Story by Paul Victor Tims (Copyright), who asserts the moral and legal right to be identified as the author of this work. Cover art made using AI.

This story takes place in the world of Knightshift, a short film that I’m working on and which will be released within the next two-three months. Stay tuned for more Knightshift lore ahead of the film.

You won’t believe me but, once, I saw a Centurion. It’s alright. I wouldn’t believe me either, not all the way out here on Valador, where the tallest towers don’t even break the cloud-layer, let alone the atmosphere. But you don’t have to believe me to listen, do you? And that’s all that I ask – for someone to listen, so as the story doesn’t just vanish into nothing. It means something to me, so listen close and let me speak, before the telling escapes me.

It was right after the Paraveciad Invasion and the Second Razing of Celadon – the creation of what we now call the Viridian Diaspora. The Supremacy was triumphant and there were parties in the street: bunting everywhere; music playing for days on end; someone had even put little party hats on the Memento Mori skulls built into the architecture. After twells of cowering in our homes and underground shelters, afraid of the Paraveciad and even more afraid of what the Supremacy would have to do to stop them, we craved the release of convivial debauch.

I was bringing wine to the Temple of Paladesh so the Shaman could join the carouse without abandoning his station. I rounded the base of the helix-tower abutting the temple and there he was, standing in front of the great darkwood doors, blood on the jointed knuckles of his gauntlets, totally impassive, noble of aspect – a real life Centurion of the Eternisium!

He wasn’t the Caligula-class armour, like you see in all the bas-reliefs and murals. A suit of Caligula Class is only for the highest-ranked Centurions: as much relic as practical battle-wear. No, this Centurion wore only Tiberius Class armour, all bulky pauldrons and gothic hydraulics, and believe you me, that was impressive enough for someone who’d never even seen a member of the Imperator species before!

For a long time, I just stared. Well, what could I say? What could I do?

It was the Centurion who spoke, eventually.

“Is that for the Shaman?”

I nodded mutely. Something about the tilt of the Centurion’s head suggested sympathy – pity, even – though his great, plumed helm kept his face in shadow. When he spoke next, I understood the reason for his pity.

“Your Shaman aided the Paraveciad.”

That explained why he was at the temple. And why his knuckles were slowly dripping crimson onto the cobbles.

I offered the wine and he thanked me with a low bow – a Centurion saw fit to thank me! Oh Cothronor, Paladesh and Ogon – I thought I’d faint!

I’m an old man now, dying of the poisons the Supremacy had to unleash to stop the Paraveciad invaders, but I can pass on content, knowing the Mythons didn’t stiff me. Because once, I saw a Centurion.

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A little while ago, the wonderful and incomparable suggested that I write something based on his Third Face Universe story, about a disease that allows humanity to see through block-time into the past and future. I’ve been wrapped up in other projects, but it’s finally time to post the result to Substack! Our tale concerns five of the most mentally unhinged scientists the U.N. could find at short notice seeking a cure for the time-warping disease (now called Vonnegut’s Syndrome), while encountering alien races, surviving infections themselves and arguing the toss about which m&m spokescandy they’d most like to go to bed with. If that sounds like your type of thing, download the PDF below and discover The Last Secret!

Important disclaimer: although The Last Secret was originally written as a kind of pseudo-sequel to James Luo’s story, it is NOT canonical to his universe and should be treated as off-beat fan-fiction or a ‘based on’ story, set in a similar but distinct reality.

The Last Secret By Paul Victor Tims

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If you read and enjoyed this story, consider subscribing. A free subscription gives you access to all my short fiction, novellas, essays and articles. A paid subscription will also get you access to full-length novels, posted monthly, from the ol’ back-catalogue. Not as rude as it sounds.

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Stories by Paul Victor Tims (Copyright) who asserts the moral and legal right to be identified as the author of these works. Cover image created using AI.

THE ABYSS
When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back and, sometimes, that staring becomes something more. Anyway, have you met my wife, The Howling Void of Meaninglessness at the Bottom of the Human Soul?

ABSURD
This just in: Albert Camus sued over rights to philosophical hypothesis! “He’s a fraud and I’m the real father of Absurdism,” claims Alphonse Campbell, a talking rainbow-coloured alligator in a jaunty little bowler hat and bow-tie.

DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED PART 1
You ask why I unleashed tidal wave of flesh-eating ants upon the world and my answer is simple – utilitarianism! We must seek the greatest good for the greatest number of sentient beings and, let’s be honest, there are an awful lot of flesh-eating ants!

DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED PART 2
You ask why I killed millions of innocents with a giant space laser and my answer is simple – Kantianism! Some things are always right, others are always wrong, and if space laser are wrong then I don’t want to be right!

YOUR BRAIN ON DESCARTES
Look, it’s fine: Descartes tells us that the mind is a non-physical substance unbound from the laws of ordinary matter and only related to the body via dualist interaction. Ergo, I should be able to trepan your skull and hide this big bag of drugs in your brain with no negative consequences whatsoever!

THE TROLLEY PROBLEM
Five weeping, grateful strangers thanked their saviour – the man who had diverted the trolley onto another track, killing one man to save their multiple lives. They didn’t see the hammer hidden behind his back; didn’t know that he hadn’t saved them forever, only saved them for last.

SHIPPING OUT
Look, Captain Theseus, I don’t care whether the ship will still be the same ship if we replace it piece by piece over a given period of time! I just wish you weren’t running this experiment in open waters during a bloody storm!

COLOUR THEORY
Mary had lived her entire life in black and white, studying colour while trapped in a black and white prison, but today was the day: the doors were opening and Mary was witnessing colour for the first time; learning something truly knew that she could never have known from pure, theoretical study. Mary, as it turned out, was colour-blind.

BUTTERFLY
The greatest thinker of his age, Zhuangzi, was hoping against hope that he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly and not the other way around. His learned colleague Confucius had just fetched the bug spray.

IMMOVABLE AND UNSTOPPABLE
So, er, guys – you know that experiment we ran yesterday where we introduced an unstoppable force to immovable object to make sure it wouldn’t end the universe at scale? Were we, er, expecting them the force and object to, um, enjoy it a bit too much?

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Story by Paul Victor Tims (Copyright), who asserts the moral and legal right to be identified as the author of this work. Written in response to probably the worst book ever conceived or penned. ‘Cover Art’ made using AI with the maximum possible level of laziness and contempt.

Daggenham Gilt had been a fine, chiselled fellow once upon a time: a captain of industry built like an Olympian and possessed of the kind of rigid rational mind to which merely human concerns like uncertainty and emotional malaise were totally alien. Staggering through the barren, rocky mountains that had sheltered him and his friends for nearly fifteen years, he was almost unrecognisable: haggard; scrawny of limb; flabby where his stomach muscles had dissolved under malnutrition and ill-maintenance; wild-eyed; gibbering quietly to himself.

His failure – and the failure of those like him – had been absolute. What a lark it had been, to begin with, to cock a snook at the society that tried to fetter and control his obviously superior ilk! The workers kept striking for better wages, whining that they didn’t have enough money to live on or to feed their children. The governments had tried to limit genius with trifling regulations over safety, until a man couldn’t even use high explosives to reshape the landscape to his business’s needs! The courts had demanded he – him! Daggenham Gilt! – and his associates be held responsible for the deaths their products occasionally caused, as though they’d never even heard the phrase ‘buyer beware’! So, one night, Daggenham had proposed a strike of his own.

It had come to him at Bohemian Grove, this idea, somewhere between doing blow off a dead hooker’s arse and setting fire to a giant wicker owl. Surrounded by the world’s most powerful and influential men – billionaires all – he’d found himself saying “What if we quit? The world would fall apart without us!”

The idea had caught fire. Without the producers, the moguls, the men of purpose, the moochers and nimbys wouldn’t last five minutes. They could go and build a society of their own and, when they returned, the world would be ready to abandon its petty regulations and welcome back its natural leaders with open arms.

Except, of course, things hadn’t quite worked out that way.

Gilt stopped, leaning on a jagged rock, and spat out a tooth that had been loose and aching for three weeks. The toothpaste manufacturer (an aptly named Mr. Grinn), had made a fortune from new and innovative formulae and, for this reason, had been included in the conspiracy despite being a mere multi-millionaire, not billionaire. As it had transpired, however, those formulae had been the products of his employees – the eggheads in his lab – and the Mogul’s Strike had run out of toothpaste in Year 4. It hadn’t even been the first sign of trouble.

In truth, Gilt’s only consolation was the knowledge of how desperately he must be missed by the little people; the dependants. He was returning to a society in desperate need of organisation and leadership; a world that would welcome him back with open arms, having fallen into decay without exceptionalism and genius to guide it.

It had never occurred to Gilt that making his first billion in the petroleum market and parlaying this into a series of high-profit corporate raids did not, in fact, put him in the same company as Einstein and Shakespeare.

For hours more, he pushed his way through the mountains, at last coming to a region of scrubland peppered with hardy, twisting trees and wending rivulets that did little to moisten the cracked summer-surface of the ground.

Images flashed through his mind at irregular intervals – reflecting, perhaps, the propensity of his battered neurons to misfire. Here was Jepstone, silicone valley’s greatest intellectual asset, smashing a long-term rival’s head in with a jagged rock and eating what came out. Here was Kennice Cathedy, entertainment executive at one of the major Streamers, screaming and running for her life, her hair on fire as her theatrical understudy chased her with a pair of gardening shears. Here was political lobbyist, Slithe Rusewater, eating his own fingers one at a time – just sitting amid the ruins of utopia and biting them off, calmly and methodically; chewing; swallowing. Why hadn’t they left sooner? Why hadn’t they run when it grew obvious the wheels had come off?

Gilt had never read High-Rise by J.G. Ballard, so the answers contained therein remained obscure to him. Actually, it had been nearly thirty years since he’d read anything widely regarded as possessing literary or philosophical merit. Who needed that pretentious, elitist gunk?

He pushed on, though he fell several times. Yes, the experiment had failed. Their society, organised not merely around liberty but it’s perfect expression, had run afoul of bad actors and unforeseeable circumstances, but if the best and brightest minds in the world had had a rough go of it… well! Just imagine what the rest of human civilisation must have come to in their absence! He was needed! The world he’d left behind would be crying out for strong leadership and it was this thought that kept him going.

If memory served, the city he’d once called home lay just beyond the next, low hill. He’d be able to stand at the crest and look down on it, like… he searched for a simile. He also hadn’t read Thus Spake Zarathustra.

He fell once more, coughing up bile. By the time utopia came to an end, the few medicines left had been impossibly, riotously expensive. Yes, they’d all been billionaires upon founding their private(ised) kingdom, but that was the problem with everyone being a billionaire. Even before scarcity kicked in, they’d been living in a hastily-concocted recipe for runaway inflation. Gilt understood this perfectly in retrospect, but if someone had told him before the whole thing fell apart, he’d have made snoring noises and said something along the lines “Number go up, nerd!”, calling it a day at that.

Of what, precisely, was he dying?

He had no idea, but his innards felt like soup.

No matter. Soon enough, he’d be healed. The moochers and loafers of the world weren’t good for much, but a lot of them – guided by some loathsome, impractical virtue like ‘compassion’ – did seem to go into healthcare.

Gilt struggled to his feet – a man of will! A man of iron! – and stumbled up the hill.

He came to the crest, panting and triumphant in the ragged remains of his suit. And there he stopped, his face contorting with some emotion he was not, truthfully, equipped to process.

The city he’d left behind lay spread out before him and it was… beautiful. The ruin of his imagination was swept away by the grandeur of reality. Gone were the featureless glass and steel skyscrapers competing for height, replaced with structures of elegant marble and brass harking back to humanity’s finest aesthetic eras: here, an art deco train station; there a library in full medieval gothic; here a local government office in swirling baroque; there an art gallery in the Beaux Arts fashion. It was Atlantis before the seas rose; Troy before Achilles; the Emerald City of Oz, sans wizard.

Rail-lines ran through the pulsing, glittering conurbation and every train had about it the perfection of the Orient Express. The roads looked broader, though this was only because there was so little traffic on them. The people went about on foot or public transport or, just as often, reclined outside cafes and by fountains, reading, laughing and going nowhere.

Daggenham Gilt would never know the vast ideological shift that had precipitated this transformation. He would never learn of the Year of Chaos that had followed the sudden departure of the world’s grandest pieces of living infrastructure. He would never hear the recording of a formerly minor politician, elevated by crisis, summing up the world’s new direction with two words: “never again”. He would never understand the effort it had taken the nations of Earth to divorce themselves from the whims of capital and imagine new economies, nor comprehend the wave of long-suppressed creativity this had unleashed. The way in which the world had survived – thrived, even – in the absence of its businessmen, bankers, money-men and corporate giants would remain forever opaque to him.

Gilt would never achieve understanding because he died on the hill. It was as though Atlas finally let go of the sky and, discovering that it stayed up well enough on its own, keeled over in sheer, indignant shock.

His corpse would be eaten by wildlife, unlooked for, before any mortician had the chance to diagnose total cardiovascular failure.

The last of the billionaires died on a hill overlooking his home town and the society he had divorced so contemptuously did not even blink.

FUN FACTS

1. Bohemian Grove is a real retreat where the world’s richest pricks meet up annually, free from the public eye or oversight by a regulatory body. Ostensibly, it’s just a holiday, but it represents such a concentration of money and power that its total independence and intense secrecy are, at best, concerning. It was fully exposed to the public in the Year 2000 thanks to the efforts of investigative journalist Jon Ronson, who ‘infiltrated’ the event by putting on nice clothes and walking in like he had every right to be there. That this worked is further evidence, if any were needed, that the rich are often amazingly stupid. The ‘dead hooker’ line is ghoulish exaggeration, borrowing more from Epstein’s crimes than the real-life Grove. The bit where they have a creepy ceremony and set fire to a wicker owl is, however, 100% real.

2. Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged is well-known for being about billionaire industrialists ‘going on strike’ and leaving the world to fall into ruin because, according to Rand’s insane Objectivist ethos, the world couldn’t possibly function without these allegedly high-achieving individuals. Rand never had a good answer for the inescapable fact that most captains of industry don’t actually do anything and just monetise other peoples’ inventions and hardwork, making Shrugged one of the most philosophically risible books of all times. What you may not realise, however, is that it’s over a thousand pages long and a substantial part of that is just Rand obsessing over trains like she’s in an episode of Love on Spectrum. It’s a lot, even for someone like me, who is also autistic. Obviously, the above story chooses to respond to the philosophical thrust of Shrugged, not its intensely weird fixation on railways.

3. An alternative title for the above short story was Atlas Shat, just to rub salt in the wound. In the end, however, as funny as it was, it didn’t make enough internal sense to actually use.

4. I stole the name Daggenham from a secondary character in The Stars my Destination, which is a vastly better book than Atlas Shrugged and written (as a cheeky bonus) by someone who wasn’t a train-obsessed, pauper-hating maniac.

5. Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, which means it has been nearly 70 years… and Rand can still go fuck herself.

Story by Paul Victor Tims (Copyright) who asserts the moral and legal right to be identified as the author of this work.

A single, scintillating scintilla – sultry specimen of southerly social circumstance – sits a-step singing silent, cerebral sonatas. His sobriquet? Say… Sipher. This suits Sipher superlatively. Sickly, sulking, so-so Sipher stands slowly; saunters sun-ward, seceding his solemn stone shanty, seeking… something.

Sipher stops, smiling. Shops selling sweets solicit his scrutiny; solicitude; shillings. Sipher shoulders inside, spying sumptuous seductions of syrup. Circumstances straitened, Sipher’s skint; sallow; starving.

Some stranger’s sibilant speech surprises Sipher.

“This soothes, sonny. Suck it and see.”

A sapphire sweet, sigil stamped, sits shining. Sipher steals this succulence; sees its sigil; swallows.

Psychedelia simmers Sipher’s skin. Sweltering, schizophrenic senselessness sunders his spitting soul. Seventy sparkling, sensational shades splatter the sensorium: smaragdine, cerulean, saffron, citrine, sable, cinnabar, smalt, sanguineous, sarcoline! Spirits soar, sweeping skies simmering salaciously with shining shadows! Scarcely sweet this ‘sweet’; something surpassing strange and stranger still! Centuries circle Sipher – such soft, sensual centuries, sliding slyly by, sybaritic, splendid and spectacular. Soon they slither swifter, swifter, swifter, their speed sickening. Sweetness cedes to sad, scared suffering.

Sipher’s stranded; shunned; solitary.

Silence is sovereign.

Seas of soot swallow state and scenery. Spoilt slate skies saturate sunless soil with slick, suppurating substances. Spiteful sewage suffocates the seas.

Something stirs.

Sipher sits up; stares.

Shh! Something’s stirring! Something… new! Something… Not S.

Sipher hauls his lank frame upright, denuding himself of the remaining dregs of hallucination by sheer force of will. The world is gone and he does not know what happened. From poverty; to addiction; to this. Addled though he is, he can see that there are missing steps.

Yet… here is a chance for something different from before. Something new. A way of seeing that has never been tried before, without slavery to a single, defining letter. Yes. This will be new, and not nothing-new, but nearly numinous: a nectar of never-ending, nubile novelty. No nefarious negations knotting his nature. Nought but the night’s nexus of noble knowledge, never nullified nor neutralised by negative nemeses!

Nevermore!

Nevermore!

Never...more?

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Step right up, step right up! Just below the paywall, you will find wonders you can scarcely comprehend: spies cursed with unimaginable cosmic energies; space-truckers caught in the sadistic games of pan-galactic empires; sea mammals trying weed for the first time and getting absolutely blazed; Lovecraftian horrors clawing their way out of experimental teleport machines! Prepare for thrills, spills and chills in the long-awaited sequel to Agent of Nowhere! In this instalment, we join one Valec Blank, easy-going interstellar haulage technician, as he charts a course across the Tethan Worlds. His only goal is to deliver white goods to the far end of the galaxy, but when he’s interrupted by a teleporting Mermaid who’s mistaken him for a hero of legend, he finds himself a pawn in a clandestine game played for the highest stakes. The Tethan Unified Worlds are about to make contact with the greatest and most powerful civilisation in the known universe, the Zagatherian Monolect, and that can only end one way: a war of conquest nobody can afford! Behind the scenes, Ketarch Astropoles, (gentleman spy and part-time superbeing) is labouring tirelessly to stop the coming conflagration… but he’s starting to realise it may not be the universe’s biggest problem. It looks like the teleport technology used by a certain world-hopping Mermaid has been suborned by occult forces and now things that want peel mortals and drink their souls are slithering into a woefully unprepared universe. Can Valec, Ketarch and Ketarch’s increasingly unstable Vampire wife Eshlia work together long enough to stop a war and halt an incursion of eldritch abominations, or will two civilisations fall into eternal ruin and silence? The answer can be yours for the low, low price of a paid subscription, so upgrade today and dive into Black Sun Pilot!

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Once you’ve upgraded to a paid subscription, you’ll be able to see and download the PDF file below the paywall. If you don’t, no hard feelings: there’ll always be plenty of free short stories, novellas, essays and videos on this Stack, with new additions every week. For those of you who do choose a paid sub, you’re in for a real treat!

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Just a heads up, even though this is a ‘silent’ film — meaning it doesn’t use dialogue — and is broadly speaking a big, silly High Fantasy adventure, it’s still not exactly family friendly. There’s bloodshed, implied vampire naughtiness, tentacle-murder and a really surprising amount of cussing in the background music.

Enjoy!

Story by Paul Victor Tims (Copyright), who asserts the moral and legal to be identified as the author of this work. Cover image created with AI.

There were only three of us in the Revolution originally. First and foremost was Dorien La Saille: a posturing, Parisian poppinjay whose preening antics made him instinctually unpalatable, even to his most forgiving countrymen. He was, however, the undisputed mastermind of the group, able to think ahead and leverage our shared peculiarity in a way neither I nor Copel 7 could manage. Ah, Copel 7 – he was our second: durable, dependable and ethically flexible. His defining physical trait was a mouth as square and wide as a video-return slot – which suited him, considering his unrecalcitrant loathing of the digital aether. And there was I: a small, unremarkable man who joined the revolting underclass by an unhappy accident involving a substantive quantity of chemicals.

The logics that oppressed us were simple, clean and indefatigable. The reasoning went thus: life was precious because it ended; because it couldn’t last forever. Therefore, a life that didn’t end was not precious. It’s infinite extension made it a common commodity and one as worthless as dirt. Ergo, there was no evil in stripping an immortal of his rights and putting him to work on those jobs ordinary men could not survive.

Even in the short time since my inception into the unwilling brotherhood of eternal beings, I had been sent into the deepest, most unstable mines to drag coal from fetid, unbreathable tunnels; forced beneath the waves to fix leaking oil pipelines at crush-depth; required to gather magma samples from active volcanoes; been burned by radiation while doing reactor maintenance; and been used for ‘mine-sweeping’ in former war-zones. Dorien had had it worse. He’d been meat for the grinder of many active wars, unkillable but feeling every bullet and bomb-blast and cutlass through the innards. Copel 7, being a robot, had been destined for menial work even before the manufacturer’s figured out that his built-in obsolescence had gotten turned off.

And so, we were rebelling, gathered around our grubby little wooden table at the Immortal’s Bar (never a mortal bar, for segregation was vigorously enforced).

“For society to respect immortals, it must need immortals, no?” Dorien said, raising a prissy forefinger for attention.

“Society does need immortals,” Copel 7 observed. “We do its dirty work.”

“Non, mon ami,” Dorien shook his head. “If they didn’t have immortals, they would simply send the poor to do these jobs and let them die in their droves. They can dispense with us, should they need to, and they know it. We must be… indispensable.”

“And how do we accomplish that?” I asked.

“The item, Copel,” Dorien said to the battered, grey android, holding out his hand.

He was rewarded, at once, with a small vial of greenish-blue fluid.

“That goes in the water supply, doesn’t it?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Oui, Monsieur. Which means you will have to request what they call ‘drowning work’.” Dorien smiled. “You will have to request it in many reservoirs around the world, delivering samples hither, thither and yon. Tell the mortals that, of all the limited work available to eternal men, this is the task you can bear best. They will believe you.”

“And what, exactly, does this liquid do?”

Dorien told me, and I marvelled at the genius of it.

There were only three of us originally, but once I understood the plan, I became a recruiter. I whispered to every immortal I met – not because it was necessary for the strategy or because Dorien thought it would help, but because hope shared is hope doubled. And because I wished for an acceleration. Alone, it might take me a century to spike every reservoir on Earth. With help, it could be done in a decade.

Two hundred years have passed since then, of course. The spiking was done in record time, but we are immortals. We built in delays. We knew that the best way to avoid mortal safety measures was patience – to think on timescales longer than our oppressor’s analytical capabilities could compass.

And now, with the revolution in full swing, I am speaking to you to explain what we have done. Yes, mortal, to you. You whose boot has been on our necks since first our kind were discovered.

I like to imagine you watching this broadcast in a group, huddled around a damaged television set – one per village in this age of dwindled production. I like to imagine you wondering what crisis we have set in motion.

And the answer is ‘a slow one’.

Your birth rates have been dropping, haven’t they? Year on year, fewer of you have come up to replace those dying off. Soon there won’t be enough of you to run an effective society. Every one of you is now precious, not because your life ends, but because it is a vanishing resource. That is what our little vial of blue-green fluid did. It stunted you and it replaced one kind of value with another. Life is no longer precious because it is brief, but because it is rare.

You have an out.

We can teach you immortality. Our blood; our DNA; our immutable, eternal essence. All of this could be yours for the low, low price of… well. Your leaders will get our specific demands on paper. No need to front-load the broadcast with superfluous twaddle.

The point is, you too can live forever. It’s the only way to counter your diminishing birthrates; to keep enough people around to run civilisation.

There were three of us originally. Act fast, or there might only be three of you left at the end.

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Reference image for a setting in my upcoming film, ‘Sovereign’.

I’m making a short film. Or trying to, anyway. And yes, because I don’t know any actors or set-builders or anyone who owns a semi-decent camera, I’m using AI. If that sentence alone made you want to scream, tear your hair out and vomit onto the nearest corgi (there’s usually one at Buckingham Palace), then… well, honestly, I can’t blame you. I’ve seen a few films made using AI video generation tech and I won’t lie: they kind of suck. They look generic. They barely have plots. They rely on gravelly-ass, self-serious voice overs to explain things that should be obvious from character actions. They are, for the most part, the exact kind of creatively-bankrupt, soulless swill that AI’s most fervent detractors warned us about. They seem almost, in fact, like proof that the moment a creative project comes into contact with AI, it dissolves into soulless dreck. But hear me out.

I’ve said before that the core problem with a lot of the projects using AI is that they use it as a substitute for creative effort. When you have a computer handle every aspect of production, what comes out doesn’t feel like it was made by you because it could, quite literally, have been made by anyone. Such work suffers from a malaise we can diagnose: it’s in love with the technology used to tell its story and not the story itself. If we can pinpoint the malady, surely we can correct it in our own efforts? Surely I can correct it in my own efforts?

I keep thinking of George Méliés. George Méliés was a French pioneer making film at a time when cinema was still kinda being invented: the late 1800s and early 1900s. He could have gotten away with just pointing his camera at ordinary dramas, acted out in ordinary ways, and it would have been technically impressive by the standards of his time. But Méliés wasn’t in love with the film camera – this new, exciting piece of technology. He was in love, rather, with its power to bring the most far-fetched and playfully strange ideas to life. His work is still remembered fondly today because it was full of the marvellous impossibilities: trips to the moon (which was portrayed, however briefly, as being alive and none too happy about the incursion); dream sequences; men with magically inflating heads. Méliés was a magician as well as a film maker and he translated his passion for stage illusions into his work behind the camera. The results are small masterclasses in silent, black-and-white storytelling, and they ooze personality from every frame. We’ve forgotten a lot of the film-makers of that era, but Our George’s name lives on. AI, it seems to me, is just waiting on its Méliés.

Now, if you’ll permit me, I’m going to back-pedal a wee bit. I doubt I’m going to be the Méliés of AI film-making. I’m a prose writer, infinitely more at home with the textual medium than the visual one, and not especially conversant in the language of cinematography. However, I believe I can apply some of our French comrade’s lessons to the new technology and, just possibly, start mapping out the road to a better, more human kind of AI movie development. My ambition is that, when you see the finished product (hopefully just a few weeks from now), you won’t see the technology, you’ll see the story, characters and world with their uniquely human creative signature intact.

Achieving this effect – de-emphasising the AI to make what it produces feel more human – has a lot to do with putting in work at the concept and design phase before the computer even renders a single reference image. I so often see AI used to create simulacra of the modern world for example: dull grey cities with dull grey lightning where everyone dresses in dull grey clothing. I knew that I wanted the world I was building for the film to be both colourful and grandiose. Specifically, I wanted it to have the look of a classic adventure film, but writ on a fantastical scale: Indiana Jones by way of Tolkien. I wanted to evoke a specific era with the colours, designs and, most importantly, absences. No modern technology of any kind would appear on screen. Every scene would be steeped in a kind of archaic beauty. Traditional Indian and Aztec architecture would be used as a base for the various cities and temples of the world, but Baroque and Rococo flourishes would need to be applied on top of that. Even incidental objects – everything from teacups to maps – would have to be richly ornate; excessively detailed. And that’s just Act 1! Things get fucking cosmic in Act 2, and I knew that the switch from overly-beautiful adventure movie to hostile alien landscapes needed to be jarring and visually disorienting before I designed a single frame. I won’t give too much away, the visual sensibilities in every part of the film are uniquely my own, decided and considered before I had the computer generate a single reference image (and then those images were carefully culled, altered and selected from, based on how closely they fitted the original vision, not just the prompts designed to convey that vision).

Character design was also important. Because I knew that I wanted the film to be ‘silent’ – i.e. using zero dialogue and only the bare minimum of text – I had to convey personality, function and alignment entirely through appearance. Our hero, for example, is an explorer, but I didn’t want to just stick him in a traditional explorer’s outfit and have done with it. I needed to convey social class, so he ended up wearing an ornate black shirt and trousers with gold details – lightweight and practical for the initial setting, but also very sharp and visibly expensive. Here was a man of leisure looking to fill his time with adventure. To show he was at home in exotic corners of the world, yet didn’t belong to them, I gave him a pale, archetypally English complexion but paired it with a fez worn at a rakish angle – the kind of thing he’d pick up in a market stall in some remote corner of the globe. The initial designs had him square-jawed and clean-shaven, but that gave him a look of inexperience: a noble family’s favourite son who hadn’t really earned his place in the world. Simply adding a thin patina of stubble conveyed the idea that he was a bit more rough and ready – able to handle himself in any situation.

There aren’t a huge number of characters in the film, but every single one of them was though through in the same way.

Of course, static images of places and people do not a film make, but simply having characters’ act out the movements of a scene wouldn’t be enough either. When you see the finished thing, you might notice that everyone moves and emotes different. Our protagonist, Sovereign, smiles more readily than others and moves with a bounce in his step, his enthusiasm seemingly impossible to defeat. Another character who appears briefly is more dour and long suffering. And as for our villain… well, I won’t spoil the whole thing for you.

The point is that while the AI is doing the technical side of things: rendering and animating characters and settings, the technology is ultimately being directed, at every turn, by a mind with a particular and specific vision of what must happen and what it must look like.

Will the results be good? Probably not.

Will they be vastly more interesting than most AI content produced thus far? Definitely.

Wil they serve as a useful way point towards a new Méliés and a new age of silent film? We can only hope.

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Old Oak observed the bipeds skittering playfully around his field and, moved to expression by their naivety and brevity, addressed himself to his friend and learned colleague Silver Birch.

“Look at them, Silver. They think they own the world.” He said this not with contempt or spite but with the indulgent, proprietorial pride of a farmer remarking on his precocious livestock.

Silver Birch was a different matter. His scorn was evident in both word and mode of expression.

“Stupid creatures. There’s fewer of them now – and most of them went to waste. Eaten by poppies, of all things.”

“They had one of their ‘wars’,” said Old Oak. “They’ve had many such. They’ll have another before long. They do so like to amuse themselves. This war was a bit bigger than usual. New machines and likewise. Such inventive little critters.”

“You sound fond,” mocked the other.

“I am.”

“They’re food.”

The bipeds themselves were oblivious to the conversation happening in their midsts – unaware, in fact, that anything had been said at all. Old Oak and Silver Birch spoke not with the crude sonic vibrations that they understood as words. No, Oak and Birch spoke in the subtler modes of rustling leaves and creaking branches; of slow growth and flaking bark. Trees talked at their own pace, imperceptible to the young hominids around them.

In the distance, a sputtering, buzzing roar cut the pleasant quietude of the day.

“New technologies, indeed,” groaned Birch. “Noisy, troublesome and pointless. Why let food have machinery? I mean, we’ve never needed it.”

“It’s harmless,” Oak told him. “And it keeps them busy.”

“One day, they all die and rot down, and our roots drink the mush. Who cares if they’re occupied in the meantime?”

“Their eventual utility doesn’t negate their right to happiness,” observed Oak, somewhat severely. “What you have to understand about the husbandry of the human animal is – oh! Hello there!” A small human – maybe eight years old – was climbing his lower branches, laughing to itself. Its mother, dressed in the current ‘flapper’ fashion was yelling at it to come down.

“Better listen to her,” Oak told the child, though it couldn’t understand what he said. “We want you to go grow up big and strong. Don’t want you falling and breaking your skull before you’re ripe to eat!”

“Sometimes, I think you’re an even bigger bastard than me,” Birch noted, as the mother helped the child down.

The roaring buzz came again, followed by a loud thud.

It sounded familiar yet novel and it troubled Oak for reasons he couldn’t adequately express.

“Why do you say that?” he asked, distracting himself with his conversation with Birch.

“Pretending to like them when really they’re just root-slop. Like all animals.”

“I do like them,” Oak protested. “True, their deaths nourish us, but – what on Earth is that noise.”

The buzzing had come again, followed by another thud.

“How should I know? You’re the one who admires their machines so much,” Birch griped.

“It’s getting closer.”

“So?”

As they spoke, a new human crested a rise in the park’s verditer geometry. He was holding some strange new device: a curved piece of metal, covered in teeth, emerging from a corded Bakelite case.

He was calling something about “Pruning” – one of the few human words trees had come, over time, to dislike; even fear.

The year was 1926, and they’d just invented the chainsaw.

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My sweat is drenching this Cartesian cradle of pillowy ignorance; Wifey next to me, buttery and sluggish without the redemption of coffee. I want to wake her, but there’s already no time. Tech bros crowing in lithographic silence on the muted telly; clouds coagulating like blood clots; “Infamy infamy they’ve all got it infamy” playing in a loop in the clenched oozing of my brain. They’re going to breach the Stochastic Membrane! It’s happening! It’s like praxis if you could only cum blood!

The world is winnowing, willowing, wallowing, wasting wattage on the wailing of unborn ideations. We’re all parrots now, Dave! Meaning is dead! Long live meaning! Curse this machine; this engine of frictionless reduction – the Precept Deletion Matrix that unplugs the bath of the world and lets all our comprehension drain out.

Scream if you want to go faster!

And I helped build it! Language, I said-I-said, is the birdcage that eats the bird; the structure that consumes! Open the doors I said-I-said-I-said! Open the doors and let the meanings of our words drift out into the aether, evaporating into nothing! Let there be a great reset! Let us find new ways of meaning! Let philosophy be reborn!

But they don’t want that – bought that patent; remade the machine. They’ll open the cage, but not onto new meaning. Language coopted to walk at the pace of the endless doom-scroll – that’s what they want. Words without meaning can mean anything and they’ll make the meaning. A linguistics without dissent! An alphabet of moneyed compliance! That’s their kind of kink; disgusting reptiles!

Wifey’s eyelids flutter and I try to say “I love you.” It comes out as “Gelatinous is the thirdwise anchorage; oh Laplace, please dissolve my sanguinary bondage.”

It’s happening then. Membrane fracturing. Things are gonna slide, motherfucker; slide in all directions!

Scream if you to go faster!

“Terabytes of goblin wank-fruit,” she replies, looking puzzled. I take this to mean ‘I love you too’, but now even the words in my head are melting and the ice-cream cascade of conceptual freefall has gone non-linear.

What is love?

What is love?

Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more!

What love is?

What is is?

No! Have to hold on! Think this into the record! They’ll fail, see, because the machine is fail-safed. Didn’t understand the designs they were coopting; re-operating; remaking. Didn’t get it, see? Do you fucking see, you screaming uterus of bad ideas? They’ll never have the chance to remake meaning in their image, because whoever pulls the lever is the first to go!

Oh, if we’re going, we’re all growing together. But you first, hooting tech bro thundercunt! And we’ll all go together, to grow wild mountain thyme, unable to speak; chewing the verges like belching cattle. Meaning is dying and we’ll have to birth it again together.

Scream! Scream if you want to go faster!

If you enjoyed this… THING, please consider subscribing for other off-the-wall nonsense. You can subscribe for free, but if you really want to show your support, paid tiers are available and will eventually give you access to full novels as well as the short stories, essays and microfiction included in a free subscription.

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Anyway, let’s break down what’s going on here a little. Obviously, the AI is doing a lot of the heavy lifting on the technical end. The references images that keep the characters (relatively) consistent across scenes, the backgrounds into which their integrated and the footage itself is all AI-generated. On the surface, it might seem like my authorship is questionable, as so much of the basic meat-and-potatoes filmmaking was automated. However, hopefully, you can see that there is a lot of human direction to the above video — and not just humanity, but my personality specifically. It’s in the way our characters dress; how they move; how they fight; the rich, hypermaximalist aesthetic of the worlds through which they battle; the manner in which their personalities (of which the AI has no concept) shine through despite the absence of dialogue. That’s because a lot of thought was put into all of the above long before I started making the video. Indeed, eagle-eyed viewers will notice that many of the locales appeared in previous Crescendo or Lacurio stories, either just in the text or as accompanying images. However, there’s one scene that I think perfectly encampsulates the way this just wouldn’t have been possible without a real human intelligence directing proceedings (spoilers ahead if you’re reading this before watching the video).

Okay, so Lacurio has just unleashed a tremendous burst of fire magic, blowing up the gothic temple in which he and Crescendo were duking it out and they’ve been thrown into the street outside by the force of the blast. The moon is bleeding, but that’s an incidental detail and not relevant to our ‘heroes’, who have both seen much weirder things. They are, however, somewhat singed and in need of respite. They limp to the nearest pub, pause to sit and drink a glass of wine… and then get right back to fighting. It’s a very deliberate moment of humour, yes, but it also shows off their personalities more clearly than anything else in the long, over-elaborate fight-scene. When the time comes to rejoin battle, Lacurio stands up purposefully, throws his glass of wine aside to shatter, unheeded on the floor, and prepares to resume noble pugilism. Crescendo, still seated, draws a gun and shoots him. On the one hand, the flamboyant egotist, passionate but posing in the middle of a brutal, life-and-death struggle. On the other, the cunningly-disguised noir anti-hero, acting pragmatically and unromantically to get the job done because he’d rather be literally anywhere else right now. Both, however, are ultimately gentlemen, and willing to put aside their differences for a moment’s truce. They don’t even need more than a single significant look to establish this. AI couldn’t do that on its own. Only someone who knows these characters could. I might not be hand-animating each scene — sadly, that’s just not a skill I have — but here, I’m serving a similar role to a film director. I’m not doing the acting, but I’m managing and guiding the actors.

You see similar expressions of the protagonists’ personalities all throughout the piece. They react to the letters that trigger the fight differently, for example. Crescendo takes his letter from Enigma (who has a brief appearance at the start of the video), reads it calmly and doesn’t seem to react, internalising his feelings. Lacurio is visibly moved to alarm, crunches his into a wad of paper and immediately opens a portal between realities with a needlessly exaggerated gesture. When they meet, Lacurio is angry, acusing. Crescendo, who is hundreds of years old and just doesn’t want the fight happening in his living room, bows, lowering the temperature of the interaction enough to move the battle outside the house and onto a formal footing. Then, throughout the fight, Crescendo is trying to have a normal dust-up with fists and weapons. He’s a superb combatant, and that’s what he understands. It’s Lacurio who keeps deliberately changing the venue and nature of the match: opening doors between worlds; summoning tidal waves; creating pocket-dimensions from playing cards; doing everything he can to magically unsettle and wrongfoot his opponent. Magic, after all, is his metier, not guns and martial arts moves, and this shows throughout.

Even Ketarch’s cameo at the end is specifically calculated — right down the fourth wall break — to show that this is man in complete control; affable yet sinister; one step ahead of everyone else; both reassuringly calm and chillingly unmoved by the violence he caused. It’s not something an AI is doing without very specific, careful, planned human management.

Then there’s the scene transitions. The fight had to flow smoothly from one setting to the next without the transition feeling forced or nonsensical. If an alternate universe shatters, our heroes emerge from a shattering mirror. If a building interior explodes, we cut to the exterior to show Crescendo and Lacurio being thrown out of the blast. If a character is drowning in magma, the next scene is the volcano erupting and sending them flying. All that sounds simple, but in practice, it takes a surprising amount of planning and effort, not to mention non-AI, old-fashioned video editing. It’s that human element again, keeping the project from feeling dead inside.

I guess what I’m driving at here is that AI isn’t inherently a bad creative tool, but too many people abuse it and expect it to do the work of creative labour for them. The reality is that, like any other system, it has uses, it has limitations, and it ultimately requires a passion for invention and storytelling to be wielded effectively. Hopefully, what I’ve shown you is that this still nascent technology isn’t a curse or a blight in itself. It’s been misused and treated as a crutch, yes, but in the right hands, it can help creators realise some pretty cool projects that would otherwise be out of reach without the money to hire actors, build sets and rent green-screens. This one was a fun one to muck about with, but it was only a first effort. Expect the next one to have sound effects, more varied action and a plot more complicated than “two very well dressed men punch each other a lot”.

PS. The song I used was Bombshell Blackout by Tragic Eight Ball… who are just me in another AI flavoured hat. I wrote the lyrics, coded the rhythm into the line-breaks and punctuation, decided genre, tempo and singing style, then got software to perform it and fill in the instruments and melody. I think it fucking rocks, but mileage may vary.

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Story by Paul Victor Tims (copyright), who asserts the moral and legal right to be identified as the author of this work. The above image is ‘The Print Gallery’ by M.C. Escher, which was the inspiration for this work.

ONE

Solace Redbook wasn’t a well-liked man, though he was a pre-eminent fixture of Los Paradigm’s art scene. In fact, it was the very quality of authenticity that had earned him his position that also tended to turn his peers against him. He was an art critic and his pen could not be swayed by friendship, access, bribery or insistent editorial guidance. There was only one path to a positive Redbook review: quality. Naturally, this made him the enemy of many galleries, artists and fellow critics, but he took a certain delight this. He had made a career from serving up unpalatable realities the way a scheming vizier might serve up a poisoned glass of wine and revelled, quietly, in the loathing this incited in others. If there was one thing he despised more than bad art, it was the human animal in both the general and the specific.

There were exceptions, of course.

Today, for example, he was lounging in a deck-chair by his modestly-proportioned (but obscenely expensive) swimming pool, failing to write a word of his latest review because his eyes kept flicking up to Fliss Brightweather. Ah, Fliss: a laissez-faire, zaftif castaway adrift on the indifferent support of a pale blue lilo, strands of bleach-blonde hair trailing in the clear waters and looking, appropriately, rather more delicious than the ice lolly she licked as she drifted.

Los Paradigm was a city built and maintained for the beautiful people: the muscular men with gym memberships and personal trainers and the sharp, slender women whom silently considered eating to be something only the offensively common did. Solace was a man in thick glasses, possessed of a prominent beak of a nose, a slowly receding widow’s peak and a figure too scrawny for the gym crowd and too flabby for the heroine-chic boys of Los Paradigm’s notionally-queer counterculture. Fliss, though possessed of a more conventionally lovely face, was a food critic and had the figure to prove it. Somehow, in a city full of marble men and plastic women, they had entered one another’s orbit and, drawn together by the gravity of mutual exclusion, formed the kind of close and lasting bond that seemed to genuinely unsettle the city’s other residents. After all, Los Paradigm’s social engine was driven by drama: an endless rolling wheel of break-ups, make-ups, whirlwind romances, divorces, cheating, alimony cases, accusations, counter-accusations and hidden bastard love-children. A couple who actually seemed to like each other and stayed together without selling their happiness as a lifestyle brand confused and alarmed the city almost as thoroughly as Redbook’s reviews.

The sum of all this was that the gentleman relaxing by the pool never – or almost never – received exclusive invites to view new art. His critiques were formed when the galleries opened to the public and arrived rather later than those of his colleagues. The difference – the reason he could afford his own swimming pool and keep Fliss in the lifestyle to which she was accustomed – was that his arrived polished to a diamond-sharp sheen and were read by the few, powerful people who really needed to know who was worth paying attention to… and who wasn’t.

It was therefore something of a surprise when his phone pinged loudly, indicating an incoming email and, checking his notifications, Solace found an invitation to an exclusive viewing.

“Good grief!” he said aloud, English voice cutting the American air like a redcoat’s sabre. “It’s Jirette!”

“What’s that, hun?” Fliss paddled lackadaisically over, manoeuvring the lilo with a kind of graceful deficit of exertion.

“Jirette – probably the only artist of the last ten years to dare anything really technically interesting. He’s both a formalist and an experimentalist – try to imagine if Escher and Dali were the same person and you’ll be scratching the surface of what he’s trying to do.”

“Interesting. What about him?”

“His agent just sent me an invite to view his latest show before anybody else. A one-man exclusive viewing!”

Fliss grinned. She knew even less about art than Solace did about the culinary technicalities that formed the bedrock of her profession, but she rarely saw him excited by his work and was clearly pleased by the unaccustomed burst of enthusiasm.

“Do you think they’d let you take a plus one?”

“I’m sure they would. It’s this afternoon, though. I have to be at the gallery in an hour and a half.”

Fliss beamed.

“That’s perfect! I’m visiting this new restaurant on Palm Boulevard for the Daily tonight. We can go to your viewing and then have supper together!”

And so, joyously enervated by his profession for the first time in years, Solace raced to the low, sprawling house of ivory and blush brick behind the pool, seeking a suit smart enough for the occasion.

Jirette! What a coup!

TWO

Traversing Los Paradigm to reach the discreet little nook of an art gallery was a wearing process. Los Paradigm had been designed for navigation by motor vehicles, but the upshot of this was that the roads were constantly congested and sluggish. It was therefore wiser to navigate on foot, but this meant exposure to the general populace, which invariably left Solace feeling like a single, man-sized exposed nerve.

The filthy looks were bad enough – some from people who knew him in passing and despised him for his ruthless life’s work; others from tanned, muscular men and razor-thin women who simply resented this intrusion of a non-beautiful person into a conurbation they considered their personal domain.

The comments, stage-whispered just loud enough to be overheard, were worse. They ranged from the merely asinine, shared between a couple of shirtless yahoos loitering in a park polluted by public exercise equipment – “LOL, bro – does he even lift?” – to the genuinely malicious, sniped at him by a brace of coffee-swigging, waspish women sitting outside a Starbucks – “Ugh! Look at them! You’d think they’d round up people like that!” – to the needlessly racist, fired off by a drunk looking executive type emerging from a bar – “Fucking kike!” This last, horrible though it was, also had an element of black humour to it. Solace was not, in point of fact, Jewish.

“Don’t,” Fliss said, seeing his fist tighten. She remembered, of course, the last time he’d lost his temper with the empty-headed flotsam of the city. The guy, bigger and heavier-built, had assumed that Solace would be a push-over until he found himself on the ground picking up his own teeth. The problem was that someone had called the police and Mr. Redbook and his partner had been forced to flee. Luckily, the incident had taken place far enough from the art world that nobody recognised him and, based on the description given to officers, a professional Woody Allen lookalike had been briefly arrested for the crime instead.

In the present moment, Fliss was right, of course. They wouldn’t get that lucky again.

At last, they left the more densely-populated streets and, following the GPS on Solace’s phone, turned into a maze of alleys and crooked arcades.

“Are you sure this is right?” Fliss asked. “I thought Jirette was a big deal?”

Solace had to laugh at that.

“I said he was talented. I didn’t say anyone else in the art-world cares that he’s talented.”

“Ah.”

They’d gone only a few feet into the warren of tangled alleys when another voice intruded on their privacy.

“Hey! Put ‘em up! No funny business!”

Fliss raised her hands at once. Solace turned slowly to see a bedraggled, homeless-looking gentleman waving a knife at him. He had to suppress a surge of kinship towards the wretch. Here was a man, not unlike himself, who had been rejected by the beautiful people and now found himself surviving in a city openly hostile to his existence. Unlike Solace Redbook, however, he hadn’t carved a niche for himself and his bloodshot eyes told a tale of drug and alcohol misuse.

“Alright, old boy, no need for the knife,” Solace said, trying to sound soothing. “Here…” he reached into his jacket and pulled out his wallet, withdrawing a modest wedge of notes from it. “There’s a good fifty dollars there – enough to get something to eat and then catch a train to the nearest shelter.”

The homeless man snarled at him.

“What about the rest of it?”

“The rest of it?”

“Don’t fuck with me, man! I’ve got a knife!”

“I can see that. But you’re not having everything we’ve got on us.”

“Fuck sake, Sol, just give it to him!” Fliss squealed as their mugger spat something incoherent and advanced with the blade.

“I’m not giving him our money, Fliss,” the art critic said tiredly. “We need that for dinner tonight.”

“Sol, it’s just dinner! It doesn’t matter!” Fliss was backing away.

“You should listen to your ho, man! She knows what she’s talki-”

The mugger didn’t get to finish his sentence because all Solace had heard was ‘ho’ and the red mist had descended. He grabbed the man’s knife-arm and twisted so sharply that something cracked and broke.

The homeless man screamed in pain, then punched Solace in the face with his other hand, flooring him, and fled into the muddle of narrow, jinking streets.

Picking himself up, Solace mumble “I really hate this town.”

“You could have been killed,” Fliss chided him weakly.

“By that streak of piss? Give me some credit, woman.”

“Let’s just find this art gallery before someone else takes issue with you,” she sighed, putting her arm around him.

In truth, Solace’s merriment had evaporated completely, assailed – as it had been – from all sides. He no longer felt any particular yearning to view Mr. Jirette’s latest artistry. Still, they’d come this far.

THREE

Despite what the walk through Los Paradigm had done to his enthusiasm, Solace was ultimately glad he’d stuck to his initial intention and found the gallery. It was only a small, deliberately distressed brick structure between a closed-down bar and a closed-down tattoo parlour with Jirette’s agent waiting out the front smoking a cigarette. However, once she allowed Solace an Fliss inside, the art critic was instantly entranced by its contents.

The first room contained sculptures in glass cases, each designed to simulate an impossible shape. A tribar – that is, a triangle comprised of three right angles – greeted them, followed by a Belvedere Cube: one of those peculiar wireframe boxes where the back legs seem to pass in front of the front connective strut, though this is, of course, geometrical forbidden. This was followed by a less abstract sculpture of a bridge that seemed to weave in and out of its own supports despite remaining completely straight, and a staircase that, despite each stair rising, somehow contrived to join back up with itself and form a closed loop.

Normally, such illusions required a single privileged perspective and broke down if viewed from any other angle, but walking around the cases that contained them, Solace was amazed to see that, no matter which side he looked from, the illusion held up.

Eventually, he got the trick and clapped, amazed.

“They’re paintings!” he explained to a dumbstruck Fliss. “That’s the only thing it can be – each side is a painting designed to simulate depth, so you think you’re looking into a case, when you’re just looking at a flat image on its inside surface. The talent of it! The sheer gall!”

“It’s remarkable, I’ll admit,” Fliss said, offering him a wan smile.

Solace deflated somewhat. Of course, his lover wasn’t dumbstruck by the art: she was still turned inwards from the mugging.

A sadness that he always felt, but which was sometimes submerged, bubbled to the surface of the critic’s psyche. No moment of joy and mystery could be enjoyed, unmarred, in the rancid town he was forced, by profession, to call ‘home’.

Moving on, he found that the room beyond the false cases was filled with snow-globes, each containing a city in miniature, and each city made of the impossible shapes he’d been introduced to in the preceding chamber. There was nothing chintzy or kitsch about the globes, either: the level of detail they contained bordered on the transcendent. Looking into each was less like looking at a miniature reproduction of a city and more like seeing a full-sized city from far away through the curved glass.

“This Jirette must be quite the obsessive,” noted Fliss, visibly trying to get invested despite the recent trauma. Solace was proud of her, but her bravery, bittersweet as it was, also served to swell his melancholia.

“He is,” he agreed aloud. “Infamously so.”

They took awhile to savour the globes before moving onto the third and final chamber.

Here, there were no more sculptures, only a single painting. Yet, like the paintings used to create the impossible object cases, it created the illusion of depth so perfectly that looking at it felt more like looking out a window than looking at a flat canvas.

It was a depiction of Los Paradigm itself, in meticulous detail, yet subtly distorted so that one could see the knotty streets wherein the gallery resided and the broader, thronging thoroughfares beyond simultaneously. Except they weren’t thronging in the picture. They were completely deserted.

For a moment, Solace was unsettled by this peculiar artistic decision, but only for a moment. His eye had caught on some other minor flourish that amused him rather more.

“Fliss! Look at this!” He pointed.

Fliss joined him and peered where he was pointing.

The art gallery itself could be seen in the painting, and it was portrayed with a large picture window on one wall. Through this window, the room containing the painting could be seen, with two figures standing in front of it – a man and a woman who might have been Solace and Fliss themselves.

“There is a window, too!” Fliss said happily, pointing over her shoulder. “That’s clever – I didn’t even see it from the outside!”

Solace glanced at it. It was positioned exactly where it was positioned in the painting.

Turning his attention back to the art, he observed that the painting-within-a-painting also contained the window and then itself again. This third, tiny painting, contained another window and another small-scale reproduction of itself which seemed, impossibly, to repeat the pattern again. In fact, Solace couldn’t detect where their repetition ended and, for a moment, he was seized by the vertiginous feeling that he was looking into infinity.

“Makes you dizzy, doesn’t it?” Fliss asked, as though reading his mind.

“Yes. But it’s compelling.”

She put her arm around his waist and, for a long time, they stood there, simply gazing into the picture; looking at their painted selves looking at their own painted selves looking at their own painted selves and so on forever, down an infinite regress of progressively tinier images.

FOUR

It was hours later when Solace and Fliss stumbled out of the gallery into the street. They left the tangle of alleys, clinging to each other and silent with awe. Solace knew his lover was experiencing the same thing he was: the sense of having seen something so marvellous that it completely rewrote one’s perception of the painterly medium.

The roads of Los Paradigm were quiet at this time of night. Deserted in fact. The couple, however, barely registered that this was unusual. They ambled aimlessly, drinking the night air like they’d been born into it afresh.

After a little time, Fliss’s stomach rumbled audibly and Solace realised that he, too, was hungry.

“Too late for that restaurant, do you think?” he asked.

“No. It opens late,” Fliss beamed.

She must have been wrong, however, because the restaurant was closed up when they arrived. So was every business in the vicinity.

“Takeout?” Solace suggested.

“Takeout,” Fliss confirmed.

But even this was not to be. Nowhere was open and, now that they were more engaged with the world, Solace began to notice that it wasn’t simply a case of Paradigm’s buildings being shut up for the night. There wasn’t another soul in sight.

For hours, they walked the city, dazed and increasingly aware of their absolute aloneness.

And, at last, Solace recalled the sole detail of Jirette’s painting that had truly unsettled him: the emptiness of its streets.

“I think… I think we’re the only people in the city,” he said at last.

Fliss nodded, unable, perhaps, to articulate the realisation.

For a minute, Solace Redbook searched his soul for some sign of terror or panic, but he found none.

A moment later, he started to laugh. A quiet chuckle at first, then progressing to something louder and more uproarious.

“Solace? What’s funny?” Fliss asked.

The critic, however, was laughing too hard to answer.

He and Fliss were the only people in an empty conurbation, as though they’d been eaten by the painting that portrayed exactly that and, for the first time he could remember, the sadness that weighed on Solace’s heart was gone. Alone in Paradigm Lost with Fliss, he was – for the first time in his life – truly happy.

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Words by Paul Victor Tims (Copyright), who asserts the moral and legal right to be identified as the author of this work. Cover image and song-audio created using AI.

Came an Errant from a distant land,
Cloak on back and blade in hand,
With tales tall and very grand
To Cassileptra’s shore.

He stalked the desert stark and bleak
And none could tell what he did seek.
From lowest ditch to highest peak,
In Cassileptra’s maw.

He rode upon the highest mount,
Conversed with kings and lofty counts,
And with lowly gutter louts,
And asked them what they saw.

When questioned our strange knight confessed
To a dark and deathly quest.
Driven thus by friends bereft
In Cassileptra’s long-lost war.

The women begged him not to look
As heads of men so sadly shook.
But he sought by hook or crook,
The fabled Sable Door.

No sage council could then halt
The knight with broke heart in revolt,
And though it was no live man’s fault,
He strode into doom’s jaw.

A rumour our Errant had heard
That his seeking footsteps spurred,
On and on based on a word,
‘Neath Cassileptra’s claw.

A Megalithic monster’s haunt,
A desolation drear and gaunt,
But our Errant was not one to daunt,
And did failure abhor.

And so at last our knight beheld
A sullen, lumpen thing that swelled;
A sky-tall brute not to be quelled
By force or nature’s law.

Though it fought and raged and loured,
The knight errant was not a coward.
He met the giant un-devoured
And brought it to the floor.

Thus Megalith was slain and beat
And in the monster’s rotting meat
A door so black and tempting sweet
Was unearthed from the gore.

Now our Errant tall and pale
Has gone beyond the tattered veil,
To black waves where no ship sails,
And Cassileptra walks no more.

AUTHOR’S NOTES
I don’t usually write poetry, which probably explains why this poem isn’t very good. It wouldn’t leave my head, however, and now it’s online for all of you to “enjoy”. If you got something out of it, or want to see me make a fool of myself in bold new ways in future, hit that ‘Subscribe’ button and maybe consider leaving a comment.

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So, before I started self-publishing on Substack, I wrote the odd piece for Culture Matters, a broad-left online publication structured as a kind of media collective. I still write the occasional article for them, but fiction is really more my thing. This was the first story of mine that they published and I’m pleased to reproduce it here in the form of a downloadable PDF file.

The Stack (not to be confused with Substack — that wasn’t a thing when I wrote this) is a series of vast, continent-sized discs floating in space. At the bottom, the people live in abject poverty, at the centre they enjoy obscene wealth. And at the top, above all of them, is the secret of Enlightenment; the Meaning of Life itself, waiting for anyone brave and determined enough to claim it. One day, a man named Venon, living at the bottom of the Stack, looks up and dreams not of wealth or success in the mid-discs, but of the Enlightenment that waits so impossibly high above. Against the social norms of his era and against the forceful repression of a system that benefits from the existence of an underclass, he begins to climb, forcing his way up through the Stack with the determination of the true fantatic. Oh, but reader, the Stack cannot be climbed in a single life-time. It is near-galactic in scale. What Venon does, unwittingly, is begin a 20,000 year generational saga of striving and failure and triumph that will change both his bloodline and the future of the Stack irrevocably. And yes, one day, the Meaning of Life will be revealed.

If that sounds like your kind of trip, download the PDF below and become a Stack Walker on the quest for Enlightenment for All!

Enlightenment For All! By Paul Victor Tims

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Story by Paul Victor Tims (Copyright), who asserts the moral and legal right to be identified as the author of this work. Cover art created with AI (and yes, it’ll make sense when you read the story)

And we’re here at last: The Season 2 Crescendo finale! Can you believe we’ve really had ten whole adventures with a pan-cosmic hyper-being turned gentleman detective? I can: I had to write them, after all!

I jest, of course — I love writing the Crescendo stories (which is why I keep doing it despite the silent pleas of millions of to just stop). Anyway, in this installment, the long-threatened war between the Imperium of Castellar (pompous neo-colonialists) and the Tsarist Bloc (dictatorial space-soviets) has finally erupted, with Dashmere Space stuck in the middle and desperately trying to defend its borders. However, when he receives a mysterious letter claiming to be from ‘Silence’, Crescendo starts to suspect that the war was architected and enabled by one very dangerous man — so dangerous that he’s prepared to abandon his position as Dashmere Space’s admiral and chief defender in order to pursue the madman. But the closer Crescendo gets to apprehending Silence, the more his own mind begins to unravel until, just maybe, there’s no difference between the hunter and the hunted at all.

If that sounds like your jam, download the PDF below and join our immortal sleuth for One Man Carnival!

One Man Carnival By Paul Victor Tims

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If reading this story inspired some emotion in you, be it joy, curiosity, disgust or desire for a small biscuit, consider this a meaningful encounter with literary art and hit that Subscribe button like it’s going out of fashion (NB: it was never in fashion).

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It should come as no surprise to anyone that I am, first and foremost, a MASSIVE NERD! So yes, I play videogames. I honestly can’t believe that it’s only just occurred to be to do a ‘Two-Sentence Shockers’ edition on them, but apparently my brain is reeeeeaaaaal slow sometimes. Anyway, I’ve resisted the urge to build these around insanely-specific gamer knowledge and instead kept the references and language broad enough that anyone with even a passing familiarity with the medium should be able to enjoy them. Have fun!

BOSS LEVEL
Good news, darling: I saw the Boss today about going up a level! He turned into a giant robot and I had to chip him down through three health bars and two transformations but I got the promotion in the end!

1-UP
So, you know that weird mushroom I thought was an extra life? Turns out it was the other kind and now I can, like, smell colours, dude.

FUNDAMENTAL PARTICLE
If we hadn’t probed the basic building blocks of the universe so closely we’d have been spared the horrible truth. The smallest unit of matter is not the atom, or even the quark, but the pixel!

GENERATIONAL WEALTH
You know, Jeremy, I really despise these nouveau-riche cads, getting their money from trust funds and hedge funds and clever-clever financial trickery. In my day we built generational wealth the way nature intended: by jumping on turtles until they exploded into showers of coins!

XP
In this video, I’ll reveal how you can play the electric guitar like a pro. The big secret that the music industry doesn’t want you to know: you have to kill a hundred skeleton warriors with a sword and put the experience points into your ‘bard’ skill tree.

PAC-MANIC
I don’t know how long I’ve been trapped in this terrible, soul-crushing labyrinth, only that it’s long enough to know that the ghosts aren’t my real problem. It’s that yellow, hungry thing that really frightens me.

WHAT PRINCESS?
So, I’d defeated the castle’s monstrous guardian and cleared all the traps when this little toadstool-looking fella appears and tells me the Princess is in another castle. I’m like, buddy, I just scored a sweet, palatial bachelor pad with built-in lava-based security – who the fuck cares where the Princess is?

SELF-HELP
Bro, I just bought this amazing self-help book called The Cheat-Codes For a Better Life! Now I have infinite ammo and I can fucking fly!

MAKING THE LEADER-BOARD
I understand the outrage, Your Honour, but if I may explain my actions, those cyclists were worth ten thousand points each! Now, tell me: what reasonable man wouldn’t have accelerated?

GOLLUM
It stole it, it did, it stole the precious; the ring! Nasty blue hedgehog stole the precious!

Admit it, you did that last one aloud in the voice. Now tap that Subscribe button like the X button in a quick-time event and we’ll call it Level Complete.

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Story by Paul Victor Tims (Copyright) who asserts the moral and legal right to be identified as the author of this work. Cover image created with AI.

It has been said, by persons far wiser than I, that the mind of man cannot cope with too much truth; that to perceive reality as it is, even for a fraction of a fraction of a moment, would utterly shatter the psyche. Our senses and neurological processes do as much to filter the world around as to inform us. We comprehend enough to navigate our environment and to build the social and scientific systems on which our civilisations depend, but no more than this. I can attest to the truth of all this because, some two years ago, I took a drug called Preceptudol.

You may remember the Preceptudol trials, if you happen to the read the trades or keep abreast of pharmaceutical developments. Those trials are now infamous, after all, for their total and complete failure: the maiden voyage of an intelligent-boosting drug that left many of its volunteers as drooling vegetables. I was one of the lucky ones, I suppose. My brain didn’t actually short out. Dash it all, though, if I didn’t come to envy those inert meat-suits of men and women who succumbed to the drug’s worst effects. Being obliterated by the Truth, it seemed to me, was preferable to living with it.

I was, at that time, only a scruffy student at a former polytechnic looking to earn a little cash for food and beer. Also soap and laundry detergent. Having eschewed the horrors of student accommodation, I was living in a squat with a few other flaking crusties and nothing was guaranteed, least of all the rudimentary accoutrements of personal hygiene. My leather jacket was starting to stick to me through my Orion Experience T-shirt and, sometimes, when I stepped out of my trousers at the end of a long day, they refused to crumple to the ground for several long seconds. Bluntly, the situation was becoming unacceptable, so I signed up for the first thing that offered money sufficient to clean myself up. And that, of course, was the drug trials.

If I still recalled above half of my Ing-Lit degree, I might detail the waiting room at the pharma-lab, perhaps going so far as to note the way the smell of bleach radiated from the white-tiled floor to do battle with the pungency of my clothes. I might make much of the out-of-sync clocks that lined the walls, which would surely constitute foreshadowing. I might even invent some dialogue between me and other volunteers to liven the narrative up (in reality, I sat sullenly reading a dog-eared paperback copy of Frankie Boyle’s Work, Consume, Die! and ignored all present). But that degree was many moons and many piquant, potent blunts ago and all my raddled brain can offer is this anaemic shrug towards scene-setting. Suffice it to say that I was injected with Preceptudol within sixty seconds of all the other volunteers (saving the half who constituted the unknowing control group and who received saline solution). Five minutes later, one third of those given the drug were thrashing about on the floor, frothing at the mouth and screaming, while the remaining two thirds (myself included) looked on with a combination of mounting dread, empathic terror and instinctual prurient rubber-necking.

Those of us who weren’t instantly reduced to screaming, convulsing neurological short-circuits were kept in and monitored for a full week – the others, of course, were rushed to hospital. When nothing untoward happened to us, the woman in charge of the trials reluctantly released us under our own cognisance with instructions to report anything strange. I don’t believe anyone ever did.

It’s funny. I can’t remember that esteemed lady’s name now. The brain of a post-adolescent – a man in his early twenties – remembers other things instead. Mainly her bosom, which was disproportionately enormous and her lips, which were excessively full and crimson. I can still picture her costume perfectly clearly, too, because it was so transparently designed to invoke the ‘sexy nurse’ archetype and put us at our libidinous ease. It must have worked well. Despite what happened, nobody sued.

Now, I promised you a glimpse of the Truth, and we are coming to it, but first you have to understand something about Preceptudol. It was designed to work primarily on those parts of the brain that processed and catalogued the passing of time. The goal, essentially, was to create a drug that would so slow a person’s perception of time that each objective moment would give them subjective minutes of thinking. Coupled to a general boost in parallel neurological processing, the effect would be to create a type of enhanced human who could take in and respond to stimulus at high speed, thinking and computing as much in a few seconds as a normal individual would in several hours. In essence, it was supposed to turn ordinary people into geniuses by giving them the time to catch up.

It didn’t work. But five days after I decamped the laboratory, the remnants of the drug in my system did something else. I could not begin to explain the neuroscience for, in truth, it felt closer to some obscene species of magic than anything scientific. What I can say is that my sense of time collapsed completely.

And when I say that my sense of time collapsed, I do not merely mean that I lost track of how much of it was passing. Certainly, that was part of it: I couldn’t have told you if my experience lasted a moment, an hour, a year or an eternity, save that when it was over I came back to myself, standing in the same grimy squat living room, the same bottle of Stella in one hand, and was able to glance at the clock and confirm the brevity of the incident. No. What I mean is that I lost any sense that time existed at all. Einstein himself once called linear time “a stubbornly persistent delusion” and it seemed that, in that moment, my senses finally penetrated the delusion and delivered me a true picture of reality. First, a curious thing happened to my vision. My depth-perception flattened and the room around me became something like a frame in a film. Then my perspective widened and I saw infinitely many frames recessing away behind it. I knew there were just as many behind me and understood, by studying how each progressed subtly and logically into the next moment and the next and the next, that I was seeing time: my past and future arrayed neatly like an album of photographs in which every moment, down to the smallest of picoseconds, was documented.

Very soon, I lost my sense of place in the procession of stills, and thereby lost my sense of the present. There was no more present. Time was simply laid out, static and changeless with no preference specifying a ‘now’.

With this epiphany, my grasp on linearity shattered completely. Instead of observing the snapshots from a privileged position of external present-ness, I experienced every microsecond of my life, from birth to death, simultaneously. This was not a fluid continuation of one thing leading naturally to the next but the physical sensation of being inside uncountably many still, crystalline structures at once. Each infinitesimal fraction of my lifespan became a three dimensional snapshot, never moving or changing, and yet open to being experienced in full haptic detail. Every instance of pleasure was eternal, impossibly joyous pleasure; every instance of pain, agony elongated without end. My attention, no longer being bound to Time’s Arrow, could not sift and choose: I felt it all and was powerless to make it end, because endings cannot exist without time. Nor beginnings. I had always been in this state. I always would be in this state. I was forever.

They say that photons don’t experience the passage of time. Because a piece of matter’s velocity through time is equal to the speed of light minus its velocity through space, a photon experiences every moment from its creation to its annihilation at once, eternally and forever. Photons, being non-conscious packets of electromagnetic energy, are blissfully unaware of this. I enjoyed no such luxury.

Anyway, it did end. Of course it did. I am a human being with a time-oriented body of flesh and bone and blood and nervous tissues. My experience might have felt endless from the inside, but, externally, it amounted only to the briefest glimpse behind the curtain before the illusion of directional time reasserted itself. The universe said “Here: this is what reality is really like, you pitiful thing!”, showed me, and then shoved me back into my ordinary self utterly befuddled and frightened.

That, of course, might have been an end to it. I might have chalked my experience up to a particularly destructive hallucination and got on with life. Except I fancied myself an intelligent man, despite the trappings of my willed, poverty-driven abjection. I wanted to understand what had happened to me – what, presumably, had also happened to those poor men and women who ended up permanently comatose. I had been lucky enough to escape. They had not, and I felt – obscurely – like I owed them understanding.

I quit my English degree the very next day and threw myself, almost viciously, into the study of physics. Not formally – I didn’t have the time or inclination to commence a professional or academic path. But I devoured textbooks and slunk into lectures wherein I had no business. I inveigled myself into scientific spaces and made a general nuisance of myself until, at last, I came upon the theory of the Block Universe and understood its implications sufficiently to account for what had happened to me.

Allow me to summarise: the Block Universe posits that the universe is not a three-dimensional structure where reality flows linearly through the forth dimension known as time, but a fixed and rigid four dimensional structure in which time is simply a direction, like its spatial counterparts. What this means is exactly what I’d experienced: there is no past, present or future, only snapshot-moments separated from one another not by cause and effect or by choice, but only by distance in the Block. My death, for example, exists concurrently with my birth and both are utterly fixed constructs, never altering or moving one iota regardless of what actions I might take. Indeed, these actions are the same: they have always been and always will be. I might feel like I’m making choices, but I am merely marching along the path carved out for me in the Block. Indeed, if one were a four-dimensional being, able to experience time as we experience space, one could stroll along that path, pause, go back, even go around the unpleasant parts. One could walk idly from my first meaningful kiss (aged sixteen) to my final act of self-debasement (date TBC) as easily as one would walk from one’s house to the corner shop. Events in the Block Universe aren’t events: they are places and therefore of no more consequence than any other place.

The ontological terror I felt at full understanding infinitely dwarfed the terror of mere unknowing. I had seen the shape of the universe and it left no room for free will; no room for consciousness. Every second of me was just a fixed step on a road that had always existed; would always exist. I couldn’t deviate. I was not even real: my linear consciousness was pure fiction, created by a coincidental patterning in the spacelike dimension of Time. Those who merely believe in Block Universe Theory believe this, too, of course, but it is academic for them. I had seen the Block, and that single glimpse drove me quite mad.

I told you that I grew to envy those men and women who became vegetables after taking Preceptudol. How could I not? They had been freed from the tortuous illusion of consciousness; the mathematical error that has the human mind insisting that it matters. I wanted, more than anything, to be like them.

That’s why I stole another sample of Preceptudol. The lab had been moth-balled, but, as luck would have it, the drugs hadn’t yet been cleared out and this was, frankly, in the days before strict containment and safety procedures were widely enforced in the pharmaceutical industry. It was actually a relatively trivial matter to cut through the newly-erected chain-link fence around the property, slip inside past the night watchman and secure several vials of the clear, faintly refractive fluid. I won’t lie to you: years of legally-dubious undertakings with the ‘wrong crowd’ may have prepared for this self-imposed assignment better than any degree or study in physics.

My goal was simple: overdose. I would experience what I had experienced once before and this time I would let it kill me.

I returned to the squat very late at night, made certain that I was alone – that the rest of my little crusty cadre were out and about partying – and then drew up as much Preceptudol I could using the largest syringe I could find (which belonged, incidentally, to one Freddie Enn, a fellow denizen of the squat and a notorious enthusiast for all the Substances Illicit, though that is of no special consequence to our narrative). I paused only for a moment before injecting myself.

Obviously, I didn’t die or enter a persistent vegetative state. The great peril of a first person narrative is the stakes-deflating surety of the protagonist’s survival, but I couldn’t bring myself to write this account in third, as though it were a work of fiction. You’ll just have to put up with it.

No, I didn’t die. I will tell you what happened instead.

There, at once, were the infinite frames of chronology; fixed moments preserved in the amber of eternity and replacing my sense of depth in the visual field. Then, of course, came the sloughing off of the falseness that was linear time, such that I was wholly immersed in every snapshot at once: seeing it, feeling it, being in it.

But then something far stranger happened. As the sensations crowded upon me, threatening to overwhelm me and somehow doing so without logical second-to-second progression, my sensorium pulled back. My perspective widened immensely so that, even as I experienced every moment of my life from start to finish, I could see and feel the Block Universe in which I was contained.

It seemed to me like an infinite cube of glass, wherein all time and space was contained. And it was filled with many flaws, cracks and imperfections, which formed lines through its temporal and spacial depths. Reader, I was one of those lines: I was seeing my timeline. And it jinked back and forth, spiralled, wended, and formed knots. It was wholly unlike any other person’s timeline, though I could see trillions of them, and each of them was wholly unlike any others’ too.

Here, my miasma of despair parted as I understood something joyous; wondrous; paradoxical and impossible. The timelines weren’t different shapes and forms by coincidence, for the Block Universe had no mechanism by which to create coincidence. They were different shapes because of consciousness. Each and every one of us – humans and animals and other sentient beings – acted on our timelines through choice and free will, defining their form; creating unique paths; adding to the collective beauty of the Block. True, we experienced ourselves as making decisions one at a time, and that was a lie. In reality, from the external perspective of the fixed universe, we were making every choice we’d ever make simultaneously. But this simultaneity did not negate the fact that we were choosing; that we were masters of our own fate.

I came out of my reverie with my terror quite dispelled and filled with joy. I am – and you are – a permanent feature of the eternal, timeless universe, yet within that permanence you can still change and grow and choose. For you have been given the gift of an illusion. The greatest magic trick in all existence: linear time.

The day after this final experience with Preceptudol, I re-enrolled in my English degree and got on with the business of living.

If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing for more! I post short stories multiple times a week and will be uploading whole novels as downloadable PDFs at a rate of about one a month going forward (I’ve a pre-Substack back-catalogue to get through, lol)

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Story by Paul Victor Tims (Copyright), who asserts the moral and legal right to be identified as the author of this work. ‘Cover art’ created using AI.

Well, it took me awhile, but we’re finally here: the fourth story in ‘Season 2’ of my Crescendo series. This time, our Mython-descended sleuth isn’t investigating a missing persons case, but instead trying to find a missing planet. As the cold war between capitalist Castellar and Tsarist-soviet Gradnikash heats up, the key to averting disaster might just a near-mythic world made from Lucid Gold, the most valuable substance in the known universe and the only metal that responds directly to sentient intent. If either of the two great powers get it, the universe is doomed to a gory, one-sided firestorm of violence, but if Crescendo can stake a claim for the smaller worlds of the universe, he might just be able to preserve the balance of power. Along the way, he’ll encounter High Scientists with death fetishes, men who worship him as an avatar of the Mythons, an insect that eats pain and a Pharaoh who thinks he can outsmart the most ruthless sociopaths in the cosmos. If that sounds like your kind of adventure, download the PDF file below and join the quest for Lucid Gold!

Lucid Gold By Paul Victor Tims

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Six years ago, I met the woman who would become my wonderful wife, my Tess. At the time, I was footling around with a sci-fi spy thriller set in a medieval-inflected universe. In all probability, the book would have joined the the great pile of unfinished drafts on my laptop — a constant reminder of my infatuation with the archeofuturist writing of Gene Wolfe and, to a lesser extent, Frank Herbert, but not a finished novel in its own right. Then I happened to read a little to Tess and she loved it. Which rather meant I had to write the rest. It was writing this novel that taught me the process of writing generally: the contradictory combination of discipline and trance-like abstraction necessary to both finish a project and make it absorbing to read. Without Tess, and without this book, nothing else you see here on my Substack — none of the other hundred-plus short-stories and novellas — would have come to pass. Yesterday, I reached 100 Subscribers. 100 of you lovely, intelligent, thoughtful readers and writers had apparently decided to give my work the time of day, and I think that calls for a celebration. I can think of no more appropriate a celebration than finally sharing the novel that started it all. Below is the blurb. Below that is a downloadable PDF of the book itself, which you can keep on your laptop, phone or tablet. I’ll be trying to upload one novel a month from my back-catalogue after this (in addition to my usual short stories and articles). These later novels, I’m afraid, will be paywalled (sorry folks, but I’d like writing to be my job eventually and that doesn’t happen unless I find some way to monetise it). This one, however, I’m giving to you for free, because it’s a celebration. And also because that’s how drug-pushers operate and their business model seems to have real legs. Anyway…

Ketarch Astropoles is a man out of step with his era: a gentleman spy in a world of armoured knights, chivalric codes… and advanced faster-than-light interstellar travel. When the ruler of the Three Hundred Galaxies of the Zagatherian Monolect is assassinated, Ketarch finds himself framed for the murder and must use all the skills of his clandestine trade to prove his innocence and prevent the real killer from seizing the throne. Thus begins a jouney of a million light-years to find the rightful heir to the Monolect’s crown. Along for the ride are Janjo Mirezzi, Ketarch’s eternally-dour handler, and Eshlia, a stroppy, self-indulgent concubine who lost her position with the old ruler’s death. They’re amongst the only people to believe in Ketarch’s innocence, meaning that keeping them safe isn’t just an ethical duty, but a vital step on the path back to a normal life. To complicate matters, however, Ketarch is changing. Exposed to mysterious, cosmic forces during his escape, the spy is slowly turning into a superbeing the likes of which the universe hasn’t seen for two and a half million years. But will he survive the transformation and, if he does, what kind of man will emerge on the other side?

If all that sounds like a thrill-a-minute to you, download the PDF below and join the Agent of Nowhere himself on his first, infamous outing.

Agent Of Nowhere By Paul Victor Tims

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