The utility fog of war

I've brought up the subject of utility fog before, here, but not in the context of use in games.

A while back I was lucky enough to see some possible stats for an old school roleplaying game. But why is it not more widely used?

Have a read up on the potential - look at what it could do. Surely it would be come the default form of conflict and exploration? And general utility of course. Even in fantasy or a low-tech future, it could pop up as the tool of a higher power. Maybe it's what makes fantasy possible?

Players of Warhammer 40,000 might think immediately of chameleoline, a material allowing an assassin some degree of shapeshifting ability. There's a starting point. But AI would need to be high. And how would the material respond to weaponry? Could it defend itself in melee? The T1000 from Terminator 2 is another source of thinking. 

Would it even need to do a thing as primitive as fight?

What set me off was the idea of a nano-cloud disguised as a bucket seat, just one of the weird flashes of inspiration the four of us have had working on C'nor's spaceport table. Utility fog could really go to ground, and could even be the entire landscape.

Conflict as we know it could vanish; maybe it already has?

How would you represent it? Deeper: how would it represent you?
_

The true grid

DocStout reminds us over at What's Next? - The Unemployed Geek that yesterday was the 14th anniversary of the date that Skynet becomes self-aware in the Terminator timeline.

I feel a little propluristemic content coming on.

What's that then? An odd concept suitable for many systems and settings, even non-gaming fiction, with the rules only a general guide, to be adapted in advance or improvised on the spot.

- - - - - -

The true grid

The true grid is a hyper-sophont woven through many of the fabrics of the polycosmos. While its purposes may never be known and are rarely sensed, they are largely realised. It touches minds of all kinds and through them interferes at critical junctures to manage the probabilities of future outcomes, and the courses of times and spaces are changed.

Foliation

Another thoughtful post by Just_Me at Bell of Lost Souls, this time for ponderers of future warfare, high technology and transhumanism, here in the form of space marines.

Compare the Kuto Sebree of Riskail, even the T1000. How else does fiction do this?