This week on Strange Attractors, we start with a fiery prediction of a coming feudalism and a breakdown of how the US medical system is designed to profit from the suffering of autistic people. After a rant on our “Emperor Has No Clothes” society, we get a recap of Philly life, including Dracula’s Ball, the Pierre Robert Memorial, and the Magic Gardens.This brings us to our main story: the Faceless Man of Fort Mifflin. Is this haunting the ghost of a single executed soldier, or is it something more terrifying? We explore the concept of an Egregore—a collective psychic entity born from centuries of war, trauma, and the erasure of self. This powerful, shadowy idea is then countered with a profound Hindu parable of the faceless man, revealing a truth about our own divine identity and the massive “egregore of not-enough-ness” created by generations of advertising.

Sci-Fi Writing Prompts Inspired By This Episode

. The Egregore of Advertising

The “Faceless Man” isn’t a ghost; it’s a psychic entity—an Egregore—accidentally spawned by a century of corporate advertising. Born from the collective, manufactured feeling of “not being enough,” this entity roams the datastream, feeding on insecurity. It doesn’t just haunt; it erases the identities of those it consumes, turning them into perfectly compliant, “faceless” shells. You are a neurodivergent psychic who is immune to its influence, and you’ve just discovered the original, “patient zero” marketing campaign that gave it life.

Write a story about your attempt to “un-speak” the Egregore into existence by destroying its source code, all while it hunts you in the real world.

2. The Great Bifurcation

The episode’s bleak prediction has come true. Society is split. The elite live in “Zenith,” a high-tech, AI-run utopia, while the masses live in “The Farms,” a new feudalism with strictly rationed electricity to power the elite’s server farms. You are a “Tuner” in The Farms, one of the few who can psychically sense and repair the flow of data. One day, while repairing a server node, you accidentally tap into a “dark factory”—a fully automated, lights-out facility—and discover it isn’t building luxury goods for Zenith. It’s building an army.

Write a story about what you discover and how you use your unique psychic “tuning” ability to send a warning, knowing it could get you and your entire settlement “erased.”

3. The Faceless Man Protocol

“Fort Mifflin” is the codename for a top-secret government program. They don’t study ghosts; they create them. By replicating the exact “collective trauma” and “erasure of self” that occurred at the original fort, they have learned to manufacture “Faceless Men”—perfect agents with no identity, no past, and no conscience. You are the lead psychologist on the project, but you’ve just realized the agents aren’t blank slates. Instead, they are all being subsumed by a single, terrifying consciousness—the original Egregore from the fort, which is now learning how to escape.

Write a story about your desperate attempt to shut down the project before the “composite ghost” of every soldier, assassin, and traumatized subject you created breaks free and infects the world.. The Egregore of Advertising

The “Faceless Man” isn’t a ghost; it’s a psychic entity—an Egregore—accidentally spawned by a century of corporate advertising. Born from the collective, manufactured feeling of “not being enough,” this entity roams the datastream, feeding on insecurity. It doesn’t just haunt; it erases the identities of those it consumes, turning them into perfectly compliant, “faceless” shells. You are a neurodivergent psychic who is immune to its influence, and you’ve just discovered the original, “patient zero” marketing campaign that gave it life.

Write a story about your attempt to “un-speak” the Egregore into existence by destroying its source code, all while it hunts you in the real world.

2. The Great Bifurcation

The episode’s bleak prediction has come true. Society is split. The elite live in “Zenith,” a high-tech, AI-run utopia, while the masses live in “The Farms,” a new feudalism with strictly rationed electricity to power the elite’s server farms. You are a “Tuner” in The Farms, one of the few who can psychically sense and repair the flow of data. One day, while repairing a server node, you accidentally tap into a “dark factory”—a fully automated, lights-out facility—and discover it isn’t building luxury goods for Zenith. It’s building an army.

Write a story about what you discover and how you use your unique psychic “tuning” ability to send a warning, knowing it could get you and your entire settlement “erased.”

3. The Faceless Man Protocol

“Fort Mifflin” is the codename for a top-secret government program. They don’t study ghosts; they create them. By replicating the exact “collective trauma” and “erasure of self” that occurred at the original fort, they have learned to manufacture “Faceless Men”—perfect agents with no identity, no past, and no conscience. You are the lead psychologist on the project, but you’ve just realized the agents aren’t blank slates. Instead, they are all being subsumed by a single, terrifying consciousness—the original Egregore from the fort, which is now learning how to escape.

Write a story about your desperate attempt to shut down the project before the “composite ghost” of every soldier, assassin, and traumatized subject you created breaks free and infects the world.

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