About

Story

Poiesis: a pretension is a serialized work of digital fiction. The story begins in 2020 Toronto, just as the lockdowns force our protagonists to adopt a fully online life. By navigating the apps used by the characters, readers uncover instant messages, emails, threads, and group chat transcripts that unravel the story.

The scope of this story increases over time. We begin in the present, diverging from real history via a massive cyberattack against the Tokyo Olympics (no, not that one). For now, chapter "0: intro" is all that exists ("1: heist" is coming soon). But rest assured that, for us, "serialized" does not mean "meandering":

We do not believe in mystery box plots.

A detailed, large-scale outline of this story already exists, continues constantly evolving, and has definitive plot endpoints. To prove this, and as an experiment, spoilers may be acquired (at reader discretion) by joining our patreon. All new chapters will always be published freely and open-source, but supporters will receive extra content, optional spoilers, and priviledged access to the authors. Alternatively, you can buy us a coffee.


Tech

In a way, this is an old-fashioned website. It does not use UI frameworks, or even external dependencies. It does, however, make heavy use of javascript, so it is possible that you arrived at this page because you have blocked or disabled web scripts.

Allow us to set you at ease: at any point, any user can right click, inspect the source, and read exactly the javascript code that is running on this site. It is not minified, and is written to be human readable.

This website tracks no data about its users, and does not use cookies or external resources.