The earliest known encounter with the Dust Men appears to have been that of Joseph Logomere, who reports seeing a tall, translucent figure step through his ship’s bulkhead while returning from the Hermes Cluster. Shortly afterwards Xelno Valcosa describes a dozen cloudy, child-sized apparitions scurrying across the grounds of her estate; within months the first mass sighting occurs at the christening of an expansion of the First Nova Generator.

Initially dismissed as Fangalexia-induced delusion, these sightings gave rise to some alarm as reports of immaterial, ambiguously-shaped visitors spread across Viridian space. The Chemists’ Guild maintained they were a symptom of Mind Plague and increased dosages of Fangalexia for the afflicted; Parliamentary Chairman Mulcifer Sanguinate claimed they were part of an alien conspiracy to undermine human hegemony in the sector and ordered another cabinet purge; Elgani Bariarch declared them another product of decadent multiculturalism and published a 700-stanza epic poem calling for a return to traditional values, cultural purity and ritual masturbation.

When the Viridian Census reported a third of Byforalla’s population hallucinatory, a formal investigation was launched. The report found no discernible pattern to the forms the phantasms took or to the activities they mimicked, confirmed their attraction to human population centers, and determined that the Dust Men in the vicinity of the Third Nova Generator were not attracted to its warmth as previously thought, but were in fact emerging from its central reactor.

What role the report played in the generator’s subsequent destruction is impossible to say, although we should note that those responsible couldn’t have known their actions would render the Dust Men corporeal, any more than they could have known of the existence of the Nova Entity. History must judge them more delicately in this light.

—Recorder 3000-21