N16 was published 5 months before The Raw Shark Texts, making it the oldest negative to be recovered so far.

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Ten Tickets was published as part of the Light Transports: A Couple of Stops anthology from Route. These books were given away free to passangers on trains in Yorkshire, UK on a single day in 2006, and never intended for reprint or resale.

N16 was discovered by readers in 2023, after all three Light Transports books were rereleased as ebooks.  

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N16 appears as part of the short story Ten Tickets, and is text number 6 within that story. It was published in Octobober 2006 (10/06).

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Letter 175

Dear Eric,

Today was a strange day. It’s difficult for me to separate the inside from the outside, what I think from what I know. Sometimes it’s like that. I have dark areas in my mind, injuries and holes where I can't see the bottom, no matter how hard I try. The holes are everywhere and when I think about them, I can’t stop. Some holes are dark wells containing only echoes, while others have dark water in their depths. Inside them I can see a distant full moon, and the silhouette of a person looking back at me. The shape terrifies me. Is it me down there? Is it you? Maybe it's nobody. The view becomes a reflection and…something more, something else. Something I knew and maybe lost, or maybe not. I know this doesn’t make sense, but sometimes the strangest things are important. It’s as if the labels have fallen off, and things have been put back in the wrong places. I write what seems important, and even when I read it back, it means nothing, but I leave it as it is because what do I know anyway? Don’t lose faith in me, Eric.

Where is everything going? I wrote so many things that aren’t here anymore. Things are lost, and that’s life, but…but. Last night, I dreamt there were five red cabinets. Four were full and I locked them up somewhere. Was it a dream, or the last wreckage of a sunken memory? You know what I mean. Inside and out. Object and reflection. Front and back. Positive and negative. I think I am making things more confusing, rather than clarifying them. I'm going to stop writing now.

Regret and hope,

Eric

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Negative 8 is included in the Brazillian edition of The Raw Shark Texts.

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The Hypsochronidae, more commonly known as the ‘Shifted Salmon’ or ‘Doppler Fish’, is a fairly common, medium-sized sentapiscis.

Adults average at about three notional lumins in length, although larger individuals are occasionally observed. Rather than the size of any one individual however, it is the sheer number of shifted salmon observable during the migration season that mark this animal out for special attention.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, thousands of shifted salmon made their way from the deep oceans of the collective unconscious to breed in the bright streams of debate and human interaction which occured at large conventions/public events around the world. In North America, tens of thousands of shifted salmon were traditionally drawn together to breed in the near constant news commentary and social speculation of Superbowl weekend. UK migrations were often more sporadic, occurring most often around long-running news stories or political scandal during the summer months.

In a dramatic evolution of their behaviour, the early twenty-first century has seen breeding groups of hypsochronidae relocate into the social media space in large numbers, with almost perpetual migrations leading to a dramatic population spike.

Hypsochronidae characteristics: The Shifted salmon’s common name comes from the alternate stripes of redshift and blueshift doppler-logic which line its body as camouflage. The shifted salmon’s redshift stripes are known to cause a strong sense of déjà vu, while the blueshift stripes can bring about acute future anxiety. A ‘flash’ of both stripes at once as the animal swims can therefore be understandably very disorientating and in large shoals the effect can be overwhelming for an observer for several hours after an encounter. Because of this pseudo-temporal effect, there has been suggestion that the shifted salmon actual exists briefly in the past and future as well as the present, but there has never been any evidence for this. There has also been speculation on the fringes of scientific study that the shifted salmon is a distant relative of the Einsteinian Ticking Remora, although as this fish is so rare no real study into this proposition has been achieved.

Negative 26 (43/100)

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N11 is included in the hebrew translation of The Raw Shark Texts. It appears at the start of chapter 18.

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Negative 28 appeared in the Italian edition of The Raw Shark Texts. It adds two additional pages to the end of chapter 27.  

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