Impressions, writing and dreams

There isn't much to show of Age of Frontiers yet: its engine is at a very early stage. So, while re-reading my old posts, I noticed that I mention impressions as if everybody knew what they are, and it is probably not that clear. Let's fix that!

Recreations

By the time of Descent, technology can produce extremely vivid simulations, the recreations, directly in the human brain, through nanomachines. A recreation creates the same neural stimuli you would have in the real world: the nanomachines act on your sensory nerves (sight, hearing, and so on) and, with the help of the bouillie, the gel the crew rest in, they even push on your muscles to match what you are feeling, when needed.

And that is actually the least impressive thing the technology can do. The nanomachines can also block access to your memories, and stand in for neurons to build pathways that work just like memories. That is what makes possible the uprooted recreations, which leave no trace in your memory, and the deep recreations, where you are given a new basic personality and new memories, to live as a different person. It opens a few other doors that Calima will explore later on (fast-reading a clone with your memories, for example. Makes you think about someone?). For these kinds of recreations, though, the person needs to be in a very dormant, almost coma-like state.

Impressions

When you are conscious, during a regular recreation or in the virtual world, the nanomachines can also give you impressions.

An impression is a group of actions by the nanomachines that reproduces in your brain a pattern experienced by someone else's brain. It communicates a whole state in one highly packed frame of information. Someone agrees with your plan, and you receive an impression of their brain acknowledging it and getting ready to act. Someone flirts with you, not only with words but with suggestive sensory hints. Someone tries to make you understand a high-level concept or a feeling, and it gets through far more easily than with a speech or a text.

Impressions are not perfect: you get the concept as the other person experienced it, which can be slightly different from how your own personality would understand it. Still, they are far clearer and more powerful than anything spoken or written. You can imagine what they did to the language within a few years of their discovery.

Writing, after Descent

On Calima, after Descent, impressions are gone. Or are they?

What is certainly gone is the habit of writing. After centuries without any real hand-writing, the survivors are quite bad at it. They mostly use signs and icons, a kind of impression-like writing. Not to mention that the crafts of making paper or papyrus and ink are mostly lost too. So very little writing exists, and most of it is marks or simple words carved in wood.

Only the most studious people have some minimal access to writing: some priests of the Red Star church, erudites, wealthy merchants and nobles. And the Cabal, of course, who inherited this knowledge from Rainoch. That god must have been carrying some books, right?

Dreams

Finally, some people on Calima experience, very rarely, what are called dreams. Dreams are a strange version of impressions. They happen to seemingly random people in strange places, who are suddenly assaulted by a vivid experience: a short and confusing mix of the memories and thoughts of another person, in another time. There are very few sources that explain why they are called dreams: the old dreamers (or old gods, depending on who you ask) explained to their descendants that this was how they learned and experienced things before arriving on Calima.

They tend to happen more often in isolated places. As if something present in the air was waiting for the right circumstances to trigger it...

Om