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SARKO
Sun February 20, 1994 Volume 1 : Issue 1 ISSN 1022-1069
How much mass
is needed
to populate a world....
CONTENTS, #1.1 (Feb 20,1994)
001 <1.1a> Yue Lan - the 14th day of the 7th moon May 13, 1993 Shatin
002 <1.2a> pointing and grouting the Wah To Bldg June 11, 1993 Shatin
003 <1.0> "The vacuum whispers nothing" May 15,1993 Shatin
004 <1.0> the Barrows May 15, 1993 Shatin
005 <1.1> Tivot & The Bishop 1 September 2, 1993 Ha Wo Che
006 <1.0a> "Short-haired goblins" September 2, 1993 Ha Wo Che
007 <1.2> "transients and trolls" August 25, Ha Wo Che
007 <1.0a> Tivot & The Bishop 2 September 2, 1993 Ha Wo Che
009 <1.0a> "Whole Geosectors were left trashed" September 2, 1993 Ha Wo Che
010 <1.0> "network layer packets" July 5, 1993 Shatin
011 <1.2> "The machines were putting out another fire" Aug 25, 1993 Ha Wo Che
012 <2.1> Tivot & The Bishop 3 September 2, 1993 Ha Wo Che
Notes:
Yue Lan <1.0> December 15, 1993 Ha Wo Che
Prins <1.0> December 16, 1993 Ha Wo Che
Cisterns <1.0> December 17, 1993 Ha Wo Che
Collectors <1.0> December 19, 1993 Ha Wo Che
Ma Kok Riots <1.1> September 23, 1993 Shatin
Sarko is journal of works-in-progress published bi-monthly.
Subscriptions are available at no cost electronically from
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(852) 605-7238 or by snail mail at: d.i.h. press PO Box
1010, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong.
Unless otherwise stated Sarko is copyrighted (c) Brad
Collins. All Rights Reserved. This is not public domain,
it is Literary Freeware. You are encouraged to copy and
distribute these texts for non-commercial use as long as
this notice is attatched.
These are completely original literary works by Brad
Collins, who bears all customary responsibilities for its
contents and arrangement. The characters and events
portrayed herein are fictional; any resemblance to other
characters living or dead is entirely coincidental.
---------------------------------------
Yue Lan - the 14th day of the 7th moon.
in the Barrows
The gates of Hell would soon close,
the ghosts having eaten their fill and sent packing
for another year.
Scattered piles of smoldering ash
formed loose rings like necklaces round the cisterns,
dotted with the remains of apples, oranges and oblong purple prins stuck thick
like pin cushions with the burnt stubs of joss sticks.
People, still squatting,
fed money into the flames, the eerie
flicker projecting dancing shadows and shifting smoke
curling round the blackened limestone rustication.
---------------------------------------
pointing and grouting the Wah To Bldg.
in the Barrows
High above, the spiderwork was coming down, piece by piece
as each pole is cut free, and hand over hand drops to
clatter, muffled, onto a Mitsubishi flatbed bobbing gently
in low pockets of mist hanging in heavy pools, growing dim
in the fading light.
The first stars of the evening were fading into place;
another moonless night wrapping the weary figures moving on
the bamboo in pale blue hues, masking their determination
to fill the load and go home.
The floods kick in, casting oblong arcs of illumination,
giving the mass shape, welding the fragil geometry of pale
bamboo and green netting to the building together whole,
even as it's dismantled and left forever incomplete, a
labyrinth with no map to guide its way in or out....
For a few precious moments the scaffold balances, poised
between worlds. A willful arresting of entropy is at work
here, percolating the vast vanquished ether itself, both
revealing and concealing something...as yet unnamed and
terrible in its lack of actuality.
---------------------------------------
The vacuum whispers nothing. There are only clumsy blunt
stumps where once there were passions, pains and stridings.
No choice but to keep moving, keeping warm, keeping busy,
never able to risk stopping long enough for the exhaustion
to clear.... Every and all is bashed into submission by
the sheer size of the thing. It's part of the service you
see. Fiber-optic channels and runnels -- strung along the
underground weave, cover the planet in an upholstery of
glass, a data fabric of light.... The satellites and
sublights -- and the spooky transmitters, talking through
the stars... linking the layered gridwork of windows and
orphans, of redundant dumps and feeds. It can all be
spliced together from any one of a million couplings,
interfacing the network of data, of intelligence, of brute
mechanical muscle, of gossamer emotive resilience.... Gawd,
ain't it all grand, the whole silly organism, and ain't it
fried, fried, that no one can ever be alone again. Can't
even plow yer 'ol lady without a voyeuristic universe of
acronyms being in on it, the FRB, PLO, the BBC, CYO and the
NKOA all having it down, down to the exact moment you blow
yr wad -- temperature flux, calorie burn, fluid volume, the
precise dimension of the wet spot.... No need for death
rattles, faked climaxes, holding your breath, wiping that
large snot on the underside of your chair -- it's all been
recorded, measured, in infrared, ultraviolet and
electromagnetic, in precise atomic clumpings and lumpings
into and onto infinity. Big Brother? The Big lie --
cause yes he's watching, recording, measuring every
drop of saliva with a Pavlovian obsession, marking and
mapping the position of every clipped toenail even as they
fall.... But he doesn't care....
---------------------------------------
the Barrows
The upper galleries were choked with the stench of a
generational accumulation of organic detritus: goblin nests
full of chicken and rat bones, looted rubbish and grey-green
goblin shit, doper's shooting galleries speckled with drops
of dry blood and broken droppers, under shifting drifts of
used pump sticks and melt-blisters, suicides, in various
stages of decomposure or mummification, depending on air
currents or disposition, uncountable and undiscovered even
by the rats. . . all composting and fermenting, feeding the
wretched wraiths and barrow wight's insatiable desire to
become tangible, forever wandering the lower galleries,
taunted with the promise of substance. . . .
---------------------------------------
Tivot & The Bishop 1
"Continental drift my ass," thought Tivot as he
picked his way down a greasy wet back alley in the Barrows
behind the not inconsiderable stink of Bishop's bulk,
blazing a sweaty trail through the labyrinth of cardboard
and mounds of sodden, rotting ruffage that smelled like
shit in the stagnant heat.
"Where the fuck do you get off talking about
continental drift? Do you really think anyone actually
believes you know what you're talking about?"
"It's a known fact that girls go for, you know,
intellectual types," Bishop said flourishing a finger as he
kicked aside a massive chunk of snot green foam rubber.
"Girls aren't that stupid.... continental drift....
shit," Tivot said noticing a slice of mold-riddled white
bread that had adhered to his leg like a lesion.
High above the squat Soobish stonework rose a
scatter of Mooter spires braiding thirty-floors into the
humidity, interspacing and contrasting the sharp-cornered
colourless Swathu granite and disintegrating concrete
towers, encased in a rusting lacework of braces, brackets,
pipes and ductwork, he resulting lattice becoming a
corroding self-replicating loop. A makeshift patchwork of
aluminum cans and discarded wire of varying gauges, shore up
the equilibrium, providing grist to rust and molder,
precipitating out as fine black particles, coating and
coagulating with the acid rainwater then hardening to form
the cement holding the barrows together, obscuring and
maintaining the sophistry of conduits, cable-drops and
railholes, protecting the anonymity of fiber strung
haphazzard through and between buildings, masking surfaces
with an absorbant non-reflective grease, keeping line of
sight clean in the radio, micro-wave and infarred.
---------------------------------------
Short-haired goblins, (proudly sporting tunics and breeches
crudely fashioned from mildewing yellow polyethylene weave
bags looted from a supermarket in Ma Kok during last weeks
blackout) and the odd lobotomized Mooter had begun to creep
out of their daylight nests and warrens and were picking
through the debris, dropping the already half-rotten fruit
into canvas sacks, talons clicking and scratching the cobblestone.
But it was all strangely quite. Even the obnoxious cackle of
Goblins that normally echoed throughout the city at night was
absent. The few gangs brave enough to come out this early,
moved nervously with muted tension. Occasionally, one would
break out in a short crack of laughter, throttled back into
silence by their fellows before warily peering this way and that
on the lookout for the odd malingering ghost, perhaps trying to
get in one last snack before the gates closed.
---------------------------------------
transients and trolls, wearing shit-stained trousers
and year old beards with more lice than hair,
slept on corrugated divans, dozing in modal chemical states,
as if the alley were a bunk house, molecular sparks
zipping through their veins, burping and farting
inflammable anthracite mineral dreams with erratic wait-states
---------------------------------------
Tivot & The Bishop 2
An old mangy tomcat sat in a puddle of light, it's
tail bobbed, lazily torturing a cockroach the size of a
small rat while an old woman, clumsily stalked the cat with
a rusty machete, her round leathery face punctured by a
fixed toothless grin, crooning, "Mao Mao, Mao Mao" in a
thick Swathu accent.
"Fucking old bag.... " Tivot mumbled as they
brushed past just as she brought down the blade in a smooth
deft arc neatly lopping off the cat's head, its mouth
stuffed full of cockroach legs.
"Tivot, did you see--"
"Fucking witch should be put down."
"Tivot, she's gonna eat that cat."
"Put down like a mad dog. The whole fucking lot of
'em."
Tivot picked up what looked for all the world like
a giant plastic paddle from a gallon sized Hoodsie-cup for
some fat little kid grown to gigantic proportions through
the intervention of some mad scientist... and proceeded to
scrape off the wet plaster-like slice of Wonder from his
leg.
"Can't be very safe," Bishop said.
"Huh?"
"That cat, can't be safe to eat--"
"No-fucking-shit Bishop," tossing aside the paddle
in disgust.
Behind them now, a group of Goblins had
materialized and were wrestling with the old woman for the
dead cat. Laughing and poking each other in the eyes, one
grabbed the cat head and threw it, hitting another Goblin
on the nose who in turn threw it at the old woman. The cat
head glanced off her ear, smearing the side of her head
with cat blood, "Pok kai, maw kwai!" the old woman
screeched, waving her machete.
---------------------------------------
Whole Geosectors were left trashed after the fracas --
it'll be a knock down, kick 'em in the balls fight to the
death brawl now. No room for measured responses or
controlled escalation -- this is a war of alembic tensions
where there is only the probability wave, a roulette wheel
waiting for the magic wand to tap thrice. Tap, Tap, Tap
Gotcha! Yr actualized sucker, bend over....
There are tears in his eyes, as the poor bugger, rubbing
his raw, red ass, slowly walks offstage, tiny prisms
fracturing the light, matrixing and actually correcting his
sight. Not just an optical correction but correcting his
very soul....
Suddenly, for the first time in his life he is sane. His
vision clearing even as his ass is still smarting, tiny
runnels of sperm mixing with the K-Y running down his
sweaty chill legs, but he is sane!
Like a mainline revelation the sanity hits home,
momentarily frying his brain before stabilizing, to float
high on an epiphanal cloud, starting to solidify,
separating from the wave, taking .... form
---------------------------------------
network layer packets
in the pipe
with a beginning and an end
---------------------------------------
The machines were putting out another fire,
in the Lam Kau Mow Primary School
abandoned in the '93 riots
just south of Ma Kok station,
no one was told --
the system was self-correcting
the building woke in time, to document its own demise,
each layer taking care of its own, cameras running
their spectral hash, recording rats escapeing through
corroded melt-sheets, sealing the windows, the grid
shutting down in increments, thermostats encased in
wire cages in classrooms, blinking dead as each
circuit is consummed, each drop ticked off, each loop
terminated as they melted, mapping the topology
of the growing blindspot.
---------------------------------------
Tivot & The Bishop 3
Even at this hour, the crashing tumble of mahjong
tiles being mixed, filtered down from somewhere above,
bringing the reassurance of annoyance, like the single thin
stream of water breaking the tension in a diving pool,
staving off stagnation, allowing passage between worlds.
It was as if, if the silence were ever allowed to settle,
it would solidify and harden, forming another impenetrable
barrier that no amount of proximity could break, signaling
the final isolation by the demiurge, that ultimate of
control freaks, not understanding that it was loneliness
that always kills first....
The alley intersected with other alleys connecting
to one road or another, framing brief illuminations from
bright yellow lamps, the light capturing a jumble of
orbiting tiggers high above the occasional lone figure
pissing against a wall or gaunt, bare chested hawkers,
wearing white cotton shorts and plastic clogs, tapping out
a two-four beat with metal shears on the edge of boiling
pots of fish balls and various shards of internal organs,
shooting shadows to sweep and probe the alleys, forced like
ghosts and the light propelling them, to travel in straight
lines.
All of this cloak and scamper was starting to wear
thin with the Tivot who had just gotten word from Gothot
that they had to pack up the dig (three months early) and
move her precious rig, Yurts, power plants, alcohol and
assorted sex toys that Gothot's entourage of Grad students,
groupies, technicians and low-rent burglars had amassed to
yet another god forsaken hole, probably without the grace
of a decent pub.
Tivot didn't have much respect for archaeologists,
lumping them in with Tapeworms, Accountants and people who
ate with their mouths open on his shit list. But then,
nobody much cared what Tivot thought and Tivot had the
sense to keep his opinions to himself and take the contract
when it came along.
The Gothot job had saved their ass, no question,
but that was now a long time past and Tivot was getting
antsy. He wasn't running no goddamn trucking service.
Tivot was no company man.
It was times like this that Tivot kicked himself
for not getting a local interface. It's not as not as if
it was difficult, any of a hundred shops he walked past
daily sold them. Tivot'd had a socket job when he was a
teenager and it would have been easy to replace the hard
bump, matching his skin behind his ear with a local
splinter. He'd been on Canter nearly eight months and his
splinter was only able to pick up one feed.
The fundies up on the mesa, had set up their own
feed, blasting the entire geosector with a constant barrage
of preaching that gave Tivot a headache, and was designed
to drown out or preferably burn out any competing net.
He could have used a flasher, he had a lovely
Motorola model he'd bought off of an AWOL dit on Elwell,
which could have filtered out the fundie feed for him. But
Tivot never liked having the thing hovering behind him,
watching him like that all of the time.
It'd been weird, that first few weeks after they
arrived, not being able to get a feed on the street. Not
hearing Hector mumbling to himself just under the
threshold. Not having lookup or being able to close yer
eyes and plug into the local e-drops to see what was
happening down the street or knowing when it was gonna rain
or any of a million things flashing across yer retina,
competing with the outside world.
It was so quiet, so empty and lonely outside the
net. It was a quiet that Tivot hadn't known in decades, a
quiet that once you got used to, became difficult to give
up....
"Are you sure this is where Barf told us to meet
him?"
"Yup, this is where he bought those rice cookers and
ground dog meat last week."
"Fucking Barf."
"Why don't you lay off. It's been three, at least
three years now, since-- "
"Since he screwed-us-over is what. We almost got
stuck on this shit-hole fer good. And why? Because of
that dried up shit-fer-brains Barf and his get rich quick
schemes."
"Three years is three years Tivot. I think we
should give 'em another chance. If the tables were
turned--"
"He'd be outta here faster than he could blow his
nose!"
"No. He--"
"Faster than he could blow his nose Bishop."
"Not, I mean Barf isn't like that and you know, I
mean.... Three years Tivot. Let's hear him out okay? I
got a feeling he's on to something. Did you hear his
voice? He hasn't sounded so, that excited since.... It's
been a long time, you gotta admit. And Barf does have a
good idea once in a--"
"The man has a whiffle ball for a brain!"
"You're no great brain yourself Tivot."
"Hah! This from a man who. . . . you and your
continental drift!"
"Go ahead, laugh. You'll see, the next time we're
in a bar and all you can talk about is how big your--"
"Fuck off--"
"I, I'll start talking about plate tectonics and we
will see, We will see who impresses the girls."
"Yeah right.... Where the hell are we anyway?"
"Dog meat. During the day this is the biggest dog meat
market in Canter. You know Barf... he gets real
sentimental. Ever since he found out that he was Korean--"
"What the fuck does that have to do with eating dog
meat?"
"I don't know, something he read..."
"Barf can't read."
"He can too. He just doesn't... very often. When
was the last time that you. I mean okay so he doesn't read
very... maybe he heard it in a bar or something."
"Or something. Korean my ass. Barf ain't Korean.
He was born somewhere in the Jushrut."
"Maybe his ancestors were Korean," he said as they
rounded a corner, obscured by a congregation of stacked
toilet bowls and Mooter stink troughs, stained in yellows,
browns and greens.
"Bull shit... I tell yeah, he's got a whiffle ball
fer--" Bishop felt his foot splash slightly in something wet.
"Oh shit!" A headless body lay sprawled in a broad
expanse of blood and shards of brain and bone. It took a
second before Tivot recognized the clothes. "It's Barf."
"It can't be Barf."
"He's dead."
"No, no he's--"
"You gotta have a head to--"
"We could revive him."
"He has no fucking head. He's de--"
"He can't--"
"Bishop, his head was burnt clean off," he said,
grabbing his arm. "I know dead. Barf is dead." Tivot
looked around the alley, his heart pounding in his mouth.
But looking for what? There were only beer bottles, a half
empty jar of cheese whiz, a small mound of mouldy pizza
crusts and the frayed remnants of a cream coloured
acceleration couch ripped from a Mooter transport being
embraced by the widening pool of Barf's blood. The acrid
smell of burnt flesh and ozone hung heavy in the thick
still air. The alley, seamless slime-covered ceramic walls
with bricked up windows or doors, extended up into the
gloom. "We gotta get outta here."
"We can't just leave him here. It's Barf," Bishop
said, lifting one foot from the sticky puddle of Barf.
"They may come back."
"Poor Barf."
"The bastard almost got us killed with him."
"It's still Barf. Barf is still Barf Tivot. We
just can't leave him for the rats. It's not. . . decent."
"Barf musta been holding."
"I didn't think Barf would ever die."
"It musta been pretty big."
"God, it burnt his whole fucking head off!"
"Musta been holding something big to get popped
like that."
"You can't revive him without a head huh?"
Tivot shook his head.
They made their way down the alley, leaving bloody
tracks that quickly dried brown in the hot dry air. Tivot
stopped short of the end of the alley, peering cautiously
into the near empty street peppered with piles of smoking
ash. Several Floxies, in dark tattered robes, glided
silently through the puddles of light, their brown fur
looking grey in the gloom. A lone rice-paper banknote,
having escaped incineration, fluttered and bobbed above a
heat vent in the street.
There were always eyes in the barrows. It was the
eyes that got to you... glowing behind grates in storm
drains, from between shapeless piles of rags, cardboard and
plastic heaped in bricked-up doorways, from barred windows
barely seen over the drip and between holes in corrugated
eaves, flashing from turret slits and peep holes in
haphazard barricades and fortified doors and gates, through
a million cameras and e-drops that were little more than
flat matt squares above doors, ringing utility poles,
street signs and discarded bits of rubbish left for dead or
just to look that way....
"Tivot!" Bishop said in a stage whisper. It was
finally beginning to sink in that they were in deep shit.
"We're gonna die!" Bishop fell back against a wall,
gasping for breath. "Tivot, whatta we gonna do? What if
the net--"
"This is the backwash stupid. They don't have
hardware like that out here. Unless--"
"We're gonna die Tivot."
"It coulda been the local--"
"Slugs? The fucking police?" Bishop groaned,
dropping his head into his hands. "We're gonna die. Some
flasher will drop outta the smog and pop us. I just know--"
"Pull yourself together. We'll get out of this."
"This is not good Tivot."
"You hear me? We'll get outta this." Tivot took a
deep breath. "We just gotta get outta here." Tivot
squinted into the gloom, hoping it was clear. "Come on."
"Where are we going?"
Tivot hesitated, unsure of what to do. "The ship,"
he finally said, "Screw Gothot and her fucking Pebble
Boxes. We've got to get outta here before anyone finds
Barf."
"But we didn't kill him."
"You got any better ideas?"
---------------------------------------
Notes
---------------------------------------
Yue Lan
When Muk Lin's, mother died she found herself traveling
down the long road to hell. The road was lined with the
ghosts of people who had died of hunger. Every time she
tried to eat, the hungry ghosts turned the food in her bowl
to fire. Her son was distressed that his mother was in so
much pain and went to ask the priests in the temple for
some way to help his mother. The priests devised a prayer
called the Yue Lan Poon King , to be spoken on the 15th of
the 7th month, and give offerings of food to ease the pain
of the hungry ghosts.
On the first day of the seventh moon (late August or early
September) the gates of hell are opened and the ghosts are
free for two weeks to walk the earth. On the 14th day,
called the Yue Lan Fesitval, ghosts receive offerings from
the living. Fruit is offered and paper cars, paper houses
and paper money are burnt, and once this occurs these gifts
become the property of the dead. People whose relatives
suffered a violent death are particularly concerned to
placate the spirits, visiting the place where the person
was killed to leave flowers and burn incense. People will
not swim, travel, get married, move house, or indulge in
other risky activities during this time. There are also
lots of Cantonese opera performances -- presumably to give
the ghosts one good night out before they have to go back
down below for another year.
---------------------------------------
Prins
An oblong shaped purple fruit that looks like a waxy
skinned eggplant with a taste and consistancy simular to an
apple. Prins grow on high bushes and are thought to have
be native to one of the Dauk worlds washward from Bambi
along the belt.
The success of the plant in such a wide variety of
ecosystems strongly suggests some kind of genetic
alteration though this view is highly contended by a number
of researchers.
Prins are thought by many to appeal to ghosts and were
quickly adopted as good luck symbols and devices for
enticing ancestors into helping to the living pick a
winning horse or help in selecting a lottery number. This
can be seen especially during festivals like Yue Lan or Mid
Autumn Festival, the fruit often is sold in markets at 4 or
5 times the normal price.
There is a very old story told to children throughout the
Jushrut of a priest called Fan Lai Tai who had spent thirty
years working as a government hooker before renouncing her
crimes against humanity and became sort of a Johnny Apple
Seed character, who traveled through the Jushrut and even
up into the San Zi planting prin bushes near temples and,
as Zappa said, spreading prins across the land using all of
the frightening little skills that science has made
available as a form of penance to the thousands of souls
she had screwed.
Carp, barbel and trout love prins.
George Shea
Lace and Lures
prins are to barbel as catnip to a cat
no sooner does the bait hit the water
and a veritable feeding frenzy ensues
·
WWilma Mak
Journal of the Jost Angling Society
the use of prins as bait is banned by every
fishing organization known to this writer
as it is thought that prins are not a bait
but a narcotic to marine life and is not
used by any true sportsmen
---------------------------------------
Cisterns
Webster's Collegiate
cis·tern \'sis-tern\ n
[ME, fr. OF cisterne, fr. L cisterna, fr. cista box, chest
Ð more at CHEST] (13c)
1: an artificial reservoir for storing liquids and esp.
water; specif: an often underground tank for storing
rainwater
2: a well like structure at the centre of Mooter villages
which is thought to be a window into the world of the dead.
3: a large usu. silver vessel formerly used (as in cooling
wine) at the dining table
4: a fluid-containing sac or cavity in an organism
OED
1: an artificial reservoir for water, or other liquid; esp.
a water-tight tank.
2: A natural reservoir or depression containing water, eg a
pong 1606
3: a pit at the centre of Mooter villages, thought to be a
window into the Spirit World. <date>
4: Applied to a cavity, or vessel in an organism 1615.
Also fig and attrib
1. Broken cisterns Jer. 2:13. A copper c. for the table
PEPYS Diary 7 Sept. 1667. a c. of punch 1815.
2. The dead hold conference in the village c. <Ref> <date>
3. Lakes .. are real reservoirs, or cisterns of water 1796.
Hence Ci·stern, v to enclose in, or fit with, a c.
The Bible
Ecclesiastes
Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be
broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the
wheel broken at the cistern.
Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the
spirit shall return unto God who gave it.
12:1
·
William Shakespeare 1564-1616
Othello
But there, where I have garner'd up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life,
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up; to be discarded thence!
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in! Turn thy complexion there,
Patience, thou young and rose-lipp'd cherubin;
Ay, there, look grim as hell!
·
Fargo Morris
Time and Endings
The mass, upended and hanging
above the cistern where souls depart
in the labyrinth that keeps us from hell
·
Brill Cheung
Barrow Song
the warmth of the walls
drawn from the lives
of Floxie offerings, screaming
at the bottom of the Cisterns
At the centre of every Mooter village lies a cistern always
with the exact proportions of 6x18x6 (one six being the
height of the walls above the ground. -- the depth of the
cistern is always thought to extend into hell, the depth of
which no one seems to know) through which the dead are
thought to keep a watch over the lives of the living in
their ancestral home. Advice is often sought at Cisterns,
as well as offerings given to the recently deceased to help
their transition into death.
When a Mooter village is moved, or abandoned, it is
possible to move this spirit window to another cistern,
even if that cistern in on another world. The empty
cistern is then no longer under the protection of the elder
spirits of the village and can be taken over by any
wandering spirit that wishes to take residence. For this
reason, the Mooter shun any abandoned village or cistern.
These beliefs remain quite strong even today, which
explains the Mooter's reputation for being poor
archaeologists but excellent archivists and historiians.
In a strange way it makes sense. They can never go back,
so they are careful to record everything so that they can
take it with them.
Mooter cisterns are not meant for trapping drinking water
and it is thought that those who drink the water from a
cistern will fall under the control of the spirits that lay
in its depths.
The cistern represents death something that traps and once
inside cannot be returned, the antithesis of a well, which
is the bringer of life. Death is a closed end, like a
cistern.
The Mooter word for Cistern means roughly, window of the
dead.
---------------------------------------
Collectors
Who washed her hands
in the smoke,
smoldering ash
and the trace leavings
of the dead
20 Years in the San Zi
Joseph Fong
in years of drought, the ash left after the festival,
in LoTsuen and other parts of the Barrows, formed great
drifts that clogged the air intakes on the collectors which
would overheat and start to weave and bump into walls like
they were drunk.
·
The burnout rate for Collectors in Canter has always been
quite high. The number of Collectors for the territory
varies between 120-195. As Collectors died, they were
canibalized for parts and kept going with little more than
tin cans and baling wire.
The mean life-span for most C Class Collectors during 24th
wc(Wongsha Calendar) century was supposed to be about 25
years. Canter seldom saw a Collector last a day over 10.
A common passtime, even a tradition, for youth in Canter
was to play kick the can -- kicking a Collector to see how
far you could make it slide on it's floaters before it's
speed dropped within it's brake threshold and stopped or
hit something.
Class C Collector Purchases ('230-240)
28 Philips Hobo-T9
14 Philips Hobo-T9
18 Ma Yuen Fa-B URC (Urban Rubbish Collectors)
8 Ma Yuen Fa-B URC
52* Gunther Waldaw 441+ (For hostile urban environments)
11 Philips Hobo-T13
20 Philips Hobo-T13
26 Gunther Waldaw 441+
18 Gunther Waldaw 441+
12 KaPok City Beauty KP-22
102** Gunther Waldaw 441+
+ Drought years
* The year of the Ma Kok Riots
** Typhoon Tinker
A wide range of the tiny Philip Hobo's (everything from the
old S80 on up to the T13's which were the last model before
the line was discontinued) were in use for almost 80 years,
especially in the Barrows where the little yellow bricks,
became integrated with peoples image of Canter
During the 230's new Hobos were being stolen, as soon as
they were set loose. The new flash boxes were ripped out
and sold in the shipyards to be installed on frieghters and
other small ship passing through the yards.
The government responded first with a ineffectual campaign
to catch the "Brick Kidnappers" which proved almost
completely fruitless. Subsequently, Marta Exodus who was
the head of maintenance at the Hui Lek Pui depot in the
West Barrows, out of desperation, began taking the shiny
new Hobo's, stripping off the outer bodies and began a
program of "pre-trashing" them, denting and artfully
scoring the bodies to make the new models virtually
impossible to distinguish from the older models. As soon
as this program began, thefts dropped by 85% in less than a
month and remained low thereafter, it was simply not worth
the effort to steal old units and new units just to find a
the small number of new flashcans which were not terribly
valuable in the first place.
Before the first Hobo's were bought, collectors were
commonly (and are still often) called flashcans a common
enough sight almost anywhere for nearly 800 years. However
the Hobo's had a personality of their own and were commonly
referred to as "bricks", "yellow bricks" or even "tin
bricks."
---------------------------------------
Ma Kok Riots
Rice Cooker Riots
Riots of '93
A shipment Ka Pok Rice Cookers got switched with a run
which used an odd chip set which were meant for
infiltrating civilian data networks during the Martha wars
in the mid '090's. The chipset was designed to insert a
worm into local nets. The worm's primary objective was to
manufacture events which would breed discontent and
misdirection in the local population. The worm would also
filter out all attempts to announce the existence of the
worm and any negative information about the MLA (Martha
Liberation Army) and even go so far as to skew all news
events towards MLA interests.
All of the rice cookers had been sold, in the Sha Gok day
markets in Lo Tsuen during a three week period in August of
'93. It's thought that only two weeks later, most of the
rice cookers had already been in contact with each other
(sending messages disguised as rice cooker reply receipts,
cooker repair requests, cooking schedule changes and rice
supply orders sent over the net.) and decided to target the
opening of a temple at Ma Kok in Shueng Hau. The feeds
were altered so that anyone getting information through the
net would be told that it wasn't a temple being built, but
a crematorium and underground mausoleum.
Unfortunately incident coincided with the torching of a
Majhong parlour in the same area by a group of teenagers
working for a local protection racket. Again, the feeds
were altered so that people believed that the torching was
really the work of the police to quiet the protest over
the mausoleum. The cookers then changed the profiles of
the teenagers, making them look like squeaky clean, model
citizens being railroaded by the police.
The riots that started as a demonstration in Ma Kok quickly
spread throughout the barrows. Dozens of buildings in the
east barrows burnt to the ground and some 150 people were
killed by both police and rioters.
The riots lasted nearly two weeks and only stopped after
the government was able to completely crash the net. It
was months before the real reason behind the riots was
discovered and the rice cookers hunted down and destroyed.
========End Sarko Volume 1 : Issue 1========
