The Saga of the Unconscious Immaterium

The river ran backwards on the day the Queen vanished. It was this sequence of events which finally unclogged the writer’s block in Jack’s brain, washing it away in a surge of inspiration that flooded his brain as he retrieved the queen from under the couch, happy to see that she’d landed on the carpet and had not broken her fragile wings. That morning, from the upstairs deck, he’d seen the alarming sight of the river running against its usual course, but having become particularly adept at mental gymnastics over the past year of living with his father, he attributed the water’s strange activity to further shenanigans from the quantum server farm being built upstream and went about his day

The server farm project had necessitated removing the proposed land’s protected forest status and allowing for the construction of a small nuclear power plant. This had gone to public vote, with the understanding that the project would provide many jobs for the locals, but, since being approved five years earlier, all work on the site has been done by military personnel. This led to grumbling, but little outright criticism, as expressing disapproval for the government’s actions could lead to being selected for reeducation.

“In the decade since the courts appointed the president, life in this country has become like holding onto a rope in the middle of a raging river, but instead of pulling us to shore, the people on the other end are withdrawing the rope strand by strand,” was how Jack had phrased things on his most recent streamcast, Dismantling the Torment Nexus. He escaped government censorship by streaming anonymously from the decentralized BlockNet 3.0. His alter ego, NO1, was an occasional whipping boy for the right wing media machine, finding in him a replacement scapegoat after Banksy’s imprisonment.

It was this media that broadcast from the wallscreens into Jack’s father, Dick’s, eyes and ears every waking moment of the day. This led to some surreal encounters in the house, as Dick was unaware of his son’s alter ego, and how the lovely house on the hill in the woods overlooking the river was paid for via subscriptions and donations of the streamcast funneled by confederates into eBook sales of a series of fantasy novels Jack had published called The Saga of the Unconscious Immaterium, which sold well, but which few people seemed to have actually read.

Jack’s life was a complicated balancing act to keep up before his mom, Dorothy, had called and said she’d had enough of Dick. She had endured a lot from her husband for decades, but when the Parkinson’s had brought out his mean streak, Jack took it upon himself to free her up to live the life she deserved. Having hated his father since childhood, it was easier for Jack to continue the aura of begrudging tolerance he’d maintained for decades, than for Dorothy to adapt to this inconceivably worse version of the man. She still loved him, after all, and would call to video chat if he were having a good day, which had been few-and-far-between until the incident with the “crazy vitamins” two weeks ago.

Having foreseen how things were going, Jack got a vasectomy after college, and so had never had children, but experiencing Dick’s decline perhaps gave him a taste of what that might have been like. There were amusing moments, like when Jack caught his dad attempting to use the streamcast equipment to contact “Russian allies.” The microphone clip he had broken while yelling “SOS, Comrade!” had been replaced by drone delivery within hours, though perhaps it was all less amusing upon reflection.

Some days were quite bad, such as when Jack had gone to town, but forgotten his proof of citizenship papers. Reentering the house, he’d found Dick incinerating, on the stovetop, his signed copy of Counting Crow: The New American Genocide, by Jim Running Bear, who had died in prison during The President’s second term. That the one-time “most burned book” could, seemingly, not escape its fate was tragic enough. Worse for Jack, though, was seeing how his father, who had always been dislikable, but was arrogant, confident, and certain, had become a person whose existence was dominated by fear.

Jack wished he could ascribe all of his father’s new brand of negativity to the disease, but he understood it was part of a larger, societal problem that had started decades before, as late-stage capitalism had turned economics into a zero-sum game played by the elite. The notion that wealth would “trickle down” had been revealed as a lie told to benefit the world’s trillionaires, leaving most of the populace scrambling to make ends meet. At the same time, new technologies had outpaced human consciousness, resulting in new vectors for all sorts of propaganda, the truth of which became impossible to ascertain, as misinformation and opinions treated as facts drowned out veracity in a sea of noise, leading to a climate of uncertainty and fear.

History has demonstrated that scared people will often seek out powerful authoritarians who promise prosperity as they consolidate power, and the people of modern America were no different. One of The President’s first official acts was the establishment of The Ministry of Truth, which served to seek out voices critical of the regime and silence them. Jack’s streamcast was able to survive via some technical precautions and his dedication to remaining anonymous. Still, it was a stressful way to live and make a living, and Jack had expected the appearance of jackbooted thugs on his doorstep any day. This was how he lived for years, insisting to himself that the anxiety was worth it when he read the comments from listeners who said his words gave them hope.

Hope was Jack’s raison d’etre, and this manifested not just in his streamcast, but in his series of novels. The Saga of the Unconscious Immaterium took place in the realm of human emotion, where The River of Dreams percolated through The Shimmering Veil. Along its banks lived faeries, gnomes, and goblins, who sustained themselves by feasting on the rivers’ bounty. With their Queendom at the headwaters, the faeries prepared feasts of the choicest dreams, formed of humanity’s greatest hopes and purest wishes.

Further downriver lived the gnomes, whose utilitarian lifestyle and worldview was a result of their diet, which consisted of humankind’s more mundane motivations and realistic goals. Measured in attitude, they served largely as mediators among the faeries and goblins, who lived at the river delta, where its waters spilled into a great void in the ground.

Geography dictated that by the time The River of Dreams arrived in the goblin lands, all that was left were mankind’s greatest fears and basest impulses, which manifested as spiky nightmares which the goblins pulled from the river and ate raw. Over the course of the saga, as humanity’s conscious minds, on the far side of the veil, grew more fraught, fearful, and taxed, nightmares had outnumbered good dreams, leading to an increase in the strength and size of the goblin horde.

Jack knew the new book needed to start with some conflict, but he had struggled to find inspiration since Dick had moved in. The day-to-day stresses of the living arrangement had occluded his creative impulse for a year, and the few attempts he’d made to address the issue had been fruitless. Three days in the mountains on a technological fast had been relaxing, but ineffective. He’d long been an advocate for psychedelics as a way to achieve greater understanding of oneself and the universe, but even the various trips he’d taken over the past year had proven fruitless in defeating the writer’s block.

Two weeks prior to the incident with the queen, Jack had been alarmed to find his father sweating profusely and dancing in front of the wallscreen, which was tuned to a music video station instead of the state-sponsored news he always watched. Inexplicably, Dick was gyrating furiously to MPop, a genre of music predicated on the notion that all of the performers were from Mars. Manned missions to the red planet had been part of The President’s platform, but ten years into his administration only a few robotic rovers had been sent.

A brief investigation revealed that his father had ingested a good number of Molly tablets, thinking they were vitamins. Rather than seek medical attention, which certainly would have attracted the attention of the authorities, Jack just let Dick dance it out. Afterwards, the old man had slept for 24 hours, but when he had awakened, things were different.

Jack had made sure his dad was hydrated before he crashed, and then spent the next day effectively alone in a blissfully silent house. Awakening early the following morning, as Jack made his way to check on Dick, he noticed that one of the pawns on the chessboard he kept on display in the living room had moved. As a child, Jack and his father had played chess this way, stopping to make a move each time they passed by the board, which had sat on a low table close to the front door.

The chess set of Jack’s childhood had been a cheap one which came out of a cardboard box, but the one in his house now was expensive and finely crafted, and naturally featured faeries facing off against goblins. It had sat, collecting dust for years, before the morning that Jack noticed one of the faerie pawns had been moved two spaces forward. Whether seeing this was triggering or evocative, Jack could not say, but he remembered his childhood, and how so much of the unspoken conflict between him and his father had been expressed on that cheap chess set in the hallway.

They had started playing when Jack was eight, and Dick was not the sort of man to go easy on a child, believing such an attitude created soft adults, and so Jack was 13 years old before he won a game. Looking back, he realized that it was the study of chess, which had begun in earnest when he was 10 that had been his first obsession. He remembered the sense of superiority he had finally felt upon checkmating Dick, who’d never acknowledged the victory, simply setting up the board again and starting a new game.

Subsequent to the incident with what Dick called “the crazy vitamins,” they’d begun playing chess again. Something in Dick’s demeanor had changed, and over the next weeks Jack was shocked to find himself enjoying his father’s company for the first time in his life. The obsession with political news content had been replaced with a fascination of MPop lore, and Dick was eager to share the origin stories of and various conflicts between such acts as Mons Olympus and 4r3s, G0d 0f W4r.

The river ran backwards the day the queen vanished, but she had merely been knocked under the couch by Dick’s shaking hand. He’d left a quarter on the board to mark her place, and Jack couldn’t help but notice that the reverse of the coin was facing up, displaying the eagle instead of The President’s face, which had replaced the founding fathers on all currency during his first term.

As Jack retrieved the faerie queen from where she had come to rest, he was stuck with inspiration regarding the next installment of his book series. He imagined the concern among the faeries as The River of Dreams ran backwards, followed by their alarm upon discovering that their queen had gone missing. In a flash, he knew that it was all a plot by the goblins to take over the faerie lands, ensuring access to the delectable dreams upriver.

He also knew that this was the book that would reveal what had long been hinted at: that faeries, gnomes, and goblins are all the same species, and that the differences in their physicality, mindset, and culture were all a result of their diets. This was the message he’d been pushing for years on his streamcast in less metaphorical, more concrete terms, calling on the world at large to pay more attention to not just their programming, but the metacognitive processes that result from the content they consume.

At the same time, Jack began to consider the real-world implications of the river visible from his deck. The government media never showed communities undergoing economic or environmental upheaval as a result of The President’s policies, but certain underground channels that escaped censorship via one method or another were full of such stories, and Jack feared that the river’s unusual behavior was just the tip of the iceberg. More troubles were certain to follow such an ominous omen.

Jack knew that Dick wanted to go to town later. Last time he had wanted to dress in head-to-toe red, a popular way for MPop fans to garb themselves, but Jack had convinced him to settle for just a red tie. They’d had a nice time, running errands, grabbing lunch, and sitting in the park. That night Jack had cried as he realized the activities of the day stood out as his all-time fondest memory of his father, and decided to let Dick wear whatever outfit he wanted next time.

Jack was terrified of the future, unsure of where backwards flowing rivers, crazy vitamins, and an increasingly oppressive government that thrived on lies fit in to the story of his own life, but some of that fear dissipated as he stuck his head into Dick’s room to say he wanted a few hours to write before they left, and saw his Dad watching videos wearing a rose-red suit that must have been delivered by drone unbeknownst to Jack.

Jack could see the river flowing backwards from the window of his writing nook, but he focused his eyes on the blank page and began to write the next installment of The Saga of the Unconscious Immaterium, in which simmering conflict between the factions who lived along The River of Dreams would escalate to open fighting, and that it was incumbent upon him as the creator of this world to find a way to resolve the worsening state of things in a way that gave hope to those who actually read his words. This is that book:

The Saga of the Unconscious Immaterium vol. V

The Faerie Queen’s Lament

Chapter 1:

The river ran backwards on the day the Queen vanished…