"Truth" was one of those words that people tended to avoid in polite company.
And in that dim and murky place between the shores of consciousness and nightmare, Henry was running out of time..
The tapestry of history was torn and threadbare, patched with both tattered cloth and with trash.
Were ghosts real? Or panda bears? Or whales? No one knew for sure anymore.
But there\'s more to the house\'s history than the real estate listing admitted.
After the Second Civil War, Henry buys a long-abandoned, desolate mansion from the pre-Internet era to get away from it all: away from the mass surveillance and constant monitoring of the new paranoid state at the very edge of civilization.
The holes in the BS-that was the truth, or all that was left of it.
Areas that the BS traced, outlined, and filled right up against but wasn\'t able to penetrate.
When Vesuvius erupted, the ash filled every empty space, obliterating the people and the landscape, but leaving holes-3D outlines of the bodies themselves.
In the post-Second Civil War history, there were holes where the BS wasn\'t.
Afterward, you could see only the outlines of history.
Like the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, everything was lost.
It was smothered, buried under an unprecedented avalanche of bullshit.
Its death was largely accidental.
No one set out to kill the truth, to deliberately murder it.
But it carried the same weight as mentioning a dead relative; a loved one lost at sea, or dead to a terrible, grisly accident.
The truth, most felt, died in the mid-21st century.
There was nothing actually wrong with it, certainly no formal policies against it as word or concept. "Truth" was one of those words that people tended to avoid in polite company
