In a time and space far removed from what is commonly accepted as the here and now he is Piotr Palmiotti, in all likelihood North America’s leading expert on astroarchaeologies. Were his life a public affair, rather than this matter of living too much of said life toiling away sequestered deep underground in a military installation so top secret no national-stage politician could or should ever even have heard tell of its very existence. If not for his young daughter Magda he’d be uncertain whether what passes for his life were in fact real, or merely another construct from the mechanized phenomena of pandimensional origins he has been long-tasked with understanding.
And within that time and space far removed from what is commonly accepted as the here and now has he made the acquaintance of one Reickhardt Caldwell, a failed but independent journalist whose quest for the truth in regards to governmental conspiracy resulted for himself in a hopeless pact with the Powers That Be, to either document the revelations which finally come forth from the lab of Palmiotti after much trial and tribulation, or end his days imprisoned with the unnatural things to come forth from said mechanized phenomena and since confined below in a sub-basement level so far down as to never again encounter another life-form. Caldwell would play the fool, running the fool’s errand to bide time until the truth is founded and his freedom reclaimed. Palmiotti was a decent man, Reickhardt trusting only his senses could read as much, but the man’s daughter…the poor girl quite evidently had senses well and beyond what even the Powers That Be could or should claim as resource or opportunity, as they do with all things. Being unreal, was she undefinable.
Unless the strange dreams further the yellow journalist’s madness, dreams of a different space and time from what is generally regarded as the present phase to the third dimension, where a different Piotr, a Peter Palmiotti struggles with his sequential storytelling somewhere in the bible belt of a parallel universe. This Palmiotti designing, drawing and inking all his days and all his nights to craft what his own dreams inform him, feebly assisted by a different Reickhardt, the drunkard Richard Caldwell, a reviewer and interviewer who shunned paper trails with little sense of irony. This Palmiotti caught fleeting glimpses in his mind’s eye of the other Palmiotti, perceiving him as the fruits of his own imagination or waking dream or night terror or all of the above, rather than the reality of the reality he called home being something else altogether.
To assist him in discerning this new fable, he tasks Caldwell into plotting and scripting what the other Palmiotti and other Caldwell might represent, what horrible challenges they must face in the massive governmental complex depths lower than proper society, with its strange symmetries of alien foundation calling forth nightmares and memories alongside nightmares and memories belonging rightfully to other realities altogether. Having sampled sizable portions of illegal substances this Richard Caldwell was himself unsure if the narrative they were aggregating was of renown or of something from beyond, the other Reickhardt Caldwell trapped inside that secretive military bunker bargaining for more time and space in fact a pawn in a different game, or a figment of the delirium which masquerades for fiction in the here and now. How would that weird psychic daughter of that Piotr Palmiotti possibly know him to wave like that, among the strange shadows and stranger spectrums of light and sound she has come to call home? If he himself were the author to their foibles, why would his own thoughts fit so roundly inside word balloons off-panel from his reality like so? And poor Peter Palmiotti, retreating further into the country after seeing for himself what lay in the gutters between the frames he otherwise filled with life, his every secret erased and blended with grey-wash til the idea of some other reality’s Palmiotti being the one sketching out divinity encompassed every joy and every sorrow he himself might ever experience on his independent road.
What a pair of jokers, thinks the girl Magda to herself of that Peter and Richard from across the way. Her father Piotr exasperated by increasing illusions from within and without, his angry superiors growing angrier still by the progress lacked, he suspected it might be necessary to flee the compound before revelation unfurls reality entirely, his willingness to trust Reickhardt a worthwhile risk if it meant his daughter finally able to see starlight with her own eyes, and in a world sparred the megalomania of its Powers That Be. Why couldn’t the other Palmiotti across space and time free them in a story? His girl insists it be as simple as that, and though he loves her with all his soul he begins to worry if she herself may in fact be losing her mind about the mechanized phenomena and its whispers, its dazzling array of hopes and fearsome possibilities alike too much for even the most emphatic mind to decompress. Good lord he thinks to himself almost nightly now, if only reality could be drops of India ink, drops of Doctor Martins watercolors, and not the drops of blood and sweat and tears drowning every ambition before it might begin.
How would I write such a thing asked the other Caldwell to the other Palmiotti in that other meeting of space and time, this melodrama of a father and his daughter and their activist friend all hoping to escape the powers confining them for arcane research and development, when the powers confining them are my words and your images? Who’d ever believe such a thing? The other Palmiotti responds, let’s create a different story, a new work of fiction for my avatar and proxy called RETRO, as he’s already lived a thousand tales outside of pen and paper, then only he might know how to break the fourth wall so that my other characters at long, long last live free. When retro is finished after all, there will be no more past to dwell within, only the future undrawn and unwritten.
And so, as that future undrawn and unwritten comes as revelation exploding forth from the mechanized phenomena originating itself at chapter’s end, the false witnesses gathered faced with the abyss at long last gazing back, that Piotr and his daughter Magda and their erstwhile friend Reickhardt make haste and escape in the void. Their futures untold by Peter and Richard, and in that silence do they find peace.