Phase Q/Sky High

The Futurista 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 Futurista designs.

With the plans for the systematic formation of matter and energy under control, the top Futurista layer lifted off, the abstraction of an ideology becoming a real party, just as previously the industrial fabrication of forms had lifted off its agricultural base.

In its 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 Tradsoc got devalued, with industries laboring heavily just to do what a single symbol could produce instantly and effortlessly.

Futuristas feted the ability to produce wantonly, which their prophets had foretold.

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

One pleasant advantage of the tubeworks, for the Fyuchees, was the utter control it afforded over the transmission of Trad signals. Whether slow vibrations through the air, or fast vibrations through the quasi-vacuum, in materialspace there was generally a chaotic mess of noise. Trad 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, Futuristas exerted useful mastery over the transception of symbols.

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

On a particular party site, Zorkon the Fyuchy shut off the air transceivers. Lighting a laserbong, Zorkon insufflated ultradeeply, blowing out fifty million semiconductors. While engaging in a fastrub with Thulyaxon, an impending vibration mildly turbulated the air. Sensors shut off, Zorkon didn’t notice.

Fwak!

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

The Fyuchy reprisal came 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 Fyuchy personnel, and most property get evacuated. 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. After a few short years, the Trad 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 Trad forebears.

Phase Q: An interactive adventure.