THE GREATER REALITY AREA

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fiction

A collection of 29 issues

THE KAMCHATKAN LIVING CAULDRON

The “living cauldron” is a cryptid first described in the journals of seventeenth century Russian expeditioners to the Kamchatkan peninsula. One such Cossack explorer described a disintegrating reindeer corpse in what appeared to be a hot spring, posed as if it died struggling to escape, reeking terribly of rot and

REALITY REVISED #3: HARDCORE ASTROLOGY

"This bidirectional telescope was built to accommodate several different modes of operation,” the research director explained. "For instance, right now, the action is set to allow hermetic feedback. In other words, whenever you focus its lens on a particular star, the image of that star exists just as

FOR NO EYES ONLY

REALITY REVISED #2: LUCK OF THE DRAW

Against their better judgment, six men sat down to play Russian roulette, and by the end of their game, seven were alive. "I've seen this happen before," the new player spoke. He was sprawled nude across their table, having just splattered into being with a loud

CROW'S FOOT

In the mid-20th century, humanity exhibited a strange habit of ceding even its leisure activities to machines. Following a prophecy by Alan Turing, chess-playing computers began proving their ability to defeat even professional human opponents. A number of apocalyptic scholars iterated on these designs, building increasingly competitive chess

REALITY REVISED #1: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ETHICAL CONSUMPTION IN THE PRETA LOKA

Pac-Man is living language, a logomotive being. His body is a sigil built from くち, the Hiragana for “mouth;” as such, his flesh is code that executes his only impulse. He moves ceaselessly forward through hazy, phosphene labyrinths, oscillating between fleeing from the entities that occupy its corridors, and

EXPERIMENTAL TREATMENT

"When I was about ten or so, I swallowed seventeen packets of sea monkeys, all at once. It turned out my immune system was missing an antibody or two, and I had an undiagnosed fistula, so the pleura between my organs turned into a whole sea monkey circus."

ON MALL DREAMS

Somewhere in the mind, or mind of minds, is a grand snarl of escalators, rectangular caves, and an inescapable dim glow, perhaps accompanied by faint, barely intelligible music. Everywhere malls exist, people dream of mallscapes, which, strangely, are remembered as if they are one singular mall, or “Mall World.” Three

THE WATER CLOCK PRINCE

TRILOBITE BLUES

In life, your pet trilobite never got to meet you. The little oval spent quiet days scurrying about the seafloor, as its kind had always done for hundreds of millions of years. Sometimes it would curl up into a ball to protect itself from danger; other times, just because it