Okay, second in the series of my Extended Floatillion Universe posts. To read the first post, on THE BOOK OF THREE RIVERS, click HERE. This week: THE TRUTH ULCER

Okay this is kind of an odd idea, so bare with me. It also doesn’t have that much to do with Floatillion directly. It’s more of a seperate story, tangentially related to Floatillion. But it’s important enough to bring up, I think. I also just want to finally get this idea on paper.

The Truth Ulcer are a band. Not very famous, or successful, or critically acclaimed. They consist of four guys, on drums, guitar, bass, and vocals. The drummer is named Glick, he’s Indian, and he has the Mark of Three Rivers scarified into both cheeks. Other than that there is nothing that out of the ordinary about them as a band.

In their entire time as a band they only released one record, The Truth Ulcer EP. Four medium-lengthed songs, one written by each member of the band. They also headlined a couple of local shows, and they hung up posters for them around the city.

Then they disappeared, and not just by breaking up. They dropped out of time. Their entire lifetimes were neatly airbrushed out of history. Their family members and friends talked to empty space, and didn’t know why. Fans went and stood for two hours in otherwise silent concert halls cheering, and walked out not knowing why they had done that or what they were cheering for. Nobody remembered them, because they had never existed. A few posters for their shows still appeared around town, and there were a few copies of The Truth Ulcer EP in discount bins and second-hand bookstores. But everybody ignored them. Nobody had ever heard their music, but they still felt it.

But the band members didn’t disappear completely. They were displaced randomly, to different dimensions, or alternate realities. They forgot their names and their histories. They spent their lives feeling purpousless, like there was something they were meant to be doing, but they couldn’t figure out what.

Some of their CDs and posters are also randomly displaced, and sometimes you can see a poster of theirs hanging around town, advertising a show in a place that doesn’t exist. Or a CD in a discount bin. And sometimes the people in these other universes buy these CDs and listen to them, and they make them feel uneasy. As if there is something fundementally wrong with everything.

The sounds they made while they existed in their original reality are also displaced. And they appear in other worlds as stray bits of music, heard from around street corners, or from empty windows, or coming in on an unknown radio station, through the static. Sometimes people even hear their music in their dreams, and wake up with their songs stuck in their head, only to have them immediately fade.

It’s unknown WHY exactly they dropped out of time, but it was almost certainly because of something they accidently discovered about the end of the world. And they almost definitely did it voluntarily, to escape something. Which isn’t to say that they didn’t have assistance.

In the end their escape from whatever they were running from was unsucessesful.

The Truth Ulcer was a central idea in the original novel, ROTOR, that I cannibalized Floatillion from. The main character was Glick, and the Church of Three Rivers cult was just a minor aspect, appearing in only one story. In Floaty the cult idea got blown up to the extent that everything else had to go. But it’s still an important aspect of the universe Floatillion is set in, and, if you pay attention, you’ll notice that it has popped up at least three times already. And it will pop up again.

Tune in next time to read about: CAREFREE, ARIZONA.