I. The Imaginary Intermission and Submarine Theater
The collection opens with an emergency broadcast from an “Imaginary Intermission” transmitted to various mythical peoples—inhabitants of Lemuria, MU, the Sunken Manchuria Union, Old Japan, and Antarctic Pymtown. The narrator warns of danger while broadcasting from a small cinema theater attached to a Korean Nuclear Submarine heading skyward. This theatrical frame establishes the work's multimedia nature, blending television, cinema, and live performance into a singular experience called the “Theater of the Telepathic Revenge.”
The submarine theater serves as both physical space and metaphysical construct, where audiences receive tickets printed on popcorn and watch puppet shows while seated in rows that extend in impossible directions. The emergency SOS signals (“Save Our Ship”) create urgency around this floating performance space, suggesting both literal and existential peril.
II. Payment for Crimes - The Triple Zone Introduction
The central narrative framework emerges through a crime story requiring payment for viewing. The narrator demands payment for unspecified crimes the audience has committed, will commit, or is committing through the act of watching. This creates a recursive loop where observation itself becomes transgression.
The “Missing Triple Zone of the Revised Republic” is introduced as both story and place—a geographical/metaphysical region that exists only when spoken into being. The narrator describes speaking from within a damaged box suspended on screen, illuminated by balloon-refracted light. The Triple Zone represents a fundamental reorganization of space and meaning, where traditional directions become confused: Up is Down, Down is Up, and Right is Wrong.
The payment mechanism involves a radioradio transaction that grants access to the story of twin beating hearts—one left, one right, both absent. These hearts pump stories through the bloodstream in the form of dancing bubbles containing the histories of particles and places. The audience gains awareness of multiple gravitational directions while these headless movietalkers dance within the circulation system.
III. The Lost Ballet of the Triple Zone
A foreign narrator whose language no longer exists tells the story in words the audience will hear in their own language. This creates a translation paradox where meaning transcends linguistic boundaries. The ballet represents the “winky story” of the Triple Zone, which was once France, once America, and also “other ping pong places” before reaching the end of known unknown history.
The narrator identifies as “we” while speaking from the “Grand Ca-Thunk Ca-Chunk Wing a Ding Windy Dust Drab Crabby Crumbling Cookie-Shaped Triple Zone of the Revised Republic.” This region exists in the sky above ground and on ground beneath sky, among thoughts that are not there. The description emphasizes the Zone's paradoxical nature—it won't exist until spoken into being, yet it provides the location from which it's being spoken about.
The theatrical space includes warnings about frogs on seats and maps contained within watches that watch back. Time becomes fluid, with the narrator checking temporal coordinates while existing in multiple temporal states simultaneously.
IV. The Aquarium Engineers and Topiary Executives
A complex social hierarchy emerges centered around the Manchu Edison Film Corporation's Aquarium and Topiary Construction Divisions. Engineers working from walking straw huts tell repetitive stories while holding up photographs of photographs—dubious proof of places that once existed but have been “topologically trimmed” into new shapes.
These Aquarium Construction Division Topiary Sub-Executives wear dog-shaped transistor radios glued to their foreheads, forced contractually to whistle while they work. The radios often slip due to inadequate adhesive, creating a hypnotic effect that causes the executives to become excited and fall down later in the day.
Children observe these adults through the windows of their straw huts, recognizing them as their own parents who maintain blank expressions—the same faces they make when punishing children for knocking over aquariums at home. This creates a circular recognition system where children and parents identify each other across different contexts and realities.
The engineers demonstrate expertise in spatial manipulation, using “gilded brand-name laser guided GPS topiary cameras” to trim physical space itself, reducing XYZ volume and transforming places into balloon animals or puppet shapes. This skill parallels pizza makers in Italian restaurants who throw topologically complex dough while folding helium balloons for entertainment.
V. The Imperial Aquarium System
A vast aquarium infrastructure dominates domestic life, with every middle-class home required to maintain Manchu Edison-produced aquariums. The Imperial Family's rail-mounted indoor aquarium features complete aquaro-dioramic reconstructions of major historical events, including the drowning of child Emperor Antoku and the waterfall death of the Triple Emperor Do-Die-Go.
These historical dioramas include elaborate scenes of Japan's sinking, the rescue of the Royal Family by invasive fish species, American whales piloted by Chinese pandas in scuba suits, and suspicious Korean nuclear submarines observing the proceedings. The Imperial Family's practice of releasing foreign fish into palace moats creates ongoing invasive species problems that excite the “Modern Girls and Boys” for unknown reasons.
The aquarium system extends into private homes, where children sleep next to glass walls containing fish-full, algae-laden aquatic environments. Families spend sleepless nights listening to the shuffling of photographic papers being inserted into aquarium diorama background holders by unknown assistants from the Topiary Division working overtime.
VI. The Spinning Book and Future-Past Technology
The narrator identifies as a spinning book whose pages are closed, existing within the book while writing to someone who was there when the narrator was never there. This creates multiple temporal and ontological paradoxes around authorship, presence, and textual existence.
The work is identified as Volume M of “The First Movie on the Internet” and the 14th book in an “Anti-Alphabet of 26 or More Books That Are Not Books.” This positioning suggests a larger multimedia project that transcends traditional category boundaries.
A technological narrative emerges describing cinema's collapse into computers where it meets virtual reality. The “maker” sits at a workstation screen, working with film production data like cellular automata working on pixels. This process involves navigating real-time proto-narrative space while encountering real automata inside the machine.
The system includes mind amplifiers that become mirrors, with “anti-eyes connected to an antibody in an alternate universe” watching back with narrative intelligence. These entities offer to replay histories of specific locations, including alternate flight paths of semi-autonomous weapons over virtual Iraq, and missiles willing to assist with spell-checking and story building.
VII. The Astronomical Discovery and Planet X
An astronomer narrator describes observing moving dots through ritualistic eye-blinking. Using a telescope attached to their chair by metal struts, they remove their glass eye and place it directly against the eyepiece to travel through space to the observed location—which turns out to be Pluto, “right there to the side of the road.”
This section parodies scientific discovery narratives while maintaining the work's themes of doubled vision, technological mediation, and spatial displacement. The dead cats of the desert serve as non-participating witnesses to these observations, “not part of the conversation” due to their deceased status.
VIII. The Manchurian Markers and Semaphoric Menhirs
In the Triple Zone, masculine-named stones (menhirs) have been replaced by flickering telegraphic signs. These markers display the “dark, dark, dark invisible sun of the Nagaoka crater” and possess anti-opposites that mirror the crater's own anti-opposite nature.
The narrative introduces dolmens as the anti-opposite of non-masculine menhirs, noting the linguistic shift from “men” at the beginning to “men” at the end of these terms. This wordplay reflects the work's broader concerns with linguistic reversals and spatial reorientations within the Manchurian landscape.
IX. The Lost Children and Modern Architecture
Lost children and adults inhabit a landscape of empty lots and railroad transformations. As Buddhist temples are destroyed for their gold inlay (needed for electrical wire insulation in steam engines converting to electric power), children run wild among ruins and construction sites.
Spatial engineers and “Manchurian Taiko-nauts” document these changes through warped color photographs later sold on “tele-television” by the Topiary Construction Division. These images serve as “transitional keepsakes” for intergenerational children who eventually find themselves choosing interiors for obligatory aquariums.
The transformation represents a larger shift from religious to technological infrastructure, with children serving as witnesses to this transition while their parents remain home “watching the aquariums and choosing interiors.”
X. The Flooded Future and Moving Plants
The narrative shifts to a post-flood landscape where families need new aquarium tanks after previous ones have broken. The choice of aquarium interiors is available at showrooms in “Our Own Locally Sourced Old New Old Tokyo,” located in muddy areas above water and ground but under constant aircraft traffic.
Mechanical plants line the power-line-shadowed roads, requiring constant maintenance and emitting bad smells while creaking at night. These plants possess their own lights and cast “crazy shadows” that interact with sleepwalking children and backward-rolling bicyclists on yellow-painted streets.
The description evokes memories of the “Old Human Zoo in Oz, in the center of Galaxy, land of Betty Boop and cartoon horrors,” where the characters were previously held in “flying big bird captivity cages” and “gravitational apiaries” before being taught using floating paper documents.
XI. Cinema as Navigational Ethics
The work concludes with reflections on cinema's future as creators navigate through machine-offered potential worlds, choosing which become virtual realities while leaving trails of rejected universes. This process transforms makers into “aesthetic eugenicists” traveling through alternate worlds rather than simply viewing them.
Navigation through mechanized association creates immersive environments embedded within one another, with modal changes available at any moment. The narrator advocates for “navigational ethics” as cinema becomes “a grotesquerie without grotesques” and “meta fiction where information wants to be free.”
Stories acquire senses, skills, and resources, stuttering in and out of existence in digital space-time across multiple worlds. The work welcomes this “proto future, where the past imitates the future” and “metafiction is potentially experimentally verifiable,” drawing connections to cosmic microwave radiation patterns suggesting the universe itself is alive and reproducing through infinite connected universes.
The final vision presents a future where new and old media imitate each other, where single users resemble single authors, and where rhetorical autonomy extends to machines while hopefully being given to people “in equal or greater amounts in various ways to be determined.”
Conclusion: The Recursive Performance
ScriptK presents a recursive multimedia performance that exists simultaneously as text, television broadcast, cinema, and live theater. The various stories interconnect through shared characters, locations, and temporal paradoxes, creating a complex narrative ecosystem where observation, payment, and participation become forms of transgression and transformation.
The Triple Zone of the Revised Republic serves as both setting and subject, a place that exists only when spoken but provides the origin point for its own description. Through its blend of technological speculation, historical parody, and spatial impossibility, the work creates a unique form of “image processed narrative” where both images and narrative are processed by humans and machines in collaborative navigation through proto-fictional spaces.
The recurring motifs of aquariums, topiary trimming, submarine theaters, and payment systems create a coherent symbolic framework for exploring themes of containment, transformation, observation, and participation in an increasingly mediated reality where the boundaries between viewer and viewed, past and future, original and copy become productively confused.