Detailed digital painting of an astronaut operating a futuristic quantum computer console inside a crowded sci-fi bar filled with diverse alien creatures.

Strange visitors had been appearing at the PACE Bar for weeks. At first, nobody paid much attention since the bar had always been a place for creatures of every imaginable shape, origin, distortion, and degree of weirdness. But the newcomers stood out in a different way. While they looked different, arrived in different spaceships and wore slightly different outfits, yet somehow they seemed to share the same thoughts. Their minds had been swallowed by a swampy hivemind, leaving only tiny corners of individuality behind. Soon, there was hardly a corner that remained unseen or unpredictable. One clever traveller came up with a plan and tapped into the randomness that is buried deep down in his quantum state. He began doing things that made no sense, moving unpredictably by hooking up his movement neurons to an old malfunctioning navigation computer he found in a corner of the bar and letting his decision be driven by the amplitude of randomly chosen frequencies recorded on a distant planet. Others followed. In an attempt to blend in, the hivemind instructed its followers to behave randomly too - but the moment randomness became a rule, it lost control. One by one, the possessed began making their own unpredictable decisions, until the hivemind lost its last host and with it ceased existing. By the end of the night, the PACE Bar had become completely unpredictable. No two beings moved alike, no conversation followed a sensible path, and nobody knew what would happen next. From Mehr sehen