Curious Item Club: Technoir Nanopaint
Added 2015-07-22 06:19:19 +0000 UTCThe future is chromed, but the relentless grinding of the wheel is constantly finding fresh ways to dull the bright edges. Smart materials promised to revolutionize the physical world the same way that augmented reality had transformed the digital, but their price was high and the cost of overhauling existing infrastructure is always higher than the cost of just letting the existing stuff rot away.
As a result, nanopaint – relatively cheap and easy to slop up onto existing structures – was the first smart material to become truly pervasive. Where the technophilic were given free reign, the garish, ever-moving mural displays of nanopaint became a common sight. (“A world filled with screensavers,” as one wonk put it.) But even where the HOAs ruled with an iron fist, the self-replenishing, never-dulling finishes of nanopaint were desirable. (And being able to change the color of your house at the push of a button was appealing.)
Nanopaint also saw the end of graffiti… for about nine minutes. Yes, the nanopaint made it possible to have graffiti-eating walls, but it also made it possible for the taggers to drop complex animations with a quick little spray. And it wasn’t long before hackartists developed the first skirted graffiti (which shielded their tags from nanopaint on a molecular level). Corporate facilities responded by developing skim-sheet bots that would periodically glide over the surfaces of their buildings and aggressively burn out the skirted graffiti, so the hackartists responded with skitter graffiti that would literally move away from the skim-sheets. When the skim-sheets got better at boxing in the skitters, the inevitable riposte were trap glyphs that could corrupt, subvert, or simply distract the skim-sheets.
The walls of the future have become digital battlegrounds.
Nanopaint: smart material
Smart Graffiti: derma-linked, firewall, linked, memetic, smart material
Skim-Sheet: automatic, firewall, linked, small, wall glide
(This curious item is designed for Technoir, but would also be suitable in Shadowrun, Eclipse Phase, or any number of other cyberpunk / transhuman SF settings.)
