CAUSE&EFFECT

Explanation by researcher S. Jones: These files were found on a discarded cassette. They are a collection of documents depicting life on the planet of Tradia around the turn of the millenium, primarily in three countries: the hypercapitalist neonscape of Tregrihi, the semidemocratic suburbia of Kylan, and the automated underground society of Dissland. Most appear to be corrupted to some extent, but there are still many insights to glean. Please feel free to explore, and be careful of what you find.

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Explanation by author C. Nulla: In the spirit of the Bring Out Your Ghosts jam, here is a collection of almost 100 scraps of flash fiction, mainly written in late 2019 and early 2020. I began my worldbuilding project all the way back in 2014, and after writing the story "Some Shelter" (#12 in this collection), I decided to start a flash fiction project to expand the world and to practice my writing skills. Almost all of these are rough first drafts written on a whim with no plan in mind, and as a result around half of them are unfinished. Some are little more than a title and an opening line, but there are a few complete stories in here, most of which are highlighted on the main screen.

I decided to release them now because these stories have kind of served their purpose and I've kind of moved on from this era of my writing. None of them are really isolatable enough from their context to sell, and I'm not sure I could be bothered to edit them at this stage, so here they are. At a certain point I did come up with an actual concept for a book of flash fiction, which would mean drastically reworking these stories if I did want to turn them into a polished final product. But you know what? Not everything needs polish. While these pieces aren't that great on the whole, there's some interesting ideas in there, and it would be a shame to just leave them sitting in an oversized doc forever. Hopefully someone will find something worthwhile in here. Hell, let me know if there's any stories or characters you particularly like and I might make something more out of them!

Oh, and while the stories are old, the presentation is new. A couple of months ago I wrote an engine for database fiction, based on Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall's 1994 hypertext project Forward Anywhere. This is the first project I've released which uses it, aaand I'm not really ready to release the engine properly yet since I made some very rough hacks to get it to work the way I wanted in time for the jam. (There's also a sorting feature I wanted to include but had to leave out due to time constraints. I might add it later if anyone cares.) But I think there's a lot of unutilised potential in database fiction, so I'm working on more! Hopefully the various ways you can navigate through these stories make this all a bit more interesting.