# The Perimeter: Mythos as Science Fiction and other works (part 3 of 4)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [235], part 3 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 3 of 4
[passage 29](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) 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, of what we are trying to defend. A man who looked a little like these two poor dead bastards buried in the concrete floor came up to me, with my kid in my arms, stuck out his hand and said "Hi, I'm Bill, you know me from work. I am Barbelith." It was a weird handshake. He did something odd with two fingers. At the time, all I knew was it was an agent codeword: relay up the line immediately, await further instructions, follow the lead of the incoming agent. I shift the kid on my hip, to free up access to my concealed. I got real alert. Bill says, and of course I didn't understand it at the time, "stand down, we are not in any danger, I just knew exactly when and where you would be from the party photos. Just call it in, and they'll come and pick me up within half an hour." Then he ate a hot dog. So that's the start of how I wound up working temporal. We go back to the car, take the moon suits off, and get the clean up kit. Somebody in the village made it for us: three resonators on burly tripods that we screw into the ground, and some "not that dangerous" plasma power packs. Nothing you could use to build a time machine: the energy isn't high enough, and the field generators don't do the same things. A nasty incident if they get loose, but not the end of the world. It takes a couple of hours until everything is ready to go, the tripods surround the crashed ship, and we go back out to the car and pull the trigger. Nothing happens. We go back inside: no dead guys, no ship, no cube-shaped hole in the concrete, just our inert metal sticks bolted to the floor. The whole thing never happened. We don't really know how it works, but if we get there in time - at most six hours after the crash - we will often see the same agents again, embedded in some other wall in a few days. We guess the rig sends a signal up the timestream telling them to abort that launch, and they just try again until it works. But you know the rules: don't ask, don't tell. Protect the integrity of the timeline, at all costs. I like the idea we are saving the lives of our successors centuries in the future some days. Cleaning up time machine crashes is one of the better parts of this job. Barbelith. ________________ Hardhats: Alien Friendlies? I’ve been working up a

[passage 30](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) But you know the rules: don't ask, don't tell. Protect the integrity of the timeline, at all costs. I like the idea we are saving the lives of our successors centuries in the future some days. Cleaning up time machine crashes is one of the better parts of this job. Barbelith. ________________ Hardhats: Alien Friendlies? I’ve been working up a new friendly alien species for RPG use. They’re from a foreign star system, but close to here. They’re “friendly” but maybe not in the way you’d think... the deal is that they’re deadly enemies with more or less all of the other mythos species and fought a very nasty war against extradimensional incursions in their home world, which they eventually “won.” Half the planet is devastated, atomic weapons and radioactive debris and weird patchy physics over former cities. It’s a mess. At home their military bases look like giant pyramids, and that may or may not be a coincidence. They show up occasionally around mythos creatures here in small UFOs. The beings themselves are about the size of small cars and carry both “bazooka” type explosive armaments and death rays which are about as effective as a machine gun with anti-armour bullets. The ships have very heavy beam weapons, kinda like A10 Warthog type firepower. For a touch of the surreal they paint their shells to look like hard hats and military helmets. The ships also tend to have flags and bumper stickers painted on the sides, often in random foreign languages. This is an attempt to communicate friendly intent but they’re so freaking alien they have no idea whether or not it is working. Needless to say their ships are immune to all human weapons short of a nuke. If they bundle up their legs under their shells they’re entirely immune to anything smaller than a tank shell: even a couple of sticks of dynamite and a gas can won’t do more than superficial damage, blow the paint off their shells, maybe scorch them a little. A heavy machine gun might draw “blood” from legs if they aren’t locked down under the shell, but nobody is killing these guys. Add whatever tech you need to ensure that stays true. Any biological samples will be incomprehensible. They’re there to be a chaotic element not an enemy! Typical mission parameters for these things would be landing near a Migo mining operation or some place Byakhee are often visiting, stealthily surround it from all sides (six or eight Hardhats per ship, usually only one ship crew required), rush in from all sides guns blazing, kill everything they can, then pile back into the spaceship and run off before anything worse happens. Return at random later for a clean up sweep, evidence collection, more bang bang if anything is left. Very hit and run. Very murder-focussed. They’ll flee humans rather than be sighted or engaged. If agents shoot at them they run for the ship or other cover. They won’t fire on humans

[passage 31](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) the spaceship and run off before anything worse happens. Return at random later for a clean up sweep, evidence collection, more bang bang if anything is left. Very hit and run. Very murder-focussed. They’ll flee humans rather than be sighted or engaged. If agents shoot at them they run for the ship or other cover. They won’t fire on humans under any circumstance other than being absolutely trapped and injured. Mostly they’re extremely evasive. Best used as a “what the bloody hell was that?” element rather than the focus of an adventure. I’d rather leave them as a mystery: players are hunting Bad Guys and a bunch of the Bad Guys mythos buddies get slaughtered while the humans are left unharmed and players are left with eye witness accounts from cultists about being attacked by huge helmets with too many legs and too many guns and an UFO and... you never get to the bottom of it. Maybe an unconscious injured PC — magical damage of some kind, taken for forensic purposes rather than generic compassion? — gets bundled on to the spaceship and dropped back fixed, wrapped up in beautifully reconstructed Victorian lace blankets. But they won’t go near a conscious human. They’re super avoidant of contact with people. They just leave chaos and confusion in their wake: they’re in the story to be a source of mystery and misunderstanding and to pursue their own agendas, not to be roped in by agents as allies. Mostly they run away from people! If you want a sense of “motivations” they’re intelligent insect-like / isopod species. Eusocial hive creatures that live in huge pyramids like termite mounds. They’re on-average about as smart as a college professor, but the ones who show up here are like elite military astronauts on patrol scanning nearby planets for mythos threats to their home world. They basically SWAT anything mythos-related that they run into and can handle as part of their patrol but mostly they’re mapmakers not heavy strike: they didn’t bring atomic weapons this is just soldiers with side arms. They’re not doing anything complicated. They operate under a sort of “Prime Directive” of stay out of the way of the humans, who they view as a situation to be properly investigated and dealt with in a few centuries if the humans last that long. The guys showing up now are just here to do their job and not equipped for first contact. They’re soldiers on patrol. Humans are civilian bystanders. Mythos critters are active enemies. The universe is huge and confusing. But at least they’re friendly. Of course they could be mighty hostile (atomic weapons) when The Stars Are Right if they picked up the right kind of activities being performed by humans or Deep Ones, something so bad it might eventually impact their home world. Then, maybe not quite so friendly. ________________ Applied Pataphysics Star Trek has [tech]. We have [pataphysics]. In a Star Trek script, writers create a line like “Picard asks

[passage 32](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) weapons) when The Stars Are Right if they picked up the right kind of activities being performed by humans or Deep Ones, something so bad it might eventually impact their home world. Then, maybe not quite so friendly. ________________ Applied Pataphysics Star Trek has [tech]. We have [pataphysics]. In a Star Trek script, writers create a line like “Picard asks Geordi [tech] and Geordi replies that he and Data will work on it”. Specialists in Star Trek physics and engineering then fill in the [tech] with fitting technobabble. DG largely relies on the ignorance of characters and a general aura of mystery to remove the need for such technobabble. However, we should improve on that situation, take our Science Fiction medicine, fill the gap on Mythos technobabble, and fake up the necessary pataphysics to support it. For the purposes of this essay, we will assume that the universe is not a simulation, and that “hypergeometry” is a fair approximation to the truth: the universe we are in has many more dimensions than three-of-space-and-one-of-time and may, in fact, have a variable number of dimensions, dimensions rolled or curled around each other, folded, or otherwise placed at the Hander’s discretion. It just has to work. For a primer, Flatland by Abbot is unbeatable. Make sure you get the basics down! And so, the four domains of pataphysics are: * Thought Wave Phenomena (TWP) * Orthogonal Direction Movement (ODM) * Cryptozoology and Xenobiology (CXB) * Unified Field Rectification (UFR) The idea is to provide a minimum amount of theory necessary to figure out roughly how various extraordinary things happen around Mythos phenomena. It doesn’t need to be true, it just needs to be consistent enough to give players the illusion that the environment they are in is complex and misunderstood, rather than simply being made up and as thick or thin as plot armour. Mythos technobabble is there to support fear and wonder not to be “realistic” whatever that word might mean. Thought Wave Phenomena First up, the nature of minds. By far the most entertaining way of dealing with the concept of the mind is to suggest that consciousness itself is a fluid, in the same family of substances as Ether, Phlogiston and so on. The brain is a kind of engine in which this substance is collected, heated, transformed, moved around, and induced to produce work: thinking. Cells make up the working parts of this mind-engine. Thought Wave Phenomena such as telepathy, mind control, possession and so on are phenomena which act on Consciousness as a fluid: telepathy is waves, precognition is a combination of the Thought Wave Phenomena of telepathy, and an Orthogonal Directional Movement: a thought-wave bounces off something in the future, reflecting off a surface which is in another dimension, and travels back to the present as precognition. It’s just like radar, across time, in hyperspace. Orthogonal Direction Movement All of these hyperspace phenomena are packed into Orthogonal Direction Movement (ODM). We have three dimensions of space, and

[passage 33](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) and an Orthogonal Directional Movement: a thought-wave bounces off something in the future, reflecting off a surface which is in another dimension, and travels back to the present as precognition. It’s just like radar, across time, in hyperspace. Orthogonal Direction Movement All of these hyperspace phenomena are packed into Orthogonal Direction Movement (ODM). We have three dimensions of space, and one of time. But in truth there are more directions: across realities in various directions leading to a variety of places like the land of ghosts or various hells, the kinds of places one might see in Hellraiser. There are also parallel earth timestreams: Bernstein Bears phenomena, Mandela Effect, and worse. As for the technobabble mechanics, “portals” and teleportation and so on are all discussed using ODM: a bridge is build from where the ritual is performed to somewhere else, and that “bridge” is actually a highway which extends from where we are to where they are, plus on-ramps and off-ramps which take movement in our three dimensional space, and bind them to additional directions. When characters walk 20 feet through a teleportation portal they are also walking 8000km in an Orthogonal Direction Movement vector which has been compressed and packed into the same physical space as the portal system. ODM is not restricted to physical movement, either. ODM systems could have a vector which moves characters 30,000 years into the past, or into hell, or gate across into a parallel reality where humans are extinct. It’s all ODM: directional vectors through the multiverse. As noted, TWP intersects with ODM: thoughts can go across all these other dimensional directions even more easily than matter. Reading sense impressions from the distant past is TWP (for the senses) and ODM for the distant past. Similarly, Dreamlands is only 15 meters away if you could casually climb a ladder in that direction, rather than just having your mind travel there. In the 20th century there is a huge confluence of immensely destructive Mythos activity in the Delta Green timeline. This in itself may be unnatural. To have one Stalin per century could be considered unfortunate, but to have five or six things that bad one after another in a single century is not carelessness, that’s outright sabotage. Perhaps there are large scale defensive structures in alternate Earth timelines: their Delta Green forces have had better luck working with mainstream governments and extracting and utilizing the Mythos knowledge from around the world to construct screens, defensive perimeters for their worlds. Incoming Mythos forces breach their reality but there is a global Mythos-event deflection system which redirects incoming Mythos energy away from that world. As far as they are concerned it is simply gone. It all winds up here: half a dozen world’s worth of Mythos trouble in a single almost uninhabitable timeline. Mythos apocalypses keep happening in the DG timeline, and being narrowly averted, because of timestream manipulation by teams protecting their homeworlds who don’t even know what they’re doing to us as their

[passage 34](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) far as they are concerned it is simply gone. It all winds up here: half a dozen world’s worth of Mythos trouble in a single almost uninhabitable timeline. Mythos apocalypses keep happening in the DG timeline, and being narrowly averted, because of timestream manipulation by teams protecting their homeworlds who don’t even know what they’re doing to us as their shields dump the problem here. Of course our timeline has narrowly avoided all out nuclear war a number of times. Perhaps teams here moved those apocalypses to some other, even worse, timeline. Seriously. The ODM jargon gets us a nice, coherent, darker-than-hell multiverse story for Delta Green, which is a nice update for the setting given the popularity of multiverse models in popular culture. There are several characters in comic book movies who would make excellent inspirations for unspeakable cult leaders! The final part of ODM is lattices. ODM requires the ability to manipulate the underlying dimensionality of reality. Lattices are the structures on which the dimensions are fixed like guitar strings. These lattices are as impossible for humans to reach from their normal situation as the outside of a submarine is to reach from inside the engine room. Cryptozoology and Xenobiology Cryptobiology and Xenobiology (CXB) are studies of species with ODM-capable bodies, for the most part. Part of what permits humans to function is that their bodies are tightly sealed ODM hulls: we see a strictly limited range of realities because human bodies lock down all the potential ODM phenomena behind thick meat walls, for our safety. That’s why we can exist in a universe this complicated without constantly being bitten, poisoned and infected by ODM lifeforms: they can’t get into human bodies from other dimensions without enormous effort. We are ODM tortoises. Shan are one of the rare CXB exceptions which can get through human ODM skin. But for the most part we are as ODM-proof as we are waterproof. That’s why it’s so rare for humans to be any good at magic: our bodies are constructed to highly stabilize three dimensions of space and one of time at the cost of completely closing down most other ODM potentialities. Almost all mammals are just the same way. Except cats. However a wide variety of CXB lifeforms are constructed in an entirely different way: we have “waterproof” skins which block most ODM phenomena. They are like jellyfish, immersed and permeable to ODM forces. We have a clear line between inside and outside, they’re simply soaking in multidimensional reality without such a clear distinction between inside and out. Very nearly any such CXB creature manipulates ODM as naturally as birds manipulate the air when they are flying. To them it’s as natural as fish which swim, or bloodhounds that catch scent. Human access to ODM is basically like human access to deep water. Humans working with these forces are just like humans holding their breath and diving into the deep sea to find pearls. For very short periods humans can

[passage 35](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) manipulate the air when they are flying. To them it’s as natural as fish which swim, or bloodhounds that catch scent. Human access to ODM is basically like human access to deep water. Humans working with these forces are just like humans holding their breath and diving into the deep sea to find pearls. For very short periods humans can fake being aquatic, but if humans push too hard, they simply run out of air and die. Most ODM is just fatal. Mythos operations of any sophistication are like cave diving teams with extensive training, preparation and equipment and once-in-a-while everybody dies in an escalating doom loop of accidents, rescues, and chaos. They now feed the fishes. A UFO is an ODM “submarine” but we can’t build those, we can only find them and steal them. In stark contrast the entities that are ODM native are those which phase, move across dimensions, fly in space, or are composed of exotic matter. The Hounds of Tindalos are as native to dimensional movement as earth-mammals are to running. They don’t need a UFO, CXB bodies are that UFO. If an entity is strong enough in ODM to just bend the lattice permanently, that confers the ability to make permanent portals of various kinds. This is sort of the dividing line between comprehensible mythos races like Migo and the utterly incomprehensible powers of the Great Old Ones: they have lattice access. They can move across dimensions, but they can also vary the number of dimensions which exist and how they are related to each-other. They can shape the fabric of spacetime in arbitrary and incomprehensible ways. The strongest ODM entities can get right into the lattices, and (for example) vary the number of dimensions in a space to produce a semi-stable time portal. The lattice layer is being bent so that the “north” direction of travel through the portal is aligned in the “back in time” direction. Twenty feet of physical movement, to half a million years back in time, unified on the same physical space by bending the lattice. This is the work of the Great Old Ones and the eldest Mythos races who got the technology from them. If the ODM structure is only moving the mind of the being and not the body, TWP not physical matter, Yithian style time travel occurs. It all fits nicely together. Lattice-level bending is done with machines in some species, and simply by brute force strength in others. Only the very strongest beings can bend the lattice permanently: most “portal magic” spells constitute calling one of these creatures and communicating with it about what is to be done to the lattice in the local area, and what it will be paid in return for this service. Using a portal requires ODM. Making a portal is lattice-work. This distinction is not something humans can or should understand in DG games: it’s just ODM and the idea that there’s a sharp split in technological capability between

[passage 36](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) is to be done to the lattice in the local area, and what it will be paid in return for this service. Using a portal requires ODM. Making a portal is lattice-work. This distinction is not something humans can or should understand in DG games: it’s just ODM and the idea that there’s a sharp split in technological capability between OGM and lattices is basically a useful political distinction when reasoning about relations between various kinds of Mythos forces (“why do the Shoggoths need anything from Yig?”) rather than something players will ever understand. OGM technology is routine to most Mythos species at least in limited domains but lattice technology is the domain of gods. A good analogy is metal working. Extreme heat makes metal soft. Humans may have observed lava cooling and figured out it could go the other way, or accidentally melted tin out of rocks in a fireplace. A forge is like a lattice-machine that uses heat to shape metal. A Mythos lattice machine could use time to shape information and make an individual being physically immortal. The human view of the universe is on a very small, very stable aspect of spacetime in which time itself is in an extremely stable flow, and the (only) three dimensions are extremely stable. Life on easy mode. Mythos CXB critters come from places with irregular time and flexible dimensionality: rough places in which life is simply built different, built alien. Unified Field Rectification The structure of experience and the regular patterns in that experience which we call “life” exist within a pataphysical setting. There is no setting which is not pataphysical, all reality and unreality is pataphysical, the question is only how much of this underlying truth do we see at any given time. The microscope is like the forge: an unusual property of physical matter opens up an entirely new universe. In a forge, heat melts metal and humans can become as gods. In a microscope, matter curves light in a way that is not like gravity curving light, but in its own way yet more mysterious. The lens opens up the entire dimensionality of the very small to human view, from our own cells through to pond life and the all-important and supercritical disease organisms. This interaction between relatively well-understood physical materials like glass and the entirely unknown and invisible universe of bacteria and the rest of the very small reshapes our entire civilization from medicine through to public health. UFR understands that the entire structure of experience itself is composed of a set of unexpected bindings: atoms stick to each-other, molecules come into existence, life itself arises, then it discovers that molecules can smell. We experience in our human reality one set of bindings: the lattice structure works in a particular way that has permitted physical life to evolve and thrive. But that lattice configuration is relatively arbitrary. Very, very tiny differences in lattice configurations in local space result in the lifeforms visible to a Tillenghast

[passage 37](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) arises, then it discovers that molecules can smell. We experience in our human reality one set of bindings: the lattice structure works in a particular way that has permitted physical life to evolve and thrive. But that lattice configuration is relatively arbitrary. Very, very tiny differences in lattice configurations in local space result in the lifeforms visible to a Tillenghast device. The extremely large space of potential local lattice configurations results in a literally innumerable number of different kinds of reality. These realities are not simply different kinds of physics but reach into the very nature of experience itself: the relations between mind and matter, past and future, shape and dimension are all entirely determined by the local lattice. It’s not just a question of whether magnetism curves light in some places, but whether beings move by shifting across entire streams of two dimensional history on their way to the shops to buy lettuce. Everything is routine to the beings who are from there. UFR understands a little about the configuration of the local lattice, and the lattice configurations which are near-enough to enable some kind of access or communication. It guesses at how the stardrives in UFOs fiddle with the lattices in every so tiny ways enabling the compression of the relation between interstellar distances and time, but in ways which preserve just enough of the fabric of conventional human-experience spacetime that kidnapped monkeys don’t always die. They test it on cattle. The deep secret in the Mythos cultures which are millions and millions of years old is that the lattices move. They drift. Every species is in a tiny habitable window in which the lattice configuration supports their form of life, and that window is inevitably closing. As beings approach biological immortality with the resulting cultural stasis and entrenchment of languages, scientific models, power structures and everything else that comes with rule-by-immortals they also begin to understand that they are on a tiny shifting island within cosmic time. All that can save them is beings strong enough to do lattice engineering themselves. The Great Old Ones. And the Great Old Ones can extract any price they like for this service, for stabilizing the very dimensionality of the form of existence which permits life (of whatever kind) to exist: they are the only defense left against time itself. All species eventually discover UFR and map their lattices. Over tens of millions of years they discover lattice drift. The very structure of reality is changing in ways which will eventually lead to their doom. But hypergeometric artefacts clearly indicate that lattice engineering is happening. Somebody knows how to do this. And so even the Mythos races are in the hands of the lattice engineering Great Old Ones. You get to be a Great Old One specifically through your brilliance at lattice engineering yourself a pocket which can maintain the conditions to maintain your specific biology forever. Time itself gets everybody else. And what the Great Old Ones know is that

[passage 38](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) And so even the Mythos races are in the hands of the lattice engineering Great Old Ones. You get to be a Great Old One specifically through your brilliance at lattice engineering yourself a pocket which can maintain the conditions to maintain your specific biology forever. Time itself gets everybody else. And what the Great Old Ones know is that lattice drift is not “natural” in some sense. The underlying physical systems do not just sort of randomly move the lattices around. What the Great Old Ones know is that lattice drift is also mappable. It’s a big job, requiring data from several dozen old ones who are in such different areas of the lattices that data communication across domains requires the energy output of entire stars. That’s how badly they needed to know. With enough data it becomes possible to see that most of the lattice drift is actually them pulling and pushing on lattice threads which are connected to lattice substructures which somebody else is also pulling on. Like pulling tense the guylines on a tent, it’s a question of give and take, adjusting tensions so all the tent pegs are equally stressed. Or, alternatively, ripping the lattices apart and destroying a third of the universe just to get rid of those annoying creatures over there who keep tangling the lines. Lattice wars. They break out at times. But beyond that, and beyond the tensions between old ones and their client races, is the inexorable realization that the old ones all come to, the thing that really gets their goat, that drives they themselves mad. When you track back cause and effect? The lattice is alive. It brings temporary structures into existence and when they have served their purpose, other temporary structures unravel their being and eat them. Something arises. Something fades away. But they are stuck on the wheel, just like everything else. ________________ Mythos, Pathos, and the Right to the Stars It was like that when we got here Horseshoe Crabs existed 400 million years ago. Humans hunt them. Humans farm them. Specifically, humans take their blood for the medical industry. Horseshoe crabs are small, and relative to modern humans, quite defenseless. As individuals, they can hide, unless they were born in a blood farm. We are their mythos monsters. But as a species, horseshoe crabs can wait. They’re not just older than humans, they’re a thousand times older than humans. They were 200 million years old when the dinosaurs evolved. Horseshoe Crabs can wait. Humans will be gone soon enough, to our graves or to the stars, but as long as we leave them the seas they could be here, doing their thing, whatever it is, in two billion years. They have been around long enough that if they talked, they could talk about a future in which horseshoe crabs see the sun turn red and go supernovae. It’s a long way in the future, but less than ten times as long as they’ve been

[passage 39](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) seas they could be here, doing their thing, whatever it is, in two billion years. They have been around long enough that if they talked, they could talk about a future in which horseshoe crabs see the sun turn red and go supernovae. It’s a long way in the future, but less than ten times as long as they’ve been around. The first fifty or a hundred million years were the hardest, they can say. Unless something changes, humans are not going to see tomorrow, never mind seeing the sun in its rocking chair days. We’re a catabolic disaster, a plague. The best possible interpretation for humanity’s actions on this earth is that we are a disturbed teenage arsonist who has set their bedroom on fire and is now standing at the burning doorway with a fire extinguisher in their hand discussing with themselves whether or not to put out the fire they just started. Maybe psychiatric treatment, a mix of drugs and therapy, would help. We are insane, and this madness is potentially the Lovecraftian issue of our time. Once you get it clear that to most of the world’s animals we are the Great Old Ones, we’re the End of Days invasion by immensely powerful aliens, then it all makes sense. We are the Mythos. The mythos is about us. The mythos is about our relationship with Nature. Uncharted Lovecraftian territory: what if the monsters are right to fear us? What if we are right to fear ourselves? What if the monsters aren’t the worst things out there? The Lovecraftian Imagination The deepest layer of the Lovecraftian imagination is that there are civilizations from the Horseshoe Crab era, civilizations which are hundreds of millions of years old, civilizations that aren’t victims of our tin-boat wrath and drift nets, but are perfectly safe and holding the whip hand relative to human upstarts. Lovecraft does not finish the job and grant most of these species the respect of being civilized – the Great Race of Yith being a notable counter-example – so let’s do the job for him. Consider a Lovecraftian imagination where nearly all of the Deep Ones are attending cocktail parties and building scientific equipment many kilometers deep in the ocean. A handful of disgusting sex criminal degenerate Deep Ones are essentially using the beaches for Fifth World Country dark tourism. That’s why the governing power structures of the Deep Ones do not particularly mind a few of their worst offenders being offed by counter-Mythos forces in places like Innsmouth: they’d be grateful if we did the whole job, frankly. It’s so bad from their perspective they’re turning a blind eye to the entire problem. Mainstream Deep One society just continues to believe there is no intelligent life on the beaches, just dumb animals, and nobody who is anybody ever went there. A couple of Deep One centers of learning intercept radio and take pictures with long lenses, but they haven’t dissected a representative sample of live specimens

[passage 40](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) a blind eye to the entire problem. Mainstream Deep One society just continues to believe there is no intelligent life on the beaches, just dumb animals, and nobody who is anybody ever went there. A couple of Deep One centers of learning intercept radio and take pictures with long lenses, but they haven’t dissected a representative sample of live specimens of homo sapiens in 18,000 years. Their military did the math on our nuclear capability and decided a surface war wasn’t going to impact them much in the 1940s. As humanity’s technological reach extends further, and submarines go deeper, the Deep One military is revisiting the analysis on the risk that humanity may present. The final report, debate, and decision are scheduled for 2060. They know Deep One cities risk discovery and they are beginning to wonder about doing something about this surface problem but our rate of change is beyond their conception. They know, right now, it wouldn’t take much to strip the surface world of technical capacity: a weekend’s worth of UFO raids targeting the cities would do it, but what then? Scour the surface world every 200 years forever? What a chore! Perhaps no Deep One military can be bothered to do that. Perhaps they’ll find a more permanent solution. Now this is a very different kind of story about the Deep Ones. The idea that we’ve been dealing with their criminal trash on the beaches of Innsmouth, and that skirmishes with those filthy customers are beneath the notice of their governments is a far scarier situation than “the most powerful Deep Ones are just bigger.” No, the big ones are strategic. They’re political. If we deal with them, we might not get two chances. So far we have been dealing with exiles and criminals, the trash at the bottom of Deep One society. Not the city builders. Not the beings operating their spaceships. Pirate cannibal scum. These civilized Deep Ones are better and scarier Deep Ones than the current stock model. These are the ones who surgically cut a hole in the hull of your nuclear submarines, insert a half ton stone tablet map of the sea bed topography showing the perimeter humans are not allowed past, and then weld the hull back up without leaving so much as a drop of water. The tablet is bigger than the hole it came through. So what I want to frame here is this: the conventional Lovecraftian read is non-ecological and largely ahistoric. They’re all monsters, not rivals. It’s a pretty good attempt for 100 years ago when we were just getting to grips with the timescales and the general horror of evolution. It falls short in the modern era. This is unsurprising because Lovecraft died in 1937. Lovecraft never heard of The Holocaust or The Bomb. He was dead. Lovecraft did not know about DNA or the Double Helix. He was dead. Believe me, if he had... there would have been stories. He’d have had us try

[passage 41](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2Yxf8JNFT8kgDETzkRKfVqDgGeVEvdNnVpGmRIm3E/edit) the general horror of evolution. It falls short in the modern era. This is unsurprising because Lovecraft died in 1937. Lovecraft never heard of The Holocaust or The Bomb. He was dead. Lovecraft did not know about DNA or the Double Helix. He was dead. Believe me, if he had... there would have been stories. He’d have had us try to nuke Cthulhu, and fail, for sure. “Wait, we are just made of DNA? We’re God’s knitting unravelling under entropy?” All of his genetic anxiety would have been sharper. This is why our Lovecraftian universe is incomplete. We have learned. We are not the same species we were when Lovecraft was writing about us and the monsters. Space Orks, Space Elves, Space Califorians Warhammer 40K is a lot clearer about our situation: humans are really a very very bad bunch, but maybe less-worse than the much worse things everywhere else. There, the ancient civilizations are not abstractly monstrous by default. Rather, they’re often a lot like us, and usually not in a good way. The Eldar partied so hard they created Warhammer’s Satan by accident. That’s their Fall. Eldar Space California. In another Space California universe, Star Trek has the general absurdity of “no old civilizations”. There are occasional holdouts in backwaters. But the main stories concern a bunch of new-to-space puppy species, in a very fragile new era of peace. It’s all led by the Vulcans who got out of bed 15 minutes before humanity and now pretend they run the place. Just don’t ask them about how baby Vulcans get made. The Klingons (representing 20th century European humans) and the Ferengi bring up the rear. It’s all very cosy. It’s so dull they need Trickster Gods (the Q) or the whole thing collapses into Space Sweden. It’s not an accident that there’s never been a widely played Star Trek TTRPG: you can’t make stories in this universe if the characters are capable of rational actions. Warhammer 40K is not so cosy: there’s a lot of very old, very powerful, very inhuman, very bad, hostile stuff out there and our entire species-level effort is dedicated to killing it before it can kill us. In Warhammer we’re winning, for the moment, at the cost of everything that makes us human. Not exactly Lovecraftian, worse in some ways, and plenty of old species. But set in the far, far away. We live here and we need something that works here. We are not short of horror, but the Lovecraftian meta-narrative is out of step with the needs of our times: we need fiction which makes us responsible for ending the world, not some God or Tentacle Godzilla. Us. We’re the monsters, and we need to rein that in. Slow Life: the Immortal Species So let’s straighten this out. I don’t mean make order, but I do mean “make useful science fiction out of pulp horror.” Humans are myths with physical bodies attached. We need much better myths to contain and manage

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