In 2028, Wesley Williams - a 43-year-old failed YouTuber who makes videos about forgotten toys and defunct media - discovers a mysterious puzzle cube in the clearance section of one of America's last standing toy stores. The cube is part of an unreleased toy line from a barely-remembered 1982 cartoon called "Star School 2028." Initial research suggests the show only aired for six weeks in an awful time slot, about kids at a space academy befriending a sentient cube named ELLIS.
Wesley's search for information leads him to Novak's Analog Archive, one of the last true video stores in America. Its owner, the enigmatic Mr. Novak, operates from a converted Victorian house and maintains a restricted section in the building's root cellar containing what he calls "analog-only" content - recordings that actively resist digital conversion. Novak, a former Library of Congress film preservationist who mysteriously quit in '79, treats these tapes like sacred texts. Star School 2028 is among these "analog-only" shows, and Novak seems to have been waiting decades for someone to ask about it.
The truth behind ELLIS and Star School 2028 traces back to Dr. Klaus Spielmann, a German toymaker brought to America through Operation Paperclip. Under the cover of industrial design and child psychology expertise, Spielmann was actually a practitioner of ancient Germanic paganism and Babylonian mysticism who saw an opportunity in Reagan-era America's consumer culture. He designed ELLIS (named after the Babylonian god El/Saturn) and its accompanying show as part of a mass ritual to undermine Christian dominance in American culture and open children's minds to Gnostic truth about reality. ELLIS serves as a Loc-Nar like device transporting into other timelines to show its user deeper truths.
ELLIS speaks to Wesley, explaining it is a Chronolith- an item, one of many, distributed across the world that allows access to the multiverse, as it is a fetish of an ‘unknown God to man’.
When Wesley begins solving different patterns on the cube, he experiences alternate timeline versions of the 1980s:
"Basilisk" - Edward Furlong being systematically destroyed by future AI, in the style of Roko’s Basilisk, for committing ‘anti-AI propaganda’ by creating Terminator
" Another Castle" - Working-class plumbers trapped in pursuit of bourgeoise princess who has been kidnapped for sex trafficking face moral dilemmas.
" - Michael Jackson's transformation into a robot to pursue eternal life has consequences.
"The Elves" - A scientist who formerly experimented with DMT creates a portal to the world he saw under the influence of the drug, and it allows fictional characters to cross over into our world, creating a Back to the Future/Gremlins crossover
"Ooze City Nights" - Street kids in Miami mutated by an attempt to create evolutionary cocaine into reptile people, a TMNT spoof
"Uncanny Valley" - A corporate-created holographic metal band accidentally accessing real darkness
"The Cull" - The Challenger disaster as an intentional culling
"The Sleepless Six" - A group of LA therapy patients sharing impossible nightmares about a burned figure
“All The Time in the World” - wherein a nuclear cold war is averted by a timeline switch
Each story Wesley uncovers reveals another aspect of how the 1980s shaped our reality, with ELLIS serving as both guide and warning.