010 - The Space Behind

Unnatural Phenomenon: The Space Behind

Loneliness is a endemic aspect of modern urban life despite increasingly centralised populations and technology innovations that are targeted at keeping us more interconnected than ever before (well, that and harvesting personal information for profit). Human minds are attracted to novelty and with incentives driving faster and more atomised lifestyles often these new things are used as proxies rather than facilities for normal relationships. Other people fall through the cracks due to lifestyle factors and choices, marooned by their problems in a sea of humanity.

All of that isolation packed into such a small area, with human contact scant feet away, building like static electricity. When it discharges those in the know call the resulting effect "falling into the space behind".

It could happen to anyone. The best guess at where it strikes is at the geographical centre of whatever storm of condensed loneliness created it, as difficult as that is to measure. The when is even harder to predict although space-chasers think it happens in cycles (ask any of them, they’ve all got systems for tracking it that none of them agree on). To those who it does ground itself through it is unmistakable.

Imagine jolting awake one morning to be greeted by a world seen through frosted glass. A pale, milky blur of colours and shapes only made familiar by recollection. All sound is muted and distant, seeming to come from neighbouring rooms and streets. Taste, touch and smell are similarly hushed. You are out of sync with the world. There is no one else in the space behind.

You can interact with the environment but you are invisible and intangible to others, as they are to you. Physical changes are only ever shared when one side doesn’t perceive them being made: you could write something down (though your vision would probably be too bad to read it) and someone could find it later but if they were in the room when it was written they will never see it. This effect deteriorates with time, the longer you spend in the space behind the less changes carry across and the more coincidental they seem.

You will be trapped in the space until the isolation breaks you and for most this happens with merciful speed (in game terms, failing an Isolation stress check). Some die in here by starvation, accident or suicide. They vanish forever with the only traces of their last moments being the physical evidence of their unnoticed final actions.