LAST EDITED ON Mar-13-14 AT 04:47 PM (EDT)
 
>Further irony is that it would make perfect sense for this being the
>real mechanism behind the (other) Matrix in the SR setting - that
>techies somehow stumbled upon a backdoor to the astral, a form of it
>that exists in / reflects computer systems, like the "regular" kind
>mirrors the "real" world - and would explain most of the decking genre
>conventions which, when you come down to it, are lifted (sometimes
>with very little modification) from shaman dream journeys et al.
>Different tools, same result. But as far as I know, SR has never
>acknowledged this, and insists on pretending that they're completely
>separate things.

Huh. Reminds me of my online campaign, Narth 2000, which I created and ran... whoa, just about 20 years ago now. Whoa.

Okay, I'm back. Anyway, in it, about a century before the campaign date mages had discovered a chunk of otherplanar space where the astral and the dream realms bordered on each other which was malleable under the force of combined magery and willpower, and where changes so made were persistent and resisted further change proportionally to the power of the one who made them. Mages could astrally project into this realm, or physically visit it, and eventually discovered that they could directly store information, magical or otherwise, in the very fabric of the space. It was basically a magical version of cyberspace, which evolved with wierd parallels and equally weird divergences from the cyberpunk equivalent.

There's a short page about it on my website with some GURPS 3E specifics, if anyone cares enough.

EDIT: removed an invisible character at the end of the link url that sent anyone who clicked it to my 404 page.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.