i'm brainstorming a sf mythos setting. it will be in the early 22nd century and at the moment, i'm plotting all the things that can go wrong between now and then. one of the fundamental themes for this is the failure of science. 'technology will solve all our problems' crashes and burns as advances in science lead to dark and dangerous paths. unfortunately, i've been going about this all wrong. i'm going to post what i've developed, then the critique....

prelude: dark matters

neutralinos are exotic particles, one of the favorite candidates for dark matter. think of them as neutrally charged electrons. in 2021 drs. yosai and singh successfully created neutralinos using the Compact Linear Accelerator. in the revised theory, the four types were dubbed vanilla, chocolate, strawberry and rockyroad. excepting vanilla, the others were short lived. vanilla particles are believed to comprise a large percent of existing dark matter. two years later it was found that these particles can occupy empty electron orbitals in certain atoms. in 2028 dr. aliyah jackson demonstrated that he-3 infused with 8 chocolate neutralinos would fuse with deuterium at very reasonable temperatures - which was announced to the would via 'cold fusion necro!'.

chapter i: the weird war

by 2030 exotic particle physics was a matter of national security in the us, which led to a number of odd projects being funded. one of those was the muon collider project, built in secret in ketchikan, alaska, with the goal of producing neutralinos. the particle prospectors struck pay dirt in 2035- solving the cooling problem and producing all flavors of neutralinos in abundance. this technology was kept from the world while the scientists at the n-lab ventured down some dark paths with their glut of neutralinos (ex strawberry infused carbon molecules made into sugar and fed to mice). but they were cookin' with gas, until november 16, 2037 when everything within 50km of the n-lab froze. as in an instantaneous drop to absolute zero.


The WeirdWar, which followed WWIII, began in 2037 with the Great Snap, which was a kind of very sudden Ice Age that completely froze Canada, Alaska and the northern USA. Millions died during the first six months from the cold alone, and millions more in the coming year from famine. In 2038, American scientists diagnosed the first case of Snap Syndrome, a bizarre kind of mental illness brought on by traumatic stress and famine. Six months later, the cause was traced to a prion contracted from eating human flesh, which affects the frontal lobes and slowly turns the victim into a kind a rabid predator, devoid of language but filled with cunning. In the winter of 2039, the Snap reached across the Pole to northern Eurasia, and it became clear that some agency was *causing* the freeze. Entire cities would vanish into a freezing fog and utter communications blackout, whereupon the citizen would riot and tear each other apart until they froze in place. Thermal imaging of the cloud showed a gigantic humanoid form, surrounded by waving tentacles of freezing cloud. The world media promptly dubbed it "wedigo", a name that was already on everyone's lips since the plague of cannibalism in North America. Conventional military assault had one noticeable result: it proved that there was intent behind the Snaps. The assaults did zero damage to the Wendigo, but they DID annoy it, with the result of total loss of all attacking units. The first nuclear attack took it by surprise and apparently hurt it, but the attacking generals erred on the side of caution and used a single low yield device. It fled back to North America, only to return in 2040 - and this time, it simply froze any incoming missiles and went about it's merry way. Over the next few years, while northern Eurasia froze and died, the surviving world governments orbited a ring of microwave beam station powerful enough to chase the invader back to the Arctic Circle. They did NOT actually kill it - the Arctic Circle is a permanent death zone, but the thing is apparently underneath the ice. The Ring of Fire was left on automatic detect and fire, and fitted with SOTA nanotech self-repairing systems. The WeirdWar represented humanity first brush with one of the Great Old Ones, just one of them, and resulted in the death of 2 billion people worldwide over five years and uncountable climatic damage to the entire globe.

chapter ii: the signal in yellow

In 2039 SETI finally hit the jackpot, though not in any way expected. The star HD 17647, 570 lys away in the constellation Eridanus, was transmitting in the 580nm range - the star itself was transmitting in the range of visible yellow light. Which implies an unthinkable level of technology...

Worse, the signal by and large doesn't make sense. Only about 30MB are received every year. The best guess is that it is an algorithmic message that describes a virtual machine, but there are also bits that are simple number series and things that appear to be music. The most commonly repeated segment describes a four dimensional image. Rendered as a three dimensional animation, it looks like nothing at all - perhaps some kind of ideograph, or just a squiggle. At several points, when viewed from the correct angle, it collapses into a lopsided pentagram, which *really* sets people off.

There are dozens of cults, some of which must be classified as actual religions due to numbers, that claim to understand the signal. They listen to the music, mediate on the images and run the code endlessly through massive computer arrays. Every second, hundreds of sophisticated AI's noodle over endless streams of potentially meaningful pseudo-gibberish, the result being that the signal itself is now imbedded deep in net.

The Signal cults do not seem to do good things for people. Almost all are mystery religions requiring level after level of initiation, protecting what little bit of enlightenment that might have garnered from competitors.

In pop culture, the Sign has come to represented a new level of technonihilism, the deep set belief that humans are no longer capable of understanding the world they have created. This is not seen as a negative - do fish understand the sea? Wearing the sign shows an acceptance of and comfort in a world beyond comprehension, where science and knowledge exist only for curiosity's sake, with inherent goal. This kind of malaise runs deep even in the scientific community, long overwhelmed with mountains of data that can be interpreted as one wishes.

chapter iii: Deep Europa Ones

the tenticular deep ones are native to the abysal vents of europa. their entire mindset evolved in an environment where interplantertary space is as unknowable to them as fire is to fish, revealed to them by the quantum physics and neutrino detection even thereafter they observed the universe through neutrinos, gravitic waves, etc, rather than crossing the ice ceiling of their world. deep ones are itioparic immortals - they do not age or sensecense but die after a single act of reproduction, another trait they share with cephalopods. their technology and civilization advances with glacial slowness - their stone age was earth's jurassic.

the deep ones initiated a trial first contact program in the early 21st century. the test zone was the salish sea, off the coast of british columbia. unfortunately, much was lost in the translation. on august 27, 2007 a size 12 shoe containing a human right foot was found on the shore of jedediah island in the salish sea. on august 26, 2007 another size 12 shoe containing a human foot was found. on february 8, 2008 a right foot in a size 11 nike was found on the shore of valdes island in the salish sea, indentified as belonging to a man reported missing four years prior. on may 22, 2008 a blue and white sneaker containing a woman's foot was found, identified as belonging to a woman who jumped from a bridge in 2004. on june 16, 2008 a man's left foot was found and confirmed to be a match to the right foot found on february 8. on august 1, 2008 a size 11 black nike containing a man's right foot was found - this time on a beach in washington state. on november 11, 2008 a woman's foot was found in a small running shoe, confirmed to be a match to the one found on may 22. on october 27, 2009 a size 8 1/2 nike running shoe containing a man's right foot was found, identified as belonging to a Vancouver area man reported missing in 2008. on august 27, 2010 a woman or child's right foot, without shoe or sock, was found. on decemeber 5, 2010 a right foot in a boy's size 6 hiking boot was found on the tidal flats of tacoma, 225km south of vancouver. on august 30, 2011 a foot was found inside a size 9 blue and white running shoe. on november 4, 2011 a man's right foot inside a size 12 hiking boot was found on the shore of sasamat lake. on january 26, 2012 human bones were found in a boot in the sand at the water line in vancouver. on may 6, 2014 a left foot was found in a size 10 1/2 athletic shoe in seattle. on february 7, 2016, a foot was found in a running shoe on vancouver island. on february 12, 2016 the mate to the foot found on february 7 was found. after 2016 there was a hiatus....the trial was over.

on january 12, 2018 a human foot was found on...(this expands to be worldwide, involving the following beaches:

clearwater, florida
vainguinim beach, goa, india
jacob's bay, western cape, south africa
busena terrace beach, okinawa
jericoacoara, Ceará, brazil)

chapter iii.5: that Innsmouth gene-fix

2021 a new species of deep sea cuttle fish is discovered, Illythus abolethi. in 2025 scientists shock the world by announcing that this species is truly biologically immortal. a complex set of enzymes continually repairs damage to teleomeres. bizarrely, despite their potential for unlimited life, they die shorting after mating. in 2031 the genes coding for these enzymes are successfully introduced to zebrafish....and in 2041 those same fish are still alive. the first Methuselah mouse is gengineered in 2033, and also seems to be biologically immortal (although slightly bug eyed). by 2036 black market clinics are offering the 'teleomere fix' for human zygotes......unfortunately for mankind, Illythus abolethi is a GMO created by the deep ones.
and the problem with all this:

Quote Originally Posted by NichG View Post
The issue is that you can strain the message of your fiction in another way if you do that too much. It's actually pretty hard to present stuff to a reader which is both onscreen for any amount of time and also convincingly unknowable without also making it fail at feeling like its internally self-consistent. Thats why in horror and in things like the mythos, you don't show too much of the monster. A concrete existence that sits in a 5km cloud of frozen atmosphere? Maybe its not within our physics, but give me 5 minutes and I can quickly come up with a physics that it'd be within, or even just a set of observations and rules.

If you want me as a reader to believe that the observations and rules I need to understand it aren't the ones I'm used to, that's fine. But if you want to convince me to not try, or to feel like my attempts inevitably fail for good reason, every single piece of information you provide is ammo against your goal - eventually I'll either figure out the hidden rules you had in mind, or figure out that you had no rules in mind and its basically just random. To put it another way, as a scientist 'hey, isn't this is weird' indicates I'm about to have a breakthrough, not that I'm about to fail. The sign of impending failure is more like 'even though there should be something, there's no way for us to build instrumentation that could possibly measure it or protocols that could possibly separate it from noise or computers powerful enough to simulate it'. It's being unable to get evidence that creates the feeling of unknowability, not when the evidence is just unexpected.

So you need to be very subtle, make every single observation and piece of information extremely rare and dear. Suggest that there may be rules, but always make it so that the task of getting the information needed to establish those rules is too costly or too difficult for people in the setting. Ithaqua shows up, there's a 5km cloud of frozen atmosphere, okay. But no direct readings, no tissue samples, no observer accounts, not even 'its Ithaqua, a solitary person-sized entity in the center'. More like 'one day, Toronto suddenly became encased in ice; the ice is slowly moving south, and gradually thawing behind; no one can get inside the icy area, but bits of evidence are surfacing at the trailing side'.

Only at the very end of the story do you want to take out the concrete stuff - sort of like a game of cups, where you know there's a ball somewhere (it seems to have rules, there must be a reason), and then you have to guess where the ball is (try to figure out the rules), and at the end if you guessed right you get to survive and if you guessed wrong then all the humans die (the concrete reality is exposed a little bit more, you can employ a twist, and use that to show just how different the reality was from the conclusions drawn using the standard scientific reasoning and knowledge that the human characters have access to).

Otherwise you're likely to get people thinking along 'Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality' lines when you're trying to tell a Harry Potter story.