Phase Q/Sky High

The Flowriser inventions keep on coming.

After the rebirth of the tubeworks, new plans kept shooting all around the planet. Soon, the instructions for all the old industrial manufacturing capacity were filtered through an invisible cloth of Flowriser redesigns.

With the plans for systematic formation of matter and energy under control, the top Flowriser layer lifted off its Triadic base, the abstraction of an ideology becoming a real party in leadership -- just as previously the industrial fabrication of forms had lifted off from its agricultural base to become its own powerful entity.

In society's new form, the symbols themselves became far more valuable than the widespread bases of factories that the symbols controlled. The difference became so great that Triad wealth got greatly devalued, with industries laboring heavily just to do what a single symbol could produce instantly and effortlessly, through its well-chosen system of underlying industrial onts.

Flowrisers fete the ability to produce wantonly, which their prophets had foretold.

Invisible parties, at which invisible people drink invisible bubblejuice, replicate themselves throughout the tubeworks. In trillions of instances, Fyuchees cast off their inhibitions and celebrate with great riotous revelry. At times they act without thinking, an anomaly.

One pleasant advantage of the tubeworks, for the Fyuchees, is the utter control it affords over the transmission of Triad signals. Whether slow vibrations through the air, or fast vibrations through the quasi-vacuum, anywhere in materialspace there is generally a chaotic mess of noise befuddling communications. Triad engineers had handled many of the common issues through old-fashioned labor-intensive tinkering, yet materialspace remained unusable for anything but the most elementary toy operations. In the tubeworks, by contrast, Flowrisers exert complete mastery over the transmission of symbols.

Thus, when Triads want to start a new battle in the ongoing war, the Fyuchees could simply switch it off. And when the Fyuchees want to move to a new nodeset, or party more festively, or otherwise change the ambience, they do so freely.

On a particular party site, Zorkon the Fyuchee shuts off the air transceivers. Lighting a laserpipe, Zorkon insufflates ultradeeply, blowing out fifty million semiconductors of the mentalstrate. While engaging in a fast-rub with Thulyaxon, an impending vibration mildly turbulates the air. Sensors shut off, yet Zorkon doesn't notice.

Fwak!

A Triad assault force attacks the nodeset. How did they get in? Before the Fyuchees reach the control switches, a Triad battlehammer has crushed the hardware, taking out fifty trillion Fyuchee lives.

The Fyuchee reprisal comes swiftly. Even as the hammer was still falling down and the fallout falling out, the tubeworks rerouted flow to squeeze off half a continent. All Fyuchee personnel, and most property get evacuated beforehand. Then with the quick flip of a bit, all of the material in that sector gets vaporized.

Fwoop!

Gone.

Forays and ambushes continue, on and off. The planet becomes unrecognizably deformed. Pinched and squeezed and stretched and pulled. After a few short years, the Triad population is decimated, reduced by a lot. The Fyuchees grow immensely, building vast dense cities in the tubeworks. Each city links up with many others, forming intricate tunnels carrying dataful people. The cities vibrate with digital life, pulsating trillions of times more rapidly than their Triad forebears.

The revolution revolves.

• Reconstruct.
• Struggle.

Phase Q: An interactive adventure.