Endless Ocean

A slab of pykrete

Pyrocumulonimbus cloud formed by the firestorm following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima , 1945. Nuclear winter effects are triggered by at least a hundred such city firestorms.

Endless Ocean has no enemies, no fail state, and no score. A manta ray glides past. A whale appears in the deep distance and keeps swimming. Players have reported sitting still underwater for twenty minutes, just watching.

At the Battle of Talas in 751 AD, Tang China lost to an Abbasid army — and among the Chinese prisoners were papermakers. Within 50 years, Baghdad had its first paper mill. Rome had none for another 400 years.

Jan Morris filed the dispatch announcing Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's 1953 Everest summit for The Times of London — then, twenty years later, completed her transition, and wrote 'Conundrum,' one of the most celebrated memoirs of the twentieth century.

Acker lifted pages of Dickens verbatim, inserted orgies and gang rapes, and called it literary theory. Arrested for obscenity in the UK in 1984; the charges were dropped.

After Sand Creek, soldiers cut genitalia from Cheyenne and Arapaho corpses and stretched them over saddle horns. Then they brought the trophies to Denver's Apollo Theater and displayed them between acts to applause.

Pykrete — 14% sawdust locked in ice — stopped bullets in tests and barely melted. Project Habbakuk planned a 2-million-ton aircraft carrier made of it; a scale model was demonstrated to Churchill in a Quebec hotel bathtub.

Scipio Africanus drilled his legions to open silent lanes in their formation; Hannibal's war elephants charged straight through and stampeded the Carthaginian flanks. The man who nearly destroyed Rome watched his own beasts end him.

Robert Hanssen attended Mass every morning, carried a rosary, and sold the FBI's deepest secrets to Moscow for 22 years. He betrayed at least three Soviet double agents who were subsequently executed.

Carl Sagan and four co-authors published calculations in 1983 showing that even a 'limited' nuclear exchange of 100 warheads could throw enough soot into the stratosphere to drop global temperatures by 35°C — killing more people than the bombs.