Lore
Aquatec is my first and oldest form of including some kind of deeper story behind my music. And because nobody bothered to figure out the ARG behind it, I might as well reveal it because I'm still proud of how it turned out. It's technically unfinished, since I wasn't motivated to expand off of it if nobody even really knew it existed, but yeah its still kinda cool
There isn't anything linked in the descriptions anywhere the song is mentioned, but upon putting the song through a spectrogram, you find a QR code that links to a Figma page for a company called Aquatec Robotics. This page has stuff like a website prototype, documentation for various aquatic robotic products, and a concept for a remote app for controlling a SubDrone, which is basically a remote control mini submarine you can take pictures and explore stuff with.
The company has an AI as its CEO, nicknamed Poseidon. Its full intent is to preserve the world's oceans through innovation and safety. It's entirely self-prompted, so if anyone were to try and prompt engineer it to do malicious stuff, it just won't. But not everything is as it seems. Upon going through the Figma files and messing around the hidden files, you can find rather unsettling images of these inventions with strange text. I still don't want to reveal everything, so I won't share those explicitly. There's a lot more I've probably forgotten about the story, and more I just want others to find, but that's basically Aquatec lore.
There isn't too much to say about World Glitcher, most of the lore is very explicitly said in the SoundCloud description. In case you missed it, it's two guys working for a company that makes computer viruses. Not for necessarily good purposes. The World Glitcher itself was intended to just be an average ransomware virus, but this one was intelligent and could figure out which files mean the most to the user, and specifically targeting those. Somehow, maybe a weird bit flip or a small power outage, it escaped the computer it was stored in and came into the real world. The song follows the two workers as they try to find safety and escape this terrifying corruption. At the end though, they just pay the virus like 1000 of their own dollars and it shuts down and restores everything because of course.
Neat secret: there's some binary text between WORLD and GLITCHER and it spells out "run cry scream hide" over and over again.
Tesseract does actually have small traces of lore. Basically, it's about a future where humans found out how to breach into the fourth dimension and can use that to find super quick routes to places across the universe, sometimes being able to travel millions of lightyears in only a few minutes. It's not like they're actually going faster than the speed of light, just that they're going around the 3D space and taking a better path. Thas all!
House Thirteen is a very spooky and weird house in an otherwise normal neighborhood. Anyone who enters it never comes back. Except for the guy that did. HOUSE TH1RT3EN is an immersive, stylized VR horror rhythm game that involves dodging attacks and moving through danger to the beat. Your goal is to try and find what's going on in the house, and why it's so dang weird. Unfortunately, there's a ghost in the house that already eternally trapped 934.3 others (the .3 was just some guy who didn't have legs and only one arm). And he doesn't like living people. Why? because it's funny! The house is also larger on the inside, and has all sorts of weird portals and rooms that go to places you wouldn't expect. So it's really hard to navigate. I probably won't ever make this game real because that's kinda hard not gonna lie.
ALTRD LYF is my most lore-heavy project yet, simply due to the absolutely massive scope of everything surrounding it. This album is the start of a series of albums where I try to make one cohesive and engaging storyline about anything sci-fi that I find cool, mostly inspired by books. ALTRD LYF specifically takes place a few decades before the main events of said series. Essentially, IPSA, the Interplanetary Space Administration, started putting a lot of funding towards biological alteration. CRISPR was once seen as really dangerous an unethical due to the fact that you're essentially just changing the DNA of an unborn baby and that could have really bad effects, and be really unethical. But if you can change the structure of the base specimen, while sill managing to keep species cross-compatible (kind of like how dogs are all compatible and the same species even though they're entirely different), WHILE keeping it affordable enough to not give rich people a huge advantage in everything, then it's a bit more ethical and reasonable.
So those challenges alone are enough to make it take forever for humans to figure out, but when paired with the resource crisis, things took even longer. Essentially, civilization has begun using Dyson spheres (aka dyspheres) to harvest as much energy from stars as possible. This allows people to do absolutely crazy advanced stuff since you practically have infinite energy at that point. Well, not infinite, but definitely more than enough for anything you would need energy for. However, big problem, stars are freaking HUGE. So each individual dysphere needs almost an entire planet's worth of metal, silicon, glass and a bunch of other stuff. And wireless energy (which exists now) only has a limited range. So if you're doing anything across solar systems, you have to make multiple dyspheres. That's just a given.
Venus and Mercury have actually just been disassembled entirely because after finding that they are in fact kind of useless there was no reason to keep them. Other planets are so much cooler anyway. Humans actually discovered real wormholes and shortly after discovered how to make them. So interplanetary travel became an actual feasible possibility. So humans found a lot of earth-like planets that could be traveled to pretty quickly just by going around 3D space instead of through it. This is where our little pig boi resides, on a planet that actually I don't have a name for because I forgot to make one v(oo)v But the city he lives in is called Dysopolis, and this is actually where dyspheres were invented! One of the larger IPSA HQs is also there and of course IPSA was the one to fund dysphere creation. They helped with blueprints, mechanisms to extract materials, machines to put piecs together, and everything else that was needed to make them.
-LightningPig actually isn't around for some of the songs of the album. He's there for Mutation, Nanobot and Okazaki fragments, but just as a placeholder guy to explain how biological alteration works in this world. He's actually the guy that says he's "not a furry" because he's not. He is not a "skinny" either. He is a pig boi and will be reffered to as such. The SoundCloud descriptions that are just explaining stuff aren't said by any particular characters and are just random scientists explaining stuff.
So essentially, the rest of the songs really are just kind of prequels to Star Collapse that explain why -LightningPig looks like a humanoid glowing piggo. Speaking of Star Collapse, this is where actually you could argue the main events of this album series truly begin. After his planet's star gets destroyed, -LightningPig is forced out of his home planet and into a floating escape pod that will drift through the universe until someone rescues him. He is there with his laptop, his mom, and unfortunately not his dad. He didn't make it. Which really sucks especially when you're gonna be drifting through space with nothing to do for... who knows how long.
and that's about where ALTRD LYF ends...
... and where the next album, AFTR LYF, begins.
coming late 2025 I think