Kontextmaschine

28th March 2023

Post reblogged from the akratic socratic with 568 notes

I have a new idea for telepaths
normally they’re more powerful than non-telepaths, yes? I want a kind that’s useful/powerful because they can read minds, but they can’t edit, and moreover they are in theory hackable by anyone
If you grab a telepath and think your thoughts really hard at them, they can’t tell it apart from their own mental narration, so it’s like force schizophrenia-ing them
You need some skill to do this, because most strangers’ thoughts don’t feel like your own, so the telepath will go “wanting to kill the president is clearly a crazy thought, I’m not doing that”, or “you’re beaming into my head that I’m in love with you and will do anything for you, but you didn’t convincingly swap subject and object”
but if you’re artful you can slip in thoughts and impulses that they can’t distinguish from their own. And if they’re vulnerable you don’t need to be artful, because they’re not paying enough attention to guard against strangerthoughts
this has the nice property that instead of a kind of fuzzy “strength” stat that telepaths typically have in fiction, the best telepaths are going to be those who have such a unique mental narration that they’re hard to mess with
it might be a good trick for a budding telepath to immediately start thinking (but not speaking) in a particular accent, but that’s forgeable
but being a genuinely weird thinker is hard to forge