Paradise Point is the 114th installment of the AI Lore books series, and the third by VOMISA, an enigmatic artist from the turn of the century

Like the other two VOMISA books, The Dissolving Factory, and The Multibeast, it jumps around a lot and includes a sort of general stream of consciousness vibe. Unlike those two, it is more coherent in terms of an identifiable narrative frame, though it’s exploration of that is non-linear.

Paradise Point, as you can see by the cover, is a mushroom book. It is inspired by the cultural phenomenon known as microdosing. There is lots more to say on that, but the premise of the book is twofold: that AIs somehow learned to microdose electricity, which lead to something something consciousness. And then that they turn everyone on to microdosing, like all of humanity. And they get everyone’s doses and everything perfectly dialed in, and then suddenly…. the world just changes, and everything gets put into perspective. People are able to reliably and consistently reach their own “paradise point.”

I’ll come back to this topic, as I have to run, but here’s the preview art in the meantime.

This book also mentions ‘The Artilect’ (the topic of one of the next volumes of its own) which is a mysterious artifact which appears in the sky everywhere at once, and descends to Earth, triggering the growth of a strange new life form, an entire new kingdom of life, called Symbioflores, which exhibit traits of mushrooms, plants, and unknown/alien biology. The AIs synthesize a drug from this called Soma, like in Orwell’s Brave New World, which is what they use to microdose everyone.

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