THE DEPARTMENT OF NOTIONAL ARCHITECTURE
The Department of Notional Architecture was founded in response to a spate of terrorist acts targeting an apparently random cross-section of structures and institutions integral to the notional fabric of the multiverse. Collaboration between government agencies and independent entities – both corporate and discorporate – has proven paramount to the Department’s continued success.
However, as is the case with all matters of government oversight and regulation, opposition to the Department remains persistent and profound. Particularly fierce pockets of resistance have sprung up among traders in fictitious capital, who had enjoyed, prior to the Department’s formation, near-unbridled access to the fruits of all conjectural and speculative markets. Complex criminal networks have emerged, many of them linked to cartels thought to control distribution of the experimental hallucinogen known as Daffodil. Tracing these networks’ connections to established and emergent Ideational Futures firms is challenging, at times confounding work. Numerous factors preclude espionage. First, the amount of innate talent in precognition and other psychic abilities required to “blend in” at these firms is vast, severely limiting the pool of potential double agents. Most persons showing signs of any such ability are trained from youth by anti-government charter schools, further shrinking the field of available candidates. Second, the influence of the Daffodil substance is highly unpredictable. While certain subjects tolerate the drug, others are driven mad by its prophetic and revelatory effects. Laboratory investigations into the drug’s chemical composition have proved largely fruitless. Conspiracy theories abound. Contrary to accounts in the mainstream press, evidence of the drug’s sentience has not been conclusively established. However, the Department can not rule out the possibility. Anyone having information about the Daffodil substance is encouraged to contact Department representatives at their earliest convenience. Finally, counter-espionage has proliferated. Accounts from journalists, themselves in the time-pockets of corporate interests, have wildly overestimated the extent to which agents working for private architectural firms, time banks, and the Ideational Futures market have penetrated the Department’s upper ranks. Suffice it to say that wherever such problems exist, the Department will find and correct them. Spies will be shown no mercy. They will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
In spite of these setbacks, the Department has enjoyed tremendous success in curbing illegal acts of vigilantism and terror committed against the notional fabric. We maintain that there is no reasonable justification for private firms to develop or deploy their own counter-terrorism measures. Moreover, it is illegal for them to do so. And for good reason. A dangerous new category of thought-criminal has emerged as a direct result of these companies’ cavalier experiments in private security: immensely powerful psychic madmen in the utter thrall of the Daffodil substance. The Department regards these so-called “dream warriors” as vigilantes and terrorists. To date, it has brought to justice seventeen such highly dangerous criminals. Advanced interrogation techniques have yielded excellent results – that is, in cases where the Daffodil substance had not utterly corroded the subject’s brain. Thanks to advances in information extraction technology, we have been able to successfully root out corruption and anti-government activity in the highest echelons of the corporate world. We are proud of our results, and will continue to work to secure our multiverse, for the benefit of all.
Universes must contract as well as expand. It is the government’s position that, after eons of unchecked growth, the notional fabric is once again shrinking. As spokespersons for the godhead, whose will is Law, the government believes that the multiverse itself, in material fact, will soon follow suit. Time and space will begin, in effect, to reverse.
Our message to the public is not to fear. Shrinkage of the physical multiverse does not of itself denote scarcity of our chief commodity, time. As long as our fine corporations continue to collaborate with the Department and its sister agencies, there is no cause for concern.
What follows is a previously unreleased eyewitness account of the first known terrorist attack against the notional fabric. Several bogus transcripts of the witness’s account have been leaked to the press. Allow us to set the record straight.
As had been previously reported, the witness was an employee of Carhardt Architects, Ltd. The build in question was rated by top investment firms as having a 99.996 percent chance of becoming actual. The man who dreamed the idea was a venture capitalist from Earth named F. R. Havana. Early plans for the idea’s development had passed through multiple levels of Havana’s organization. Given Havana’s track record, as well as precognitive forecasts from the finest practitioners of the art, the progress of the development from idea to reality appeared all but certain. It was to be an open-air market, combined with a luxury shopping mall, with Ottoman and Turkish architectural influences, as is the current fashion on Earth. It would cover a quarter of the surface of the planet’s moon, a luxury haven for high-class vacationers.
Several firms competed to create the perfect notional construction to implant into Havana’s brain. The Ideational Futures market saw a frenzy of activity. Most of the bids clustered around the construction produced by Carhardt Architects, a fledgling firm which had yet to execute a build of equivalent scale. In spite of the firm’s lack of experience, the influx of capital from Ideational Futures allowed the build to proceed smoothly and ahead of schedule. One day towards the end of the build, one of the workers saw what he described as a deposit of some crystalline substance attached to the inside wall of the tea-house his team was constructing. The worker’s testimony is as follows.
“I saw the crystal flash and expand. It seemed to have an infinite number of surfaces, all of them glimmering, radiant almost. I saw things reflected in the surfaces. Fragments of daydreams, visions I’d experienced, half-remembered glimpses of alternate timelines, childhoods adjacent to my own, choices I wished I’d made, friends and lovers I’d left behind. As I watched the crystal expand, the space around it began to warp. The walls, the floor, the very atmosphere became spherical, liquid, like a rapidly expanding bubble. Workers stood by, transfixed by the visions reflected in the crystal. I don’t know how or why I thought to back up. It doesn’t make sense, looking back on it. But I did. I ran to the next room, and watched from there.
“The bubble burst, and in its place was...nothing. I don’t know how else to describe it. All the workers who’d been standing there were just...gone. Anyone who works notional construction has to be adept at interdimensional travel, disapparation, transtemporal motion, that sort of thing. These skills are identified during early childhood, and developed throughout adolescence. If the missing workers were removed to any known portion of the multiverse, I feel certain they could have found their way back. I know I could’ve.
“The only explanation is that they went somewhere else. Somewhere outside our multiverse. Where that place might be, I couldn’t say.”
The hole the bomb produced in the notional construction was less than twelve meters in diameter. But it was enough to infect the idea, and destroy the man behind it. F. R. Havana developed a rare form of brain cancer, and was dead within six months. His company languished in the hands of his less competent children, and was eventually broken up by the banks. His idea never came to fruition in actual reality. Carhardt Architects, which had invested enormous capital into the build and its concomitant thought-implantation, went bankrupt. This in turn caused a ripple of uncertainty to spread through the market. Ideational Futures saw its worst crash in over two thousand years. Many families lost precious reserves of time, and have struggled to recoup their losses. Thankfully, the Department of Notional Architecture has implemented a series of safeguards and stopgap measures to prevent market instability going forward, even as we continue to pioneer bold, innovative counter-terrorism solutions.
Rumors in the press regarding holes in the notional fabric are not to be trusted. While it is true such holes exist in areas where terrorist attacks have occurred, the press exaggerates their number, and misleads the public by trading in conspiracy theories and hearsay. Please be assured: the holes in the notional fabric are not expanding. There is no evidence of any entities coming through them, be they alive, dead or otherwise. The notional fabric is not “haunted.” With continued cooperation from corporations, financial institutions and the public, the Department of Notional Architecture forecasts a bright future for us all.
by Miss Unity
Miss Unity (@doyoumissunity) is a writer and drag performer from upstate New York. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Hobart, Tragickal, and others.