This all begins with imagination. Thoughts plucked from the collection of photons swirling magnificently through all matter; atoms dancing in a sea of possibility to form a collaboration of unconscious and conscious perceptions that magically come together to create the intangible—to create an idea—to birth the universe all over again, with the simple, effortless task of occurrence, and thereby spawn a chain of events unbound by time or space or any other dimension. One such occurrence among the trillions and trillions of firing neurons came about this way: into the mind of Jules Fernando whilst pondering the novel he had just finished reading, Subdivision Homesick Blues, a poorly written science fiction conspiracy, taking place in the near future.
Upon reading this tawdry tale, Jules Fernando drew parallels to modern society, and afterward spent many nights in his cellar, which he had converted into a model train room, reexamining the book’s premise. Jules became intrigued by certain events in the story that seemed to have direct correlations to actual events happening in and around the Settleburg area where he lived. Many highly irregular “clients” came into the offices of the Settleburg Home Owner’s Insurance Agency where Jules worked, and on several occasions he overheard hushed conversations, spoken in code, seemingly about the very things that he had been reading about in Subdivision Homesick Blues. His boss began sending him out of the office more and more often, for what felt like no good reason. Tales of sightings of “Tree People” and “Walking Bushes” started popping up in some of the restaurants and bars that Jules frequented, often followed by missing persons fliers, and reports of a rise in violent crime in Settleburg.
Feeling paranoid and unnerved by all of these coincidences, he began working on a theory secretly at the Settleburg Home Owner’s Insurance Agency. He called it, “Homogeneous Distempering of Flowering Humans”. Much of this theory was in direct correlation with the book itself, which was concerned with a government project to create a biochemical agent that fosters a flowering fungus on humans that they themselves can eat and be sustained by. The government offers this specialized fungus to anyone willing to live in the many empty subdivisions that currently exist all across the country—for free. There are two catches. One: electricity disrupts the fungus, so there can be no electrical current in these communities. No TV, no Internet, no cars, nothing that uses an electrical current. All homes are powered by alternative means, so the communities are basically cut off from all outside culture and leave no carbon footprint. And two: (the government’s dirty little secret behind all of this supposed benevolence) mental and physical distemperment in anyone infected with the fungus, causing mild to severe mood swings and leading ultimately to a complete collapse in cognitive abilities, an effect called Drone-Mind in the book. In fact, this is the whole point: the government is farming the mindless self-sustaining drones and trading them to aliens in exchange for advanced technology. The aliens use the hapless Mind-Drones as fuel cells.
Despite the outrageous claims made in the novel and underpinning Jules’s theory, his suspicion was not, as you might suspect, ungrounded in reality. This ‘Shruberbs Theory’ as it was known to the characters in the book, was in fact already known as Project Flowering Fuel Cells to a certain little-known branch of the United States government. And, in fact, Settleburg Home Owner’s Insurance Agency, which specialized in Subdivision Home Insurance, was set up by a proxy government agency as an exopolitical pilot program for Project Flowering Fuel Cells. Frank Rizo was the government agent in charge of over site of project F.F.C. and, incidentally, Jules Fernando’s boss.
One night, after routine inspection of the office computers at the Settleburg Agency, Frank Rizo came across Jules Fernando’s notes on Homogenous Distempering of Flowering Humans and instantly took action. Frank traveled directly to Jules Fernando’s home in Maple Ridge, just outside of Settleburg. Slowly creeping up to the house and letting himself in, he quietly made his way to where Jules sat in his underwear in front of the television drinking a warm can of Faygo cola, and pulled out a silenced 9mm revolver. He then successfully shot Jules Fernando in the back of the head—twice. Frank Rizo then blew out the pilot light on the oven and to allow himself enough time to leave the scene, set a spark timer for five minutes, igniting the home and Jules Fernando with it in a fireball that completely destroyed the house and damaged several of the lovely tract homes surrounding.
Frank Rizo also put a choke on the book, Subdivision Homesick Blues by the little known author David Orm, under the pretext that it was subversive and a threat to national security. This made absolutely no waves in the literary world, and almost all of the 60,000 copies of the book slowly disappeared from all public record. This effectively cut off David Orm from the little literary success that he had, and years later, after the ban on his book, he committed suicide by slashing his wrists with a quill pen in the bathroom of his Sunshine Terrace home.
In his suicide note, which ran twelve hundred pages, he blamed the failure of his first book as the main cause of his, “Loss of hope and cessation of effort, discouragement, depression, and dejection of his mind.” He pointed out, “the abjection of the government throttled his will to create,” and he felt he had been, “smote by the very hand of Big Brother that he wished to expose.” Consequently this rather wordy and accusatory suicide note was confiscated, for reasons of national security once word of David Orm’s demise reached the government via the agent that watched his every move. No one knew that David Orm ever wrote a book, save the handful of people who read it, or why he killed himself, except his family. David’s will and estate were also seized and his body was incinerated, all with the same justification of national security. A whirlwind of legal jargon and tightlipped government officials coerced David’s wife and daughter into signing bank documents, leaving them utterly homeless, financially destitute, and scared as hell.