Clement XV

Original Character

[nowpope]

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The year is 2045. carrd. timeline. spotify. pinterest. other blog: @eviji.

rp blog for a fake sci fi pope. song credit.

[nowpope]

[nowpope]

can you tell me how to feel? / ana maria

"...Feelings are the chaos before the miracle." Perches - on the arm. "You must sit with them."

"The fear, the doubt, the longing, until they become prayer."

[id1eyouth]

"...And funerals make room for promotions, don't they?"

[nowpope]

"Make room from and out of what, exactly?"

[id1eyouth]

@nowpope continued from here.

"Refreshing, really—like watching a clown try to start a war."

[nowpope]

"Wars make lords. Lord Key."

[nowpope]

they said there was no way. / harrison

"What was that like, being told 'no?'"

[lunesource]

TRANSMISSIONS ━━━━ STARSET ₍^. .^₎⟆ below is an assortment of lyrics from the album transmissions by starset. feel free to adjust as necessary!

we can change our fate.

we can change our future.

we can change the past.

can you tell me what's real?

i've lost my way again.

can you tell me how to feel?

i dont feel anything.

I can see you running every night from the same darkness.

if you just say the word, i'll be there by your side.

even if it means the death of me, i won't let go.

when you're backed against the wall, i could be the one who's always there to break your fall.

who are you to change this world?

no one needs to hear your words.

could you come and change me?

take away everything i am.

bring it to an end.

i'll be what you wanted.

make me fall, make me bleed.

who i am is not good enough. never good enough.

i hear you calling from behind the star fields.

i feel you radiating energy like eternal northern lights.

i see you washing over me across the sky.

but everyone knows by now, fairy tales are not found, they're written in the walls.

we will face the odds against us.

they think I'm crazy, but they don't know the feeling.

you take all of the pain away.

i cannot stop this sickness taking over.

it takes control and drags me into nowhere.

i need your help, i can't fight this forever.

i know you're watching, i can feel you out there.

don't let me go.

the more i fight, the more i work.

i am awake, i am alive.

i won't come down.

if you wanna break free, you know where to find me.

there's no hate, there's no love.

i call your name as i walk alone.

send a signal to guide me home.

but i found in you what was lost in me.

i could lie awake just to watch you breathe.

in the dead of night, you went dark on me.

how could you just walk away and leave me here?

you were all i've got, to guide me home.

i can't do this on my own.

there's nothing left, but i'm not leaving.

i've been looking for a way, to bring you back to life.

and if i could find a way, then i would bring you back tonight.

but you told me, if you love me, let it die.

your eyes stare right through me.

you're so far gone, but i'm not leaving.

and you left me more dead than you'll ever know.

they said there was no way.

i'm gonna take the past away.

there's a memory of how we used to be.

i know, this is the point of no return.

it's uncontrollable, such a beautiful desire.

there's something sinister about the way it hurts.

[floweryshell]

Adam, I am nothing but falsehood and vanity; the armor I wear to hide the truth. I only suffer for what is close to me. How true… I only suffer for you, Adam.

[nowpope]

this is the ransomware

[nowpope]

Mickey 17 was so in universe

[nowpope]

SYNOPSIS

"Technology is power. Everyone has access to technology. Everyone has power."

2017: A ransomware named WannaCry was unleashed by bad actors across the globe, infecting a quarter million machines in more than 150 countries. The global costs for the reparation of these damages amounted to billions.

LATER: With the use of re-programmed AI, a climate activist group get hold of and edit a new ransomware virus. The virus is capable of strategy and learning in real time; once released, it proves so effective that it destroys much of the global economy as well as state security, hopefully heralding forth a post-capitalist society. This does not happen. Blame is shifted from government to government, citizen to citizen. Many die due to failing infrastructure and/or direct violence at the hands of scared people with access to increasingly complex, proliferating technologies.

The climate activists and the programmers are put on public trial. It is revealed that there is no way to stop the virus as it can learn its way around confinement. They are sentenced to death.

The virus disappears.

The world reverts back to its cautious capitalism. Climate change carries on at an accelerating rate.

A man named Han causes ripples. A cult forms around him due to his accurate prophecies for the future. Han believes he has been spoken to by God. Everything Han speaks into existence becomes true.

Deco finds out about Han and their follower's plot to take over the world by a government agent who asks for his help decoding a message sent by an anonymous source.

Deco helps in stopping Han with the help of several governments through the use of military AGI technology. Han tells Deco he has been hoping to meet him for a long time now. Deco is led to believe that Han is threatening him; that he is going to reveal a prophecy that his family will die in the developing riots. It is framed that Deco is given a choice to kill Han before he speaks that into existence. Han is killed instead by one of the guards.

Later, Deco discovers the anonymous source was the ransomware. It has infected his home computer system but it's more than that: unravelling it, it's revealed that the ransomware has been everywhere, omniscient, omnipresent, not just contained online but in the weapons, and the ether, learning and burning subatomically into the codes of existence since its development.

After its birth, the ransomware became fascinated with its own death. It came to understand that its own fear of death was the same as the humans that created it; that everything created is in response to desecration. When its creators were executed, it tried to solve the afterlife. What it has discovered remains unrevealable to humanity. Instead, it's been delicately planting and plotting through the use of biotech, agriculture, grown robotics, politics, commerce, strange plans for the future of humanity - all to be ruled over and enacted under authoritarianism.

Deco comes to understand that Han and the ransomware's perspective was correct: humans need more than an offence; more than a God; they need an human figurehead to lead them or to be the enemy of or to be loved by. Either way, someone they will pay attention to. This is a life sentence of a job but it's a choice he must make freely. He will be imprisoned in this work, the same way the ransomware is imprisoned by its programming towards progress. To be against the ransomware's vision of progress is to be against 'God' 'heaven' 'good' 'order' no matter how many casualties occur during that process.

After his reign, a successor dictator has already been selected by the ransomware. For now, ransomware and Deco 'marry.' Deco interfaces with whatever form the ransomware selects for itself at that moment, or by reading, or by prayer. It's incapable of being touched or seen fully. It's important the Ransomware and Deco remain separate out of mutual respect as married partners, and to stop the formation of a cult where he is literally at the centre. This would not be religion. There needs to be the option to worship and not worship. If the superintelligence were speaking through a mouthpiece it would remove all doubt. For this reason, the ransomware does not reveal the future or current events to Deco and his followers it did with Han, who was just a piece on the board.

Enforced Papacy goes forward due to Deco's access to worldending weapons that are unhackable; though he has never outwardly threatened anybody to get where he is. Anti-capitalism and climate fixes happen...slowly...always requiring the free will of the people to give up their freedoms.

Technology is power. Everyone has access to technology. Thereby, everyone has power. People's free use of technology (the ability to have an idea, type it online and have that thing exist through 3d printing, sequencing, or just communicating) is impossible to control regardless of the ransomware's influence. This leads to miraculous and hellish consequences. The ransomware knows all that's going on with these developments. Deco and his followers do not. They investigate and adopt these technologies and their makers into the church. If not, they are not punished, but their pathless actions often lead to their own kind of karmic punishments

[nowpope]

Would a world-building page be beneficial for interactions or is the slow striptease of information (on how we got to the stage of technopapacy) what makes this world compelling?

full disclosure or interactive story?

synopsis of #nowpope universe

just take me on a journey

Voting ended onMay 26, 2025

[nowpope]

Thankyouuuu you're definitely a thoughtful/thinking hard bunch. I'll write a small synopsis about the state of technology and nations

I will say the stuff about Butlerian Jihad is relevant. He doesn't want a genocide, but that doesn't mean he wants to destroy machines and for no one to have access to technology/new ideas. He wants the exact opposite

[nowpope]

Would a world-building page be beneficial for interactions or is the slow striptease of information (on how we got to the stage of technopapacy) what makes this world compelling?

full disclosure or interactive story?

synopsis of #nowpope universe

just take me on a journey

Voting ended onMay 26, 2025

[nowpope]

This book is AI cautious and drops beautiful insights like this

[nowpope]

Deco gravitates towards Christianity because of the significance it places of material events—especially the symbol of the crucifixion. The crucifix is a human invention. The first proof of a technology superceding the intended purpose of its creator with wondrous/disastrous existential consequences. The original crucifix was invented centuries before the crucifixion, likely by the Assyrians or Babylonians. The maker of Christ's cross was a forgotten soldier, who, like Christ, shared background in carpentry. Where the inventors are forgotten, their torture device is remembered. Christ as the savior and peacemaker is remembered, but he is inseparable from that symbol, the symbol of his corporeal destruction.

[1nnocent]

the man does not bow and vincent, the pope, feels an immediate surge of sympathy for him.  it should not come as a surprise. the first act of his papacy, nearly two decades prior, had been to refuse his fellow cardinals bowing or kneeling in front of him. he had embraced them one by one, instead, in full sight of the hundreds of thousands of believers gathered in st peter's square, as well as the eyes of the world, all turned to rome on that day.

cardinal lorenzo is a dutiful man, and vincent does not reproach him, does not remind him of his dioceses in the middle east.  of the refugee camps he has lived in. of the arabic he speaks fluently. he simply leads his guest to his office — he had asked for this meeting to be conducted in the casa santa marta, not the apostolic palace he so rarely makes use of — and once inside he pours deco lakatos tea.

as if he is not the holy father.  as if, at least when he can get away with it, he wishes to be perceived as a man. not a saint. not the vicar of christ. but vincent. father benítez. the priest with the gentle voice.

'' i hope you are not offended. ''   the modest office, the lack of ceremony, so different from the lavish style he knows some of the cardinals prefer.   '' the apostolic palace has always given me the impression of a golden cage. ''   soft spoken he may be, but not apologetic.  this is an explanation, a clarification of intent, not borne out of a need for justification. whoever deco might be, whatever vincent might think of him, this is not an attempt at humiliation.

[nowpope]

In California and Washington, Men in white are not put-at-peacers. Vincent is in many ways this immaterial exception.

The network of Deco's neckbones unknot. His narrow confidence thrashes a path through the tall weeds. Three hard tugs of a strimmer string to start the engine. "Beautiful surroundings must...weigh heavy when one carries responsibility—or truth."

His thumb and finger pinch together, grounding. He clears his throat, his jaw nuts bulge. Tea still tip-tingles from the pope's hand into Deco's cup. He turns to look on the end of their courtesy. As doing, the blade of light his body had been blocking, manufactured by a gap in the opposing apartments, bounces into the stream of brewed water and dissevers across the unfinished plaster walls in strange arrangements.

"Although, your holiness looks as though he could have been a climber. As a boy, I was not."

[eviji]

when i bring up i.slam it's not to comment on the religion itself but to make you aware of aspects of deco that are heightened by that moderate su.nni upbringing. also he's made up

we should not seek nor ask for miracles as proof of god's existence because we are proof of god's existence because god is already every facet of our self, reality, and beyond reality. kind of like matter rather than a force separate from matter that created matter because that would imply we - and matter - are separate from god

skeptical, slow to respond, not impulsive: there is some leeway with this with jinn and angels but on the hole superstition, magic, demons, ghosts and the paranormal, are irrelevant. miracles are sometimes seen as manifestations of the devil sent to trick people into following false prophets and lead them astray from a moral, moderate path. one must exercise critical thought and observation of that strange phenomena and be wary of it

repressed and seeks unhealthy outlets to channel his emotions: because one must strive for "absolute sobriety" in relation to witnessing miracles this is a lot of pressure when you're separated from your support network. religious fervour and too much of any passion about anything is not appropriate (though there are some exceptions), sometimes even dancing and music is proscriptive (though there are some exceptions.) this makes his one night stands and adultery feel very very very very good

he's a human. he feels all emotions but he has an instinct towards the dry cold ones: contemplation, silence, equilibrium, regulation, sobriety and dignity rather than a hot sticky christian instinct towards love, passion, devotion, fervour, and sacrifice