Despite this, there is a machine on the Moon. Several. They all used to be down here. They are there because, centuries ago, people told each other romantic tales about the Moon. She was a goddess, who looked down on us. When full, she caused werewolves to change from humans into animals. Even then, humans were quite good at doublethink; the Moon was clearly a big silver disc, but, at the same time, she was a goddess.

Slowly those tales changed. Now the Moon was another world, and by harnessing the power of swans we could fly there in a chariot. Then (Jules Verne suggested) we could get there in a hollowed-out cylinder fired by a giant gun, located in Florida. Finally, in the 1960s, we found the right kind of swan (liquid oxygen and hydrogen) and the right kind of chariot (several million tons of metal) and we flew to the Moon. In a hollowed-out cylinder, launched from Florida. It wasn't exactly a gun. Well, actually it was in a basic physical sense; the rocket was the gun and it went along for the ride, firing burnt fuel in place of a bullet.

If we'd not told ourselves stories about the Moon, there would have been no point in going there at all. An interesting view, maybe ... but we 'knew' about the view only because we had told ourselves scientific stories about images sent back by space probes. Why did we go? Because we'd been telling ourselves that we would, one day, for several hundred years. Because we'd made it inevitable and introduced it into the 'future story' of a great many people. Because it satisfied our curiosity, and because the Moon was waiting. The Moon was a story waiting to be finished ('First human lands on the Moon!'), and we went there because the story demanded it.

When Mind evolved on Earth, a kind of narrativium evolved alongside it. Unlike the Discworld variety of narrativium, which on the Disc is just as real as iron or copper or praseodymium, our variety is purely mental. It is an imperative, but the imperative has not been reified into a thing.

However, we have the sort of mind that respond to imperatives, and to many other non-things.

And so it feels to us as if our universe runs on narrativium.