X-imaging was accidentally discovered in 5292 by Aron Entwait, a sub-Zeiral technician working in the bowels of the Vermailian science–industrial complex. Assigned to the development of an unremarkable and likely redundant military targeting system, Entwait had been dutifully illuminating enemy organs for long-distance surgical strikes when a serendipitous sensor miscalibration caused the battlefield to vanish entirely from the display, replaced by a series of gentle, rolling hills.

Repeated trials achieved similar results: subjects viewed through the new process appeared to change, sometimes dramatically. Landscapes shifted; cities grew, shrank, and vanished entirely into vast and alien forests; stars and planets changed their composition, their orbits, disappeared from view. No obvious pattern among the altered images presented itself; nor was it clear how the process itself actually worked.

Entwait’s employers were markedly uninterested in these questions and terminated him for deviating from the specifications of his grant. Entwait, however, had already become obsessed with X-imaging, and would devote the next decade to increasingly arcane studies of the process: a survey of an asteroid field only he and his equipment could see; a project to calculate exactly how much of the galaxy appeared to be misplaced or nonexistent; an X-imaged safari through downtown Orsinder, where Entwait observed a procession of horned, leathery giants quietly trundling across an invisible savannah.

In 5303, Entwait presented his findings at the Science Confidence Exhibition:

• X-imaging, he maintained, does not merely capture an altered image of our own reality; rather, it captures an image of another reality altogether;
• This reality is not merely an alternate reality but is, in fact, the authentic reality, the one we inhabit being a warped copy or fabrication;
• This real reality has been attempting to contact us for millennia through countless means (meditation, psychotropic fungi, etc.), X-imaging being only the most recent.

Before Entwait could complete his presentation—he’d planned to conclude with a demonstration that would prove to his audience’s satisfaction that neither he nor they existed—he was jeered from the stage, a development he would eventually credit to false reality itself acting to prevent its exposure. He would become convinced of this thesis once his former employers claimed X-imaging as their intellectual property, beginning a protracted legal battle that would leave him penniless and dying of gillrot in a Miakovan slum, mildly comforted by the possibility that in a truer universe, his story had ended better.

Today X-imaging research remains tied up in dozens of court hearings and legal proceedings. The scientific mainstream has largely dismissed it as a curiosity, while most critics frown on its use in the visual arts, considering the questioning of consensus reality passé. The technique remains popular among a handful of hobbyists, often seen scanning the altered night sky or wandering the ruins of Orsinder listening for the distant thunder of ghostly hooves.

—Recorder 3000-21