Nightside

 

Nightside. It had been a while since his mind had drifted there.

It was like waking life, but different. Slippery, in the sense of Time. Soft, like a Dream.

You could crash in front of a computer and do a three hundred page novel in two minutes. The chances of finding it again were next to none though. Websites had a better chance at propagating, but it had to be simple to leave an impression. Past a certain point though, it morphed and changed on it’s own as readers input tipped the site away from the original design.

There were ways to prevent tampering, but they made the page ‘heavy’ and hard to travel on the network. The best thing to do was to describe the pictures and keep the text short. That way people were busy building the page in their own mind rather than distracting themselves about how it could be.

Popular websites from the waking world were anchors, and people could dream-surf made up filler indefinitely. If it was hard to find true content in the daytime, it was nearly impossible on Nightside. Self reinforcing feedback kept all but the most reflective people on their preferred course and mindset.

TV tended to be reruns, old EM signals being beamed between minds as they relived the impression of the original broadcast within the Nightside world.

Everything and nothing was memorable. Movie stars and old high school friends walked around vaguely recognizable landmarks all around the world. Death was common and temporary.

It was inevitable that this was where the first Time Travellers went. It was ‘easy’. You could land, get an impression of the time, make an impression, and yet come back and have none of it matter.

It made most people think the whole process had failed. That is, until they stayed long enough to leave a real difference in the malleable version of the world.

They found they could adapt Nightside to be stable enough for long term visiting. People were still prone to missing time, and strange feedback, but nothing that would force their exit to when they came from.

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The easiest way to meet new people was to make them up. Combine a famous first or last name with a different last name, or an age, or job. Nathan Ellis might look like Nathan Fillion, but have a completely different backstory. Or it could be Nathan Fillion with a completely different face. You could make someone in the Sims format, but in Nightside it was probably easier to just look through FacesBook, the infinite version of the famous website. Add a number after the name and you could build a custom combo character. Me 80 Prank 20 would be you with a habit of, pranking, obviously. Not amazingly creative writing, but good for a harmless foil in a twin v twin story.

It took a while to organize the various variables into meaningful houses, plots and dreams, but it was worth it.

Looking back, it seemed that Dayside and Nightside were just points on a spectrum. How much oddness and how much order. It boiled down to what one got used to. Unreality level is what the science types eventually went with. With that, it boiled down to a matter of sifting the various technologies, mental shortcuts and memory aids into appropriate levels.

Missing Piece cards became handy as equipment you dreamt/Nightsided with could be distilled into something specific, and yet innocuous, during Dayside. It was easier to plan missions with having to make or buy stand-in technologies and props.

A few times it seemed to backfire, leaving a person with cards rather than the ‘real’ equipment on a mission. Usually it was only one or two items, and also an indicator the object in question had improved or changed, needing new art or rules to cement.