# The Perimeter: Mythos as Science Fiction and other works (part 2 of 4)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [235], part 2 of 4. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: document (Text), 2024-12-27 (from the career record), https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit. Text: document text
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024), the latest step.
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Side fiction whose stated origin is the 2008 pandemic worst-case planning; not part of the build plan.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The Fiends Give Sudden Chase (2011): Five very short horror stories, written after reading Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives.
  - The Perimeter: Mythos as Science Fiction, and other works (2024): Story collection: worst-case scenario planning meets the Cthulhu Mythos, read as science fiction about...
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction.
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: The Perimeter / fiction — immortal species, mythos races, mythos (58%); Fiction-led: Mother of Hydrogen — harry, yevish, president (15%); Fiction-led: Mother of Hydrogen — peter, harry, cadets (12%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Swarm (17 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); The Perimeter (7 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2007, 1 undated); The Fiends Give Sudden Chase (2 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); science fiction (6 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Strategic Air Command (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); COVID (2 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); pandemic flu (3 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); life support (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); scenario planning (1 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); accounts (2 here; 51 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.43 (1.00 is the top), number 146 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [87] [The Atrocity Archives, and a little new fiction. | The... (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/87.md): same career work: The Fiends Give Sudden Chase
- On the same works, just before: [556] [ETHCC24: 'Selling physical things using NFTs: what we... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/556.md); [230] [The Man Who Tries to Stop Humanity Destroying Itself (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/230.md); [704] [Vinay Gupta: Liberation, Culture, Conflict and Catastrophe (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/704.md)
- On the same works, just after: [223] [Finding Each other in the Ruins - resilience (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/223.md); [231] [Chit Chat With the Nightmare Destroyer (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/231.md); [545] [Hyper-Liquid Real Estate (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/545.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: The Perimeter: Mythos as Science Fiction and other works, document, 2024-12-27, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [235], https://guptaoption.com/texts/235.md.

## Passages, part 2 of 4
[passage 15](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) of all universes which required me to do what I have chosen not to do. It’s simple math, in the negative. That’s for monks. The positive case is a lot harder: if I Will to do something like run a 6 minute mile two years from now, maybe I can do it, and maybe I can’t. I can set all manner of decisions in motion to get that result, read the books, design a training schedule, and run run run... but all for naught if I skid on ice and break my leg half a year into the training. Will requires the environment to agree with you, if it’s Will in the positive case. Making specific things happen is very, very different from refusing to participate in the messiness of life, as the monks do. Will needs support, needs the world to be rooting for you because, for the most part, Will is about other people choosing to do the things which get you what you want and where you want to go. Love, money, scientific success are all easy if people instinctively open doors for you, and impossible if they instinctively slam them shut in your face. The world is, face it, made of other people. All the bits of it that matter, anyway, outside of some very narrow and specific exceptions. Will will will. I’ve rehearsed the argument. It’s become part of the ritual for me. I do it, muttering under my breath, as I draw out an elaborate set of chalk circles and sigils on a painted-black floor in a rented art studio. I stop periodically to compare the diagrams to the one on a sheet of graph paper, all hand drawn. At the end, I’ll take the risk and get out the laptop for the final inspection, overlaying a picture of my work on the ground with an image I know is correct, flicking backwards and forwards quickly to check for discrepancies, like an astronomer looking for comets and pulsars. As I open the bag with the candles and candlesticks and incense and glass beakers I rehearse the next part. Acts of positive will which require the cooperation of other human beings can be acts of persuasion, seduction, or control. You make them a great offer, you convince them your offer is great by being really shiny, or you just make them want it, like cats with mice. The world is run by those who have mastered the art of control, for the most part. Black magicians. Marketing, PR, banking, politics, consumer product design, it doesn’t matter: you put live mice in front of a cat, you are fully in control of what the cat does next. Giving a monkey refined sugar... A magician who leaves his surrounding humans with free will is a magician without a bag of goodies. The organism will always take what is given to it, unless the price very nearly approaches the value of the offer: the devil asks a man

[passage 16](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) you are fully in control of what the cat does next. Giving a monkey refined sugar... A magician who leaves his surrounding humans with free will is a magician without a bag of goodies. The organism will always take what is given to it, unless the price very nearly approaches the value of the offer: the devil asks a man to make a decision, because the devil insists you have free will, something to corrupt. Real demons, the bad ones, just give you what you most want without ever asking you to sign, and watch as it destroys you: heroin, and your ex girlfriend. You’ll chew yourself to pieces because that’s the nature of the addiction, not because your destruction was part of the bargain. We’re evolved to want what is bad for us, given infinite supply. I know the logic. I know the rationale. We evolved with resistance: we evolved to want more than we could ever have, because wanting, discontent itself, kept us alive. It was our fuel. Then we invented mass production and, well, demonology. Final checks. The images match, and I’m careful. I flick back and forth between the picture I just took and the original 50 times, inspecting square by square for flickering, indicating things are out of place. It’s perfect, close enough anyway. The precise placement of the loops does not matter, but the topology is all important: if one is going to trap a higher dimensional energy in a two dimensional matrix, the matrix better conform to the correct projection of a 2D slice of (in this case) a 7th dimensional space. The entity itself does not matter, but its “mouth” is one end of a topological pipe: I’m going to get it to open its maw, and then kill it while its mouth is still open, leaving me with a pipe through spacetime. That’s what the sacrifices are for. I figured I would need three, so I brought five. I’ll spare you the gory details: the blood will be spilled at a predictable rate on to a glass pan below which there is a very strong propane burner. The blood will boil off, releasing its energy at a controlled rate, and the entity will sense the potentiality of a portal in this place and time because I have prepared the way, and it will come to feed. About three hours later, we’re done. The exsanguinated bodies lie on a plastic sheet with one edge held up by a bungie cord so it doesn’t puddle on the floor. It was, of course, painless, not particularly for humane reasons, but because this is a solo operation, and painless means quiet. They’ve all been unconscious for a couple of days. It’s basically a “free candy” operation: a man, a van, a plan, and a very seriously over specified stun gun of my own design. I pick the smallest people I can, because I have to carry them. Women and children first, for science. It’s not

[passage 17](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) solo operation, and painless means quiet. They’ve all been unconscious for a couple of days. It’s basically a “free candy” operation: a man, a van, a plan, and a very seriously over specified stun gun of my own design. I pick the smallest people I can, because I have to carry them. Women and children first, for science. It’s not that I don’t try to think about that part, but I’m aware that I’m losing my humanity to doing this: they’ve become like lab rats for me, casually expended. I don’t like that part: I’m doing this because I want a better life, not because I want to become a monster. I have goals, autonomous free will, and values. These things are just a means to an end. The end is right in front of me: in the centre of the floor, in the middle of my design, in the centre unbroken circle, is a shimmering disk of “energy” about four feet across, and a centimetre thick, hovering a hairsbreadth above the floor. It mostly appears to be a spatial distortion like a particularly strong heat haze, but if you get down on the floor and look at it edge on, looking through the width of the disk, its very clearly a portal: through the edge I can see shimmering waves of colour organically drift about, pastels and blues, soft geometric edges: hyperspace. I’ve pinned open a stable piece of hyperspace by attracting a higher dimensional predator, snapping its neck in a rat trap, baited with human blood, and now I’m going to have a little word with the universe about my future. I’m going to reach out through that portal, and rearrange my timeline. I lie on the ground, with my forehead just touching the edge of the disk. I could use a crystal rod or something, or perhaps attempt further spatial manipulation, but this is fine. I’m not some poncy wizard. I am a scientist. As the Ajna chakra intersects with the open 7th dimensional gate my consciousness smoothly pours out of my body and into 7space - I am all possibilities, all possible versions of my timeline exist simultaneously, including this one. I nudge and steer and reform and then, when I am happy with the result, I very gently easy my head back out of the zone of wobbling hyperspace and return to myself. The bodies are gone. I’m lying on the marble floor of my bathroom, where apparently I was snorting a line of probably-ketamine from a mirrored tray. I assume it’s mine, anyway, it could be a hotel. There will be a couple of days of disorientation while my timeline stabilises. I’ll gradually forget much of my knowledge of the old life, the old identity, where I’d burned out all of my options and had nothing to lose, no hope but this. But in those vital days I can write down everything that I remember about my past life and embed that knowledge in

[passage 18](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) days of disorientation while my timeline stabilises. I’ll gradually forget much of my knowledge of the old life, the old identity, where I’d burned out all of my options and had nothing to lose, no hope but this. But in those vital days I can write down everything that I remember about my past life and embed that knowledge in this new head. I sit up from the floor. I hope I’m alone. I certainly willed it that way but you never know. Hotel. There is a ream of typing paper and a mechanical typewriter, some pens, a bottle of ink. There is also a laser printed document describing to me how my life works - what I do, how I earn a living, my social relationships. It’s all been made ready. This is, after all, me. The me that mastered the money and the world of men, meets the me that knows the secrets of immortality, and all sins are forgiven. We will join, and have the best of both worlds, a fused hybrid being. I have been at this a while. I get to work, furiously pouring the knowledge on to the page, as the consciousnesses merge. But surprisingly, or perhaps not, when this body is finally wearing down I feel done with life as a process. I’m satisfied. I find that don’t really have the heart in me to do this all over again, just for another lifetime of inferior years. Nothing is going to match this. There is an additional complexity. I’d have to figure out how to tunnel through hyperspace back into a timeline where I’m young, rather than simply being rich, famous, healthy and fabulously talented. I’d have to go backwards in time, not just sideways. I just don’t quite have that figured out. I’ve been busy. I’ve been lazy. The math is hard. If it goes wrong, a fate worse than death, likely involving my infinitely slow dimensional dissection, is not that unlikely. I fancy taking my rest at the end of my natural span. I’ve had a good run. So I decide to leave it to others to decide what to do with the knowledge. Of course I can’t come out and say “here’s how it all works”: that would be irresponsible and corrupt. People would think I had gone mad. An inconvenience in one’s old age. So I write a couple of albums about all of it, with all that I had to say framed as myths and legends, so that anybody who really knows their alchemical art and meditates upon it will be able to understand my coded message, of singularities and timestream manipulation, and the transmigration of souls. I wonder if I’ve said too much or if, conversely, nobody will understand and be able to follow me here, back to the higher dimensions where time and space are my playthings and cause and effect do not apply much, if at all. I agonize over it for years: how to

[passage 19](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) singularities and timestream manipulation, and the transmigration of souls. I wonder if I’ve said too much or if, conversely, nobody will understand and be able to follow me here, back to the higher dimensions where time and space are my playthings and cause and effect do not apply much, if at all. I agonize over it for years: how to say, how to imply. Too little and nobody can follow. Too much and there will be a lot of completely unnecessary innocent blood shed. So it’s a question of how to leave breadcrumbs. I think about it for years. It’s a real puzzle. While I’m thinking about just precisely what to say, I find that I get really quite old. Then I get very ill. Clock’s ticking. Tick tock. Time to act, cut bait, make the plan happen. Proceed with the action. Speak! Sing. In the end, I just have to trust my own judgement. I’m the Blackstar, and if I can’t get this right, no-one can. ________________ Approaching the Void They say “Great Old Ones” like it’s a bad thing. I used to think that way too. “Cosmic horrors” said the pulp literature. I watched True Detective, and their funny little story about Carcosa being some golf club for paedophiles, and I laughed. It was no realer than A Study in Emerald. It was a story, a fable, a nonsense. It was good art about bad people: the bad boy existentialist detective who wrestles with elemental evil and finds meaning in the Void. It was Star Wars, Superman, Noir. Good over evil, ignorance is bliss. I paid it no mind. It was media. I’d always been interested in the occult, of course. If you’re smart enough, you pretty soon realize that the world is a hamster wheel, and your life simply serves to concentrate life force in the form of money into the hands of a few billionaires, most of whom are useless fools making the world worse by using their wealth and power for short range political gain, or sponsoring panda charities,or buying up just enough rain forest to feel good about their oil wells. I didn’t want to spend my life turning that wheel, running around in my circular days, like Oscar Wilde at hard labor, to pass a share of my life energy to an employer. What would my life have been for? Somebody else’s GDP? Valhalla seemed like an idiot’s afterlife: endless battle over nothing, forever. How long before even that afterlife would seem like hell? What better offer was there, other than stringing a harp and praising the guy who’d dropped a nuke on Sodom, murdered the little children? I’d come to the end of the road. I felt trapped. I was going to die, and it was going to be followed by another meaningless lifetime like this, turning a wheel to make the rich richer, or by an afterlife which brings contentment only to idiots, and who (in time) would not grow wise?

[passage 20](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) Sodom, murdered the little children? I’d come to the end of the road. I felt trapped. I was going to die, and it was going to be followed by another meaningless lifetime like this, turning a wheel to make the rich richer, or by an afterlife which brings contentment only to idiots, and who (in time) would not grow wise? I investigated Buddhism: nibanna. The total cessation, the ending. The liberation which comes when nothing is left to make you exist at all. Exit condition. This was appealing: but the path was hard. So much meditation, so much work, and the utter unreliability of the guru-disciple tradition. As a student, you lack the tools to know if your master is a master, and if your master isn’t a master, you’ll dead end behind them on whatever block they are stuck on. Now what? Who do you trust, who’s got the goods? And that’s when I found the dark ones. “Dark ones.” Monsters, in the Buddhist tradition, with very, very long lifespans, ancient at the time of the Buddha, and by his standards, enlightened. In the edge traditions, he’d fought them off, to a standstill, holding shut the gates for one more generation. Some of the Tibetans still do that job, they say: holding shut the gates the Buddha held shut, generation after generation. Tough dudes. They’ll be reincarnating in those roles until doomsday. But I was more interested in what was on the other side. Eternal beings capable of contesting with a Buddha, allegedly still around. Eternal. Darkness didn’t matter to me, darkness is darkness - if you’re born as a shark, you’ll live your life in darkness, eating whatever fits in your maw - for centuries, forever, as sharks do not age... Perhaps there is something to be said for darkness and hunger. Human life may be precious, but it is fleeting and rare, and fleeting was the part that was bothering me: what might my rebirth be, from here? A fatuous heaven that would soon feel like a hell, exhaustion of merit, rebirth in a lower realm. What if I was next to be a slave or, worse, an animal? But these immortal dark ones, old in the time of the Buddha, they knew things. If you can find a being that fought with the Buddha, and still lives, no question about the guru-disciple tradition. No question of its spiritual integrity: it knows what the Buddha knows, or he would have destroyed it, not simply slammed the door in its face, and held on. These were the teachers I sought, these endless masters voyaging through time, nigh-immortal. From there you know the story. Grimoire, secret traditions, contacting the servants of the Old Ones, mastering the complex incantations which make Leng into a real place, and so on. The journey into the darkness, slowly changing into something less human and more shark, more able to withstand the darkness and the pressure, the changes until one is finally strong enough

[passage 21](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) there you know the story. Grimoire, secret traditions, contacting the servants of the Old Ones, mastering the complex incantations which make Leng into a real place, and so on. The journey into the darkness, slowly changing into something less human and more shark, more able to withstand the darkness and the pressure, the changes until one is finally strong enough to stand them on one’s own terms, to step out onto the bridge, and see these ancient foes of humanity, the ones who strove against the Buddha, the ones who know. In this darkness, I found my master. They know what the Buddha knew, and chose immortality and mastery, rather than a quick extinction. That all things are empty, that phenomena are fleeting, that all things must die, this they know. That the soul is a vial of delicious nectar, recycled lifetime after lifetime, all this they know. If you wish to be immediately snuffed out, with no possible next reincarnation, this fate is only one meal away. Nobody returns from that dread maw. But this is the irony: they will not eat me. Rather than offering a quick exit, they offer a different course: rather than being winked out now, like any delicious snack food, learn, serve, and master. Bring him what he desires, work to break his chains, and at last merge into his consciousness, not metabolized and excreted out by his body, but added to his mind, a little free-floating neuron which is integrated into the Great Brain. Millions have followed this path in the past, species so distant, so foreign, so inhuman, and their residue is as much part of his mind as his original consciousness. You are what you eat. By joining with him, I’ll get to see the entire journey of the cosmos, right into the heat death of the universe if he plays his cards right. And then, at the end, I’ll be exactly where I would be if I found a good guru, and attained nirvana the hard way: I’ll be nowhere. Those little punks from the FBI that took down my last safe house and cost me nearly two years of work have no idea what happens next. I am on official business from a power that was old before this world was young, and who will not be denied. I will be a cell in his great mind, and I will know liberation through his ancient agency. There will be no mistakes this time. I have laid my plans. My will is his will, and his will must be done. They’re going down, and they’re going down hard. I will not die with a bullet in my back, risking rebirth as an animal, fourteen months from immortality. ________________ Wolf on the Fold What nobody tells you about being a werewolf is that there is no manual. You think "what the hell was that" as some huge hairy fanged monster rips through your camping trip, with the blood and the guts

[passage 22](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) not die with a bullet in my back, risking rebirth as an animal, fourteen months from immortality. ________________ Wolf on the Fold What nobody tells you about being a werewolf is that there is no manual. You think "what the hell was that" as some huge hairy fanged monster rips through your camping trip, with the blood and the guts and the screaming. Rips through the side of your tent and sticks a huge, stinking, bloody head through the side, bites you in the leg kind of on principle, more of a nip really, and then leaves you quivering uselessly in terror in your sleeping bag as the screaming and crying continues outside. Held in a cell for two weeks as the Bulgarian police tried to get to the bottom of it, and eventually wrote it up as a freakish attack by wolves, possibly with rabies. Yes, they tested me. No, no rabies. "I was lucky." You think you know the rest of the story, light of the full moon, I'd turn, and so on. Yeah, not bloody likely. Nothing like that. Nothing so easy. It takes years for the bloody transformation to take place. Long enough I was able to educate myself in biology, buy a microscope, watch my blood and tissue samples behave in increasingly weird and inhuman ways as I did needle biopsies of muscle fibres and poked them with salt or chlorine or voltage. It's not an all at once thing. The body warms up for, in my case, half a decade before the first "let 'er rip!" transformations. I'm not a fool, I'd worked it out within hours of the police questioning me - the story clearly made no sense, my story made no sense, there was only one story that fit and you don't need to be a rocket surgeon to figure that one out. I didn't need to believe it: I had puncture wounds on my leg two inches too far apart to be any known genus of wolf. The hormonal stuff started almost immediately: I wasn't running amok covered in fur the first full moon, but it was utterly hypnotic. I did not sleep that night, I just walked around all night, compulsively searching for something, spellbound. It was clear where this was going. I didn't know how long I'd get. I am not a fool. I knew, odds are, it can be managed: the Bulgarian police didn't just shoot me in the head, so they didn't know. No men in an unmarked black van had come to get me on my return to the States, so that was ok... I was in the clear, if I could just avoid eating people. I did wonder if I'd just had a light dose, maybe my body would fight it off, but over the next three months, the progression was unmistakable. The night-prowling at full moons was unbelievably intense and compulsive, like nothing I'd ever felt before. But it was just that: prowling. A

[passage 23](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) in the clear, if I could just avoid eating people. I did wonder if I'd just had a light dose, maybe my body would fight it off, but over the next three months, the progression was unmistakable. The night-prowling at full moons was unbelievably intense and compulsive, like nothing I'd ever felt before. But it was just that: prowling. A behavior, no physical changes. That took another two years, really. A slow realization that I never got sick, I'd lost most of my body fat, gained a bit of body hair, the gaps between my teeth had closed right up, the gums strengthened and filled out, pink and oddly plump, and several old scars - notably not the initial bite - had faded. I wasn't sure it wasn't in my head, for a while, but I changed dentist anyway. No footprints, right? No footprints. I intended to stay alive. Ranch hand. It seemed a safe bet: on full moon nights I could drive off far, far into the grazing herds, far from people, and surrounded by meat. Hopefully by the time I was back - and remember, I hadn't changed yet, I was interpreting most of this from movies - I'd be back to find my way back to the truck, wash off with soap and water in the back, change clothes, and nobody would be any the wiser. It could work, right? It took me a while to get the right job, but I did. You'd be hard put to find a more out of the way cattle station in the Continental US, and bonus point, we have real wolves. Tagged, GPS collars on some of them, but not all maybe. Any additional edge. Weirdly, even after it started to hit, nothing changed. The first time, I followed my procedure - always take the full moon days off, my boss buys the story that I go fishing on the full moons because that's when you get the best bites, and that it's been a family thing since Ireland in the 1700s. No licenses, no seasons, we were poachers, and it's always going to be that way, bossman. It's a minor point of eccentricity, fine, nobody cares, it's the only thing I'm a dick about. I get those three days off, and I work my Sundays. Anyway, it was a way of life at that point. I was out, in the truck, compulsively walking around in the woods in a widening circle around the truck roughly, and then next thing I know I wake up under the truck mostly naked and covered in blood, little bits of raw meat in my mouth, under my nails, the whole bit. I laughed so hard, it felt completely ecstatic. The tension had finally broken, after years of waiting and wondering what it was all about, what it all meant, it had happened. I followed my plan, washed off, changed clothes. I wasn't sure if it would happen the next night, but it felt

[passage 24](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) my mouth, under my nails, the whole bit. I laughed so hard, it felt completely ecstatic. The tension had finally broken, after years of waiting and wondering what it was all about, what it all meant, it had happened. I followed my plan, washed off, changed clothes. I wasn't sure if it would happen the next night, but it felt done. I stayed out another night just in case but, no, the prowl instinct was done. I was home. But there is no manual. By now it's a routine, it's a procedure. I remember nothing, who or what I am when I'm out, I don't know. But as long as I'm careful on the way in and the way out, it seems happy, and I seem happy. I go where I need to be when I need to be there, and nothing gets left behind other than some bones. I filmed it. Put a GoPro on a strap around my ankle, elastic wrapped around a good few times, and hoped I wouldn't tear it off. I figured a "collar" was just asking to lose my camera. I put a deer camera on the truck too, motion sensing, hoping I'd still be transformed when I came back. What came back was... a low rent Blair Witch Project. It was so stereotypical I deleted all the footage after five minutes. I know what werewolves look like. I have seen the movies. It almost looked fake. That was so disturbing. I’m never trying it again. But I do still try to be a scientist about this. Next thing up is to figure out how to get a GPS collar on this beast that I am, and see just where it goes. I want to backtrack to the kill or kills, take a look at the bodies and the bones, get a sense of whether it's just feeding or wanton slaughter. And I'll try the camera thing again. It's hard because I move around, and I don't know how long it is between the loss of consciousness and the transformation. Maybe I'll save up and get a drone that follows me, loft it before the transformation, I don't know. Nothing with an IP address! Nothing that can phone home. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in some steel tank, poked and prodded by military scientists. I've seen quite enough X-Files thank you very much. No starring role for this wolf boy. I do worry that one day I'm going to run into some hikers or another rancher. I don't know how far I roam, and I don't know if I seek out or avoid human contact, although obviously, back at the start... we weren't even that far into the boonies. I think it can be managed responsibly, but in the end, I know over the course of a lifetime, I'm going to kill. I'm going to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a human is going

[passage 25](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) seek out or avoid human contact, although obviously, back at the start... we weren't even that far into the boonies. I think it can be managed responsibly, but in the end, I know over the course of a lifetime, I'm going to kill. I'm going to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a human is going to be in my way. I've thought about locking myself in a cage on a time lock, or just hitching a chain to the truck, and I can't make myself do it. The same unstoppable impulse to wander, to prowl, kicks in. No chains, no no no, not part of the agreement, not part of the deal. It's the same depth of impulse that stops a normal person from walking off a cliff or cutting off their own fingers, it's that strong. I just won't do it. So for now it's man-beast harmony, monthly feedings, and I play a bit with the science in my little suitcase laboratory. I can't really do anything that matters, no genetics or any of that stuff, but I've documented the changes in muscle and blood cells and that's enough for now. I'm doing my part. If I can just figure out how to stay out of the way of humans on the nights of the full moon, I don't see why I shouldn't have a perfectly normal life. I don't want to marry or have kids. Is this heritable? Not an experiment I choose to run, thank you very much. And I kill less animals than any decent hunter. I'm managing this. It does not control me the other 27 days of the month. I guess you could say this is my religious practice now: I go into the woods once a month, and I sacrifice an animal. The fact that I'm covered in fur with inch long teeth when I do it is, let us pray, never going to be anybody's business but mine. I just have to accept that I'm going to be alone with this, because my gut feeling is that if I go looking for the others, it's going to be a shitshow: some Van Helsing / X-Files nonsense of "hunters" trying to catch people like me, and who knows what historical or cultural or mystical/magical/religious bullshit passed down with the bites... I don't want any of it. I made my compromise for the good of society and my own safety, and I'm going to keep out of whatever the big story is. I guess you could say I'm a lone wolf. Picking Up the Pieces We drive out to the crash site to take over from the local PD. They've cordoned off the area, and isolated the few first responders that have been inside. We'll deal with them later. Click click. We suit up in the parking lot, and head in. Nothing on the geiger counter, and the spatiotemporal anomalies are within safe human range now: we'll experience a

[passage 26](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) the crash site to take over from the local PD. They've cordoned off the area, and isolated the few first responders that have been inside. We'll deal with them later. Click click. We suit up in the parking lot, and head in. Nothing on the geiger counter, and the spatiotemporal anomalies are within safe human range now: we'll experience a little glitching later, but nothing like those first cops hit, when they saw into the 14th century, met their dead grandmothers, and so on. They are, needless to say, pretty shaken. In a few days they won't remember a damn thing. We'll take care of that. We'll do the usual exit interviews before we drug them, to see if there are any observations from their glimpses into the past we can use, and maybe do some recruiting. It's a lot easier to take somebody who's seen it first hand and done a good job of coping and bring them in, than to do selective exposure and pick out the crack ups the hard way. One in fifty, one in a hundred, we'll take back with us for further debriefing and evaluation rather than drug them. That's tomorrow's problem. We check each-other's suits, make sure the seals are all intact, batteries charged, reagent tanks full and pressurised. Inside, there's half of a time machine above the concrete floor, at about a 45 degree angle, the rest buried in the floor. It's a small model, 23rd century home built by the looks of it. Square aluminium tube frame, bucket seats, field generators, power cells, no life support systems or environmental controls: garage launch into a time when the air is easy to breathe and the climate temperate. Two dead passengers, both partially embedded in the concrete. They didn't suffer: temporal shock will have killed them a little before they planted in the ground. They look like college kids, but they're probably in their sixties, given the time period of the tech: by then we live about 300 years on average, at least the ones who can build time ships. The occupants have done a good job localizing - baseball caps, shorts, GAP t-shirts, sandals. If it wasn't New York in February they would have passed just fine. It's the fourth dead ship this week. The cell up the line will just keep sending agents until somebody arrives in one piece, does whatever it is they are here to do, and leaves, either back up the line, suicide (surprisingly common), or they'll make lives here off the grid and try not to mess up the time stream more: always risky. Obviously they don't talk to us on the job if they can avoid it. Security has not changed. There is, however, a village we maintain for the temporal strays, the survivors of missions who don't leave and don't suicide. It's generally safer than them making lives alone, particularly given their lifespans. They're nearly always briefed about it, at least the general principles, before

[passage 27](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) talk to us on the job if they can avoid it. Security has not changed. There is, however, a village we maintain for the temporal strays, the survivors of missions who don't leave and don't suicide. It's generally safer than them making lives alone, particularly given their lifespans. They're nearly always briefed about it, at least the general principles, before they jump back: kind of a detent measure with our peers up the line. If they make contact and give us the right passwords, we guarantee them three square meals a day for the rest of their lives, and the company of their fellow time travellers where they can mostly be themselves. There's a couple of hundred of them. We don't even know where, it's the most tightly guarded secret that I know of. We have to be extensively briefed because we're first contact in the event we meet a live one that we want to keep alive. We need to be able to convince, to negotiate. That means we have to know enough to cut a deal and talk a distressed time traveller with no reason to trust us down from their ledge, whatever it might be. We infer from the high failure rate that, in critical time periods, rival bands of time people do stuff to the spacetime continuum which makes time jumps hazardous: some kind of chaffing or ECM that flips ships off course into the past or future, or just plants them into the ground. If we saw four failures, odds-are whatever is going on is serious enough a lot of people are willing to die to get two agents across time, in hats and shorts, to fix it. 60 year old men that look like teenagers, giving up their long, long lives, for... best not to ask. Best not to know. Enough to know that the struggle, at least in some timelines, continues. In some timelines, we make it far enough out there to send missions back here. It has become an article of faith for nearly all of us who are briefed in on time travellers: "at least somewhen, we made it." The agents from the future, and occasional terrorists, freedom fighters, mercenaries, spies, saboteurs, historians, soldiers and tourists, if we can even tell the difference, are all luckless refugees now. The ones we keep alive and protect either succeeded or failed in their missions - neither us nor them can tell what happens without further communication from the future, and we have to not care which way their job went. We especially do not want to know what their mission was. That's tomorrow's problem. They're all terrified of the unintended consequences of their visit, as are we: it's safer to contact DG, give us the password, and slip out of history than to leave a mysterious body at the bottom of a lake, they say. No evidence, no questions. Once in the village, they can live normal lives, sometimes quite long ones, talk

[passage 28](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) problem. They're all terrified of the unintended consequences of their visit, as are we: it's safer to contact DG, give us the password, and slip out of history than to leave a mysterious body at the bottom of a lake, they say. No evidence, no questions. Once in the village, they can live normal lives, sometimes quite long ones, talk to people from their time period, and know that we are smart enough to not listen in. If we make a change, based on data from the future, we could wink all the time travellers out of existence, and all the horrendous things they have prevented would be doomed to happen. We just don't have the capability to handle knowledge from the future safely: one ripple could blow the entire timeline. There is no safe level of exposure to tomorrow. They know. We know. Don't ask, don't tell. We need them to keep coming, doing whatever it is they do, and so we protect and care for the arrivals who survive. That's the deal. What we don't tell them, although I'm sure the agents already know, is that they're also our final reserve. If the wheels come off the situation so badly that there is no future unless something gets done, they're all free to leave the village, and take whatever they need that we can equip them with, at any time. Even the terrorists may come from a timeline where humanity is wiped out or worse, and we don't have - can't have - an opinion on lesser matters, not while the survival of our entire timeline is imperiled. If they know that some 8 year old kid in Iowa has to die now, and the team that was supposed to hit him wound up in a wall or in 1868, we let them go. Hell, we escort them. Don't ask, don't tell. It doesn't happen very often. They strongly tend to stay put. A lot of them are enhanced. 23, 24th century, they are pretty post-human. We have a couple of guys who are four, five hundred years old, passed along from the Renaissance. Immortal alchemists? No no no. The philosopher's stone was a ruse, they were already functionally-speaking immortal before they got here. They just needed a lab to make gold to travel or to make a better lab. Dr Frankenstein? I presume. So when and if the gates of hell open, or Very Bad Things get off a spaceship or seed our ecosystem with a deadly virus, the temporal agents are sitting around waiting for the day. The ones up the line, the ones here, they all need us to survive, or they, their families, the entire worlds and histories they were sent here to protect will simply wink out of existence. I got into temporal about five years ago. My kid's third birthday party, a picnic in a park. All my friends, our families, toddlers, babies, the dog. Grill, brews, a little slice of paradise,

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/235-3.md (part 3 of 4).
End of [235] The Perimeter: Mythos as Science Fiction and other works, part 2 of 4. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.