Listing to Port

1. Queen Victoria was largely absent from public life for years after the death of Prince Albert. The public were given to believe that this was due to unbearable grief; however, in truth this was only the initial cause of her absence. In fact, she was engaged in a titanic secret struggle for the future of London. After Albert died, the Queen made certain consultations with dubious magicians, leading to a midnight ceremony in the gardens of Buckingham Palace at which they attempted to talk to Albert’s shade with the help of John Dee’s scrying-glass. The ritual went disastrously wrong, raising something from the deep that should never have been wakened. Some of the survivors claimed that it had Albert’s face; but it is certain that it was not Albert. For the next thirteen years, Victoria and her inner circle fought the beast, which was intent on making a nest in central London, eventually defeating it in an epic battle in Regent’s Park which was successfully passed off as a firework display.
2. Greta Garbo did not actually retire from acting at the age of 36. In fact, she was replaced by a robotic replica from the future in 1940, the film Ninotchka having become a quasi-religious obsession in the Patagonian robot cultures of the 3970s. Following this replacement, the real Garbo made a further fifty-seven films in the future before her eventual death at the age of 118. The robotic Garbo tried its hand at acting but proved to be an imperfect copy; it executed its emergency retirement routine and spent a significant proportion of the following years on standby mode in a cupboard. Interestingly, Garbo’s future grave site has become temporally dislocated and tends to wander through time between her original birth date and 4450 or so. Interested hikers near Ushuaia should keep on the lookout for a large and mysterious cube.
3. Another victim of body-swapping was Bobby Fischer, the American chess champion. During a particularly inspired game in 1973, Fischer’s pieces were infested by the Zugzwang collective, a team of sixteen floating spirits who had taken to defining their hierarchy in chess terms. The queen of the Zugzwang collective, angry at being sacrificed, executed a bellybutton-level essence swap with both players, essentially splitting herself in two. Fischer’s body was rather inexpertly controlled by half of the Zugzwang queen for the rest of its life. The whereabouts of his mind is currently unknown.
4. It may seem odd to suggest that Kanye West has a reclusive secret life, as he is not known for being exceptionally reclusive. However, this is because at least sixteen clones of West have been made. Each one spends ten months of the year in strict seclusion, before telepathically communicating with the others for an update on the outside world and spending the next two months as (part of) West’s public face. What they are doing in their ten-month sabbaticals is unclear, but I’m sure the world will find out eventually.