Doublin' Trilogy

Whereas science fiction puts us into a world yet-to-be, I want to put you in a world you are unaware is all around you. Right now, things are happening and more often than not, we don't even know how they change our lives.

Built using Threatcasting and Storycasting, these books of speculative fiction reflect the world we live in, as it is revealed, offering a plausible chain of events that may be occurring without you knowing. Many of the details in these stories are not at all fiction. They make references to research papers, books, events and technology that are all around us. It are those details that make the trilogy plausible. 

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Here, I've provided curious readers more than what could be included in the books themselves. The letters the characters share, the research that led them to their conclusions, created their paranoia, and put them in danger. 

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Take a look around and see what clues you find. Can you separate fact from fiction?

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  “Like what details?” Anton asked with skepticism. 

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  Gus and Anton leaned against a fence as Gus began. “You remember Ed, right? The retired intel guy?” 

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  Anton chucked, remembering him from their early contracting days. “He always talked like he was being listened to.”

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  Gus chucked. “Yeah him. I called him a couple of days ago and ran this idea about hidden messages in books by him. It’s not that crazy. In fact, he said it’s sort of outdated really.” Gus turned to Anton and ran through his idea some more. “It’s common for people to fold down pages in a book so they can pick up where they left off, right?” 

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  “Sociopaths. Bookmarks aren’t hard to find,” Anton said.

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  “Anyway, so to direct someone to a specific word, pages get folded, the corner pointing to a specific word or even letter. The page would be flattened again but a faint crease would remain. Knowing what book to look it, another person can come by weeks or months later and with a little patience, find all the creases and refold each page to find the series of words.”

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  Anton was following with interest, so Gus continued with more confidence. “Or the easiest way is to just list the page number and the number of the word on the page. Y’know, page 342, 45th word. If someone knows what book to look in, all you have to do is leave a list of numbers that no one could make sense of. Without the title of the book, it’s simply a list of numbers. You wouldn’t even have to worry about someone copying the list a hundred times or just posting it online somewhere.” 

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  Anton raised his eyebrows in acceptance. 

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  Gus started speaking faster, as though the words poured out. “Make tiny pinpricks above or below certain letters or use microdots that look like periods. That’s been around since World War II. Then there’s homoglyphs, where you simply rely on people’s lack of attention. It’s easy to use a different font for specific letters. A Times New Roman A instead of a Garamond A. A zero in place of a capital O. That sort of thing. Easy peasy. Or use misspelling or grammatical errors that indicate a word or paragraph or sentence is significant. These things happen thousands of times a day and no one notices. Unless they knew what to notice, right?” 

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  Anton asked, “But that can be done online too, so what’s the significance of doing on the printed page?” As soon as he asked, he answered his own question. “Because digital errors get found easier by digital devices, but books are subject only to the scrutiny of the human eye.” 

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   “And humans make mistakes.” Gus nodded with more enthusiasm that Anton expected. Gus began to speak a bit loudly, “again, even if all of that has nothing to do what Kyle’s looking for, I still have plot fodder for a novel.”

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  Anton didn’t say it, but he was starting to think Gus was becoming a bit obsessive about what he was doing. Gus often spoke about the secret way he needed to communicate everything back to Kyle. He admitted that he didn’t want to email or talk on the phone with Sophie about their writing for fear of, as Gus put it, “people in windowless rooms monitoring all the networks.” All the hours of research and writing and plotting and postulating, it was starting to make Gus seem a bit almost manic. Anton had already talked to Nadine and found she got the same sense as well.