Qualia Pop
sref 4106542748 148282440 1456025709 4032873324 4157282216 38941867 272520544
In the Polychrome District, your red burns while my red soothes. Your sugar tastes like my salt. We point at the same sunset and see different views. When you and I say "blue," we mean fundamentally different things, always have, always will. Somehow we function. Traffic flows because we've agreed the top light means stop, whatever color that might be in your particular neural constellation. Love persists even if your embrace feels like sandpaper to me and silk to you. The whole district runs on manufactured consensus, because connection matters more than accuracy. So, we’ve stopped pretending we share reality and started sharing our realities instead. Yes, some try to bridge the gap through Qualia Parlors where you can borrow another's senses for a day, others undergo permanent neural swaps, trading their entire sensory reality for their partner's, but it doesn’t change who we really are. Our district's motto hangs carved in the central square, each citizen feeling different textures in the same letters: "Consensus is kindness." We know it's the only way to survive together.
WORLD ELEMENTS
Sensation Swapping: Permanent neural trades. Partners often swap to understand each other, only to find themselves more isolated in their new perceptions. Support groups for "swap regret" meet in sensory-neutral rooms.
Calibration Test: Monthly district-wide testing where everyone describes the sensation they experience from a specific tone played at noon. Results prove no two descriptions match, yet everyone jokes they got the 'most accurate' score. The distribution of results is used to calibrate the average of city-wide services: lights, alarms, schedules, etc.
Synthetic Prohibition: After the 'Inverse Incident' (when someone created anti-qualia that deleted sensations), synthetic experiences require permits. The district's Sensation Gardens grow legal synthetic qualia - colors that taste like memory, textures that hum with emotion.
Philosophical Zombie Paranoia: Some residents secretly fear others might be "qualia-empty,” going through motions without actually experiencing anything. You can't test if someone has inner experience. Neither can they test you. Support groups meet to reassure each other they're "really feeling."
The Subjective Dictionary: The district maintains an ever-expanding archive of sensory testimonies: 47,000 descriptions of "sunset orange," 89,000 definitions of "smooth," 12,000 accounts of "the smell of rain." No two entries match. Citizens can submit their personal definitions, creating a monument to humanity's beautiful range of realities.
LOCATIONS
Qualia Parlors: Cafes where baristas mix temporary sensory cocktails. You order "The Beethoven" to hear colors for an hour." The Garden" makes textures bloom with taste. Regulars develop tolerance, needing stronger doses. Back rooms offer illegal synthetic blends—dead people's last sensations, animal perceptions, nightmares.
The Portrait Quarter: Artists work in pairs—one paints what they see, partner paints what subject describes. The gap between paintings reveals the unbridgeable distance. Gallery walls lined with "translation failures," are beautiful in their impossibility. The most famous piece is titled "My Mother's Face": six portraits of the same woman, each unrecognizable to the others who love her.
The Neutral Room: Underground space painted in "absolute medium,” which is the statistical average of all submitted color descriptions. Everyone sees it differently but pretends it's gray. Used for treaty negotiations, divorce proceedings, and support groups.
The Perspective Institute: Research facility where the failed Universal Sensation Machine stands as a monument to the impossibility of shared reality. Scientists work in pairs, constantly translating. Their latest project uses Integrated Information Theory to calculate each citizen's Phi coefficient—a numerical measure of how differently they experience reality compared to the district baseline. High Phi scores (extreme divergence) qualify citizens for subsidized translation services. Low Phi scores (near-baseline perception) often spark existential crises: "If I feel what everyone feels, am I even real?" What's your Phi score? Have you checked, or are you afraid to know?
FACTIONS
Consensus Keepers: Enforce the consensus reality. They publish Standard Sensation Guides and arrest those who publicly refuse to translate their experience into common language. If you insist your sour is the only "sour,” they'll be at your door by morning. Tattoo: "Consensus is Kindness" on their bodies.
The Untranslated: Refuse to describe their sensations in words others use. Communicate through art, dance, calculated silence. Believe language itself corrupts pure experience. Their manifestos are wordless, painted in personal colors no one else can see. They attend Calibration Tests but submit blank forms, which counts as civil disobedience.
Serial Swappers: Trade sensations compulsively, never satisfied with their current reality. Form loose communities based on shared swap histories rather than shared experiences. Their meetings begin: "I've been seventeen people, and I still don't know who I am."
The Children of Drift: Kids raised knowing reality isn't shared have developed an entirely new culture. They speak in deliberate sensory confusion—saying "loud" when they mean "good," using wrong sense-words as in-group slang adults can't decode. Some attend underground schools taught in pure geometry and spatial language, learning to navigate the world without ever pretending to share it. Their parent generation sees them as either humanity's honest future or a generation permanently exiled from connection.
The Calibration Heretics: Claim the monthly Calibration Test is rigged, that authorities adjust "district average" scores to make citizens doubt their own perceptions and stay compliant. They publish counter-data, sabotage testing equipment, and preach that there IS one true reality and the government is hiding it. Most citizens think they're conspiracy theorists. Some are starting to wonder if they're right.
CHARACTERS
Mirror Twins Mari & Yuki: First documented case of "reflective qualia.” What's sweet to Mari is bitter to Yuki, her red is Yuki's green, in perfect inversion. The Institute study them obsessively. They finish each other's sentences despite experiencing opposite realities.Dr. Norm Spectre: Claims to experience the mathematical average of human sensation. The Institute also studies him obsessively. Either humanity's rosetta stone or its greatest liar.
The District Founder - Mx. Concord: Established Polychrome District after their child asked "How do you know your blue is my blue?" and they couldn't answer. Still alive, very old, claims to have "given up" their original qualia to experience the statistical average. Speaks in careful, neutral terms.
The Flavor Judge: Polychrome's only restaurant critic who admits they can't taste what you taste. Reviews meals based on the faces diners make, the sounds of satisfaction, the choreography of eating. Their reviews read like poetry: "The soup made three people close their eyes but one person flinch." Restaurants hire them specifically because their reviews never mention taste.
STORIES
Dictionary Proposal:
A dying linguist adds one final entry to the Subjective Dictionary before death—a secret definition visible only to those who "see the world the same way I do." Thousands check the entry. Everyone sees a different word except two strangers who see identical text. They've never met. They may be the only perceptual match in history or they're both hallucinating. The Institute wants to study them. The Calibration Heretics want to weaponize them as proof of objective reality. The strangers just want to know: If we matched on one word, what else do we share?The Inheritance Riddle: A wealthy resident dies, leaving everything to "whoever feels my true joy." The will includes a painted square and cryptic clues. Hundreds claim to see the "true" color, but the executor suspects the answer isn't about matching the deceased's qualia at all—it's about understanding something deeper about connection across impossible differences.
The Universal Sensation Machine 2.0: The Perspective Institute builds a new Universal Sensation Machine using an AI trained on the entire Subjective Dictionary, hoping it can finally translate between incompatible human experiences. It works flawlessly, or so we think. Find out if the AI is just a philosophical zombie—or if you are.
?
BIG QUESTIONS
If we can never verify shared experience, is empathy just elaborate guesswork?Can love exist between beings who literally perceive different realities?
Are we comforted or destroyed by accepting we're alone in our heads?
Is consensus reality a necessary lie or a beautiful gift we give each other?
Why does your red feel like anything at all instead of just being processed data?
How do you prove to me you're really experiencing anything, and not just “performing humanity?”
When you finally find the perfect word for what you're feeling, does it capture the experience? Or kill it by forcing it into someone else's shape?
CULTURAL REFERENCES
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974, Thomas Nagel) - Philosophical EssayThe Giver (1993, Lois Lowry) - Book
The Island of the Colorblind (1997, Oliver Sacks) - Book
Being John Malkovich (1999, Spike Jonze) - Film
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, Michel Gondry) - Film
Synecdoche, New York (2008, Charlie Kaufman) - Film
The Dress (2015) - Internet Meme
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022, Daniels) - Film
“67” (2025) - Internet Meme
PROMPT GUIDE
Main aesthetic (--sref 4106542748 148282440 1456025709 4032873324 4157282216 38941867 272520544): The main illustrated style comes from a blend of these seven sref codes. Core aesthetic uses no style weighting (--sw). Experiment with pasting the lore descriptions as the prompts.Personalization Codes: Use the Overall:--p okz8wvj and Illustrated: --p d8ar1zk codes for the illustrated style. Use the Photo code: --p eg1dl45 and “cinematic film photograph” to get the combination of photo and illustrated elements.
Alt srefs: Use different combinations of the seven srefs to get new variations of the aesthetic.
PROMPT ATOMS
Aesthetics: vibrant clashing colors, reality doodle, bold line art, sensory overflow, chromatic drift, gradient, synesthetic halos, impossible colors, artists, vibrant illustration, playful, reality doodleConcepts: subjective reality, qualia, consensus reality, philosophical zombies, radical empathy, synthetic experiences, peceptual drift, sensation swapping
Sensations: colors with taste, textures that hum emotion, sweet salt, burning blue, dissonant flavors, the taste of Tuesday
Locations/Objects: Qualia Parlors, sensory-neutral rooms, mismatched portraits, cocktail of memory, translation paintings, split-perception corridors, sensory gardens, research facility,