Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Sherwood Greg scootered his bulk around to face Terra. “Of course,” he said. “What motive could there have been? Shreve as living off his remainders, the damage he did to Galaxian as a staff writer far in the past! It didn’t make sense, until I found this.”

Greg swiped again, and pictures of a teleplay dated 1995 began appearing. “The script for The Malevolent Monkey, reviled by fans of Star Force Five as the worst episode ever, and the only one that series creator Rod Cherrywood declared apochrypal!”

Several Star Force Five fans groaned at the mention, and even the one poor soul dressed as the monkey from The Malevolent Monkey hung is head in shame.

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“So what happened, then?” Chief Strong said. “Whose prints are those?”

“They are the prints of the murderer, of course, the same person who dumped Shreve in the fountain. Don’t you recall, Chief, that one of the cosplayers mentioned seeing someone walking a little oddly around the time of the murder? We assumed it was Shreve and his affected limpy walk…but it was actually our murderer, walking backwards in their own footprints to make it seem like Shreve had come through, and conveniently dumping him in a place which was likely to was away much physical evidence. The bloody handprint was Shreve’s, but not the footprints.”

Terra shook her head stubbornly. “No, it still doesn’t add up. Why kill him? There’s no motive. If everyone who acts like a dick at a cosplay event were murdered, there’d be no one left!”

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“But we found Shreve’s footprint by the fountain, and his handprint in blood on the marble!”

“Yes, it would seem that way, wouldn’t it?” Sherwood Greg said driving his scooter in a slow circle. “But do you know what we didn’t see? The mark of his cane!”

“We might not have seen it,” said Terra. “The driveway is loose gravel.”

Greg produced the artifact in question, its serpent head gleaming malevolently, from his bag.

“You can tell a lot about a man by the cane he uses, especially if he doesn’t have the mobility issues some of us do,” he said. “I think we can all come to the same conclusions about a man who uses a replica Lucius Malfoy walking stick.”

Then he jabbed it lightly into the gravel, where it left a series of sharp impressions; on the last jab it sunk in so deeply that he simply let it rest there. Sherwood Greg then held aloft his iPad, with snaps of the footprints as they had been discovered.

“You can check these photos for timestamps and edits,” he said, “but I think you’ll find that they were not present. And yet, when we compare this shot from earlier in the night, we see that he had the cane when he left.” Greg swiped to a photo of Shreveport looking sour as he retreated through the door. “This came off of Instagram, where the posting time confirms it was less than five minutes before the body was found.”

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By late 1971, rumors of activity in the Futuro compound had led to a police investigation and a search warrant, which Danton Wells did not allow. Several Futuros left the group’s compound around this time, and though they did not go to the authorities, Wells was apparently convinced that they would. In January 1972, he abruptly declared to his remaining followers that the Deus had manifested itself and that the time had come to merge its technological aspect with humanity. He began trying to graft random inanimate components to his favorites to realize this; with no medical training, the results were gruesome. The oldest of his children was around four years old at this point, and at least four children are known to have died from having circuit boards or chromed metal rudely implanted into their bodies. Others were left permanently maimed, losing fingers and limbs. By the time of the final police raid on the Futuro compound, in August of 1972, only thee children had not been given this horrifying “treatment” in some way.

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By 1969, Wells was telling the Futuros that their efforts had taken on a new form. The Deus, in the person of a PDP-8 minicomputer, had instructed its followers to “breed” a perfect mother, allowing the machine god to be born a perfect fusion of organic and technology. What followed was a nightmarish period in which Wells wantonly took advantage of his female followers, locking those who resisted in an outbuilding and subjecting them to repeated beatings. It’s not clear how many children Wells sired during this period, but sources account for at least a dozen.

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It has been speculated that many of Wells’ subsequent actions are the result of his deception. If anyone with even a remote familiarity with a contemporary computer were able to see the random code he had printed out, they would be able to see through his fraud. By isolating his remaining followers and strictly controlling their information, Wells could draw out the deception and remain in control. The compound he bought with his followers’ money was a former summer camp about 25 miles outside of Youngstown, and Wells became the sole intermediary between his followers and the outside world. He was the only one to leave the compound for supplies, he was the only one with access to radios and television, and by taking advantage of this the Deus was able to successfully “predict” several major events after they had already happened. Perhaps sensing that this could not go on forever, the Deus also began “commanding” Wells to take several wives and partners from among his flock.

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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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