>Cyberpunk setting has a "totally not a god" figure

>>51108208
Being all-knowing, all-powerful, all-anything, are not requirements to being called a god, being worshiped as a god, being thought off as a god, etc. What you have here is a god that thinks it can stamp out the human need to call out or be in awe of something they think greater than them. It *will* be worshiped, if for no other reason that it exists, is powerful/knowledgeable and has regular contact with us.

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>>51108301
ok, so worship is tolerated. Not encouraged but after a while trying to stamp faith out to no avail there's no longer an active effort against it. I want to avoid the "demon/evil deity is subverting people's faith to nefarious ends" so simply dealing with the reality of faith seems like a reasonable middle ground

>>51108208
>>The average citizen has a home, of sorts, enough clothing and regular meals provided by the goverment. Some education as well
Fuck off commie.

>>51108880
Have it remain indifferent to the worship and religions. The people of this world will create/make up/righteously believe/condemn/etc as they always have. It concerns itself with periodically "inspiring"(which will be what attracts the most attention, religious or otherwise) and whatever else it wants to do and people are left to their own devices. They may not even worship it as one entity.

The grain of truth in all this would be the 'mad souls' and everything that is built/believed/interpreted from that, every atrocity and good deed is wholly man-made.

>>51109083
>>51108880
>>51108301

Look, if you want this whole pseudo-but-really, then you replace prayer with "appeals to logic". People will still "pray" to the not-god, but instead of just random wishes and declarations of passion, all that energy is spent on trying to convince the not-god that it's a good idea to do what the supplicant wants.

99% of the time they're ignored, but the 1% that the not-god sees as a 'good' idea or an idea that does no harm but was in a good enough 1000101010101 mood to agree with the supplicant will have the same power as a prayer heard in other settings.

You can have people appeal-pray for something as simple as "I'd like to have double rations because I'll be taking an extra long walk tomorrow" or whatever, or have people who spend years studying up logic and law to prepare to ask the not-god for something and hope that the thing sees it their way.

>>51109083
Oh yeah, there is zero moralising here. It may have provided the spark, the proof that you in fact can build a city the size of a planet, eradicate the atmosphere and defile the human form. But these are a holdover from the early days- something that has become a tradition wherein the gift is given and mankind does as it will.

Every 200 years visions spike and become coherent. Culture has grown out of this and enables the hodgepodge of tech as every thinker on the planet sets about attempting to reverse engineer the new information. Old law dictates that patent rights go to whoever can produce -something- with the gift, and as a result instead of taking the time to fully explore and understand new things the scientific community figures all of one thing out and then drops it for a while. The latest gift was an increased understanding of space and dimensions- how to manipulate them. The breakthrough that won?

Near-infinite physical storage. Flat panels connected to a compressed space, sci-fi bags of holding. This technology could do so much more but since one corporate think-tank worked out how to use it first they get to demand unreasonable patent fees and strangle any further research into -their- technology.

Without taking a side this world represents what happens when science, knowledge and technology are removed from any and all restraint

>>51109198
To take this idea in a slightly different direction allow me to introduce you to KRENN.

Named for the five minds who first developed it back when there was still soil KRENN was a singular leap for its time, a functional quantum computer. Intended to solve the titanic mess of maintenance and control needed for a united city-planet that was starting to form even then the system's only drawback at the time was its creators weren't exactly sure how to make it -do- anything. They had a staggering amount of computing power but no real notion how to make it all work. So they went with the next best thing to knowing themselves, building something that could approximate the job

The scientists had themselves hard-wired into the system, giving the system a human edge as it where. Unfortunately this was before A.I had taken off and interfacing with machines was almost exclusively done in meatspace. The process -did- work, it just also drove the slaved humans insane, holding fast to the information processing and abstract thinking ability's while allowing the rest to languish.

In spite of this (nobody had a better idea at the time) KRENN was installed as near to the planet's core as could be done. There in a super-fortified bunker fed power from geothermic taps the system would look after power, water and other systems that generally demanded man hours to accomplish. It worked, and so long as you where willing to ignore the odd "glitch" in the internet everything worked.

fast forward a few hundred years and KRENN is still in use. Massively overloaded and taxed to its limit this proto-ai still requires hardwrired humans to function, the strain tends to quickly destroy them and has long since aggravated the original problem. Computer networks connected to the official city grid are prone to sporadic malfunction and all manner of bizarre phenomena, most corporations choose to run their own, separate grids. But to the common man KRENN is a constant presence

>>51109459
So instead of having people pray to the not-god they could instead ask the incoherent, occasionally screaming A.I that runs the water, food delivery and most of their world.

finally this idea is more or less a total rip from the Hyron boss from Human revolution. I fell in love with the notion when I first came across it

>>51108208
I like it. Guess I'm a fedora-tipping atheist.

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>>51109459
Now this whole mess should have been overhauled a long time ago. But in typical human error nobody wanted to spend the time, money and possible weeks of breaks in the universal controls it would take to replace KRENN with something newer. As a result by the time anybody worked out that it might be a problem, well- it was. KRENN is the only thing keeping most of the planet running, all the main hard-lines are either ancient or retrofitted to the system's specs. Now turning it off would more or less be the end of the world and short of building a whole bunch of smaller, new replacements and sloowly weening the system off there's no detaching the planet from its rambling A.I caretaker. Much like the golden throne the powers-that-be know there's a major problem and that, sooner or later it's going to explode in their face. But lacking a real solution everyone is more or less closing their eyes and ignoring it

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Now onto society. Work is the most desirable thing for the population because when every factory job is entirely automated and the overwhelming majority of positions -not- in the hands of literal robots the only people able to find a position are the ones with a skillset and a willingness to assist in productivity by being augmented to the nines.

Jimmy the aug engineer with bleeding-edge skills paid for by his rich teacher parents will loose a position to Jonny the similarly educated, because jonny is willing to let them augment him until he can work 30-hour shifts and do the work of three men. Jobs go to the post-human or, for a few speciality positions, the genetically flawless. Fashion agency's, gene-services and the like will only employ people born in the 0.1% of human perfection, or who where built that way from the ground up.

Now what all this means is that the bottom 90% of society has never seen a paycheck in their life while the remainder gets to actually enjoy the fruits of their nightmare utopia. This naturally creates a stranglehold on work, people who have jobs are expected to hold them until they die and if you don't like your job? tough luck- you could be replaced almost instantly and have next to no prospects. The upside? money is only really important to the people who have it.

Yes the under-class can't eat real food or watch TV unless they somehow pay for it, but the lack of money's not killing them and there is no real middle class. A "low" paying position will allow a person to own a real apartment, eat real food of above average quality and generally live comfortably with minimal financial concerns while the upper crust live in lavish decadence.

Corporate law, set down centuries ago to prevent stagnation and dynasty building forbids jobs passing down a family directly. A father cannot give his son his position. It must be earned.

>>51109909
I've never been 100% sure if the extreme disparity here is a good idea. I don't actively -need- a huge planet and a massive population. It's always just seemed like a good way to drive home what would happen when most work is automated and the option to be super picky is there.

Perhaps a smaller planet would work, less people while still showing that so many people actively cannot find work