The Switchboard
The Switchboard is the staging ground for Project Samsara. It is a universe that operates primarily on the mechanics of tangible information.
This document is old, very old. It probably hasn’t held up particularly well over the years I’ve spent building this project. I should probably revise it or bin it outright. But I won’t because when I wrote it, I wanted to capture a feeling. I feel I’ve succeeded. And while that feeling has been refined over time from starry-eyed idealism to a defined vision - and thus this document makes me cringe somewhat - I will still keep this document here for all who come to see where we all began.
Cryogen’s Proposal: The Switchboard
The Switchboard is a realized vision for an infinite literary sandbox. What I want it to be, or wish it was, is something hard to fully capture or explain, but I will try.
I imagine the Switchboard as a bare wall in a rough, urban downtown. It is at the side of some otherwise unnoticeable building; a travel agent’s, or funeral parlor, or law office. Something that serves a specific, uncommon purpose, a purpose that you can name it, but not when last in particular you had need of it. There is an industry by a lake or river, it does something with plastics or metal, and dumps the wastes into the aforementioned water body. Every house has guard dogs, but not all have signs indicating their presence. Those people want to be crossed, and you can tell by how their evening entertainment is sitting, scowling, on their porch, sipping lemonade with a loaded shotgun in their lap.
It is in a place within the northern hemisphere, and so it experiences seasons. This is important, because the cycle of hot and cold and and wind and wet have battered this wall endlessly, and so it is cracked, marred, generally ugly looking. It wasn’t built to be anything other than shaped rock.
It is also important that this wall be visible from a street. The street is passed by cars, busses, people on bikes, scooters and skateboards. Particularly foot traffic. The foot traffic is essential. The downtown is generally unsafe to walk in, but the people who inhabit it are particularly hardy, well versed in living, so they walk anyway. It is important that they are young as well, and that the world around them is cruel, not so cruel that they are harmed in ways they cannot recover, but rather cruel in the way cold rain prompts seeking shelter - or making it. It is also essential the world be predictable, and even more necessarily - boring. This boredom is allowed to hurt them.
The wall is oriented in such a way that it’s emptiness screams. Like turning a street corner and seeing an entire circus or parade, but in reverse. You are in the drudgery of a typical downtown, but this particular wall seems doubly as ugly, as unpleasant to look at, that much like a small rock in an otherwise splendid shoe, it occupies a corner of your mind, never fading away.
And the corner grows larger as days grow into weeks and into months, and as the rest of the decrepit downtown becomes slightly more pleasing to look at in the ways steel, brick and glass only can, the empty grey of the wall only seems to grow in emptiness and greyness, until it’s scream is deafening. Above the street cars, or the industry near the river, or the barking guard dogs, or the yelling blood-thirsty neighbor. The scream sweeps in like a summer storm. It fills like Sunday lunch. It cannot be ignored, as if it were a swarm of flies. The scream prompts aged cogs to spin to life. It will spark ancient engines to churn and blow.
It is also essential that this downtown has a store for arts and crafts. It will sell stickers, colored paper, glue, scissors, chalk and pencils. Most essentially, spray paint. It is a lone bastion of color in a sea of emptiness.
The first of the young people who defaces the wall will likely not be good at it. Or they will be DaVinci reborn. Most likely they will be something in between, something most common; a fellow with an idea. I don’t need them to be anything more, just that they exist, and that they see the wall and think “this could be more than what it is now”. It will be something they do hurriedly, an intrusion on some established, natural order. But it will be enough. It will answer a question and create new ones, and the answer to the new ones will be more paint on the wall.
Most simply put, the Switchboard is a canvas.
I asked myself who I was in this analogy. Initially I thought myself the pioneer to put the first paint on the wall, but I reevaluated. I think myself the person who built the wall, and all who come after me will serve to build new, beautiful things, with my work as a foundation.
It applies to Project Samsara at large.
The Switchboard
The Switchboard is an informationpunk universe characterized by esoteric mathematics, magic, magic-adjacent ritualism and grand exploration. Striders gifted powers over information itself via the Strider Protocol take grand sojourns across an endless sky, searching for secrets, powers and new frontiers.
Cities and settlements dot the various planets that hang in stately appointments, stars moving between them in grand processions, sections of the sky cordoned off by supernaturally deep void. And the farther out you go, the farther you Stride, the further you stretch your mind - as a net - capturing swathes of the infinite, you only realize how much more there is to see, and how much stronger there is to get.
And Striders and other Striders make names for themselves, and as they exist, they grow weightier and sharper, leaving deeper grooves on the Switchboard as a whole, and like a tapestry or a relief sculpture, slices of it tell of the story of those who traversed it, eyes pointed upwards, in relentless skywards pursuit.
The tales to be told in the Switchboard are ones of grand exploration, discovering the hidden and the secret, contending with the sky and the void-deep, and most of all, contending with other Striders.