“Now, I could ask you how many moons the Earth has,” the professor began. “Wait for someone in the room to blurt the obvious answer of ‘one,’ then smugly rebuke them. It is within my rights as your instructor to do this, but I am not a jackass, and all of you are smarter than that. You wouldn’t be at this university if you fell for such banal tricks. You’d have suspected I was playing at something the minute I asked such a question. So, I’m going to be straight with you on this one.
“It’s true that our planet only has one external moon. From my choice of adjective, you’ve already determined that I’m going to tell you that the planet has at least one internal moon, though you haven’t quite pieced together what an internal moon would be. The very word ‘moon’ implies externality to you: smooth, spherical rocks hurtling around one another, tethered together by an invisible rope.
“But gravity is far messier than that. Every single pair of masses in the universe is drawn to every other, no matter how far apart. Therefore, every fragment of the planet is drawn to every other fragment within it, as well as to every fragment of the outer moon, and vice versa. There is just as much gravitational drama happening underground as there is in the heavens. In certain creation myths, the planets themselves originated underground before being placed in the sky by the gods. This is not true, of course, but it does demonstrate a matter which modern thinking tends to ignore: the relationship between that which we can see above us, and that which we cannot see below.
“We’ve given Earth’s inner moon the name ‘Persephone.’ For those who know their mythology, this is probably an underwhelming choice, though it’s hard to think of one more appropriate. It’s nothing more than an orb of heavy, magnetically-charged gases, low enough in density to pass freely through solid earth, yet strong enough in field to maintain its spherical shape. It revolves primarily around the Earth’s core, though the planetary mass between it and the surface, as well the amount of planetary mass inside of it, have to be factored into calculating its orbit.”
One student raised her hand.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking. How can something like Persephone exist so close to us, yet not be known to modern astronomy? People ask the same kind of things about Nibiru, I suppose. Like many other celestial bodies, Persephone has an elliptical orbit, and as such, a segment of it occasionally crests above ground in summertime. Of course, it is so diffuse in nature that it can neither be seen nor felt, even from inside its surface. Despite this, were one to inhale deeply while the moon were passing through them, they’d then be able to taste or smell it. Most who experience this never actually realize what they’ve done; after all, who would ever suspect something so bizarre existing from just a strange flavor in the air? It wasn’t until our underground observatories came online that such a thing could be proven: we’re now able to detect changes in geological composition that come and go with the seasons, and record when they happen to map Persephone’s trajectory. Does that help to clarify?”
“Well,” she sighed. “Actually, I was going to ask why you thought ’Persephone’ was such an appropriate name, but I suppose the last bit answered that question, too.”
"You probably expected this one to have the Hellenoia tag from its title." "Well, actually-"
"-I was going to ask you about the possible moon supposedly discovered on the Earth's surface."
There is probably only one sun, though there's no telling how many moons are inside of it.
“Now, I could ask you how many moons the Earth has,” the professor began. “Wait for someone in the room to blurt the obvious answer of ‘one,’ then smugly rebuke them. It is within my rights as your instructor to do this, but I am not a jackass, and all of you are smarter than that. You wouldn’t be at this university if you fell for such banal tricks. You’d have suspected I was playing at something the minute I asked such a question. So, I’m going to be straight with you on this one."
Among believers, vaultgulls are said to possess golden feathers, as well as eyes of black crystal; then again, they are also said to have never before been seen, so such descriptions ought to be met with skepticism.
For these clever birds, all that is unseen is the sky; their wings slide cleanly through metal and stone as easily the wind. The only solid surface they know is the periphery of human vision, the greatest obstacle to their shimmering wings. The subtlest twitch of a single eye is enough to thrust them aside like a hurricane's gales.
For humanity, it is the earth that is solid, and the air that is permeable; for chthonity, the opposite is true. They wander just beneath our feet, as we do beneath theirs, sometimes even atop one another. Their world is an inversion of our own, one which rests within a sphere atop an endless sky. Our atmosphere is the soil upon which they tread.
“I’m telling you, the seismic readings are fairly clear at this point. It’s down there.”
“I mean, I believe you, but how?”
“From what I understand, the outer surface of the inner core is reinforced with hexagonal plates that hold back the sea of molten rock. There’s no external path inside- its body is armored in all directions.”
There are more than two-thousand species of bird present throughout the Great Agarthan Jungle, from the minuscule anteater hummingbird to the greater spherical penguin. Despite the extraordinary diversity present, however, all of their eggs, no matter the parent, are outwardly identical. Each egg is recognizably Agarthan by its signature gömböc curvature, gumdrop size, and transparent shell that reveals nothing but green jelly inside. If appearances are to be believed, there is no embryo within at all- just the same undifferentiated ooze.
If the tales of the old north are to be believed, when the gods created the world, they began by murdering a giant. Ymir, as he was known while alive, was disassembled into his most basic components, then used to sculpt the planet. Mountains were carved from his bones, forests were woven from his hair, and oceans were brewed with his sweat. Once this was done, his eyebrows provided just enough thread to sew the boundaries of reality shut. The last of these stitches marked the end of his usefulness, but also, the beginning of time.
Some mathematicians go so far as to call their work the language of God. In their hubris, they refuse to admit that they write in a language that is very human: one with its own idioms, clichés, and platitudes. In order to prove supposed mathematical truth, they routinely employ the same handful of phrases and arguments, yet are startled when these phrases and arguments are echoed back to them in the same language that they began with.
An ancient winter was buried in those caves, pressed between layers of geological strata. It was another kind of season from another kind of time, when the snow was luminous and refused to melt. After nine days spent lost in the dull, indigo glow of those tunnels, Thomas was no longer certain if the cold or hunger would kill him first. Almost all of his skin was numb, yet he could feel the outline of his stomach more clearly than ever before.
“So, where do we go from here?”
“Well, this is a maze,” she responded. “By definition, I don’t know which way to go.”
“Hmm. Then which way don’t we go?”
“The wrong way, clearly.”
The secret of your smartphone is that it is most powerful while turned off. In truth, its screen is the surface of an endless black sea shared among all others of its kind. Messages and information sent from one phone sink down through this vast darkness until they bubble up to the glass of another. All who gaze within are looking downward, no matter the direction of their eyes.
The gnomes of Hyperborea are neither born nor created; they enter our world by climbing out of their own shadows, and leave a few hours later when they inevitably tumble back down into them. At the bottom of each of these peculiar holes (sometimes over thirty miles in depth) is a pool of black lava of unknown origin. Some say that each such shadow is a window into a second underground, and that our planet hides multiple interiors beneath a single surface. Others claim that there is no such multitude of underworlds, and that the gnomes create a material debt by existing that eventually swallows their borrowed bodies whole.
There are chambers beneath the city where sound continues to exist without space in which to propagate. For most species, including human beings, these environments appear to be little more than solid walls of limestone and granite. For bats, however, these barriers are as permeable as the air they breathe. They dip in and out of the subterranean passages hidden beyond, preying upon the immaterial insects within.
Through rainfall, the dying hurricane entombs itself. The world below swallows what were once its clouds, beginning a process of transformation beyond human eyes. Eventually the weather above ground calms, but from the storm’s perspective, this is far from the end. Underground rivers become new arteries and reanimate its vaporous flesh, allowing mist and soil to merge into a new kind of sinew. After several weeks of gathering its bones back together, the storm returns to life in the depths of the planet.
You are waiting for a train at a station hundreds of miles beneath the Earth’s surface. The entire structure has been carved from what appears to have once been a colossal tortoise’s shell. A commemorative plaque attached to a column indicates that this is indeed the case, and that the station itself is “a relic from those chaotic days before the world was hammered into a sphere.”
The head of your pickaxe has been reinforced with depleted uranium. You swing its leather-bound neck with weary arms, and the honeycomb comes loose in thick ingots of iron-beeswax alloy. Throughout nine years of tunneling through the world’s guts alone, it has often served as your only friend.
While it's true that cephalopods use their ink to escape potential predators, so too do humans use their voices to elude danger when they scream; such behavior does not preclude the fluid's use for more complex communication.
The hornet's feathers were beautiful under a microscope. In each vane, he could see its stripes unfolding into sharply-defined fractals, interlocking Sierpinski triangles of black-and-yellow contrast. The further he increased the degree of magnification, the more intricate the patterns became.
“Now, I could ask you how many moons the Earth has,” the professor began. “Wait for someone in the room to blurt the obvious answer of ‘one,’ then smugly rebuke them. It is within my rights as your instructor to do this, but I am not a jackass, and all of you are smarter than that. You wouldn’t be at this university if you fell for such banal tricks. You’d have suspected I was playing at something the minute I asked such a question. So, I’m going to be straight with you on this one."
During his research into the nature of flora, Goethe began to suspect the existence of what he referred to as the “Urpflanze,” a primordial plant from which all others had been derived. At the end of his quest to find it, he instead came to the conclusion that, rather than there being such an archetypal plant, there instead existed a single, protean form from which all others had been constructed: that of a solitary leaf.
In the late 1890s, scientists at the University Beneath Chicago developed the first atomic bomb, a weapon which they referred to as the "Antithalesian device." Despite it being a milestone of human engineering, this research was never approved for surface publication. After proof of concept testing, the results joined scores of other papers in the vaults of Shaver Hall, only to be read again on a need-to-know basis.
There is no topological model which can easily account for what astronomers at the University Beneath Chicago have observed under the ice of Jupiter's sixth moon. Though its surface is indeed a sphere, with a finite diameter around three-thousand kilometers, Europa’s volume is infinite.
“My research suggests that humans are not primates at all. In fact, we’re cervids. Bipedal deer."
"That's going to be a pretty hard sell with the biological community."
"Oh, without a doubt. I don't expect the mainstream to accept it as fact. Ever. In fact, I fully expect the truth to be buried and forgotten. And to be honest, I like it that way."
“I specialize in the process of hypercamouflage in marine animals.”
“Hypercamouflage? How is that different from the normal kind?”
“Well, you could learn about that by signing up for my class,” she smirked. “But I don’t mind talking to students about my favorite subject. Hypercamouflage is a term for any process by which an animal becomes so well concealed that it is physically indistinguishable from its surroundings. When achieved, no known scientific equipment or sensory organ is able to detect the creature’s presence. It is as though they no longer exist.”
“I’m telling you, the seismic readings are fairly clear at this point. It’s down there.”
“I mean, I believe you, but how?”
“From what I understand, the outer surface of the inner core is reinforced with hexagonal plates that hold back the sea of molten rock. There’s no external path inside- its body is armored in all directions.”
The professor’s laboratory was centered by a walk-in freezer, where he stored his collection of cube-shaped pseudobrains. Each was formed from a mixture of carbon and silicon nerves, equally sized, and wrinkled with pearlescent grooves. The chamber’s subzero temperatures prevented them from storing thoughts and memories, allowing each experiment to begin tabula rasa.
“Now, let’s get started.” The professor drew two large ovals on the blackboard. “What’s the first thing that any mathematician learns about division by zero?”
“That it can’t be done,” one student replied.
“That’s right,” she smiled. “And why is that only half true?”
It has become common knowledge that, when an observer gazes up at the stars from Earth, they see them as they were at some point in the distant past. Furthermore, [...] the observer is looking upon those stars as they were at a time when the universe was significantly smaller. Were anyone to build a telescope which could see the furthest edge of the universe, they would see it as it existed at the moment time began: a moment when it was so small that, paradoxically, its edge was closer to the point occupied by the observer’s eye than their own telescope's lens.
“Now, I could ask you how many moons the Earth has,” the professor began. “Wait for someone in the room to blurt the obvious answer of ‘one,’ then smugly rebuke them. It is within my rights as your instructor to do this, but I am not a jackass, and all of you are smarter than that. You wouldn’t be at this university if you fell for such banal tricks. You’d have suspected I was playing at something the minute I asked such a question. So, I’m going to be straight with you on this one."
There is no topological model which can easily account for what astronomers at the University Beneath Chicago have observed under the ice of Jupiter's sixth moon. Though its surface is indeed a sphere, with a finite diameter around three-thousand kilometers, Europa’s volume is infinite.
Giordano Bruno was of the belief that the sun was just another Earth, and that its glow emerged from eternal forest fires that sprawled across its surface. While such forests have never existed, Bruno’s hypothesis is not entirely incorrect, as stars produce their light by burning that which isn’t there.
1. An astronaut should be able to subsist for one lunar cycle on nothing but canned sunlight. Only the purest variety will prove their readiness: it should be distilled by the solar panels of low-orbit satellites, then carried back to Earth in the talons of doves.
2. An astronaut should be lowered into a pool of raven’s feathers, then meditate in stillness for three days and three nights. During this ordeal, gravity will tempt them to sink to the bottom, but they must be able to resist through force of will.
The Phaeton hypothesis, though largely abandoned by astrophysicists, suggests that the asteroid belt lying just beyond Mars’ orbit was once a planet unto itself. Zecheriah Sitchin believed in the existence of this world wholeheartedly, and further, that it was destroyed by an undiscovered rogue planet which he referred to as “Nibiru.” Upon its inevitable return, is said that it will bring with it chaos, disaster, and an army of extraterrestrial demigods known since Sumerian times as the Annunaki.
Seasoned conspiracy theorists know that it is coming soon, as it has been for decades, and always will be.
These things have long been known to be true: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, the north and south poles of magnets cannot exist without one another’s affection, and protons and electrons engage in hundreds of elaborate waltzes that we interpret as matter. These principles seem to point towards a universal rule of duality, yet one of the four fundamental forces defies this pattern: gravity.
The wildfire is visible from space, an ever-burning semicircle that connects the planet’s poles. East of this phosphorescent meridian, the world remains violet with life; to the west, however, there is nothing to be seen but smoke and desert, a landscape ruled by worms. The flames take several earth-months to complete a single rotation, allowing just enough time for the fields to regrow. Satellites orbiting its equator can see the entire gradient of life and death in a single rotation, from ashes to fertility to ashes once more.