DOYLE FANTASTIC

DOYLE FANTASTIC: Part I

Another Alien Space Bats setting.

In this one, I give you a world based on Conan Doyle’s more fantastical writings, most notably the Professor Challenger stories. I am not including Sherlock Holmes in here, since the poor man would be most put out by being included in such company.

I will note that there is a bit in “The Land of the Mists” which makes out “The Lost World” and “The Poison Belt” to be fictions in-universe, stories which Challenger finds quite annoying. I am disregarding that on the basis of it being a retcon made in the light of WWI and the passage of time, and anyway spiritualism is sillier rot than any surviving colony of dinosaurs.

Due to excessive length, I am splitting this in two parts.

The year is 1950, and it is a very different world from ours. It is a world where man’s place in the universe has been turned upside down over the course of a few decades, a world where an afterlife is a solidly established fact which religious people worldwide loudly declare to be a satanic fabrication, where the world itself is known to be a titanic living thing, where strange beasts swarm in the upper atmosphere, the deeps of the earth, and apparently in the aether itself, where strange new sciences threaten the peace and safety of the globe, where new ideologists argue for the colonization of the afterlife or the elimination of organized religion, where Islamic terrorism is based on secret ancient science, and where people live with the alarming knowledge that someday – perhaps tomorrow, perhaps not for a hundred million years – some fluctuation in the properties of the aether might wipe out humanity or toss civilization in ruin overnight. And then there are the Fairies, who have their own agenda…

The world in the 20th century has taken two major shocks, and although the Great Mortality of 1913 certainly shook the world, the failure of God to follow up on it, like the Black Death before it, led to a revival of new extravagance within a generation after the initial period of piety and introspection, and is a mere old wives tale to those under 35. Far more durable in its effects has been the so-called “era of spiritual science”, which is generally seen to have begun in 1926 with the first solid scientific proofs of spiritualist phenomena, and the conversion of several elite scientists. The existence of the so-called “land of mists” and its inhabitants is accepted not merely as a faith but as a scientific fact by half the human race: the other half denounces it as a deception carried out by the Devil/Shaitan/Mara/the Jews/the government/the freemasons/rosicrucians/evil immortal Atlanteans/the Fairies (the last two being actually sort of credible to the spiritually better-informed).

This New Revelation has brought about revolts and revolutions, broken apart families, disturbed international relations, and created a bitter and powerful new Islamicist movement to shake the Middle East. It has on the other hand brought peace to countless men and women oppressed by the inescapability of death, given power to marginalized peoples now that “odd talents” are energetically recruited by government and business, helped science and technology to make great strides, and created a variety of new businesses to cater to the newly open frontier between the living and the dead.

There is considerable overlap between spiritualism mediums and psychics, but it is not a unified group. Many quite powerful psychics have no talent for sensing or channeling the spiritual realm: on the other hand, no medium worthy of the name is lacking in psychic sensitivity. Most mediums are psychic specialists of sorts, although those at the very tippy-top of the psychic community, power-wise, are almost always are aware of and in contact with the spiritual realm: indeed, it requires a level of spiritual elevation to master the most advanced psychic skills. Some mediums suffer from excessive sensitivity, and tend to be pestered by psychic impressions and spirits day and night, to the point of having to resort to drugs to sleep well.

The problem of the fake medium has been greatly reduced by the creation of recognized boards and societies of psychics empowered by the government to vet and license mediums and spiritualists of various sorts, although here and there skilled fakers have fought back by trying to create licensing boards of their own and even tried to spoil the reputation of actual mediums by sneaking in psychic saboteurs into their sessions (it is generally easier for a psychic to mess up another’s psychics efforts than to duplicate the effects themselves, and psychics whose abilities are not conducive to making the big bucks are often easily suborned).

Mediums usually work alone, but in some cases as cooperative groups. Aside from psychic contact with the spirit realm, they also provide power for the spirit to act on the earthly side of things, in the form of the aetheric substance known ectoplasm or more vulgarly as “animal magnetism”: this can be a considerable stress on the medium, since the energy drain has a physical and well as spiritual component: a working psychic may lose as twelve pounds in weight during a particularly energetic séance, which is why séance work is not recommended for the very thin or anemic: bleeding and bruising is not unknown. Ectoplasm is dispersed by light and various forms of radiation, so séances are held in dark rooms: only the most powerful of spirits are capable of manipulating the physical world by drawing on the aetheric currents directly without a source of ectoplasm, and such spirits are rarely summoned just to find out how Uncle Julius is getting along in the afterlife. (The invention of infrared optics, however, allows the modern attendee to have a much better look at what is going on and further reduced the problem of fraud). Usually the medium works with one or more “spirit guides”, spirits tasked with helping increase humanity’s understanding and awareness of the afterlife.

The Land of Mists, as it is called, exists in multiple planes, the “higher” ones being where more spiritually developed spirits dwell, for a total of six: outside and below the lowest “proper” layer is a seventh (although counted as the first) the realm of earthbound spirits, occupied by those who have died but deny the existence of the afterlife they have found, refusing to accept their deaths: they wander, dimly aware of the “real” world in a blurred, distorted manner, seeing through dull, grey mists, to a considerable extent cut off from contact with the higher planes. Mediums can more easily contact them than first (second) level spirits can, and help them recognize the actual situation, but such lost souls can be dangerous to the sensitive, filled with resentment or longing for what they left behind. Usually higher spirits guide mediums to help such spirits – seeking them out unaided is dangerous: some are downright insane.

There are stranger things which dwell in the realm of the earthbound spirits: the strange, long-lasting collective ghosts of extinct species, amorphous, indefinite spirits of dried-out lakes and burned-down forests, the dim and short-lived shades of recently dead animals, strange oddities seemingly made of random scraps of ectoplasmic matter: these rarely appear at regular séances, which proceed with a definite purpose and call for specific spirits, but have mostly been recorded by scientific researchers and mediums “outside the church” fishing blindly into the void. At times terrible things have happened.

“Traditional” ghosts exist, but most are not really “people”, but psychic leftovers, mere shells left behind by agonizing emotion and violent death, acting out stereotyped actions and limited in the harm they can do to invoking toxic emotions. Far more dangerous are the aforementioned actual spirits stuck in the lowest plane, since they can react intelligently and draw ectoplasm from those with higher psychic energies to give themselves a form to physically attack with, although in most cases they are only able to materialize in the vicinity of where they died, unless foolishly summoned by an incautious medium. Previously they could only be dealt with by persons of powerful spiritual force essentially talking them down, or by the intervention of a strong spirit working in tandem with a medium: nowadays, ectoplasmic and aetheric technology exists that gives other alternatives (see below) – to the considerable displeasure of those in the spirit realm.

The higher realms are described as misty, but luminous places, and the landscape is shaped by the psyche of the inhabitants. People (from their own perspective) still have bodies, but without the ickier functions, and age only as slowly as they desire. In the higher realms, the mental boundaries and interpersonal issues that plague terrestrial humanity are reportedly fully absent. Given the relative absence of reports from the recently dead (who are either stuck in the lower earthly darkness or have not yet passed beyond the lowest couple of the “heavens”, which are respectively not much of an improvement on Earth and nice but apparently a bit of a Cloud Eight to Cloud Nine of the higher levels, there is some skepticism, especially in the absence of many of the great and good of past history in séances – they’re supposedly too elevated to be directly contacted, you see. Nobody supposedly gets to see God (He’s everywhere), but there are those who report meeting Jesus or the Buddha or other “ascended” ones, dwellers in the seventh (heh) heaven, usually in rosy but somewhat vague terms, although these chaps don’t show up for séances either.

Many are also unhappy with the rather vague evocation of the form of governance in the upper levels (the first two “heavens” are a bit of an anarchy, although with a bizarre sort of economy based on creativity – since objects other than people are mental constructs, the services of people who can really imagine a nice house or what a good steak tastes like are in demand, along with such creations as music, poetry, stories, etc. People trade in ideas and sensations).

(Speaking of economics, there is now a system of trade in existence between the lower levels and Earth: there is a demand for music, writing, etc. from the Land of Mists, and royalties from those items can pay for mediums or services on earth: see the section on the upper atmosphere. There is a big demand for postmortem works of great artists and writers of history, but many have either gone on to other, higher levels and are rather hard to get hold of (a lot of people are _really_ annoyed that the first-levelers let Shakespeare’s post-death works go out of materialization a century or so back), or have moved on to other things (Johan Strauss creates symphonies out of color and form, which although reportedly quite magnificent, are quite impossible to duplicate on Earth). There is also the problem of transcription – it takes a long time and a lot of stress for a medium to type out or write out (many dead people don’t know from typewriters) a whole book – if the author can be persuaded to take part in the tedious task in the first place- and as for trying to duplicate a painting which was initially created largely mentally through the shaky medium (hah) of a medium’s hand –well.)

There is in both the lower levels, and presumably the higher ones, a largely omnipresent Church of sorts, organized to help prepare and train people spiritually to reach the higher levels. Some are uncomfortable about this: there are suggestions that people in the lower levels aren’t entirely content: the subject of sex tends to be avoided, but there is a widespread rumor that it doesn’t translate well; and there are other, uglier rumors, such as that long-resident spirits are brainwashed by the Church and higher-level spirits into bucolic contentment – vehemently denied by the leaders of the Spiritualist churches and mediums whose contact with higher-plane spirits has been extensive.

Psychic phenomena have become a part of normal everyday discourse, and every government employs psychics in various roles, aside from that of medium: spies, provocateurs, criminal investigators, etc. Different nations and nationalities have been more or less successful at creating psychic agents, limited by access to training by often uncooperative masters in the land of mists or by local genetics (the defection of Ireland from the Empire was a bad blow for the British psi-corps, given the higher percentage of the gifted among the Irish rather than among the more mentally stolid Anglo-Saxons), and of the percentage of people inherently gifted with psychic talent, most need training and close contact with existing mediums and psychics to actually bring their powers into active use. The world’s leading nations when it comes to psychic talent and training remain Tibet and Bhutan, where the secret training methods of the Elder Masters produce the world’s greatest talents (which has allowed these nations to maintain a tenuous independence: aside from the dangers of psychic assassination, the arch-adepts know where all the bodies are buried).

Powerful psychics can read minds or compel obedience through hypnosis: once they have established a mental link through hypnotic trance, they can, from half a world away, influence people, send thoughts or sounds into their heads, move objects in their vicinity, or put them in trances. Once a top-level psychic has got their claws into someone, although spending all ones time in an Andresen Box (somewhat like a Faraday cage, only also interfering with Aetheric energies) will protect you, to permanently break the link the assistance of another powerful psychic or spirit is needed. Other psychics, with the aid of a medium, can shape ectoplasm into quite solid if temporary creations which mimic living things – sometimes dangerous things – while they last. Government “spookers” are greatly feared, and many wealthy and powerful individuals will only meet with them while sitting in an Andresen Box or over the videophone. Many licensed psychics are in private practice, employed in jobs as varied as the healing of nervous disorders or psychic archeology (determining the history of an object through reading its “psychic resonances.” This can be dangerous, especially if the item in question was used as an instrument of murder or torture).

There is perhaps an excessive public fear about psychics: usually, for a psychic to establish mental control requires lengthy exposure, and the sort of psychic that can mentally suborn someone unwilling in broad daylight, so to speak, is generally rarer than rubies and to be found in some ancient temple or behind six layers of government security rather than accosting someone in the street. Nevertheless, some wealthy people have begun to hire licensed and vetted psychics to serve as bodyguards to their minds as well as the usual sort for their bodies: as psychic professionals grumble, it is foolish to guard from the very unlikely case of high-powered psychic attack by giving ongoing close access to someone with lesser but still potentially dangerous abilities who may be as vulnerable to corruption as any other human being.

Indeed, of late it seems psychiatrists are more dangerous than psychics: given the increased prominence of hypnosis in psychological treatment, and the use of the mental projection screen to view hidden traumas and forgotten fears, scandals of blackmail and mental manipulation of wealthy clients have been the latest Big Thing for news media sensationalism. (Given that most psychiatrists can’t read eachother’s minds, the vetting procedures of psychiatric and psychologist organizations is less efficient than those of similar organizations for psychics: and even in those bodies, there have been occasional corruption scandals).

Of course, throughout history, strong self-trained psychics and secret societies set up to cultivate psychic powers have engaged in acts felonious and worse, secretly battled by strong spirits and more beneficent groups of seers and psychics such as the Hidden Masters of India and Tibet. Nowadays national licensing boards and government special operatives also work as “psychic police” hunting down rumors and traces of dangerous unregistered groups and individuals, although much remains still hidden to official authority in the West.

Harry Houdini was never a psychic. But since he died, no medium on this side or spirit on the other side seems to be able to find him…

Some psychic processes and technologies seem like magic to the uninitiated, and there remain some ancient secrets of the psychic sciences lost to modern humankind. Many mysteries were known to the ancient Egyptians, and to the Atlanteans before their exile: there may be ancient spirits dwelling in the land of mists which know of such things, but by the governing conventions of the spirit realm they will not communicate such potentially dangerous knowledge to mankind. A single instance of these foul ancient secrets was discovered by an archeologist which used it to try to murder a rival: baffled, he fled back to Egypt, only to find himself in the hands of the Dagger of God, an ancient Muslim society dedicated to defending the faith against unnatural powers. It appears that they decided to make use of his learning, despite its blasphemous nature, if the reports of agents and officials of the British crown being attacked by things that should be long dead are anything to go by.

Technology has marched on, in some ways similar to our world, in others very differently. The application of technology to psychic and spiritual phenomena is a new science, but an advancing one. Spiritual and psychic photography of ghosts and spirits is becoming a mature phenomenon, and recent advances have been made in mechanical means of communication with the afterlife without the use of a medium: ectoplasm can now be mechanically extracted from mediums and stored in lightless containers charged with psychic energy, and used for various purposes – for instance, a very sensitive ectoplasmic “receiver” can detect any pressure or contact by a spirit, and convert it into an electrical signal, while a keystroke can release a burst of ectoplasm which can be easily perceived by the spirit.

So far only a sort of morse code communication is possible, but enthusiastic inventors are talking about some sort of ectoplasmic “screen” onto which the spirit will be able to write letters. Many low-level spirits seem fascinated (Professor Challenger is particularly enthused about getting his thoughts down on physical, lasting paper), the higher-level ones seem oddly noncommittal, and talk a lot about Life’s Purpose being about preparing for the future stages of existence, not messing around with gadgets. They are even less enthusiastic about recent successful efforts to contain dangerous ghosts in ectoplasmic networks, insisting they be released to be dealt with professional spiritualists and mediums and helped to pass on rather than “caged like beasts.” (Scientists, very annoyed at losing the opportunity to study ghosts close up, have protested against the support given by governments to the Spiritualist/Spirit demands).

In Germany, ghosts are mere “noxious psychic phenomena” and creations of human minds: they have developed a rather massive aetheric generator which when put in a “haunted house”, puts out destructive vibrations so unpleasant to an earth-bound spirit that it is eventually forced to flee into the misty deeps of the lower levels: “the negative energies have been dispersed”, says the official report. (Generally, such reports are kept out of the public eye: although the German leadership reluctantly accepts the existence of psychic (NOT spiritual) phenomena, it prefers that the general public thinks of it as little as possible).

Medical science has benefitted from spiritual healing, which although of limited use against, say, fast-working tropical diseases, is of great benefit against various problems of the nervous system, degenerative diseases, and some forms of cancer, spiritual and psychic energies being able to boost the body’s ability to heal itself. (Efforts to mechanize spiritual healing have shown limited progress: indeed, the efforts of one Dr. West (of New England) with terminal patients and stored ectoplasm had results of a distinctly negative nature).

The sciences of Atlantis have brought the thought projector screen in common use in schools and offices (no need for power point). Flying machines remain propeller-powered, although the largest 16-propellor super-ships travel as fast as 600 miles an hour and carry as much cargo as six OTL Jumbo jets. Airships of the dirigible sort remain plentiful. Synthetic food production has helped decrease hunger across much of the world (although powerful agricultural lobbies have largely prevented the production of synthetics as anything more than a relief medium for the very poorest). Nuclear technology has not as yet achieved any powers as lethal as the atom bomb, but there is little interest in still greater frightfulness than what already exists – the disintegrator has seen to that.

Disintegration technology was developed relatively simultaneously by Sarducci in Italy and Bohr in Denmark in 1929: some claim that Theodore Nemor of Great Britain may have developed a working model as early 1925 judging from some papers of his found after his mysterious disappearance – some attribute said disappearance to the effect of a disintegrator ray – but most pooh-pooh this idea, noting that the idea of etheric networks of force, the basis for the reassembly of disintegrated matter, arose as a result of the cross-fertilization between aetheric and spiritual sciences and the consequent scientific investigation of the “apport” from ’26 onward.

Disintegration technology has since spread around the globe. It has fortunately turned out to be not quite as irresistible a weapon as initial foreseen: the ray requires a projecting and a refocusing element, so an attacker needs to position heavy equipment on both sides of an enemy to scatter their molecules, and rather severe difficulties in focusing the disintegration field exist if there is no line-of sight: this makes disintegrator-wielding forces vulnerable by bombardment by artillery over the horizon, which nowadays can “spot” enemy forces with the aid of trained psychics, and rather defenseless against airplanes. Furthermore, in the 1940s the technology was developed to create a form of protective “screen” of interfering aetheric currents able to neutralize the effect of the disintegrator (although requiring equipment of such size and power requirements as to make its use impractical so far save fixed defensive positions and the largest of seagoing battleships).

Still, the disintegrator is unpleasant enough, as was seen in the Third Sino-Japanese war in the late 30s, in which Japanese forces equipped with disintegrators took on Chinese forces which to their irritation had been equipped by the Russians – rather uninterested in Japanese dominance over China – with disintegrators of their own. Several armies on both sides were entirely reduced to atomic gas as pissing-in-their-pants troops desperately maneuvered to get their disintegrators aligned and in place first – the Japanese having better leadership and mobility, the Chinese the advantage having knowledge of the land and a defensive position, allowing them to conceal one of the disintegrator poles in a convenient place beforehand – and in one case both armies were pretty much wiped out simultaneously. After the Japanese got to the point of wiping out ala Carthage several Chinese cities in an effort to terrorize the enemy into submission, the Council of Nations finally moved to place a total embargo on the combatants, forcing the Japanese to accept a negotiated peace which left them rather unhappy, but also pissed off the Chinese, leading many to think it was probably fair. A great number of conventions and international conferences have since tried to tame the disintegrator, but nobody is willing to give up the technology.

Indeed, the disintegrator has turned out to be more important as a peacetime tool than as a weapon, being of tremendous value in mining, tunneling, road-building, and more sophisticated uses such as garbage recycling and materials refining. The new Korea-Japan undersea rail tunnel, or the Channel Tunnel between France and Britain, would have been perhaps impractically expensive without the disintegrator. And then there is transportation: although problems with line-of-sight and transmitting through the bowels of the earth make transportation of complex materials impractical over a few hundred miles, and trans-Atlantic trips remain a dream of the future (there has been talk of creating an “artificial satellite” as a transmission link) if you want to go from, say, London to Berlin in a real hurry, travel by disintegrator is the thing to do. It remains a bit pricey (after some disastrous premature efforts by the Russians to implement a mass transit system, any setup licensed for human travel tends to have quadruple redundancy and a ferociously thorough maintenance schedule), but it is now a major venue for business travelers and the transport of perishable or high-value (as in eminently thief-attractive) products, and there are many promises of a genuine teleporter for the masses any of these days now. Currently there are negotiations between the US and Russian governments to create a system of relay towers across the Bering straits, creating a staging system which would allow a lengthy but uninterrupted trip to Europe.

The existential worries about a transporter-type device that would exist OTL are here absent: the spirits and mediums have given their assurances that the soul remains attached to the aetheric “matrix” of form and the same person emerges at the other end as entered. (Indeed, from the POV of the psychic, the most unpleasant part about a disintegrator battlefield is all the disembodied but not yet truly dead spirits, too dispersed and widely scattered to be reassembled, but not yet in the land of mists, hanging around for days or weeks until their aetheric matrices entirely fall apart).

Transmutation of metals – say, lead into gold – has been rediscovered three times since Raffles Haw, in despair over human nature, destroyed his equipment and notes. Each time it has been successfully suppressed by the local government, due to the likelihood of global economic catastrophe if the method became publically available. (Of course, the method of suppression varied: the Japanese inventor is buried in a shallow grave, while the American one was massively bribed and is currently working for the government as part of a continuing effort to make the mass production of radium from iron economically practical).

The discovery of the Earth’s actual nature took place thanks to the disintegrating of a shaft some ten miles deep through one of the thinner portions of the planetary crust by the (in) famous professor Challenger in 1931, whose curiosity had first been aroused by a report of a mysterious “rain of jelly” after a volcanic eruption in China in 1922. Dropping a multi-ton steel drill into what later theorists have suggested was a rather sensitive aether-sensing organ led to an outraged screech that was heard in France, a geyser of tarry, stinking goo that reached a height of half a mile about the shaft, the closing of the shaft with such force as to leave a 200-foot heap of rubble above its exit, and volcanic eruptions and quakes world- wide. Human casualties were low, but Challenger was sued for damages by so many people and governments that he was forced to go into hiding after 1932, until his shuffling off the mortal coil in 1943 (reportedly of apoplexy after reading a particularly idiotic “popularized science” article) allowed him to once again bait and insult his opponents from the relative safety of the spirit world. The Earth appears to be thickening its crust in the area of the assault, at least judging from the alarming two feet per year uplift taking part over a thousand square miles of English countryside, which has already substantially modified the local topography and hydrology.

Studies of the poles have located vast, disk-shaped structures hundreds of miles across underlying them, which are believed to be some sort of organ absorbing the aetheric energies as the world-beast moves through space. Studies with new and sensitive aetheric instruments have confirmed the existence of some form of aether “current” in the Polar Regions: other instruments are being trained on the other inner planets in hopes of detecting some signs of similar processes. Opinion varies widely re the giant, gaseous planets, with some holding them to be a different form of life, others feeling that they are what the Earth was formerly supposed to be – lifeless common elements. Some rather strongly worded international laws have forbidden any digging below eight miles, although recent studies indicate that Challenger was just lucky (or perhaps knew something?), for the general thickness of the planetary shell appears to be over fifteen miles. New and more powerful methods of sonic echolocation have begun the process of mapping out the interior of the world-body and its complex internal voids and structures.

Psychics world-wide suffered a mental shock and a sensation of stabbing pain (most often in an eye) during the event, and since then considerable efforts have made by the psychic community to establish contact with the world-beast, if it is a beast (some small cults have formed which worship it). There hasn’t been much success, best efforts merely reporting a “fundamental note” in the psychic background which may be created by the vast living thing: some suggest that the world-beast may simply live on so different a time-scale than human beings that it’s thoughts – if it has thoughts – take place at so much slower a pace than human ones as to be entirely incomprehensible to someone with human perceptions. (The swiftness of its reaction to Challenger’s, um, needling seems to argue against this, but many claim that these should be understood as automatic reactions rather than some consciously directed). The inhabitants of the spirit realm claim ignorance on this subject, but some old spirits do smugly point out their having intuited the living nature of the world centuries or millennia ago.

The fact that the world seems to subsist on Aetheric energies has led many to theorize entire ecosystems of Aetheric life, and a greater study of the relationship between spiritual phenomena such as ectoplasm and aether: it is considered suggestive that spirits refuse to materialize near the Poles, referring to a dangerous “suction.” Does the planet eat ghosts, or only their material manifestations? Are there such things as space ghosts? (Presumably not heroic types wearing capes and black hoods).

Such theories, aside from producing a great deal of bad fiction and ponderous scientific theorizing, has led to closer attention to the edge of space: but getting there in this world is not without its dangers.

The high-altitude microorganisms which form the basis of the stratospheric ecology, typically known as “air plankton”, are found world-wide, capturing floating dust and ice particles in their fine webs of filaments, feeding off the intense energy of the high-altitude sunlight, and perhaps the minute particles of Aetheric life that drift down from the vastness of space. However, a number of factors, including air currents, the location of fluxes in the planetary magnetic field lines, availability of nutritious dust and frozen water particles, all means that the density of such life, and that of the higher forms of stratospheric life they support, varies with location. What are termed “Air Jungles” as per the 1923 usage of the early discoverer Joyce-Armstrong are scattered about the globe, with borders that are frequently in flux as the atmosphere is agitated by serious meteorological events.

The situation is of course somewhat more complicated than a simple matter of “jungles” and “barrens”: a thin scattering of life is found everywhere, and the ecology of the denser areas varies widely: the Putamayo Efflorescence above Ecuador and Columbia is a rich ecosystem, but possesses no inhabitants than need worry the balloonist or the cautious aviator (cautious for the risks of collision, not attack!), while the Joyce-Armstrong Drift was notorious for the ferocity of its local predators before their extermination at the demand of an alarmed British public. And of course there are vertical variations: lifeforms encountered at the 40,000 foot stratum usually differ substantially from those at 60,000.

Air Jungles usually are at heights of 35,000 feet or above, varying in height as the density of air changes with daily temperature: the lower layers of the Joyce-Armstrong Drift generally vary between 38,000 and 42,000 feet. Some air jungles may separate into largely unconnected strata some thousands of feet of elevation apart. Generally only a few highly specialized air-plankton feeders are to be found at heights over 65,000 feet, and even air-plankton become rare at over 80,000 feet, where the by then extremely rarified atmosphere provides little protection from the raw aetheric forces of space.

The great majority of stratospheric life tends to be highly tenuous and vaporous in nature, adapted to a life of permanent floating: while many are little more than living balloons or collections of soap-bubble like cells, some of the more dense-tissued species have developed large floatation bodies which buoy up their more substantial feeding and fighting organs. The development of psychic abilities, feeble in most terrestrial forms of non-sapient life, is quite developed in many stratospheric life forms: to signal potential mates over vast distances far less conducive to carrying sound than the Oceans’ waters: to detect the approach of prey or predators hidden in the vastness of sky: and in many species a form of self-psychokinesis comparable to a levitating Medium, which allows movement through the air without the expenditures of body tissue and chemical energy that something like bird wings would require. Some of the larger species can move at speeds one would consider impossible for such soft-bodied creatures: a Segmented Airsnake was clocked at over 250 mph over Brazil in 1939.

It is a widely circulated myth that some upper-air predators use mental hypnosis to lull humans into becoming prey: this is false, the nervous system of humans being far too different for such specific effects to be induced without millions of years of co-evolution. At most, stratospheric predators can sense the mental “noise” of humans at a distance.

The dangers of stratospheric predators has been greatly exaggerated by books and other media, and an overreaction to such tragedies as Joyce-Armstrong’s last expedition to the heights has led to the mass extermination of large predators in many areas. Although generally too decentralized in body plan for bullets to do much, almost all of the larger predators use auxiliary floatation bodies vulnerable to rupture, and can be torn apart by the shock of explosive devices: pretty much all examples of the Joyce-Armstrong Drift’s Greater Purple Amorph ended as a gooey purple rain fouling people’s yards and laundry lines across western England. (The most solid part of the Amorph, the Genital Horn – which the repressed Joyce-Armstrong had assumed to be a “beak” – is known to have caused at least two fatalities falling onto motorists and pedestrians from over 40,000 feet). Similar fates befell the Orange-Spotted Amorph above south Germany, the Multi-Mouthed PseudoDirigible over Kansas, and others: leading to ecological disasters, movements of species out of their previous niches, and rains discolored by some species of air-plankton overbreeding when harmless but large and alarming-looking microlife feeders were likewise shot or burned out of the skies.

Only after a generation of wasteful destruction have people come to see the need to protect and conserve these air jungles for the enjoyment and scientific learning of future generations. After all, it’s not like anyone is going to be living there, nor are there any raw materials to be exploited. A stratospheric lifeform with dozens of times the bulk of one of the great whales may not mass more than a few hundred pounds all told, making for a rather poor fisherman’s investment.

Since none of the larger species have been seen below 30,000 feet, and none at all below 22,000, world aviation standards keep “cruising altitude” to a standard maximum of 20,000 feet, with certain exceptions for extreme high-altitude locations such the Tibetan plateau. This is not so much due to fear of attack – the modern enclosed, steel-framework 400-passenger plane would plow right through a Greater Purple without even slowing down – as to avoid, firstly, severe damage to the stratospheric ecology, and second, the risk of a crash due to the engines becoming clogged with the gelatinous tissues of dead stratospheric life. (Indeed, an Amorph’s Genital Horn or a Bunyip’s Equatorial Struts could take out a window or a propeller).

Increasingly, guided tours by balloon or airplane to various Air Jungles are popular with the general public, and many have gawked at the sight of a flock of Sunspheres float by like a collection of iridescent 250-foot soap bubbles, or watched the mating dances of thousands of Chromatic Airsnakes. In the case of more dangerous species showing up, of course there is always a professional hunter on hand, who will attempt to keep such specimens at bay non-lethally by shooting out one of their floatation bladders, or using explosive flares – those who aren’t alarmed by the concussion will be scattered by the flame (some stratospheric life forms use hydrogen to help stay aloft and are rather flammable).

All this is of substantial interest to folks in the spirit realm, having their terrestrial links with (normally) ground-bound human beings, had no idea about this high-altitude ecosystem. Thanks to the new Ghost Banking System, spirits have been buying the services of mediums to take trips to the upper atmosphere and serve as a window, so to speak, on the scene.

Currently, investigations are being carried out by balloonists at extreme altitudes (over 70,000 feet) to attempt to capture the semi-material substance of still somewhat theoretical aetheric life: as yet only known as a result of subtle interactions with normal matter, “goblin flesh” (as dubbed by some media skeptics) appears to have some elements in common with ectoplasm. Cameras designed to detect spiritual and aetheric phenomena have so far only been able to capture mysterious blobs and spots of luminescence, apparently at very great heights.