnnâ€"nnn----ooo…” the goliath-sized robot continued to spasm as if in death throes.  Weak, booming yet hissing tones, like rusty girders creaking in a windy necropolis.

Sang got on his hands and knees, putting his ear to the giant's huge smoking maw.

“Iiiii kn-kn-know wh-who th-th-th-the tt-t-t-tt-traitor i-i-is.”

Jax chomped down on Sang's skull-chassis, which exploded into a thousand flying bits of gnarled metal, coiled spring, and neon-blue robot brain substrate.  A piece of Sang shrapnel nailed me in the forehead and I felt the blood running.

“Oh, oh God!” Sybil screamed and backed against the quantum-prison wall.

“T-th-the colonel, colonel Coch will be h-h-here any minute, n-n-now.  He n-n-n-needs those p-plans to defeat the S-S-Syrians!”

Jax's steel fingers folded out and downwards from his hands like an origami trick, twin 80-caliber cannons ejecting from his forearm.

“Get down!” I dove out of the way just as the fireworks started.  My eyeballs vibrated in their sockets with each blast in the enclosed space, my head filled with distorted roar of the gunfire, that quickly devolved into a deaf sine wave.

A scarlet curtain pulled over my right eye, a bloody waterfall blurring vision.  Through the veil I watched an adrenaline-slowed silent film of Proto-J's rusty goatee contorting into the words “Mother fucker”, horizontal golden gun spitting fire; a ghetto David to Jax's Goliath.

Even the magnum rounds ricoccheted uselessly off of Jax's thick durithium hide, built to withstand anti-mech military-spec munitions.  The cannons turned on Proto-J, and with Jax's attention diverted, I made a desperate dive for Sang's EMP cannon. 

The way the fully-automatic, armor-piercing rounds took the bot boy apart reminded me of this experiment I used to do in science class, before science class amounted to playing whackamole with selfie-taking social media wireheads and trying to keep the rampant homeless from stealing copper coil and magnesium blocks.  I'd take a MAP blow torch to an empty Coke can.  The first thing, the paint goes matte grey.  Then the can twists, fragments, gnarls away from its cylindrical shape, like a withering metal rose, till there's nothing but a rumpled pile of charred paint, aluminum oxide and a bead of pure aluminum burried somewhere within. 

There was a Proto-J sized pile on the ground now.

“I knew I should've run my own goddamn background check against this team,” I said, and fired the transcranial EMP into Jax's head.  This time, I set the voltage up to “obliterate”. 

“You ok?” I staggered over to Sybil, the only one of us who'd come out unscathed. 

“I'm fine,” she said, frowning at my forehead.  “You're hurt.”
 
I went up to rub the Buddha's belly and my hand came away soaked in blood.  I'd also been hit in the leg, apparently, which explained the staggering.  And the gory fragment of bone sticking out of my pants.

“Damnit, so it was Jax that was undercover for Coch-Jobbs the whole time.”  He must've been completely, thoroughly brainwashed, his PTSD twisted, forged like red-hot steel by psy-ops people into a covert weapon with a triggerword.  Either that, or he deserved an academy award for best actor in a time-travel caper.  In which case, I take back what I said about going full retard.

“Who would've known, huh?” Sybil shrugged.

“Wait… what happened to the containment field?” I puzzled, looking around to discover that we were no longer surrounded by the evolving metal surface, but were in fact inside of a warehouse of some kind.  There were crates around us.  Bags of what looked like quinoa and fresh cuttings of kale.  There were men, women in old t-shirts and shorts.  Young, old, all races, though lots of brown.  There were sentient machines, robots, even hybrids.  A tentacle wrapped around a tomato, picking it for an octopus-sized eye to examine it, presumably for freshness. 

“Te gusta?”, the tentacle proferred the tomato to me, it's cyclopean owner's accent vaguely Puerto Rican.  Undulating folds of pink humanoid skin over a boneless skeletal structure.  I recognized the mutation as a common byproduct of human eugenics experimentation by the .01% to create more perfect human bodies through recombination of human and animal DNA, gone awry.  These were the frankenpeople, the discarded runoff of the Transhuman Project.  The new lepers.  And also the new apostles, apparently.  Taken in by…

“Beautiful, isn't it?” Sybil began.  “Every one of these people â€" Homo Sapiens, sentient robot, or chimera â€" has an equal stake, an equal privelege in this community.  There are no classes, there are no walls, of racism, speciesism, or literal drone-defended fortresses with ramparts of durithium and all the litigation and jackbooted swat teams money can buy.  There is no Great Firewall, there is no barbed wire or high fence around our borders.  There are no barriers of mindless social media siloing us into monetized tokens of “Like” and “Retweet” and other mirrors of narcissistic fulfillment.  We do not live in prisons of the digital self.”

“Everyone participates in the community.  Everyone helps to build our houses, grow our food, nurture our children.”

I took the fruit from the cephalopod-esque member.  In the reality I'd come from, hybrids were generally criminals, junkies, and most died early due to genetic incompatibilities.  Somehow, this one had survived, the hair on the arms was grey, yet the flesh was firm, not sallow, riddled with putrid junk veins. 

I studied the tomato.  I'd never seen anything so red or ripe in my life.  It smelled incredible, smelled like… Like real life.  Not “real life” like the exhausting daily-grind hellhole you're defacated into when you unplug from whatever movie or game or VR sim you were in.  Real LIFE, like what a real, happy, meaningful life, with real loving relationships and a community and all that could be like. 

I opened my mouth, considered.  Considered the tomato, considered the tentacle.  It was too good to be true.  The tentacle was the serpent, the tomato the apple of the Tree of Eden.

I gave a long, slow series of golf claps, genuflecting before Eve.  “So YOU were the Clington-Busch ‘handler' all along.  Well played, your worship.  Well played.  You almost had me convinced.”

“There's nothing to be ‘convinced' of, Jim.  This is my life's work.  Building a better world.”

“So, what, you think you're the Second Coming of Jesus Christ?  You're gonna build utopia all by yourself where hundreds of charismatic do-gooders with ‘Panacea' theories and NYT best-selling ‘Idea Books' have failed?”

“I wouldn't put it in those terms, but basically, yes.  Wasn't there a time in your life when you wanted to make the world a better place by educating children?”

“Well, yeah…”  I was 22, fresh out of a post-college commune much like this one, actually, and was full of ideas and naïve excitement.  Then five years of teaching destroyed it.  I wasn't about to admit that to this Holier-Than-Thou neofeudal though.

“So how is this any different?  Except I'm well positioned, with the… resources, the wealth, the strategic positioning as a Dynastic to achieve what someone like you alone could only dream about?”

“Fine, this is nice, great, whatever.  Congratulations, you solved world peace, world hunger, world war, male pattern baldness (I crossed my fingers), the whole shebang.  Problem is, you had to kill three of us.  Jax, Proto-J, Sang.”  I enumerated on my fingers like a litany of sins against an archangel.  “You killed three perfectly sentient beings as a means to your ends, however utopian, and those are just the sins I know about.  I'd say your pristine community is soaked in blood, like any other perfectly pleasant, Stepfordian suburb that relies on foreign country slave labor, underpaid Mexican servants, and blowing up Arabs.”

“What revolution is born without blood?  If you want to make an omlette…  Look, Jim, I'm not going to get into a protracted Jesuitical argument on utilitarianism vs. virtue ethics with you.”

“Fine, fine.  So what was the point of stealing the time machine anyway?  Why not just start your Puerto Rican worker-owned co-op Xanadu, and just trust that ‘If you build it, they will come'?”

“That's the thing, Jim,” Sybil frowned, “This isn't the first time I've stolen the time device.  It's not the first time I've time travelled, actually.”

“What?!”  This was quickly going into lateral, in a deeply creepy, Gonzo direction.

“Yeah.  I actually… You're right, I did have some problems starting my Edenic community.  Actually, the first time, I didn't quite have all the kinks worked out of my constitution/manifesto, and the hybrids, humans and robots ended up killing each other over food and oil and stuff.”

My jaw dropped and I smacked my still bald, still bloody, but mostly coagulated forehead.

“Come on, I had just finished my Social Justice dissertation at Berkeley, I didn't know what I was doing yet!  The second time, Proto-J ended up killing you two got into that Mexican standoff.  He kinda took me hostage, stuffed me into a box of organic acai berries.  Unfortunately, my father had a microscopic GPS tracker inserted into my organs, and tracked my to Puerto Rico, which I had bought from the US with a portion of my trust fund. 

“Upon realizing I was the one who created such a, ‘freeloading, communistic waste of prime real estate', as he put it, he decided to leave me captive.  He then sent in his personal paramilitary forces to attack and colonize my island, turning it into his personal resort / tobacco plantation.  Proto-J became a kind of ‘Che Guevarra' figure, and united the races in a protracted Guerilla war of attrition, known thenceforth as ‘The Kill Shot War', for the technique of the resistance fighters who held their firearms sideways, gangsta style.  Proto-J later became El Presidente, which he renamed to “Bot-Boy In Chief,” and renamed Puerto Rico itself to ‘Gangsta's Paradise.'   President Proto-J also  instituted “Ice Cube remembrance day” as a national holiday, “Fight The Power” as the anthem, and made it illegal to ‘stop the party'.  Proto-J was eventually assassinated by my father our of spite, at which point the island devolved into chaos.”

“The last time, Jax ended up killing the other three of you, and he started a robot uprising that kinda quickly led to a worldwide machine takeover on the order of Terminator.  90% of the human species was exterminated, and the remainder was imprisoned in internment camps where they were kept for entertainment, experimentation, and as a biofuel.”

“Oh, Jobbs H. Christ…”

“So, anyway.  That's the secret.  If anything does go wrong in Eden, I just go back in time and reset Eden.  In a way, you were right, Jim, when you said that quantum time travel was our life boat.  Except not a life boat to escape the secret lab.  Time travel is a lifeboat from entropy itself.  When the Titanic of our society crashes into the iceberg of entropy, or the quantum randomness of human nature, then we jump ship into the raft of the “rift”, and sail back to shore.”

“I'm seriously going to black out from the whiplash of this mindfuck, and I deal with the insanity of quantum physics myself as a scientist, so that is saying something.”

It was a beautiful world, alright, but it all seemed so cheap.  So shallow.  Like kids choosing the same old baking soda volcano for their science fair project, cause it was proven to work.  Like playing Galaga through with godmode and permanent double-ships.  Wasn't the fun, the excitement, the meaning found in the fact that you could fail? 

Maybe that was my problem with the Dynastics like Sybil.  She could crash as many companies into the ground, blow the GDP of an entire African country on a failed venture, and her family's bottomless pockets would always be there to dig her out of her crater, get her a new $100,000 “ethically sourced” ring when she lost it.  And when she found daddy Clington-Bosch not giving her a generous enough bailout, she turned to a new daddy; Father Time.

But maybe Sybil and I weren't so different.  There were co-ops springing up all over the place, many not so different from this place.  Resistant sectors within the edifice of late Capitalism that dared to commit to a sharing economy.  To community.  To getting your hands dirty, talking to your neighbors.  It meant giving up your convenient Starbucks, your McDonalds.  Your penthouse suite.  It meant actually commiting to giving a shit about the world and other people, rather than whining, however eloquently, about giant megacorporations and then scarfing down their tasty convenient fast food in a drive-thru on your way to your predatory real estate/finance job. 

Or cooking meth.  I probably should've given that up too.

But the rage, it was almost better than meth.  Someone to hate.  I'd hated the ADHD kids, the Hypetechs and other tech-giants that ruined my love of teaching, I'd hated the austerity, the cutbacks, the neofeudals, The System so long that I'd tricked myself into believing that doing these heists, breaking into 100-story towers for Swiss account numbers, stealing teleportation devices and time machines or whatever hot new tech was about stealing from the rich to give to the poor, or stealing from the rich to Stick It To The Man, or some other form of self-righteous punk schadenfreude.  When really, what I was doing was getting rich by stealing from other rich people â€" which is what rich people do â€" and thus perpetuating what I purported to hate.  Because I was too scared and lazy to actually try to actually do something. 

“Well, you've just got one problem, Princess.”

“What's that?”

I took a big hearty bite of the deliciously red, non-GMO organic hand-picked tomato and had the most orgasmic sensation of my entire life.  You could found religions on that tomato. 

I then took out the quantum displacement device, which had reverted back from television static to it's characteristic radiating, opalescent mirror texture.  I set it on a vacant blacksmith's anvil.  Using all my strength I hefted the deadweight of Jax's anti-aircraft-grade arm cannons. 

“How do you like *dem* apples?” I said, in my best Scarface tone.

I pulled the trigger, firing a single 80-calliber round directly into the device.  There was a phosphorous-bright flash of light, but surprisingly little sound, like the reality surrounding the destruction of the time machine had just absorbed the spacetime, and thus the air molecules themselves.  A negative space yawned, there, like staring into the heart of a black hole.  It might've been apophenia, a trick of the imaginations
, but I swore I saw a million billion worlds, untold possible pasts, presents, and futures flash before my eyes.  Like a library of hells, heavens, and everything-in-betweens on Earth.  All the kingdoms of the world, in a moment of time. 

Infinite superpositions, collapsing to a single state.  Forced to make a choice.

Then the infinity was gone.

“What… What have you done!  You've ruined-“

“Hey!  I think you've got your heart in the right place, Sybil.  But, the problem with you millenials is your fear of commitment.  Failure to launch.  It looks like we're both going to have to step out of our comfort zones and take the plunge, your highness.  God does play dice, and I like our odds!”  I grabbed her by the impossibly perfect pseudo-rebel hair, touched her impossibly perfect skin, and messed up her make up with a hard, slightly bloody kiss.

[Superposition]

Apologies for the length of this story if this is an abnormal length.  Took a while to wrap.

Superposition

Jax was an EX-800, tungsten-durithium coated, went in first as our minesweeper.  He'd survived thermion blastwaves worse than this, but his firmware warranty'd expired mid-heist or he'd just straight up lost his shit to the PTSD Demons and shot his own fucking foot off. 

"Colonel, colonel come in!  Mission is FUBAR!  I repeat, mission is FUBAR.  The Ahmed forces have us surrounded.  Request immediate evac,"  Jax's bulletproof Panzer-armored head flailed as he hallucinated out loud, gripping his foot, the lava-red hole in his metatarsals dripping molten slag everywhere.

"Jobbs H. Christ, Jax!  Get your head together, take a neuroleptic or something!" I smacked him upside his cranium, which hurt like a bitch, while dodging archipelagos of six-thousand-degree dross.

"I told central casting not to go full-Rambo.  Damnit."  Hiring these multi-tour soulja-boy types was like going full retard.  Never go full retard.  Mowing down Syrian soccer teams and rioting homeless PhD's in front of Trump Palace is a one-way-trip mindfuck to crazyland.

"Tell me about it," said Sybil.

Sangrita Blast was second through the temporal “wormhole”.   He'd recorded our entire break-in to the vault, diving through the lightning storm around the Novikovian rift and posted it to Friendbook and Swaggler before the lightcone to the outside world caved in.  I watched him tweak, wireheading out on his feed, each Like! and #mention on his personal microcelebrity profile "DewDiePew" like a snorted line of crack.  He blue-screened, mentally masturbating in the intarwebz till it was cut off by time travel like a mythadone drip in a rehab clinic. 

"Sh-shit, what the hell happened?  I was right in the middle of a major Tweet war with the Girlosphere and only the MOST POPULAR 'LET'S PLAY'ER OF ALL TIME!!!  Fuck!  Fuck my life!  FML!  My profile is over!!!!-" He spasmed uncontrollably, shooting compressed air into his mouth-hole, sucking it like a mother's teat in a fetal position.  Hydrogen fluoride mist mixed with ash and rust puffed out portholes in his neck.

If we didn't need Sangrita to hack the Great Firewall, I would've left him to rot in The Pile with the rest of the sentient refuse.

Sybil was the highborn pull.  Accounts in every timezone, tweak LIBOR with a text, like a digital Midas touch.   She'd fronted the cash, acquired the spacecraft, and puppeted multiple strata of government to modify industrial zoning codes just for our mission.  Fuschia-rebel streak raging against daddy's neofeudal-corporate machine bob haircut. On her finger an "ethically sourced" Toroidal Tanzanite gem screamed "Millenial via Old Money".  She was also the only human among us, besides me. 

I'd've made a pass at Sybil, if I wouldn't have been instantly vaporized by some PRISM-targeting, satellite-mounted ion cannon of her father's, during our first date, for being a mutt born in The Pile and not the Titled son of a shiekh or a Clinton or such.  And if she wasn't a MtF trans lesbian.  There was that.

Another headcase, a century-worth of daddy issues.  Sybil had ECLAT status though, a real dynastic with license to live (indefinitely), so she did actually have centuries thanks to “The Singularity”, if she wanted to live that long and work out her neuroses with therapist-bots.  Unlike us.  Wait, where the fuck were we?

"Wait, where the fuck are we?" Sangrita momentarily extracted his head from his ass to notice.  "I don't see the alleyway, there's no dumpster, no door." 

He was right, we were definitely NOT at our rendezvous point.

We were in a space like the inside of magnetoplasma fusion reactor, spherical snow-globe of iridescent silver.  Or a shipping container, if shipping containers were made of Mandelbrot fractals and liquid metal.  I know, cause I grew up in a container half-filled with unsold paper books.  Shredded copies of 'The Time Machine' and 'War and Peace' make for a comfy pillow.  It was like God had run reality through a paper shredder and wrapped us up in it, out of spite.   â€œWhat you get, for having the Promethian gall to fuck with my laws of physics, bitch.”

Unstuck in time?  Trapped in some kind of fucking paradox?  Fuck.

"There's a scientific explanation for this.  The universe does not play dice," I scratched the mole above my right eyebrow that I liked to call my 'Brain Buddha.'  Always came up with my best ideas when rubbing his fat, possibly melanoma-filled belly.

"Um, 'double-ewe tee eff'?”  Sang interrupted.  “I thought we got here through some quantum mechanical hax0ring of yours, Jim?  I'd say the universe DOES play dice, and you just got us rolled a snake eyes!  DERP!"  I really wanted to punch the dandruffy virginity out of Sang at that moment.  At all moments.

“Fuck, dog, I knows we shoulda popped dat fuckin' re-entanglement pill shit.  The doc was right, bruh, you always take da red pill, straight up.” Oh, I'd almost forgotten about our fifth rat-pack member, Johnny Silica AKA "Proto-J".  Ghetto blasting pissant thought he was straight outta Compton.  MC name: "The Six Billion Dollar Baller".  Jacked out of his skullcase on mythium most of the time, but with one little secret sauce.  It's a secret.

I checked the quantum displacement device, a simple orange-sized sphere with an ever shifting surface.  I tried to get a reading, but nothing but pure white noise.  I smacked it against Jax's head.  "Jobbs on a stick, I'm not even picking up cosmic microwave background."  We were, for all intents and purposes, dead to the universe.

Timespace, spacetime, timeshares and Space Invaders all out the window, now.  I should've stuck with my old gig: teaching STEM to slumdog humans, freak-of-nature hybrids and obsolete sentient machines for a government meal ticket, even if it barely covered rent in the ghettos of Coastlandia.  I missed competitive retro-gaming from my 8x10 coffin apartment in The Shelter, cooking meth and myth and jack and krunk on the side, rather than chasing this idiotic American Dream. 

Goddamnit, self.  Decision making skills.

Sangrita got up, pacing back and forth, eyes darting like waking REM dream, shoulders hunched in reptilian shiver of internet withdrawals.“We're losing our timeline!  I've got to get back, I had a Kickstarter campaign for a mockumentary/game of our heist planned to start in 30 minutes!  I'm probably losing hundreds of high-clout subscribers by the second!  They're probably image-shaming me for not responding right now-”

“Shut the fuck up, Sang, and let me think,” I said, trying to figure out what went wrong.  It was supposed to be a milk run: drive thru trandimensional grand-larceny. 

"We should've popped out at 10:34 PM, precisely 3 hours, 14 minutes, 27 seconds before our entry into the quantum gate, in the alley behind the McSwift's burger place where we synced watches.  Just in time to close and ensure seamless continuity of our loop, our worldline."

"So what the fuck are we doing here!?  Why aren't we back in our timeline or worldline, or whatever?!?!"

"Sierra!  November!  Alpha!  Foxtrot-" Jax railed on, punching at the wall with his chrome Hellboy-sized fists.  Haymaking the enemy combatant that wasn't there.

"Would someone secure that fucking mechwarrior jarhead!"  Sang whipped out a massive transcranial EMP, held the electro-blunderbuss against Jax's ear-hole and zapped his neural net with a shower of sparks and a sound like a million-volt transformer short circuiting.

Jax went into shock mid-swing, releasing one particularly nuclear punch.  On impact, the entire room warbled and reality appeared to phase for a bit, like a blizzard of CRT television static but resonating through the very fabric of the room.  The quantum stasis field.  The non-space.  The what the fuck ever. 

It was a disorienting null pain, an anti-sense.  Felt like that time at Jefferson Elementary, when I got a baseball bat to the temple by one of my students and his gang for ratting to his parents that his Enviro-Science grades were down due to drug abuse. Then they pawned all my lab equipment to score more junk.  All the fucks I had left to give were knocked out of me like so much candy from a piñata, by that bat, and I started cooking krunk the next week in the abandoned school library.  I traded up from my hot, garbage-reeking shipping container, I'll tell you that.

“I just want you all to know that I'm not going to let this transgression of the corporate state stand.  I WILL get us out of this," declared Sybil, like she was addressing a Puerto Rican worker-run co-op, or a $10,000/plate NGO fundraiser.  She brushed back a forelock of her Lady Gaga rendition of Princess Buttercup, like it was a minor barrier to entry to a socialized business.

"Unfortunately, you can't do a leveraged buy out from within a closed-timelike-curve, or a quantum-foam bubblebath, or whatever the fuck we are in, your majesty."  I said, crossing my arms.  She daggered me with a bitchy look that broke her poised business façade into prickly shards of fifteen year old punk chick.

It was a simple enough job, really.  The employer was Sybil's family, the esteemed and omni-present Clington-Busch dynasty.  A family with more American presidents, Fortune 500 CEOs and talentless Hollywood stars than a “100 most influential people” edition of Time Magazine.  As usual, looking for a leg up in maintaining the technological edge on their equally world-domineering, though marginally more republican rival, the Coch-Jobbs dynasty.  Everyone hated both families, almost everyone was somehow employed by both families, through some convoluted chain of subsidiaries and shell companies.  Voting Democrat or Republican was like a popularity contest between the prettiest and lol-worthiest children of Stalin and Hitler.

The target: Hypetech, a Coch-Jobbs subsidiary tech-giant that was wiping the Wallstreet floor with Clington-Busch's own Google-esque megacorp, Singularis.  The mission: break into the sublevel research lab, steal the quantum time travel device we knew was already completed from industrial espionage reports made by Clington-Busch moles.  The lab was said to be inescapable, and that was the genius bit: we would use the stolen merchandise -- in this case the space/time travel tech -- as the life boat.  We'd float on out of the lab on a bed of quantum foam.  That was the theory, anyway.

"Them dwanky fuckin' Coastlandia po-po must've been tipped off.  The fuzz be crossin' our quanza streams and shit!" Proto-J's eye cams dilated to 80 mm's in emphasis and he turned his gold-spraypainted Desert Eagle sideways like he was about to cap some invisible cop.

"'Quantum', you imbecilic, failed techno-utopian experiment.  And the 'po-po' would have neither a.) the classified info to know about this run and b.) the ability or motivation to fuck with our spatiotemporal escape plan," I blasted the young punk in poorly sublimated frustration.

Proto-J pivoted his tacky magnum on me, segmented Galvanized face plates scrunching up into an obvious mimicry of Ice Cube's resting-asshole-face.  "The fuck you call me, you Bill Nye-ass motherfuckin' meatbag?  YOU probably the one fuck up our Battleship coordinates, get us lost in this motherfuckin' liquid-metal Bermuda Triangle shit." 

I found myself staring down the 50 caliber barrel, and felt real fear coming on.  But the hot ball of self-righteous death-wish rage in my stomach felt even better, and I leaned into it, "You better take that fucking gun out of my face, boy.  You kill me, I *guarantee* you will be stuck in this ass-end of the universe till your lithium-ions run out. I am the *only* one who knows the faintest fucking iota about what we're in here."  I wanted to crush his fucking occular lenses in with my thumbs and skullfuck the gooey gelatinous of his synthetic brainware.

"Boys!  Break it up, now!"  Sybil stepped in between us, Jadeite-frosted glass slippers coming down hard and maternal.  Proto-J instantly backed off.  He was a dumbass, but he knew that even if he made it out alive and Princess Sybil did not, he would be hunted down by All the King's black helicopters and All the King's bone-mic'd, black-shaded men.  After being transcranial-magnetically-tortured for subjective millennia, his skull-chassis would be mounted on a skymansion wall, next to the taxadermied heads of Siberian tigers, cloned mammoths, and liberal senators.

"These are dire straits, I know.  But we've got to take a step back, swallow our egos a little, and work together as a cooperative if we want to change our lot in life," Sybil said in her PR voice.  It could've been a $50,000 motivational speech at a Ted Talk keynote in New San Francisco.  Come to think of it, I now remember being forced to watch a speech starting with exactly that line at a yearly mandatory teacher-training seminar on 'compassionate living', before being thrown into the 9th circle of hell called public education. 

Proto-J uncocked the gun, stepped off, "Fine.  But only cause it's a royal fucking decree from Princess Diva, here," He wiped at his nose with the back of his gun hand, even though he was a sentient machine, with no snot, let alone mucus membranes or nasal passages to speak of.  Sheer osmosis of gangsta idiosyncracies through hypermediation.  It was cute. 

"Ok.  Given what we know about quantum entanglement, the transfer from our spacetime entry point to the exit coordinates should've been instantaneous. According to the Gortzel-Takeda theorem, our superposition of eigenstates should've collapsed instantly to our final destination through the wave function-" I began

"English motherfucker, do you speak it!?" Proto-J yelled, pointing the gun in my face in a subconsciously Jacksonian fashion.  Sybil shot him a hard look and he backed off. 

"Passing through the quantum rift should've been instantaneous.  Like flipping a channel to a new station.  My calculations were triple checked, bulletproof.  There is no possible way for us to get trapped in...  Where/whenever we're in."  I grasped at the thinning silvery straws of my male-pattern baldness, coming up short.

"Well, we sure ain't in fuckin' Kansas no more, is we?" Proto-J folded his arms in disdain.

"Proto, you're not helping!" Sybil jumped in, before turning to me, "So we're not at the destination, but we're obviously somewhere.  You're a neurophysicist, Jim-"

"Ex-neurophysicist," I corrected.

"You're a scientist.  And a damned good one, or we would never have gotten this far!  So maybe the latest and greatest Theory of Everything from the scientific community got it wrong, wouldn't be the first time, right?  Einstein had his cosmic blunder, Galileo was imprisoned in his own house for saying the Earth went around the sun.  Maybe this is an opportunity for you to propose a new hypothesis, a new theory.  No one has boldly gone this far before," she motioned around to the admittedly alien, sensawundery circumstance we found ourselves in.  "This could be your chance to take up the mantle from the shoulders of giants like Newton, Einstein, Jobbs, and revolutionize our entire understanding of the universe!"

I had to admit, Sybil had the Princess Di / Cate Blanchett 'inspiring beam' complete with eye-sparkle down pat.  Even I felt my grizzly-dense hide of cynicism wavering.  I mean honestly, where the hell was that light source twinkling in her sky-blue peepers coming from anyway?  It was like the evolving quantum-space had blossomed behind her into glittering golden spirals and majestic chakras, making her the heart of some kind of progressive hipster mandala.  With perfect skin.  She snapped her fingers in front of my face.

"Hello?  Isn't there some kind of experiment or test we can do to figure out where we are?  Jim?"

I snapped out of it, “Right, of course.  Time to Science.”

I tried kicking the mirrored surface of our glass cage, this time paying close attention to the data. 

“Ripples appear to propagate through the Mercurial wall, look here.” 

Ripples of probability?  Half-remembered Kahn Academy knockoff of a Harvard lecture on quantum mechanics flickered through my head.  Maybe the punt of my foot just caused a typhoon in Malaysia?  Maybe it made some overworked single mom stripper with a lotto ticket into a millionaire?  Maybe I just killed my own grandfather and would soon evaporate into a decreasingly me-like configuration of atomic particles till I was nothing but my constituent hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen bits, to be inhaled by my ex-crew?  Who knew.  Too much headache, end thought process.  Yes/No? Y.

“Well, we haven't been shredded into constituent subatomic particles, so it's safe to assume we're still in some kind of spacetime manifold of our universe of origin.”  I hopped off the ground.  The floor warbled and rippled where my shoes landed, like a bizarre Dance Dance Revolution game made by acid tripping developers.

“We've also got gravity here, which is a big puzzler,” I massaged Brain Buddha, pulled his single wiry hair.

“What goes the fuck up must come the fuck down.  Bitch, even I's knowin' dat sci-sci shit.  That's old school, dog.” Proto-J said, tossing his Goldeagle up in the air like a juggler's club, catching it with his finger on the trigger and causing us all to duck and cover.

“Yes you little-“  I bit my tongue, literally.  Smiled, “Just, don't ever refer to science as sci-sci, again, alright?”  I sighed.  “Yes, *normally* objects accelerate at 9.807 meters per second every second towards planet Earth.  Key word: ‘normally'.  Wherever we are, it is highly abnormal, obviously.  The fact that we still have gravity almost identical to Earth's suggests…”

“What?  It suggests what?” Sybil asked.

“It suggests that wherever we are, we aren't actually in any kind of quantum gate or warp-purgatory at all,” I felt a sinking feeling, like the day I got a call back from the Coastlandia Department of Education and they gave me the news that they were cutting back on human teachers due to, “Rise of the Robots, old sport!” and my salary and benefits would be halved to match the cost of a machine instructor. 

“It suggests that… we've already come through the rift, and are somewhere on Earth, and this… is some kind of containment field.”  I rapped on the wall, that again emitted waves of dark and light, but this time they stripes resembled the bars of a prison.

“Woah, woah, woah,” Proto-J raised his hand, “You sayin' we be *trapped* in this crib?”

The cell suddenly got pin-drop quiet.  The only sound was a quiet hum that we hadn't noticed until that very moment, coming from somewhere beyond.

“Is that possible?” Sybil asked, hands lacing together.  “Who, why would anyone want to trap us?”

“Well, the obvious culprit would be the Coch-Jobbs or a subcontractor thereof.  They have the most to lose if we succeed in stealing their time travel tech,” I noted.

Proto-J stroked the circle of rust around his mouthpiece coincidentally in the shape of a gangsta goatee.  “You, Heisenberg,” pointing a finger at me, yet again.  “You was a teach in the public schools, when they still had human teaches.  Coch-Jobbs done bought all the schools when them Smash Crash happened and the govmint ran outta money.  So YOU used to work for Coch-Jobbs.”

I threw my hands up, backhanding the accusation like a poorly served ping pong ball, “And they cut my pay in half, and I had to sell my Toyota to pay for my angioplasty.  Believe me I have NO love for the Coch-Jobbs.  The Clington-Buschs may be just as fucked up and ruthlessly fascist, but I haven't yet been screwed by them, and I need this fucking money.  No offense, Sybil.”

She shot me a cryptic look then that I couldn't quite crack, through fluttering lashes.  A dent of hurt at the corner of the brow, masked by smoky eyeshadow, “You know, we're not all like that.  Some of us are trying to do something positive in the world.”  I wasn't in the mood or circumstance to argue with that.

“Sang, you were on retainer for Rexton Frakking, an oil company under the Coch Jobbs,” I brought up.  “You looking to make some extra dough on the side?”  All eyes spotlit on the tweaker.   

“Hey, I don't have any loyalty there!  I just needed the money to keep my premium-tiered internet connection, Like!s and higher rankings on Swaggler.  Plus, I'm Swag-friends with BurnBro, the most viewed, most subscribed Let's Play!er of all time, who also happens to be leading the polls for president, and is dating that reality-show star, Shirley Clington-Busch.  If I burn the Clington-Busch's, my entire internet existence will be meaningless!”  It was so pathetic, it had to be true. 

“Ok, that rules out Sang.  Proto-J-“

“Hey, this heist be my first big-leagues job.  Before dis I was just runnin' wit da Kromeboyz in The Pile.  Mythium runs, black-market bot-parts, chop shoppin' flying cars and shit.  We humanoid bot-boyz ain't got no fuckin' pure-breed human high-class connections, dog.  No Clit-Bushes, no Cock-jobs, none of that blingy royal shit.  Only reason I's be on dis crew is cuz da handler contacted me with dis tight gig, dropped the line about the seven-figure payday, and I was like, ‘Motherfucker, of course I'm in.  Show me the money.'”

“Ok, well, Sybil is a Clington-Busch herself, and since the Clington-Busches set this whole thing up, sabotaging our run for her would be like shooting herself in the foot,” I stepped in before anyone else could make an accusation, I glanced back over to see if I'd won any favor with the Princess after publicly criticizing all royalty.  She looked away.

“Speaking of shooting onesself in the foot…” Sybil glanced down at Jax, who had come to from his neural defibrillation and was losing it on the floor again. Moaning on about the rebels and the launch codes and generally going to the Dark Place.  By now the molten metal had cooled and he found himself stuck to the floor like an obsidian-sloped shield volcano made of war machine.

Sang knelt down and shined a light into his forehead.  "Looks like he's overheating.  Could be an algo-virus or the PTSD, something else.  He needs a defrag and a reboot soon or more sectors of his consciousness could be corrupted.”

I'd love to tag along and help someone with art, even if just a little!

I'm working with Creamy, but we're not really exclusivist, so maybe drop him a line?  He's going to be the majority of the art department for our OROW project.

Looks pretty awesome man!  Nice raycast-ey lighting effects there in the screenshots too.  Maybe I'll give this a Let's Play run in a bit if you don't mind!

This looks really 90's-tastic, and I spent most of my high school years locked in a bedroom listening to Smashing Pumpkins and being generally disgusted with mainstream TV.  It'd be criminal not to play this. 

My time zone is Hawaii so I'm basically I'm 11/12 hours behind the UK, unfortunately.  Fortunately, I tend to do work in the mornings, so if you're on in your evenings the scheduling might work.

Oh, and for my curric vitae / dating profile, my previous game was Terminus Machina.  A very different animal, I know.  I guess that would make hooking up with a native AGS'er kind of interspecies, but I'm also a big fan of Splice, so it should work out.

No problem!  We had a great time playing the games.  Keep up the good work!

Great game!  I did a quick 'nother 'Let's Play' with the wife.  Fear and Laughter in Las Vegas, baby!

I think I need to buy a 12 pack of Huggies adult diapers before playing next time.  It's scary!

[embed=800,450]http://youtu.be/Hpx63WRtAb4[/embed]

Just discovered this and haven't participated in an AGS game-making competition yet, but I'd be willing to try something -- art, writing, coding, music -- with a partner.  My only actual AGS experience is Neofeud, which of course hasn't yet been released, sorry!

Great job, JackLucy!  I've just completed a little "Let's Play" of Tales From The Eureka Cluster: The Abtyon Case and will be throwing it up on Youtube shortly.

Nice visuals for something that came out of a game jam, very raunchily hilarious writing.  Wife and I had a great time.  I tell you, phallic spacecraft jokes beat Barry White for mood-setting, hands down, every time.

Cool job guys.

EDIT: Here's the Let's Play
[embed=960,720]http://youtu.be/70FJXkwBThk[/embed]