patrickthoffman.com / exploration
A shared fiction universe where beliefs are running programs, every mind executes code it cannot see, and the closest thing to freedom is the ability to watch the algorithm run.
The Premise
In the near-future world of Executable Minds, the dominant scientific paradigm is algorithmic memetics. Every culturally transmitted system of ideas is a memeplex: a running program that processes information, applies evaluative weights, and produces behavioral outputs. It does not sit in memory. It runs.
Two people watching the same event will perceive different realities — not because they disagree, but because their cognitive architectures are generating different outputs from identical inputs. Neither person experiences themselves as running a program. Both experience themselves as seeing reality clearly.
The Timeline
The Executable Minds canon spans from present-day Paris to near-future Hong Kong — each story a different lens on the same set of rules about how minds work. The stories can be read in any order, but here is the chronological arc.
Paris — Aubervilliers, Pantin, Saint-Denis
Three kitchen workers converge along Boulevard de la Chapelle. Same sleeping man, same police check, same phone screen — three different cities. The world-building rules operating in pure contemporary realism, without any futuristic technology. Just the code that's already running.
Pacifica & San Francisco, California
A Saturday with two old friends — one who builds optimization systems and one who sees the machinery in everything. Naia introduces Sam to algorithmic memetics on a bench above the Pacific. The origin story for the characters who will shape the Reunion decades later.
New York City
Two women who have known each other since age eight discover that the gap between them is structural, not personal. Danielle Cortez leaves finance to co-found Second Skin — the biometric textile company that will still be dressing people fifty-five years later.
Kwun Tong, Hong Kong
Eight-year-old Kip comes home from school carrying a wound. One evening, told through five parents who each process the same crisis through a different cognitive architecture — and a child who hears every frequency at once.
Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong
Thirty years later. Kip turns thirty. Dai is dead. The story-worlds of Garment District and Weight of Seeing physically meet when strangers arrive carrying their own histories — and on a balcony above the harbor, two of them discover the wrong question.
Explore
The cross-disciplinary research paper that serves as the scientific foundation — a formal reframing of the memeplex as an algorithm, developed through five disciplinary lenses.
FoundationFourteen sections of binding worldbuilding law derived from the research paper — the transfer function, perception, self-repair, transmission, media ecology, polarization, and the transparency problem.
Story · ParisThree kitchen workers pass the same sleeping man, the same police check, the same phone screen — and see three different cities. The world-building rules in pure contemporary realism.
Story · PacificaThe origin story of Naia and Sam — two friends who spend a day together and discover that the distance between them is not a misunderstanding but an architecture.
Story · New York 2043Two women running incompatible code. A fashion show becomes the fault line between a designer's way of seeing and an engineer's way of building.
Story · Hong Kong ~2068One evening, told through five parents. One child at the kitchen table hears every frequency at once.
Story · Hong Kong 2098Kip turns thirty. Dai is dead. Strangers arrive. On a balcony above the harbor, two of them discover that the question they've been asking was the wrong question.
Sixteen FrequenciesEvery character is tuned to a different frequency. From Nour's discipline to Naia's systems to Mo's exits to Clémence's seams — sixteen ways of processing the same world.
"The algorithm runs. Your characters live inside it. Tell us what that feels like."
— Executable Minds World-Building Bible