Tycho: Does Narrative Have Gravitational Pull

Early Reflections

Dr. Edgar Allen Wright

Andy Onimous’s drop triggered thoughts about the very nature of sensitives. As many of you know, Andy wrote a screenplay, decades ago, which he believed was a work of fiction.  That is, he did not believe that the events of the Niantic Project had actually happened.  And indeed they hadn’t.  Not yet.

Andy believed that he was creating characters and settings and events. That they were somehow alchemically spawned whole from his imagination through some process we call ‘creativity.’  While it is not my intention to get into a discussion of ‘creativity’, we should proceed in this discussion with the understanding that ‘creativity’ is a word we have placed over the ‘human portal’ if you will, that connects our conscious selves, the ones feeling the air around us, touching the earth below us, with some mysterious dream-like void from which we extract images, narratives, people, monsters and indeed whole other worlds.

Creativity is a subject so mysterious, unknowable, uncategorizable that we rarely discuss it.  In fact, we rarely think about it other than to say some people are ‘creative’ (read sensitive) or some act is very ‘creative’ and get on with it.  I would submit that we have an inborn psychological superstition about looking at creativity. It is as if we are looking a ‘gift horse in the mouth.’

My premise here is that while creativity involves complex processing in the human brain, the hidden and undiscussed component to it is that creativity might be a hidden perception of other dimensions (quantum realities). And, does our creativity project into other dimensions.

But let us return to Andy Onimous.

Andy is what we categorized, at the Waratah Symposium, as a precognitive sensitive. That is a sensitive who sees events which are to unfold at a later time. From an Earthly point of view (or from our dimension on our point and heading) these events have not happened. Of course, from a Quantum perspective, there is no time, or time is just a dimension so everything always has happened, is happening and is going to happen again. So the line, used by one sensitive that ‘he saw the present from a future time’ grasps the concept. At least to the extent that a normal human mind is able to grasp it.

In the case of the Andy Ominous’, Felicia Hajra-Lees and Tychos, they possess an ability to shift place and time and perspective, to inhabit other beings.  The curious thing about it is that the navigational points of their journey are not geographical, temporal, or even psychological. They are narrative.  It is as if narrative… Story… Has, in and of itself an immutable path, like a series of numbers or like a path on a map that is irrespective of time, location and perspective.

In this case of what we perceived to be real people.  Those who are right around you.  They are pinned to the same time and place and velocity as you are. They traverse geography with you, they travel through time at more or less the same rate you do, they inhabit your space and you appear to inhabit theirs. Even when they are not with us, they maintain a persistence of existence in our minds, though now and then we seek to confirm this by calling them on the phones.  We construct narratives of them when they are away from us.  When we speak to somebody on the phone, we simulate the environment, usually in low resolution, from which they are speaking.  Of course this is a fantasy environment, but we need to have a ‘mental image’ of things.

This, of course is a fiction. We imagine them, however vaguely and dimly. We see their faces, based on old data, we see their clothes (though rarely do we ask what they are wearing) and we have a highlight reel of them to refer to. A series of images in and ‘clips’ we can call up to remember them. It matters little that many of these images might be years… even decades old. This does not affect us until we see a person we knew as a child and suddenly encounter them as an adult. The toddler is now six feet two inches with a deep voice.  We are incapable of updating the toddler files to the adult files, so they exist within us as two separate people who through rationality we harmonize as one until that magical moment of reunification in which we notice a connection – a mannerism, a gesture, that harmonizes the child and the adult.

And, of course, the thing we colloquially categorize as ‘Self-Image’ is really just a kind of mental simulacrum we have created that is how we appear and are perceived by others. It is what we think we look like, sound like along with what we perceive our perceivers as perceiving.  It is very complex, but before getting confused, suffice to say that we are very adept at apprehending and networking a shared reality with other humans in order to be able to function.  We constantly ping and confirm our realities by sharing perceptions and opinions to tune our machines. The closer to our perceptions one is, the more we consider them synced or more colloquially, ‘sane’. When somebody is too far outside the realm of shared reality, we perceive them as ‘insane.’  That is why it is comforting to see a person who appears as crazy drinking a branded cup of coffee, because we know that we share the same perception of, if nothing else, the cup of coffee.

But I digress. Andy Onimous (obviously a pseudonym invented by this author to express his own unreality while maintaining a reality and a self-image)somehow tapped into a future narrative, so accurate and so precise that we perceive it to be extra-sensory perception. He did not see it that way when he wrote it. He thought he was making up a story. And there are others who suggest something far deeper and more sinister and that is that he created our present reality. At first, this appears to be a non-scientific theory in the realm of ‘speculative fiction’ from which we get an ‘uncanny thrill.’  We let this idea in. For a moment, a great door of possibility stands impossibly ajar, like a magic portal Lord of the Rings or Alice’s Rabbit Hole or Dorothy’s suddenly colorful (enlightened?) world. But quickly, we smile and we dismiss it, because to accept such a reality would be to violate our network of shared reality (that which connects us to the world) and leave us lost and confused in an incomprehensible universe.

However, even in our most mundane perception of the world, we believe, we really believe that visions create reality.  We call the exremophiles of our network (which includes many people we do not actually know, but share a belief of their existence) as visionaries.  We accept that Walt Disney was a visionary. He had to envision Disneyland in order to build Disneyland.  We accept this, as disturbing as it might be at a primal level, because so much of it is a dream and we work very hard to delineate dreamlike thinking from reality thinking.

Each morning we dismiss our ‘dreams’. We don’t know where these come from, through the gate of horn or the gate of Ivory, but we use them as calibrating our reality each day.

‘You wouldn’t believe what you did to me in a dream I had last night’ a friend from ‘reality’ says. The curious thing is that a part of us believes that the dream behavior is real behavior (or was a warning of real behavior) and we perceive these friends in a slightly different light after dreaming about them. Thus it is that we accept, though we may not admit or discuss it, that dreams inform reality.

We are amused that cultures, such as the Anazteka that Yuri Nagassa is so intimate with perceive the dream world as the real world and the world we inhabit as the illusion, though we have the disturbing feeling that they might just be right.

But I digress from Tycho. Tycho is a comic book artist. He is a painter of dreams. He came to us from an accepted portal medium in our world (all art is a portal world, I would maintain, but that is beyond the scope of this discussion).  Comic Books are an accepted medium, born as all creative mediums as children’s fantasies, in which characters with unbelievable powers interact with our worlds and journey to impossible worlds on impossible adventures but somehow connect with the primal in us. We do not afford these adventures the same gravitas or even reverence that we afford religious fantasies, though even that line is beginning to blur.  For instance, the Force in Star Wars is taken quasi-seriously by some ‘fans’ (remember fan is short for fanatic).

Tycho himself is a semi-fictional character. He was not born with that name. It is a name he adopted.  He is a ‘ghost’ artist, famous among the comic book elite, who has been drawing for decades.  Of course, the Tycho we saw in the ComicCon video at the Buck Rogers panel, did not appear to be old enough to have been drawing for decades. One, maybe two decades, but he could not possibly have had the legacy described by Paul Dini, Mike Becker or any of the others described.

And what was his message? He was claiming, without specificity, that the Buck Rogers comic strip, released in 1929, was issuing secret information about transdimensional portals.  Tycho looked like a madman. He acted like a madmen. He was led away like a madman. Few paused to ask, why was he led away and by whom?

We now believe this to be the NIA (an agency which reputedly no longer exists, wiki it), who appears to now be headed by a gentleman named Ken Owens who can best be described as a P.R. agent (read that ‘perception of reality engineer’ portalist extroarinaire).  What are the implications of a perception engineer running an intelligence agency?  I guess they are no more sinister than the alternative, which would be the sinister J. Phillips, but I digress again (though digression is the message here. How do you order thoughts when all thoughts are linked? How do you order reality when reality is holistic?).

The curious thing is that Tycho, Andy Onimous and Felicia Hadjra-Lee as well as Thomas Greanias (who I can assure you is a real person, I have met him) are all seeming to focus on the same narrative. I submit to you that narratives themselves have gravity. They pull sensitives towards them.  This is not a new thought, Carl Jung wrote it out over a century ago, and Homer himself freely and openly shared detailed and credible bronze age battlefield accounts with the activities of Gods and saw no line between them.

Clearly narrative has gravity, but what does it pull to it.  And this is the most shocking possibility, does the gravity of narrative pull Reality towards it the way Walt Disney’s fantasy of a magical kingdom attracted engineers, cement mixers and groundskeepers?

When this began, there was no ‘game’ called Ingress.  Shortly after Tycho’s rantings, a mysterious phone appeared and through means known only to Ben Jackland and/or the NIA, Ingress spread to millions of users. Whether they call themselves Enlightened or Resistance, every one of them has actually harvested Exotic Matter, built fields and has spread word of a new way of perceiving the world. Of course, 84% of them say that it is just a ‘game’, but a game is not real. However this has real effects. When is a ‘game’ no longer a game?  When is a game real? When is reality a game? What is the line?

Is there a line?

The day if afoot and I must get on to other things, so I will leave you with this.  Tycho has released a few panels of his new comic on Tumblr. The curious thing is that there is new dialogue in the panels. There are new features. I suggest that this is far more than simply an artist re-writing previous work, I suggest that Tycho realizes that his fiction, along with Felicia Hadjra-Lee’s fiction and Thomas Greanias’ fiction has actually bent reality. Has shed light on deeper realities previously hidden to him and thus he must transform his fiction.

Is that what it is, other reality begets fiction begets our reality begets fiction which bends other reality which begets a new reality for us?

Something to ponder as you drift off to dreamworld tonight.

E.A. WRIGHT