First, Denise reminded me of something vital throughout the conversation - this game / project is commercial suicide. The target market for a game where you take the most villified drug in the world as the primary protagonistic device - a game about being fucked out of your gourd, as you will - is about 2 dozen people.

Secondly, she had just read AssassinX for the first time. She tore apart the layout, and commented on the typos and spelling errors. She also pointed out that when AssassinX is redone and released, and Junk Dreams is launched, that we'll have Drugs and Violence covered, leaving only Sex for our next game. I thought that drugs was commercial suicide... I can't imagine a game about sex that *I* might write being any more feasable. But it would certainly involve a lot of pretty latex and bondage gear.

We hammered away at our concepts, what we each felt Junk Dreams was about. Denise had a much nicer view of the world than I do, more idealistic. She wrote an excellent manifesto for the junk world as a place that was wonderful and has slowly been tainted by paranoia and fear, but where only those with special acquity can manifest now... these are the pharmonauts that the players portray. It is an excellent meme, the thought that some junkies think that the junk world is something that junkies discovered instead of created, that the junk world can be a beautiful place as long as good people are there. Of course, in my opinion, it is totally wrong. :) But it brought us to talking about Memetic Warfare, and how to apply it in-game, which in turn brought us to talking about the Control Machines themselves.

The 'native fauna' of the junk world is generally the creation of the junky. A mugwump actually doesn't exist when there are no junkies around to interact with it. This serves two purposes - first, it reinforces the concept that the junk world is not a wholly seperate world, but exists purely as an extension of our own. Secondly, it gives the mugwumps a reason to cluster in areas where there are junkies - effectively, they like to stick near people who will interact with them in order to live. This gives us social groupings and areas of interest with populations of native life, and the rest of the place is generally abandonned - this makes social interaction more interesting in a limited population game such as Junk Dreams. This also makes the mugwumps desperate - a race of con artists, drug dealers, information brokers and fast talkers, eager to tell you or sell you exactly what you want... and odds are if you want it badly enough, they will just 'happen' to have it for you thanks to their own mutable nature - and of course they won't give it to you for free, because junkies know that everything has a price...

The exception to this 'co-exist to exist' rule is the Control Machines. The Control Machines have managed to exist independently of the junkies now, although they were born of their paranoia and fear. While junkies went into the junk world afraid of the junk, full of self-loathing and paranoia about the 'man', the man went in also, looking for something to control people, a tool to be used to keep the world in line, predictable and placid. They both found what they were looking for, of course, and these became the Control Machines. The Control Machines want the status quo. They want people to sit still, not revolt, and watch a little more TV, thank you. They don't want drug addicts, they don't want crime, they just want the world to keep on spinning nice and quiet-like. The Control Machines seem to present a unified front, but in fact there are many of them, each with somewhat different goals and opinions, based on their conception. In southeast Asia, the Control Machine first appeared in the Opium Dens. This Control Machine wanted peace, quiet, and changelessness. However, with the Vietnam War, many American GIs discovered heroin and joined into the junk world there. These men were seeking to forget the horrors of war, they were looking to go home, back to America, to be anywhere but here. The Control Machine became fairly psychotic after this, a meld of Asian and American influences - wanting to go home, wanting to stop the commies, but also wanting everything to be quiet and unchanging. It remains a very strange and confused machine to this day. Control Machines in other areas show other influences, but most of the ones are in Europe and America, and are insistent that each one must control the world.

But a new meme is travelling among them. Somewhere, a communist Control Machine has started thinking that they ALL should control the world, and those Control Machines that accept this meme become part of this hive-mind, while the others fight it. So even the Control Machines are fighting one another with memes and more direct methods through junkies, and in the real world.

Junkies also have their own memes. Various junkies have different ideas about what they are experiencing when they get their fix. The most common meme is actually the truth, but there are others - people who believe that they are seeing the aliens who run the world (think "They Live"), others think of the junk fauna as Angels or Demons or both. Some even see the junk world as the next step in human evolution - pharmolution, enhancing the race through pharmeceutical change.

The Control Machines can create puppets from junkies that they overwhelm in the junk world. A junky who is fully immersed in the junk world faces such a fate if they are 'killed' by a Control Machine. Most junkies never get that deep into the junk world, maintaining lower doses for a variety of reasons, often of finances or self-preservation. However, a truly hard-core junky will skirt the edge of overdose with every trip - some do it to get as far away from the world as possible without actually commiting suicide directly, others because they need to be immersed that deeply in order to use their abilities to change the junk world... the most powerful abilities require very deep immersion, and open you up to fates far worse than death.

(In our conversations, banging junk gives the average junky an Immersion Level of 5. Lower forms of drugs produce lower immersion levels, and are often used by tools of the Control Machines that require the ability to function normally in the 'normal' world, such as various real and synthetic opiates. Getting deeper than level 5 requires interesting cocktails and speedballs, or newer and scarier designer drugs. The latest such drug is Burroughs' fabled di-oxy-heroin, which can get to level 5 by smoking or ingesting, and can be banged as deep as level 10.)

At level 6+, a person overcome by the Control Machines becomes a puppet of the Machines. Even more frightening is that someone at level 10 becomes a gateway for the machine into the 'normal' world. Fortunately, the Control Machines agree that they are not ready to impose themsleves physically on the 'normal' world yet...but obviously another Control Machine disagrees, because di-oxy-heroin is still making it out into the population occasionally, and the Control Machines don't understand how to neutralize a threat whithout killing it, sometimes accidentally opening the door that they never wanted to open.

My mental image of the Control Machines at this point is something biomechanical, like those biomech tattoos people were getting in the 90's. Machines covered in pulsing cables and conduits, strangely organic but nearly entirely synthetic.

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We discussed more (the China White overdoses in the late 90's; politics in heroin production vs usage (something I don't think I want to get into, its bad enough writing a game about heroin, it would be double suicide to get into politics at the same time); more about memetic warfare; working on the concept of handling the correlation between normal and junk worlds; other junky memes; comparisons with the Matrix - how people who are not aware of the junk are 'sleepers' and how you can't wake most of them up (turn them on) because they would run away screaming, or worse, call for the Control Machines, so you have to be careful when introducing new users to junk, and so on...)