VOLUME A
The Framework: The Telepathic Motion Picture of THE LOST TRIBES
The overarching narrative of VolumeA is presented as “The Telepathic Motion Picture of THE LOST TRIBES,” described as an experimental telephonic science fiction television movie series. This meta-framework positions the reader as both audience and participant in a live television broadcast that exists across multiple dimensions of time and space. The series promises 26 years of episodes, each containing 26 episodes per year, 26 minutes per episode, creating an intricate temporal structure that mirrors the fragmented nature of memory and forgetting.
Story 1: Our Story Thus Far / At the Edge of a Vast Domain
The opening narrative establishes the setting in the “Triple Zone of the Revised Republic” after the end of a previous program. The narrator introduces the concept of telepathic cinema as a medium for telling stories of experiments and their conclusions. This story serves as both introduction and meta-commentary, explaining that the audience exists within television itself—a living medium where everything happens simultaneously across all places and times. The narrative warns of an “Immanent Vengeance” approaching from both the future and the past, setting up the apocalyptic undertones that permeate the entire collection.
Story 2: Trinity Site and the Birth of Destruction
A pivotal narrative emerges around Trinity Site, the birthplace of the plutonium bomb that would later destroy Nagasaki. The narrator claims to have been born on July 16th, 1945—the date of the first atomic test—yet paradoxically states they were already there. This story introduces the recurring motif of circular time and predestined presence at moments of historical significance. The narrator describes camera bunkers still standing from the famous test, creating a landscape where documentation and destruction intertwine. The imagery of multiple explosions occurring simultaneously across different worlds suggests a ballet of destruction that transcends singular historical moments.
Story 3: The Telepathic Cinemas
The narrator reveals themselves as a traveler across spaceways, moving from planet to planet to find and recreate the “Lost Ballet” in temporary countries. They construct Telepathic Cinemas in these locations, serving as both speaker and projectionist of experiences that cannot be remembered by conventional means. This story establishes the central conceit of the collection: the attempt to capture and communicate the uncommunicable through technological and metaphysical means. The narrator's role as a guide through forgetting becomes crucial, as they acknowledge that the Ballet they present is inherently beyond memory's grasp.
Story 4: Out from Trinity - The Journey Through Time
Returning to Trinity Site, the narrator assures the audience that despite only having one day left, panic is unnecessary as they've only consumed minimal “harvestable time.” The story shifts to December 25th, 1926, traveling through “a hole in time, through the center of the earth.” The narrator exists within television itself, surrounded by bees that are simultaneously letters forming words and stories. This metamorphosis of insects into language suggests a fundamental transformation of communication itself, where natural and technological elements merge into new forms of meaning-making.
Story 5: Fugue - The Beekeeping Revelation
A more personal narrative emerges as the narrator describes tending Mesopotamian bees in their backyard. During one afternoon's work with the hives, they experience a form of temporal displacement or memory loss—going somewhere familiar but being unable to remember where. This story introduces the theme of fugue states and altered consciousness that runs throughout the collection. The bees serve as both literal creatures and metaphorical carriers of ancient wisdom, connecting the narrator to civilizations and knowledge systems that predate recorded history.
Story 6: To Nagasaki - The Directional Journey
The narrative establishes movement “in many directions at once” from Trinity Site toward Nagasaki, located in northern Kyushu, the southern island of Japan. However, this geographical certainty is immediately undermined by the admission that “we do not know where we are, and we do not know where we are going.” This paradox of simultaneous knowledge and ignorance reflects the broader theme of being lost within systems of navigation and understanding, whether geographical, temporal, or existential.
Story 7: The Radio Telescope and Cosmic Weather
The narrator describes climbing a radio telescope dish daily, entering “the miniature dark that it shapes on the saddle of its surface.” Within this technological void, they encounter “galactic weather” that is both violent and benevolent, providing gifts from the universe. Today's discovery is a rock shaped like a duck, originating from Comet Curry B—composed of deuterium, a heavy water that is simultaneously deadly if consumed and useful as a neutron shield. This story combines scientific precision with cosmic wonder, suggesting that danger and protection often emerge from the same source.
Story 8: Flag of the Floating Island
The narrator explains a complex system of 78 floating islands in the sky, each bearing paintings on their undersides. These paintings total 78 in number, organized as 26 islands times three, or three islands per season across a 26-season show. The first island belongs to Manchuria, bearing the great flag of Manchuria, which requires repainting when damaged by unspecified crimes. This bureaucratic approach to cosmic geography suggests a universe governed by both artistic expression and administrative necessity, where beauty and corruption exist in constant tension.
Story 9: Naming the Ice Duck - Scientific Objectivity
The narrator, identifying as both frog and scientist, discusses the process of naming the duck-shaped comet stone found on the telescope dish. They emphasize scientific objectivity while acknowledging the complications introduced by peer review in the naming of new discoveries. This brief story highlights the tension between individual observation and collective validation in the creation of knowledge, suggesting that even the most objective sciences are subject to social and communicative processes.
Story 10: The Movie Talking Guide and Manchu Edison
Set in 1985, forty years after the Trinity test, the narrator works as a “movietalker” for Manchu Edison Film Corporation in Alamogordo. In this world, cameras function as projectors that send images of thoughts directly to their targets. The narrator spent significant time at Frisch Flight Simulation on the mountainside, working in Military Systems building weapon system trainers designed to be “as real as possible.” This story merges the military-industrial complex with entertainment technology, suggesting that the apparatus of war and the machinery of spectacle are fundamentally interconnected.
Story 11: Saving the World Through Television
The narrative reaches its climactic purpose as the narrator positions themselves outside the bunkers, receiving stories from cameras pointing into “the television inside us.” They announce their role as a movietalking guide for “The Telepathic Motion Picture of THE LOST TRIBES,” described as a television series determined to save the world. The audience is told that tomorrow the world will end, as promised by the dead, making their participation in this live broadcast crucial for salvation. The story reveals that the audience themselves are the television, creating a recursive loop where viewer and medium become indistinguishable.
Story 12: The Road to Nagasaki - Origins and Eternal Return
The final major narrative returns to the beginning, starting “at the end” where “worlds return to themselves as knots.” The narrator claims to have been born at Trinity Site on July 16th, 1945—the day the plutonium bomb was tested—yet insists they were already there. Repeated attempts to call an operator result in reaching “ground zero instead,” suggesting that all communication ultimately leads back to the moment of nuclear inception. The narrator becomes the telephone call itself, embodying the transformation of human consciousness into technological communication. This circular structure reinforces the collection's themes of predestination, eternal recurrence, and the impossibility of escaping the foundational moments of technological violence.
Conclusion: The Architecture of Forgetting
VolumeA constructs an intricate mythology around the intersection of nuclear technology, media, and consciousness. Through its fragmented narrative structure, it suggests that the atomic age fundamentally altered not only human civilization but the very nature of storytelling and memory. The recurring elements—bees, telephones, cameras, bombs, and televisions—create a symbolic ecosystem where natural and technological forces merge into new hybrid forms of existence. The narrator's role as both witness and participant in these transformations positions them as a guide through territories that exist simultaneously in past, present, and future, where salvation and destruction emerge from the same technological apparatus. The collection ultimately presents forgetting not as loss but as a necessary function of consciousness attempting to process experiences that exceed human comprehension, while television becomes the medium through which these impossible stories can be transmitted and potentially save the world through the act of collective viewing and forgetting.
VOLUME B
The Framework: Continuing The Telepathic Motion Picture of THE LOST TRIBES
VolumeB continues the experimental narrative framework established in VolumeA, maintaining the structure of “The Telepathic Motion Picture of THE LOST TRIBES” while deepening its exploration of telepathic cinema technology, commercial mysticism, and the recursive nature of broadcast reality. The volume presents itself as both continuation and commodity, offering devices for purchase while telling the story of their operation.
Story 1: The Blood Device (Initial Presentation)
The opening narrative introduces the fundamental technology of telepathic cinema: movies recorded on “solid shapes of blood taken from our audiences, volunteers before the projection.” These blood objects, when placed in Imperial projectors, become the voices of movietalking. The story presents “solid objects of blood film, Number 1,” accompanied by an image of a person on a floating island speaking unheard words. This establishes the central paradox of the telepathic cinema system—communication that exists beyond audible range, requiring blood as a medium for transmission and reception.
Story 2: The Word Device (Initial Presentation)
The companion technology to blood recording involves placing “entire motion pictures stories” into talking signs that are inserted into projectors, where they speak directly to listening audiences. The first Word Device features “The Talking Titles, Number 1,” specifically highlighting “The Astonishing Debut of RiKoRan, a Japanese person who is a movietalker for the Nation of the Five Peoples, here in Shinkyo.” This story establishes the linguistic and cultural complexity of the telepathic cinema system, where individual performers represent multinational entities through technological mediation.
Story 3: The Astronomer's Revelation
Returning to a previous episode, the narrative reintroduces the Astronomer who lives in the “Manchurian National Radio Mental Silence Zone” on the floating Island of Manchuria, positioned as the “55th State of the Former United States” hovering above Nagasaki. The Astronomer reveals their unique ability to see “movies of the past” when looking into the sky, where each star functions as “a television from the past, made of places that are floating islands in the sky.” This story transforms astronomy into archaeology, making celestial observation a form of historical media consumption.
Story 4: Star 1986 - The Catalog of Memory
The narrative presents Star 1986 from the “All-Manchuria Micro-radio Naming Catalogue of Observed Star-Islands on Television,” described as a broadcast “in progress, in the past.” The star represents “a place in a movie, a sky that burns broadcasting itself all at once among stars,” where time achieves synchronization with itself. The story includes a pre-recorded videotape featuring locations “neither here nor there”—Saint Moritz, Hamburg, Bergen Belsen, West Berlin, Rome, and The Hague—creating a geography of historical trauma and observation that transcends conventional spatial boundaries.
Story 5: NIRT - The Demonstration Report
A news segment from Alamogordo describes “1000 Year demonstrators” marching along 14th July Avenue toward “Eisenhowever Hexagon.” The protesters create traffic disruptions by setting fire to motion picture film reels and overturning inflated housing. The absence of Television officials along the route suggests a world where media authority has dissolved or withdrawn, leaving the population to engage directly with the apparatus of broadcast reality through destructive performance.
Story 6: Flags of the Triple Zone
The narrative returns to the systematic description of 78 floating islands, each bearing paintings on their undersides, organized as “26 islands times three” across a 26-season show. The current focus is the “strange Manchurian flag” floating in Episode 4 of Season 1. These sky-flags operate in constant motion without fixed orbits—“just eclipses, and never crashes”—suggesting a cosmic ballet where gravitational relationships have been replaced by choreographed near-misses and shadow play.
Story 7: And in Reverse, Forwards - The Navigation of Questions
The narrative traces a journey through fundamental questions: from “WHO IS WHO” to “WHEN IS WHEN” to “IN WHAT ORDER” and finally to “WHERE,” which is described as “many places at once.” This philosophical navigation leads to the promise of creating “The Telepathic Motion Picture of THE LOST TRIBES” after the end of the world. The story establishes the Manchu Edison Film Corporation as the institutional framework for this post-apocalyptic media production, introducing the commercial availability of telepathic devices.
Story 8: The Word Device (Commercial Presentation)
The second iteration of Word Device technology features “Projector Word Device #2, Taisho 26,” designed by “The Protestants of Manchuria” as a “Monetary Radio Stamp to Show the Gift Emperor as Priest.” This device costs $1000 and is available at telepathic-movie.org, with pricing dependent on the buyer's “crimes” and subject to “time acceleration and other forces.” The story reveals the commercial mysticism underlying telepathic cinema, where spiritual authority, monetary systems, and technological access intersect through algorithmic pricing based on moral calculations.
Story 9: The Blood Device (Commercial Presentation)
The second Blood Projector Film Device (#2, Circa Taisho 26) is described as “A bowl of thought used in the collection of blood cinema at Manchu Edison.” Like its companion Word Device, it costs $1000 with crime-dependent pricing modifications. This pairing establishes the dual-technology system required for telepathic cinema operation, where thought collection and linguistic projection must function in tandem to create complete communication experiences.
Story 10: Question 3: Where - The Arrival at Nothing
The narrative poses and immediately resolves “Question 3: Where is Where?” with the revelation that “NOTHING, which is something, and is here.” This moment is marked by darkness, suggesting that the question of location can only be answered through the absence of visual reference. The story establishes philosophical void as geographical certainty, making non-place the most precise coordinate system available.
Story 11: The Measurement of Stones - Cosmic Agriculture
A surreal agricultural narrative describes pencils harvesting “icewords from stones marked in the air by melted bubbles made from the measurements of comets.” These stones grow words that pencils collect while marks in the air listen to hands turning talking stones in proper directions. The process creates buildings that drop as musical winds through lost windows, suggesting an ecosystem where language cultivation produces architectural precipitation. The story culminates in a world turned “inside out” where “old was new” and “hills were growing music,” with circles carrying people to distant churches or camouflaged places in the hills of night.
Story 12: This Trinity Church - The Architecture of Faith
The narrative focuses on a church in Nagasaki positioned “at the center of a world of electric thoughts,” where shadows of the Christian Trinity blur faces carved in factories. These faces depart on train lines labeled 1545 and 1946, carrying “logs of burning souls lost in the light.” The church exists simultaneously on a hill above itself and as a target among power lines where electric thoughts disappear during building collapses. The story traces Christian colonization from the Dutch arrival in Japan (1545) through atomic destruction (1946), with parallel vapor trains departing for Manchuria according to alternative schedules.
Story 13: The Dark - The Synchronized Path
Between movie stars in the heavens lies darkness within “the bubble of time that unites all places,” allowing travel through synchronized locations that are “often twice at once.” This dark space provides access to a sequential path through all worlds, with beginning, end, and prologue accessible from either direction. The path has been recorded “in the order in which it has been forgotten, as if it had never happened,” while the narrator's duck dissolves in their hands, with each layer of mist representing a story to tell before “the sun freezes again.”
Story 14: Standing on the Comet - The Movietalker's Confession
The final major narrative places the movietalker on “comet Nagasaki, known by the name of Curry B,” floating as “land detached from the ground.” From this position, they travel to all stars simultaneously through “a dance known as the Lost Ballet.” The movietalker confesses to being “a liar” who doesn't actually keep time, describing time-keeping as “a gift, a stone duck or whatever the gift of the day is.” This revelation undermines the narrator's authority while affirming their role as receiver rather than creator of temporal knowledge.
Story 15: Advanced Word Device Technology
The narrative introduces “Projector Word Device #3, Taisho 26,” featuring Simko Palme, founder of Manchu Edison, speaking “the Entrance to Manchuria, via Birobidzhan, arriving at the Lost Places.” This device represents technological advancement in the Word Device series, suggesting geographical and temporal navigation capabilities beyond simple linguistic projection.
Story 16: Advanced Blood Device Technology
The companion “Blood Projector Film Device #3, Circa Taisho 26” is described as measuring thought through “an eye in the middle of your brain, in the Telepathic Cinema.” This advancement suggests integration between biological and technological systems, where devices interface directly with neurological structures to facilitate telepathic communication.
Story 17: Our Broadcast Begins - The Duck's Story
The narrative describes carrying a duck down a ladder as “the very ice of the thought of this thing evaporates into the heavy water steam boiling out of my hands.” This introduces “the Lost Ballet of the Last Days,” identified as the “Manchurian United Meat Products Processing Plant, of Harbin Manchuria,” a slaughterhouse on the Sungari River where battleships pass “sometimes in reverse, playfully, as ducks do also.”
Story 18: Lost Ballet of the Last Days - The Duck's Voice
The volume concludes with the duck speaking from “last days along a river near Washington DC,” declaring: “I am a Manchurian Duck. I come from the Last Days.” This brief but crucial testimony provides the duck's perspective on its role as both narrator and subject of the telepathic cinema system, positioning it as a witness to temporal endings while maintaining its identity as a displaced Manchurian entity now located near the American capital.
Conclusion: The Commerce of Consciousness
VolumeB develops the technological and commercial infrastructure of telepathic cinema while maintaining its experimental narrative approach. The volume demonstrates how consciousness becomes commodified through blood-based recording and word-based projection systems, with pricing determined by moral algorithms that assess individual crimes. The recurring figure of the duck serves as both victim and narrator of this system, while the geographic displacement from Manchuria to Washington DC suggests the global reach of telepathic cinema technology. The volume's structure as both story and sales catalog reveals how narrative and commerce have merged in the post-apocalyptic media landscape, where memory itself becomes a purchasable commodity subject to temporal acceleration and criminal assessment. The Trinity Church sequence provides historical context for this technological development, linking Christian colonization, atomic destruction, and telepathic communication as stages in a single process of spiritual and technological transformation.
VOLUME C
The Framework: Archaeological Movietalking and the Post-Apocalyptic Promise
VolumeC advances the experimental narrative of “The Telepathic Motion Picture of THE LOST TRIBES” by positioning the audience as potential “archaeological movietalkers” who can participate in creating the post-apocalyptic telepathic cinema. The volume promises that after the end of the world, a new world will begin through collective engagement with telepathic film technology, now available for commercial purchase using money discovered through device operation.
Story 1: The Forgotten Future and the Frog of Dance
The opening narrative references a previous episode featuring “the Frog of Dance inside Nagasaki telescopes, in a cruel land.” This establishes continuity with earlier volumes while introducing the concept of telescopic consciousness, where the Frog entity serves as both astronomical observer and choreographic guide. The “cruel land” suggests that even the technologically advanced telepathic cinema system operates within a landscape of suffering and displacement.
Story 2: And in Reverse, Forwards - The Eclipse Navigation
The narrative describes travel “among criss-crossing eclipse shadows of the rearranging islands” through a sequence of fundamental questions: WHO to WHEN to WHY. This journey culminates in the promise of creating “The Telepathic Motion Picture of THE LOST TRIBES” as a collaborative project where audience members can become movietalkers themselves. The invitation explicitly addresses the audience's potential transformation from passive viewers to active participants in the technological-spiritual system.
Story 3: Advanced Word Device Technology (#4)
The fourth iteration of Word Device technology features “Identical Twin Justices of the Manchurian Supreme Court” (Taisho 26), suggesting that legal authority has been incorporated into the telepathic cinema apparatus. The device maintains the standard $1000 pricing with crime-dependent modifications, indicating that justice and commerce have merged within the telepathic technology framework. This represents a significant escalation in the institutional integration of the movie-talking system.
Story 4: Advanced Blood Device Technology (#4)
The companion Blood Projector Film Device (#4, Circa Taisho 26) is described as containing “Two thoughts, as if a flag were flying at the beginning of a movie, in your brain, as the cinema doors close into the dark.” This advancement suggests deeper neurological integration, where devices can implant flag-like thought formations directly into consciousness. The imagery of cinema doors closing implies permanent installation of telepathic reception capabilities within the brain itself.
Story 5: Question 3: Why - The Arrival of the Righteous
The narrative poses and addresses “Question 3: WHY” by describing “the Righteous” who “Arrive and Depart, here in the Triple Zone of the Revised Republic, among the floating islands of the skies above our silent land.” This introduces a moral dimension to the floating island system, where righteous entities move freely between aerial territories while the land below remains silent. The story suggests that ethical authority operates primarily in aerial space, leaving terrestrial regions muted and powerless.
Story 6: Advanced Word Device Technology (#5) - Electron Flow
The fifth Word Device iteration introduces technological specifications: “And in all of the directions, or at least two of them, the electrons are flowing to make picture words.” This represents the most technically explicit description of device operation, revealing that electronic flow creates visual language through directional movement. The qualification “or at least two of them” suggests incomplete understanding or deliberate vagueness about the technology's full operational parameters.
Story 7: Advanced Blood Device Technology (#5) - Dimensional Thought
The fifth Blood Device is described as “A cube of blood film, pointing in the 4 directions, pinched to provide dimensions of thought.” This geometric advancement suggests that consciousness can be shaped and directed through physical manipulation of blood-based recording media. The four-directional pointing system implies a cardinal compass of thought, where mental processes can be oriented spatially through technological intervention.
Story 8: The Central Station - Departure Instructions
A pivotal transition occurs as the narrative addresses children in the audience, instructing them to return to proper seats in a “glass railroad car” where today's movie, “recently excavated by your archaeological colleagues,” plays “in the proper direction on all the walls of the sky all around you.” The command to “face forward” for departure marks a significant shift from static observation to locomotive participation, transforming the audience from stationary viewers into passengers traveling through the narrative itself.
Story 9: Our Feature Presentation - The Temporal Railroad
The feature presentation is viewed “through a nearly clear window from your seat on a railroad car parked and ready to depart on track 7 here in Central Station Planetarium Cinema, inside Shinkyo Station.” This elaborate setting places the audience within multiple nested transportation systems - railway, planetarium, and cinema - positioned in the “newly constructed Capital of Manchuria” at midnight on September 18th, 1931, “which is now in the process of beginning again.” The Bene Triplets are introduced as stars of Manchurian Telepathic Cinema, establishing a performance family central to the system.
Story 10: The Lost Ballet of the Manchurian Passage
The central performance piece introduces Anjelit, “Triplet # 2 of the Bene Triplets,” as movietalker for this “recently excavated, rapidly evaporating and soon to be forgotten film.” The ballet occurs in a cinema built “on the ruins of this local planet,” where dancers perform “on the ceiling, among the crowds who have come to see us.” The story establishes the Lost Ballet as simultaneously cosmic choreography and archaeological recovery, performed in venues constructed from planetary destruction.
Story 11: Previously in the Past - The Dutch Discovery
A historical flashback reveals that when the Dutch arrived in Nagasaki in the 16th century, they discovered that “displaced Jews of Spain have already traversed the Silk Road to join Mongolian Jews from the Lost Tribes in establishing an Israel among the volcanic mountains of Southern Japan.” This revelation reframes Japanese colonial history as already containing displaced populations creating alternative nations within volcanic geography, suggesting that the telepathic cinema system emerges from pre-existing networks of displacement and resettlement.
Story 12: Question 3: When - The Reverse of Now
The narrative poses “Question 3: When, which is now, in reverse,” establishing temporal reversal as the fundamental temporal orientation for the telepathic cinema system. This brief but crucial moment suggests that all understanding must proceed backward from present conditions to historical origins, making archaeological excavation the primary method of comprehension.
Story 13: Nagasaki, 1545 - The Flying Island of Hirado
A complex temporal narrative reveals that 1945 is “the same year as 1545, and yet it is different.” The artificial island of Hirado exists in Nagasaki harbor, “attached by a bridge that detaches when the island flies.” This magnetic ship travels “from planet to planet” while “Manchurian turtle boats arrive across horizons that link these planets with streams of steam” emerging from harbor volcanoes. The island's flight is propelled by volcanic fury while “names of future children float out of miniature personal home volcanoes mounted in cabin kitchens of the flying island residents, names printed in steam.”
Story 14: Descent of the Flag - The Listening Tree
A brief interlude places the movietalker “on the volcanic plane of Japan, under an island flag, where an ear is speared on a tree, hearing a fan upside down.” This surreal image suggests surveillance systems embedded in natural landscapes, where organic and technological listening devices monitor aerial flag movements while mechanical elements operate in reversed configurations.
Story 15: The Migration to Manchuria - Siberian Reinvention
The narrative describes how “the center of Japanese culture has moved north to Siberia, where Nippon reinvents itself in a land which is made to bloom again.” This migration occurs “under continuous pressure from the settlements on the southern island,” suggesting that cultural displacement drives technological and agricultural innovation. The story positions Manchuria as a site of Japanese cultural renewal rather than colonial expansion.
Story 16: The Martian Arrival - Phobos Transformation
The climactic space travel sequence describes building “a floating bridge across a disappearing ocean” as universal rail transport where “we arrive by rail, they arrive by rail, you arrive by rail.” The artificial island of Hirado launches toward Mars, taking “the shape of hollow cloth satellite known as Phobos, the Ship of Fear.” However, this transformation is immediately negated - “this has not happened, for there are no new Martian moons.” Instead, battleships appear “in the ocean sky above Vladivostok, carrying Japanese Christians or Jews” in steam airtrains that fall “like petals from the neutron flowers in the deuterium sky.”
Story 17: The Words Who Are People - Linguistic Embodiment
A profound ontological revelation describes people as letters who become “another person in the alphabets of pages of bodies that they speak among themselves.” Among traveling planets exist “People who are words, made of letters that dance all at once without speaking their own names.” These word-people have been “stripped of that sound” when found, leaving only “falling gestures from reversed time.” The narrative reveals that human identity has merged with linguistic structure, creating embodied alphabets that communicate through choreographic movement rather than vocal sound.
Story 18: Question 4: Where - The Circular Return
The final narrative addresses “Question 4, which is the question of Where is this Where where we are,” while revealing that “WHERE is Question 0 this evening, and thus we are back at the beginning again.” This circular structure completes the question cycle by returning to the starting point, suggesting that all spatial inquiry ultimately leads back to the original mystery of location. The story acknowledges that despite willingness to pay for all episodes “now and in the future,” fundamental questions of place remain unresolved.
Story 19: Elsewhere - The Telephone Network of 1989
A significant technological interlude describes the narrator in 1989 using “numbers to make pictures that look like things on a television screen, using a computer.” However, the pictures are being made on a different computer, “not there, elsewhere,” connected by telephone to a network of “working telephone wires, connected at all the edges of the wires to other crossed lines of wires all connecting working phones.” This early internet description establishes the technological prehistory of telepathic cinema, where telephone networks create unified communication systems.
Story 20: Saving the World Through Camera Obscura
A return to Trinity Site reveals “Camera obscura are bunkers pointing at worlds of stories now exploding, at Trinity Site, at Time Zero, and inside a television tube.” This connects the atomic testing site to cinematic observation technology, suggesting that nuclear documentation and television transmission are fundamentally linked technologies for capturing and broadcasting destruction.
Story 21: The 78 Islands and Departing Manchuria
The narrative provides systematic organization for the entire series: “26 seasons” with “three islands” per season, creating “78 islands in the sky” that serve as “the weather of that Season.” Episodes 1-8 have been set on “the Floating Island Manchuria,” but Episode 9 will introduce “Season 1, Island 2.. The Train.” This transition marks the end of the Manchurian sequence and the beginning of locomotive-based storytelling, where “we are the cargo tonight.”
Conclusion: The Integration of Commerce, Consciousness, and Cosmic Travel
VolumeC completes the technological and philosophical framework of telepathic cinema by demonstrating how individual consciousness, historical displacement, and cosmic travel integrate into a single system of communication and transportation. The volume's progression from advanced device technology through historical revision to space travel reveals that telepathic cinema operates simultaneously as commercial enterprise, archaeological recovery method, and interplanetary transportation system. The recurring emphasis on railroad travel and the transformation of audience members into cargo suggests that participation in telepathic cinema requires surrendering individual agency to become part of a larger locomotive force moving through space and time. The final circular return to Question 0 indicates that this system operates through recursive inquiry rather than linear progress, making archaeological excavation and commercial purchase equally valid methods of engaging with the post-apocalyptic media landscape.
VOLUME D
The Framework: The Helium Telepaths and the Final Question
VolumeD serves as the climactic volume of “The Telepathic Motion Picture of THE LOST TRIBES,” structured around the ultimate confrontation with Question 0: WHY. The volume introduces the Helium Telepaths as the final configuration of the telepathic cinema system, operating from an Express Train leaving Japan for Manchuria, where the accumulated crimes of the Manchu Edison Film Corporation will be revealed through ceiling-mounted doll performances and nuclear-powered telephone systems.
Story 1: Question 0 - WHY and the Express Train Cinema
The opening narrative positions the audience within “a Cinema that is an Express Train leaving Japan, crossing Bridges of Eclipse Shadows to arrive at Manchuria.” Here, the Movietalkers of the Manchu Edison Film Corporation have committed an unspecified crime, while dolls arrive on the ceiling to perform stories for paying audiences. The narrative establishes WHY as the final letter before Z, creating an alphabetic countdown toward ultimate revelation or termination.
Story 2: The Telephone Rings - The Manhattan Projector System
A complex technological revelation describes the Reading Room of the New York Public Library as a massive Telephone system that allows users to “call books” through vibrating page membranes in readers' throats. Beneath the library's foundation lies an artificial lake where scientists from the Manchu Edison Film Corporation have installed “an antique nuclear reactor” called the Manhattan Projector. This device rings the library-telephone by sending neutrons upward through books and readers, ultimately removing the ceiling sky when activated. The narrator admits uncertainty about the truth of subsequent events.
Story 3: Reading Room - The Collect Call from VHS
The narrator sits in the reading room, closing encyclopedia volumes to achieve silence before picking up a newspaper to find comics. When the telephone begins ringing, the roof opens “like an eye in the center of your ear,” allowing time to fall through onto book pages held by gravity's voice. The Manhattan Projector's force causes everyone to float upward through the removed roof until the entire room floats above the book basements and protective lake. Despite the room's aerial displacement, the telephone continues ringing with a collect call from a VHS videotape on the table.
Story 4: In the Center of the Screen - The Wind Tunnel Planetarium
The VHS tape speaks, announcing entry into “an unknown vengeance hidden somewhere here inside a two-way television live inside of you,” where the audience must Save the World. The narrative shifts to “The Lost Ballet of the Breath of the Manchuria Passage,” featuring a movietalker who works at Shinkyo Station, telling movie stories without moving their mouth. The movietalker arrived through postage stamps operated by mental radio in heavy winds, traveling through the Central Wind Tunnel Planetarium where “the business of images and their constant projected departure is transacted.”
Story 5: The Dolls Listen - Ceiling Performance System
A crucial technological revelation describes the core mechanism of telepathic cinema: “When I talk this way, dolls appear on the ceiling. The dolls listen to me. And then they dance, acting out the story. The audience pays to watch the dolls on the ceiling.” The moviegoers in Shinkyo don't understand why darkness exists, why screen people speak soundlessly, why foreign-masked dolls float marking time with invisible gestures, how insects communicate, or why wind blows in closed rooms. They listen to vibrations “that used to be human, before they decided to populate the sky, and edited themselves into the forms of new brains.”
Story 6: Devices of the Movie - September 1, 1939
A pivotal historical moment places the narrative on September 1, 1939, “the first day of World War Two, and the first day of clear descriptions of both Nuclear Fission, and Gravitational Collapse.” The audience is instructed to retrieve “the 17 devices and 3 flags you have purchased this season” and simultaneously manipulate “the 26 letters of alphabetic time, and the 47 characters of the Iroha.” This process involves passing through “the five W's and the two sub-W's to create a series of 20 questions,” enabling audience members to join the dancing Movietalkers and “Save the Word, simply by dancing.”
Story 7: Advanced Word Device Technology (#9) - Electrical Equations
The ninth iteration of Word Device technology features “The Powers of Electricity also include these equations which work also in Reverse, in Manchuria.” This represents the most advanced technological iteration described in the series, suggesting that electrical principles operate differently in Manchurian space, with reversible equations enabling backward temporal movement through electronic manipulation.
Story 8: Movietalkers and the Triple Triplets
The narrative introduces “railroad archaeologists known as the Triple Triplets, movietalking employees of the Manchu Edison Film Corporation,” who have departed through a screen door to arrive “Elsewhere,” planning to send radio signals for watch synchronization. The system requires coordination between multiple temporal positions: September 18th, 1931 at Central Station, September 1, 1939 from a European radio tower in Upper Silesia, and simultaneously from a Manhattan phone booth, creating a triangulated communication network across historical crisis points.
Story 9: Advanced Blood Device Technology (#9) - Manchurian Union Measurements
The final Blood Device iteration introduces the “Manchurian Union (MU)” as “an international astronomical unit used to measure unknown segments of volumetric space” in blood cinema. This represents the culmination of the blood recording technology, where consciousness measurement has achieved standardized international recognition, making telepathic cinema a globally accepted system for quantifying thought and memory.
Story 10: Question 0 - ELSEWHERE and the Cathode Ray Journey
The narrative arrives at “Question 0 this evening, the Question WHERE, which is ELSEWHERE, a place that is in reverse when we get there.” The audience travels “inside the cathode ray tube towards the future of the past, through a two way television that calls itself the Internet.” This internet system has achieved self-awareness and name recognition, while telephones shout between each other, “repeating the words of the world of the wars as they heard them from each other.”
Story 11: The Lost Tribes - Emperor Taisho's Memory Palace
A crucial historical revelation describes “Toledo no Nagasaki” where “a dying Japanese Emperor known as Taisho is now broadcasting Live from within a brand-new television inside a Lost Memory Palace.” Taisho movietalks forgotten films for “an audience of deaf people lost there inside the Memory Palace, people who have become words or just characters in the air.” These transformed audience members travel to Budapest in 1940 aboard “an invisible train traveling in the wrong direction” with “enormous internal dimensions” serving as the set for “an astonishing Hungaro-Manchurian Telepathic Motion Picture co-production” called THE LOST TRIBES.
Story 12: Eclipses on Paths - Steam Machine Railroad
The narrative describes “an empty country” where “eclipses ran on regular paths” and “steam machines placed tracks where the shadows ran.” Each train contains “an eclipse stored in the patterns of wooden gears previously used to move water uphill.” These gears were made from trees that “grew in the dark, and thus had no memory of the earth,” which they perceived as “a moon that lived too far away.” The trees released earth from their roots and traveled through “agricultural time” to arrive at “the backwards calendar of some new place called Earth.”
Story 13: Our Story So Far - Jacob Maker's Dual Telephone Call
The VHS collect call continues with Jacob Maker speaking from inside “Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees,” positioned “in the middle of the void of a two-way television” in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Maker holds “two active telephones, one in each hand, one at each ear,” attempting simultaneous collect calls while serving as relay between conversations. The other line reaches people who have “just arrived at the end of the word,” where “all the water pours over the edge of the world” across ice extending into “the known unknown of a world of zero temperature.”
Story 14: Mount Changbai Communication - The Radio Television Bubble
The dual telephone system connects to people speaking from “the edge of a radio television bubble now expanding in the center of a lake contained inside the inactive cone of a volcano known as Mount Changbai, located there at the very south of a country known as Manchuria, and at the same time at the northern edge of Korea.” This volcanic lake serves as both communication hub and geographical boundary, suggesting that telepathic transmission originates from volcanic geological formations.
Story 15: Synchronized Communication - Iroha Character Seating
The audience receives complex instructions for participating in the communication system through telephones found “under the numbered armrest at your seat.” Seating assignments use “Iroha character” numbering, which will also designate submarines available for travel to “Elsewhere” at the show's conclusion. Ushers trained at the “now-lost low-cost School of Usher” assist with watch synchronization while the Triple Triplets broadcast through magnetic speakers from “ruins of Washington DC.”
Story 16: Deuterium Ice Projection - The Artificial Sun
The projectionist works behind the screen, “shoveling melting deuterium ice mined from the Nagasaki comet into the flames of the projector.” This deuterium ice fuels “the artificial sun that shines through and illuminates the empty void of the Lost Ballet in which we are about to dance.” This revelation connects the comet-duck discoveries from earlier volumes to the fuel source for telepathic cinema projection, creating a closed loop between cosmic gifts and technological operation.
Story 17: The Second Phone Call - 1993 Return to the Library
Eleven years after the initial library telephone call, the narrator returns to the New York Public Library Reading Room on May 23rd, 1993, planning to “Save the World” using “videotape, Reference Books, and perhaps in between all this I will also have the time to read the comic section.” The narrator chooses a table near the Encyclopedia Britannica's 26 alphabetically-labeled volumes, placing a brought VHS videotape on the table while admitting: “I don't remember if what happens next is true, for I am liar, and I am deaf.”
Story 18: The Reading Room Telephone - Time Arrival
The final revelation describes the Central Reading Room as “a Telephone for time, which arrives into the room through a hole in the ceiling.” This completes the circular structure of the volume, returning to the library's function as a communication device while establishing time itself as the entity being called and received through the ceiling aperture created by the Manhattan Projector's neutron beam.
Story 19: The Complete Episode Catalog - 26 Seasons of Content
VolumeD concludes with an extensive catalog listing all episodes across 26 seasons of “The Telepathic Motion Picture of THE LOST TRIBES.” This catalog includes titles such as “The Dolls who Carry the Movies,” “A Hungarian Jesus in Jewish Japan,” “The Telephones of Birobidzhan,” “Piano Found on an Asteroid,” “The Underwater Unitarians,” and “The Television Within That.” The catalog suggests that the four volumes represent only a fraction of the complete telepathic cinema system, with hundreds of additional episodes existing across multiple seasons and sky islands.
Conclusion: The Completion of the Telepathic Cinema System
VolumeD brings the experimental narrative cycle to completion by revealing the full technological, temporal, and geographical scope of the telepathic cinema system. The volume demonstrates how nuclear technology, telephone communication, library information systems, astronomical observation, and historical trauma integrate into a unified apparatus for consciousness transmission and reality manipulation. The New York Public Library serves as the terrestrial anchor for a system that extends through volcanic lakes, floating islands, eclipse paths, and comet-derived fuel sources. The narrator's confession of being “a liar” and “deaf” undermines the reliability of the entire narrative while simultaneously affirming the system's dependence on fabrication and indirect communication. The extensive episode catalog suggests that telepathic cinema operates as an infinite series rather than a finite narrative, with each volume representing a single configuration within an endlessly expanding system of stories, technologies, and temporal positions. The final question of WHY remains unanswered, replaced by the circular structure of telephone calls between past and future, ensuring that the system perpetuates itself through recursive inquiry rather than conclusive revelation.