[center:3vty7kty]"Polly"
(oo)
llllllll
"A collection of semi-sentient impulses that can travel not only the synapses of nerves, but over cyberspace, as well." --Kurai[/center:3vty7kty]
What is Polly?
At its most straightforward, the 'polly' is a collection of electrical impulses. It comes into being probablistically, generated by some combination of radiation and meme density. There have been attempts to create pollies in controlled circumstances. As should become obvious, they are potentially very dangerous weapons. However, it is almost impossible to control these creatures, or to contain them.
Where is Polly found?
Teinar's wastes are home to several schools of conceptual octopi. The Teinari are the most familiar with pollies. It is, however, possible that they are ubiquitous to any area settled by sentient beings; however, outside of Teinar the vast majority of people consider them mythological or have simply never heard of them. They may ascribe the symptoms of polly attack to dementia.
Physical Description:
The polly is only corporeal when boundary conditions dictate corporeality. It can grow or shrink in weird tandem with perceptions of it. In short--it only exists as random electrical impulses determined by probability. When it latches on to prey, they often give it a shape and corporeal heft, but any non-sentient creature would think (if it could think) that all the sentient creatures struggling with conceptual octopi were delusional, fighting with nothing.
Is it real? Is it corporeal? Who knows--that's a question for epistemology, not taxonomy.
Behavior:
The conceptual octopus, is a primitive creature prey to primitive urges. It wants to feed most of the time. Of course, what it feeds on are memes, word games, narratives, dialectics--any form of communication. When it seizes its prey, it fights for the parts of the conceptual structure most full of the juicy meat of meaning. It seeks totalizing knowledge. When it gains in concepts, it grows. When it's thrown off the scent of unified ideological structures, it can shrink, grow confused, or even fragment, and if successfully fought off, will seem to disappear. If the prey can distract it with enough conflicting static, it can shake off the singleminded conceptual polypus.
If you catch a polly in a loop, you can get it to solve logical puzzles for you, but otherwise it's largely useless.
If a polly succeeds in feeding on a victim's conceptual structure, it may do two things.
1. Inhabit the victim. The victim will at that point appear insane, catatonic, or prey to memory loss. Conceptual octopi sometimes eat memories and sometimes leave them to propagate, so they'll have more food for the future.
2. Feed on the victim and depart. If the attack is mild, the victim may only appear dazed and suffer brief 'delusions' and memory loss. If the attack is severe, irreparable damage can be done to the victim's selfhood, causing lasting and irreparable dementia. Sense of self is the most delicious conceptual structure to the conceptual octopus, which itself has only the selfhood it can glean in this fashion (its nascence is probablistic and precarious).
Pollies behave the same way 'in person' and over any connective network. They will attempt to latch onto any source of theoretical unity, whether human or synthetic.
How to Defeat Polly: Cacophonous or non-unitary thoughts cause the conceptual octopus pain. Some hallucinogenic drugs can drive the creature away. Alternatively, it is possible to defeat a conceptual octopus before it attacks, using memetic weaponry. It is possible to contain pollies, in theory, inside of certain containers, but not enough research has yet been done on the matter.
