The Lost Torah and the Jesuit Quest
The foundational narrative revolves around a missing library book that becomes the center of an elaborate theological conspiracy. In 16th century China, a group of Jesuits discovers that a crucial text has been borrowed from the library and never returned. This book, titled “Hi I Am A True And Un-erased Torah AKA THE BUBBLE BOOK CALLED TORAHLAND, WHICH IS NOT A PLACE,” allegedly contains the original, unerased names and stories of Jesus, his Sister, his other Sister, the Naughty Twins, and various family members organized into “numerically inaccurate Triplets.”
According to the Jesuits' theory, all other Torahs in existence have had these Christian figures systematically erased from their pages, leaving only smudges and mysterious markings as evidence. The Jesuits believe this borrowed book is the only complete copy that proves Jesus and his extended family were originally part of Jewish scripture. Their goal is to find this book to validate their claim that all Jewish people are, in fact, “a certain kind of printed Christian.”
The Jesuits categorize all Jewish people who haven't read this lost book as “THE LOST TRIBES,” marking them as “PEOPLE PREVIOUSLY EXISTING AND NOW UNEXISTING.” To locate these Lost Tribes, they devise an elaborate scheme involving home movies. Since everyone would need to remake stories from the missing book at home, investigators could track the filmmakers through copyright notices and addresses, eventually converting entire populations to “Infinite Christianity.”
The plan requires unanimous agreement to unlock the “Great Cosmic Egg” - an Easter Egg lost on the galactic lawn - which would release “the Long Awaited Messiah sequel, known simply as Messiah 2 or 3 or 4.” This cosmic event would place “the thorny heart of God” in everyone's homes, though children are warned not to touch it for home movie documentation purposes.
The Airship of Cain: A Story of Erasure and Flight
A parallel narrative introduces the biblical figure of Cain, who appears as a modern storyteller fleeing his crimes in a cross-shaped airship. Marked with a bloody, scarred X on his forehead - carved there by God as punishment for being “the first to kill, first in flight, first to kill in flight” - Cain invites listeners aboard his transparent vessel that travels through clouds of red, green, and blue smoke.
Cain's story becomes a meditation on erasure and forgetting. He speaks of escaping “into the words of the telling of the forgetting of a crime that I have forgotten, just as you will forget when you forget it.” The narrative focuses obsessively on the act of erasure itself - not the crime that was erased, but the physical eraser used to remove the X-mark from his forehead.
This eraser becomes a central character: “how it was once new and then worn down, worn, worn down the old eraser and then replaced.” The story suggests that forgetting becomes entertainment - “a pulsing forgetting that will forever after be our entertainment” - in underground radio cities in the sky, powered by enslaved bicycle-riders generating electricity in basement pods.
The X-shaped airship travels “across the times of happenstance space, planet to planet, crime to crime,” while Cain repeatedly asks for quarters from his passengers, suggesting a transactional relationship between storytelling, transportation, and the economy of forgetting.
The Steam Railroad System and Pure Land Cargo
A vast transportation network spans multiple worlds through the power of steam, which is described as “the only thing in the world that isn't flat.” This steam allows travel between gravity wells, carrying “lost memories across the universes” within its transit vapors.
The railroad system consists of millions of flatcars loaded with boxes containing “Pure Land cargo” - the disassembled buildings of Original Japan. These structures were pre-disassembled in the late 19th century and stored in “authentic iron bubble repositories” before being loaded onto magnetic monopole railroad cars.
Giant cabooses, each capable of carrying 5,000 people, are attached to these cargo trains. The railway operates on a precise 47-year cycle: every 47 years, the train stops and unpacks, reconstructing entire Japanese cities and buildings using numbered pieces. These temporary “Pure Land” exhibitions remain open until attendance declines, then everything is re-disassembled and the journey continues.
The steam powering this system is said to be “the breath that Sister Jesus lost when she pushed the Pure Land trains across the Sister of Messiah bridge.” Steam Churches throughout the industrial cities worship this sacred vapor, with mobile Buddha-shaped boilers broadcasting radio explanations to nearby residents.
Earth Island Karafuto serves as the industrial center powering “the Great Sambatyon Sister Messiah Big-Bridge” that crosses into “the Mobile Vastness of Motion Picture Manchuria.” The entire system follows “the shadows of the eclipse of the shadow of Sky Island Jerusalem” as it moves across steam-sterilized earth.
The Oak Log Voyage and Recursive Storytelling
A more intimate narrative describes a train journey where the narrator hops onto a log transport train and finds a seat on “a very thick heavily accented ancient complete oak log.” Seated next to an older woman, he begins telling her about his life.
This story becomes recursive and self-referential: the narrator tells his life story, then tells it again with changed details so the woman won't recognize it as the same story. Each retelling grows longer than the previous one, and by the fourth iteration, “the 4th telling of this story promised to be actually longer than my life had been.”
The oak log itself becomes a listener, and the story transforms into “this long and completely accurate story I have just told you about the book that was never returned” - connecting back to the lost Torah narrative. The narrator requests that the listener not repeat the story, as he wishes to tell it again later without being surprised by people who claim to have heard it before.
This recursive structure suggests that stories grow and transform in the telling, that memory and narrative are unreliable, and that the act of storytelling itself becomes more important than the content being shared.
The Mysteries of Vengeance and Floating Islands
A meta-narrative frame identifies the speakers as members of “the Business of the Mysteries of Vengeance,” addressing their audience as fellow trade members. They describe their work as requiring payment - literal quarters and nickels - to continue their “Movietalking Voices” performances.
These voices tell of “an Island that was once a mechanical continent” that has exploded and now floats in fragments casting shadows shaped like numbers on the ground below. These floating islands serve as “a readable map placed in the air to orient us,” suggesting that the entire narrative landscape exists in a state of suspension and fragmentation.
The Movietalking Voices operate within what appears to be a coin-operated storytelling system, where payment determines which stories get told: “Will we tell a story of Love, or a Story of Crime? Of floating, or falling? Of life or death?” The audience's payment literally shapes the narrative reality being constructed.
The Manchu Edison Film Corporation and Child Kings
The industrial backdrop reveals that all characters are “adopted by the Manchu Edison Film Corporation,” with Simko Palme as their “Electrical Current Father” and Margarit Bene as their “Electrical Current Mother.” This corporate family structure governs the city of Shinkyo, where children transform into “child-kings that rule the world.”
A subplot involves the systematic shrinking of dolls “from the size of a railroad caboose” down to “the size of a housefly” through repeated exposure to movies. These nested dolls “make us dance, who make them dance, who dance the dance,” creating an infinite regression of performance and control.
The narrative suggests that after “a terrible life,” individuals ascend to “an electrical throne in the middle of a screen,” transforming into movietalking entities who control reality through their voiced narratives. This transformation occurred “79 years ago yesterday,” placing the origin point in a liminal temporal space.
Conclusion: The Meta-Structure of Infinite Recursion
ScriptL ultimately presents itself as a self-consuming narrative where stories reference other stories within the same text, creating loops of meaning that resist linear interpretation. The lost book that everyone seeks may be the very text we're reading, and the characters telling stories may be the same characters within the stories they tell.
The work suggests that reality is constructed through acts of telling, forgetting, and retelling, powered by industrial systems of steam and electricity, managed by corporate entities that blur the line between family and business, and ultimately serving some greater cosmic purpose involving the conversion of all peoples into participants in an infinite storytelling machine.
Each narrative thread - the Jesuit quest, Cain's flight, the railroad system, the recursive voyage, the floating islands, and the film corporation - represents a different aspect of this central theme: that stories create worlds, that worlds require constant retelling to continue existing, and that the boundary between teller and told, between audience and performer, between memory and forgetting, is far more porous than conventional narrative suggests.