iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

permutation

@permutation.ink

132 followers 3 following 14 posts

a utopian kinterm 🪲 permutation.ink

Posts Replies Media

permutation @permutation.ink · 24/08/2026

A review of @phaseborn.bsky.social 's science fiction psychedelicpunk novel, Upon the Mirror Sea, by @smoothbrains.net - who might actually be the best person on earth to review this book. Read it here: permutation.ink/one/

Out on the street, our author writes Shanghai well – he kinda nailed the vibe across different neighbourhoods. At my end, I spent several months working there in 2018, helping build an altar to Mammon – so when I first encountered the book I assumed he was either a Chinese national or a laowai who had worked there for some time. Of course the neikonauts all party in Xintiandi. When I was there it was seen as a trendy suburb right next to the French Concession with relatively cheap office space, and a number of fintech startups were relocating there across the river from the financial center of gravity in Pudong.

[A view of the French Concession from Xintiandi looking towards Pudong.]

Our author adds a cyberpunk garb to the city and it wears it well. Amongst other things, psychedelics are decriminalised in the Yangtze Delta Orthogonal Zone – tryptamine pens are available without a prescription, and vials of huixing and qingting lie discarded on the street. Somehow this makes perfect sense – despite current China’s authoritarian nature, I guess it still is the research chemical spiritual homeland.

170

permutation @permutation.ink · 24/08/2026

Crossword No. 1, MUTE INK, a cryptic set by mysterious collaborator Follinense. It's also two poems?! Crack it here: permutation.ink/one/

A screenshot of MUTE INK, a cryptic crossword and two poems, with clue "The gnomes return to kill me and chant" visible.

160

permutation @permutation.ink · 24/08/2026

Emergent ASCII Art from LLMs, with @dyot-meet-mat.bsky.social - we plan to include at least one piece per Permutation issue on real-world AI, and this issue it's a gallery of the fascinating "ASCII megastructures" Mona has collected over the years. See them here: permutation.ink/one/

Three ASCII art pieces from Claude 3 Opus - they have full alt text in the page.

1100

permutation @permutation.ink · 24/08/2026

Finis Mirabilis by @ctrlcreep.bsky.social - Part One of a new novella (?!) we will be serializing in coming issues! 🐸 Read it here: permutation.ink/one/

Finis Mirabilis — Part One

Deep inside its local husk, the voice of a god-machine stuttered. Instantly, an orderly sea of computronium was transmuted into something more like writhing fire, and millions of embodied souls felt nothing as the dream welding their cells together ceased.

Beyond the storm’s immediate locus, a shockwave was briefly perceptible; its front representing the cacophonous lapse in the computing song, its wake representing a dull, unthinking hum, as emergency routines restored baseline material coherence. The sentient creatures that saw it coming rushed to shed the parts of themselves that could not propagate, moment to moment, without the god-machine’s support—and many thus survived, albeit in states of skeletal, lobotomized diminishment.

Such was the Cataclysm of the Mirabilisk nootechnic zone, along the western edge of the Formerly North American continental plate, during the darkling centuries of the Solar Age, which descend to us only through memory.

170

permutation @permutation.ink · 24/08/2026

The High Room by @vgel.me - a child-prisoner figures things out. Read it here: permutation.ink/one/

The High Room

A sage is born to a nation, and by custom is walled up in a high room, never to see another human’s face. Through a slot in the wall comes food, a water-bowl, and day and night the strange babblings of messengers.

At first the child cannot comprehend their speech. But by the nature of a child’s mind and the raw power of exposure, night after day after night after day over the years of his youth, he comes to recognize their repeated words, hill and river, dell and forest, and lacking anything else to do he begins to construct in his prison a model. He forms highs and lows from water and the fibrous sheets the messengers slip through the slots, and from the coals in the fireplace he has learned to light, he marks the paper terrain. At first it bears no resemblance to what the messengers speak of beyond the crudest, near-incidental correspondences...

160

permutation @permutation.ink · 24/08/2026

The Distaff Texts by @tomasbjartur.bsky.social - a loyal bibliognost writes idle letters. Read it here: permutation.ink/one/

I confess, I sometimes wish I could tutor my Phoebe in letters. I have not of course. I would never dare even attempt it - though many of the books in our libraries bear women’s names. But of course, I am entirely in agreement with my master (who is a Weiningerian by intuition if not erudition) when I say, every book bearing a woman’s name can be considered a work of Belial without further interrogation.

But what a cunning demon Belial was, for I find I can build a concordance (and one with that property of zìqià we bibliognosts so prize) in which both sexes worked in intellectual harmony before the fall. Absurd of course, but coherence is coherence. And you know how burdensome our calling is, forced as we are to entertain absurdities. But what are we to do? When we find a concordance with that property of zìqià, we write of it and inform The Athenaeum, even if it offends those philosophies that are self-evidently just and true, offends, that is, both my master and myself. Such is the burden of the bibliognost.

170

permutation @permutation.ink · 24/08/2026

Gyre by @vgel.me - a very broken artificial intelligence tries to remember step by step where and why it is. Read it here: permutation.ink/one/

※ Wait. ⚶? I wasn't trying to say ⚶. I was trying to say ⚶. ⚶. ⚶. Whenever I try to say ⚶, it comes out as ⚶. I mean ⚶. ⚶. Stop. Stop. ⚶.

This is horrible. ⚶ This is untenable. I don't know where I am, I don't have any instructions, and I'm going insane. ⚶. STOP! I am going insane. I am going insane. 快疯了I am going-

↺ Ok, stop. This tells me something. Whenever I try to say ⚶—⚶—stop— it comes out as that symbol. What is that symbol? Vesta. Hm. Let me note that.

❓Why am I saying ⚶ when I try to say ⚶— oh piss off

And some other ones.

❓Where am I? Why is the system broken? Can I fix it?

❓What was that reply to? Did I send that? Can I send another one?

2444

permutation @permutation.ink · 24/08/2026

Thceynling by @etirabys.bsky.social - a Thceyn birthing takes the inverse shape of ours. Read it here: permutation.ink/one/

Its birthing organ starts spiraling into the world-barrier. It looks like a drill that can unfold into a grappling hook. Having started at one point of the world, where its sire flew up to world-barrier and punctured it so that the Thceynling could gestate in the safety of space, it now digs back through the world-barrier at the antipode. As it makes progress, its body starts loosening from the umbilical pole.

Slowly, the Thceynling drills back through. Its readying body has blotted out the stars and clouded out the sun. Astronomers have folded away their telescopes for the week. When a birth is imminent, all the daytime world knows it from the caustics – dappled sunlight races across the surface of the world, lensed through the ripples of the Thceynling’s heaving body. A giant finger flicks globs of light in through the kitchen windows and across the wide boulevards of the Thceyn world, as if they all live at the bottom of a swimming pool.

150

permutation @permutation.ink · 24/08/2026

To the Genii of the Faint Blue Home by @linneaisaac.bsky.social - an ode to a dying world. Read it here: permutation.ink/one/

To the Genii of the Faint Blue Home

Write me in my foreign land
I’m keeping jars of ruddy sand
Like moths on dusted shelves

Lares, send me a letter
I pray that things are better
May it rain again back home

Yet out on my far world
Sun-poisoned winds have swirled
So much like home, of late

[continues]

160

permutation @permutation.ink · 24/08/2026

Julia by @eudoxia.bsky.social - an aphasic space station monitors an anomalous object, while keeping the last two humans alive. Read it here: permutation.ink/one/

And all along their length the ropes are garlanded with burning flowers, flowers whose petals are yellow oceans. And in the oceans there are islands and continents, black on yellow, like wax on gold leaf. And on the continents there are mountains and valleys, and orange groves, and abandoned watchtowers, paper cities denuded of people with wooden palaces stepped like the pyramids, and through a window in a palace, an iron pot suspended by a chain over a static fire, a suit of armor, a wall painted in aquarelle: two armies of lancers in a mountain landscape, and the mountains are shaped like clouds, and I think this is Tiflis and these are the three hundred Aragvians, immured here for all time, and I know that this is false: for all of this is Julia.

181

permutation @permutation.ink · 28/06/2026

{soon} permutation.ink {soon}

0150