roentgen

for the new year i wanna talk about one of the most troubling things to come out of the 2040s, the whistleblower reports on roentgen. i dunno if anyone remembers this, fuckin pepsi-coca is still going strong despite all the weird shit that's happened, but like... ok

roentgen was somethin that a corp out of delaware, Elucida, was working on. remember elizabeth holmes? theranos? took her three years to get that thing rolling and she somehow got seed capital despite being a convicted fraudster but whatever right, pigs fly i guess lol. anyway it started out like a wellness thing you could get as a linker app, it'd stimulate some nerve centres or whatever, but then someone was like "what if we could bake this into images lol" and holmes apparently took them seriously enough to start work on roentgen

the thing itself is like.. ok so if yall havent heard of memetics, its essentially the study of cultural memes, which r like packages of cultural information stored and shared within and transferred out of a culture's zeitgeist. i like to think of em like the individual bits of cereal in a cereal bowl, like they have their own form in and of themselves but the gestalt is more than the sum of parts or whatever. roentgen was all about encapsulating and manipulating that. creating gestalt within gestalt thatd convey its true meaning subconsciously

this started out innocent enough for literal fucking mind control (lmao). they'd take a photo, "bake" it with some nebulous thing through some means, and then people'd look at it and take that nebulous thing from it. the trials they did from the whistleblower report were real innocuous, like they'd take a picture of a puppy and bake Love or whatever into it and you'd feel it. it was pretty promising and the news was all over it for a while, ofc they kept the process under lock and key but the pics were shared bc they were interesting but thats about it at the time

ofc the big corps got involved right after and ofc it was for advertising. pepsi-coca merged in 2038 so they were fucking primed for this shit. big deals went down, rights bought, and suddenly u were getting weird greebling on labels everywhere. i personally never actually felt the effect of it - i actually talked to a few friends and they said they didn't either, but we're all autistic so who's surprised LOL - but the General Public or whatever did, and they got a big boost in trading volume. shit was like the new coke but they didnt change shit

then the fucking govt got involved bc of course they had to and they were like "ooh what if we made a weapon out of this" bc of course they would. like they were already making memetoviruses, the army just figured they could make em mean. apparently they had some success in inducing mild cold-like symptoms, which is fuckin frightening like imagine looking at an image and you start feeling like shit and sneezing and u dont even know why?? fuck man

anyway army got that far but i think pepsi-coca was ahead of em in realising the effect would just dull out after a while. its like getting used to a smell, you just forget its there. they figured changing the encoding every week would work at first, but it still dulls. the trick of it - and yes, this is indeed a man-made horror beyond comprehension - was to change the people so the feeling wouldn't dull. i still don't understand the exact mechanism but it's in those fucking leaks and i have read it.

ofc then came folks noticing smells they didn't usually because it's practically the exact same mechanism, and weird tastes in the food they usually eat and weird feelings when they met someone they knew, and the cat was out of the bag. whistle blown, they retracted all the memetic bullshit, and now pretty much everyone who wasn't born after 2043 is now permanently fucked up. i mean its not surprising that pepsi-coca kept going after this considering they're a megacorp with their fingers in both metaphorical and literal pies all over the place but whatever. i think lizzy got arrested again too but they let her off, Elucida dropped off the map tho

anyway thats roentgen. weird little thing that took off and immediately fucked with peoples heads. shit was like tetraethyl lead except we have internet now. thank god this doesnt happen anymore cough cough ebombs cough cough