Closing Statement in the Court Martial of Sergent Kist

Beware,
If you from here must damn what I did there,
You too would've faltered on that tower,
Beneath the wreath of that thousand-yard stare.
Will you measure the sins of one hour
Against ten years of duty served with care?
A day's courage to a second's error
One minute foul against four fortnights fair

Have care
Then, my judges, when you pass your sentence,
If you would light the truth 'neath this affair,
That you judge the crimes not their repentance.
Do you think fear drove me away from there?
Rendered still a loyalty whose currents
Carried my soul through ten years of warfare?
Then you condense my disobedience.

Though where
At last I fled, of this become aware:
My betrayal came long before the flight.
It ended when at last I fled from there.
Cowardice? Dereliction due to fright?
Would that I had at once fled down that stair.
But can mere brute fear shut out the sharp light
Of ten years service as a legionnaire?

That stare
Did not scare but enthralled; it overawed.
No clearer centre had the world but there;
No sight more vivid, no more shining gaud.
The world fell deaf and dumb before its flare.
If I had banged the bell, would it have drawled?
It laid your every civil impulse bare
And there at once you knew them for a fraud.

And there
It appeared, convulsing atop the stair.
Throwing that stare first at me, then downward
At my poor charges below in the square.
Its weight pulled the feathered heavens earthward.
They bent around its edge, first bled of their
Blue, then breaking outward at its halyard
To plates of colour wreathed about its stare.

It dare
Impose itself despite our sky's outcries;
Despite our foursquare tower, walls and prayer;
And every elaborate enterprise
Of civility to send it elsewhere.
Our guise of redemption could not disguise
Us before those special eyes; it saw bare
The I, with those specialised, special eyes.

Breaks

They have no time in the landscape of E-Prime
A man who wanders for years returns in the fury of his youth
A long-strider patrols the plain
He breaks the line of the horizon
And his voice sounds like a squeal of breaks

Crescendo to an error

A certain private parking area near my brother's apartment includes fold-up pedestals that the spaces' owners can upraise to defend them from other motorists. Each pedestal folds up into the middle of its parking space, where you lock it into place with a key. The distance between pedestals in adjacent spaces then becomes just one pedestal diameter less than the width of the space. Now instead of just blocking your space, the interloping vehicle blocks two spaces:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/cars.jpg

Hive pieces

This shows a set of pieces with cartoon artwork for the board game Hive. To turn them into a real set, I recommend sticking them to hexagonal bathroom tiles. Each set should contain three ants, three grasshoppers, one queen bee, two beetles and two spiders (making twenty two pieces in total).

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/hivepieces.jpg

Peter Temple's Truth

Peter Temple's Truth reads like an Australian television miniseries. You can even see where they would show the tits.

The novel's beauty comes from the vividness of its writing. We leave it with afterimages of "sharp-toothed skulls" and "beer cartons blown flat against the fences" still glowing behind our mind's I. We can still hear the footsteps on the "gap-planked verandah" and the "rip and flap of a loose truck tarp in the nearest yard".

The plot that it adorns follows well-worn lines. Police detectives with personal problems swear their way through an unfolding series of homicides. As he searches for truth behind the city's mean streets and the life he lives on them, Temple's protagonist guides us through a bloodier, grimier congener of the Melbourne we know. It leaves behind an imprint, marked in luminol.

See also:

• France-Presse, A. "Peter Temple wins Australian literary prize" Edmonton Journal (June 2010)
• Steger, J. "Harsh heart of the truth" The Age (September 26, 2009)

Abstract

The various possible three-valued propositional logics of implication validate different formulae. For example, depending on the truth-table for their implicational connective, some validate the axiom of contraction while others do not¹.

Thus for any pairing of a set of implicational formulae with a single implicational formula one may ask, "does every three-valued logic of formulae that validates all the formulae in that set also validate that single formula?". For example, does every possible three-valued logic that validates both the axiom of identity and the axiom of prefixing also validate the axiom of permutation²?

If we restrict ourselves to nonempty three-valued logics of formulae whose truth-tables for the implicational connectives preserve the classical evaluations for true and false, we can view this as a relation that holds between a set of formulae and a single formula whenever every such logic that validates each of the formulae in the set also validates that single formula. It turns out that, according to established criteria for what makes a logic, this relation qualifies as a logic itself³. For any set of formulae together with any single formula, this logic countenances the consequence relation from the set to the single formulae if and only if every logic that validates all of the formulae in the set also validates that single formula. It gives us a logic of the relationships between logics.

Footnotes:

1. The classical tautology, '(p -> (p -> q)) -> (p -> q)' (an instance of the W schema).
2. The classical tautologies,
   
   • 'p -> p' (identity) (instance of the I schema)
   • '(q -> r) -> ((p -> q) -> (p -> r))' (prefixing) (instance of the B schema)
   • '(p -> (q -> r)) -> (q -> (p -> r))' (permutation) (instance of the C schema)
3. It qualifies as a consequence relation characterized by the family of nonempty three-valued logics of formulae whose truth-tables for the implicational connective preserve the classical evaluations for true and false. For criteria for logical consequence relations, see D. Shoesmith and T. Smiley Multiple-conclusion Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1978).

Flat inspection

Bendy crept upon the moth. He moved his limbs one at a time, between clock ticks, splitting each step into tiny motions. He had to keep calm; if he yielded to the temptation to dash, the bell would jingle on his flea collar and scare the moth away. Three more inches and he could pounce.

"Bzzzzzzzzzzt!"

The buzzer sheared the roof off the night.

The moth shot to the ceiling. Bendy screamed in protest.

"Bzzzzzzzzt bzz bzz bzzzzzzzzzt"

His mistress darted out of her bedchamber to the intercom.

"You only have to press the butt-"

"Bzzzzzzzt"

"The door switch doesn't work. I'll come down."

She wore her bells on the ends of purple dreadlocks. Bendy listened to them tinkle as she climbed down the staircase, paused at the door and the climbed back up again.

She returned with a big, clomping man who smelled like the outside: the Allergy Man. He had a big, pink baby face and a plump body. Dressed in a floral shirt, he looked like a cherub on vacation.

"The woman in number eleven hasn't come home," she said, "can we put Bendy in your car?"

"I don't think he likes me," said the Allergy Man.

"No, he likes you," she said.

"He always claws my shins," said the Allergy Man.

"See," she said, "he likes you. Hold his cat box up while I squeeze him in."

She picked Bendy up. He purred in satisfaction; nobody had picked up the Allergy Man. But wait - now she lowered him towards the cat box! Bendy grasped the top edge with his front feet. As she tried to swing him into the box, he grasped the bottom edge with his back feet. The Allergy Man shook the box. She tried to pry his paws away with her free hand, but each time she got hold of one Bendy twisted another loose and grabbed back hold of the box. At last, her discipline broke and she lunged for his limbs with both hands. Bendy squirmed loose and bolted for the bedchamber.

The Allergy Man dropped the box and clomped after him. Bendy hid under the bed.

"I can't see him," he called out.

He stepped up next to the bedstead. Bendy dashed forward and clawed his shins.

"Christ," he said, flinching back.

He clomped out of the room.

Would they try to sweep him out with a broom?

Bendy's mistress entered and set a plate by the door. On top sat half a wheel of camembert.

Did they think he'd fall for so barefaced a trap? Bendy stayed under the bed and watched his cheese.

The Allergy Man appeared at the door. He stooped down, picked up the plate and ate some of the cheese! When he set it back down, only two-thirds of it remained.

Now Bendy's mistress came in and nibbled away another piece. Bendy whined in anguish.

The Allergy Man returned and took another bite. They meant to eat Bendy's whole cheese!

Bendy dashed forward. He'd begun to devour the cheese when hands clenched him under the shoulders.

The Allergy Man carted Bendy back to the foyer. His mistress toted the cat box, but now she peered out through the windowpane at the parking lot below.

"I think I see Laura's car," she said, "She might see you on the stairs. I've still got the cardboard box the microwave came in. We'll have to tape him in."

She ran to the other room and came back with a packing box and tape.

"Will he just go to sleep once it gets dark inside?" said the Allergy Man.

"No," she said.

The Allergy Man flung him into the box and held the flaps while she taped it closed. It went black inside the box. Down below, he could hear somebody unlocking the front door.

The box jolted upwards. It pivoted to the side and then lurched forwards, sending Bendy sliding across the bottom. Then he heard the Allergy Man's shoes on the staircase.

Bendy clawed at the side of the box. Soon he could scratch right through to the Allergy Man's chest.

"Ouch! Jesus," cried the Allergy Man.

The box stopped.

"Oh, hello Laura," he said.

Bendy leaped sideways, hurling his weight against the side of the box. The box pitched sidelong and started to topple over. Then with a lurch it swiveled back to the other side and started to topple in the opposite direction. Bendy skidded across the floor. The box dipped and at last heaved back to the horizontal.

"I almost dropped your microwave," the Allergy Man called out for no reason.

Bendy slashed at the Allergy Man's chest with both claws. The footsteps started to run. The box rolled a quarter turn forward, rotating the gash Bendy had made to the top. Bendy clawed at the new side. He sliced through the cardboard and then the tape. At last he struck the Allergy Man's stomach. The box rolled through another quarter turn.

Now the footfalls fell on gravel. By the time Bendy clawed through the newest side, he heard them ringing against concrete.

Torn through in three places, the box began to crumple. A hole opened in the side as wide as Bendy's head. He could escape!

He plunged his head and forelegs through the hole, but a hand came up and forced him back inside. Bendy whirled around. Slashing the hand with his hind claws, he ran for a new breach in the other side. Now the other hand came up to force him back, but the whole box had started to collapse, he would soon find a way free.

As the last of the tape gave way, the Allergy Man swung open the door to his car. He threw Bendy inside. He held Bendy at bay with his throat while he shut the door.

The Allergy Man sighed with relief. He dug a rag out of the glove box and dabbed at his wounds. Bendy raced around inside, but could find no escape. He scratched at the door, but no one opened it.

Bendy hid beneath the seats. Minutes later he emerged, purring, to huddle up against the Allergy Man. Together they sat in the dark.

As they waited, the Allergy Man started to splutter and sneeze. He began wheezing and his eyes turned red. His eyelids swelled up.

Bendy meowed for his mistress. He watched headlights passing on the road. Twice he thought he heard her bells among the sounds of traffic.

When she appeared at last, she had a plate in her hand. She had brought his cheese! He purred with affection as she carried him back to his house.

That night, he slept on the Allergy Man's head.

Reassessment

Several Christmases ago, I caught Karen home from work watching a home improvement programme that showed you how to build a procession of plywood reindeer for your lawn. You sawed the antlers and the reindeer out as separate pieces and then nailed the former on to the latter.

Imagine yourself sawing out plywood reindeer in your garage on a Sunday afternoon. What a sense of purposelessness must assail you. You had dreams once. How did it come to this?

Tiririca

By subjecting Francisco Oliveira to a literacy exam, Brazil's National Congress has only enriched the metaphor. Now, instead of a clown in congress, they have a semiliterate clown in congress¹. For a medley of ads from Oliveira's electoral campaign, go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK4p35wYgXI

For news stories reporting his victory, please see:

• Brazilian clown's poll win threatened by illiteracy claim (October 5, 2010). AFP
• Brazil clown secures congress seat after literacy test (December 1, 2010). AFP
• Send in the clown (October 7, 2010). The Economist

Footnote:

1. No source that I can find online can tell me whether Oliveira has become the first professional clown to hold legislative duties.

Lunch

By law, every commercial street in Australia must contain either a fish and chip shop, a laundromat or a milk bar with a sandwich board showing pictures of the ice creams. Streets, like mine, that have all three can apply for a government grant to construct a newsagents next door, which thereafter will support itself, in the main, by peddling lottery tickets. For lunch today, I ordered a vegetarian burger from a Chinese restaurant between the laundromat and the fish and chip shop. I believe the restaurateur must once have seen a hamburger at some distance and then deduced its contents. It had its points, but no person who'd seen a burger at close range could've classed it as one. In place of the bun, it had two chive pancakes with soy sauce. For the patty it substituted a loose shred of cabbage, slivered black mushrooms and bean shoots. Not one to skimp on the essentials, the restaurateur served it with chopsticks and a selection of dipping sauces.

I ate it with the chopsticks while watching Herzog's Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht. Even Herzog's monster film somehow reminds me of Joseph Conrad; more human than human but unafraid of the truth about the world. I watched it on a television projector plugged into tiny, quiet speakers, but the source volume set to maximum. Every time the music swelled the speakers rattled and distorted like Hendrix wailing the seventh sharp nine in Heart of Darkness.

Declaration of principles

I have it on good authority that the MPAA intend this commercial to discourage movie piracy, rather than, as it appears, to encourage car theft.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU

One marvels that such advertisements make it past their first test screening, let alone into the forefront of a multimillion dollar crusade against copyright infringement. The average viewer must jump ship at the first premise:

"You wouldn't steal a car."

I would if it belonged to Sony. The first car, I'd steal to drive. The second one, I'd set fire to and photograph burning on a stolen Sony camera, so that later I could send them the pictures of me laughing watching it burn.

Monolith

I whittled this out of a lump of acrylic paint. To create the lump I layered different-coloured coats of paint on top of each other until the lump became thick enough to whittle.

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/sculpture.jpg

Arrakis

Sophie kept a boyfriend named Alan - the same way that one might keep a housecat or a gerbil. Alan belonged to that shadowy class of persons who somehow leave no discernable impression in your thoughts. You would've found him listed in the credits as 'fireman #3' or 'guest at party'.

He had a genial temperament; he'd amble out to see you when you arrived and make small talk. He just appeared underwritten. When you looked up from a conversation, you'd find him standing in the background fiddling with something, as if his actor didn't have any lines and needed to full up the time pretending to do something. His presence left so scant an impression that to this day I can remember only two facts about him: he owned a video camera and slept heavily.

Alan pointed his video camera down random city streets and empty staircases. He filmed car yards, corroded fire escapes and parking garages. But, like Thierry Guetta, he had no coherent plan for what he'd ever do with the footage.

From time to time, Alan would turn up in the evening to discover that Sophie had already gone out. He'd hang loose in the living room for a while, before taking a break to chill out while he worked up the energy to kick back for the rest of the evening. Exhausted from the effort, he'd fall asleep on the sofa (why he didn't move to Sophie's room eludes me). Nothing short of an air raid siren would wake him. I could blow my harp in the same room without rousing him.

Returning one evening after midnight, Hilary and I discovered we'd both forgotten our keys. While Hilary hammered on the door, I worked the intercom buzzer. I buzzed it on and off trying to avoid any sort of rhythm, which I reasoned the sleeper might adapt to.

"Bzzzzz b-b-bzzt bzzzzzzzz bzzzzzt bzz bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt b-bzzzzzz bzzzt bzzzz bz bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz bzzzzzzzzzzzzt"

Thus do the Fremen stride the great deserts.

Four flights of stairs down, I could hear Hilary hammering on the door. Inside it must've sounded like they'd detonated the family atomics.

When he answered the intercom at last it took me at least half a minute to notice.

"Bzzzt bzzz Yes? bt bzzzzzzzzzzz Who- bzzzzt this? bzt bzt bzt Can y- bzzzzzzz -rist's sake pl- bzzzzzzt bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz"

"Oh, Alan?" I said.

Hilary kept battering on the door.

"Oh God," he said, "not this again."

Space fish

I knitted this space fish together in Adobe Illustrator using Illustrator's punk and bloat functions, which replace the segments between the anchor points with curves:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/spacefish.jpg

Númenor

Despite contentions by many aggravated flatmates to the contrary, agreeing to live with someone has always meant agreeing to live with any girlfriend or boyfriend they may acquire down the track. Two millennia before the invention of television, Socrates' flatmates woke up at three in the morning to find some shirtless guy mending his sandals in their vestibule.

When Hilary and I first started going out, I became the House Boyfriend. Her housemate sometimes found me in a towel mending a harmonica in their living room. I paid no rent and never did any housework.

Later, when I moved out with Colin, we swapped and Hilary became our apartment's House Girlfriend. Colin sometimes waited for forty-five minutes to take his shower while she ran through some occult cosmetics lustration in the bathroom. I don't know anything about it except that it involved filling up the sink with water.

When Colin moved to California, Hilary and I moved in together. After we broke up, I kept the apartment and invited Ken to come live with me. For the first time, I found myself on the receiving end of the arrangement.

Between them, Ken and his girlfriend owned one dressing gown (and it, threadbare to the point of obscenity). Until they got around to getting dressed sometime around midday, only one of them could leave their bedroom at a time.

The close quarters also foists a haphazard cognisance of your flatmates' lovemaking upon your awareness (in particular if in its course they should involve the wall that divides their bedroom from yours). I'd never dealt with this before and had assumed I'd react with one (or both) of the usual two responses we make to sexuality: arousal or embarrassment. Instead, I found it cast the condition of my newfound bachelorhood into rather severe relief. When you find yourself designing a fantasy roleplaying system on the computer at three in the morning, while your flatmate has terrific sex next door, it becomes difficult not to wonder whether you might've taken a wrong turn somewhere.

Children's ice cream, Mandrake?

This started out as a sketch of Sterling Hayden as General Ripper in Dr. Strangelove. I could never get it to look much like Ripper, so I softened it into a face with a more sympathetic expression.

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/face.jpg

Relocation

I've relocated Arc to a virtual server at,

http://208.91.129.206/

At the moment, the choicest virtual servers go for around $200 a month. For $200, you get a glamorous server-townhouse near the city with its own security force and a cleaning lady who visits twice a week. At the cheaper end of the market, $50 a month will lease the server equivalent of a modest apartment in the suburbs with one parking space and a functional hot water system. The $5 a month I pay (to a provider who spells the word 'experts' in their name with two Xs and a U) leases the equivalent of a cardboard box in a slum ruled by local gangs. Please let me know if you have any trouble getting in.

Moses' trump

As he nears the land of Canaan, Moses sends ahead scouts to reconnoitre the terrain. He directs them to ascertain both the enemy's strength and the fertility of their land.

To their delight, the land appears fertile,

And they came as far as the valley of Segola, and cut down from there a branch with one bunch of grapes, and they carried it between two of them on a pole; and they brought some pomegranates and some figs...
And they returned from spying out the land after forty days.
And they came to Moses and Aaron and to all the congregation of the children of Israel, to the wilderness of Paran, to Rakim; and they brought back word to them and to all the congregation, and showed them the fruit of the land.¹

The tactical situation appears less propitious. Giants and their offspring infest the land. Fortifications gird the cities.

There we saw giants, the sons of giants, the descendents of giants; and we... [appeared] in their sight like grasshoppers...²

Few field surveys in the history of warfare can have returned such unfavourable results. Little wonder that most of the Israelites lose heart,

And all the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron; and the whole congregation said to them, Would God we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would God that we had died in this wilderness.
Why has the Lord brought up into this land, to fall by the sword...
And they said to one another, Let us appoint a leader, and let us return to Egypt.
Then Moses and Aaron fell on their faces before all the assembly of the congregation of the children of Israel.
And Joshua the son of Nun, and Caleb the son of Jophaniah... rent their clothes;
And they said to all the congregation of the children of Israel...
If the Lord delights in us, he will bring us into this land and give it to us, a land which flows indeed with milk and honey...
But the whole congregation said to stone them with stones. And the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud in the tabernacle of the congregation before all the children of Israel.
And the Lord said to Moses, How long will this people provoke me? And how long will they not believe me, for all the signs which I have done among them?
I will smite them with pestilence and destroy them, and I will make of you a nation... greater and mightier than they.³

Through his readiness to carry out mass executions for the crime of murmuring, God shows again his infinite love and mercy. Again it falls to Moses to talk him down,

And Moses said to the Lord, Then the Egyptians shall hear it (for thou didst bring up this people in thy might from among them),⁴

Can fears about how the news might play among the Egyptians stay the hand of a God?

And if thou shalt kill all this people as one man, then the nations who have heard the fame of thee will say,
Because the Lord... [couldn't] bring this people into the land which he swore to them, therefore he has slain them in the wilderness.
And now, let they power, O Lord, be great according as thou hast spoken, saying,
The Lord... longsuffering and of great mercy, and thou forgivest iniquity and transgression, by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and upon their children's children to the third and forth generation. Pardon the iniquity of this people according to the greatness of thy mercy, and as thou hast forgiven them from Egypt even until now.
And the Lord said to Moses, I have forgiven them according to your word...
And yet all the men who have seen my glory and signs which I did in Egypt and in the wilderness have tempted me, behold now, these ten times; and have not hearkened to my voice;
Surely they shall not see the land which I swore to their fathers, neither shall any one of those who provoked me see it...
(Now the Amalekties and Canaanities dwelt in the mountains.) Tomorrow turn and set out for the wilderness by the way of the Red Sea.
And the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron, saying,
How long shall this wicked congregation murmur in my presence? I have heard the complaints of the children of Israel which they murmur in my presence.
Say to them, As I live, says the Lord, as you have spoken in my presence, so will I do to you;
Your corpses shall fall in this wilderness... from twenty years old and upward, because you have murmured against me.
You shall not come into the land concering which I swore to make you dwell therin, except Caleb the son of Jophaniah, and Joshua the son of Nun.
But your little ones, who you said would become prey, and your sons who today do not know good and evil, they shall enter into the land, and I will bring them there, and they shall know the land which you have despised.
But as for you, your corpses shall fall in this wilderness.
And your sons shall be shepherds forty years in this wilderness, and shall suffer for your whoredom until your corpses... consumed in the wilderness.
According to the number of the days in which you spied out the land, even forty days, a year for each day, shall you suffer for your iniquities, forty years...
And the men whom Moses sent to spy out the land, who returned and made all the congregation murmur against him by publishing an evil report concerning the land.
These men who published an evil report of the land died by sudden plague before the Lord.⁵

Those men just reported what they saw. One imagines that few scouts ever made that mistake again.

Footnotes:

1. Numbers 13; 23, 25-26. Quoted without ellipses in comments.
2. Numbers 13; 33. Quoted without ellipses in comments.
3. Numbers 14; 2-6, 8, 10-12. Quoted without ellipses in comments.
4. Numbers 14; 13
5. Numbers 14; 15-20, 22-23, 24-34, 36-37. Quoted without ellipses in comments.

Arc

Arc simulates skirmishes between spaceships controlled by different algorithms. The players upload Java bytecode files that implement acceleration and target functions. Each pair of functions then controls a squadron of spaceships as it maneuvers and fires upon another such squadron. Arc tabulates the outcomes of these skirmishes and allocates an Elo rating to each pair of functions for comparison.

Each skirmish in Arc transpires within an arena. The arena defines the limits of the battlefield, the capabilities of the spaceships, the initial size and distribution of the opposing squadrons and the positions and behavior of any obstacles or areas of interest within the battlefield.

Arc spaceships move in two dimensions. To alter their velocity, they may apply a fixed magnitude of acceleration in any direction.

Each spaceship begins with a number of structure points. The arena determines how many. Each spaceship also has a reservoir of charge, which increases over time up to a maximum of ten points. By expending one point of charge, a spaceship may launch a torpedo in any direction, nominating one spaceship as its target. These torpedoes glide at a constant speed relative to the battlefield. The arena determines how fast. A spaceship struck by a torpedo that targets it loses one structure point and the torpedo dematerialises. A spaceship that comes into contact with a torpedo that doesn't target it remains unharmed, but the torpedo still dematerialises if a friendly ship launched it. A spaceship that loses its last structure point or stumbles into an obstacle explodes in a shower of harmless sparks.

For the website, go to:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/arc/

Meat ark

The masculine squalor of a man's first share-house often owes as much to his housemates' incompetence at housework as to their disdain for it. Some may know how to replace fuse wire or unblock a toilet, but few men of eighteen have any tangible notion of how to clean a grill trap or defrost a refrigerator. When Dirk moved out in the seventies, many young men couldn't even cook.

Dirk shared a house with several other young men. Beginning somewhere in the twentieth century at their arrival, conditions in the house at once began to deteriorate backwards through the aeons of human history. After a month, they'd plummeted to a pre-industrial level. By the end of winter, the housemates feared certain rooms of the house and could no longer make fire.

One of them had inherited a multitude of pots from his grandmother. Leftovers that decayed beyond a certain point they would throw out, in one piece, with the containing pot. The painlessness of this solution impressed the housemates. In their minds it planted the seed that would blossom into the Meat Ark.

The household purchased meat in prodigious quantities and stored it in a deep freezer in the basement. When the freezer's motor seized and the meat started to rot, they just stopped using the basement. By the height of summer, the stench infused the house. Roused into action at last, one of them liberated a high-temperature sealant sprayer from his work. Wearing a protective suit, he cocooned the freezer inside a glistening prism of silicone.

When archaeologists excavate our civilization's remains in a thousand years, they will find Dirk's Meat Ark. What a puzzle it will pose for some grad student. One suspects that even in the thirty-first century, supervisors willing to accept "youthful stupidity" as an archaeological explanation will remain rare.

Poster for Colin

Colin:

Poster for Poor pluto

Poor pluto:

Parties

The clock showed three when the speeding person made his move. He'd stalked me since two, prowling around the edge of the conversation, waiting to detach me from the herd. The need to verbalise his jumbled thoughts to some listener beat like a fever behind his eyes.

I knew a carnivore when I saw one, but the the room's shadows made him almost invisible. I think the Goths who decorated the place must've concocted them on purpose. Draped in costume-shop gloom for the occasion, their apartment looked like a Tim Burton exhibit realised in eight dollars of black and purple crepe paper. When I looked away for a twinkling moment, he pounced out of the shadows.

Forty five seconds later I knew that,

• his starch allergy had improved since he started eating organic foods,
• that a Myers-Briggs personality questionnaire had categorised him as a Feeling Judging Sensing person, but that he considered himself a Thinking Intuiting Perceiving person instead,
• that he deserved to get a new desktop at work and would talk to Robin about it on Monday, and,
• that a goldfish, Logan, whom he'd kept as an adolescent, had taught him a lot about responsibility and real respect for other living creatures.

Pinned in place by the speeding person at three in the morning, listening to them play that Cure song about the love cats for the fifteenth time I decided to see whether, next time she wanted to stay late, I might not just drive home by myself and get her to telephone when she needed me to pick her up.

At the next party, I left at midnight - or, to speak in more salient terms, half an hour after they started taking pills. She stayed behind. When I phoned back four hours later, a man I'd never met answered the phone. I asked if I could speak to her. He said he didn't mind and then stayed on the line.

"Quick!" someone cried in the background, "Chad has the phone again."

A few moments later I heard them wrenching the handset away from him. A friend of mine came on the line, out of breath, and apologised about Chad. He went to find her, but as soon as he left Chad came back on. I'd become prey again.

"Can I play you Mary Had a Little Lamb on the phone numbers?" he said.

"Ah," I said, "Could that disconnect th-"

"Beep bloooooop bleeeeeep beep bloooooop beep bloooooo-"

"Ok," I said, "I-"

"Hang on," he said, "I got it wrong."

"Look," I said, "it doesn't mat-"

"Beeeeeeeep blooooop bleeeeep bleeep blooooo-"

"Wait," he said.

"Hold up!" I said, "It jus-"

"Beep bloop bleep beep bloop beep beep bloop bloop bloop blooop bleep blee-"

"One sec," he said.

I had about a second to plead with him.

"Stop!" I said, "Why don't-"

"Beep bloop bee-"

"Wait," he said.

"Beep bloop bleep beep bloop beep beep bloop bloop bloop bleep beep beep bloop bee-"

"I know I can do it," he said.

"Stop! Wait!" I pled.

"Beeeep blooooooop bleeeep beeep bloooop beeeeeeep beeeeep beeeeeep beee-"

"Wait," he said, "just one more try."

"Stop this! Stop this! Stop this!" I chanted.

"Beep bloop bleep beep bloop beep beep bloop bloop bloop bleep beep beep beep bloop bleep beep bloop beep beep bloop bloop beep bloop bleep"

I think he'd done it.

"Perfect!" I said, "If I could just talk to-"

"Now," he said, "let's play a duet."

Poster for Poodles

Poodles:

Ethnographic exercise

The Brotherhood of Trustees owes its present influence to an archaic custom barring the aristocracy from direct involvement in commerce. The custom holds that commerce can never furnish the form of unassailable security it sees as the precondition for noble disinterestedness. Moreover, by their nature, commercial transactions would often compel the nobleman to deal with commoners as equals. The noble must regard such concourse as demeaning, both to himself in person and to the institution of nobility as a whole¹.

Since it draws its legislators from the noble class, the state expects its nobles, even when they operate through agents, to remain free from any economic attachments that could affect their judgment as lawmakers. Instead, tradition requires the aristocrat to base his wealth upon a secure foundation unlikely to feel the effect of changes in the nation's laws or shifts in her citizens' activities. He must feel as secure in his wealth as he does in his social superiority. Only then, says the tradition, will he have complete freedom to act in defence of the public's honour.

In earlier ages, the nobility derived their income from large country estates, often leasing portions of them to commoners. As the nobility moved to the city and the importance of the traditional estate receded, it needed a way to invest its wealth in business concerns without compromising its aloofness from direct commerce or exposing itself to too much risk. The doctrine arose that the nobleman should remain blind to the nature of his investments and concern himself instead only with selecting an agent of the best possible character.

The Brotherhood of Trustees began as a simple trade guild for such agents. Its code of professional ethics, though strict, ensued from the simple practical need to win the nobility's confidence. But as the brotherhood grew rich, it became presumptive. By stages, that code transformed from a series of practical injunctions into a baroque and often unintelligible system of religion worshiping the notion of contract through the person of the sovereign.

Although audited at intervals by the Crown, it operates from day-to-day without oversight.

Footnote:

1. Worse, depending on his commercial fortunes, he may even need to abase himself before commoners, laying his own dignity to waste and thus marring the dignity of the state.

Tour scenic Cesta Punta

I thought I'd draw old-timey travel posters to portray some of the blog posts as various holiday spots.

Tour scenic Cesta Punta:

Allergies

My puppy seems allergic to something in the garden. After roaming around in it, he scratches and rubs his face with his forepaws. I've pulled out what I thought the most probable culprits, such as Wandering Jew, but something out there still makes him itch. Can anyone suggest what else might cause it? Together with several plants I can't identify, the garden contains: thyme, dill, basil, cumin, aniseed, liquorice, borage, rosemary, chervil, chamomile, wormwood, wormseed, marjoram, evening primrose, caraway, sage, pineapple sage, bog sage, catnip, tansy, woad, motherwort, mugwort, soapwort, pearlwort, garlic, laurel, mint, Corsican mint, apple mint, Korean mint, spearmint, peppermint, lavender, hyssop, creeping fig, smyrnium, violets, parsley, brahmi, fenugreek, strawberries, coriander, pennyroyal, laksa leaf, pegagan, elm trees, sorrel, daisies, mustard, alyssum, oregano, feverfew, perilla, tarragon, carrots, tulsi, meadowsweet, chives, fennel, valerian, jojoba, rue, bee balm, verbena, lovage, poppies, onions, raspberries, savoury, skullcap, yarrow, jasmine, salad burnet, a maidenhair fern and an expiring cardamom plant.

Don't Remember Day

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Cesta punta

After cooking and eating his shoe in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, Herzog explains that he ranks a lack of adequate images as one of the gravest threats to civilisation. He puts it on par with overpopulation and ecological devastation.

For the man who fixes his focus well into the future, it cuts to the marrow of his fear that human progress in his society may've ground to a standstill. Without adequate images to knit its dreams from, can his society dream dreams of significance? Or will it spend its time perfecting the Slurpee and finding Australia's Next Top Model, as its citizens grow more and more isolated from each another?

But to his more myopic brother, it must sound about as probable as our dying out from an overreliance on serif typefaces.

Needless to say, cinema has given us some splendid images. We love watching Sonny strutting up and down in front of that bank in Dog Day Afternoon or M. Emmet Walsh gleaming in the moonlight in Blood Simple. We love Walter Sobchak holding out the homework in a zip lock bag. We love Fitzcarraldo playing his gramophone on the roof of his riverboat or Aguirre scuttling sideways along the shoreline. But by 2010, our movie industry has come to the point of investing 200 million dollars in a sequel to the movie Tron¹.

According to Wikipedia, after its release in 1982 the Tron franchise produced eleven different video games, a novelisation and a comic book, before finding its final expression in the electroluminescent bodysuit of Jay Maynard².

Some years ago, a Trivial Pursuit question brought to my attention the futuristic gladiatorial sport of Jai-Alai - by all appearances the inspiration for Tron's lethal disc game. Its players use arched scoops tied to one forearm to throw and catch a hard ball on a long squash court. The ball can reach speeds of up to three hundred kilometres an hour. It may ricochet off of several surfaces before the receiving player tries to catch it. From time to time, the ball kills one of the players. Ernest Hemingway witnessed a near fatality in Havana,

"In my life I have seen many people with life threatening injuries, but the accident which Ibarlucea suffered exposed before my eyes an event of courage and serenity which I could never have dreamed. All of a sudden, Guillermo... caught and threw the ball in an awkward posture and had the bad luck of hitting Ibarlucea in the head. The ball... sounded different, dry, cold, like the slam of a door. But Ibarlucea did not fall. What fortitude! It seemed impossible that he could remain on his feet. Red carnations began to spread on his white shirt... The other pelotaris and the judges ran up to him and led him to the infirmary... They operated on him two times and science miraculously returned him to life."³

This photograph, which comes from the weblog Plumb Lines⁴, shows a modern player ready to serve,

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/cesta1.jpg

Here we see the gladiators saluting with their claw scoops⁵,

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/cesta2.jpg

These show a cover of the Mexican Jai-Alai magazine A Chula and an old program booklet for Melbourne Jai-Alai in Melbourne, Florida⁶,

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/cesta3.jpg

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/cesta4.jpg


Footnotes:

1. Slated for release in December 2010. Disney promotional site at http://disney.go.com/tron/
2. aka "Tron guy". For the Wikipedia article, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Maynard
3. Quoted in The History of Basque Pelota in the Americas, Carmelo Urza, University of Nevada, Reno. Retrieved from http://www2.library.unr.edu/journals/10423834/1995/p001.pdf
4. At http://plumblines.wordpress.com/
5. From Tampa Bay Online. Caption begins, "After an illustrious 45-year history, Jai- Alai players lineup to salute their fans on the last night of Jai- Alai at the fronton in Tampa."
6. From http://armenta316.tripod.com/arch.htm

Tastes or cravings

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Read your ticket

For Sophie, physical necessity, by itself, didn't fix the moment when the future must arrive. Time marched rubato, stretching and bending to the individual rhythms of the players. As long as you stuck to the spirit of the arrangement, Time would turn a blind eye to a few extra minutes here or there.

To those with a pragmatic turn of mind, the view must've seemed an unmitigated failure. You found Sophie forever running late, out of petrol and waiting on her next paycheque to make the phone work again. Repossession agents chivvied her in flocks while friends she'd failed to meet crammed her answering machine with irate messages.

Yet, it dispossessed these predicaments (and many others) of their ability to engender distress. Once you believed a person's will could distort time itself, you always had time for a cup of coffee.

Sophie did recognise that parking restrictions, on the other hand, permitted no such flexibility. However, she could always convince herself that she'd have enough time to get in, do whatever she needed to do and get out again before any traffic warden ticketed her car. Picture the traffic wardens patrolling in slow-motion, mired in their belief in a rigid time, while Sophie alights from her car, folds the space to the post office and uses her Guildsman's badge to bypass the queue.

When she returned ninety minutes later, with a coffee, to find a ticket on the windshield, she would move it to another car - if possible, a fancy one. She believed (on faith rather than evidence) that most people would just pay any ticket they found on their car without reading it.

At home, Sophie parked in an L-shaped parking area behind her apartment building. The driveway ran down the side of the building next to the fence before making a remorseless hairpin turn into the parking area. Sophie parked on an otherwise disfavoured rise near one corner. Her car required push starting. Any two people can push start a car, but doing it by yourself requires a certain will to slapstick. Every morning, Sophie pushed her car down the slant, sprinted around to leap into the driver's seat and tried to start it before it coasted into the fence. As soon as the ignition caught, she'd execute a handbrake turn around the hairpin, slinging an arc of gravel up against the fence. With that, she hurtled down the driveway on to Hotham Road, off to occupy a loading zone at the university.

Headache

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Men without women

A friend of David's owned only one glass. In the mornings he would drink milk with it. In the evenings he would drink beer with it. He held that the beer washed out the milk and then, in turn, the milk washed out the beer, so that he never needed to wash the glass. In the end he got quite sick.

Air hog

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Rural man

Our electoral system has granted us a chance to see the rural man with his plumage outstretched¹. If we'd sought his canefield notions by direct methods, rural man would've come with his guard up. His keen rural nose would've warned him that something smelled amiss. An instinctual wariness of the city folk would've confounded his eagerness to foist his granddaddy's wisdom upon them. By the time we coaxed him to state his views, he would've bored them full of equivocations and other boltholes for escape, lest the devious city folk try to trap him in them. But instead, our electoral system has managed to deliver him to us with his pride in his backwoods convictions unabashed. I indulge in a few samples:

• "Mr Katter reckoned yesterday he would 'walk to Bourke backwards' if 'the poof population of North Queensland...[equals]...any more than 0.001 per cent'.
  'Mind you,' he said, 'if the percentage...[equals]...what they say it...[does]...in the rest of Australia, then I think I'll take to walking everywhere backwards.'"
(Mike Seccombe, Bottom Line for Katter (March 4, 1994). Sydney Morning Herald^2,3, Quoted without elision in the comments)


• "Ethnic community leaders say the use by the National Party MP for the Federal seat of Kennedy, Mr Bob Katter, of the racist term "slanty-eyed ideologues" could ruin the Coalition's electoral chances on March 2."
  (Helen Pitt, Sack Katter, Urge Ethnic Leaders (February 15, 1996). Sydney Morning Herald.⁴)



• Katter Throws Crocs Into Climate Debate (August 12, 2009, ABC News Online)



• "Independent MP Bob Katter has wheeled a barrow full of bananas into Parliament House as a way of highlighting the threat imports pose to the local industry...
  Mr Katter's staff, dressed as bananas, danced and howled in the background"
  (Katter Pulls Banana Stunt in Canberra (September 17, 2009). Sydney Morning Herald⁵.



• Nats try to lure rednecks (September 24, 1999, Illawarra Mercury)

Footnotes:

1. Can democracy forgive my childish misgivings? I see now how much better it knew my desires than I did. On behalf of all Australians who delight in the mockery of country people, I extend thanks to our electoral system for the sudden eminence of Bob Katter.
2. Retrieved August 28, 2010 from
   newsstore.smh.com.au
3. Repeated in Jo Chandler, Katter Country (August 28, 2010). The Age.
4. Retrieved August 28, 2010 from
   newsstore.smh.com.au
5. Retrieved August 28, 2010 from
   news.smh.com.au

Provisional government

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Reply to Peter

Most of us observe in history a persistent, if unsteady, trend towards enlightenment. It delights us to contemplate the extent to which human freedom has expanded since, for instance, the seventeenth century, or the extent to which it had by then already expanded since the seventh. But I can't see that democracies have had any more hand in spreading that enlightenment than other sorts of governments. If grounds exist to think that systems like ours produce abominable regimes less often than the alternatives, I'd love to hear them. For my part, I just see various regimes, some admirable, others abhorrent and many in-between, scattered between the different forms of government.

The Nazi party came to power through a popular election; Stalin's regime through maneuverers within the executive. Would it have mattered if it'd happened the other way around? Would the former somehow have perpetrated even greater abominations or the latter lesser ones? To take a current example, could the foreign policy of the United States somehow become even more barbaric if, for instance, some ancestral dynasty ruled it as a kingdom?

One sometimes hears that our system supplies the twin benefits of including us in the governance of our nation and compelling our leaders to respond to our wishes¹. In my own case, for instance, I find that little could stray farther from the truth. Instead the process amounts to a triennial alienation ritual through which the electoral commission reacquaints me with the knowledge that,

1. No party for whose candidate I've voted has ever formed government


and


2. No party that even entertains the hope of installing members in either house represents my views on basic questions².

Footnotes:

1. A misapprehension that one presumes they'd resent (just as the country magistrate would resent it if his townsfolk thought he might handover a prisoner to them whenever a majority of them got into the mood for a lynching).



2. 1. Like many, I believe that the foreign policy of the USA has become so heinous that as a nation we should oppose the USA irrespective of the consequences for Australia
   
   
   and (to echo the same conviction in more general terms)
   
   
   2. If Australia must choose between doing the right thing and its survival then we should do the right thing and die with honour.
   
   I concede that in our current climate opinions like this one qualify as contentious. More than half the friends to whom I've confided it disagree, but I've never received the impression that they find the idea outrageous. Yet for all the political endorsement it receives, I might as well have as my representatives a parliament of owls.

Cover of "The Warriors of Batak"

Somewhere in the last century, the boilerplate book cover for fantasy roleplaying products became a picture of two magical warrior women in cleavage-armour confronting each other from the backs of dragons¹.

Although one applauds Task Force Games' decision to depart from this formula in The Warriors of Batak, one can't help but wonder about the process that chose this:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/batak.jpg

Footnote:

1. Miniatures wargames caught a blast of the same wind, although they favoured a more crowded-looking, homoerotic version of the same scene.
   Where the fantasy game or magazine had already used the dragon riders on a recent cover, the formula permitted five variations:

   • Cleavage-sorceress steps onto balcony with a ball of fire over her hands,
   • Cleavage-warrior holds a spear in front of her companions,
   • Man sits in room of astrological apparatus,
   • Group of friends consult map in a tavern
   
   and
   
   • Man in rich armour fights ogre in the snow.

Night clubber

I revere Vincent Gallo's film Buffalo 66 as a work of genius. From the outset, the film seizes our attention through its humour and stunning photography. Buffalo looks like Orwell's bright cold day in April when the clocks struck thirteen. Gallo's flurrying delivery leaves us in hysterics.

At first, we despise his protagonist. After heckling her away from the payphone, he mooches phone change from the tap dancer and then sneers at her in return.

"Don't you say thanks?"

"What?"

"Don't you say, 'thank you'?"

"What?"

In the toilets, he all but beats a man in a tantrum of homophobia.

At best, we see him as a rodent trying to swagger like the eagle.

And then, somewhere between the train wreck of his family and his friend Goon who sent the raisins, we start to feel sorry for him. By the time we finish cackling at the photo-booth snapshots of the couple "spanning time together" and the goal kicker's "Sexxotic dancers", we discover that we've come to care about him. We even like him. As he treads the last footsteps of his plan for vengeance, we pray that he'll turn back.

How did we come to care about Billy Brown?

In 2003, news reached me that Gallo's newest film would debut at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival. I mustered a posse to see it.

Before the screening, the film's co-writer and co-director, Dale Reeves, welcomed us to the theatre, apologising that Gallo couldn't make it tonight. Dale had a bodybuilder's body but pudgy cheeks and a weighty head that he waxed bare. Together, it generated the impression of a giant baby forced into a suit. Dale stammered through a swift speech, relating how for years, he'd dreamed of making this film. At last, after years of striving, his dream had become reality. As we applauded, he beamed at us in thanks and tears welled in his eyes. It seemed a moment of perfect joy.

Dale moved to the back of the cinema near the door. We sat in the backmost row over to one side of him. Most of the other seats remained tenantless. Leaving out people connected to the film or festival, it appeared that less than a dozen patrons had come to see it.

In the end, Vincent Gallo's 2003 film The Brown Bunny suffered from its premature release. We, however, had gone to see Vincenzo Gallo's Nightclubber, which suffered from a total lack of any merit.

It resembled nothing so much as a teenaged boy's attempt at self-aggrandisement. It starred Dale Reeves himself (at that moment standing behind and to the right of us) in the role of 'NC', following NC's quest to prove to the wincing viewer what a badass he'd become.

The majority of the dialogue sounded like that same teenager browbeaten by a relative into describing his day at school. The remainder they had derived from a farrago of 80s action movies and rock albums, divested of any lingering humour and then subjected to several rounds of machine translation.

Though I now find it amusing to recollect, at the time it produced in us an amalgam of embarrassment and loathing akin to seeing a man soil himself in public. We felt an overpowering need to get away from it, but we could only gain the exit by trampling through a man's dreams.

When, at the Last Judgement, the matter of my atheism comes before the celestial court, my attorney (if he knows his stuff) will cite my endurance on this occasion as evidence of my good character. He will summon witnesses present on that evening to testify that, with my comrades, I held to my seat for a full thirty minutes.

However, under cross-examination, I fear that the suave prosecutor may force me to admit that this constituted less than a third of the film's full length. Or that ("more damning still," I can hear him chuckling to the jury) for the last ten of those minutes, rather than hanging on out of any laudable sympathy, we simply lacked the nerve to shuffle out of the theatre two feet in front of the man's nose.

Tony

Throughout history (save perhaps during some momentary outbreaks of nationalism) reflective men and women have seen their societies as wasteful, self-destructive, cruel, superficial and rapacious. The notion that one lives in a democracy (whether true or illusory) now serves to infuse these perennial reflections with a sense of alienation by implying that the majority of one's fellows want it that way.

Recent polls find the Australian public conniving to place Tony Abbot in charge of the country¹. If in the next two weeks no chimera materialises to frighten them back in the opposite direction, they may succeed at it.

Suppose that instead of our current system we endured under some sort of corrupt (and unelected) noblesse who plotted the same thing. We would still resent them. We would see their Abbot as proof of their contempt for us. But we, together, would resent them.

By making that same man the confection of a process it describes as democratic, our system alienates us from the majority of our countrymen and countrywomen by alleging the he embodies their ideals.

Footnote:

1. Abbott leads Gillard in latest poll (July 31, 2010). The Age, Retrieved August 8, 2010 from
   http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-national/abbott-leads-gillard-in-latest-poll-20100731-1102s.html
   
   Government trails coalition in latest poll (August 7, 2010). Business Spectator, Retrieved August 8, 2010 from
   http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Labor-trails-coalition-in-latest-poll-83L73?OpenDocument&src=tnb

Poor Pluto

The educational films they showed us in middle school seemed all at least twenty-years old. On flickering projector film, scientists in brown suits took us on a tour of the body's respiratory system while sanitised hipsters with pompadours showed us how to resist peer pressure. Crew-cutted schoolboys discovered the power of lunchroom manners while other sons and daughters of white hegemony learned how quiet helps at school. Deep-voiced fabulists sold us a version of the American legislative process with no pharmaceutical or energy lobbyists. Other narrators, whose measured delivery somehow conveyed the vastness of space, described the then nine planets of the solar system as the viewpoint swept out towards poor Pluto (of late expelled from the League of Planets for conduct unbefitting a solar planet).

In a grainy National Geographic film from the fifties we saw Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert hunt an elephant. To those of us inclined to sentimentalise the elephant, it seemed villainous. Whatever their actual character, elephants prevailed in our jejune sympathies as gentle creatures, even altruistic ones. Watching them hunt this uncomprehending behemoth felt like seeing them hunt Lennie down through the last pages of Of Mice and Men.

For most of the film, they tracked the elephant. For days they circled around, changing direction at each stripped tree, pile of dung or elephantine footprint. No doubt, in reality, tracking a ten-tonne creature over a featureless plain proves harder than it sounds, but it did put a note of suspicion into one's mind. Time after time, we watched them wake, fill skins with water and spend the day reading the tracks, only to retire at sundown empty-handed. As time stretched on, it seemed less and less probable that they'd find the elephant.

And then, with no warning, it appeared in the shade of a solitary tree. The Bushmen, who before had seemed such masters of their environment, now looked tiny and defenceless; the elephant immense and unconquerable. No honest pundit would've given them much chance. Three nude men with sharpened sticks confronted an African bull elephant twice the size of any we'd seen in zoos.

Their attack, when it came, took some time even to get its attention.

Instead of fanning out, the Bushmen ranked up together to hurl their tiny spears in volleys. Their first three spears just rebounded off the elephant. The second volley managed to embed one into the rind of its hide for a few moments. The elephant looked up, saw them and went back to eating its tree. The spear fell out.

By the time they ran out of spears several volleys later, they had succeeded in annoying the elephant.

After several death-defying sorties to reclaim the spent spears (through which the elephant neither charged nor retreated), the Bushmen renewed their attack. It'd become patent that they would never succeed in administering any serious injury. It just remained for us to see if the elephant would trample one of them.

Then, as a new volley of spears glanced the elephant, the film jumped and it lay stone-dead on the ground. We watched them carve the carcass and carry bundles of meat back to their village.

Even as children we realised the film crew must've stopped filming and shot our elephant. But then, what had we seen the Bushmen doing? As soon as you saw them facing down the elephant, you knew this could never work. Not against an elephant half its size. Not if they'd brought twice as many hunters. Their village can't have included elephants among its hunting targets. So how had three huntsmen with tiny javelins wound up leading a film crew across the savannah in search of one?

Could they've found themselves caught in a lie?

No doubt when they arrived in the village, National Geographic's team had said that they'd come to find out what sorts of things people in this village did. It doesn't seem too hard to imagine that some young man might've stepped up and announced that they hunted elephants.

"We'd love to see that!" said the anthropologists.

And perhaps before they knew it, they found themselves out on the plains trying to pick a fight with the savannah equivalent of a tiger tank.

League of Twelve Nations (map)

This shows the League of Twelve Nations on Vinland-7:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/leagueoftwelvenations.png

Mojave (map)

This shows the suburbs and major thoroughfares of Mojave, California on Vinland-7:

http://www.sevenextraeyes.org/andy-social/mojave.png

Vinland-7, 1946

1050: Fifty years after Leif Ericsson's discovery of North America, Norse colonists build a permanent settlement on the island of Newfoundland.

c. 1060: Exploring the mainland to their west, Norse explorers introduce European diseases into the Americas. By 1200, the native population has fallen from eighteen million to less than four million.

1082: Thorgil Ulfsson explores the North American coastline from Newfoundland to Delaware.

1133: Egill Haengsson founds the city of New Oslo in the region of Connecticut. In 1155, his nephew, Skapti Thorvaldsson, founds the city of Skaptibyggð in the region of Maryland.

c. 1500: European conquest of the New World proceeds at a slower pace. Instead of societies soon decimated by disease, Europe discovers populous native cultures with iron tools and weapons.
The slower pace of conquest, in turn, leads to increased cultural exchange between Europe and Native America. Intermarriage between prominent European Americans and the Native American oligarchies becomes an important tool of diplomacy.
American Christianity adapts to local customs, evangelising in native languages and often building its churches on the sites of former native worship. Elements of native religions enter into American Christianity.

1775: The Norse state of Vinland now comprises the Northeastern region of the United States from Maine to Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania as well as the Canadian regions of Newfoundland, Labrador, Québec and eastern Ontario. England hold the territory to their west, from Ontario to Saskatchewan in the North and Virginia to Louisiana in the South. Spain hold most of South and Central America as far north as Honduras. The remainder of North America including Mexico, California and Texas remains under native control.

1775: A confederation of British colonies comprising Indiana, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, West Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida and Illinois rebel against British rule, beginning the American Revolutionary War. On July 4, 1776, they declare independence as the Federated States of America (FSA).

~1775: A nuclear explosion with a yield of at least forty kilotons takes place in Antarctica. Infinity's Technical Analysis division believe Centrum responsible.

1823: Retaliating against an attack on an American merchantman, the Federated States Navy bombards the town of Quallah Battoo in Sumatra.

1851: A four-year war between the FSA and a league of Native American nations concludes with the Treaty of Essa-queta, which cedes California, Texas and New Mexico to the FSA.

1852: Tache becomes the first incorporated city in the FSA state of California. It serves as a temporary capital for the state until the legislature moves to Chemehuevi in 1855.

1854: After a clash over tariffs between the FSA and local townspeople, the F.S. Navy sloop Cyane bombards the town of San Juan del Norte, Nicaragua.

1859: Fifty-thousand F.S. settlers receive homesteads in the new state of California under the Federation Homestead Act.

1860: Vinland begins the world's first commercial exploitation of petroleum. A well in the province of Mitrland, Vinland produces two-thousand barrels a year.

1863: F.S. entrepreneur Christopher Peacock contracts to build a Chilean railroad between Santiago and Valparaiso, but when the Chilean government advance him $400,000 to begin, he absconds with the money.

1865: French archaeologist Jasper Faille discovers four adult Neanderthal skeletons in a cave on the South Sandwich Islands that differ to a considerable extent from previous finds. Faille dates them to the Middle Palaeolithic period of 50,000 BC. Two-years later, the scientific community mourns when a museum fire in Paris destroys all four specimens.

1868: A cholera pandemic that began in 1866 comes to an unexplained end. From January to September, 99.8% of all suffers die, sometimes advancing from their initial infection to death in less than a fortnight, but after September, no new cases appear.

1869: Riots against Chinese coolies erupt on the streets of Ohlone, California.

1870: The first transcontinental railroad through the FSA links Virginia Beach in Virginia to the city of Mojave in California (counterpart to Homeline's Los Angeles).

1872: The Vinland ferryboat S. S. Leifr Eiríksson explodes, killing all aboard. Vinland adopts rigorous steamboat maintenance and design codes.

1874: The Orphrey Railroad links the cities of Ohlone and Mojave in California.

1876: An outburst of typhoid fever in Vinland kills five-thousand before disappearing almost overnight. Within a span of days, all known suffers either die or make complete recoveries and no new cases occur.

1879: FSA President Samuel Tilden signs the Chinese Exclusion Act limiting immigration of Chinese labourers to the FSA.

1890: By 1890, California has become the largest oil producer in the Federated States. Oil wells dominate the Mojave Basin and Kern County west of the Antelope Valley. The trading floor of the Mojave Oil Exchange covers almost a hectare.

1895: Mobster "Diamond Jim" Colosimo immigrates to Chicago. He dresses in flashy white suits with diamond pins and rings. By 1910, he owns a share in more than two-hundred brothels and gambling dens in the FSA.

1896: Oil prospectors drill through piers off the shore of Summerland, California, constructing the world's first offshore oil wells.

1901: A reputable study into the efficacy of Old Professor Hostetter's Stomach Sarsaparilla, which contains forty percent alcohol, flabbergasts FSA's medical establishment when it finds the nostrum effective against dysentery, dyspepsia, colic and bilious complaints. Sales skyrocket.

1903: Anthracite coal miners begin a six-month strike that cripples the Federated States. Dexter Chamberlain of the Federated Iron & Coal Company replies that, "The rights and interest of the labouring man will not find protection under the auspices of labour agitators, but only under the aegis of the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of this country".

1905: Universal Studios, MGM and Warner Brothers all purchase land in Hollywood on the outskirts of Mojave.

1906: An earthquake and the ensuing fires destroy two-thirds of the city of Ohlone, California, leaving a quarter million Californians homeless.

1907: Clement Wheelwright founds the Asiatic Debarment Coalition in Konomihu, California, which seeks to ban Japanese immigration to the FSA.

1909: The Industrial Workers of the World begin the publication of two newspapers: the English-language Industrialist published out of Ahwahnechee, California in the FSA and the Vinlandic-language Waulk published out of Liripipe, Meginland in Vinland.

1910: Roald Amundsen's South Pole Expedition ends in disaster. Going off course near the Axel Heiberg Glacier, the crew perishes in December from hunger and exhaustion.

1911: William Mulholland completes the Mojave Aqueduct connecting Mojave in southern California to creeks of the Oowekeno mountain range in the north.

1912: The Industrial Workers of the World add a Finnish-language newspaper, Tie Vapauteen, to their publications.

1913: The Lincoln Highway links Ohlone, California to Plymouth, North Carolina.

1914: Shipping millionaire Cornell Burroughs builds his mansion in Hollywood, Mojave in the shape of an Iroquois longhouse, starting a fad that lasts until WWII.

1915: The Californian city of Kumeyaay hosts the Panama-California World's Fair. Kumeyaay Zoo, constructed for the event, remains the largest zoo in California to the present day.

1916: The FSA invades the nation of Quisqueya in the Antilles archipelago to protect routes through the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean to the Panama Canal.

1917: The Mescalero Confederation nationalizes its oilfields.

1918: Annual lynchings in North America fall to an all-time low of 31.

January, 1919: The states of the FSA ratify the Eighteenth Amendment to the Federated States Constitution, prohibiting the manufacture, sale and transportation of 'intoxicating liquors' within the FSA. The ratification, which requires three-quarters of the thirty-five states, completes on the sixteenth of January, with North Dakota and Nebraska the only states against the amendment.

February, 1919: "Diamond Jim" Colosimo opens a brothel named 'The Four Deuces' at 2222 South Wabash in Chicago with his nephew Johnny Torrio. Torrio brings in a young lieutenant named Al Capone to work as its bartender, introducing him to Chicago. When an unknown party murders Colosimo a year later, first Torrio and then Capone gains control of his gang - later known as the 'Chicago Outfit'. Between 1925 and 1930, the Federated States Treasury estimates that Capone rakes in half a billion dollars in illegal income (equal to about six billion GURPS dollars).

September, 1919: In the case Schenck v. Federated States, the Supreme Court of the FSA rules that clauses of the Espionage Act that restrict citizens' freedom to discourage participation in the war effort during wartime violate the right to free speech guaranteed under the First Amendment.

November, 1919: Airmail service begins between Chicago, Illinois and Skapti, New Finnmark. By the end of the year, flight time falls to ten hours.

February, 1920: Mafioso Albert Anastasia (born Umberto Anastasio) emigrates from Calabria, Italy to Virginia, FSA. He soon rises to a position of prominence in the International Longshoremen's Association.

September, 1920: Marcus Garvey opens the first international convention of the Universal Negro Improvement Association at Liberty Hall in Red Bluff, California. Twenty-five thousand delegates attend.

1921: Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding defeats Iowa Governor Thaddeus Drake to become President of the FSA. After Harding's death from an aneurism in 1923, Vice President Montgomery Glover becomes President of the FSA.

January, 1922: The Mojave Ambassador Hotel opens at 532 Oak St. in South Sowee. It has six-hundred rooms and occupies twenty-five acres.

November, 1922: The Shrine Auditorium, future venue of the Academy Awards, opens in Mojave. It features domed cupolas overlaid with tan and pink stones in a Hopi Indian basket-weave pattern.

1923: FSA president Warren Harding fulfils an electoral promise to end the occupation of Quisqueya. In 1925, Quisqueya hold their first elections.

January, 1924: The state of Georgia convicts Albert Anastasia for the homicide of a fellow longshoreman. They incarcerate him in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he meets Jimmy "The Shiv" Destefano.

August, 1924: Mojave begins an ambitious infrastructure project to remodel the financial district around Pioneer Avenue in South Naahleeka as a grid of identical blocks. Delayed by the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1942, the project completes in November of 1945.

June, 1925: Vinlandic prizefighter Sigurd Kyrre defeats American Jack Dempsey in Oregon, becoming World Heavyweight Champion. By the end of the fight, Kyrre cannot see because of his own blood.

September, 1925: In the case Carroll v. Federated States, the Supreme Court of the Federated States rules warrantless search of an automobile unconstitutional.

March, 1926: On Al Capone's orders, enforcer Tony "Big Tuna" Accardo assassinates Northside racketeer Hymie Weiss outside the Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago.

November, 1926: A Vinlandic-language radio play about a workers revolution causes a panic in New Oslo.

January, 1927: Route 66 links Mojave, California to Chicago, Illinois.

October, 1927: FSA president Montgomery Glover announces that he won't contest the 1928 elections.

December, 1927: In the case Olmstead v. Federated States, the Supreme Court of the Federated States rules that FBI wiretapping, used throughout the previous decade to catch bootleggers, breaches the Fourth Amendment to the Federated States Constitution as a form of unlawful search.

September, 1928: Mojave completes construction of its city hall, at that point the tallest building in Mojave. It uses a façade of alternating pink and yellow stones to reproduce an Inca zigzag pattern. City officials brag that it can withstand any earthquake California chooses to throw at it.

November, 1928: Republican Herbert Hoover defeats democrat Spencer Bowling by a landslide, becoming president of the FSA from 1929 to 1933.

1929: The USSR expels Leon Trotsky. In 1930, Trotsky settles in Chile.

February, 1930: American boxer Marshall Weir knocks out Vinlander Sigurd Kyrre in Ohio to become World Heavyweight Champion. In 1932, he loses the title to Nakai Mahpeeya of the Republic of Yucatán.

August, 1930: A hurricane hits the Eastern shore of Vinland, killing 112 people.

February, 1931: The FSA convicts Al Capone for income tax evasion. Frank Nitti becomes figurehead boss of the Chicago Outfit. Tony "Big Tuna" Accardo becomes caporegime of an Outfit crew in Mojave, specialising in loansharking.

April, 1931: During the so-called 'Castellammarese War', Gangsters Albert Anastasia, Bugsy Siegel and Jimmy "The Shiv" Destefano execute Salvatore Maranzano and "Joe The Boss" Masseria on the streets of Detroit. Lucky Luciano becomes the preeminent gangster in the FSA.
Luciano appoints Anastasia and labour racketeer Louis "Lepke" Buchalter as heads of his enforcement subdivision, soon known as 'Murder Inc.'. By 1940, they've committed over five-hundred murders, operating from the back of a candy store in Indianapolis.

September, 1931: The Mojave Central Library opens at the corner of Pierce Road and Main Street. Terracotta reliefs around the building create a Cherokee herringbone pattern in cream, grey and red.

November, 1931: The Australian submarine Nautilus sinks when it collides with the edge of an undersea trench at a latitude of 61 degrees south.

January, 1932: Unemployment in the Federated States rises to thirty percent.

July, 1932: Three-thousand participants compete in the Mojave Olympics.

February, 1933: Prohibition ends in the FSA when the states ratify the Twenty-First Amendment to the Federated States Constitution (which repeals the Eighteenth Amendment).

March, 1933: David Sigmundson (counterpart to homeline Hollywood producer David O. Selznick) emigrates from New Oslo in Vinland to Mojave, California.

November, 1933: Missouri Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeats Herbert Hoover to become president of the FSA. He will remain in office until his death in 1945.

1934: In a controversial split decision, American boxer Sterling Roach defeats Yucatecan Nakai Mahpeeya to become World Heavyweight Champion. In 1937, he loses the title to American Joe Louis.

1935: After a five-year campaign to curtail the agency's power, Federated States Congress and President Roosevelt disband the FBI.

1936: Teletypewriters see use in the FSA.

1937: Lucky Luciano sends Bugsy Siegel to California to take over Mojave's gambling rackets. Soon, competition from the Chicago Outfit leads to escalating violence on the streets of Mojave. In 1940, Californian Attorney General Earl Warren describes Siegel as the 'Al Capone of Mojave'.

1938: Vigilantes drive three hundred striking agricultural workers from their homes in Grass Valley, California.

1939: Merchants National Trust and Savings opens in Mojave. Its building on Paramount Boulevard in Monterey Park uses an ornamented French style decorated with pink and yellow stones in a Navajo chequerboard pattern.

August, 1940: Leon Trostky survives an assassination attempt by Stalinist agents in Chile. Though bedridden by 1945, he remains alive to the present day.

September, 1940: The Supreme Court of the FSA upholds the right, on grounds of free speech, of FSA citizens to advocate the violent overthrow of the FSA government, her subordinate governments or institutions.

October, 1940: Heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis retires (undefeated) after contracting tuberculosis. He dies in 1942 at a sanatorium in Billings, Montana. In 1941, the National Boxing Association recognises American Garland Cartwright as World Heavyweight Champion.

January, 1941: At Good Samaritan Hospital in Glendale, Mojave, Willie Sue Vliet gives birth to Don Glen Vliet (counterpart to homeline musician and painter Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart).

February, 1941: Radio station W47NV begin broadcasting in Jackson, Mississippi, becoming the first FM radio station in the FSA.

September, 1941: Bugsy Siegel's "Murder Inc." defenestrate criminal informant Abe "Kid Twist" Reles in the presence of an eight-man police bodyguard in Mojave.

October, 1941: KECA Radio open studios on Pacific Avenue in Huntington Park, Mojave. Their building uses a Cree Indian pattern of dark crosses over an ivory-coloured background. By 1946, they have become the most profitable radio station in Mojave.

February, 1942: John H. Johnson begins publishing Negro Digest in Mojave. In 1945, he will introduce Ebony magazine.

March, 1942: At Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Mojave, Toby Futterman gives birth to Lewis Allen Reed (counterpart to homeline musician Lou Reed).

June, 1942: Reform candidate Acid Chandler defeats incumbent Fletcher Bowron to become Major of Mojave.

August, 1942: Pronto Siete, a Chilean food company founded by soviet exile Leon Trotsky, unveils the 'Slurpee' ice beverage at a tradeshow in Punta Arenas.

September, 1942: Federated States Courthouse opens on Woodland Street in Maywood, Mojave. Its building features an Algonquian pattern of red and white zigzags over a black background.

October, 1942: Open war breaks out between Bugsy Siegel's gang and the Chicago Outfit in Mojave. It ends four months later when the state of California indicts several high-ranking members of the Outfit for extortion.

January, 1943: Despite a notorious record of corruption, former Mayor of Mojave, Frank L. Shaw, defeats Justice Earl Warren to become Governor of California.

February, 1943: The state of California indicts Frank Nitti and other members of the Chicago Outfit for attempting to extort money from Hollywood film studios through their control of labour unions. In March, Nitti commits suicide by the rail tracks near Mojave's Union Station by shooting himself through the head. Tony "Big Tuna" Accardo becomes head of the Outfit in California.

June, 1943: American boxer Junior Tahachee outpoints fellow countryman Garland Cartwright in Wisconsin to become World Heavyweight Champion. Sportswriters describe it as the, "fight of the aeon". In September, Tahachee enlists as a private in the Federated States Army. He travels with the Special Services Division giving exhibition matches throughout Europe. In June, 1945 he returns to live in Mojave, California.

November, 1944: Infinity agents recover twelve machined stones that generate weak parachronic fields from inside the big clock at Union Station in Mojave. Each has a drawing of a unicycle stencilled on to it in white paint.

December, 1944: In the case Korematsu v. Federated States, the Supreme Court of the FSA rules that Executive Order 9066, which allowed the federal government to inter Americans of Japanese descent during WWII, violates the constitution.

February, 1945: Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, staring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, opens in the FSA.

April, 1945: FSA President Franklin Roosevelt dies of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of sixty-three. Harry S. Truman becomes president of the FSA.

June, 1945: Fifty nations, including the FSA and Vinland, sign the United Nations charter at the War Memorial Opera House in Ohlone, California. Other signatories of note include, Cōzcatlān, France, the Canadian Confederacy, the Paiute League, Czechoslovakia, the Mescalero Confederation, the Republic of China, Zuma Union, the Philippine Commonwealth, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom, Yugoslavia and the League of Twelve Nations.

September, 1945: Infinity recover eight further stones from an open-cage elevator at the Bradbury Building in downtown Mojave. These have drawings of spectacles stencilled on to them, but otherwise appear identical to the twelve recovered from Union Station.

December, 1945: Fire comes out of the brambles and devours Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Mojave.

1946: Heavyweight boxing champion Junior Tahachee drowns while swimming near Long Beach in Mojave. In February, the National Boxing Association recognises fellow Mojave resident Jimmy Barlow as World Heavyweight Champion.

Divergence Point
1050: Fifty years after Leif Ericsson's discovery of North America, Norse colonists build a permanent settlement on the island of Newfoundland.

Major Civilisations
Western (empire with rivals), Orthodox (empire with satellite states), Chinese (empire with rivals), Islamic (multipolar)

Worldline Data
TL: 7
Mana Level: No mana
Quantum: 6
Infinity Class: P4
Centrum Zone: Orange

Vision quest

Born in Muddy Waters, Cocopa on Vinland-7, Kiss-the-sky attended the Quechan Lyceum at Limbic Gulch. In 1908, she received a PhD in electrodynamics from the Cocopa Medicine Lodge for Advanced Physics.

At the outbreak of the Third Apache War she accepted a lieutenancy in the Brigade of Engineers. Captured in 1910, she remained a prisoner of war until the capture of Beating Heart in 1912.

After the war, she returned to a lecturing position at the Medicine Lodge of North Maricopa, where her interest swivelled towards thermodynamics. In 1916, she received the Stymbjörnson Award for her contributions to the kinetic-molecular theory of gasses.

In 1918, she accepted a professorship at the Vocational Medicine Lodge of Hualapai, becoming Deputy Shaman of Physics in 1927.

Sometime around 1923, Kiss-the-sky became fascinated by wireless broadcasts transmitted from the Federated States of America. She came to believe that certain radio programs concealed messages directed towards listeners outside the Federated States. By the late twenties, she'd become positive that the radio sportscasts of prizefights in the Federated States somehow pointed the way towards a "hidden medicine lodge" somewhere on the Colorado Plateau. With deepening obsession she poured over maps of the plateau, matching "hints" from those sportscasts to landmarks and sites of historic occurrences.

More and more she disregarded her academic duties. In 1931, the medicine lodge cancelled her professorship.

In 1932, after listening to the title bout between Nakai Mahpeeya and Marshall Weir, she believed she had located her hidden medicine lodge on a tributary of the Grand Canyon between Horseshoe Mesa and Sockdolager Rapids. In the heat of summer she drove out to find it.

She had neglected to eat or sleep for several days. While climbing down the escarpment near Vulcan's Throne she swooned and fell. She banged her head and blacked out.

She recovered consciousness at the bottom of a ravine. A deer stood guard in front of her. It'd come to guide her. It nuzzled her and at its touch all pain left her.

The deer helped her to stand. It led her down the ravine, beneath an overhanging of rock and into an Infinity Patrol surveillance post. When questioned, she said that instructions coded into their radio broadcasts had led her to them.

The personnel on-hand felt that her acute state of fatigue made it unsafe to administer Eraser. Alarmed by her story, they decided to bring her to Homeline.

The subsequent investigation could not determine whether her experience and surrounding events stemmed form anything besides the collision of a delusion with chance. Nor could it determine why the surveillance post had failed to detect her before she blundered into their camp. Footage from cameras covering the approach showed only two deer walking along the ravine.

Kiss-the-sky elected to remain on Homeline. After completing an acclimation course she commenced a degree in paradynamics at Prairie View A&M University in Texas. In Homeline year 2018, she accepted a research position at the Interstate Convocation for Parachronic Research.

In 2023, Kiss-the-sky completed work on four conveyors intended for Patrol missions to Vinland-7, her worldline of origin. She lives in Centennial, Colorado with her husband Nelson and a bull terrier named Snowflake.

Knee breeches

I find I have a copy of The Military Experience in the Age of Reason on my bookshelf¹. I assume I must've purchased it for its cover art. Could I ever, in sincerity, have doubted the general tenor of that 'experience'? Could I have imagined that soldiers woke up in the morning and thought, "My do I enjoy catching diseases out here in the mud. Not a day goes by that I don't thank providence for the string of circumstances that led to my becoming an artillery target in the Austrian Plumed-Hat Corps."?

Endnote:

1. (Christopher Duffy, Wordsworth Editions Limited: Hertfordshire, 1998).

Sky's conveyors

Original licences: Kiss-the-sky, Interstate Convocation for Parachronic Research
In service: 2024-

An unchanging pattern of pink and green zigzags overspreads each of Sky's conveyors. The relentless alternation of contrasting colours exhausts the eye. Individuals immersed in such patterns for long periods may enter a state of sensory deprivation from which hallucinations arise. For patrolmen preparing to jump, these hallucinations appear to offer insight into parachronic processes. Patrolmen who've spent a day or more surrounded by such patterns may halve the time required to make jump computations.

Each conveyor carries two message drones, a searchlight, flare launcher, siren and set of flashing lights. Clocks built into the conveyors replace the hour numbers with the names of the twelve apostles of Christ.

ISC Allen Ginsberg

Appearance:	Beach bathing box painted with pink and green zigzags
Mobility:	None
Jump capacity:	2000kg
Empty mass:	1200kg
Crew:	Jump station, Medical station
Length:	2.4m
Width:	2.0m
Height:	2.0m
Interior volume:	5.8 m3
Sensors:	Parachronic detector, Radiation detector, Camera sight, Searchlight (range 1km)
Manipulators:	None
Weapons:	None
Communications:	Two message drones, Encrypted long-range radio (range 100km), Flare launcher, Siren and flashing lights
Power:	Electrochemical fuel cell, Backup electrical motor
Shielding:	Sand proofing,
Other systems:	Fire escape chute, Security system (-3 to Lockpicking, Traps, Electronics Operation, and Computer Operation rolls to circumvent; encryption strength equals complexity 8)
Projector rolls:	+1
Jump rolls:	+0 (-3 during daylight)
ST/HP:	25†
HT:	10 (7 for electrical shock)
SM:	+3
DR:	5 semi-ablative
Notes:

ISC Grace Slick

Appearance:	Railway signal cabin painted with pink and green zigzags
Mobility:	None
Jump capacity:	5000kg
Empty mass:	2400kg
Crew:	Jump station, Communications station, Medical station, Buzzbot monitor station
Length:	4.2m
Width:	3.0m
Height:	8.0m
Interior volume:	50.0 m3
Sensors:	Parachronic detector, Laser rangefinder, Radiation detector, Coquelicot searchlight (range 500m)
Manipulators:	None
Weapons:	Sticky foam launcher
Communications:	Two message drones, Encrypted long-range radio (range 100km), Infrared communicator (range 50m), Flare launcher, Siren and flashing lights
Power:	Electrochemical fuel cell, Solar power array, Backup electrical motor
Shielding:	None
Other systems:	Buzzbot, Security system (-4 to Lockpicking, Traps, Electronics Operation, and Computer Operation rolls to circumvent; encryption strength equals complexity 9), Bathtub, Fire extinguishers
Projector rolls:	+2
Jump rolls:	+2
ST/HP:	50†
HT:	10c (7 for electrical shock)
SM:	+5
DR:	10 ablative
Notes:	Twenty minutes before each jump, the crew must active a pre-jump system that floods the interior of the conveyor with seawater. They then operate their stations wearing diving helmets.

ISC Jello Biafra

Appearance:	Street dumpster painted with pink and green zigzags
Mobility:	None
Jump capacity:	5000kg
Empty mass:	4000kg
Crew:	Jump station, Medical station
Length:	5.7m
Width:	3.5m
Height:	2.5m
Interior volume:	20.0 m3
Sensors:	Parachronic detector, Global Positioning System (+3 to Navigation rolls), Quantum analyser, Searchlight (range 1km)
Manipulators:	None
Weapons:	None
Communications:	Two message drones, Flare launcher, Encrypted radio (range 10km) Siren and flashing lights
Power:	Electrochemical fuel cell, Backup electrical motor
Shielding:	Radiation shielding, Water and gas seal
Other systems:	Fire extinguishers, Climate control, Security system (-3 to Lockpicking, Traps, Electronics Operation, and Computer Operation rolls to circumvent; encryption strength equals complexity 8), Hammocks, Refrigerated compartment (0.53)
Projector rolls:	+0
Jump rolls:	+0 (-5 at night)
ST/HP:	75†
HT:	9 (6 for electrical shock)
SM:	+4
DR:	10
Notes:	A sealed box near the jump station reads, "Antimatter trap"

ISC Jack Kerouac

Appearance:	Shuttered bus shelter painted with pink and green zigzags
Mobility:	None
Jump capacity:	2000kg
Empty mass:	1000kg
Crew:	Jump station, Security station, Medical station
Length:	2.5m
Width:	1.4m
Height:	2.2m
Interior volume:	3.9 m3
Sensors:	Parachronic detector, 360° camera system, Searchlight (range 1km)
Manipulators:	None
Weapons:	Crewmembers can electrify the outer surface, like an electric fence, which will also interfere with nearby telephone and radio communication
Communications:	Two message drones, Infrared communicator (range 50m), Flare launcher, Siren and flashing lights
Power:	Electrochemical fuel cell, Backup electrical motor
Shielding:	Electrical shielding, Radiation shielding (with shutter deployed)
Other systems:	Fire extinguisher, Security system (-3 to Lockpicking, Traps, Electronics Operation, and Computer Operation rolls to circumvent; encryption strength equals complexity 8), Jacob's ladder, A dense but radiant muffin
Projector rolls:	+0
Jump rolls:	+2 (-3 at temperatures below 20 degrees Celsius)
ST/HP:	25†
HT:	9
SM:	+2
DR:	20 vs piercing, crushing and corrosion; 10 vs all other damage types
Notes:

Loadouts

Besides crewmen, the basic mission loadout for each of the conveyors comprises:

• one megaphone
• three pneumospray hypos
• three pocket calculators
• three pocketknives
• one extensible baton
• one police riot shield with the words 'riot shield' written on it
• twenty pieces of writing chalk
• two lorry batteries
• one polygraph set
• one twenty-four-hour candle
• three rolls of duct tape
• one television antenna
• three pairs of handcuffs
• three egg whisks
• one TL5 caplock pistol and seventeen bullets