Refineries + Revelations

“Timebombs are time machines. They release the future into the streets.”

Kay Madère is a woman without a face, floating through a world stuck on the verge of its own future. Her father, Blue, died in a refinery accident when she was a child. Once grown, she traded oblivion in Louisiana for nuclear-tinged war in the US Southwest. After her mother Catherine died from cancer, Kay came home to her brother, Blake, and the family’s rescued android, Million.

Kay has a lot of bad feelings about her brother. Represented by a jittering :(, Blake reminds Kay of her grandfather and her mother in the worst ways—as though impulsive, manipulative ghosts were steering Blake’s future, clashing with Kay’s own failings along the way.

But Blake is the one who’s been tying up their mother’s loose ends. Catherine had been working on some sort of mysterious research project for a mysterious client, and several mysterious parties are quite keen to possess the data. Blake’s gone missing.

Norco, developed by Geography of Robots and published by Raw Fury, is a deeply weird point-and-click adventure game. Puzzles and slightly psychedelic combat punctuate a dreamy, dreadful meander through oil-sick suburbs. Much of the confusion, joy, and dissonance that makes for a good cosmic mystery comes from this exploration. Checking a pile of opened mail reveals a notice from Shield Oil, claiming that their activities pose no health risks to the nearby residents. The television displays a disorienting spread of Catherine’s memories split across the channels. Kay remembers the three times her house flooded, and afterward is overcome by the certainty of a fourth, foretelling the destruction of the entire region. Pixel art has this way of familiarizing the future by painting it retro, of showing that Kay knows the shadows so well she can see where they grade.

Information from this exploration feeds into the mindmap, a representation of Kay’s inner thoughts. In this menu, Kay can remember people, think about the past, and make new connections.

One of the reasons I like cosmic mysteries is that they echo the way the real world feels to me. I move through my own small part of the world, expanding it whenever I can, seeing more than I can touch, constantly brushing up against the socioeconomic, political, and cultural apparatuses that shape my experience.

 In fiction, the cosmic sometimes serves a stand-in, an expression of those forces. But Norco isn’t shy. Cosmic forces aren’t a stand-in—they’re the direct consequence of economic, social, and climate devastation in this Louisiana suburb. Spoilers below.

Kay’s search for her brother takes her into the heart of Shield Oil’s operations in Louisiana, where the bionic equipment tells her where she’s headed.

Prophecy is as prevalent as the refinery lights. Everyone in Norco, from the ditch man to the regional head of Shield Oil, seems to be in the business of telling Kay her future. Kay isn’t so much an easy read as she is the statistically likely victim of capitalism-driven community erosion and climate destruction. Most who foretell Kay’s future have the means and motive to create a future to suit themselves, one that will determine (or destroy) hers. If you’re powerful enough, material influence becomes cosmic certainty.

Kay makes it clear she doesn’t want her future to happen here. Shield Oil and the cult (oh, there’s also a cult) similarly think they need to leave to seek their futures—not just Norco, but Earth entirely. The cult certainly represents that space-bro ideal of abandoning Earth to proliferate among the unsullied stars, driven by the impulse to build a niche subculture to find meaning instead of challenging the systemic structures that caused your alienation in the first place. But they remind me, more sympathetically, of younger generations from stagnant areas who need to leave home if they want any chance at prosperity.

Shield employed Kay’s father, and the work killed him. Norco, the suburb, probably wouldn’t exist without Shield Oil. Norco is now rotting because of Shield, and will, one day, be destroyed by a flood. Shield would create and destroy countless Norcos in order to transition to a space-based extractive industry.

The game periodically switches to the perspective of Catherine, shortly before her death. Catherine wishes to pass her memories on to her survivors, but not her medical debt from her cancer treatments. In her first flashback, she visits a neural versioning clinic where she syncs her headdrive, choosing which memories to keep, and which to die with her. Then she takes a gig on QuackJob, a freaky gig app that pays for jobs in its own QuackCoin. (Catherine cannot afford to pay attention to red flags.)

The app pairs her with a man named Dallas and sends them to a commercial warehouse where they encounter this thing.

“A system of signals. Wireless communication of locusts and frogs. Cypress roots. Disease vectors. Internet of flesh. Biomimicry. Internet of internet. Radio towers.”

That’s Superduck. Superduck knows that Catherine saw an unidentifiable flying orb out on the waterways. Superduck wants to eat it to obtain the distilled knowledge of the universe. Superduck knows Catherine is the orb’s favorite and wants Catherine to bring the orb to it.

Superduck pays Catherine 0.16 QuackCoin for this meeting/cosmic revelation, which I think comes out to like fifty bucks. (So… several hundred cosmic revelations equal Catherine’s medical debt.) Catherine quickly spends this on the crosstown rideshares needed to complete her task. Typical gig—doesn’t matter if the app’s run by a company trying to dodge regulations and labor protections, or a Cancer Alley techno-folk specter.

At this point in the game, I started to think of the crows outside Kay’s house in the present, the other forms of biological and technological life following her as she searches for Blake. I never doubted Kay was being surveilled, but I never would have guessed there were so many eyes.

A lot of people want to eat this orb, metaphorically or literally. Laura, regional head of Shield Oil, thinks the orb will help the company develop an AI that will identify areas for mineral extraction in space, so that Shield can stop being an oil company but keep the profits coming. Laura’s father, the head of Claire Bionic—which provides Shield with androids and other bionic equipment—wants it too.

In Catherine’s time, the orb is in the possession of John, the Christian influencer-slash-prophet who leads the aforementioned cult in an abandoned mall populated by the prospectless men of the Norco community. He makes his aspirants solve a series of Pinterest-spiritual AR puzzles about his somewhat sad but ultimately unsympathetic neo-fascist biography. He believes that drinking the contents of the orb will allow him to travel outside the range of cell towers and Earth’s electromagnetic field and speak with God’s children in space.

(There’s also an apostate in a ditch called Pawpaw who thinks there’s a Da Vinci Code situation going on with Catherine’s bloodline.)

While Catherine doesn’t really go for this specific offshoot of Christianity, it is true that she came back to her faith once her cancer took hold (she hid a card reader used to unlock a secret basement room inside a lawn statue of the Virgin Mary).

In short, everyone who wants the orb represents some kind of economic or social influence at work in Norco. How does a cosmic horror like Superduck fit in?

Catherine and her long-time friend (or more?) Duck, both having developed cancer, had their memories saved at the same cut-rate, unlicensed neural versioning clinic. At the time, Duck wanted his ideas preserved: the intermingling of environmental pollution and technology and the will of things beyond human grasp. In Duck’s case, this affordable option malfunctioned so badly that a “viral fork” of his consciousness manifested all these ideas into reality.

In trying to preserve what he thought was the most important part of himself, Duck inadvertently created an eldritch monster.

‘Cosmic’ implies the incomprehensible. Something beyond humanity, something too complicated and vast for a single mind to grasp. Superduck was created from a human mind’s attempt to make sense of the forces that shaped his life. But Duck chose those thoughts and chose not to include others. Superduck was created from something less than the entirety of a human mind. What cosmic horrors might grow from any mind, if thoughts and memories were separated from the context of a whole human experience?

While Duck’s mind is on the future, Catherine’s is on the past. She works for Superduck so she won’t leave her debts behind for her children. She’s too worn down to think much about how the orb could give her the power to make her own future, even though it likes her best. She hands it over, giving away her possibilities, hoping to earn enough money to pay off a debt she had no choice but to incur—a situation many other residents of Norco surely share, minus an orb or a bird.

In working alongside Superduck veteran Dallas, Catherine asks Dallas why he keeps doing weird stuff for a weird entity. His family has moved in with him and he needs to support them, but also, he’s been interacting with Superduck for so long that he’s resigned to it. This is what he does. This constant exposure to the cosmic has become a numbing sort of normal. Everyday pollution. It can’t be escaped.

By the time Kay catches up to Superduck and the orb, Superduck is bleeding radiation into the bayou, a nightmare of a Superfund site. Even though Superduck was born, in part, from Duck’s musings about Shield’s long-term effects on the area, Superduck’s legacy is a poisonous mess left behind for others to clean up, die to, or escape, no better than Shield.

Once Kay knows where Blake is, her search spirals into enough apocalypto-baroque delirium to make a Shin Megami Tensei game blush. It’s the player’s choice what happens to Kay and Blake at the end, but I chose to put Kay and Blake right back where they started—a home waiting for the flood. They will live, they will leave, they will lose everything that reminds them of home, but they will know where the other is.

There are many beautiful, heavy sequences in Norco that I didn’t quite get to explore here within the framework of the Cosmic Mystery Club (particularly the ghost bayou dives, which reminded me so fondly of Sunless Sea). Have you played Norco? Share your favorite cosmic moments in the comments below.

NEXT MONTH

Thank you, everyone, for your continued curiosity in this weird genre experiment. If you haven’t already, please subscribe, and if someone you know also loves strange mysteries, please let them know they’re very welcome here at the Cosmic Mystery Club.

Next month the Cosmic Mystery Club is going on a field trip to Meow Wolf’s immersive art installation, House of Eternal Return. This is a return trip (ha), and I’m eager to revisit the house now that I have a little more (secondhand) experience investigating the cosmic. See you then.