8. PICTURE MAZES

This is a maze of "pictures" that lead one to the next rather than a physical maze. These are a bit like the computer adventure games where you have to find your way from one room or scene to the next one. But these "pictures" are realities, and they are usually different realities from one to the next.

You might be in a jungle and there is a rock cliff with a cave, and if you go in it, you will be on a yacht, or there is a bullseye painted on a tree and if you dive into that, you will be on the roof of a tall building in a city. And if you do neither, a tiger comes out and eats you and that leads to a medieval dungeon.

These could be very interesting and distracting and you could get lost in one for years. Various exciting things happen in the scenes. Will'o'Whisp show up to lead you around or monsters chase you or whatever.

This was entertainment back in the home universe and games universe.

But later on the track, these things got nastier and eventually started being used like implants, to abberate someone who was tossed or lured into them. We could call these things "implant mazes".

An implant maze is characterized by being heavily restimulative and tricking you into making bad postulates. Usually you needed to make some negative postulate to get out, or you "learned" from the mechanics of the game that some sick and degrading idea was correct. The "Service Fac Maze" discussed elsewhere is an implant maze, but it is fairly straightforward and doesn't use a lot of force. Many of these were random in laying in various buttons (goals, items, symbols, significances, and whatever) and used heavy force and energy.

Often the implant maze was unsolvable and meant to drive you into apathy on problem solving and games. The maze would change at random. There would be various traps or things that would spin you around etc. Here might be the first use of amusement park mockups and falling and crashes type stuff, but not in any real pattern or sensible sequence. This early on the track, the impacts didn't bother you very much, but these kind of scenes happened fast and the scene keeps repeating over and over until you spot the way into the next scene, so you get anxious about it.

You might be falling off the edge of a cliff and smashing down on the rocks below and it keeps repeating over and over until you spot and grab the tree branch and swing into a cave in the cliff at which point you find yourself on a rollercoaster. And you keep going over the crest and down in this rollercoaster and smashing into a brick wall at the bottom until you notice a small cloud labeled exit which you pass by halfway down. So you reach out and push it on the next run through and the whole maze blows up and pictures and pieces of yourself fly all over the place and you get buttered all over the universe.

These often include mirrors and copies of yourself and misleading visions etc. Sometimes you lose a piece of yourself. This might be by a needle prick, or a wrath grabs part of you, or you must trade part of yourself for something, or you're pulled apart, etc.

Often there were also enjoyable scenes mixed in. Crowds cheering you or cities of gold or exciting sex or whatever. These were used to attract you in and to keep you in enough agreement so that you couldn't exteriorize out of the maze easily.

These implant mazes were used intensively in the motions universe and to some degree in the symbols universe as well. I think that there were a lot of different ones, just like there are many different implants that were used in this universe.

I haven't tried to map any of these or work out detailed platens (except for the service fac maze which is much more structured in its pattern).

Any handling of these is experimental at this time. But if you do dig one up or get it into restim, the following actions should get it to key out.

a) Spot the overt of designing and building these things.

b) Spot the over of tricking or forcing others to go into them.

c) Spot a scene in the maze that you found extremely desirable (if possible, get the scene that you desired most). You can even asses whether it was triumph, excitement, wealth, admiration, love, sex, joy, etc. that stuck you to the maze. Take this scene and copy the picture many times, changing its color, making it nicer or worse alternately, etc. until you can both have the picture or throw it away comfortably. You should feel something let go. If not, then find another even more desirable scene that was in the maze and handle.

d) Check for any pieces of yourself that were left in the maze. For each, have it point to the being it divided from.

Note that to some degree you tended to keep creating the maze after you left it. When you run one that is still charged, you will find that you still have it mocked up somewhere and that's where you're handling and releasing the pieces of yourself that were stuck in it.