"Truth" was one of those words that people tended to avoid in polite company. There was nothing actually wrong with it, certainly no formal policies against it as word or concept. But it carried the same weight as mentioning a dead relative; a loved one lost at sea, or dead to a terrible, grisly accident.The truth, most felt, died in the mid-21st century. No one set out to kill the truth, to deliberately murder it. Its death was largely accidental. It was smothered, buried under an unprecedented avalanche of bullshit. Like the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, everything was lost. Afterward, you could see only the outlines of history. When Vesuvius erupted, the ash filled every empty space, obliterating the people and the landscape, but leaving holes-3D outlines of the bodies themselves.In the post-Second Civil War history, there were holes where the BS wasn't. Areas that the BS traced, outlined, and filled right up against but wasn't able to penetrate. The holes in the BS-that was the truth, or all that was left of it.

After the Second Civil War, Henry buys a long-abandoned, desolate mansion from the pre-Internet era to get away from it all: away from the mass surveillance and constant monitoring of the new paranoid state at the very edge of civilization. But there's more to the house's history than the real estate listing admitted. Were ghosts real? Or panda bears? Or whales? No one knew for sure anymore. The tapestry of history was torn and threadbare, patched with both tattered cloth and with trash. And in that dim and murky place between the shores of consciousness and nightmare, Henry was running out of time.