We Descend

By Billy Bly

Work on We Descend began in 1984, when five words came unbidden into my mind: “If this document is authentic…” I had no idea what the phrase signified: Who’s saying this? What document? Why wouldn’t it be authentic? How would it be authenticated? By what authority? How would that authority be established? Where did the document come from in the first place? As I pondered these questions, a clutch of fragmentary writings began to appear under my hands — via the standard tech at the time: fountain pen, notebook paper, clipboard.

Almost from the beginning it was clear that each tale bore a double significance: it told a story, but it also *had* a story, the account of how its author came to write it. Further, their transmission formed yet another narrative: as a group they seem to have their provenance in some personal collection of texts that was passed on, lost, found again, added to, broken up and scattered, all but destroyed, then miraculously pulled together once more. Eventually, what came to be called We Descend took the shape of an archive of archives, an anthology of writings by numerous authors, gathered, regathered, and repeatedly reorganized, passing through the hands of many generations of authors and curators. The earliest known such curator was a scribe named Egderus, hence the subtitle: Archives Pertaining to Egderus Scriptor.

The fragments generated by that original five-word phrase were eventually transferred from paper to a desktop Macintosh using Storyspace, an early hypertext authoring environment. Eventually, Volume One of We Descend reached publication in 1997 as a standalone computer application, distributed on floppy disk by Eastgate Systems. Twenty years later (in the wake of at least three revolutions in digital tech), Volume Two appeared here in The New River, built in HTML & CSS for reading on any internet device.