Introducing Pyrite
a new serial for paid subscribers
This week I am taking a break from all the heavy-ass politics of hatred and division and announcing an old/ new project.
Pyrite was originally my back-up character in Rick Barton’s Arden Vul playtest game. Sometime during the pandemic I went on a creative tear and wrote a bunch of short stories, and an even bigger bunch of story fragments, using that character but set in a different time of his life, in a different creative universe. I would sit in my cubicle at Greensboro HQ, a co-working space downtown now called Transform Greensboro1, and cackle to myself like the prototypical mad scientist as I stroked my keyboard.
In the course of those few fevered weeks, Pyrite became a little less intellectual, a little more saucy. The stories so far have been straight-up fantasy, with some of the same tone and fourth-wall-breaking that characterized the adventure journals on Obsidian Portal:
This more SF-y character sketch was the fictional starting point, though. Hope you like it.
The Allusionist
My name is Pyrite. I am a Goblin. Or Tengu, or Kallikantzaro.
What do I look like? Well, that depends on what images those words conjure in your head — or in your search engine, if you are not a reader of your world’s mythology. Small, bipedal, big eyes, big ears? Fur, feathers, scales? Horns, hooves -- antlers? Bird-like? Bat-like? Bug-like? All of those, and none.
I’m going too fast for you, aren’t I? Consequence of the conducting nanofibers in my axons. I’m willing to be patient if you are.
Let me start closer to home. Your home, I mean. My home we’ll come to in a bit.
Have you ever seen a giraffe? Imagine for a moment that you had not, and that the word camelopard, a compound of camel and leopard, was your first exposure to the concept. You would abstract details from the two more familiar animals and construct a mental model of the camelopard. It might look like any number of old European woodcuts or panels from DeviantArt, but it would not look much like an actual giraffe.
A more detailed scientific, analytical description of the rhinoceros, focusing on measurements and details, led your Albrecht Durer to a somewhat closer visual picture, but gave no idea of the animal’s irascible personality, of the twitchings of its mobile ears, of its smell. I speak of course of the black rhinoceros, which is not black but gray, rather than its close cousin the white rhinoceros, which is not white but a slightly paler gray (to your eyes).
Do you begin to understand? You think largely in metaphors, in comparisons to things you already know. You have no choice. Your brains have at least twice as many fibers projecting outwards from your memory systems as projecting inwards from your sense organs. I’ve dissected several of you now, of different races and genders and life stages, so I know this is not a fluke. Literally everything you see and hear is more than half memory — or imagination.
Don’t believe me? There’s a blind spot in each of your retinae, where the blood vessels enter the eyeball. If you put a small object like your thumbnail at arm’s length, just below and lateral to your center of vision, it will eventually disappear. Your brain updates the simulation and fills in the blind spot with content from adjacent parts of the retina. You have to close one eye and then hold the eyes completely still. It helps to pick another, more distant object to fixate your gaze upon, while paying attention to the periphery. Then wait.
That, by the way, was what we hypnotists call a convincer. If my little demo worked, you are more likely to accept my future suggestions. If it didn’t work, my confident delivery of a plausible explanation may still have made you doubt yourself. It’s OK. That’s just how social primates are. You leverage the brains of your peers for cognitive shortcuts. It’s a good strategy, given how slowly you think and react.
We Goblins are more independently minded. Conversely, our bodies are almost embarrassingly context-dependent. Where we are raised, and who we are raised by, determines how we look. We are all the same species, biologically — we can all interbreed, if we want — but individuals display extreme levels of what you call phenotypic plasticity. Over time, tribes in a particular environment develop ideas about what traits are adaptive, and the bodies of the young respond to the chemical consensus. Genes get turned on, or off. They change the timing or the extent of their expression. And so there are gremlins and kobolds, pukwudgie and gudrobonga, all of whom are described by you with at least some accuracy, though the descriptions are different. Very postmodern of us, I know.
Goblins are smellers, and tasters. Especially tasters. That’s how we mine for minerals, by tasting the rock, the same way you did, centuries ago, before you figured out that most of them were toxic to you. That’s how we communicate, down in the mines, by chemistry and touch. We taste with our fingers and toes, as much as with our tongues.
I don’t mean that Goblins are synesthetic, that we confuse and combine sensory impressions, such that the digit 6 is also blue, and spiky, and smells like [6]-gingerol. No, Goblins actually have olfactory and taste receptors in our skin, like an octopus. That’s a comparison I left out earlier. Does it change your mental model of me? Am I more squishy or bumpy now? Or had the model crystallized already?
I can be a bit synesthetic, personally, but that’s because of the magic.
Oh, sorry. Had my vocabulary, so dependent on Greek and Latin roots, led you astray? My cavalier use of chemical nomenclature? Were you imagining me through an SF lens, as a little green man, or one of those bulbous-headed grey saucer people with the vacant black eyes like a squirrel’s? That’s OK, too. There was a brief period in your mythology where the saucers were imagined to come not from space, from outside the atmosphere, but from under the ground. There’s a memetic thread from that time, just a thread, running through to today, in productions like Hellier, where a group of ghost-hunters from Cincinnati combine hypnotic trance techniques with UFO lore and a highly speculative map of the limestone cave systems under that part of your world to generate the conditions for psychic contact with a vaguely Goblinesque creature (definitely not me!). Why it was naked, I have no idea.
I am in fact a researcher, but I work at the College of Perception, specifically the Center for Visual Magicks, here in the imperial city of Chimerea. The saucers came from here. More accurately, the spells you interpreted as saucers came from here. They were a part of my graduate work. The lights in the sky, defying the laws of physics? Apprentice level. Activating your social feedback loops to grow and stabilize a subculture of thousands over several decades was what earned me my place on the faculty.
You see, I am an allusionist. I help creatures hallucinate. Not with drugs, as is common here in my world among certain cultures, but with magic and memory. People have all sorts of reasons for wanting to hallucinate, from hoping to see lost loved ones to guidance on their future actions. Boredom is less of a factor here than it is in your world.
Your world might have had magic at some point in the past, but it doesn’t now. To be honest, though, you have something just as good. You have computers. Marvelous machines that route hordes of demon electrons through silicon wafers to perform mathematical calculations. Calculations that can manipulate images and sounds. Calculations that can reinforce perceptions, abort allegiances, or sway elections. Calculations that can alter reality.
My current research project, which you can help me with, is to use your world’s computers to enhance my spell-casting, to speed up the necessary calculations so that I can cast more extensive, more detailed, more ambitious illusions. Currently I can paint only with the colors I myself can see, components of my own umwelt2, which are only a thin slice of the possible. You never know who will be looking at your work, what exotic energies or molecules may impact upon their various sensoria. Chimerea is a cosmopolitan sort of place.
How can you help? I’m glad you asked. I have a bit of code that you can download from a certain site on your dark web, which will make use of otherwise wasted cycles on your graphics card.
Why should you help? Because I’ll pay you. I have vast sums of cash and crypto-currencies hidden on various financial servers around your world, some of which I can transfer to you. To do that, I will need your account and bank routing numbers. You can enter those at the same dark-web site I mentioned a moment ago.
How can you find said dark-web site? I have already placed the directions into your subconscious while you were reading, through memetic engineering techniques I may disclose to you later, once we know one another better. These directions will bubble to the surface while you are sleeping. You will dream of Chimerea, as you imagine it to be. The saucers will point the way.
If you happened to read this Kolchak fan fiction from last year, you might recognize some similar themes.
I just love that phishing bit at the end. At one point I thought about setting up a web form just to see how many people would go for it, but came to my ethical and legal senses.
I’ll be releasing Pyrite stories serially, a thousand words or so at a time, over the course of the next several months. Paid subscribers who read those stories will also get to meet some other characters of mine, like Jasper Malachite and Roman Holiday, who I also ported over from that ongoing Arden Vul campaign, with some changes.
See you next week!
David Eagleman was brand-new faculty in the same department where I was a baby-exhausted and slightly embittered postdoc.