Halloween in June Open Species Challenge (Mort Harris's entries)

== Day 2: The Busted ==
Busted 1.gif
Busted 2.png
The Busted are ambiguous creatures; parapsychology has yet to determine whether they are truly digital entities, psychic imprints of humanity on the digital realm, or otherworldly beings using digital technology to communicate with us. The Busted in their “true” forms appear as lines of garish colour sleeting across a computer screen, but they can coalesce into approximations of humanoid form while attempting to communicate, and cause programs to freeze, reset, or otherwise glitch out while they manifest. The Busted, while capable of doing some very horrifying things to one’s computer screen, are, one would think, incapable of breaking out into the real world. The problem is that the Busted do not think so, and, while genuinely friendly, can shoot out of one’s screen in quite a physical way. While unable to survive long before they must return to the digital world, their temporal and spatial powers are little affected, and more than a few digital delvers have been chased through their homes by a very real entity of vivid colours that only exists in two dimensions and occasionally freezes all physical motion, unaware of the harm it is doing in its quest for affection. More three-dimensional variants of the Busted are reported but apocryphal.
=== Author Notes ===
So the Busted are pretty obviously inspired by Car Boys, and specifically by @chooseyourownadv‘s Car Boys meta. I deeply agree that the main strength of the series is that the events are largely beyond human control. This is a simulator for car crashes, and yet when the simulator breaks, it does things that look like sci-fi horror, within the game’s fiction at least, and the media Nick and Griffin produced that had Busto 2.0 bleeding into our world furthers the theme of lack of control. The human folly inherent in Busto and in the Busted is not necessarily in the misuse of technology, but in how we interpret our relevance to our technology. Car Boys is a modern take on themes presented in Asimov’s “The Evitable Conflict” - if we cannot accept the lack of control over our creations, if we call entities like the Busted horrible, cursed glitches and refuse to let ourselves love the Blob, then the only narrative we can create is one of horror.
== Other entries to be put up ==
== Author Notes ==
These creatures were created for TitleKnown‘s Halloween In June Open Species Challenge and, as such, are free to use by anyone as long as I, Mort Harris, am credited as the creator.
Category:Open Source Characters