Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Danton Wells, armed with printed machine code from the PDP-8 computer that he and the remaining Futuros had poured their life savings into, emerged before his followers and claimed that “the Deus had a heartbeat.” The machine code he had was in an extremely difficult-to-parse format, even for someone with training:

NL0000= CLA / 0
NL0001= CLA IAC / 1
NL0002= CLA CLL CML RTL / 2
NL2000= CLA CLL CML RTR / 1024
NL3777= CLA CMA CLL RAR / 2047
NL4000= CLA CLL CML RAR / 2048
NL7777= CLA CMA / -1 or 4095
NL7776= CLA CMA CLL RAL / -2 or 4094
NL7775= CLA CMA CLL RTL / -3 or 4093

Wells, having painted himself into a corner, claimed that this represented coded communications with the gestating Deus. His followers, being even less computer-literate than Wells himself, were convinced. Armed with this, Wells issued the first of several “interpreted” edicts to his Futuros: they should sell their homes and all worldly possessions and join him in building a compound where the Deus could be born in peace, a “maternity ward for a new god,” as Wells put it.

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Eventually, the lack of any real sign of the Deus emerging despite Wells’ insistence that it was nigh led to a dwindling number of members. From a high of about 150 in 1964, the Futuros had fallen to less than 75 by the following year, and a satellite branch in Dayton was shuttered. Wells began desperately to search for any sign of the Deus, and, in mid-1965, he found it in a DEC PDP-8 minicomputer. At a fraction of the cost of a mainframe, around $18,500, this computer was latched onto by Wells as the first sign of an emerging technological god–the “ovus of the Deus,” as he put it. After raising the money from his remaining followers, Wells took delivery of the computer in early 1966. The PDP-8, though, was not an easy machine to master, and Wells did not take the free courses on its operation offered at Ohio State in Columbus, choosing instead to attempt to puzzle out its user manual, something for which he had no aptitude. The only thing he managed to do was to have the PDP-8 output a discrete bit of its machine code via a teletype. And this simple operation was at the heart of the Futuros’ later infamy.

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Wells’ ideas struck a chord with people who had been alarmed by the dawn of the nuclear age, and by 1963 he had amassed enough followers to quit his former occupation and purchase a building for the Acolytes. There, they kept a “representative example” of “each aspect of the future Deus” and practiced worshiping it even as they also used publications like Popular Mechanics as holy texts to look for new and better models. One photograph from 1964 shows Futuros gathered around a 1963 Chevrolet, a blender, a Kirby vacuum, a Zenith television set, and an RCA radio. The Deus, Wells told his followers, would manifest itself from the merger of all technology at a singularity that was fast approaching. So, he held, it behooved them to worship and minister to its nascence.

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While the Futuros were mocked as the “people who worshiped cars,” that was an oversimplification. Danton Wells taught that the increasing complexity of man’s creation would eventually produce a deus ex machina, a god from the machines. If this rising god were not met with respect and a ready cadre of worshipers, Wells thought, it would destroy mankind. With a loyal group like the Futuros shepherding it and intermediating it, the machine god would instead being about a utopia. He called this force the Deus, and the Futuros set about the unenviable task of worshiping a god which had not yet been born.

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Danton Wells, named after the French revolutionary Georges Danton, was the son of a high school history teacher and a homemaker in Youngstown, Ohio. Despite coming from an educated background and being extensively taught at home, Wells was a mediocre student at best and quickly amassed a reputation as a feckless, unreliable daydreamer. After graduation, the only work he was able to find was as a janitor and part-time mechanic at a Chevrolet dealership. It was there that he noticed, over the course of a few years, the startling increase in sophistication of the cars on the lot, from the initial postwar models in 1946 (Wells had been too young to be drafted into the war). He began to wonder when cars would be sophisticated enough to talk, and this became the basis for the Acolytes of the Future cult, better known as the Futuros.

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“I found her in Kagoshima, during the first part of the occupation,” said Ayles. “It was really remarkable. Her family had been killed in the bombings during the war, and she’d been making a living by talking herself into wherever there was food. Impersonating dead children, stealing, whatever it took.”

“And you were impressed by this?”

“She was six years old,” Ayles said, “and she was working the area better than an OSS agent.”

“That still doesn’t explain-”

“I saw a kindred spirit, and so did the woman who would become my wife,” Ayles said.

“And so you trained her-”

“She begged for it. Like a fish to water. And you didn’t need to be a CIA station manager to see how useful someone with her talents could be.”

“And now she’s disappeared, leaving three dead agents in her wake.”

“Maybe she’s realized she can do better. Maybe she’s outgrown us.”

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01. What is the one piece of advice that will forever jump into your mind because you didn’t take it when your were first given it?

Write the backstory first and then take it out.

02. What is your favorite thing to binge on?

Video games. One mammoth session in a classic can devour hours of my life.

03. What is a physical gesture you tend to use a lot and why? (e.g. talking with your hands, winking at someone while you speak, shaking your leg).

I tend to jab at the heavens with an outstretched pointer finger.

04. Pick a card, any card… a tarot card. 🙂

Hmm…”Rules for Tarot Cards in Divination and Palmistry.”

05. What are your top two pet peeves with our digital age lifestyle?

Things being designed to look good on an iPad at the expense of actual functionality, and how easy it is for Russian trolls to mess with peoples’ perceptions.

06. What is your all-time favorite blogging beverage?

A 24-oz cup of High Point Coffee’s coldbrew iced mocha.

07. Name a book/movie that you can watch/read again and again.

Book: A Wizard of Earthsea. Film: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

08. What is an activity you enjoy watching other people do but don’t want to do yourself?

Singing and dancing.

09. How do you explain why water turns into ice to a four year old?

“It gets so cold it stops moving!”

10. What is a habit you have that you got from someone else?

Iced coffee, from other people with sensitive mouths who find the hot stuff altogether too scalding.

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“Well, Charles, it was a life well-lived, wasn’t it?” said Death. “An Oscar, a Tony, a Nobel Peace Prize, and five marriages to supermodels.”

“Yeah,” Charles said. “I think it’s been pretty good. But I’m ready for heaven now.”

“Heaven?” said Death. “Oh, no, Charles. You need to play life in hard mode to see the true ending. You were living on easy mode.”

“So…I have to live again, only harder?”

“Twice, I’m afraid,” said Death. “Hard mode doesn’t even unlock until you’ve beaten normal mode.”

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“What’s this?” said Dr. Karen.

“I can’t see,” said Splendificus the Prestidigitator from behind a mound of junk. “Describe it?”

“It’s, uh, a statue of a demon, I guess?” Dr. Karen said. “Maybe a succubus? Looks like black onyx or maybe obsidian, highly reflective. I hear the distant sound of children screaming when I’m near it, and when I touch it my hands come away sticky with foul and nameless ichor.”

“Oh, that’s the Totem of the Soul Eviscerator,” said Splendificus. “I used to use it to exterminate rats.”

“When’s the last time that you needed to exterminate rats?” For a warren of a century’s worth of hoarded wizard junk, Splendificus’s hovel seemed rather vermin-free.

“Not since I drew a circle of extreme vermicious unction,” said Splendificus, appearing from the other side of his junk mound and stroking his floor-length white beard sagaciously.

“Maybe it’s time to get rid of it, then?”

“NO!” the wizard shouted. “I need it! I had to murder a civilization to get it!”

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“Be careful in there,” came the final warning. “The death count is very high.”

Behind the ivory doors was a throne made of bloodstone, in a pool of light dripping from cold moonstone shards weeping from above. On the throne was perched Lord Mortus, the death count. He had one leg looped over the arm of his throne, and was slouched forward looking intensely at his pale bony hands.

“Duuude,” he said. “Dude.”

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