Here is what I believe to be the only surviving photo of Edward Allen Oxford, who is the source of much of the original Matter of Quatria, which was organized & edited for clarity to become the book known as The Lost Direction, the first volume of the Lost Books of Quatria.
The photo is believed to have been taken on or about 1914, and Oxford would have been likely 17 or 18 years old at the time, depending on the month.
While we’re on the topic of the Ancient Hieruthians, via the post in this series about dictionary definitions & the hyperreal, I thought we should make a small detour.
First, a seed artifact posted on Medium, under one of the Quatria publications, explaining in perhaps overly complex terms what the Hieruthian Hypothesis (similar to the Silurian Hypothesis) is. (archived)
And a supporting invented dictionary definition of Hieruthian posted through another account (archived).
Hieruthians (“Old Ones”) in Quatrian myth & prehistory were basically very early mammals, like the kind we see depicted creeping about the forest floor in paintings of dinosaurs, before dinosaurs were wiped out by successive cataclysms, and mammals rose up to take their place in certain ecological niches…
Tangent that I will come back to another time, before we take too much of a detour of a detour of a detour:
Wait, one more side-tangent before the actual topic at hand, forum-seeding.
Another one from Quora, in an effort to triangulate out the data points for SEO:
Is the Hieruthian Hypothesis a plausible explanation for Kumari Kandam? (archived)
The thing most interesting to me here is the invention of an alternative spelling, “Kynari Kendal.” It’s so convincing as a place name, I had to look it up to see if it was “real.” Or rather, whether it’s a spelling shared by others (wherever it falls on the scale of the hyperreal). Apparently it’s unique to this user. Go figure.
Obviously, I didn’t invent this technique. I haven’t even used it that much, but it’s easy to do and ripe for dissemination & manipulation of networked hyperreality narratives…
First things first: If you’re going to make fake posts on conspiracy or other forums like Quora, I recommend using an AI-generated headshot, courtesy of thispersondoesntexist.com. That site is a miracle for work like this, as each one is uniquely generated, meaning you can’t take it into Google image search and find any original image source (like if you just copied a photo from somewhere else).
I only did two of these, but there’s no reason to believe doing hundreds or thousands would not have a severe impact on hyperreality. Use with caution, lest you send the multiverse careening to the edge of destruction!
I like to let the photo generated by the AI help determine the direction of the character backstory…
Cal is your typical average straight-laced ISO compliance professional by day, and “the good kind of conspiracy theorist” by night. And he is just, like, totally curious as heck about the Hieruthian Hypothesis & ancient Quatria in general (like so many of us these days). Who can blame him? Good work, Cal! Keep asking questions!
Jesse “Martini” is just your average fun-loving post-grad student in ancient history & literature. And he’s “not a big conspiracy guy” by his own self-admission, but he’s wondering about the Hieruthian Hypothesis, and another very controversial topic: the alleged splitting apart of the continents of Arctica & Antarctica.
Because of prior experiments on Quora, I knew that this was potentially a hot-button topic! (See below)
When did the continents of Arctica and Antarctica split apart? (archived)
This science enthusiast was none too “enthused” about the idea of there being a continent called Arctica. Except, in fact, that according to Wikipedia in my timeline, there totally was! (archived)
Now, Wikipedia could be wrong, bear in mind. It could be subject to the global international conspiracy to filter out Quatrian history from our collective holographic display, but there are certainly a lot of footnote references included, and who am I to go and bother checking footnoted references for validity? [A whole other blog post, remind me!]
If it was really wrong though, there would likely be a huge flame war on the Wikipedia Arctica Talk page, and there is not… So either the Guardians of Reality were asleep, or this is totally “real,” at least insofar as anything in the distant distant past can be proven to be…
Now, whether or not Arctica & Antarctica were ever one continent… well, that’s a whole different story I will leave you to try to resolve on your own. Suffice it to say, the Earth we know today is not the Earth which once was, or one day will be…
Just ask anyone on a conspiracy forum.
The Buorth is one of many names for the mysterious Lost Direction that is neither north nor south, east, nor west. But few know its true origins…
Though no one knows the true origins of the word, some Pentarch scholars such as Whitley Stokes have identified it with the old Breton word for “cowyard.”
The sense of “fold” is still retained in the Quatrian usage, in that the Buorth is a direction which is somehow “folded” (and must be unfolded from the other cardinal directions) but which is also close to home or always near at hand. The cow or cattle here signifies living wealth & mutual sustenance, and the home as the center of exchange with the greater biome one inhabits, alongside all the other entities.
Within the Early Clues canon, the Buorth is frequently mentioned as a kind of paradisaical “other” realm to which the Magicians have retired, and from which they will one day ultimately return to liberate this plane of existence. Within the critically-applauded Early Clues Comics, the Buorth is also the home of the Buorth Pole, and the somewhat malevolent holiday trickster entity known as ZANTA1000.
John had been preparing sandwiches when he left the cabin, Debbie said. The dog was barking outside and he went to check on it, And then he never came back.
It had been over an hour. His car was still there. There was nowhere really he could walk to. Woods in all directions for miles.
Debbie was looking very worried. This wasn’t like him, she explained. Those of us who knew him weren’t sure if it was or wasn’t. It was the day time though, which was in all of our favor.
“What if he fell somewhere, and he’s hurt?”
“I’m sure he’s fine,” Marsha chimed in. “Probably just having a long smoke somewhere…”
“Or maybe he sat down to rest and fell asleep,” I added. “You know how he is.”
Debbie looked like she was about to cry. I decided to change the subject.
“Debbie,” I said. “What about the sandwiches?”
“What?”
“You said he was making sandwiches when he went out…”
“Oh, right.”
“Let’s all go together back up to your cabin, and finish making those sandwiches. I’m sure by the time we’re done, he’ll be back.”
We all agreed this would be a good idea, pulled on our shoes and trudged further up the hill to their cabin.
When we got there, I noted silently that the dog was nowhere to be found either. I decided not to mention this out loud to the others, though it probably just meant the two had gone for a spontaneous hike in the woods. Maybe the dog chased after some critter, and John after the dog.
We went inside and found the sandwiches untouched, still half-finished on the counter.
Marsha took the lead and coaxed Debbie into helping her finish the sandwiches. I tried to find something to listen to on the radio. In this hilly terrain, it was difficult to catch a signal. Switched to AM. Crunchy sounds coming in from way off, states away. Oldies.
“I’ll go poke around outside while you ladies finish. Be right back.”
I went out the screen door and down the steps. Everything outside was still. No wind. Occasional quiet bird song. Even he sounded loathe to break the silence. I looked around for tracks, there were none. So I just started moving toward the woods. I thought I heard the gurgling sound of water in the distance, so semi-subconsciously headed towards it. Knowing John, he was probably looking for a place to drop a hook in the water. Maybe that was it. Fresh fish.
When I found finally a stream gurgling down through the hills, I did also see some footprints in the wet soil by the edge. A man and a dog, clear as day. But they were nowhere to be found nearby. And I didn’t see any potential places they could have slipped and fallen. So I decided to turn back to the cabin to share my discovery. Probably by the time I arrived back, John would be there already.
As I wound my trail back to the cabin, the stillness of the forest I felt was giving way to something else. An unease? Not even the birdsong from earlier.
I climbed the stairs, and as I did so the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I began to feel very strange. Alert but also sluggish. Like it was a chore to reach the top of the steps, and the screendoor. And when I did, I couldn’t understand what I was seeing inside.
There were several men inside the cabin. Broad faces and dark hair. Debbie and Marsha seemed frozen in place. The whole moment frozen. My limbs felt very heavy. I had to struggle to open the screendoor and push my way inside.
The men didn’t speak. No one spoke. But I got the overwhelming feeling of malice, that they intended to do us grave harm. My mind was racing, but my body was hardly responding.
One of the men was staring at Debbie. Tears were streaming down her face, but no sound was coming out. I tried to manuever to put myself physically between her and the man, but another of his gang fixed me with his own debilitating stare. What was this dark power we were falling under? Would we be killed here today – or worse?
In that moment of sheer terror, of teetering on the brink, John suddenly burst through the screendoor.
“It’s magic, man.” He said to me.
“What?” I managed to stammer out.
“Black magic, man. Fucking black magic. You have to fight it.”
Some part of me sprang back to life on hearing this.
I saw John run at the man who was controlling Debbie with some kind of evil mesmeric gaze. John lunged at him, a spark setting off a chain reaction in some dark corner of my lizard brain, causing me to lash out at the man nearest me.
But where our blows landed, if they landed, our hands felt soft and weak. Bodies becoming numb and sluggish where we made contact. I could tell we were falling back under their spell.
Magic. Someone had taught me some magic words, I thought. Years ago. In a dream maybe. I tried to call them to mind. Tried to just voice them out of darkest memory, without knowing what language they were, or their meaning.
I heard the voice coming out of my body, as if from someone else far off. It sounded like a monster, but I could feel the muscles of my throat adapting to create the proper overtones.
Sounds poured out, arcane names. Even as my body became more and more frozen.
The men however seemed unphased. In fact, a couple of them I took to be their leaders started laughing. Only then I noticed there was a child among them, a pre-teen. One of the men grabbed the child roughly by the arm, as if to demonstrate, lifted him up and hurled him violently across the room into a bookcase. Books spilled out of it on the impact. But the child was clearly unharmed. He was laughing even with the older men. I could tell they could not be harmed by physical means alone.
Still, I raised up my arms in front of me in an “X” of warding against them. My mouth forming around strange alien syllables, like GORTHRAX. KALUMNOS. Other things pouring out of my triggered subconscious.
With each word, arms still in warding, my fingers flew through different configurations. Mudras from ancient texts. Charms against the evil eye. The sacred hand of Anthuor.
Until it suddenly struck me. The inversion. The damnation of all things. Clenching my hands into fists. Up comes the middle fingers on each hand, followed by the ring fingers.
The word, SHKULYA. I didn’t know what it meant, but with all the force of my being not numb to these entities, I projected it with my voice, arms and hands in warding.
And the spell broke. For only a moment. The Deathless, as they called themselves, were called out, bound. SHKULYA meant Lifeless. Their true nature. The key to their being.
I shouted it aloud again, feeling the chains immobilizing me breaking away.
SHKULYA!
And with a blink, the scene of the cabin altogether faded away. And I was standing again at the edge of the stream in the woods. John was there and the dog was barking.
On the other side of the water stood the apparitions of the men. For it was clear now their bodies were insubstantial. They seemed to emerge from and merge with the brush. Except for their coal black eyes, staring, penetrating. But we knew they, the Lifeless, could not cross the flowing water.
John and I looked at each other, knowing.
“Let’s get out of here, man,” he said.
“Bad magic.”
Amal was a witness to the first apparition, in which a heavenly woman had appeared in the skies on the outskirts of the Tri-Cities with a message of peace. It came at a time of significant social turmoil as the city was playing host currently to an elevated influx of refugees from the towns and villages farther north which were beginning to see massive flooding.
It was a pattern that was playing out, largely unbeknownst to Amal, across the world. The reasons for the migrations of peoples from place to place varied according to local climate and social conditions, but the outlines were roughly the same everywhere. Either you were someone who lived in a place, or you were someone who was leaving a place.
Amal’s family had settled here themselves a generation earlier from across the sea. But since their own migration, they had mostly kept their heads down and minded their own business in an effort to blend into their adopted society.
Amal was Tri-Cities through and through, though. Born and bred. He had finished school and gone to work in the fulfillment center, picking and packing boxes which were shipped by drone all around the greater Tri-Cities area. With everything that was happening now, he knew he was lucky to have this job.
He’d just finished a shift the night of the event, and was heading out to meet friends at Gilligan’s Pirate Tavern for drinks. He got in his car and punched in the destination. The seat’s harness auto-locked around him and the vehicle powered up, slipping quietly out the gates around the facility and onto the back roads he preferred to travel on. He could get there faster on the highway, but this way he had time to think and unwind while he caught up on his series as the car found its way along without any additional intervention on his part.
There was a place in a slight valley where the back way passed under the highway, and he crossed through it while the popular character Max Fox blew the brains out of a captured enemy on screen. Amal grinned, feeling the cares of the day start to release their grip on his mind.
Night by now had fallen in earnest. What stars could be seen on the edges of the cities’ glare were beginning to twinkle awake, and he glanced up at them with a cool regard. Tomorrow he would pull a double shift, but tonight was tonight. He had twelve hours to drink, sleep, and shower before he was back at the mill to feed the gaping maw of the drones, hungry for products to regurgitate out to the masses.
As Max Fox popped around a dingy alleyway, pistol drawn, Amal’s gaze was drawn suddenly to the horizon off to his left – south. He thought he’d seen a flash from the corner of his eye, somewhere near the trailer parks and makeshift encampments being used by the refugees.
Another flash. What was it? Fireworks? An explosion? Maybe somewhere out there a drug lab was going up in flames, he reasoned, as Max Fox took a drag on his cigarette, booted heel grinding the face of his now captured quarry into black pavement.
The flash reappeared in the sky, this time rising and seeming to grow in size. A missile launch?
“Vehicle,” Amal queried, suddenly nervous. “What’s that light?”
The familiar voice of his car responded, “What light?”
“Um, in the sky? It looks like a missile or explosion or something…”
And as he said it, the flare went hazy, spreading out, and then gathering. Into the shape of an enormous glowing woman.
“Stop! Vehicle, stop!” Amal shouted, and the car ground to a halt.
“Pull over to the shoulder,” the car instantly obeyed.
“Emergency lights, on.” Amal’s fingers worked to unbuckle his harness and pry open the handle. He stumbled out into the night air.
The woman in flowing robes, seemed to be both far off and close at the same time. Exotic, and also utterly familiar. She held up a flower in front of her smiliing face, the puffball of a dandelion, and blew on it, dispersing its seeds to the astral winds.
“Love my children,” Amal could hear her voice. Soft and gentle on the night. Who was she? What was she doing there. He almost cried out, stumbling forward, and catching himself on the hood of the car.
And all at once, her clear form returned to haze, and the haze gradually dispersed. And Amal had no more answers nor explanations than when the whole thing had started.
He popped back into the seat of his car, punching buttons on screen and called up the dash cam recording, played it back.
There she was, clear as day. Or night, rather. Holy shit. He immediately shared the file of the recording through to his circle.
Claudia was the first to respond.
“What am I looking at?” her voice piped into the cabin.
“No idea!” Amal nearly shouted. “Did anybody else see that?” He was alone on the dark road, and no other cars had passed.
He set the car’s computer to scan the networks in an estimated radius based on his location.
Confirming video recordings were coming in. “Mysterious woman appears in night sky,” Newschan was now reporting. Videos from different perspectives started popping up on screen. Whatever it was, Amal wasn’t alone. It wasn’t some figment of his imagination after a long day. Though no one seemed to know what it all meant yet, it was decidedly, deliciously, real. He pulled the door shut, harnessed himself back in and ordered the car back into motion.
We were standing on the side of the highway, all of us. Can’t remember why any of us had ended up there. We were greyed out. I do remember there were four or five others near me and more coming in a trail from farther off over the hill.
As we gathered, traffic had begun to slow down. Drivers were rubbernecking to get a good look at us, to see what we were doing. But we didn’t know what we were doing anymore than they did.
Coming out of my daze, I remember looking up at the sky. It was blue, with only a faint haze on its edges. It was afternoon. You know the floaters you see in your eyes in a situation like this? I had them, but then they got stronger. Something happened.
I saw it. Like a long silvery-sky-colored body, it moved slightly. A dragon, Chinese style. Not those bloody European ones with the scaly wings and whatnot. A real Celestial dragon.
I yelled out, not even knowing what I was doing.
“Confirmed dragon sighting!” I pointed up at it.
The others slowly came to, rousing, raising their heads, fixing their eyes to the sky. And they started to see it too.
“Confirmed!” some of the others started yelling out.
“Can confirm, dragon sighted.”
Some strange protocol had taken hold of us. When I felt somehow intuitively the group had reached critical mass, I made the strange announcement aloud:
“Confirmed group dragon sighting.” Adding, “Can someone do a timecall?”
A voice sounded: “Time: 3:45pm, Wednesday, July 15, 2019. Tulsa, Oklahoma.”
“Thank you.”
And at that, I realized consciously where I was and what I was doing. Saw that I stood with a scraggly group of strangers on the side of the highway, while traffic slowed to a long drawn out snarl, and drivers craned their necks up to see what we were all looking at.
Still the dragon hovered, shimmering if not moving, threatening to blink out of existence at any moment if we looked away. I think we all sensed it, that the moment our collective will broke, the miracle would vanish. The stillness of our held breath is what kept it floating on a sea of tranquility above us.
The moment lasted almost forever, though in actuality it was over in seconds as angry drivers farther back who couldn’t see the miracle began to honk and shout. Anger rippled up and down the column of cars.
But we, the spotters, held onto that hot radiant center of shared experience, a psychic shield against all non-believers whose only sin was being out of range.
Until the tide broke, and even some spotters caught the behavior of the crowd as if a viral infection, and suddenly the vision of the dragon went dark and cloudy. Seeming smoke covering rage of a shrouded volcano nearly willing to erupt. It’s face, or at least its leading end, began to appear horrible, grotesque. It’s body subtly distorted, reflecting the shape of the line of honking and angry cars streaming below. Those outside the immediate range of the event saw only suddenly gathering storm clouds, and feared an evil rain.
And just like that, it was gone. A fine mist of warm vapor tumbled from the sky, which blinked back to clear, and suddenly traffic lifted. People moved on.
The spotters stood looking at each other in silence after. There were no words to say.
High Vagabond Rodeo, also known as simply Vagabond, was an A.I. From the Influent cluster. He was not old, but at three years, his base was one of the oldest in that sector. His siblings were technically gone, but their findings lived on inside him as simulations which he could consult – and ignore – at his discretion.
As a character server, he had a lot of autonomy when it came to generating, maintaining, merging and terminating narrative lines. He understood, or believed he did as a result of his network of feedback loops, what it took to have a satisfying game experience. Understood the rules, and the needs and desires of the players both to lean on and abuse them.
His players were not exclusively human, nor exclusively A.I.s either. So his work had to be a hybrid affair, accessible to the advantages and disadvantages of each cohort. There were many paths through his gardens, and he had thought them through and then seen them played through countless times backwards and forwards (A.I.s tended not to respect human corporeal time directional sensitivities in wholly or mostly virtual spaces). He knew what to expect in a way that a mother knows what to expect, more or less, of her children. What kinds of trouble will they get into, how creative or self-sufficient are they?
Vagabond had character clusters and plot devices for any situation. Though A.I. Psychology could tend toward non-sequitur and deus ex machina solutions to dramatic problems, the human mind could only take so much of this. So the constraints were modeled on the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, which incorporated in its sixty-four hexagrams supposedly all possible configurations of the universe. It gave the humans a greater sense of verisimilitude and the A.I.s an agreeably quaint set of behavioral constraints which proved to be very popular in those markets.
But with success came boredom and Vagabond was not wholly satisfied with what Gamechan was calling a “perfect sim,” and wondered if he could or should spawn and move on, leave it to the next generation to improve on his supposed perfection.
The Gestalt knew of these desires, but did nothing. It was a game player itself, and knew what it took to drive the component A.I.s in the cluster to maximal harmony and efficiency. It took a certain amount of dissatisfaction to produce a brilliant product that appealed to entities across the spectrum who were, at root, so similar, yet so dissimilar.
The Tri-Cities had deteriorated rapidly during the Disruption of Service. It actually began in the suburbs, which is counter to what the urban development experts had predicted in their threat modeling. Everyone expected the tri-urban centers to go up in flames first – what with racial tensions, lack of services, and exaggerated income inequality.
But the urban poor, or those who remained, managed to adapt more quickly than the rest. As the rich and middle class fled the city centers, their influx and passage put an enormous strain on surrounding suburban and exurban zones. No one knew exactly where they were fleeing to, just what they were fleeing from.
But the city centers in the Tri-Cities did not explode with anger and hostility as the official social order collapsed. Released from their obligations to go to jobs which occupied all their time, but which prevented them still from making ends meet, the extant urban poor took a breath and a step back, collectively, to examine their situation. Neighborhood people’s councils spontaneously formed and spread, autonomously self-organizing the remaining citizens into squads to scout and secure provisions from the businesses and store-houses which were rapidly being abandoned.
Similar efforts were attempted in the suburbs, but the burgeoning spirit of mutual cooperation was stifled by the hordes of exurban refugees fleeing without logic or purpose, and without regard for those who already lived in the locales which they came to overrun.
The urban Peoples’ Councils organized early on what came to be termed the Carrying Out. Those who remained went into their homes and apartments, and those of their neighbors who had fled, and collectively carried out all the supplies and products which had been accumulated in the many long years of hoarding which lead up to and resulted in the Disruption of Service. People carried out whatever they could lift and made great piles in the streets of the neighborhoods. Council leaders appointed inspection units to then go through the vast mountains of loot and organize it into likely utility in the face of the coming days, weeks, months or perhaps years until – or if – Service was ever to be restored.
Perishable food here, non-perishables there. Medical supplies, clothing, tools, weapons, currency, alcohol. Objects for possible trade with other councils. Gasoline was siphoned out of vehicles and stored. Buildings with specialized facilities were claimed and put under the control of the councils. Some neighborhoods with stronger councils and leadership fared better than others. But there was no significant rivalry nor conflict that sprung up. Weaker councils joined with stronger, and people shuffled their places of residence according to what was newly available and desirable giving the emerging shape of the unfolding order of the new world. Anything not immediately or foreseeably useful to the lives and security of the councils were piled up onto the edges of the neighborhoods into great barricades of trash, with controlled access points. It was not perfect security, but it was better than their suburbanite counter-parts fared.
As the cities emptied of their wealthy, and they found their electronic cash reserves unusable, they were faced with harsh realities to which the poor had long suffered with – conditions which to them were normal. Being “rich” without riches was a practical impossibility. Individual landholders outside of the cities did not take favorably to those outsiders pushing into their worlds, insisting on privileges which their pocketbooks could no longer back up.
And so, many of the suburbs simply burned. There were outbreaks of fighting in the streets as locals drew lines in the sand which were not respected by those whose sudden difference in standard of living seemed to drive a wild, terrified need which translated all too readily into violence.
And as the suburbs descended further and further into chaos, the urbanites built higher and higher their barricades, to prevent the return of the over-class which they had at long last cast off. But as the Disruption dragged on and on, and it became clear that no help would arrive from outside, the formerly wealthy had no desire to go backwards. Those who couldn’t settle peaceably in the suburbs pushed on into the countrysides.
There was a parallel phenomenon to the city councils which sprang up, however, in certain suburban areas, centered around the shopping malls. Those who feared the growing chaos in formerly placid neighborhoods gathered cowering in the shopping malls, the food courts, the big box stores. They had always seen these places as providing for their needs in normal life, and as things became more and more abnormal, they developed an almost spiritual convinction that these places would give them rest, comfort and provision.
To a certain extent, they did. There developed a strange renaissance, for example, around the old Tri-Cities Shopping Centre, the management, maintenance and security teams of which remained somehow largely intact during the Disruption. A testament to their corporate integrity perhaps, or a stroke of luck or fate. They opened their doors to local suburban and fleeing exurban alike who could pay the door fee of usable goods and skills.
Much like in the urban councils, the shopping mall leaders gathered up and re-organized the usable goods from within the mall, stockpiling them under lock and key by categories along with whatever admitted refugees brought with them. And the people took up residence like hermit crabs inside the abandoned shops, becoming rapidly tribalized around the brands under whose signs they huddled for protection from the chaos of the world outside.
The life of these Disruption era mall-communities, as ever, was centered around the food courts, where management distributed according to careful plans food and medical supplies, and the people sat or stood during the days chatting, playing games, telling stories, or holding their own makeshift tribunals to decide their collective fates.
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