 
Fenworld: a novel

by S. Michael Choi

Published at Smashwords.com

Copyright S. Michael Choi, 2014.

The moral right of the author to be accredited this work is asserted.

for 822
I. FENWORLD

31 Auguste 2471

The glaciers which have covered the world for hundreds of years retreat, and the earth is now revealed to be largely flatland, wet swampy terrain, endless swamps, fens out of which methane rises, from the peat, from the decayed organic matter, to power rusty but functional walker mecha. Humanity, or what we know of it, is divided into clans: Elephant, Lion, Wolf, Bear, etc., which engages in low-level agriculture, scavenging, and hit/run raids against other clans. We follow the Cave Wolf Clan as two children are growing up, amidst autumnal sunlight and the steaming earth, out of which every year's retreating glaciers reveals more and more useful scrap to be collected, recycled, and reused into freeboot settlements, and the first rise of strongmen wishing to control the physical territory of the earth. Meanwhile, the stars sparkle at night, a reminder of where man might head, if he is able to take advantage of this reprieve from extinction.

As with the genres of "elf-worlds"/fantasy, etc., the central questions remain the same. Is it proper to forcibly recruit people into an army of righteousness against brigands or warlords? Should a clan fight against overwhelming odds or simply accept some primitive master as their leader? What technologies does New Earth use?

The obvious and most appealing feature of New Earth is its walker mecha, which are stilt-legged robots 30m tall onto which a crew might pilot or sprawl upon, useful for tending methane fields/collectors. These became platforms for war when necessary, where scrapped together lasers and missile pods welded on allow ragtag armies to duel across irregular terrain. Relatively dry patches of plain or the still cracking-apart ice sheets are still dominated by tracked or half-tracked or even wheeled vehicles or respectively the ice sledges and ekranoplans that dominated arctic-age warfare.

Clan Cave Wolf reveals itself to be a bright, optimistic, open and accepting group, which accounts for its relative strength versus the straggler-bands of 40-50 it frequently meets/trades/cooperates with. But faced with an overwhelming steam-roller enemy of ice raiders, it cooperates with Clan Black Puma, which has an entirely different philosophy of targeted assassinations and concealed operations. Does Cave Wolf risk losing itself by adopting methods of poisoning and torture to win the war against the ice raiders? That is Fenworld, Episode One!

FENWORLD ep. 1: Boy (Bey) and Girl (Gee) are out scavenging when they are attacked by a shinsenkami, an underworld spirit taking the form of mechanical metallic parts compromising some kind of spiderlike beast. Shrieking horribly and displaying fearsome weaponry, the creature nearly overcomes B and G, who barely escape with their lives. Thereafter, B rapes his childhood friend G. Or no wait, he doesn't. That is a stupid idea. We are writing serious science fiction here, get back on topic. A third of women will raped in their lives, and what are you doing about it? Following such attacks, female personalities tend to change radically. Whereas she was once a happy-go-lucky girl who was interested in pretty things, she now becomes hostile, cynical, and sarcastic. In fact, she decides to leave her pathetic existence as part of a bunch of weak and diseased, smelly and poor scavengers and move to... New York City!

FENWORLD ep. 2: G discovers that her sultry sex appeal is highly valuable in NYC, where a decadent cabaret culture has revived after the departure of the glaciers. No more sad meals of reindeer and pemmican in tundra settings, half-torn apart clothes of discarded animal skins. Several colorful cocktail drinks are prominently shown, after which a brief close-up of the bottle label reveals this episode's sponsor. G tries cocaine and benzopaine and acid and discovers she is quite keen on the coke. Wearing a bunny costume, she "entertains" rich businessmen and begins to ascend in NYC society. She gains a reputation as a man-eater, a woman who can convince otherwise affable and settled family men into abandoning it all.

FENWORLD, ep. 3: In this episode, we discover that the Russians, long rumored extinct, have survived the great glaciation in deep underground shelters powered by "thousand-year" crude fission reactors. For a brief moment, it appears as if the Russians are going to take-over the world, but all remaining mercenary and scavenger bands, terrified by rumors of pre-glacier weaponry, combine forces and rush the Russian underground settlements, many of which have not yet emerged. G continues her rise in society while B is still tending methane dumps.

FENWORLD, ep. 4: The network cancels FENWORLD due to parental complaints. They had thought they were getting a teenager's sci-fi cartoon and instead are dealing with all these weighty issues, what is going on. However, the animators, graduates of RISD and Cooper Union, decide to go out with a bang. G is shown being violently raped by NYC gangsters and she exacts her revenge with a bloody stiletto. Finally, B, who pathetically remained on the farm tending goats, marries a fat-bloated Chinese woman and raises a pathetic brood of ugly children. The last Sergeant Major of the US Army high on prescription painkillers eradicates this settlement in the name of freedom and justice, THE END.

FENWORLD was supposed to be so much. B and G, the naturally sympathetic protagonists, grow up as Clan Cave Wolf [CCW] itself extends its dominions across the new lands constantly exposed by the retreating glaciers. Cute but not too cute, dynamic but tempered by an understanding of cooperation, the youthful heroes fight off (1) the weird spirit creature composed of discarded metal artifacts from the pre-glacial age (bicycle wheel, sheets of corrugated zinc steel, etc.), then (2) settle into conventional warfare against Clan Ice Bear, [CIB] which first utilizes pulse-rifle snipers and then attempts a sledge-borne attack. In response, CCW devises tactics effective against each threat: first improvised flame-throwers and heavy machine guns welded to its agricultural walker-mecha tenders—the Aragons, then fully combat-specialized walkers, that is robotics that have been designed from the ground up for combat, fully enclosed pilot stations armored against 14.5mm, with twin gatling-guns and a laser-fuse-mod pulse cannon on the chin. Sound-direction trumpets and attack dogs complement a 4x4 grid of mortar barrages that eliminate CIB harassment, and the sledge-walker battle that finally consumes CIB also reveals that they have been pushed south by armored mammoths and ice-hover tanks of an unknown and even more powerful enemy (Clan Turtle). The methane-producing fields and peat bogs of CCW support a limited economy, but one based on cooperative self-rule rather than strong-man politics. CIB POWs becoming semi-indentured servants or even lovers of powerful CCW personalities opens up the Titus Andronicus scenario of prisoners eventually ruling the generals who captured them, and G's development into a woman naturally leads to fan-serviced adolescent crisis material.

OKAY. OKAY. FULL STOP. PERIOD. REWIND. [Sound effect of tape rewinding even though nobody uses magnetic tape anymore, the sound has outlasted the technology, ha.] Reader, you have my respect that you've actually gotten through a full 1100 words of that slash fanfic monstrosity. Beginnings are just very important things, but wow, you're still here even though this book has started in just about the most stupidest and inane way possible. You're a patient reader. You're a quiet introvert. But, you want things to get better and fast or you're putting down this thing. It's totally understandable.

Okay, what you've just read are merely the _notes_ for FENWORLD, the animated series, which I've preserved word for word because they're a record of a fiasco and amusing in that sense. The project, which has entered the annals of television history for being so laughably bad, went sour in so many ways because at the very end of episode I, channel IV brought in an Azalian expert who had a whole bunch of theory and privileged content and absolutely no idea of what was going on. Our production team and Mr. Azalia First had a huge power struggle over the direction of the series and the storyline, and of course, highly amusingly, if either we or him had just simply had full creative control, actually FENWORLD would have been quite good. It's that we were feuding constantly about how to do things and you can almost parse, sentence by sentence, who's in control one second and who's in control the next. The result is history, of course, Atlantica's first ever total unmitigated flop, 1.3 trillion Atlantic credits in one of the biggest roll-outs in history, and a viewership of, at the end, about 30,000 people around the world. FENWORLD was a fiasco; FENWORLD has now become the term for "total, extremely expensive flop," but decisions have been made at the top, we're going to be trying to relaunch FENWORLD again, but this time correctly, one show-runner, one final point of command, and you can say we've learned tremendously from our experiences. You can't blame us too hard: remember, we're recovering tapes from before the ice in an adhoc fashion—in 2063, everyone went to 2-D only B&W because an entire repository of the stuff was recovered from somewhere that used to be Denver and the material was misidentified as being the most futuristic stuff just before the Ice. In actuality, it was actually very early stuff from the first days of broadcasting, but the archeologists misidentified it completely. So like, in our experience, we're rediscovering media all over again but in the most anachronistic way possible—retro-futurism before the actual retro period; 2-D cinematic 'classics' before the 4X holographic output. Let me get you up to date on the basics though and then we'll get back into FENWORLDrelaunch, FENWr.

I am Bei. Today's date is 31 Auguste 2471, and the setting is the planet Earth, filled with a population of several hundred million human beings, the world having been covered in sheets of ice for approximately 220 years. We know that before the Ice there were a number of human empires, that civilization rose and fell a number of times but that towards the end there were quite a few independent and sovereign nations that had media empires, space flight, fission, etc. At the very end, the biggest and most powerful country was the Indonesian Caliphate with its capital at Djakarta, but feeling itself threatened by Brazil's near completion of its lunar mass driver, Djakarta went atomic some thirty or forty years before the ice caps met and Brazil precipitated that final blow by shooting a thousand tons of chaff into Low Earth Orbit and decreasing solar radiation by a more-or-less world ending 30%. It's only about forty years ago that enough chaff has sufficiently deorbited that the glaciers are once again in retreat. We've nearly become extinct ourselves, and we're certainly not out of the woods yet.

Although it's didactic or annoying, just to keep all facts in order, I'll point out that strictly speaking, the Brazilians aren't totally at fault. Apparently even before everything came down to the two coalitions Indonesia and Brazil, a lot of the last few regimes kept "escalating," shooting chaff into outer space to "prove" their seriousness in international disputes, and actually global cooling had been going on for some time before. Ironically, the immediate age preceding the space junk wars was actually highly peaceful—atomic weapons, obviously leading to situations of total human extinction, actually kept countries from escalating their arguments to too high an aggressive pitch. The nations invented mechanisms for resolving disputes—an International Court of Justice, a United Nations, a World Bank, etc. We don't have an absolute picture of how all these things worked—actually even today we don't all agree it's 2471 or that it was Indonesia that finally launched the thermonuclears, but evidence resurfaces every day that our view of history is more or less the correct one. Atlantica has kept its culture and technology because it held hotspots in Fireland (once, ironically, 'Iceland'), Yellowstone, and Hawaii. The Indonesians have and will always have their lava-strewn archipelago. Middle Kingdom claims they seized their archipelago after one of their client states killed a million of their citizens in a massacre of their southern capital. This issue is disputed, but I can't go on and on here about that ongoing legal and historical dispute. We know our country, Atlantica, is a continuation of a major high-technology civilization occupying what once used to be an entire continent and that it itself was a continuation of a prior civilization called Mu. I can get granular and granular and granular about what 300-strong group of people managed to survive where or the continuing and unending argument about which nationality or tribe or religious group is actually a sovereign nation and which is merely an "inclination" or "affinity," but, that's that, of course, you have the factual basics of the world in 2471. I am Bei.

74 years of age, I'm going in for medical treatment in a few weeks, and while modern medicine is one of the sciences that not only survived, but indeed thrived during Ice, of course there is no guarantee I'm going to survive the episode. I'm an old man. I'm writing my memoirs. The only reason I have memoirs to write is that G is indeed a real person. She's a national hero. She led Atlantic forces in the Battle of Paris Bas and fell at the conclusion of that siege. That's why the Azalian's attempt to "hyper-modern" her story by making her into some kind of sex assassin falls flat. Everyone knows. G was never a sex-killer. She's the hero of the III Corps, Atlantica's heavy assault division. She's a martyr to our society. "Hyper-modern" sex-killer rewrite just doesn't work. People are actually offended; FENWORLD was a flop. But at least one person knows the whole story, because I was her childhood friend, see? I knew her when she was six years old, or even younger, and we were both toddlers playing in the tundra swamps up north. If anyone is qualified to tell her story, it's me, so, I do so, without any special agenda or need to re-examine her life story. Girl hero of the armored corps, martyr of Paris Bas, and soon, the proper television drama lead actress for a story that spans decades of post-Ice history. This is a true story, of course, but let's get back to the central narratological idea: unity of perspective. Okay. Restart.

I need you to do something. I need you to put down this book, flip the cover closed, and walk away from it. No, I mean really. No, I mean really. Are you going to do it? Are you going to do it?

Why aren't you doing it?

Yes, yes, the problem. The problem of narratological unity. Each line is referring directly to the next line, and though I am directly asking you, you, yes you, to put down this book and walk away from it, you refuse to do so. You refuse to do so because my command is a little awkward. What does that mean? Is the author requesting the reader to abandon this book forever? See, I should be a little more complicated in my instructions. I've deliberately used a narratological trick to explain to you the chaos surrounding the original launch of FENWORLD: The Animated Series. There was no way for me to show to you the chaos that surrounded the launch of this media adventure unless you could see for yourself how competing personalities and artistic temperaments fought over a trillion credit television event unless you read it by yourself, one fiasco of a sentence after the next. The thing is though, by introducing you to the television show and the world surrounding it at the same time, things have become a little confused. I need to repeat, for clarity's sake, the world which I am describing. I am Bei. I am 74 years old, a fairly low level media operative in 31 Auguste 2471, on planet Earth, which is slowly recovering from a two hundred year period of glaciation. I am a citizen of the New Atlantis Confederation, which is an amalgamation of the remnants of Brazil and certain islands of geothermal activity that survived the Ice. My significant claim to fame is that I was childhood friends with G, who is our feminine culture's hero, commander and master of the III Armored Corps, heroine of the Battle of Paris Bas, and the subject of the upcoming television event FENWORLDr. R stands for "reboot" or "relaunch," because FENWORLD: Animated was an unmitigated fiasco.

If you have an electronic reader, I want you to switch it to verbal mode. The reason why is that I want you to get the full impact of the central narratological idea all at once. I don't want it contaminated by all the data that you've already read. On the other hand, if you're reading this on hemp stock or at a public terminal, then do it this way: go home, go to sleep, then come back. Fine? Okay. 3. 2. 1.

Central narratological idea: this is it. You are standing on the platform of one of Atlantica's mag-monorails awaiting the arrival of the 11:14 to Azal, when suddenly the plasma screen, 10m by 40m running a central length down the platform, springs to life. Suddenly, in intense, deep, passionate, absolute color, you see it: the autumn sky. Bigger than life. Perfect. Purple, orange, blue, clouds and magentas and oranges, the CLAUDE LORRAINE sky.

Who was he anyway? CLAUDE LORRAINE, the French painter of landscapes whose gigantic canvases captured the infinite majesty of the French countryside. Why did he endure where other equally famous painters are now known only through holographic copy? Perhaps because, well, your throat catches when you look at something so majestic, so overwhelming, so intense that it has to be that Claude Lorraine sky of perfect, competing, antagonistic, horrifying colors. Now against this gigantic immensity of autumnal umbers and grays, standing slightly offset to the right: the white walker mecha, a robot of 30m height, two walker legs, the cabin sporting hardpoints for sledge dragging and methane collection, decorated with decals of red and blue. Now you know where you are: 25th century Earth, to the background the two hundred meter tall glaciers retreating but still immense, still intimidating, and a tiniest spark in one crag that only to the informed signals the event that is to follow. In the foreground, bending over, well, myself, Bei, aged 11. Standing up, shading her eyes to the sun, G, culture hero of the world. What is this? Why is this series being announced in this fashion with the modernistic font scrolling across FENWORLD: the reboot. Why the billions of credits expended on advertising? Only because of course: the people want it. The people didn't want the Azalian retake, G as Nikita-type assassin. The people don't want to think of G as servicing quadrillionaires or on her hands and knees at a casino. They don't like that subversion. They want G at her famous moment: 12 years old, just about to be shot at by the Iceraider wielding a plasma bolt. Harassment fire from nomadic tribes who scavenge off the relics of ancient civilizations rather than invest the time to build a sustaining methane economy. Did anyone at the time even know the raiders were planning bigger and bigger raids? Were young preadolescents to know how to fight back against an adult sniper? I ran for cover, of course; I am Bei. But G unslinged an ancient .50 calibre Arctic Warfare magnum and fired back. She wrote her entire future history at that point: a child warrior and commando. Aren't boys supposed to be the ones who go off and defend their homeland? Why G, why a girl? One might say Gaia culture, the Gaia ethos, began at this point. It is the founding myth of all Atlantis.

So I've done it, right? You can reread that paragraph over and over again until it sinks in. It's the visual I'm concerned about, you know, that fantastic gigantic sky overwhelming all human characters us, damning us with its name, immeasurable, immense, disturbing. That's the image we're going to put on a thousand holoscreens in a thousand stations, on bus kiosks, on media rotation, the works. And the main point is, is that it could only happen because of one point of reference. We went nowhere with FENWORLD: Animated because that was a team effort, forces conflicting within, different aesthetic ideas and theories. But now you get it: G at 12, Bei at 11, and their fates written from that point on because G reaches for a gun and Bei runs away. The girl hero, the culture founder. Clan Cave Wolf's future leader sending .50 calibre shells at an Iceraider. She didn't even hit, but it was the resistance that sent the sniper scurrying. He didn't want to deal with a full response, he was just attempting to harass. Moreover, the orange sky, the palisade-like wall of ice: doesn't that capture it all about that fresh, clean, refreshed world of ours? Doesn't it remind you of your own childhood and the feeling of cleanliness and enthusiasm for this world? FENWORLD, FENWORLDr, coming soon out of Atlantica media headquarters beamed to the four corners of the world. We know it's propaganda of a kind, but it's the show everyone needed.

FENWORLD is going to be about the historical truth of G's rise. Her tough green-jacketed enthusiasm for the fight only developed after that first skirmish. 25Th century mecha juxtaposed with Third World conditions, the advanced technology of a walker robot towering in the sky but the people all beaten and half-starved because every free calorie has to be traded between either defense or personal consumption. The next episode we'll develop some sympathy for Clan Ice Bear as well, because of course as in truth, once we began fighting them we discovered they were a clan after all, practicing a rough sort of communal rule, and not inclined to outright cannibalism or massacre as opposed to the ruthless and authoritarian Turtle. Turtle in fact turned out to be a far more dangerous opponent as they had some kind of access to preglacial hovertanks (although highly limited in number and without any capability to be repaired after taking damage or a mobility kill). Whereas CCW uses its scrappy workshops to patch together a motley assortment of balloon-wheeled carts, walkers, and the occasional ground-effect ekranoplan or patched-together hot-air surveillance balloon. Our Fenworld rests on the improvisation of combat tactics in a world in which a glacier might suddenly retreat from a fully-stocked military base from pre-Ice, and the group with superior mobility rather than armor will suddenly acquire a 200cm heavy laser artillery point defense piece, parabolic arcing like only the ancients knew how to do. BANG! Within hours an entire methane/peat bog of a hundred acres goes up in smoke, and the lone-wolf bikers with chained tyres might have as much as a survival possibility as the smaller scavenger packs of orphans and raider-rejects from defeated clans or destroyed settlements. Post-apocalyptic fun in a believable scifi high tech/low tech society stocked with fresh faced heroine, oddly charismatic and highly visual characters and fan-propelled boats laser-firing against missile-equipped walkers.

You can tell I've been in media my adult life, I suppose. (If this were transcript and not novel, there'd be a notation for a sigh.) Rereading the preceding paragraph, I've done it again, I've transitioned from telling the story to selling it, I'm telling you how great our launch is going to be when after all, all you want are the details of G's rise from humble beginnings to the culture hero of our times. So I can do this. I know I can. I was with her from the start. But I don't know exactly how many details appeal to you and how much you want me to accelerate to get to the great campaigns, to Paris Bas. Even media stories and citizen journalists are competing to get unique angles and the weird thing is that the greater the volume of data collected, the less we seem to know. So that's the advantage of single-point of reference as well, subjective as it may be. I knew G. I won't deny, I desired her. But if a sun-speckled childhood memory of her tawny hair and freckled face constitutes a type of earliest impression, well of course everything began with that sniper raid, her wolf-fur lined hood, the plasma bolts cracking through cold arctic summer air. We should have ran, I guess; we should have been nobodies after all. But G was tough, a scrapper. She wouldn't have had it any other way.

Military history of Clan Cave Wolf begins in that late 24th century time period when the glaciers had already begun to retreat past the 35th parallel and the lands that were beginning to be uncovered were rich and fertile, nearly instantaneous reversion to shrubland and wet taiga, the permafrost melting, the earth heavy with smells of two hundred years of decay and now regrowth. We were a nomadic band of only a couple hundred stragglers ourselves until impelled by the wisdom of our shamans and elders we began to harvest the earth rather than just sift it endlessly for goods. In that sense, we were "civilized;" the true ice-dwellers held taboos against staying in one place indefinitely and did not hold territory. Their survival truly depended on whether several months' foraging turned up an old lightning-fork laser cannon or whether all they could subsist on for weeks on end was rodents and grain seeds.

Clan history says it was a female shaman who staked out our territory. From two hundred we grew to two thousand, and then when the nomadic tribes began realizing that our very mode of life was a threat to them, that we were holding onto territory and beginning to process ancient technology and even learn how to repair it, the single snipers began, and then even team raids, ice sledges and dog-pulled carts. Yet, even under these terrible conditions we began to build and even construct defensive outposts. We could put up watch-towers and surround it with barricades and galvanized sheeting. We had occasional patrols; we had rapid-response fan boats that could go from our main settlement to outposts in the case of sudden attack. CCW did not grow absolutely linearly—there were times when we would lose population or a number of families would desert and try their luck elsewhere—but the overall trend was positive, and our sophistication, technology, social mechanisms, and reputation all grew.

When people ask, "tell me about G, tell me about G," of course I'm really used to this question, but keep in mind this is very early childhood we are talking about, I'm eleven at the time of G's shooting back at the iceraider, and my entirety of that memory consists of how suddenly the whole clan's attitude changed to her. It wasn't the point that she actually hit the plasma sniper, it was that her firing back alerted the elders who were a bit distant, and they could roll out the small calibre mortars and give the raider a very strong incentive to make himself distant. That was early warfare, most likely the first decade of the 25th century, the zeroes or whatever you call that awkward ten years, and we were at war first against Clan Ice Bear [CIB] and then later against Turtle [CT], most of which action consisted of exchanges of either ballistic or energy-bolt fire from long-distances and then only later the sort of sledge-borne attacks that became the trademark of the scavenger clans.

It's difficult of course to summarize so many years in just a meaningful fashion. I know we were conducting raids onto the iceshelf but that was G being taken along as an early trainee or scout, and me being left behind to tend the methane or keep the babies and toddlers out of trouble. Some people say it's precisely because we were a feminine-ruled group that Gaia/Atlantica later chose us to be its primary allied partner among the icepack groupings, of which they were many. Gaia/Atlantica hated Turtle—that was your very typical male-led society, all smokers and drinkers and dozens of chained female slaves for each bearded, fur-covered male. Our soft, feminine nature made us practically Gaians before Atlantica ever knew of our existence and that's a point to, that Gaia was an ideology and inclination way before it was a formal political federation or way before the glacial melt sprung the continental shelf out in what used to be Bermuda. It's a subject I'll return to in time, but of course people want to know about the next big major action or part of the G legend.

People don't want to know about our all night dances (ha, they don't even want to know that peasants have been having raves since the dawn of history; modern city-dwellers wish to believe they invented the all night dance), or the smell of ammonia and alkyls in our fermentation vats, or what a clan settlement dinner consisted of, roasted mutton, seal, rabbit. All these kind of "sensory details," or peacetime, cultural related stuff doesn't hold attention. It doesn't command people's interest if you say that linen, flax, and hemp fabrics could be sewn together with pouches specifically for .30-10 cartridges or that a travel-type yurt could be transported by just one ox and host twenty people in a snow emergency. They don't want to know that three or four blazingly hot years, years in which one could physically sea the glaciers retreating, melting like ice cream in summer, could be followed by a sudden year without a summer because up in the northern altitudes climate is extremely fickle. As I write in a nice climate-controlled HEPA-filtered office in New Atlantis overlooking plasteel skyscrapers and arc-shaped shell buildings, it's true Atlanticians really in a way don't want to know about the rest of the world. Here is New Atlantis; there is the outside barbaric world, and it's clear which is civilization and which is just some primitive raider culture. Gaians are elitists. That can't be denied.

The next huge milestone in the G legend has to be the Battle of the Pyramids which would be 2511, yes. That makes me fourteen and G famously only a fifteen-year-old at the time although already a veteran of half a dozen raids onto the ice-shelf and furthermore, an experienced killer of half a dozen iceraiders. Fifteen years old! A girl! But she had already shot, knifed, plasma-bolted, mortared, or bludgeoned to death six human lives, adult men, and wounded countless others. Let's see, 2511, so that makes Clan Ice Bear at the time already conquered and integrated into our clan (hey, they were a bunch of blondes, how much can you hate them), and our main enemy at the time Turtle. But despite our increased numbers, our fear of extinction was actually at probably one of its highest points.

You already know two reasons why. First, Turtle was a male-dominated clan. Its thirty top male leaders all held a regular Rijktagg or Rijkthig (dialectical disagreement), and essentially all women were just seen as breeding machines for the next generation of Valhalla's warriors. They weren't extremely Scandinavian. Actually only 30-40% of the bloodline came from Norway/Sweden, and then 10-20% cross-bred with Russians although none with the generally altered ones and so weren't the core iceraiders, the unorganized ones. They were, if you have to be linguistically accurate about it, "Russian-like mystical-like" not Russian, not ice mystics per se. Actually they were probably quite similar in origin to us, with any observer concluding they absolutely understood its pre-ice genetics until a brown-skinned red-haired Turtle was seen sending all your theories into the mud. Second, Turtle as scavengers and not ice-farmers of any kind disdaining even sericulture were inherently headed for extinction in one sense—sooner or later all pre-ice artifacts would be exhausted. They had hover-tanks. They had pre-glacial technological, levitating 100kph 145cm plasma cannon firing armor. They had no way of repairing any of the things once broken; they basically did not understand how they worked, but they had stumbled across some way-before-pre-pre-Ice emergency reserve whether Russian or Atlantic confederation no one knows, but the things had been stored properly, thoroughly winterized, and centuries later at the touch of a button the things worked. Most of them anyway.

As anyone basically reasonable can understand when a gentle, agricultural, progress-oriented warrior society meets a harsh, scavenging, destructive, military cult the results are not generally pretty. Turtle was vicious, atrocity-prone. When they captured any of our probe teams, the typical outcome was a mass gang rape and half of the girls thrown into Turtle slave pits and the rest either chained to a work gang or scarred and sent back naked to us, assuming they could survive a twenty mile trek back to the tundra without clothes. It was weird, though, in a way too. They had some strange unknown male code of how to treat female soldiers and sometimes when they could have completely wiped out one of our units they would just raise their sabres and gallop off. You know sometimes it's true, I'm a male media specialist in a female centered society, but at night dreams come that I had been born into the wrong culture. I mean, what would have happened if I had grown up and seen men in leadership roles? Wouldn't I have been the one and not G who picked up the magnum rifle and fired back? Aren't we always just responding to societal prompts? The questions go round and round without any definite answers. Here we are; there they are, but dreams of my own barbaric treks across the ice pack come at night. The psychologists say they'll disappear, but I'm 74 and they've never quite managed to be completely eradicated. Put that in the memory hole for your future retrospective deep analysis.

Anyway back to the story: the Battle of the Pyramids. Clan Cave Bear's most terrible and horrifying moment, when it suddenly had to faced do-or-die pitched battle with Clan Turtle, although outnumbered 5:1 and lacking in pre-ice hovertanks. A bunch of ragtag misfits with plasteel walkers, ice sledges, dog packs, and a methane economy at 0.5% secular growth a year facing a hundred thousand bloodthirsty warriors drunk on blood and alcohol, hirsute, bearded, fur-wearing, smelly (you could smell a Turtle a mile away; three on calm days), and way before we're ready it's the apocalyptic battle. It was because of glacial melt.

The ice had melted another one hundred kilometers and in this piece of ice, a strange, "Aztec" pyramid had been unveiled. Even before its full shape was recognizable, instantly everyone in a three hundred mile radius knew: pre-ice, pre-ice, pre-ice! There was absolutely no way the structure could have been built during the glaciation, it had to contain amazing, unbelievable, almost seemingly magical technologies, and obviously whoever held it would pretty much own the ice cap or at least our segment of it for thousands of kilometers around. If one lowly depot of a couple hundred hovertanks could convert a small tribe of spear-armed warriors into the renowned Clan Turtle, what unbelievable, completely undefeatable technologies would we discover in the Aztec Pyramid? The first scouts to see it completely understood its significance and were racing home after only the most cursory inspection. The fates had intervened; climate had its vote; General Winter decided the crisis had been reached and it would be Clan Cave Wolf, 24000 souls versus Clan Turtle, over a hundred thousand spread out across the miles for complete dominance and hegemony of the Arctic ice cap. Our advantage was that we had radio, we had compact settlements and Turtle was thinly spread out. We would get to fight them in waves rather than all at once.

[Bei smokes an entire pack of cigarettes, drinks four cups of coffee, and shakes his head for an hour before continuing. The date is now 1 September 2471, Atlantica City, New Atlantis.]

Forgive me. Forgive me.

The Battle of the Pyramids was big in the all capital BIG sense, in the "defining the nature of humanity and the course of human history" sense. I mean, just in vernacular, my head's going to explode if I don't pre-agree with myself that I can return to this topic, there is absolutely no way to just recount it in a straight narrative, we need hyperlinks and hypertext; we need three dimensional ebook readers because otherwise that cut-up time period makes absolutely no sense at all.

I'll borrow a page from a popular pre-Ice thriller and novel and use the exclamation point to try to communicate what happened. Pyramids needs to be looked at more than once because it completely changed everything! My ability to craft sober prose is hereby disintegrated because who we were before and who we were after were completely different! Everyone on planet earth not just ourselves faced a different situation before and after that capital-e Event! My mind is still thrilling and tumbling and can't spell it out in line form! Battle of the Pyramids! G stands for Genevieve, my Genny!

Pyramids can't be described straightforwardly. I know that before this national crisis we were just Clan Cave Wolf, a band of stragglers in the northern wastes and afterwards we half the number but formerly integrated as the military of the Gaia Movement / the Atlantic Confederation. Before: tundra walkers, methane economics, harvesting and seed distribution. After: formal integration, command ranks, Atlantic Strike Corps, the III Armored. Genevieve before: 15 year old rising star of the raider ranks. Genevieve after: Commander and Captain of III Armored, Atlantis Federation, New Atlantis. Bei before: pig-sty keeper, methane tank overwatcher, yeast expert and farrowing consultant. Bei after: Atlantis New Media Intern, Atlantica City, near ex-Bermuda, New Atlantis. The world before: scavengers and raiders and the knife-wielding Turtle; the world after: the Gaia collective, the Gaia Hypothesis; Gaia movement against its arch-rival Geist, heir to the Indonesian Caliphate of pre-Ice.

Back to the exclamations we go! The battle was so desperate they took me, a boy, a male, an XY-chromosomal, and handed me a Steyr, a pair of oil lenses, up the pyramidal! Pitched battle lasted six weeks, continuing assaults and mass action another three months! Bodies stacked up like cordwood! Once you've seen warfare, blood streaming from wounds, you're never the same! I'm psychotically losing my mind here, it's indescribable! Tears like blood, like piss and urine and semen streaming down your thigh! A head blasted to bits with an artillery shell, the back of the head open, its skull in fragments, brain tissue everywhere! New religions starting up in the aftermath!

Well you know, it's sixty years ago, but I'm crying. Yes. I'm resisting the urge to fill the next hundred pages of paper with just a stream of expletives, but what other than sh-t, f-ck, c-nt, sperm can describe a 125mm plasma bolt rocketing directly 10m away from you. You get a concussion, and then the concussion gets a concussion. You're blasted out of your mind, and then the mindless mind gets blasted out of that. There's no words, of course. You can always tell a combat veteran. Hemingway just never goes out of style. I stopped laughing after that time. Everyone was wiped out.

Pyramids was an unforgiving and relentless battle because it was driven by fear and paranoia. Turtle thought the Aztec pyramid, what we now know to be a Mu pyramid, a Mu airship with solar panels, a creation of an alien (?) civilization that drifted the stars, had hundreds of hovertanks or even worse and that their survival depended on getting that thing. They set up a line of hovertanks 3km away and just start firing at will, blasting and blasting away, not permitting surrender, not doing any daring maneuver, not engaging in ritualistic 'honor war.' They were under the belief that they were going to be wiped out to the last man, and they brought out everything. They had Rocket Over Ground [ROG] and Missile Over Ground [MOG]. We had less than two score of aerobots, that early technology, our walkers, plasma rifles, a few sledges, and the edge of being entrenched. But essentially, everyone was killed. It's why there were no middle aged or older Wolves after that time. Human bodies were used as staircases in order to get around, and Genny was deep in the pyramid with a probe team, unaware of how heavy the fire had gotten above ground, and she was racing for some technology that did not exist, although Mu technology did exist and was nothing like a kinetic or energy weapon. It was just beyond that.

It's after this time that all the new religious forces emerged. In fact, I think historians say the GEIST movement began concurrently from this pitched battle. Records show the first PAPERTHIN intrusion as well, those weird two-dimensional spirit monsters that provided the inspiration for that Azalian guy's proposal that we do a metal monster concept for Episode One of the Animated Series. I don't have endless commentary to make on the months of battle. I know something went crazily wrong or some sort of self-destruct sequence was set off, or God had a manic episode. Were the pyramidal walls covered with Egyptian hieroglyphics, did the dramatic slave society of meat-eaters and blue metal men refer to some long-deceased ur-civilization or was that Turtle itself, those smokers and consumers of flesh? Were tattered and burnt Walker hulls used to prepare the site itself for demolition, because if we couldn't have it, nobody could, HE means High Explosive, AP means Armor Piercing, Genny being captured by a Turtle intrusion team and then, typical Turtle style, violently gang raped, her personality forever changed after that moment. That's metaphor right. Only a boy talking about a massacre or months of pitched battle can understand a gang rape, and that's why we let women rule, that's why all sex is rape, that's why we have Herstory not History and Femrule, the Gaia Hypothesis, and Civilization As We Know It. It had to be like a dream, because my own brain is at war with itself here. I can't even acknowledge it happened. I wanted to save her, but I was a coward. It was my first time with a scoped rifle, and I hid for fear, up at the top, watching the slaughter unfold before me.

Egyptian bird men, right.

Twitter birds.

Cicada night.

Little blue men, drifting submarine, under THC high, like being underwater, like spit glistening on the concrete, impressed into memory forever due to specific serotonin manipulation. Hijacking of the brain's own neurochemistry to induce an auto-immune allergic reaction. "I'm allergic to you. I'm allergic to you anyway."

FENWORLD was my scope, the origins of the spirit creatures that always obfuscated and the possibility it was an Aztec civilization after all, trope-haze, sadism developed through masochism twisted, Merrill's Raiders become the III Corps, the Great Accord, and then the world dividing into two camps, the circumstances of immediate pre-glacial creep reestablishing themselves in, once more, a binary opposition. New Atlantis a/k/a the Gaia Hypothesis or Gaia Collective versus GEIST, the restored Indonesian Caliphate. Islamic law. That's it. That's the world in 2471 after centuries of glaciation and desperation.

There's some countless and endless number of further tasks to carry out. As already stated, we're going to have to revisit Pyramids, and then there's Pyramid and then Pyramid, so pyramidon yourself, but in all seriousness, what of the Basics, and how about Genevieve after the battle raving mad wandering the streets of Atlantica dressed in bird feather and chanting haunting melodies from the taiga northern wastes.

We were a female shamanistic culture. What else could you expect?

Way before male gods ever showed up, wandering those haunting northern-light lit wastes, tribes of 150 or 200 people wandered the earth, scavenging even before metal technology, and carried away in the visions that were sent to them by G-d.

Furthermore, speaking of metal, are you aware that some fringe cult is claiming that plasteel was invented _after_ metal? In other words, in all those pre-glacial film celluloids that have been recovered, when you see the people living in skyscrapers, those are _metal_ skyscrapers. Hard to believe, right? There's even a theory that the ancients had so much metal at their disposal, they put sugar and water and carbon dioxide into cans made of metal, and then after drinking it, they threw that thing on the ground because it wasn't worth the time to recover the material! I think we can safely assume that's a pretty crackpot theory. Of course ancient civilization was highly different from ours, but it's pretty mathematically clear there could never have been that much metal present in the world. Plasteel it's been; plasteel it's always been; plasteel it will always be.

To provide a fair and cogent picture of modern society, I'll have to cover an encounter with some of the few remaining Basics. It's said as well that the Shintoists of GEIST are a fraud and fake, that GEIST has no claim on Basic Shinto. Basics living in the Atlantic Confederation are especially vocal about this matter, and it leads to interesting arguments, such as whether a Basic who has been living in Brazil since pre-glacial times is precisely the same thing as a Basic who emigrated there during the Great Emigration (millions of people?). The matters, as can be seen, are pretty complicated, and actually there's probably a story in every little nook and cranny of every possible combination of religion and nationality. So we'll cover that. We'll cover the "female shamanistic" matter; we'll look at GEIST and its offshoot GYIST; we'll examine female courts and the Court of No Return; we'll look at CCW aerobots; we'll return to the Pyramids; and of course, finally, inescapable we have to know about Paris Bas, since, after all, it concluded not so long ago and defines everything that is going on right now, this very moment.

Before doing any of these wonderful things, however, given uncertainty of time coverage and matters (the scopolamine is making everything taste like iodine), naturally we have to cover the very important and large matter of GEIST, the successor to the Indonesian Caliphate, and what they think about us, which in a word is bad.

Our strength, our complexity is that we are capable of seeing what they think about us; they are incapable of understanding what we are. We are Atlantica. We have the media towers. We are broadbanding to all four corners of the world and kilometers beneath the surface. We are recovering technology as we speak and in a matter of years rather than decades, we will have the ancient capabilities in space flight again. We are twenty years away from fusion.

GEIST is the Resistance. GEIST claims Right of Hegemony. GEIST says before the ice caps came, they were the sole and only civilization on earth. They claim Brazil was an abomination. I don't like this theory. You don't either, you're reading this in English or Basic. But their viewpoint commands 80% of the world's thinking population. They claim Paris Bas was a massacre and their martyrdom movements are increasing. There is talk of GEIST infiltration into Atlantica. Their god El Ranty brings his followers into ecstatic dance, and the male god El Ranty appears unchallenged in this universe. We must understand the way they think, for that is the only way we can predict their behavior, and prediction is power. We must acquire an El Ranty mysticism.

The GEIST movement clearly has multiple roots and in any situation, describing its origins is going to be complicated and prone to error of characterization. But of course what they say are oftentimes things that are offset from our recorded herstory. They are misinterpreting things, we know. First of all, it's not even 2271 to them but some sort of year like 5930, I don't have the exact figure on hand. GEIST says our preglacial records are all incorrect and highly subjective. We understand they offer something like this:

There once was a House of Peace where all the people of the world lived together and obeyed El Ranty's law. The man was king of his house and his sons fought for the right to one day start a house of their own, although many could not and valiantly failed in the course of life without dishonor. Unfortunately, the Atlantic Confederation, Prescient Atlantic, or Greater Brazil, Basic Brazil, Basic Atlantica (there are countless names) constantly kept attacking our just and right civilization, destroying our peaceful researches into space exploration, and indeed managed to delay our acquisition of atomics for many years. If not for the sacrifices of men such as Khan and Kin, we would not have even a free country of our own such as we do today.

Before the ice came, Basic Brazil practicing their iniquities created such atrocities as the Retrovirus 1, SIV variants, the GRID, etc. without number, practicing decadent sex and containing their animals including the swine together such that diseases spread between all such impure animals. Overcome with righteousness, Djakarta found the Shiite martyrs who would travel aboard to the Brazil's space station disguised as the infidels themselves, before concluding the lunar cannon that was always known to be an implicit threat to all of the saved believers. In the course of the war, the Brazilians even used metotronic weaponry; they concluded gene-crime; they used a completely untested and highly dangerous chain-reaction chemical weapon on the Andes shield wall, and when finally their navies and armies had been defeated by the submitted armies, they then launched the final space chaff weaponry and covered the world with ice for centuries to come.

As given to us by the will of El Ranty himself, we inherited the hotspot and volcanic haven of the Archipelago, and joined by many fellow believers, we now return to the world at large to find once again the swine-eaters plotting yet again against us. All true submitters to the law should join in martyrdom operations against the towers of Atlantica, which must be ground down again to the sea.

One must feel, naturally, somewhat awkward reading the official line of GEIST. The truth is mixed so subtly with fact that actually one can't directly oppose this statement, only point out odd inconsistencies. For example, why would Brazil have used a chemical weapon against their own Andes shield wall? The available videoscripts and binary files showing an atomic type weapon have to be accurate; we must accept that an unprovoked Indonesian attack on the Andes in order to clear a passageway for their militaries is verified and indisputable truth. It is irrefutable.

Second, how could Shiite martyrs been tricked into an El Ranty maneuver? The well known divisions and fissures in El Ranty theology are established by the weight of centuries. The spoken about operation must be taken as GEIST propaganda. There are, after this, just further countless examples of inconsistencies and errors in GEIST ideology; we oppose it on principle and on faith.

University Edinboro in exile actually offers a third proposal: GEIST is in no way a successor state to Indonesia; it has no roots in pre-Ice civilization at all. In fact, GEIST's origins are in the eastern swamps of Britannia, where trader / rafter culture has existed for centuries at a time and was not even eliminated in late Britain. According to Edinboro, everything you've read is a lie.

There's absolutely no evidence, zilch, zero, that the Gaia Hypothesis/Gaia Alliance or the political entity terming itself 'New Atlantis' represents in any way a continuation or continuity with pre-glacial ancient civilization. We believe that New Atlantis is engaging in what academics call 'a Founding Myth,' a national story similar to the ones composed thousands of years ago by Ancient Greeks and Romans, in their national epics the Illiad and the Aeneid. Just as with these political entities, the 'Foundation Myth' is a lie; it is a myth.

_As academics and researchers who maintain an unbroken continuity with the British educational system since the 13_ th _century of humanity, we are the sole and only keepers of knowledge, information, truth, history, and accurate information in the post-glacial world. Our records cannot necessarily be absolutely complete, but consider this, is it likely that the gods actually gave birth to the first Greeks? Did Virgil's hero leave Hades through the gate of truth or the gate of lies? No evidence has emerged suggesting that there was an 'Atlantic Confederacy' of any kind during ancient times; at best, a 'North Atlantic friendship' existed, a North Atlantic relationship._

_The political entity terming itself Movement GEIST is similarly an abstract creation, an affinity group, or an ideology. It has absolutely no connexion or bearing to pre-glacial civilization, whether that civilization be Indonesia, the Islamic Caliphate, or any other known entity of the 21_ st _century. Movement GEIST is as likely to be a political creation of some group of cadre-fanatics as it is to be a direction civilizational offspring of Greater Indonesia/Djakarta. We are witnessing shadow puppetry at work, survivors of the New Ice Age. You must distance yourself from spurious claims of uncertain provenance._

As can be seen, academics are a strange lot. Apparently most of them survived _underground_ , meaning in other words physically the below two kilometers of ice and in campuses that were ground down to their foundational nubs but had extensive tunnel networks. We know certain survivor spots had exactly that: an extensive tunnel network, the Manhattan Mining District, most famously, but also Muscovy, GTRANS, Paris Bas, and so on. As everyone knows, mole people who have spent ten generations underground tend to be a little dotty. Further, I am Bei; I've been working my entire life. How can any academic, tenured and notoriously reliant on a slave economy, claim to have truth? Edinboro lacks moral legitimacy. Let it free its Talibs before it announces anything to the world. Let it look itself in the mirror and see its true face.

I included the Edinboro Announcement just so that the complete picture of theories is presented. Edinboro went on to detail the precise nature of the Movement GEIST from its alleged beginnings on the eastern fringe of Britannia island, the fen country, and while the complete picture isn't necessarily available, obviously the theory has enough elements to warrant at least some inclusion here. Essentially Edinboro thinks GEIST came out of market/trader culture where everyone living in the fens was a swamp gypsy or swamp rover, living on skiffs and meeting every seventh day for market. GEIST rules came out of an essential core belief that every action was an exchange and every two-hundredth part was a fraction. In other words, all communication is understood to be some sort of equal balancing of information/data, and 0.5% of all goods traded went to the public fund.

We can't absolutely dismiss all of the academic research, of course. There's something to this theory, as it explains how a "self-organizing" phenomenon can emerge and then spread so rapidly. It explains why GEIST is composed mostly of young men on skiffs sailing the seas and so eager to establish markets, and there's very limited archeological evidence that the ancients had regular market days or 'fleast markets,' which is some kind of record that communities would exchange used clothes and homebaked goods, the foundation, in other words of what is commendable about the GEIST. GEIST has a tradition of charity, it has clear prohibitions and commendable acts, and it does acknowledge some sort of moral authority in the heavens. We cannot just dismiss it as self-contradictory claptrap. GEIST is part of El Cantare's vision.

The appropriate theory of where we are living is in some sort of in-between period with the arrival of El Ranty, but before the Second Impact predicted in numerous pre-glacial vidteks. The Third Child and the Second Impact: aren't these the Basics of belief, the ancient's most holiest of holies? No matter what else we know, we know there is a worldwide Movement GEIST; that it opposes the Gaia Hypothesis/New Atlantis, and that it contains tremendous vitality, especially since the destruction of Paris Bas or "Paris Below." Paris was at the time still a kilometer under ice, and so we've reached the climactic battle of Genevieve's career, Commander G, "the G" in Gaia battle-slang, or some sort of pre-Ice term for 'leader,' 'basher,' or 'commander.' It is Paris Bas that defines the G legend.

Paris Bas, c'est l'histoire qui ne peut être dit que par la traduction, à travers un écran, en clair et par un miroir obscurci. Je me souviens de tout voir à travers la brume de la scopolamine, avec toute la cuisine réduite au goût d'iode, et tout l'iode comme rien du tout. Quelle tragédie. Quel dommage. L'information a été perdue, mais peut être récupéré ici, malheureusement, de façon incomplète. Nous avons souffert de la perte, mais nous demeurons profondément bouleversés par les événements.

Gamine [G] a mené l'assaut, tout au fond, à un kilomètre sous la glace après les transmissions radio ont indiqué non seulement la présence de la vie, mais que de il y a l'abomination. Les personnes vivant en dessous, dans les catacombes, avaient recours à des mesures impies pour rester en vie, coupée de l'atmosphère et absolument sans espoir. Les choses avaient changé. Les monstres PAPERTHIN avaient émergé. Ils ont été coexistent avec humanité et douloureux pour rejoindre GEIST. Ils étaient l'avant-garde de GYIST mouvement d'aberration, une réforme importante de la culture Unité GEIST qui lui permettrait, enfin, de surmonter des sentinelles toujours vigilants d'Atlantica.

Suis-je en train de perdre mots? Je, Bei, entré Paris Bas par intervalle de transducteur, "avatered 'dans un accompagnement intégré directe du Corps blindé III avec Gamine en tant que leader, passé la première couche, le Forum des Halles avec son odeur de brûlé du caoutchouc et des voitures brûlées de tramway, le RER, err ei err, ligne directe de Chatelat Louis XIV, et la retraite de l'ancienne noblesse, l'ancien régime. Pourtant, les données en continu entre les fils de silicium communiqué mauvais et mal traduits tout ce que nous savions. Je voyais les choses à travers la scopolamine et ensuite à travers la mise en relation numérique. Ma vision se scintille avec des objets et de fausses informations. J'ai entendu des choses.

Nous entré. Nous n'avions pas le choix. Toutes les transmissions indiqué abomination. Ils ont indiqué l'humanité a été lui-même élève d'insectes. Ils ont montré que l'humanité avait atteint un reapproachement avec les PAPERTHIN deux monstres dimensions et qu'ils ont été trop élevage. Comment une telle culture magnifique pourrait retomber cette dégradation? Comment pouvaient-ils moyen de Geist pour les réformes de GYIST, et d'un leadership qui les emmenaient dans les salles de Atlantica lui-même? Ils savaient qui étaient leurs ennemis. Ils étaient prêts à se battre. Nous sommes allés avec les plus avancés trois combinaisons de combat les générations; l'ancienne technologie marcheur avait été entièrement modernisé. C'est Paris Bas.

Possibly words are wasted here. I mean, every human being living on earth had or currently has access to all the data binaries, and they've been scraped and flash-torrented across the webs of eternity. What visuals do we need? G in her off-purple battlesuit, powered with electrically-stimulated metal muscles? The outcome with the fast scramble and myself jacking out, embedded survivor of the Atlantica Army? Or just the dash inward to France itself, the hyper-tracked and cushioned cannons firing egg-shell calcium unit deployment modules onto the physical terrain of Normandy. Generations before us had stormed these very shores; invasions had been launched the other way as well. Nothing had changed.

Paris Bas was about the concept of whether Atlantic nations could impose standard morality on an extreme circumstance. Did humanity have the right to cross its genetics with bacteria or insects in order to survive a darkened sky, the end of the world? Was micro PAPERTHIN a true abstraction that emerged out of fissures in this universe to represent the malevolent impulse of another? What of the Antarctic cracks of doom, the true origin of GEIST's GYIST allies, and the strange sight of human beings completely nonchalant with the presence of two-dimensional spirit creatures that were slowly browning with age? A cult had developed solely around this emergent phenomenon as well, yet many denied their very existence even with holographics transferred directly before them, retinal scan. It was the old lie: media inventing things, media creating the monsters it then demanded the public destroy. Just as no one knew whether the media complex had created the advent of modern terrorism, so too also there could be no fully comprehensive religious theory that explained the emergence of the two dimensional spirit creatures, their effortless march north, and their strange eradication around Aztec territory. For whatever reason, even with the entire south of North America sunk under the sea, PAPERTHIN could never march north.

Well of course we reach a crisis point. All the important facts are laid out. My childhood friend, Genevieve who became commander of the Atlantic armies died in Paris in an act of self-sacrifice in her late 60s, when she had become old and gray yet was revered by generations that came after her. They are building a statue to her name. They are putting her on vidscreen on continual rotation. But all I want is a glass pyramid to be build over the tomb they call Paris, the catacomb that is her grave. I am Bei.

II. Pools of Sorrow, Waves of Joy

I'm filled with self-loathing. 74 years of age and my writing is that of an excited schoolboy. In a sense it's good to be manic, hyped up on scopolamine, on the other my writing lacks heftiness, weight, dignity. It's not Stevens the butler. It's not even Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint. Sort of a work of shame, but the pen keeps moving, I've turned on a fan, and outside it's become dark but it's still Atlantica, still 2174, the traffic is moving in the streets, the people are going about their business and capitalism is prosperous. We are civilization.

Any of the stories I've mentioned can be filled in, with greater detail. That's what I should have done in any case, at least to talk more about the Battle of Paris Bas, more about the rise of the GEIST movement, and more about AZAL perhaps. There's heaps of notes prepared at my feet, but I don't really feel like reviewing them. The whole abstraction exists in my head, anyway, or at least I think it does which might functionally amount to the same thing.

I should be filled with shame. Possibly as a humble XY, I'll never understand sex from a proper XX perspective. All sex is rape, all possession self-possession. Herstory is about getting males to understand these things from the beginning, then they'll turn out all right. The checklist before seduction, and the Take Back the Night. The Talibs marching through Edinboro because none of the grad students have been tenured in over three hundred years. Who would have thought campus security was so all-powerful.

So, what should I write about? I don't exactly know. The thing is that second chapters are by design supposed to be sophomore slumps. You dash out the originating idea, 10000 words, and then there, you either have a reader or don't, because now at least some people are committed. They've invested the time in understanding the starting circumstances, and so have to carry through, or perhaps more positively speaking, they've become intrigued and what more detail. Their needs can be met, but perhaps its better to provide that level of detail the slow way, obliquely. I need to address my need: the need to know. Wait, I think, maybe it's true; Edinboro despite its flaws really does know something after all. That thing is the thing of perspective and remove.

To clarify precisely what I'm talking about, what I'm talking about is the problem of understanding where exactly you've come from. Read carefully, Edinboro is precisely correct: the Greeks attribute their origin to gods directly intervening on earth and Rome is famously founded by twin sucklings of wolves Romulus and Remus. In both cases, the author predated the country, in a matter of speaking; the act of mythologizing brought forth a political reality.

Are the academics, therefore, correct? Is there, in truth, actually no link between the civilizations of pre-Ice and our modern world? If so, where did Gaia consciousness come from? Where did we learn about such absolutist truths as feminine dominance and the Earth Mother? How did we evolve from bands of stragglers into a dynamic, powerful nation? How much truth is there in the allegation that our opponent, GEIST, is actually a constructed society? Does the binary division of humanity, a feature of political life since the year 1900 amount to a purely gendered difference? If so, who is the male and who is the female? At least in our case the answer is obvious.

The GEISTs have their own foundation myth. According to their writings their weekly seventh day market saw the arrival of Gy, the First Gypsy, red bandanna, sabre on the side, and blue pantaloons. With his wildish ways, his churlish enthusiasms, and his tendency to decide where to go and what to do entirely on whim, he was the GEIST culture hero, the founder of a way of life. While stragglers and scavengers were working the mud pits and fen ways of terran land, the Movement GEIST was keen on mobility and water-borne travel. They were a combination of nautical traditions and male-centered action. They were anti-GAIA.

Generally sources agree that GEIST is a reaction to GAIA. GEIST cannot exist without GAIA to rebel against just as their god El Ranty exists in one fewer dimension that the universal spirit. Such revelation El Cantare has left us. Yet we still don't have an absolute explanation for why GEIST opposes AZAL so much, nor are we sure if the rumors of their impending strike against us are true. The problem is perhaps akin to that of economies that transition directly to tertiary services before they've mastered secondary industry. Is our civilization's media complex generating the very idea of the GEIST opposition such that we are now beginning to see GEIST everywhere and behind every thing? Notoriously the hermit Middles announce perpetually that Xiao Ren's three-headed baby is indisputable the product of GAIA influence. Generally GEIST extends into Middle territory, and reports generally agree that the browning PAPERTHIN live side-by-side with ur- or proto-GEIST in the southern continents, where few dare. An expedition by GAIA and then later by the reformed GEIA accommodationists discovered nothing and was presumed lost. GAIA's own security force of black technical Toyotas, organization MAMMON, did find out that PAPERTHIN could be set afire, that it did take damage and suffer when shot at; its sole invulnerability was that approached from directly aside, it was functionally invulnerable. Moreover, its waving two-dimensional appendages could slice through the toughest plasteel.

There's no end of this kind of anecdote. Above what used to be Mexican territory, the white paperthin monsters begin to ossify and even crumble into soft, tofu-like consistency. Browning becomes evident much sooner, and the apparent "invincible" spiritual threat has a strict geological limitation. In Paris Bas and in parts of Africa, the rumor is of human-PAPERTHIN genetic mixing. No actual verifiable reports have surfaced, but much of humanity remains convinced the thing is happening.

[2 September 2471]

I'm filled with shame, remorse, fear, relief, and anger. There's a droplet of a tear in one eye, but I'm helpless. I'm an old man. I'm 74 and a waste of space. It isn't so much a list or bulleted sequence of things, but a shining jewel of shame, multifaceted, sparkling. It's the morning. Rain falls on Atlantica. The white plastic shell buildings are dripping with rain water, and the streets are being washed afresh, but I'm not sure of anything anymore. I'm not even absolutely positive I'm Bey. I am Bey.

Number one overriding reason for shame and anger and remorse. Look at this sad, sad pathetic excuse for a memoir. What does it feel like it's being written by? A nineteen year nerdy teenager? Can't you detect the little weird nerd sounds being ejected by the geek as heh-heh-heh chuckles writing his sci-fi slash weirdness? Every line is just compacted with technical descriptions or numerical summaries. There's no dignity. There's no pride of place. It's just, well, crap. How can an old man whose lived his entire life and seen it all still see the world like this? Only because, well, I'm crap. I'm a media specialist. I've lived almost my entire life in Atlantica Activision Four, AA4, producing and gophering broadcast content, flipping around story lines, consulting in on commercials. How meaningless can things get.

Number two overriding reason for shame and anger and remorse. What about all those girls? What about those thousand upon thousands of talented scouted models and actress trainees discovered out of shack and hovel villages—just like the one you came from Bei—who arrived, giddy, gazelle-like, stick-thin and big eyed, seeing Atlantica for the first time. They've never seen a city in their life. And all of us in the industry, from the car service that takes them to their four-girl bunkbedded flat to the doctors stripping them down once a week to the media managers pitching their stories to C-level—we were all preying on them. How many of them actually ascended? How many actually saw their dreams come true. But almost all put out. 80-90%. Absolutely. They slept with somebody or another, and yes, I partook of that feast too. Actually I was nice. If the girl started crying before we started or if she really seemed like she was being forced by events, I always let her go. But my conscious can't be completely clear. There was always that 1%, acting sort of oddly. But then again the thought comes, wait a minute, you've been a 3.5 million/year your whole life, and made only 2.0 for much of it. What exactly else were you going to do to find lovers?

So there you have it. Confession on a rainy Tuesday. The streets of Atlantica dripping with rain. White shell buildings, plasteel, holographics dancing across the facades, and an old man awaiting medical treatment he probably won't survive. Yet looking back on his life, the realization also dawns: FENWORLD is about a national myth. The media controllers of New Atlantis are losing the war against GEIST. Stories are coming in off small farming communities on the coast, villages that have always been GAIA, that have always been Atlantis, turning over to the Movement GEIST. FENWORLD the media production, my pet project, my last project, is about Foundational Myth. I am being paid to tell the story of G, so that little girls growing up in abandoned projects or the dustiest and dirtiest villages aspire to pick up a gun. So that FemDom continues. But I'm FemDom's worst contradiction. All sex maybe is rape. Men are indeed just spermies. Genevieve too should be pitied and not celebrated; her life was tragedy. Azal was right.

The issue of this exact and precise moment, however, is that in a sense, it's too late. Yes, I should have done a slow reveal. I should have shown you the world chapter by chapter so that you eventually visited all the places, Paris Bas, Azal, Atlantica, and the GEIST mining platform, through a series of exciting adventures and by the last word of the book, finally received a full and comprehensive picture of the world. But it's too late. It's too late. I wrote you the 10000 word chapter one write up. You now know the entire world. You now know the Edinboro deconstruction. New Atlantis has no legitimacy at all. It's just one of any competing powers, _laying claim_ to the pre-glacial Atlantic alliance in order to advance its legitimacy. GEIST probably too is completely constructed. Gy the original Gypsy, the swashbuckler of brown skin and round eyes, the red bandanna and sabre and blue pantaloons, the culture of whimsy, he too is a G—a person selected to represent the whole. Their economics are failing and they are facing the Malthusiasn paradox: growth is geometrical for population, but arithmetic for resources. There are GEIST Gys now who feed on insects and cornmeal and never leave a ten mile radius. That's the GEIST tragedy. That's why they're closing in, deeper and deeper every day on us, Atlantica, the City on the Hills, the city that's sprung out of the ocean.

I think I summarize it. I think I've explained it in detail.

My shame, my sorrow is that there's no way out. I've given you the picture of the world, chapter one. But now, the legs knocked out under me, I'm thinking of Edinboro, I'm thinking of the Atlantic Federation. I have to begin again. I have to be sure what is real and what is simulated.

I am Bei. I am 74 years old, an old man. I've had a long career at Atlantica Activision Four, AA4, which is the premier media channel of New Atlantis, which is global hegemon but under severe and fierce pressure from the resistance movement, Movement GEIST. In particular, the genesis destruction of Paris Bas, a city which survived two hundreds years of ice age _under_ the ice is rallying people around the world to join GEIST, or even just sympathize with it. I cannot complain about my life. I've had dozens of lovers, including two seventeen year olds, and had a salary in the lower-middle reaches of Atlantics but far higher than the villages that constitute 95% of the world. The world is New Atlantis, Manhattan Mining District, Azal Special City (a/k/a "Bayism"), and GEIST resistance worldwide with particular strength in archipelagos. I am being asked to complete the G story before I move on, but I have come to understand that it is national foundational myth. Atlantis predates Clan Cave Wolf, or at least achieved tertiary economics way before we could get more than a half dozen aerobots in the air. I've seen battle, although I spent most of it curled up in a terrified ball and I've taken fire. But, in the end, I die as I live, a coward and weakling, connected to the top medical technology of the universe with bleeping machines and the most expensive drugs available to ease my passing.

Certain facts can't be denied. We're human beings, it's the year 2471 (there are atomic clocks that confirm this and are separately verifiable with other clocks in other parts of the world); the world has been under glacial ice for over two hundred years after the countries that existed at the time began shooting chaff into outerspace as a defensive weapon but also to incrementally demonstrate seriousness in international disputes. The sun radiation's was cut by over 30% and the world entered an ice age, which has only in the past one hundred years begun to recede as the space junk deorbits. Mankind survived in a variety of different ways: Yellowstone, Hawaii and Iceland maintained radio contact although likely not considering themselves one single country; Indonesia probably most of the 17 million who lived during glaciation (the world's population being 700 million today, estimated); there are definitely submarines and deliberately scuttled aircraft carriers in which navies with rigidly controlled hierarchies including the death penalty for food theft rode out the ice under water, sealed in ice. Some Russian mystic project spliced their DNA with radiodurans bacteria and are now 4'7" tall, IQ roughly 70, but totally resistant to the radiation pouring out of the unshielded reactor they tended and continue to tend above the Arctic Circle in some priesthood of ritual they don't understand but consider just religious doctrine. There's a rumor of a tiny science team on the Moon which remains unconfirmed. As the ice has receded all of these groups have begun to reassemble together, but ironically they are replicating the bicaramel division of human geopolitics that has existed since the year 1900. There are two alliances; there are always two alliances; and this inevitably can't be fought because man is two fold in nature, good and evil, man and woman.

My story begins when I'm 11 years old, and Genny is 12. We're kids; we're assigned to some completely safe task, overlooking some swamp fields that are being cultivated for methane production, and although the ice glacier 200m tall is not far away, it's considered extremely safe, a part of our landholdings that isn't really accessible.

On that day, that day that becomes famous, Genny picked up an Arctic Magnum rifle and fired at a raider sniper while I hid and cowered. This was my nature, and that was Genny's nature, but it was exaggerated by the female shamanistic nature of our Clan, Clan Cave Wolf. Our enemies were the Russian dwarves as well as other ice stragglers with varying degrees of viciousness. We existed right at the edge of the retreating glaciers and established a strong alliance with other female dominated societies in the actual warming zones. Women have been in power ever since men have been discredited by the outcome of the 21st century, total apocalypse, the use of atomics, and the hazing of the sun. The biggest power bloc is New Atlantis which glaciation has popped out of the sea near Bermuda even as the southern half of North America is now a shallow and warming sea. Female domination, encoded in classrooms where men-children are taught that they are 'spermies,' that all sex is rape, and that herstory is the universal doctrine of humanity, is widely accepted as the only way to avoid another apocalypse. We've almost become extinct; we can't go to the brink again. It's unacceptable.

Three years after Genny self-categorized herself as a scout and combat leader, our clan faced a dramatic and horrifying battle against Clan Turtle which was five times our size and brutal in its methods, male-dominated, aggressive, cannibalistic, rapist. In a horrifying, mind-numbing, destructive, brutalizing, overwhelming to the point of expletives repeated five hundred times, we held the 'Aztec' pyramid against 125mm hovertank plasma cannon fire although losing more than half our population including almost all of our older clanmates. Following this period, we reached some rapprochement or alliance with New Atlantis; Genny entered a period of madness where she was wandering the city of Atlantica in bird feathers chanting haunting northern light melodies and the old clan songs, and I was shuttled my way into a proper classroom and education into becoming a media junior manager. I've spent my whole life in studios and classrooms and Class-A plasteel skyscrapers, white plastic shells buildings with holographs and near magnetic monorails, and I'm a sort of physical and moral coward. I've had dozens of lovers, including two seventeen year old girls who looked like gazelles, and I'm a moral failure. I'm pathetic trash.

Still, the day winds on.

The day consists of rain drops falling from a leaden sky, and the newsholos talking of nail bombs. I don't understand the world. I realize I've been lied to. I realize Clan Cave Wolf is just a stalking horse in a sense for Atlantis; that Genny's life is the construction of a national hero. But nobody's in charge. It's just, like, a year passes, and then a submarine base, meaning, so to speak, four submarines chained together next to two scuttled aircraft carriers, almost a thousand people, 400 breeding pairs or whatnot, finally sees open water again, or, as they say, open water that they haven't been pumping out through fission reactors, a hole in the ice, like swiss cheese, stocked with whales and called the Whale Research Centre.

Where do I know such terminology? Why do I have access to all the wires and all the holos and continual streaming bookmarked content. Only because I'm a media junior. With my battered forty-three year old face, I once seduced a seventeen year old into my bed and splattered my sperm into her. It was consolation for a life behind cameras and within the headquarters of AA4, looking out endlessly into endless rain. I had grown up with yeast on my hands and the smell of cow dung, but finally everything had given way to the deliberate release of greenhouse gases, the glacier accelerated, magnified, global induced warming. Here is Fenworld.

I am recording my thoughts because scop'd up or not, there's no way but forward, the Lamborghini set on second emergency gear and minimum revolutions per minute still trundling us along at the 5000 word/day clip. Novels like this are invariably poor, but then, hey, it's turning into memoir rather novel isn't it. This isn't fake at all, is it. It really is 2471, and I really am writing in a media tower awaiting the barbarians and seeing only ghosts. The spirit creatures are real after all, and GAIA's police force, MAMMON, the black technical, black Toyota trucks with machine guns mounted on the flat bed, were militarized, equipped with flame throwers, and sent south in an absurd war against an enemy that couldn't get north of the pyramids anyway. Any sort of snow is lethal to the PAPERTHIN.

Maybe that was the missing link. You had to think that actually MAMMON was the Gaia Cadre's true act of brilliance, a military force that believed itself to be fighting the people, and in turn only patsies for Atlantica's seizure of power. Atlantica established itself as a revolutionary movement and in this way eradicated their enemy before the enemy even knew it was the enemy. MAMMON had been suborned before it knew of its own existence. They were "bad guys;" Gaia was the maquis good-guys, and then before you knew it, the cell phones towers and media broadcast antenna were all back and running again. Theory of voice to head. Gaia as deliberate construction.

I don't know. It sounds like crazed conspiracy theory too in a way. I'm more or less accepting Gaia is actually the broad faced movement. Masculine control of the universe is discredited. When we have 'male-dominated' societies, we have war. That is inevitable. Gaia is the way to peace; society and life and humanity dominated by female shamans and prophets. We need girls in bird feathers singing to us haunting melodies about our ancestral history, our long trek over the ice. For we will survive. We will live to see another day. That is humanity. In the end, we will live even if it's a matter of splicing our DNA to bacteria and cockroaches and putting every nuclear reactor in the world on permanent fizzle. We will remove all shielding and shoot out hard radiation at maximum output, because the heat and gamma rays all contribute to melting the ice. Direct microwave to frozen dihydrogen monoxide. Melt.

So, I think you're following along. This is all high writing. I'm scop'd up. I'm caffeinated and nicotined out of my coherent thought process. But we are covering amazing amounts of territory aren't we. It's going to be 20000 words by end of day, and that predicts this work will be finished way before I ever enter the facility. There's that much reprieve, and Schrodinger's gun is a self-imposed sort of thing. What I mean to say is that it is self-inflicted. You'll want it in the end. It's coming. But okay, whine, snort, remove; relentless creativity. The artistic model.

[3 September 2471]

I've promised to write more about the third battle of which the G legend is founded, Paris Bas, and there's heaps of territory just as there's heaps of territory about any number of items. We haven't met the Azalians in full yet, just understand their influence. We don't know for absolutely certain if the Azalian theory that Genny worked the casinos and nightclubs of Manhattan has any bearing in truth (although it is clear that Manhattan is a Mining District; it certainly didn't survive Ice). While there's immensities in the tiniest grain of sand or a world in the eye of a fly, writing can't be composed of lists of ingredients to make cupcakes or beef stew. In fact, the modern trend is towards greater and greater hyperactivity, and this crazed, manic, manipulated, highout screed completely out of taste to the distinguished or elder reader may yet be to the Ritalin-addicted teenager an example of future style. We don't know for certain.

Rather than jump back into discussion of war, as horrifying as the sight of a half torso burnt and blasted and with its intestines hanging out crawling across scuffed blackened ice and still carrying its plasma rifle, possibly the reader wants to know most of all, okay then Mr. Disadvantaged Gender, Mr. Masculinist Movement: what of sex? Have you had a good sex life?

The answer is complicated. The recessive or defeated gender finds it hard to love its captor. Yes, in a sense, I won't contradict or complain at all: I do not nor did not love G. How could I when as a boy child, my buttocks were inspected by the tribal elders who laughingly called this a form of fortune telling. Now that women are in control, they widely believe that staring at male buttocks allows them to see the future. I find this theory hard to swallow, but, what am I going to do, organize all men everywhere in an anti-butt staring movement? Design a logo with a circle and a diagonal through it, SAY NO TO BUTT-GAZING? Nobody knows why the women invented this practice. It's revenge for 15000 years of men staring at breasts. Or, women have always found the male buttocks to be the one part of the anatomy they actually enjoy looking at, but have more or less managed to hide this fact from men for eternities such that a man watching a football game is watching the aggressive passing offense but the women watching are staring at buttocks.

I lost my virginity at age 19 whilst in the college years at one of the underground ice campuses to the 'standard' GAIA type, the coffee-skinned blonde-haired look that is said to be 'typical GAIA,' although, you know, GEIST is coffee-skinned wide-eyed boy with black hair if it has a 'typical Swashbuckler.' Those wanderers and whimsical travelers despite no connection to any sort of prior earth movement nevertheless demonstrate genetics of some kind of tribal archipelago mixture, Basic, Indian, Indonesian, Turkish, Russian, Baltic, everything. It has no pattern whatsoever, or at least, nobody really does anymore because every combination is found somewhere, there's a green eyed black haired beauty and a red haired black-skinned monster-face and a white skinned pink-mohawked felinesque average-looker, the words exist for every single possible combination. Yet this makes situations more dangerous than ever, for GAIA and GEIST can exist in the same community. There's a GEIST underground here in Atlantica; at GEIST headquarters in New Bombay quite possibly fervent adherents to the GAIA and hence Atlantis movement exist. The best situations are when some underground surfaces and through retention of radio have already elected a formal affiliation; even before physical contact they know which inclination they prefer.

My sex life begins with the 19.5 year old coffee-skinned blonde who is searching for male virgins to pop (the terminology is weak; some boys claim to be virgins perpetually), and then precedes I guess to the highlight of my sloe-eyed chasing days when a girl had sexual intercourse with my big toe, and another girl licked my behind, and a girl performed a somersault on my sceptre. I guess this is family writing in a sense; I'll need to restrain the impulse to provide full details, but naturally an AA4 Media Specialist does not suffer for lack of access to the sexual undertone of things. I have in fact, seduced people and walked away. Scores. Not every women is able to take advantage of her privileged status and not every male is a total moron with low IEQ. I can't forget the weird autistic boy who kept insisting, 'it's Emotional Quotient, it's Emotional Quotient,' a completely quantitative statistic to him, but, well, a lifetime in the media corp will come up with plenty of odd personalities stocked away in the strangest places.

What do I sing about, as sheets of rain fall from the skies and the gentle pitter patter of the water drops hitting the ground sounds like a radio station set to white noise? I've tumbled with the best. I've kept my place as a middle-grounder in AA4. There's even an anti-AA4 tendency, a set of ideas claiming that we are the center of global evil. Every single type of theory exists, and every affiliation or group identity that can exist, does. GAIA's biggest reform is the GEIA heresy, a gentler form of female suppression or a movement that allows men to occupy the higher position in missionary position, as the joke goes, or in other words strives for the equality that thousand of years have shown is patently impossible. GEIST's tendencies were originally founded on the GYIST tradition, Gy the First Gypsy, whose dramatic sabre flourish ended the tendencies towards introverted market exchange and built the way for whimsical exploration of the entire world surface. GYIST explored the surface of the world and through the dynamics of ocean currents expanded far more quickly than land-bound GAIA. GEIST exploited the complete knowledge of the world to construct its first at-sea mining platform, and these today remain the only areas of the world in which GAIA intrusion is absolutely curtailed... or almost so.

I've been in one. It was years ago. I had completed my first eight year gig at AA4 and took a life sabbatical, a reform obviously stemming from GEIST's wanderJahr traditions, and obviously recognized by Atlantis Central as actually in the end offering significant advantage to the institutions of Gaia itself. Hard Gaia in its strongest form prohibited any sort of wandering; that is not the ethos of Gaia it is the ethos of Geist, but once when the reform was adopted it became clear on a subliminal level why things were just prettier that way. Pretty clever, huh.

Gaia allowed you to take a sabbatical because then you saw the world yourself and became more inclined to understand the opposition philosophy's way of thinking. My travels actually did take me to the platform whose name I have down in notes somewhere but now escapes me; I don't bother looking it up because content and output is more important than detail, even if I'll rue this all later when I'm off the scop and caffeine. It was a major one. Absolutely haram to women. But I skiffed over to enjoy my prerogatives as a man, and what do I have to hide? Yeah, it's slavery of women. The women there are being completely lied to about the nature of the world.

It's the second way to see G-d, isn't it? Who else can argue? At the bottom of a foxhole as a 155mm lands meters away, you find G-D, you just enter awe. The other way is the GEIST abomination, the target of AA7's 24/7 coverage, the repeated fatwas issued against the sex-slavery of woman. Heaps of Middles, heaps of Basics not taught letters, not taught anything but obedience, feet bound from childhood, a stuttering walk, and a giggling servile manner. Years ago I would not have dared to confess it, but here I do; an old man with nothing to lose, and who will find death a release. Entering one for the first time, I admit, I was terrified, but suddenly a giggling sloe-eyed girl stuttered forward, took me by the hand, and seated on a golden throne, I was mounted by an entire tag team of giggling girls who took their pleasure and then jumped off, covering their mouth with their hands in gentle embarrassment and allowing the next one to take her place. They were trained for this.

This was the first time in my life a girl had intercourse with my big toe, and another turned somersaults around me with her lips clamped around the sceptre, and yet another was visibly trembling with desire with moisture running down her thigh and she yearned for a physical round with me. Yes, yes, this is public writing, family friendly I can't use quite as many of the terminologies as would be necessary, but you understand the issue; you understand why many GAIANs would rather terminate this part of Movement GEIST even if physical destruction of Atlantis would ensue nonetheless.

Yes, so to speak, these girls are slaves. There's a self-perpetuating factor to this situation as well, as the uneducated, unlettered girls eventually generate another generation to serve as an unending cycle of playthings for men. AA7 militates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to expose this network of facilities and remind all free cities that if Movement GEIST wins, it will place many, many women in these 'drilling facilities.' This institution, above all, energizes the GAIA free forces. There's not even any need to independently organize military units; the media AA7 alone by itself reminds free citizens of the independent need for women to organize themselves and commando away the moral atrocity of uneducated women.

[4 September 2471]

Self-loathing wakes me up, just as certainly as the rains that fells yesterday beaded on sheets of plastic and polyurethane, the signature material of a scavenger society, the gift of the ancients to the strugglers who survive some unknown hundreds of years in the future. It's said it was the last action of pre-glacial man, mass production of sheets of polyurethane tarpaulins, the single most useful product made by a dying civilization, bedding, shelter, clothing, heat source and signaling device, the mathematically perfect last product of Homo sapiens ante crystalliam. I'm driven to self-loathing and hatred and a desire for personality death only because, of course, it sinks in; dozens of years in visual media have completely destroyed my capability to work with the textual element. This is scopo- and caffeine- and nicotine-induced mania; this is text flowing out as fast as physically possible but really shameful stuff, quantitative, and nerdboy in its imaginations. Everyone's met one, the jerky Aspie's, the XY condition, obsessively logical where feeling is called for; numerical when sentiment is the truth of the human condition. The tribunals with which Gaia examines cases of male sexism often permit that exit point of the medical diagnosis of Aspie's; their only regret is that before the ice the condition was known but not recognized for what it was. It barely raised an eyebrow.

I'm seated at a desk in front of a clear white translucent computer, the translucent fad once again starting up as it rotates in every seven years or so like a cicada, atop a white translucent desk, amid walls of white plastic, and seeing out the clear window to a city that stirs to life again after a rain storm of the 33 degree north parallel, not quite tropical, not even subtropical, but what we have to term a temperate climate zone, salt in the air, the river Effluvius flowing through the city, the media towers with their vast arrays and dishes blinking red obstacle strobes against the occasional aerobot. Flight remains retarded compared to the ancient days; its consumption of methane is generally not considered an efficient use of resources as every spare hydrocarbon has to be husbanded between either plasteel or for combustion. It is said however that new untapped reservoirs of energy are being located and they offer the double bonus: they are sources of energy, and after they are burned, they add to the greenhouse effect, they are helping to rewarm the earth.

All of this may be the truth. Still, I can't escape the boundary columns I've created for myself. I should have released everything to you in the proper novelistic way. I've read enough, nearly three thousand works, to understand how it's done: a series of characters, a dialogue, a description of environment. Slow down, slow down, slow down. But I can't. I can't. I'm a visual artist calling for new elements to be introduced to the unfolding tableau in real time. Chained to this desk, I'm in this moment and in then in this one, and then in this one, if you get what I mean. I can churn this stuff out at 5000 words/day because it's my skillset. It's my specialty. Nobody else possibly can spin it out that fast and for this long. We're getting closer and closer to the conclusions. But I still want to talk about self-loathing.

The situation works like this: text can't capture a pause or a re-read. For example, watch this.

[Pause.]

Okay, I just spent 10 seconds counting in my head. But that pause took you merely a half second or even less, a blink of the eye, to create. The words are coming out at light speed, and what takes a year or more to write (the typical write-length of a novel) is consumed by the reader in two or three hours. The investment of some years amounts to at most a few happy days for the line-scanner, even if that output, quantitatively, becomes rated by the masses as some low 3, the middle score, the compassionate score, the hyperlinked masses' movement to the instant rating and winner-take-all model of doing things. Excavation tomorrow will bring up a disney of some late 20c. Masterpiece, but then tomorrow show how 2055 subverted it, maybe completely re-did Snowwhite with all the girls in garters. The trends, moreover, are becoming faster and faster. The work is obsolete even before it's finished.

So I'm on Schrodinger's gun. It's ambivalent pendulum-swinging nature is the precisely the point trying to be expressed. When I look out onto this city of whites and blues, I'm fully aware that on some subliminal nature I did feel that whisper of prescience. The aesthetics of doing such like created the groundwork for the next movement, according to certain theories of the Art, but on the other hand, the firehose is just set to full spray; there's no rhyme or reason at all. Furthermore, ebook technology now offers the problem of reverse obsolescence, an issue identified as early as the 20c. Old wooden and fabric biplanes completely obsolete by 1942 were by the 1960s once again dangerous as they were completely invisible to radar. Cultures evolve their own ways of doings things, and it's difficult to understand where exactly where you are that moment. In fact the holographs have recorded a Men's Rights march down Atlantica suburban thoroughways yesterday, and the debate currently is whether the capital's response is excessive or whether Men's Equality is actually the step towards terminal GEIA, a working system, a system that will capture the loyalty of more than half its citizens. The liberals declare, ultimately, freedom for the discriminated castes inspires a new generation of this pointy-shoe wearing, elf-hat sporting Myn. I sported some synthetics and a jogging jacket yesterday on the street and was thrown some appreciative glances from a trio of schoolers. It's the media thing.

Manic drug-induced screed writing may result in what is known to be a poorly-created product, unable of rising to the true literary level but at least in another sense, there's been no wasted words. When we conclude this chapter, you're basically going to fully understand the FENWORLD, its inhabitants, its histories, and its affinity organizations. FENWORLD, as you have been informed multiple times, is divided into two competing groups, the Gaia Hypothesis-believing New Atlantis with its capital of Atlantica and its second city of Azal and the opposition Movement GEIST which is either a self-organizing resistance or a deliberate creation of fanatic cadres based on the ideas of trade, 0.5% tithe to the community, and whimsy in physical movement across the planet. GEIST travels in skiffs, searches out new markets and new excavation zones, and debates within itself that which is permitted and that which is abominable. Its greatest sin of its own, according to Atlantica, is that it maintains no-go zones for females, 'Offshore Drilling Platforms,' which are actually houses of pleasure for the GEIST loyalists and Gaia betrayers, men. In these communities entire generations of women are brought up for the pleasure of men and to serve in turn as cleaners and laborers so that the GEIST traders have a zone of recreation and refreshment. I have visited these pleasure palaces; I can report they are dressed in brocades of crimson velvet and silk; they are decorated in all the rich fabrics and unique pre-ice items of a wealthier and more optimistic world.

At present as we speak, a Flotilla of GEIST refugees is nearing Atlantica. Declared through protocol to be a humanitarian evacuation, in truth as everyone knows it is a retaliatory strike force for the destruction of Paris Bas, which was genesised by Atlantica military some four years ago, November 2067. The story has already been alluded to but it is important to now re-represent the story in proper context and now that its significance is understood. Unfortunately, this turns the story of Genny into her early days, her breakout battle, and then finally her closing act, but narrative has to be slaved to information-proximity. Unfortunately that is her story: she's had three defining moments, and then only in historical context can we delve into her South American raids, her attempt to eliminate the iceraiders once and for all, and the various periods of her popularity or obscurity and when she was in or out of favor with Atlantica Central. She hasn't always been the favored daughter of Atlantica; of course her career saw ups and downs. But Paris Bas goes does in history, Paris Bas is definitional to who we are today.

The first comment about the Paris situation is that it contained the elements of mysticism way before anything had occurred. For some obscure reason, even as the ice caps began to retreat north of Britannica, south of Rio de Janeiro, a "finger" or "peninsula" of ice for some odd reason maintained itself east of the former UK islands and extended almost like an arrow directly over the City of Paris itself. There was no logical reason for this to happen and climate scientists were completely at a loss. Paris, Muscovy, Kiev, Manhattan Mining District, D.C., GCANS: all the main tunnel cities were known to have ridden out the glaciation period underground, with shielded nuclear reactors providing water, power, light, and most importantly heat; two hundred years of heat that ensured survival of the human race on some level even if compromises and perversions had to be accepted. Everyone knows this story. Everyone knows there were "four submarines and a sunken cargo ship" survival posts in dozens of places around the world, some still under pack ice. But, for whatever reason, almost as if G-d himself were trying to send a message, Paris would be last to unfold. It would be the largest major human population center that remained cut-off from the rest of the world, even two kilometers of ice above it, and a relief tunnel years away from completion. But, long-distance radio was established finally about thirty years ago, which generated a flurry of activity, theory, and societal change above the ground. Many commented that they felt the inhabitants had turned " _weird,"_ but weirdness isn't a crime per se, and equally large number of individuals believe that there was nothing unusual at all in the Paris transmissions and that any society of individuals being cut off from the outside world for two hundred years would undergo unique and irreversible changes. " _You're seeing things,"_ said the Francophiles; furthermore, they maintained, French culture has always been misread by the English-speaking or even other Romance-language speaking world. It's unique; it's filled with a sense of historical mission; Napoleon Bonaparte is a transcendental historical figure who defies simplistic analysis or dismissal.

For whatever reason or ideology or set of circumstances, even as the ice began to diminish, generally the sentiment that began to form across that 800 bits per second radio link, that simplistic cord of 0s and 1s, was that Paris was going to be the major addition to GEIST sentiment. In fact, there is considerable evidence that GEIST's original doctrine was Gypsy-ism or Gypsism, hence GYIST, and that its formal doctrine was actually established by Paris into Movement GEIST through private transmissions carefully protected from the Gaia inclination's notice because Gaia was the ultimate target. This theory can't be absolutely accepted as basic truth, as Gaia technology was fairly well advanced at the time and it's unclear an iced over city could have hidden a superior communications method from Atlantica central nor is it easy to establish that a cut-off city can truly influence hundreds of millions of people all over the world through what would have to be, in the last analysis, esoteric or spiritual ways. We do know that Commander G's last transmissions included her ostensible claim to have found the final abomination but once again, as everyone knows, that issue is immensely in dispute with at least four or five schools of thought about the nature of the III Corps' exploration and attack. In any case, we get ahead of ourselves.

By the late 2450s or so, generally it was agreed that Paris Bas was going to become the focal point of some kind of anti-Atlantica resistance and the authorization was made for III Corps to tunnel down to the city and investigate the situation that had ensued with a remit to terminate the enemy doctrine with prejudice if the circumstances demanded it. For this task Central command could only turn to its most storied and illustrious commander, G of the Clan Cave Bear, heroine leader of the III Armored, and the mission was launched from Britannica soil itself, through the use of Channel cannons, and with a no-expenses barred understanding, fully accompanied by research scientists and embedded media.

L'attaque a commencé sur une fin de matinée Octobre en 2467 avec la mise à feu d'armes à feu de la Manche qui a tiré une «coquille» forme oblongue résistant aux chocs calcium imprégné à travers les eaux où les quais qui avaient lancé des invasions dans l'histoire pourrissaient, bois dans l'eau, le sol et neige. De l'intensité de la résistance qui nous a rencontré, il était évident que l'ennemi connaissait notre intention. Milice ordinaire ou les combattants de personnes armées de fusils de boulons simples fixées harceler le feu sur nous, et à travers les rigoles et les collines laissées par le retrait des glaciers nous ont riposté avec des tirs de mortier et d'artillerie lourde laser. Un sur cent de nos coquilles d'assaut débarquèrent maladroitement, pris entre la glace et de la terre, par exemple, et les habitants, malgré toute la protection science moderne pourrait fournir étaient morts par choc de commotion cérébrale. Ensuite, la proche force blindée de GEIST a été activé, et si le combat a éclaté entre nos marcheurs quatrième génération et les réservoirs de ruban premières qui étaient la fierté du mouvement GEIST. Coques chenilles / chenilles pourraient accueillir deux rubans de coupe que tournoyé au-dessus du réservoir, à condition métaphore de la nature de l'ADN lui-même et son hélice, mais capable de frapper soudainement à la vitesse de l'électricité, et déchirer nos propres réservoirs de plasma.

Le résultat ne pourrait être contesté pas indéfiniment. Nous étions tout le troisième Armored Corps; s'agissait d'une seule division blindée GEIST. Nous avons eu les réacteurs à fission apporté le long pour alimenter nos défenses laser continu et de notre formation et soldats aguerris se sont battus férocement pour conserver un avantage moral continue sur les maquis de l'ennemi. Dans l'action blindée cataclysmique, tout le monde a lutté pour assurer la suprématie locale, la suprématie locale permettant enfilade feu pour soutenir les alliés moins bien adaptés. C'était Normandie, après quoi un périmètre de défense a été créée, puis la ligne de mars à Paris a commencé.

Après que nous ayons saisi le territoire du glacier, nous avons commencé à frapper au sud-est de Paris, sur une distance de quelque deux cents kilomètres à travers la plupart des éboulis et de la glace, la manipulation des raids continus des forces de luge origine GEIST irrégulière. Selon transmissions toutes les unités GEIST disponibles ont été activés et dirigés dans notre direction, mais avec leur manque typique de la mobilité qui pourrait signifier littéralement mois avant leur arrivée. Nous avons eu à forer vers le bas, que nous avons fait, avec en forme de bol chauffée fusion de fission dans un tunnel en traînant des fils de communication, du kérosène et du carburéacteur tuyauterie, et les liens de fibres optiques aux unités marcheur asservis et modules avatar projeté à travers lequel les médias spécialistes pourraient rester intégré avec le Corps III tout le chemin vers le bas.

La bataille de Paris Bas défie toute qualification facile. En fait, parce que j'ai été transféré à travers un lien haut débit flux de données élevé, drogué sur la scopolamine, je trouve l'histoire doit toujours avoir lieu à une suppression. Je pourrais avoir besoin de conseils. Le fait de la question est que je ne peux pas absolument déclare que la légende du monde est correcte, toutes les données étaient constamment soumis à des artefacts. Les scientifiques affirment que c'était inné de la légende, mais il a une qualité onirique, un remove comme à travers un verre sombre. J'avais erré à travers le miroir et a découvert qu'un monde télécopieur, où les fantômes sont rendus, translucide et nous avons été récupérer la plupart du temps nous-mêmes.

Je me rends compte probablement tout se résume à l'absurde. Nous sommes injectées à travers le plafond de verre du Forum des Halles, mais comme d'une scène de certains films de science-fiction du 20ème siècle, nous avons déroulé une longue corde synthétique noir, et a glissé vers le bas, pour découvrir les galeries marchandes fermées jusqu'à comme une fouille archéologique du passé. N'était-ce pas le point de la culture matérialiste du 20ème siècle sur les hauteurs? N'étions-nous pas des idéalistes vivre dans un monde de rêve et d'absorber l'information en lieu et place de l'expérience réelle? Mes pieds sont coupés en ce moment et je ne peux pas échapper le flux de données binaires moi-même, les flux d'électrons, la vie embrochée. La matrice nous considérait comme des piles seulement à être tendance, et avec la grâce d'aimer, les machines nous tend.

Je me bats pour les mots encore absolument sûr de moi. Nous descendîmes la corde; nous avons trouvé Châtelet à être exactement comme tous les écrans d'écran vidéo nous ont préparés pour; les motifs de linoléum ont été saupoudrés de poussière fine, deux siècles d'accrétion, sans vie. Pourtant, il était derrière une grille métallique de pied-dans, une télévision qui pulvérise à la vie que nous approchions de l'affichage statique noir et blanc? «Rayonnement de vos powersuits" a expliqué l'agent de débriefing. Pourtant, il a donné le ton pour la descente qui restait. C'était une descente dans notre propre conscience, comme la découverte de couches d'une ville médiévale dans le cadre du moderne; puis l'Ancien sous la médiévale. Catacombes nous étaient à découvrir, mais pas encore.

Faute de capacité majestueux à tourner mondes de mots, je me limite à la vraie et réelle. L'excavation tooks semaines. D'abord, nous descendons le centre commercial; alors l'ascenseur Réactionné nous a pris vers le parking, puis de former des lignes, puis dans les égouts, où nous nous sommes battus les créatures d'égouts, les rats, les petits monstres humanoïdes, alors toa-Zoa; les dwarfmen; les hommes-oiseaux; les elfes moins; puis la zone d'étrangeté à travers lequel des cercles et des portails et portes de transport défié notre connaissance de la réalité.

Peut-être cette frappe quelque corde subliminal: dans votre enfance, vous aviez passé d'innombrables heures à explorer ce même donjon. Il était classique. Des millions qu'il a joué. Par conséquent, ses passages sont entrés dans la noophere et retentissaient autour de la création électronique que nous appelons «la conscience humaine." Propulsé par rayonnement parasite de la nôtre, n'étaient pas là en effet quatre niveaux avant, nous avons rencontré la liche en bas. Égouts, puis les murs de pierre taillées; Majestés alors obsidienne avec les atrocités les plus sombres; puis, étrangement, une zone de jungle aztèque; enfin les murs du casting luxuriantes et richement du vrai intérieur.

Cela est d'autant déception dans un sens; encore dans un autre, en descendant les couloirs j'étais au courant de la nature de la chose truefold. Freud avait déclaré une ville continue à être construit au sommet d'une autre; En ce sens, notre conscience est un repliement et le repliement ajouté sur des couches de connaissances préalables. Était-ce le modèle de la subjectivité ce exploraient? Étions-nous "nous trouvons?" Je sais seulement que tout le monde sur la mission a réalisé qu'il était le dernier qu'ils avaient jamais prendre. Mobilesuit Propulsé cédé la place à fléchettes pistolet; puis lance-flammes ont été utilisés directement contre ce qui n'était plus humain; et même les réfugiés et les soldats de la paix ne sont pas totalement en paix, alors même que leurs propres inhabitations ont été envahis par des créatures étranges oiseaux et les œufs de ces créatures d'oiseaux ont servi de négociation pour un passage sûr à travers les couches qui étaient venus trop tôt et trop exigeant. Extérieur: le terne, incessante, banlieue inutile; à l'intérieur, un groupe de «nerds», en jouant des jeux de rôle, regarder des rediffusions Orange Road et fantasmer sur un deux-certains avec la plus brune et le blond jeune. Nous n'avons pas l'esprit de l'autre société alors; joueurs, weirders datajack, robots net. C'était la chose. Ce fut le point final. Enfin, nous avons cessé façons d'explorer d'autres conventions, et dans la pièce dans laquelle le point de la créativité s'échappa, j'étais aussi à peine ambulatoire, et la caractérisation de la mémoire à travers le film de recouvrement de la drogue.

For those who will consider the divergence into French (and a fairly inaccurate French for that matter) too far a divergence of the 25th century novel, I will summarize in short that inexpressible part of Paris Bas, resulting as it did in the death of Genevieve and the final globe-shaking act of destruction that was a necessary thing and yet not a complete triumph in the lives it cost. Genevieve set off the genesis device because after weeks of battle, tunnel after tunnel, layer after layer, she began to realize that the half-bug, half-humanoid creatures with which she fought were indeed actually human, and not that strange myth of DNA-splicing with the angelic PAPERTHIN or the "MICROTHIN" as reports have been made. In order to survive hundreds of years below the surface of the planet exposed to high-energy radiation, humanity had crossed itself not just with the blue bacteria known as "radiodurans," but in France with beetles and insects, hybrid human beings and cockroaches that would live no matter how much hard radiation was poured at them. It was abomination. Yet more deeply than that, a half-mistransmitted screen of video coverage shows what is ambiguously a laboratory of preserved white-clad scientists on the final level, beyond the insects themselves. A cadre of the scientists remained fully human even as they forced the workers and common people to cut their genes, and with their traditions and religions and prohibitions maintained control over the society itself. They were the worst monsters of all.

As Genevieve's sole confident even as I accompanied her through telepresence form, jacked into an embedded assignment with her 60 year old self plunging deeper into dangerous territory, I understood too finally that her life was the tragedy. Born into a chaos of ice and fire, she had accepted the gun yet realized too late that the gun now defined her. A hellstorm of violence, pain, suffering, sexual torment, and abuse was the life she knew, and Genevieve was the commander of that process, an individual tormented and fleeing one cycle of grievous harm after the other. There was no way out. In its quest for survival, humanity would do anything, and all that was left was the explosive cleanliness of genesis, and the crater that erupted spread hundreds of kilometers wide, a scar on the very face of France. France was dirty; France was assertive; France was a revolution in motion, and all its socialists and socialcrats spread across the surface of its free, Western-learning tendencies, yet it with all its standardized nuclear power plants and its belief in cuisine and its charming alternate way of doing things did not add up to the possibility of information hijacking and data transfer control. We were lost. We were lost in there and feared we'd never come out. Caves of Mandabar, Christopher Banks' descent; the traditions we upheld with knowing fully their name. Paris brewed up in hellstorm of crimson and red and flickering yellow fire, and the world instantly knew that the conflict had been made absolute. There would be no more intersibling bickering between generation mates who hoped for reforms of one kind of education and were willing to concede better policing in another. The society itself had grown so top heavy, so tilted that although everyone knew what was happening there wasn't much room for anyone to give way themselves. It stuttered; it sank; and then the choice had been made. Gaia Atlantica gave up the central main part of its armored strike force, but Geist lost any chance of founding a city to counter the unholy influence of its nemesis. From this point on, the warfare would be general but from the very bottom of society, its weakest and most powerless members. To that degree we have entered the conditions of the Flotilla and now await its imminent arrival.
III. Under an Uncertain Sky

5 September 2014

I feel the tingle of acid between my toes as I've applied 25% undecylenic acid to treat chronic ringworm or "waterbug," that tingling, fungal infection that's the bane of all human beings in a world that's 70% ocean and 30% wetlands, discounting of course the ice. Those patches of fungal red you can see everywhere on everyone are a reminder that we were originally a savanna species, inclined to yellow grasslands in Africa with stunted dwarf trees; that much at least is undisputed. But the fungus is everywhere; mold grows everywhere, it's a wet world.

For the past few days, as you've been following around, I've been reporting to my Class-A office space in AA4 towers overlooking the heart of Atlantica and finishing my pitch/rewrite of the FENWORLD concept, a broadband 4D sensory about the life of Genevieve, my childhood friend and the Joan of Arc of the Swamps. She was a French-blooded girl who destroyed the ultimate threat to mankind, the laboratory project Paris Bas, after a lifetime of heroism and evangelical spread of the doctrines of FemRule, the Gaia Hypothesis, Earth Mother, and New Atlantis Happy. That's where we are, you know. This calm, studied measured voice doesn't capture the fire that's raging between my toes. I've spent ten minutes hyperventilating and gasping as the acid burns away at the yeast. Yeast everywhere you know, the central infection of mankind.

I'm not ignorant of the processes that have gone on at AA4 senior echelons. From the bright-eyed youngsters who have met me to the current crop of more senior handlers shifting their eyes away, I get it that they get it that I get that they get if you get what I'm saying. The attempt to found Culture Myth is far too late. We can't write a Founding Myth. The Flotilla is said to be less than five hundred kilometers off shore and closing fast. Our aerobats can't strafe because that would be atrocity. Meanwhile in the suburbans surrounding Atlantica, there's reports of nail-bombings and the police themselves turning on the more effeminate males of the Atlantis community. It's the intrusion of GEIST dialogue; or, had you actually lived in the scheduled districts, you'd have known Gaia never held rule there anyway. The scheduled district slums have always been under male criminal rule, law of the club and fist. Nobody cares any more about poor Gaians and their daughters being sacrificed to GEIST, it's all just the chemical nail, SSRI, the legal amphetamines. So that's symptom of our condition too. Yet, the door remains open, a pleasant breeze waffs through the air, the HEPA filters are clearing out all miasmic pollution and fungal spores even despite the open window and door, and I'm drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes looking out at this beautiful wet drenched city. In the end it's our aesthetics that are copied, translucent white plastic arc shells arcing into the sky, the perfect crystalline glass verticals that are homage to pre-glacial internationalist type.

What is there to say? Acid burns and stings like madness, and I'm almost driven out of my mind, the white tissue paper of sanity trembling and tumbling in the breeze whereas insanity is every neuron firing at once, total communion with the universe, a communion with the Milky Way. Maybe I've uncovered a creativity trick: apply some mild acid to your skin as you want to scream the most unholiest of unholiest against G-d and the universe, you'll see it all. You'll write like the dickens only to be transported into somewhere that's not here. Ouch. Ouch ouch ouch. Ouch ten trillion ouches ahhh, tear-jerking pain. I mean.

In the next chapter, I'll play some literary tricks, so you're convinced that we've fully assimilated the reality culture of pre-ice. Still, I know at this moment that this third debrief or characterization is the last of FENWORLD proper. The situation is that the novel writes itself; the text you've already created defines what comes next and after the wild madcap 10000 word brain-on-fire mania, it's already pre-determined what will come. I should have given you the chronological treatment; I should have taken you from the fens to the school under ice where I received my secondary education, then through my early years at gopher at AA4 all way to where we are right now. In this one case, narcissism is the mercy. By slightly holding your mind open and then pouring in data at a maximum every-energy-module-charged velocity, I've flooded you with numbers and acronyms and MAJUSCULE proper nouns but lost in the battle the dignity and quietude of a truly reflective man. I blame the scopolamine. I blame the caffeine and nicotine, and my artificial heart pumping away at an accelerated beats-per-minute as I approach the end of my 74 years on this planet. The doctors say a year or two at most; I'm inclined to face this situation as most do, on the happy pills, choked up with glee, and watching the fungus spread over my body. They say whitlow or something is the real killer these days, tufts of white covering your body until you depart this world. It doesn't sound so appetizing. But widespread use of anti-fungals treated on walls and injected onto our food has changed the DNA patterns of Candida albans. That stuff is supercharged now, impossible to fully eradicate. You can eat it if you're starving.

With fighting on the outskirts of the city and the familiar green recycle bins of New Atlantis now sealed by direct order of the council, I have to admit that the AA4 master plan appears finally foiled. Even if I would finish this tomorrow, a statistical impossibility, we still wouldn't have enough time to get the actresses, CGI teams, the costumers, etc., completely ready for a media blast and see the 6-24 months surveys showing the impact of our work with the Flotilla skiffs drawing ever so close. In fact, I'm inclined to believe it's going to be a matter of days rather than weeks before we start seeing the gunfire in the streets. The people are going to preemptively rise up even before the flotilla lands, and then we'll see point by point the battle erupt in its obviously self-evidently destined way.

Seeing as this is the final debrief, the third chapter, and the last opportunity to scan download all the nooks and crannies of FENWORLD, in a way I'm liberated to just treat subjects according to their maximal last issue of importance. After this, probably the day after tomorrow, I'll demonstrate some literary tricks of the McEwan variety so that you know all artistic progress hasn't been loss or is it so that the future world as it is will understand how much we knew. I don't know. One can't ask a creative to justify his acts of creativity for they are intrinsic to the person himself. Atlantica must fall but its animating thesis is correct: women should rule, culture should flourish, and 'whimsical scavenge society' clearly represents a degeneration and backslide. Yet, on their slowly churning recovered oil-tankers and icebreakers, the Flotilla GEIST offers their own sets of loss and grief, and they are animated as well by their own women, however unspoken this truth may be. The weird thing is that gender sexuality is the strangest force of all, and in the filthiest brothels of New Bombay you will find a princess of royalty and in the most elevated circles of Channel IV Atlantica social dinners there you can discover monsters and decrepitude too. Nothing ever changes. The world travels endlessly through its circles and imaginations, its wanderings.

The big, big, large, undisclosed topic is Azal, our Second City and unpredicted by the prophet Cantare. The situation perhaps had much to do with the unique geography of that area, the bay with its separate lobes, and the nature of the city as haven to sexual minorities and the only district of its kind majority of Asiatique blood, and being as it were the City on the Hill to so many refugees in the end days, a new Shanghailand, a refuge.

The City of Azal is the second major city of New Atlantis, a survivor from the latter days, remarkable for the technique it used to survive. Hundreds of people groupings, so to speak, attempted to ride out the ice and in a sense, exactly hundreds of different methods were tried. There were the gene splices, the ice farmers, the fission-to-light evangelists. We know of several governments that deliberately sank naval ships to ocean trenches and attempted to heat and light their surroundings until the end of time. One such recovery, an almost certainly French project JULESVERNE, has been recovered after ignoring radio hails and the habitation dome, almost completely spotless, without dirt, presents one of the strangest mysteries of all: absolutely no sign of human presence. We are absolutely sure several hundred scientists and military personnel entered dome JULESVERNE but there is absolutely no sign whatsoever of them and no clue as to their eventual fate. Speculation runs rampant: a dimensional rift? PAPERTHIN attack? mass suicide pact? But none can explain what happened.

Azal's unique method, completely unplanned, a self-organized phenomenon is that they somehow learned how to induce autism in their children and have created an entirely new society based on universal Asperger's syndrome. The condition, which was once thought a learning disorder, and in any case remains according to conventional wisdom a sort of predominately male psycholearning problem, manifests itself in what is obviously to the general population a series of stereotypical behaviors including obsession with logic, "rationalistic" thinking, and unawareness of what other people are feeling or what they themselves ought to tone down in a pattern of stereotypical behavior and thinking patterns. You've met one, surely. The autistic savant can calculate multiplication of two seventeen digits numbers in their hand but can't tell you why a thin brown-haired soccer player might be a better date to the prom that a tremendously obese Mayor's daughter. Their intelligence, for it is a form of human intelligence of course, displays tremendous capability in one highly specific mode of thinking but it comes at the cost of all the other varieties of human intelligence including the famed EQ, musical thinking, vocabulary variety, etc. That is Azal and its hyper-intellectual culture which survived Ice through a rigid series of proscriptions and as inevitable those type of monocultural societies an absolute intolerance of outsiders. The xenophobia remains; Azalians today as part of Gaia are a small and clannish minority. They do not mix with Movement GEIST but of course they see their host culture as merely the lesser of multiple evils.

Azalia the movement and the city of Azal are not universally beloved in turn by Gaia or New Atlantis at large. While the Azalians are quite good at electronics, many people agree they must accept a junior role in relation to society because the same autism that permits them such advances also makes them entirely vulnerable to ordinary human beings. An Azalian might be perfectly capable of generating precise capital bonds that maximize long-term yield to the issuer, but if you put him on the street and had him negotiate the mere purchase of some pirated mirror discs, he would quite possibly be convinced to part with his entire bank account. The syndrome is weird, and not every Azalian is helpless in this respect, but Azal could never stand alone without New Atlantis Armored Corps as its protection. Azal even more so than the Gaia Hypothesis and Movement GEIST is a state of mind and recognizable even at the far ends of the earth. Two Azalians together are instantly communicative and enthusiastic, whereas when in a crowd of regular Gaians they tend to be insular and remote. Azal beckons but it also pushes away. Azal is a city of red brick and arabesques, and it knows its own fate to fall after the Fall of Atlantis.

About this topic actually little should be written. Why fill a text with images of destruction in loss, a mother weeping for her baby lost to high calibre artillery shells is a universal image of history and gains nothing from the constant repetition. We know Azal will fall; we will have to characterize the details of that fall in time, but the city of Azal with its hills, its tower, its red brick and barbed wire, and its profound culture of human development through induced autism, no drugs, no religions, no authoritarian government based on slavery, and certainly no mixing of DNA, merely stands for itself in the way that it is. I went to an Azal school, or at least one with many Azalians and I'm aware of its profoundities and its limitations. Maybe there are in some sense a special people, and I'm sure millions will rue its loss. But I can't just talk about destruction endlessly here. We know the substructure of the substructure, Matryoshka doll, has already been proven long ago and when the quanta are torn apart, there will be colors, and when the colors are torn apart, we're back to numbers. Heisenberg indeterminacy exists from the bottom to the top, and both the bottom and the top are exactly the same thing. Gunfire falling onto redbrick; it makes little difference in the end.

We're at, in a sense, quadruple three's here. This is section three, my remit is to tie up all odds and ends and take the reviewer on a magic carpet tour, and while the urgency of 'broad-spectrum' appeal is now lost, obviously nobody can get this far and not have a dozen unanswered questions about the way things are. Although nothing remaining to talk about carries the significance of the broad and fundamental topics discussed before, there's still large and vast areas of experience that demand explanation, and for some, indeed, the description has only barely begun.

Left unsaid so far: a visit to the three basic remnant students and a revisit to the Pyramids as promised. But before these topics, in terms of strict chronology I've avoided so far discussing my career in media. You already know I'm a junior media operative, an Atlantica Activision IV manager with enough pull to have drawn this final assignment. I'm told that some people actually my forty-odd year career a success, which I think is a bit of an exaggeration but certainly not everyone manages to hold down almost forty years in industry. In fact, media is widely known to be an extremely cruel and sadistic world in which to operate, and if the lights have always turned on and I've always generally running water, I might be permitted to make a few comments on this enclosed world and elaborate on AA4 and the glittering white media towers.

I think, what it really comes down to, is that somebody in the decision-making circles wanted to run a clanner, and an orphan to boot, and so in that sense I've had the protection of a powerful patron. There were all these moments in my media career when I seemed just about to approach disaster and then some forces collided, a compromise was reached, and I escape disaster only through what had to be the intervention of superior powers. It might not be too farcical to speculate why. Ultimately every human being has their little foible, and I suppose I was somebody's whose name I'll never learn and whose face I'll never see but who even in these end days ran one last project of their own. Media's ruthless. It's true I slept with two seventeen year olds but that's a notch less than some monsters in the sector, and I'm not sure I'm covered with green bottle flies and stink to the high heavens yet, although there are those that feel that way. I've been lucky. I have no complaints. Yet my weird self-destructive streak is something that can't be eradicated, and I can intellectualize that death is a release even as the world trudges on without too much additional sentiment or care for the situation that exists.

I'm ashamed of myself. It's the emotional tenor of our times. The middle-aged women in particular it is said are vulnerable to 'the apology condition,' a psychosomatic fugue state where they sit there apologizing seventeen hours a day as the crush of the world's thoughts come to feel a personal and individualistic state. Many are sympathetic. The specific issue is that Gaia culture, our post-apocalyptic women dominated society is a reaction to thousands of years of male domination that led to a cycle of war and violence and eventually mutual assured destruction that finally nearly ended the human race. But although the ice has begun to recede, it's clear that nothing has changed. We've merely taken a brief break from our hostilities of ice and knife and fang, and soon it will indeed all collapse in a final and dramatic meltdown with all civilized norms smashed into a nothingness state. How do I describe this? Psychoillnesses are dramatically on the increase societywise. The 'apology condition' consists of otherwise gentle and pleasant women becoming almost vegetables as they are subject to a relentless pressure from the outside world and the refugees from all points of the globe converge on Atlantica promising to tear down its structures. Deviances and subverted values keep popping up requiring new vocabularies and support structures to manage. There's airlessness and hopelessness all over.

To a degree, the degeneration is itself beautiful, which I might think is not a subversive statement in itself. For example, it has become the fashion among Atlantic youth to dress in funereal clothes and live in reconstructed Victorian mansions. The habit is called 'Neo Victorianism,' because just before the ice there was a huge Victorian upswing and then appeared all over, and took in half the world. What would occur is that a group of friends who join this aesthetic inclination will band together and sharing their money rent out a Victorian reconstruction and live solely in the 19th century, no electricity and no media broadcasts. People call it phony, enjoy mocking it, but it's a signal of widespread sentiment and it brings happiness to its practitioners without the need for neo-religion or cult practice. I'm told in fact that there is considerable peace within the interactions defined by this code and I would lie if I confessed myself to have been entirely immune to its charms when I was young.

Does this bring us earlier than expected then to my meeting with the Basics? Yes, I suppose the moment has arrived. What had occurred (I was in my thirties) was after a major set of news reporting assignments abroad and then my spell with GEIST, I found myself summoned back to Atlantica to intern yet again and see what new media had evolved and if I had myself taken on new talents or experienced some growth or development as a professional and human being. Walking the less-populated streets of Atlantica (among other things, Gaia typically has far-less populated cities than Geist), I found myself struck by how sun rays would reflect off high located mirrors, and the way aerobots would reflect off mirrored skyscrapers, climbing in one polygonal plane or arcing sideways in another. That was the beauty of the rain-swept city, and if Third World poverty, noise, and pollution were absent, in the developed world you were able to hear yourself think; people respected distance. I had relocated a certain sentiment of childhood, secondary school deep within the ice, and everyone in light blue uniform, without material resources, but assured of their moral compass and the rightness of the cause. There could be little room for error because there was little luxury or room for slack in anyone's case. If individuals at the school deep within the ice still were slipping down the slope of moral decay, pot use, graffiti, mobile pornography, nevertheless we aspired to contribute to the larger society and in that sense were considered on our way to earning the rights of adulthood. Desire and beauty were set off by the necessity of duty and hardship. A flash of an eye, an aerobot zooming through endless blue: who will record these things for the useless eternities.

AA4 offered me an internship, salary 011 level (2.7 million credits a year, was it?), and I accepted the job, bringing me back to Atlantica central, and in the space of some weeks before work duties began in earnest, I investigated rumors of the presence of Basics who are, as everyone knows, the only national group that elected to freely die out wanting no part of either the iced-over or post-ice world. As a matter of fact, there are theories that Basic culture is actually a myth; that there was no such race or group, and that we are seeing, when we see those extremely Basics today, a laboratory creation or a deliberate media construction. I disagree however; I've met some. Three in fact on that internship summer preceding reentry to AA4, who were university students and of course to some tiny degree a little averse to my older age (I was 33), but didn't make me endlessly feel conscious of it all things considered. The Basics consisted of two boys and one girl: Godwin, Treeton, and Highbridge, who were university students at Atlantica and self-aware that they were unusual in background but letting me attach myself to them to satisfy my curiosities so long as I did so in a non-oppressive way. Well, what do I have to report. They were not immensely financially well-off, but they had a wistful air as if knowing how to model themselves such that we could all take a lesson, yet completely aware that it wasn't to be. Of the three, I think Highbridge, the girl, liked me flat out, while Treeton took who I was with a grain of salt. Godwin of the three probably didn't seek out my presence but accepted I was behaving within the norms of society. I spent probably just a matter of a few weeks with them—they were off to school, I was off to my job—but I felt that this here was a sort of memory worth making; to understand things from their perspective and not flood them with the two-fold nature of world crisis that kept dominating my view.

Was is just the airy, slightly sad view of things that I wanted to suck out? I don't think so. The nature of the thing was the preservation of eccentricity that was kept entirely within, such that the outside personality (other people) only got the pleasantness of social discourse and interaction but the internal odd self was wholly maintained. Highbridge was odd: she was the kind of girl who took up some eccentric personal cult and kept it completely compartmentalized while dealing with the economic realities of a young adult just starting out. Treeton subscribed to the typical array of recycling, non-bleached hemp clothing and paper, less environmental impact, and quiet agreement with feminine society. He was a "grass-eater," so to speak, not a "macho." Godwin had the streak of a street tumbler if it came down to it, but he had accepted his economic disadvantage without any tendency to secretly hope he'd subvert the system. So that was, all in all, my little foray with the Basics, who at last count number only in the thousands and continue to show extremely low rates of marriage and childbearing.

Since this is probably it in summary of the movement, I guess I'm obligated to at least outline its tenets: minimalism, simplicity, ceasing of childbearing, and environmentalist concern. Highbridge was slightly eccentric and droll, inclined to minor cults of her own, and physically fit as Basics famously always were. Treeton wore muted colors, gentle 'middle-aged man' clothing, family man clothing although I think he in turn never married or had a child. Godwin was the closest to what non-Basic society considered "normal," liking baseball and motorbikes, but even he was becoming slowly drawn into lack of affect and personality. They had accelerated beyond all hope of return the drawdown of their presence on this earth, and the only tragedy is that their unique artforms and culture were never quite completely successfully duplicated, although many attempted; many indeed have attempted through the years.

6 September 2071

Increasingly, in Atlantic society, the tendency has grown to join one or another micro-society, affinity group, aesthetic study organization, or subculture. I went to preliminary medical screening today and as the rich plastic walls and blonde-wood surfaced interiors, the spot lighting and tasteful skylights gave way to a high wealth interior, the thought occurred to me that despite the impending doom (newsholographs reporting early landings of Flotilla up and down the coast), perhaps things weren't entirely all for vain, even if we can see no way out of the situation at present. Complaints of the gender equalitists do not go entirely unheard, with the specific issues of male catamites, dress restrictions on men, men always in tight boy-shorts by weight of custom, and severe and unrelenting sexual harassment of men representing ideals that society strives for whatever the ensuing total destruction of humanity will look like. All that plastic surgery, you know; it creates unrealistic ideas of the male body and then has a sort of snowballing effect as previously normal physiques become 'denormalized,' a sort of 'arms race' of beauty that dominates male conscious thought.

The subcultures, moreover, were and always will be the refuge of the gentle spirit. Of the thousands of microcults, possibly, I've dallied in an odd handful, and you can't declare society completely worthless when there's a behavior subgroup somewhere somehow that matches your own personality matrix and represents a community of sharing and self-help that finds some kind of middle ground between aggressive utopianism and Thursday night live music hour at the cafe. The Neo Victorians never completely appealed to me—I saw too many men dressed up in frock coats and smoking jackets to slide too easily into their circles—but then on the other hand, the "cult of the AMC Gremlin drift racer" or the "cult of the obscure 1970s cinematics" were in their own time fairly harmless things, liable to include a range of personalities and class backgrounds and being a possible argument against the 'bowling alone' phenomenon that social critics were making as early as the 20th century. We are a continuation of pre-ice society and we are a rebellion against it. Our values stem from a multiplicity of pre-ice cultures and practices and our strength is in our diversity. Yet entirely at the same time the gunfire is already beginning on Atlantica outputs and all our prescience also lets us know exactly how the battle will unfold. The really key dynamic is how our own police and militia forces as responding to societal change and the eruption of anarchic and destructive forces as flotilla draws near.

MAMMON's fate perhaps offers the greatest and most dramatic set of intersecting forces. According to fringe Edinboro theory, MAMMON was the first deliberately constructed 'enemy to rebel against to launch the actual movement' force in history. Fringe Edinboro declares that some especially devious and anthrophobic elements of Gaia created a radio-equipped, black Toyota pick-up truck and flat-bed mounted machine gun 'CorpSec' that defined very very early post-ice time and created a convenient enemy against which all the female-led groupings that were reassembling could use as a convenient enemy. Picking up orphans and order-obsessed rifle-carriers, some unknown Gaia element (according to Edinboro) launched MAMMON and then let them be overwhelmed by a liberationary, revolutionary counter-movement within the communities that then became what we know as Atlantica today. This theory is at best discounted, yet in a sign of the increasing disorder mounting day by day, Mammon Technicals have been reactivated despite their losses in the first great birthing days and then against Paperwhite, and then finally in whatever uses they have been put to for the past few decades. It's said it's a bad sign when your final, final defensive force has to be activated, and so the ersatz army, the subterritorial territorials, the guard beneath the national guard has been activated and in reports streaming in from across the landscape, there are last-ditch fringe groupings of bearded Mammon flak teams imposing martial law on the communities and adding just one element to the chaos of extremist Hindu, New Age, and Orange Alert fight teams that are rapid-firing flechette at each other in shopping malls and creating the once absurd scene of crowd-control directives "remain calm" even as blood flows in rivulets down shopping mall tiles and robotic surgeons are stitching away at a torso at emergency speed even as further shards ricochet off the pillars and sidewalls. Our greatest fears and demonic imaginings have come true, and insanity is the name of the day.

Gaia and Geist exist in every human heart. The line between the feminine and the masculine never establishes itself in a pure form, and our Christian-Muslim-Buddhist-Hindu-New Age syncretism spawns a new temple-shrine-church by the seeming hour with belief communities lasting at times just long enough for a property dispute to be settled by force and the aerobots now equipped with nail guns rather than tear gas and the criminals becoming deputized by scramble teams whose sole remit is at times the maintenance of lines of communication or transport across the swampland continent. Our satellites in the sky are becoming further and further information about the composition of the Geist flotilla and we know now its core production manifests.

I'm tempted, to some degree, just to end the description here. I've seen data manifests and they're quite long and technical, full of microinformation about whether a slight preponderance of sulfurics and salts will allow the Geist fleet to immediately manufacture self-replicating proteins from the get-go, or whether we're going to see an extremely straight-forward clash of steel and methane in the typical pattern of energy warfare. My obligation is still to discuss the Azal defense perimeters and I haven't fully debriefed on my spell with Geist, including a direction interaction with one of the gypsy's inner-circle (it would of course be far too much to ask out of fate for me to have known both Genny and the Gypsy personally; I think anyone would find that a little too far-fetched). But the fact of the matter is that the fleet is incoming, and the crowds are milling and then becoming hyperactive; there's rioting and barricades reported on the mainland, and reports of live fire in the Manhattan Mining District. I wish I had the opportunity to, in the narrative sense, "build up" to a huge climax, but I'm going to be either medicated up or striking out myself for the north woods within the next few days, and all the opportunity that exists is just the opportunity to write what everyone already knows. It's been good. I have no complaints. I treasure your brown eyes and liquid sentiments, I'm always with you, my adoration is like a fire that never ever goes out. You never have to fear my loss or inability, and I'm with you to the maelstrom's end ever deeper and deeper and deeper though my fingers ache and my neck has a crick and my feet are now covered with the white tufts of whitlow, our wet world, our last chance to skiff and be done.

But that's all just sentiment, isn't it. If the pad was left by my whitedesk and it contained nothing but spreadsheets of attack data, presumably that was the topic of the day and running away from it wouldn't help. III Armored is gone as with its storied commander, and the remnants of the Gaia army are legions of earth-brown uniformed shock troops, several treaded brigades, and then the mainstay of the Gaia force, the Ashcan Bot, with amounts to an oblong of thick reactive armor and a high energy laser twinned to a projectile cannon. Moreso than anything else, the last of the Gaia combat force is this slow moving but heavily armed monstrosity, and even as historians disagree on how much the Tiger tank defined the WW2 Germany's forces or even the Minie gun or needlegun earlier centuries, the records show even the American army of 2020 traveled by rover jeep rather than armored fighting vehicle. Three hundred Gaian soldiers, a handful of Ashcans, a wing of caterpillar tanks, some light air support, and an artillery element round out the basic fighting force of Atlantis against which several thousand irregular boat refugees however well-armed with explosives, assault and pulse rifles, and a scree of mostly on-the-spot manufactured bots don't necessarily have all the odds.

The sad thing about data management, control, broadcast, and predictives as an industry is that once you develop all the ability to quantify battle and control, you also become aware of what precisely the odds are for what type of pitched battle. Atlantica's chance to survive this onslaught are fundamentally non-existent, and even if it should by some miracle triumph this month, in a few years there will be further intrusions while the spirit to take the battle to Geist has disappeared in reforming Geia culture. The thought generally goes after political power is shared with a new class of people, those people then have something to fight for and fight ferociously. But in truth, we've reached limits of human integration and if FemDom is disputed as a core principle, the weak tea 'Gender Equality' society inevitably captures the worst of two worlds, men still wearing little elf hats and pointed shoes, boy shorts; but the once dominant women no longer scrappers, fighters, dyke-tough and leather-clad. The spirit or quality of Geia life is what is diminishing; there's just less palpable enthusiasm in the air and the complaints about society are becoming more esoteric and indescribable. We are just old enough to remember the days of want and need, and just young enough to hear the latest generation whine that they are being imposed vocoder lessons or neurolinguistics when after all these were once extremely expensive luxuries. Yet, of course the sympathetic heart understands that each generation must fight its own battles, and in a sense, it's unluckier to be born now, at the impending end game, then during our rise and conquest period.

Predictive science proves a double edged sword. We can model, within 1 or 2% points of accuracy, how exactly the Geist invasion force battle will unfold, but even with all the benefit of hindsight, we already know that any error that does exist will be to our disadvantage. For example the order will go out to Mammon Task Force 01 "proceed down national route 20 and engage Geist forces whilst they are still forming up," but that Mammon technical will turn out to be led by a field lieutenant whose fallen under the influence of one of the Geist interpretative chapbooks and instead of attacking, he'll switch sides. He'll turn over his technicals to the enemy side. Or, on the other hand, heaps of random citizenry in one of the suburban towns will declare their holdings to be an open city or anonymous and unnamed individuals will set off their own sniping and bombing campaign of terror, resulting in degradation and disintegration of the Geia defense.

[It's too late to entertain such bizarre hopes that Geist having reformed from Gyist will review its doctrine even some more and end up Geisa. The two halves will amalgamate rather than duel to the death. Geist is infinitely hostile to Atlantic command; Geist holds the keys to world power again in its hands.]

We predict, based on extensive computing modeling, that of the thousands of instant manufacture designs, the 3D-printed combat vehicles, the Geist Bulldog will represent the core of their force strength. Twin 145mm plasma cannons and a one meter tread, Bulldogs are sort of the efficiency-honed down armored strength capable of operating in suburban and temperate zones, as well as some limited swamp capability, and will tear down fire through hostile environments impacting buildings, hard points, and armored positions and reducing shielded or sandbagged positions to detritus of war. Information and science are nigh infallible and there is through history little to oppose brute strength, armored firepower. They will not march straight our defenses as if they do not exist, but we do not have an answer quite yet to their capabilities.

We predict, of our own multiplicity, tens of thousands of designs, the Gaia Ashcan is the balance between walker mobility and armored power sufficient to wear down Geist assaults at maximum energy-material efficiency. The Ashcan, especially when umbilical-ed to the power network, can send shooting down Geist ranks its own green-tinged 125mm laser fire and it backs up its capabilities with triple-load missiles, anti-personnel, anti-armor, and blast-concussion. It's the Bulldog versus the Ashcan we know already and auto-historians are already preloaded with this inevitability. We know the core of the Mammon technicals will also stay loyal to the end, having been indoctrinated since childhood. Indeed in some quarters technicals are being ordered to stand down, as in their enthusiasm they are full-automatic firing on innocent civilians and peaceful protestors in their excess of battlelust.

We know that a major thrust up national route 20 is inevitable, although predictive strategy also shows the major battle will be at Druid Heights, where there will be spotlights, and deliberate flooding, and a firing line of Ashcans which will achieve 5:1 kill ratios but still be insufficient to discourage the Geist assault. We know the tempo of battle will actually increase as the zone of conflict draws closer and closer to the capital. I know this very building will fall. I know this desk and plasma will be shot through. I know I will be killed if I remain here.

We can predict down to almost individual battle scenarios how rioters will bolt-fire at Geia security and Geist invaders alike. That there will be destruction and bloodshed and explosions in the streets, and that these mighty towers, this collection of the pride of humanity, this broadcaster to the four corners of the world will be rocketed and cratered and shell-burst and riddled with tank and cannon and aerobot fire. All the lightning and thunder and hurricanes of nature cannot stay the inevitable course of history, but we will resist in turn, and there will be fantastic sights of purple-haired hairdressers fleeing Geist bot patrol units and headscarved infantry. This Babylon, this unholy city of lies and broadcasts and media events and staged personality conflicts and public conflagarations will be burnt down to the sea, and the lamentations will rise to the heavens yet none will heed their call. We are doomed. We are fighting purely on principle and for the liberation of women and women's rights. The tragedy was only that our reforms came too late.

Thanks to the amazing wonderful equations written by the mathematical logic-gate computers, we can model evacuation patterns. We know which citizens have already figured the unfolding scenario out by their purchase patterns, and we have no shortage of information about the traffic, data-system, and capital flows that already demonstrate which remaining power groups are truly Geia loyalists and which are now revealed in the final hour to have been pretenders all along. In some cases the findings are surprising; networks we thought loyal are already negotiating privileged status in Azal, not that that will save them indefinitely, whereas groupings we believed to have Geist sympathies or some sort of quiet understanding with the movement are in fact resigning themselves to the last and futile resistance. But, all that being said, these green hills and blue rivers, this island of New Atlantis, and the airships, seaships, and solar power; the majestic sweep of this organization will also endure its destruction through a limited survival in Azal, our second city, thousands of miles to the west. Despite all the frank inevitability of our loss here in Atlantis, there is still a haven for a few more decades in Azal and in that sense a limited number of opportunities to preserve just briefly some of our culture and citizenry. Nobody could have known Geist would become so powerful, so quickly, but strategic surprise remains an inevitability of the march of human history. To that degree there is still a manifest to fight on in the sewers; there is still data to be collected and interpreted, and our broadcasts will continue to the end for a Geist atrocity does in fact stay the hand of those who might join the fight, and the simulation of 4D holographic technology is still beyond the capability of the very best computers. The image and the sound and the smell of war are still issues that cause men and women's hearts to beat more rapidly, and our conduct in the last few days will be an inspiration and a testament for the last fragments of humanity to continue on the fight, even in ways that we did not anticipate or hope for. Absolutely predictive informatics does not equate to true destiny or fate; this too the mathematician-philosophers offer us.

7 September 2014

We close. I begin to bid you adieu, fond reader, for I can hear now the sound of thundering artillery in the distance which bears a resemblance to nothing so much as the sound of a gigantic piece of paper being ripped from top to bottom kilometers in height. I remember as a child hearing such noises and being comforted by the woman-leaders of my clan that it was nothing and that I should sleep. Fitting it marks once again the end point of a useless life, a media spider who has drawn prey closer to his clutches and consumed it avidly. Yet here also my apotheosis, a grand gesture in the end days.

Last among the topics that must be covered is the issue of my walk with Geist, which took place beginning with a Wanderjahr, a sabbatical year from AA4 which permitted me to ride skiffs with the emerging enemy movement and see for my own eyes what they offered and perhaps how they might in turn one day be approached. As I wrote, I have visited their pleasure palaces located on stilts on offshore compounds that were once the foundation of hydrocarbon economies and resurrected as best as a post-disaster society could resurrect, given of course that merely rebuilding a shallow offshore post is a relatively simple task compared to the original mission of those recovered shell-hulls.

My ride with Geist, however, was not so much those pleasure domes as it was the sound of lutes on a lowing evening, the smell of cardamom and sandalwood, the strumming of a baliset, the excited chatter of children, shadow-puppetry, and the chants of water-carriers and tile-traders, the click of tiles themselves. Geist, our enemy, is not pure evil. Nothing in human life is. I remember being carried away by the philosophy of whim, and I recall countless evenings with the Geistlings, watching an elder recount stories of his big finds and code-bound battles, and seeing in the sloe-eyes of a Geist girl a longing for adventure for herself, marriage to a foreigner, banana leaves and the scene-palette of the spice islands.

One thing comes at the price of another. Rigid, regimented Atlantic society with its rules and regulations allows meta-technology research at the speed of light. Data hums across wires and new learning models are established every year, and even in the midst of chaos and invasion, some scientists are still at their posts in the laboratories and the lawyer-barristers of Atlantica propose new compromises and human rights advances in their elevated knowledge and greatness. The card of knowledge is scribbled upon, and then the data sets are shocked down into retrieval columns deep in permafrost that once again, perhaps millennia rather than centuries, the advances of our culture are understood for what they are. The information is blasted into gallium-doped titanium and will resist a hundreds years of fallout or the impact of a genesis weapon mere kilometers away.

It's seventhday. By tradition I should rest from my labors but we've reached the terminal close, and with evacuation trains spinning out from Atlantica Central and I'm torn between the quick and easy death by bolt fire, and joining those crowds of dirty-faced small-package toting middle-aged who are neither capable of stiffening the ranks of the militias nor in their absolute decrepitude provide a useful final graphic of Geist atrocity. I feel dizzy. Whitlow was aggressively attacked yesterday by some sort of iodine drip and I coated my lower extremities with white cream, earning myself a brief respite from the ever growing fuzz. Yet possibly this is all part of the collapse as well as the HEPA filters fail and the tendrils of fungus creep out from wetspots to engulf the controlled climactics district.

Am I punning now without even intent. I'm down to hours and counting, and I can report, finally, that I rode with Geist. I met even one of the original few hundred disciples of Gy, the original Gypsy, and culture founder of the Gyist, and then Geist, Movement. What I can say about the man, given that his disciples in turn adopted his style and view of life, is that his Romanian flair, his black boots (the original Gy used soft calfskin brown, mine was permitted this deviation), blue pantaloons, white linen shirt half-opened, red bandanna, sabre and Mauser, was that yes, what does it matter now, there was a point to in his view of things. Our society is indeed extremely rigid and controlled where after ice school (and Gy had attended an ice school, do the records show this?) you were shunted into a factory job, a junior tertiary, or proper university, but that all of it stemmed from your performance on provincial-11, the 11-year old's test. From the moment you entered the work force to your eventually retirement at 65 or 70, in many ways you could never know chance or real risk or the entry of randomness into your life.

Gy, or something, was actually being channeled into strategy-level work as part of Gaia; he rebelled. He went off to skirmish wars in the Balkans or New Bombay and he led packs of brigands that he trained into teams of ideologues years before Atlantic central realized how subtle of a danger he was. The rebellion against conformity and the path laid down for your by your parents was the essence of the Geist revolution, and if the cinematics showed bands of First World citizens fighting in Third World battlefields, something in the male nature had rebelled against FemDom after all and the all-powerful dictates of Atlantic central. I don't claim sympathy with Geist. I am aware of its capacity for atrocity, its pleasure domes, and how its hegemony will mean the end of scientific research, man's reach for the stars, and the diversity multi-culturalism of our society. But, all this being said, we will always have a hollow in our hearts and no utopia ever constructed can ever answer all the needs of all its citizenry. Somewhere, somehow we know that the Gaia high council enjoys blue wine, travels by hover-car, and never dirties its hands with field combat. Yet, I am at peace with this state of affairs after all, and tend to think I will not join the last refugee convoy to Azal.

No city has ever stood alone against the entire rest of the world and after the fall of Atlantica, for all of Azal's wonder and its cobalt weapons and its prepared and disciplined soldiery the day must come when it too will fail. Across what remains of the mainland (the southern part of the North American continent has more or less been ground down into shallow sea), the townships and feedlots and methane megafields will—must—give way to the inexorable pressure of the terminal Geist, and the hand-explosives of one revolt will give way to the ground-tread of the twin-cannon main force. Up in Canada Geist regulars are putting into action their ribbon tanks, and down to the south the skiffs of people who affiliated to the tendency that tilts for a sympathy slowly ease their way over settlements that tilt ever so microscopically ours for the time being. The Ashcans return now from early combat with deep scores and pits; it is only a matter of time before their own weakpoints are identified and the precise charge necessary to cripple them is discovered.

With the way open for a gathering of forces against Azal, it can only be a matter of one-and-a-half to two years before Azal itself is surrounded by enemies approaching in five columns, two by sea and three by land, overflown by aerobots and perhaps even with the early generation tunneling raiders completely sealing off the three dimensions of escape. They have competent commanders there; Azal has the capability to pull off dramatic victories but 1% of the world cannot endlessly hold off 99%. Even if Geist were to fissure into a thousand different new clans and societies these would all still be anti-Azalian in nature, and the Bay area is not easily defensible territory; it is not a mountain retreat per se, and the Azal regulars are limited.

The armies of Geist will approach the city of Azal, the second city of New Atlantis, and then from the heavens will come a bright beam, a sunbeam of immense glittering majesty. Then from a million throats will arise the call, "Jesus..."

IV. Four Thousand Days

Shanghai, 2024 - Present

MilkCocoa, before she was KOKO, before she was just KO, was one-half of a visual-novelty act. What that meant was that in Shanghai in the early years of the 2000s, she was an indie rock musician who performed with an extremely huge, extremely gigantic large black man, perhaps in his late twenties, basketball shirt (and this was way before HM, although admitted co-contemporaneous with the back half of Gorillaz), and then, right in front of him, her tininess magnified by the contrast, 6'7" 350 pounds vs. 4'11" 80 pounds, a tiny Shanghaiese doll-like miniature of a girl-child, straight-cut bangs, pigtails, rocker t-shirt and boy shorts, who bounced around the stage carrying her microphone, and cheerful, energetic, loud, created a visual and auditory spectacle that was striking, that stood out, that evolved out of the incestuous member-sharing that was the hallmark of Shanghai rock.

Some held that "Chinese rock" was a Western creation, sponsored and financed by UK and Japanese labels, and created, delivered, and packaged primarily for the expat and then foreign market. Entire bands toured the US marketed solely as "rock music from China." In any case, MilkCocoa, cream, dark coffee, enjoyed a degree of support beyond the mere ironic. The hipsters went to the concerts because pose was hip, so fly sugarcats with mock ironic sideburns feigned an absolute dedication to MilkCocoa that was half understood, while others opened up with a MilkCocoa night before they disappeared at 3 or 4am into clubs that never advertised. And although Shanghai's rock scene was all of two hundred actual performers (city population: 23 million, viz. NYC's 8 million with 4 to 5000 aspiring rock artists), actually it would be overstating matters to declare the scene was borne aloft purely by foreign capital. True, the main livehouse was 51% Japanese owned, two indie movies were paid for out of London or Los Angeles, and US cash financed five or six little web-streaming ventures, but there were two suicides and one almost-certain homicide in the scene. This could not be purchased. China's rock god-father, Cui Jian, could still be approached at music festivals and livehouse openings and name-dropped by itinerant actresses out of L.A., but the existence of black leather motorcycle-clas thin washed-up middle-aged Chinese at the occasion 20rmb group show demonstrated that not everything was purely imitative.

This is about Shanghai. This is about the rock scene. This is about a city that was actually the largest in the world but carried little prestige. "I just got a job in Shanghai," one might remark in Chicago. One's friends would all feel sorry for you. "I landed a position in Dubai" or "I'm starting work in Washington D.C.," and there, ears would perk up, the status of the speaker enhanced.

For these reasons one might begin here as much as anywhere else. YoungPunk, LittlePea were two short-lived groups that were almost exactly quite like MilkCocoa, but either they lacked the Western partner or their tunes were banal, or they just faded before MilkCocoa's crowd-pleasing excellence. If Cocoa made eye contact with Aaron the summer festival for not more than a fraction of a second, and if all of a sudden the moshers were on him, or if the glam rock model band from St. Petersburg wasn't glum and looking for new fans, in the air dense with marijuana, Century Park, then maybe nothing at all would have happened. But that's where the Green Bay Aaron, a painter and international program art teacher, met Co, and so this is where we enter the scene, 23 million teeming Chinese, mostly laborers, heralded by national music, awoken in the morning by group dancers, and bombarded with pollution, yellow dust, PM2.5, noise, blaring horns, klaxons, propaganda, and tumult, out of all this, the tiniest possible thread of destiny or history.

With a cute little bear hat, Cocoa bounced around the stage singing "When I Grow Up," and if she had not yet discovered the little trick of wearing a dark blue sailor top to go with the Hello Kitty hairpins, she was still clearly "mode a la gamine," and she had assembled a rotating crowd of some five hundred fans at any one turnout, half foreigners, half Chinese, with the precise relationship between her and the huge black monster deliberately kept ambiguous. Were they a pair in real life? Did they date or sleep together? Few knew, though one guessed no, since artists don't necessarily get along in that sense with their musical partners, but later, by the fourth or fifth concert, by which time Aaron had finally initiated conversation with her, the truth of their existing relationship came out.

\--Ah ha, so you are dating him.

\--Well, "dating" is an odd word.

Aaron sniffed. --Do you know I have an airplane?

She laughed. He had already told her he was a painting teacher.

\--He says he loves me. I think he's going to marry me.

\--Where is the ring?

The gods—or the gremlins that run the clockwork of the universe—decided they had their games to play. A few weeks later Aaron painted a deck of cards as a extended classroom module for his brood of thirty seventeen-year-olds. That evening, without any prior communication, she sang "Ace/Spades; Queen/Diamonds" newly released. The following week he sketches out hands and delivered a brief lecture about the motif to the students. Not two days passed before MILKCOCOA performed an impromptu encore about "my P.A.W.S (People Against Whaling Society)." There were these washed-up late thirty-something Brits who had said hello to her at the first little folk acoustic event or 30-person unannounced Friday night. The whole joke was that you would only hear by word of mouth. But Aaron was now puzzled at the possible linkage of subconscious—he understood artists, being one, and believed he could identify exactly where the line between stage persona and base personality lay, and with some social contacts with NYC's shoegazer scene and little dalliances in Seoul, Los Angeles, Seattle, El Paso, he wanted this to burn for a long, long time. There could be only the slowest of slow slow plays, against the backdrop of jackhammers and skyscrapers rising, factories churning, the air heavy with pollution, the high-rise residential compounds multiplying like fruit flies. Summer had arrived, and the expats retreated to outdoor pools, artificial beaches, frozen margaritas.It was here, after a few blurry drinks, that hands brushed hands and eyes met, and in a somewhat dazed out alcoholic evening, hearts did whatever they did, and to a few curious coy glances, the two casually disappeared from a night full of wild passes and put-downs, bought drinks and affected conversations. She lived in the French concession.

Aaron would go on to live some kind of life after this infatuation, of course. He would live for many decades afterwards experiencing various ups-and-downs and ending up, as most citizens of the First World, with a better-than-average outcome. But of all the memories, pains, dreams, fears, pleasures, holidays, family get-togethers, periods of poverty and loss, desolation but also redemption, marriage, jobs, friendships and deaths, the memory of the beautiful Shanghai girl-child, small-breasted, guitar strap-strung over her naked shoulder and wakening him on a Sunday morning with sunlight's crepuscular rays streaming in would endure in his memory forever.

Then Milk burst in.

From post-coital afterglow and feelings of warmth and oneness with the world, Aaron went to the other extreme: perfect and absolute terror. A huge, gigantic black man had entered his love chamber and discovered that a thin scrawny white boy had just screwed his girlfriend. Holy fvck! The situation could quickly have led to disaster. Instead the most strangest thing happened. Without taking the slightest notice of the thin Wisconsin boy, Milk began to animatedly refer to a song the duo were composing and Cocoa provided the requisite answers. Then Milk spun on his heels and returned to his mad composing, apparently without noticing his cuckolder at all.

Later that week, things were worked out between Milk and Cocoa as such things are worked out between people who have been both good friends and lovers for years and much of their youth. Milk wrapped up his day job in Shanghai, reception clerk for a magazine, and returned to Durham, N.C. Of all the people covered in this work, only Milk found happiness, family, stability, a good job, tradition, peace, and comfort. He would return home to the States, an uncle would provide him with a good contact who found him a Food and Drug Administration job, he would rise through the ranks and almost make Senior Executive Service, and retire to two two-story homes, three cars and a boat, a brood of children who were all off to the university. Amidst this noise and happiness, a friend of him would ask him, "Milk, what's the secret? How did you unlock the mystery of life and become so great?"

And Milk, the tall big jolly Negro, now 57, would say, "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Lissen' son. It's all very simple. I know when I need to be blind, itz that simple. Thatz all you need in life!"

What had happened with that some filthy rich lobbyist was caught adulterating US meat products and bribing Milk's boss, but Milk just didn't seem to catch on. Eventually yeah the boss got caught and went to jail, but that just meant Milk got promoted, and his boss's boss, who was also in on the take but not obviously so, gave Milk a nice big raise and a honorary gold watch. People just gave Milk everything and Milk kept smiling.

He was the only happy guy in all this span of time.

Anyway, to return to the present. Aaron and Cocoa are entwined. The thing about these brief intense love affairs brought together by "artistic chance" and not through tradition or genuine history is that of course by nature they cannot last. The magic had been enough to bring the two together, Cocoa the poor-little-rich-Chinese mainlander, Aaron the abstract painter from Green Bay, but when the day broke on the real texture of a relationship, about dirty laundry and washing dishes and the career that was already arcing downwards, both already knew that the wild uneasy and passionate flare-up was of its own accord limited. There were four full months of perfection, four golden 30-day spans in which everything worked perfectly, in which even the motion of the trees seems to scribe adoring hymns to love and the city lay before them, ancient, yielding, gloriously in decline. But finally the love-light began to fade, the two split up.

All things can be characterized at least two ways. We can look at Cocoa and say that she was a beauty-rock indie-punk pre-indie-industry meta-goth whose sonic progressions tore down that whisper-thin veil between this and the other world. This brief, poignant love affair that took place in mythical Shanghai (characterized here as whispering plane trees, the French concession buildings in stone and modernist concrete already crumbling under the assault of 21st century Chinese air pollution) with fictional, only in retrospect Suzhou-style canals running through the alleyways (this is fictional; Suzhou was a hundred miles to the west, but memory is elusive) may have been the ultimate rock progression of dada art, Aaron's unthinking subconscious art-mock-if conzept against which we trade the purely subliminal, jazz-influenced improv sequences that marked early Cocoa. Or we can say that just another typical West Chinese girl was trying her hardest to get into Canada, and briefly succeeded for a few years before the visa paperwork fell apart. The judgment is too difficult to make. We proceed.

Whatever analytical bull-crit we impose on all this featherweight recitation of events, the fact of the matter was that there can only be a half-dozen maximum love affairs in a life. How many thousands of losing your head do you have to go through before your disquietingly began to realize the futility of it all? The French, the French-Canadians would encourage this sort of affair as a necessary first experience. But once it was over, once that magic had been lost, we would be left with only the drear and financial realities of this world. A Beijing interlude intervened; but little of that period need be said.

Instead we resume coverage of the Cocoa phenomena at her next awakening, at her leaving behind, once again, polluted, foggy, smoky China and land her at Narita amidst a bustle of other sing-song Chinese in green, rice-paddy Chiba prefecture. The group that had brought her over, a small offshoot of the famous Avex team, had made no misrepresentation about her contract. She would have to teach guitar, 20 hours a week, three weeks off a year, for which she would receive housing and about a thousand a month in spending cash. It was not an entry point to stardom. It was not a training ground for J-pop. It was an opportunity for a twenty-six year old to have some participation in the making of stars, but for which she would receive no additional cash if a protegee succeeded. The official sentiment was that she was lucky to receive this offer, and she was, in the end, Chinese: she accepted this judgment as correct.

Obsessive investigation of interior phenomenon would reveal that Cocoa's interior life began here: all that came prior was mere window-dressing. Locked into a world only with other artists, other young daughters of poor families who found the entertainment industry the only possibility for middle-class cash, the cycle of personalities began to feedback on itself. Three years in, she became unrecognizable. Her inner eye had turned in; her hair had gone platinum blonde; what it found, inside, was beauty.

Rare and difficult phenomenon are by their nature hard to discover and even harder to accurately penetrate. Our best sources on the KO consist of a half-crazed Japanese koto drummer who was briefly her friend before she began speaking only with females. The drummer, one Nagayoshi Shimizu, who had already become addicted to his own cycles of endorphins, was already on his way to an alcoholic death and was already in the habit of speaking in cryptic bursts.

"Idon'treallyknowwhatshewasseeing!"

"Ithinkshewasinlovewithgreenfields!"

"Maybeitwasgreenwood."

What could possibly be meant by this explosive discharges? What was greenwood? What was the mystery of greenwood? Was Shimizu speaking in katakana or in kanji? Nobody could answer these questions. Actually only the next best source offered any sort of solution:

REPORT of the Kiyomizu Temple on 'KO'

Our subject of observation is a twenty-eight year old female Chinese national here on an entertainment visa which has been quietly renewed for her through the Avex head office in Tokyo. She is a guitar teacher and itinerant musician of the tabigeinen-type who has appeared spontaneously in the Tohoku region, researching and expanding on the old koto and enka styles of the region. We believe this is an expression of the...

Here the Kiyomizu temple expands on the religious significance of the appearance of KO, using the vocabulary and terminology of their own internal religious system. Because the faith remains classified as a "new religion," we cannot in good faith lend extreme credence to the belief structure, but this document was useful only in that it was one of the sole available documents for exploring KO and her travels for the next ten years, which was a gap in official record.

Other than these two data points, we have what is best called "hearsay" and then the speculations of the her later years. Apparently she left behind no children but may have been married to a fifty-year old Buddhist monk later in her life. Some sources indicate that very early on, she described her travels as tracing Chinese ideograms across the surface of Japanese physical territory. Unfortunately, there is no information on what those ideograms were, or why she traced those patterns, or if they were efficacious. Similar reports exist in literature of extreme criminals or insane believing "their one act of crime" was actually saving the state from a drastic earthquake. The Japanese terror cult that launched the nerve gas attacks on Tokyo expressed the belief that they were similarly saving the public from disaster. Had KO lost her mind? Or was she actually battling forces from the beyond against which scientific instruments have no power? We would wish, in the cast of the latter, to provide aid and comfort in such a situation, but it is also possible that our help would not be desired.

With any luck this hyper opening hasn't been too incomprehensible or incoherent. It is Shanghai around the turn of the century. A young group of post-punk rockers assembles around Milk, who is an extremely black man, and Cocoa, who is a very tiny Chinese girl. Milk is a temper, a dilettante, a musical guy but no artist. He returns to happiness in the Virginia/North Carolina area and remembers Cocoa as an impossible love. Cocoa is a legendary poet and wanderer who walked and train-rode the steppes of west China before breaking out into the rock scene in Shanghai, population 24 million, total rock scene, 2000 people (artists and concert goers, roughly half-half Western-Chinese). Aaron is the Green Bay, Wisconsin boy who has a glorious vision of Cocoa on a French Concession Sunday, and this liasion is the catalyst of the breakup of MILKCOCOA the band (but which was already on the downswing.)

Cocoa switches her name to Koko, and then just plain Ko, has a brief interlude in Beijing, and then moves to Japan, where for some ten years she disappears from the scene (but is apparently exhaustingly training young aspiring J-pop stars in the art of the six-string or five), eventually becoming an itinerant musician and evolving into more of a folk artist, the Grey Ghost of Tohoku, an "artist of artists," or somebody who produces work primarily known only by the community. She finds a sort of heavily introverted peace with herself, writing gigantic thousand-kilometer wide Chinese ideograms through the process of wandering around the countryside. She enjoys black nights with no stars, conifer forests, and hidden north of Japan villages located in nooks and crannies.

In countryside Japan, she enjoys a second career of sorts, although she is known solely to regionalists, specialists, artists of the folk, and the quiet potters and nature-artists reclusively hiding away in valleys and snow-bound mountains. Some evidence points to involvement with fairly obscure mountain-cults, but Ko shocks and delights by showing up at obscure livehouses and Shimo-kitazawa club openings where all the genuine genuine literati know her. Sightings are elusive and treasured, and the stuff of legend.

That is, so to speak, "the conventional reading." We paint a big large big-eyed cartoon character at the center of the story and declare, there, it's finished, the thing is understood. Alternatively, we can throw away science, logic, the microchip, space travel, linear thought--in other, everything that makes Western culture go around, and then we're left with the possiblity that all the little loose odds and ends are the KO so to speak.

If KO is keeping the Shadow Gnosis out of this plane; if she is actually going around according to religious dictates to repair the breaks in the fabric of the universe and to sew up the occasional creature that's worked its way through, then in that Jewish theological sense, she is one of the twelve "sinless" people on whom the entire world depends, we just don't know it. This entails believing in other worlds, astral planes, shadow creatures, the Gnosis that KO wrapped up in Nagano, all the little small dangerous ones she worked with from Osaka to Sendai and beyond, and an entirely picture emerges of some sort of fire princess or soothsayer, with all detail before mere preparation and the actual, real KO being the creature of starless nights and a shadow Japan.

"Oh dear, oh dear, I shall be late!"

Finally he came, although she had had to wait a lifetime, decades, almost the very end of childbearing years for something all the signs and symbols had declared to arrive at the very start of things. Had there been some madcap afternoon garden party in Shanghai where the French-Canadians had all settled on their future? Had it been declared, settled, seen by all that some found love and others found knowledge? She was thirty-three or thirty-four, and the curious little Japanese monk passed by, carrying his odd watch and a giant spirit hammer. He was a fellow hunter.

"Wait, wait," she said, "I think it went that way!"

And the monk actually paused; his eyes glittered as he realized the girl could see his spirit hammer, and moreover, that she probably was on the trail of the same Shadow Gnosis, and that, of course, this was the fated partnership of SG hunters that was hinted in the texts, that everything, of course, had already been scryed and written down, and so we had to merely accept our fate rather than fight against the impossible.

The stars all went out; the fifty-two year old Buddhist monk with the round face and pale blue robes met the thirty-three year old ex-rocker with the double-blade polearm and the satchel pack. Usage (oo'-sah-geh) and KO had met.

The dichotomy, if such a thing exists, can be said that metropolitan Shanghai, with its glossy CityWeekend magazine aimed at expats, its flowing wine and Monday night dinner specials, its club scene, offered a sort of possible future to Ko. At each interval, at each step of the way, glory beckoned, every video share, every cover of a MilkCocoa song, every write-up seemed to offer a chance to breakout, and wasn't there that one time when an article writer from GQ seemed to be the verge of offering one-and-a-half inches in a rocker special edition? To flip, black-and-white, from this set of realities to the cold, austere, emotionless, futureless airlessness (anymorelessness?) of country Hokkaido and Aomori would possibly have been seen as a profound and breakdown-inducing trauma to any but a healthy, self-conscious artist. This had to be the way it was: this was it.

And it was! Love had arrived! Everyone got a turn on the merry-go-round! This weird sickness or illness, this rapidity of heartbeat and pressed speech that Ko had seen, that she had characterized over and over, had arrived for her! Usage! Fifty-two years old with thinning hair! A head like a round baseball, a Gozaemon head! The former punk rocker with a Hello Kitty tie-on attached to her mobile found herself swept away, as the two, as partners, sought out all the escaped Shadow Gnosis hiding in nooks and crannies of the wilderness and occasionally, blatantly, in city streets or parks. The general public could not see them: they knew them only as an odd shiver or prickly sensation as they walked around a park or took a hiking expedition up in the mountains (those that did, anyway). But Ko and Usage went to work, she with her double-blades, he with his spirit hammer, and the body count of the astral demons piled up, as the months made their way, seasons rolled into each other, and expenses were taken care of by begging and the occasional busking act.

The relationship of the two was intensified by the fact that they shared a same profession.

The present writer after graduating with a dual science-language degree spent some ten years after university supporting himself in the trade of "abstract writing," which entails three to four hours reading a highly scientific technology paper and composing a "general audience" summary. As such, he lacks the ability to create long "scenes" cinematic in scope or presentation, lush with detail, carrying "the clash of personalities." One individual's loss, however, may be an advantage to the world of literature as a whole, as a different, scientific, restrained voice replaces the plethora of free manuscripts clogging up the Internet.

J.K. Rowling could have converted the whole of the previous story into a million-page epic. Markson at least would have inserted further commentary about the abuse of artists by society at large. Gaiman would have pointed out the entry of the sun, "where is the moon?"; whereas various other folk researchers and entomologists undoubtedly scribble in the margins their own hurried observations and commentary.

The general public, however, doesn't like authorial asides. So, we return:

Moment of the Sun: the two-person band MilkCocoa, active in Shanghai sometime before the year 2000, existed in a city that was somewhat "uncool" or "unpopular;" Shanghai in the 1920s has spawned some incredible amount of works in both literature and movies. Shanghai in 2000 was still relatively poor, backwards, uncool, full of nerds with bad haircuts, and people who lived in mud houses, and factories belching pollution. Yet in the Suzhou/Shanghai mythical construction invented here, canals run through the French Concession, and on a blazing early Sunday sun shooting rays around Cocoa as she played a love-ballad on an unamplified six-string Japanese electric guitar, Aaron the abstract painter had his memory permanently altered; he was focused on the visual, and the moment had connected emotion, sexuality, memory, visual spectacle, a fellow artist, timelessness, youth, and the blazing, eternal sun.

The moment was also striking because it marked the watershed for three personalities. The MilkCocoa dynamic was already fading, Cocoa could have followed Milk back to Delaware or Virginia and lived in a two-story house with three cars and a brood of children, but she would have been listless and depressed and possibly eventually cancerous. Milk in his own way understood that he had been on a lark, among the three, he was the genuine non-creative poseur, the "rock star pretender," and although the Chinese had been agog at his spectacle, although on trains their mouths had dropped open, the experience had been finished, he was not a devotee of Chinese culture beyond superficial kungfu moves he knew and he was not intending to spend twenty years striving at work to eventually live in a city that approximated the living standards of his own timewater domicile. Now it can be noted that in China, due to decreased prices for things, twenty-somethings could live in high-rise duplexes, but that is whatever point that needs to be made, that is something whose implications can explored further on. Suffice to say: he endured.

Cocoa went on to change her name to Ko, she moved to Japan and reinvented herself. She became an "artist of artists," or somebody whose creations were understood only by fellow artists, and she spent twenty hours a week training somewhat spoiled youngsters in guitar or upcoming pop artists in hook development. Indeed, one of her chord progressions eventually became part of a plasticized and heavily produced pop hit, so her 20,000 USD/year salary eventually earned a small but real profit margin for the parent company.

Finally much later in her life Ko found spirituality, and began searching for shadow creatures from the other side that had escaped into Japan and had to be wrapped up and sent back. She encountered a syncretist Zen monk named 'Usage,' (not yoo-sidge but oo'-sa-geh) and two became the Bonnie-and-Clyde of spirit hunters, and sent many an astral creature back to the shadow world.

Usage died first. It was a B-type monster, not the familiar S or the dangerous N. B-types were just weak enough that one did not put up one's guard enough, and a careless foot position placed the old monk too close to one of the B's spines, and the slight brush of glittering poison entered Usage, reducing his body, soon, to dust. Ko saw it all happen. Instantly tears blurred her vision, and though she dispatched the creature without further ado, she knew, once again, that life had irrevocably changed.

The remains of the creature lay before her. The mountain river, plunging down from 4000m carried the ice cold message of its origins. And before her, her whole life swirled.

China: the dust-ridden monster of a country, filled with noise, filled with emotion, firecrackers, smokestacks, tonal language, the ever so rare almost liquid individuals who actually had talent, beauty or reserve.

Japan: the population in decline, mountains raging into the sky, rivers slicing down ice-cold, perpetual nightfall, perpetual work as the 53-year old monk and the 37-year old former punk rocker-cum-spirit warrior kept the paperthin boundary between this world and the shadow realm intact. All of a life's breadth, love and war, contained in the miniature tea-cup that was a country that had it all, but nothing at all. Should she apply the edge of her double-blade to her own throat, know oblivion in a second? Her hand trembled...

But she couldn't. It was not the way. She found her way to a dusty town in Hokkaido, hundreds of miles from the nearest other settlement, and began to carry out her painstaking research.

Finally, after the passage of years had turned her own body old and frail, and her withered hands sometimes shook as she dusted off very old, almost crumbling volumes, some of the pattern of the war between the astrals and the shadows and the hunters became clear. Ko found reference to the Kiyomizu temple and accounted for the odd feeling that her doings were sometimes tracked. She uncovered a thesis that suggested that Usage himself was a benign type of Shadow Gnosis, one that misdirected natural-born hunters into chasing relatively innocuous escapees. Putting together her writings, she almost seemed to almost characterize the three-way world.

Milk died a very old man. At the moment of Ko's death, he experienced a stroke that reduced about a fifth of his cognitive capacity. He lived on for another decade, and then had another stroke, which this time was followed by very rapid decline. He lived a happy life and dozens of his grandchildren are all thriving in the Beltway region.

Aaron lived a life somewhere between the absolute reclusiveness of Ko and the genial extroverted gentility of Milk. He never found an explanation for that odd period in his life when his paintings precisely mirrored Cocoa's song lyrics, although one of his friends once scoffed at his recitation of his story and another seemed disquieted.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

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  * www.happyscience-br.org

That is to say, yes, I am claiming I foresaw even these geometries, Le Corbusier may have seen them even before production, and there's a painter as well who put up a modernist Universal style polygon in the 1890s as backdrop to a weepful woman, but claims of prescience have in their own way a nature of self-fulfillment on the one hand and unverifiability on the other. Should I write five predictions down today, of course one will be correct; I will remember that one.

Those same news-holographs also report that Flotilla is mere days away. A free media also carries the peril that information can't be fully blockaded from any of its citizens. "Everyone," so to speak, is aware that Flotilla is a GEIST strike force disguised as refugees and asylum-seekers. But according to the doctrine of Political Correctness, we're to assume its actually a humanitarian crisis. Tens of thousands of skiffs and derelict ex-methane carriers, lashed together and surrounded by squawking merchants, Flotilla will link up with GAIA traitors and run through Atlantica streetways blazing from the hip. It's been four years since the Battle of Paris BAS and the GAIA strike expeditionary corps is no more. That has to be the topic of next paragraph in the mainspace.

Moore's Law, that of the doubling of clock speeds and halving of electron channel widths every eighteen months, finally petered to a close in 2040. Despite the most advanced gallanium-doping techniques, as the chip channel sizes approached 4nm eventually there was no way to control leakage and single-bit errors. Today the limits of silicon chips are now fully understood as offering only a certain of capability and human research must perforce be dedicated to the searching out of 'elegant code,' code that uses a minimum instruction set to generate maximal results.
