Real geography, invented people, and frameworks written to actually get built. Here is the whole thing, plainly, so nobody has to guess.
The geography is real — the rivers, the counties, the off-ramps, the flood maps, the interstates that wash out. The people are not: 875+ characters across 19 regions, and not one of them is a real person. The labs — the interactive science rooms, which live at Opathorlokan University, a fictional campus on this same network — make claims you can go check, and those claims are cited. And where something sounds wild, it is extrapolation — a real mechanism pushed further than anyone has built it yet, not invention.
That last part is the point of the whole site. The frameworks in here are written to be implementable. Not gestures at the future — things somebody could pick up and run.
Fiction on real ground. The places are real and you can drive to them. The people, the organizations, the broadcasts and the coordination network are invented — including the FVC, the regions’ hubs, and every name attached to them.
The labs live here, at opathorlokanuniversity.net — a fictional campus teaching real, cited science. A lab is a hands-on science room you open in your browser and play with. They work, the sources are published papers and federal data, and the claims are checked before a lab ships. The faculty are characters — several are honoring transforms, a real researcher’s name altered by a letter or two, with the real person credited on that lab’s page.
These are real and there is no fiction in them. They are built by Travis Jenkins, EIT — a Transportation Hydraulic Specialist at TDOT — on personal time, and they read live from federal sources. They are preliminary screening tools. The authoritative federal portal always wins.
Real. Not part of the story at all. A handful of pages here are working reference documents — real phone numbers, real programs, real organizations. They are meant to be used, printed, and handed to somebody. Nothing on them is invented. See the box below.
Plenty in here sounds too big to be true. A national coordination layer. A DJ network nobody licensed. A university with twenty-three colleges. Those are stories.
But the mechanisms under them are not made up, and that distinction is the one worth holding onto. When a page describes how something would work, it is built on a real gap, real data, and a real process — pushed further than anybody has actually taken it. That is a different thing from a number pulled out of the air, and this site tries very hard never to do the second one.
A few pages on this site are not stories. They are reference documents with real numbers on them, and they are meant to be copied, printed, and passed along — no permission needed.
988 — Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, call or text, 24/7 in the US.
1-800-662-4357 — SAMHSA National Helpline, free and confidential, 24/7.
When You Can’t Speak → collects more of them — domestic violence, assault, and crisis lines, laid out so a page can be handed to someone who needs it. The Clink Recovery Network → carries recovery resources.
Those numbers are real. Nothing about them is part of the fiction.
One person. Travis Jenkins — User Zero — a solo builder and father who went back to school at thirty-eight, taught himself calculus in the six weeks before walking into Calculus II, graduated at forty-two, and has six years of engineering experience. He is an EIT. He does not hold a Professional Engineer license, and no character in this universe who does is a real person.
Much of it was written on a phone. If you see something wrong — a broken bit, a bad number, a claim that doesn’t hold — say so, and it gets fixed and you get the credit.
Fiction on real ground, with the receipts kept where you can find them. Browse everything →