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"I Want to Go Where the Nouns Don't Exist"

I. Sequel to "Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius"

II. Sequel to "Beyond Lies the Wub"

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After the secret society of Orbis Tertius is found out and all the encyclopedias are collected, most of the current disciples go into hiding.

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The physicist Marner Haslam IV, the great-great grandson of Silas Haslam, becomes obsessed with the idea of making Tlon a real place and chooses to do it on the nearest terraformed planet: Mars.

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He joins an expedition and begins to recruit fellow travelers for his plan to build this imaginary world turned real. When they get there, however, they see that other creatures have already colonized the planet.

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Frustrated that his plans have been foiled, he runs into the forest ranting exasperated about what could have been when he runs into a boar-like creature who seems to understand what he is saying.

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Thinking he is hallucinating because of the change in the atmosphere, he mostly ignores it as he tears his schematics to pieces and the creature begins to eat them up, erasing all traces of Tlon…so he thinks.

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Because of ideological differences with the rest of the crew, mainly that they thought they should  eat him and he thought otherwise, the Wub seizes to exist in his porcine form.

(Events of Beyond Lies the Wub)

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The Wub, now in Captain Franco’s body, is leading a more humanitarian mission and seeking to expand the human-wub relationship.

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After having a change of heart while getting to know the Wub, the crew obliges and begins to build a new headquarters.

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The Martian natives, however, were not too happy, as this hurt their businesses and trading lines. They plotted to sabotage the project by spreading a rumor that the Wub had been tricking them for his own gain.

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In the middle of a survey trip to seek out where future laboratory and research stations will be placed, one of the crew members who is convinced he is being betrayed shoots Captain Franco/the Wub in the back and leaves him to the elements and fauna.

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A scavenger Martian bird finds the body and begins screeching but as he begins to eat the flesh, the hissing grunt begins to sound like speech, and he begins to wax poetic about hrönir and duodecimal systems.

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"Ah, in this form I can finally get places. I have to spread ideas for a new world. Tlon lives," says the Wub.

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This story contains both scientific and fantastical elements, although I do believe the distinction between those is blurry: what seems like a magical, talking animal to us may have developed from some technological advancement wherein the Wubs were able to extract their “essence” the way we humans hope to upload ours into the cloud to “live” forever. There is also space travel and the ability to terraform Mars, which currently is still out of the realm of possibilities, although that won’t always be the case, and that adds another level of complication to what makes this story, or any, sci-fi.

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Most of the images were taken directly from Google, while others were created with Google Gemini, and still others were generated with Canva's Magic Media App.

The stories used were Jorge Luis Borges's "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and Philip K. Dick's "Beyond Lies the Wub."