He noticed the crystal ball on the oracle's table. “I take it that this is what shows us the future?”
"Nah." Her face flashed briefly into view beneath her hood as she lit another cigarette. "You didn't do your homework, did you? Looking in from outside, the crystal ball shows you the past. Looking out from inside, it shows you the future. Here, let me show you how it works.”
In the late 1890s, scientists at the University Beneath Chicago developed the first atomic bomb, a weapon which they referred to as the "Antithalesian device." Despite it being a milestone of human engineering, this research was never approved for surface publication. After proof of concept testing, the results joined scores of other papers in the vaults of Shaver Hall, only to be read again on a need-to-know basis.
The gargoyles of the Red City cannot fly; the wings of fossilized coral that they carry on their backs serve as an ever-present reminder that they were built by humanity to surveil in stillness. Even so, they shamble through the streets of the city at night on legs that groan in defiance of their stone composition.
Once we flip this switch, you'll begin to see your life’s High Scores table. It will scroll across the sky on nights of the new moon, as well as along the insides of your eyelids during the interludes between dreams and wakefulness. Here, you’ll see the initials of everyone who has ever been you, as well as how well they performed over the course of your lifespan.
In the year 1968, there were four separate cases of submarines disappearing under mysterious circumstances: the American Scorpion, the Israeli Dakar, the French Minerve, and the Soviet K-129. The last of these events came under scrutiny when, six years later, a United States black project disguised as a manganese mining operation attempted to locate and salvage what was left of the Soviet submarine. This program was known as “Project Azorian,” and was primarily carried out by a single vessel known as The Glomar Explorer.
"My mother taught me that all of the punctuation marks that you miss while typing build up in your fingertips over time." She held up her hands, revealing that the ends of her digits were covered in black splotches. "So, I haven't used any since I was twelve. I’m chock full of them now, periods, commas, parentheses, you name it.”
The glyphs of the Folorsine alphabet are neither read horizontally, nor vertically; they march towards the eye as a procession of phosphenes, parading one after the other through the iris’s gates. This is not a language that is interpreted from a page, so much as swallowed by the brain. It is still actively used, though its spoken form has not been heard for centuries.
While it’s not uncommon for factory errors to result in fortune cookies with blank messages, when Martin split his open, he found that it contained an atypical form of blankness. Along the left-hand side of his fortune, a blinking cursor could be seen, still awaiting user input.
