The basic idea is that, the setting is a vast cellular automaton with mathematical rules that perpetuate interesting constructions within it, and the characters/etc are groups of cells inside it. Complex bodies of cells that are capable of "thought" and produce meaningful output are "people"; bodies that are not self-aware or anything so robust but still exhibit complicated behaviors are "animals"; stable cellular oscillators that don't do anything besides exist are "environment".

I don't have any idea what sort of plot I would write; I just think it would be a somewhat-interesting setting as a thinly-veiled allegory for human society. Some potential items to incorporate would be:

Determinism (obviously), since for any given state of the system, there is only one possible "next frame"; this does not mean that the future of the system is predictable, because of chaos theory (and the mathematical rules aren't necessarily known either).

Religion/metaphysics; who or what made the rules and who or what implements them? Do the mathematical rules apply universally, to every cell in the system? How are the cells linked? How stable is their existance? Is the system self-contained? Does it have boundaries?

Death; when a body of cells reaches a stable state of nonexistence, it has no measurable form, but its influences on other bodies of cells persist and expand forever outward (again, due to chaos theory).

Determinism and related concepts were actually the inspiration for this whole thing, if it can even be called "inspired": the Earth wasn't formed by luck, it was an eventuality that at least one planet out of the practically-infinite universe would support sentient life; the rich white banker's son isn't "lucky" to have everything provided for, he's just the inevitability of the banker's want for children; the widespread starvation and such in Africa is sad, but not "unfortunate"; that's just how things happen and continue to happen, given how people function and give leaders the power to oppress everyone else around them.

Hah, listen to me, I sound like a first-year philosophy major, spouting all this bullshit. I'm not out of high school yet; maybe all this would be more refined if it were to come from a more matured and seasoned mind.

Anyway, I'm not a writer. I don't know my way around rhetoric; I only understand the syntax of English and am more adept at technical writing to the end of reducing ambiguity (ironic that I should favor archaic grammatical constructions, such as the omission of an expletive at the beginning of this parenthetic statement). I don't write, and I don't even read much, aside from patent documents, math textbooks and musical scores.

Hence, if anyone in Starbucks should happen to -not- think this is a worthless load of BS, they are free to use it in their own works. I won't even demand credit in the liner notes.