Aftershocks: Reality Quakes, Redux

"Plainly, we have to face the possibility now that reality did fracture in or about the beginning of the year 1477. Equally plainly, it is possible that fragments of that prior history have existed in ours, becoming gradually less and less 'real' as the universe moves on from the moment of fracture."

-- Pierce Ratcliff, in Lost Burgundy: The Book of Ash, #4, by Mary Gentle

Last week's column uncovered (or synthesized, or invented) the "reality quake," a delightfully unprovable phenomenon of vast bisociative potential. Such a convulsion overturns established history, upthrusting a new past which extends backward from the fracture point, or "eimicenter" (the linguistically picky can swap it out for "ontocenter," which is better Greek but less euphonious English) leaving only fragments of the previous reality ("pragmaclasts") visible "above ground." This week, a few more reality-penetrating tomographic pings to map the substrata of existence, and yet more fun and games for, well, fun and games. Let's see what else is shaking.

"You will understand soon. Terrible times are coming but everything will become clear. Now, you recall a catastrophic event -- the 'Crisis' -- that recently took place on this stratum? This crisis, we discovered, has resulted in the current threat to your reality. The continuum was radically altered at that time, but some holes remained, unseen, pockets of contradiction."

-- Yellow alien, in Animal Man #12, by Grant Morrison

By contrast to Mary Gentle's superb novel Ash (referenced last week), the traditional four-color superhero comic book presents reality quakes at their most common and (usually) least earth-shattering level. Seemingly blasé superheroes find themselves with new histories, powers, and arch-nemeses on an almost annual basis. This practice, "retconning" (from "retroactive continuity") doesn't often show up in supers games ("No, you've always been vulnerable to silver. Don't you remember?"), although it could in a psychological-horror supers game modeled on Grant Morrison's Animal Man or a more light-hearted romp based on Alan Moore's Supreme. However, retconning seems to be a fairly harmless practice in most four-color worlds. It might be that in such worlds superheroes act as kind of eimic shock-absorbers -- after all, the retcon waves seldom change who won World War Two, regardless of how many superheroes they remove from its battlefields.

You can take comics-style retconning into other reality-quake games, as well -- both personal reality-quakes ("No, this house has always been vacant.") and global ones. Animal Man, especially, provides not only a surreally menacing picture of the way that pragmaclasts (both people and items) can behave, but a deliberate tie-in to the greatest overt reality quake in comics history, the Crisis on Infinite Earths. Adapting a storyline of cosmic reality collisions -- or of time patrolmen unwittingly investigating the Animal Man-style aftershock of such a crisis -- to an Infinity, Inc. GURPS Time Travel game would be difficult, but the rewards of scope might be worth it.

"The bay-trees in our country are all wither'd

And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;

The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth

And lean-look'd prophets whisper fearful change."

-- William Shakespeare, Richard II, II:iv:8-12

A crisis on infinite alternate earths might wind up looking something like Reality Sidewise, with Halley's Comet as its harbinger. Comets, of course, anciently signified disastrous changes, since they altered the perfect and permanent heavens. Such a reputation could, in fact, be the lingering result of a reality quake caused by a comet's disastrous passage through our previous history, or by a cometary impact. Velikovskians posit two major "quantavolutions" (perceptual reality quakes) that scramble recorded history in around 1450 B.C. and 686 B.C., caused by the dangerously close approach of the comet Venus. Could the Venusian Mirror Realm be the Preality born and then broken in the comet's passage? The Tunguska event (possibly a subliming comet impact) of 1908 might have triggered a reality quake -- could the whole unsettled, "alienated" condition of modernity simply be our global subconscious sensing that reality has been jarred loose?

Maybe Tunguska thrust us out of a steampunk (or rocketpulp) Preality, leaving only scientifiction -- and perhaps, somewhere, a warehouse full of eimically shielded ether-flyers. The timing is also suspiciously close to the Futurist Manifesto; could the Tunguska strike have shunted Reality Futura into a Preality now only dimly seen as UFOs and forgotten Italian paintings? Disaster certainly followed in the comet's wake The records of comets might also indicate eimic fault lines, either with their appearance (1066, and one of the falls of Magelion?) or their failure to appear as predicted. The pages of Charles Fort are full of comets that defy their rightful periodicities -- has reality itself perturbed their orbits?

"Although earthquakes have often been associated with inexplicable past societal disasters, their impact has thought to be only secondary for two reasons: Inconclusive archaeological interpretation of excavated destruction, and misconceptions about patterns of seismicity. However, a better understanding of the irregularities of the time-space patterns of large earthquakes suggest that earthquakes (and associated tsunamis) have probably been responsible for some of the great and enigmatic catastrophes in ancient times. The most relevant aspect of seismicity is the episodic time-space clustering of earthquakes . . ."

-- Amos Nur, "The Collapse of Societies by Giant Earthquakes" (abstract)

Suspiciously tight planetary alignments might also cause reality quakes, instead of conventional earthquakes or pole shifts, in a kind of ontological "Jupiter Effect." The Piri Reis Map and other alleged evidences of a historical pole shift might, in fact, be pragmaclasts. Or, of course, a reality quake might legitimately trigger other purely physical traumas. The massive wave of earthquakes that seems to coincide with the end of the Bronze Age in 1200 B.C. (another possible Velikovskian quantavolution date, and the beginning of the most reliably hollow history) could simply be the material tremors from an eimic fault-slip. Vulcanism, too, may either be symptomatic or causative of reality quakes -- the famous volcanic "year without a summer" in 1816 strikes me as very suspicious indeed, when you consider that Frankenstein's monster and the modern vampire both emerged from that dust cloud. A similar climatic "dolorous blow" struck in 535-536 A.D. that may have triggered the death of Arthur, the plague of Justinian, the migration of the Avars, the collapse of the Jin in China and Teotihuacan in Mexico, and the rise of Arabian messianism. According to M.G.L. Baillie, the culprit is a cometary impact (or possibly the Tauride meteors); according to David Keys' Catastrophe, it was an immense volcano in Java. Either way, it makes a suspiciously good eimic fracture zone for history.

"I understand how things could be left over. No process is perfect, the universe is large and complex, and what Ash and the Wild Machines did -- it's not surprising if some of the evidence of the first history wasn't expunged. Reality has its own weight. It's been gradually squeezing the anomalies out -- things becoming legendary, mythic, fictional."

-- Pierce Ratcliff, in Lost Burgundy: The Book of Ash, #4, by Mary Gentle

King Arthur is obviously the "Ash" of that 535 event; his eimic signature continues to radiate even fifteen centuries later. The Holy Grail, then, might simply be an incredibly powerful pragmaclast, a piece of the previous reality possessed of literally transcendental powers. Perhaps the Grail is simply the core of the comet that struck our previous reality; recall that to Wolfram, the Grail was the lapis ex caelis, the Stone Fallen From Heaven. As the actual proximate cause of the reality quake, the Grail-comet's eimic dosage might vastly increase the unreality (or unknowability, in a more Heisenbergian sense) in those who see it (or guard it, or drink from it). The power of a pragmaclast such as the Grail could wipe people from continuity, or give them superpowers, or awaken their magick, or simply make them very eimically-sensitive, able to see the echoes and ghosts of the forgotten history.

"It seems reasonable to suppose that the cuts [in the Encyclopedia of Tlön] obey the intent to set forth a world that is not too incompatible with the real world. The spread of Tlönian objects through various countries would complement the plan . . . . Almost immediately, reality 'caved in' at more than one point. The truth is, it wanted to cave in."

-- Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"

And some of those echoes, and ghosts, and remnants, might not like being forgotten. They, too, might possess greater levels of eimic radiation -- with concomitant weird powers -- slowly decaying over time. (This, it suddenly occurs to me, is the best explanation for faeries that I've ever come up with -- it explains their archaism, their ties to poetry and legend, their creepy reality- and time-distorting powers, and their cringing need for human belief and company.) Couple such powers with the knowledge that reality quakes do occur, and the pragmaclastic entities might actually be able to reverse the fracture, or at least set off another one just as good at the same fault line. The qlippoth, those shells of God's first creation, are the quintessential pragmaclasts, plotting to infect the new reality with eimic "radiation sickness." The Lemurians, or any of Madame Blavatsky's disturbing giant psychic shamblers, also make superb pragmaclastic species, as do the sphinxes I posited earlier. In his own alternate chronology, Isaac Newton gives 958 B.C. as the date when Oedipus kills the Sphinx of Thebes, a fine date for an eimicenter.

"There are mad and beautiful things beneath the skin of the world we know, that you only see when you look at things on a planetary scale. What if, underneath all that, there was an entire classic old superhero world? What if there were huge Jack Kirby temples underground built by old gods or new, and ghostly cowboys riding the highways of the West for justice, and superspies in natty suits and 360-degree-vision shades fighting cold wars in the dark, and strange laughing killers kept in old Lovecraftian asylums . . . what if you had a hundred years of superhero history just slowly leaking out . . . ?"

-- Warren Ellis, original proposal for Planetary

The greatest thing that reality quakes do for your game is open it up into a whole new dimension. You can put anything you like, from influencing engines to griffins to the Iron Chef, underneath the strata of reality for your players to dig out. Or, to add familiarity along with surreality, previous campaigns can eimically "leak" into new ones, reintroducing villains and artifacts in a quasi-Moorcockian avalanche of archetype. Anywhere can be an eimic subduction zone, any legend can leave peculiar traces in the grimmest and grittiest reality -- perhaps the Empire State Building focuses eimic energies through sacred geometry, and keeps Doc Savage's eyrie waiting for him on an unused floor in case a new temblor shakes him back into existence. Eimic fracture points can be places of mystery, dungeon tunnels to adventure, or bad places boiling with vengeful pragmaclastic Things That (literally) Should Not Be. The past isn't what it used to be, and it doesn't have to be like it was. Shake it up, baby.