The writer for the most popular soap opera on videovision is a brain in a glass jar. As part of his contract every evening a young woman comes in and for an hour sits with him and describes in minute detail the day’s weather.
They say the New Albion monorail F Train is haunted at night by the ghost of a pop star who not only hasn’t died yet, but hasn’t even become famous yet. Amongst a very special circle of the entertainment industry there is an active hunt, an obsession with very high stake bets, to find this person while living and “discover” them.
One of the most popular musical instruments of the day does not in itself make a sound. It allows you to conduct the different sounds in your environment, mixing and looping them as you walk about and they occur. Kid Z’s weekly Saturn Park remixes which he makes while strolling in the afternoon through Saturn Park on Saturdays are a consistent bestseller.
The power for the Syer’s Building is supplied by the dreams of 150 sleeping volunteers. They sign on for a period of time ranging from a week to 3 years (although plans are underway to offer up to 10 years). They are placed in a state of deep sleep and offered a variety of incredible themed dreams. The energy their dreaming minds create is used to power the building and it’s well regarded top of the building lighting. The dreams are “induced” by a computer simply reciting 10 key words related to the chosen dream theme over and over again every few minutes for the legnth of the sleep.
New Albion has its own superhero, Captain Apollo. Some nights he can be spied high above, leaping about buildings in his never ending quest to fight crime. He is basically adored. Interestingly, he does not actually exist. He was initially a performance art project that proved so popular the team behind him decided to just keep going. He is simply a 3D video projection. It takes a team of 3 to produce him and whenever, after a year or so one of them decides to move on, they are easily replaced, as many young videographers would love to be involved with Captain Apollo for awhile. What the team behind Captain Apollo cannot explain is the number of crooks who end up hog tied outside police buildings or at crime scenes with a note from Captain Apollo taped to their shoulder.
A series of transparent plastic tubes connect buildings for block and blocks allowing pedestrians to walk about in any weather well above street level without ever having to go outside. The biggest nuisance of these tubes however are gangs of cosplayers who play a day long elaborate chase game in these tube. The game is a unique combination of Laser Paint Tag, Spy and Capture the Flag where they hunt each others’ team in costumes from popular comic and videovision series (although some will dress normally until a key moment when they will throw off their disguise to reveal their colorful “real” clothing), shooting each other with stained light and trying to capture each team’s Princess (who is not necessarily female or even at times human. Dogs, cats and goats have on occasion been used).
A popular form of fashion involves clothes made out of electricity.
Amongst the New Albion middle class there is a popular oracle they go to in order to divine the future. The oracle resides in the Psychedelic Basement deep in the industrial park. This oracle is actually a puddle of radioactive ooze. Due to a rather improbable accident the ooze somehow possesses the ability to cause hallucinations when stared at for over a minute. What’s more these hallucinations are sometimes of a possible future. When they are, the probability of that future being accurate is about 67%, which makes the ooze far and away the most accurate fortune teller in the city.
One of the most popular taxi drivers in the city is an automation who cracks jokes and dispenses with hilarious and homey advice. No one is quite sure how he operates. Some think he really is an automation and others assume he’s controlled by someone at the central depot. Actually he is controlled by a talking mouse named Kevin, who comes from a long line of very intelligent mice and sits in the automation’s head where he has controls to drive the cab. Kevin also helps the police solve all sorts of crimes. Several constables are in the habit of taking a leisurely cab ride when they are particularly perplexed by a case. Kevin’s ability to think like and predict criminal behavior is unsurpassed. Even most of the cops do not know that the automation is actually Kevin the mouse. There are only a small handful of people who know that Kevin even exists much less is the wisecracking taxi driving automation.
