The Möbius Server

The Möbius Server is a nonspatial, nontemporal computer server. It can be accessed anywhere, anytime, using computer technology or other forms of consciousness expanding activity (like dreaming, meditation, spirit messengers, etc). It has a variety of functionalities and securities that draw on a mastery of Time, Correspondence, Spirit, Mind, Entropy, and Prime. It is designed as a fee-per-service system, charging users quintessence, willpower, or a magical energy source of another kind (like gnosis, glamour, or pathos).

Types of Connection 
Digital: Use the Computer skill to connect a digital device to the server
Mental: Use the Meditation skill to mentally connect to the server
Spiritual: Use the Cosmology or Rituals skill to spiritually connect to the server
Dreaming: Use Lucid Dreaming skill to go there in sleep
Interdimensional: Characters with Time, Correspondence, and Spirit 5 can travel to their domain within the server.

Power Sources 
Any form of mental or spiritual energy can be used to pay the costs of the server. Quintessence, Gnosis, Glamour, Willpower, Pathos, etc.

Functions

Create an Account
The user connects to the server for the first time. They choose their type of access (digital, meditative, etc). They establish a personal domain within the server. They also choose which other accounts or services they would like their domain connected to (another users, the Virtual Alexandria Project, the MUSE Network, an interlibrary loan partner, etc). Their personal domain in the server only has the information that they supply (either through mental sharing or upload) or by connecting to other domains or networks. Interested in creating an account? Click here!

Basic Uplink
Connect to the server for a moment, allowing a computational/mental task to be done instantaneously. Can upload information (making it always available upon future uplinks, even if the information is forgotten by the user) or download information they have access to (things they have previously uploaded or information from networks their domain is connected to). (Rules: costs 1 quint, will, pathos, etc, per round. Being linked into the server gives the user an additional non-magical mental action that round and +5 to mental challenges that round.)

Deep Uplink
Connect to the server for a moment in embodied time around the user, but it allows the user to delve deeply into the server, temporarily suspending the users mental world and allowing them to work out complex problems in a moment. (Rules: cost: 3/connection. +5 to mental challenges, gain an additional downtime action based focused on learning, analysis, planning, or building mental models. At ST discretion, deep uplinks may spark the awakening of an unenlightened user or a seeking for an enlightened one.)

Reconfigure
By exposing themselves to vast knowledge, users can inspire themselves to transform, learn, and grow. (Rules: cost: variable. This can be used to alter one’s nature, trade one derangement for another, buy off mental flaws, buy mental merits, rename or rebalance resonance, or acquire merits related to the pursuit or protection of knowledge (like Higher Purpose, Conditional Magic, etc). The cost of this function is equal to the point value of the merit, flaw, resonance renamed, etc. STs can set cost for natures, derangements, etc. Also, STs can require the character to visit one of the Epiphamies in order to change a significant aspect of their character.)

Pantemporal Computing
Connect to data structures across time. When reading data, this effectively grants the user a use of pre/postcognition. Can be used to auguemnt the pursuit of various forms of knowledge. (Rules: cost: 2. Allows the user to gain +1 to the use of a background that spreads or acquires knowledge. Also, knowledge seeking/spreading backgrounds can be triggered in a single turn, as the server can backdate the request so that it finishes at the time of the request.)

Visit Epiphamy
The Server is connected to the Epiphamies, a set of abstract spirit worlds that teach important lessons and concepts. The Server enables users to create an astral representation of themselves and visit the Epiphamies or other astral realms. (Rules: cost: 5. Astrally projects the user to the Epiphamy realms)

Overclock
Creative users can potentially use the server to accomplish other effects given its unique design. (Rules: cost: variable. The cost and likelihood of success are subject to ST discretion. As a base cost, add the total of all relevant spheres needed for the effect.)

Proliferation

Open Source API: The code needed to connect a computer to the server is out in the world, hosted in various places across the web. It is all but impossible to get rid of the code, and it is a relatively simple matter to get one’s hands on it.

Temple of the Mind Meme: Spiritual and mental users often share with others the success they have had accessing the server. The methods of using it spread through religious, spiritual, and intellectual communities.

Networks within the Server

The Virtual Alexandria Project

Characters can access the project from their server.

The Epiphamies (from the Infinite Tapestry)

Epiphamies are powerful, highly conceptual domains found in the High Umbra. The Server is manifested in the same astral strata. In essence, it is an epiphamy in its own right. However, it is connected to the other epiphamies. Users venturing to the Epiphamies should do so at their own risk; they are complex spiritual realms

· The World Stage
· The Continuum Orrey
· Newtonian Mechanics/Einsteinian Relativity
· Motherhood
· The Apex of History
· The Nihil
· The Well of Remembrance
· The Well of Souls
· The Fortress of Government

In essence, the Server is itself an Epiphamy, inviting its visitors to reflect on the nature of space, time, and knowledge.

The Dreamtime Collective

At a recent gathering of scientists, mystics, and willworkers, I was describing the Library of Babel sub-project and how it contains every written truth (and falsehood). My conversational partner was quick to ask, "Does your Library have unwritten truths?"

Which is a good question, of course. Knowledge isn't always written down. Some knowledge is spoken, sung, danced, and drawn. Even further, not all knowledge is expressible. Embodied knowledge. Visceral knowledge. Experiential knowledge. Ancestral knowledge. If one relies solely on words, one misses vast regions of the knowable.

The multivalent nature of knowledge/knowing is precisely why the Virtual Alexandria Project is hosted in the Umbra. Umbral frameworks are very permissive compared to the frameworks in more calcified places in the Tellurian. Further, ephemera can encode unexpressable truths.

Today, the most detailed "stack" within the Library committed to unwritable truths is a project called The Dreamtime Collective. This vibrant intersection of knowing draws together collective experience across time and space. Contributors to the Dreamtime Collective teach and inscribe their sundry wisdom on the unconscious palate of the universe, while students of the Collective meditate and learn and delve into what it means to become what you know.

Sounds pretty mystical and juju, right? Well, in part, it is. That's why we call it the Dreamtime Collective. The Dreamtime is term created by European anthropologists to describe the aboriginal Australian concept alcheringa. Ignore for a second that it looks like it has something to do with dreams, as that is mostly a result of a mistranslation. The core of the idea is this: The way that the world is is a result of the way the world knows itself, and that the self knowledge of the world exists in a timeless time. The way the world happens to be particularly in any given now-moment is due to the ventures of mythic heroes forging their way across a formless land during the Dreamtime. Their paths left/are leaving/will leave songlines that resonate resonant in the Dreamtime, and by following these paths we in this world can know alongside our ancestors and descendants in time beyond. Maybe that makes sense...

#howthefuckdoyouprogramthat?

It turns out it isn't that hard. All sorts of programmable things exist outside of time. Equations, for instance, can be thought of as simultaneous accomplishments. More to the point, 3D-modeled maps can be rendered out of time. That's how the shamans did it. The songlines form a map that is inscribed along  the intersection of the timed and the timeless. So you just gotta hack a few dozen satellites, filter all space, crossref a few dusty turtle shells and the strange tattoos of chosen one children, and you have a map. Boom. A secret map that you can use to trace paths in the world in order to fray a linear continuity of time and touch eternal. So one last step: upload that clever widget into the broader Library database and know alongside forever. Easy.

How 'bout massive system crash instead.

Any guesses as to why? Why would a map that 3D models timeless time be a problem for a VA database?

Took me a while to debug it. So I'll let you ponder.

The Library is Virtual Adept design, and if you've been on the internet since like '93, you've probably heard of the Correspondence Point. We teach that spatial relations are data relations, and that the only thing that even approaches a thing like space in the actual universe is a single point where all things simultaneously exist. What most folks think of as space is really a virtual array, one possible experience of a arrayed bits.

So when you take a 3D modeling program that maps timeless time and try to boot that shit on a server that is based on a spaceless metaframe... you don't get the tenth sphere, lemme just say that. (Unless the tenth sphere is Titanic Collapse due to Being a Fucking Idiot. Which is not actually completely impossible, given a conversation I recently had with a Hollow One postmodernist. But I digress). You can't rely on a 3D render to collapse time and then collapse the 3D render within time. We call that, folks, a paradox.

So... stuck. No Dreamtime map for TOPHAT. No way to touch the infinite unconscious mind that exists beyond linear expressions of time.

And that would be the end of the story. But we keep this guy around the Library who digs in dank places and stinks. He reads the books other people find revolting. We think he's a bit mad. But, he wanders up muttering after the system crashed. "What if," the Delver of Dark Secrets asks, "the thing collapsing isn't the problem? What if, instead, the problem is the thing collapsing?"

I do confess I have a secret love of koans.

It's a poser, but this is what the nut really meant: The fact that the model collapses isn't that's the problem. The fact that it's a model collapsing is the problem. I have to build something else then let it collapse.

What can be built that can express space but also be mathemetized but also not have the entirety of its essence undone via collapse? Sometimes in life, the teacher accidentally gives you the answer by the way the question is worded.

What can be built? Buildings. Or more precisely, architecture. Architecture has collapse as a core component of it's timeline. Better still, architecture has long resonated with human knowing and is a place of abiding, which is sort of a bonus, since abiding is a corner stone of spiritual realities (which is where we are trying to get to eventually anyway, remember?). Best of all, architecture is basically geometry with emotions, and we have long known that tessellated geometry can recursively fold into the Correspondence Point.

Translation: If one can design recursive architectural representations of the Dreamtime songlines, that same hypothetical person can load that program on a server that doesn't exist in space and know in ways that are neither enspaced or entimed.

So that's what we did.

In practice, it means that we help people share knowledge beyond time and space. That's what the shamanistic vision of knowledge always was. To draw on past lives. To speak to the heart of the earth. To look at the world from its beginning or its end, or beyond beginning and end.

What does that actually do? Yes, Neo, we can teach you kung fu very quickly. Wherever you are, irrespective of your physical training. You can draw on the collective knowledge of future and past selves and allies. The Dreamtime Collaborative is the most potent and expeditious mechanism for disseminating knowledge. We can use it to blend past lives together, help unschooled dreamers learn from their dreams, create databases of lived experiences, tap into the Akashic Record, and yes, download skills, knowledge, and abilities straight into your being.

And that's how you make library with unwritable truths.

Ars Spirituum

The Art of Spirits is used to connect between other realms and denizens therein.Before attempting to study this sphere, one must, and I emphasize must, become familiar with cosmology, as well as having a simple understanding of spirits, their lore, legends, myths, and facts. Once you have achieved the appropriate knowledge you may then start working to truly perceive the other realms. After perception lies the ability to call or summon certain entities as well as reach out into the void.

I caution any mage to not summon or deal with any creatures that they cannot handle, some entities may be summoned more easily than can be banished while others may bring unwanted results for having been conjured against their own desires. Be warned.Disciple level of understanding can allow one to awaken inanimate objects to strengthen their composition and interact with the umbral reflections. Further understanding allows the barriers between realms be to be distorted and manipulated. I do not recommend performing such effects so lightly.

Spirit and the Virtual World

On the face of it, the spirit world and the Virtual Adept perspective couldn't be more at odds. What does shamans dancing around with sticks talking to disembodied ghosts have to do with computed reality?

Thankfully, not everything is as it seems. To a VA, the spirit world is just like any other world - the manifested array of data. In fact, many spirit realms hold and display data better than the "real" one. While the VA tools and the Dreamspeaker tools are quite different, the realities on the other side of the tools is quite amenable to both.

Consider. The material world is a concrete mirror of the spirit world. Changes in the material influence the spiritual, and vice versa. The spirit world it complicated, ambiguous, and messy, while things in the material world are a bit more concrete.

Ambiguous and messy on one side...
Apparently clear on the other...
Interacting representations of data...


Does anyone else get the sense that the material world is reality's graphic user interface (GUI)? The platform designed to make things appear simpler than they are so everyone can play with code?

Recognizing this multiple representation is required for advanced reality hacking. Some of my VA brothers call the Gauntlet a firewall. I say that's crap. Firewall between what? Set up by what purpose. For my part, the Gauntlet is nothing more than learning how to program in MS-DOS when you could just rely on the easier interface.

Now, I've argued elsewhere that there is no foundation on which all other reality is set, so I don't want to slip into that here. I don't want to claim that the spirit world is the real one and the material one is simply predicated on it. It isn't.

But I will boldly assert without hesitation that the coding possibilities are broader when working the the Umbra. In the material world, perfect circles are impossible. In the Umbra, plenty of ideals exist exactly as their paradoxical natures suggest. This opens up radical computing options, as there are so many more forms of data infrastructure. Just as many VAs prefer coding without GUIs, I prefer to code in the spirit world. There are more geometries, more codes, more recursion, more ciphers, more fractals, more sets...

Besides, the Digital Web is hella cool. In addition to hacking Technocratic databases using glowing motorcycles and light disks, the Digital Web is just a hop away from the Astral Plane, the Dreaming, and the Horizons themselves.

So dance around your fires, shaman dude. It turns out your hallucinogenic ayahuasca was just your way of crashing your GUI and booting up your command-line interface (CLI). I think I'll call them DOSpeakers from now on.

McGreagor on Spirit

It amazes me how many of us neglect the power of the sphere of spirit.  In many ways if the user is clever he can bypass the restraint of paradox by utilizing and bargaining with spirits and asking them to utilize their unique talents which do not garner such backlash from consensual reality.  Not only that but a utilization of spirit might also allow shortcuts or alternate routes to solve problems with time and effort many other spheres may be mimicked with this one if the right bargains are struck  sometimes these bargains are expensive but if you want to avoid realities backhand there is usually some sort of bypass.

A large number of our people see the world as it is, or they see time or some other alternate way of seeing this world. But they neglect to look at the other worlds such as the Umbra where spirits reside.  The Umbra is comprised of several layers, at differing layers there are different types of spirits. One of the ways to show spirits respect is to visit them in their world and bring an appropriate offering.  These offerings vary from spirit to spirit One might want a bulls heart cut out, another might desire a small piece of willpower or a prayer said in its name..  It is important to note when dealing with spirits to treat them with dignity and respect.  A harshly treated spirit is most likely not to help you again, or to actually attempt to hinder your efforts.

It is important to note we are not the only ones that deal with Spirits. The drinkers of life, and the Werewolves also bargain and deal with them, the the appropriate terminology is Garou for the latter. While the vampires seek to manipulate for their own political gain.  The Garou usually have the best interests at heart for the spirits honoring ancient pacts they made ages ago, they are in touch with the spirit world and can come there as easily as stepping through a doorway.  I have seen this ability first hand and it is very impressive.  Not all Garou, are cooperative some can be down right hostile, if you find one that is hostile my recommendation is to run away.  If they seem apprehensive always be respectful and considerate towards them.  If they tell you to leave and they don't know you, you should apologize for intruding and WALK away.  Vampires should be avoided they are untrustworthy, dangerous, lying and conniving monsters, that will try to use you in their little political games for their own advantage.