The Framework Narrative: A Circular Journey
The ScriptP contains a complex, multi-layered narrative structure presented as both a documentary and personal religious testimony. The narrator repeatedly emphasizes that what unfolds is both documentary truth and his personal beliefs, creating an ambiguous reality where fact and fiction intermingle. The stories are organized around a circular motif—trains running in rings around cities, story arcs that curve back on themselves, and a general sense of returning to where one started but with altered understanding.
Story One: The Train Station of Perpetual Transfer
The first major narrative centers on a peculiar train station designed to force constant passenger transfers. This station sits between two railroad lines with incompatible track gauges—one with small wheels, another with large wheels, making direct passage impossible. Every day, trains stop at this station, and passengers must disembark, walk through a commercial center, and board a different train to continue their journey.
The narrator describes this system as both a practical transportation solution and a commercial strategy. The forced transfer creates captive customers who must patronize the businesses within the station's commercial center. This arrangement existed in various locations: Shanghai, Manchuria (where northern and southern lines, Russian and Chinese railroads intersected), and most significantly in “Super Tokyo”—a reconstructed version of Manchuria built after the original sank.
The narrator mentions the Yamanote line in Super Tokyo, which runs in a circle around the city, creating an endless loop where passengers can theoretically ride forever. This circular railway becomes a metaphor for the cyclical nature of all the stories being told. The system works by capturing time itself—each transfer through the commercial center steals moments from passengers' lives, monetizing the very act of movement through space.
Story Two: The Tokyo Gas Attack Narrative (March 20, 1995)
Embedded within the train station story is a harrowing account set on the morning of March 20, 1995—the date of the actual Tokyo subway sarin gas attack. The narrator describes cult members (identified as Aum Shinrikyo practitioners) carrying plastic bags wrapped in newspaper pages, wearing hidden helmets from their “new religion” concealed under their hats so no one becomes suspicious.
These figures puncture bags containing gas while exiting trains, leaving umbrellas behind as they depart. The gas begins to “speak” to the “soon to be previously breathing people,” causing passengers to collapse on train floors. The trains continue rolling between stations, each of which has transformed into a large bookstore.
The narrator finds himself in one such station-bookstore, anxiously searching for an exit while the poisonous gas literally speaks, saying: “Hi, how are you, did you know that words are things, and there are things that are books, and there are books that are poisons that float through the singing and dancing air.” Understanding the imminent danger, the narrator quickly closes a book titled “The Jews in Japan and the Japanese in Budapest” and leads his group to escape.
Above the bookstore shelves, glowing frogs dance, their bodies illuminating a promotional message: “YOUR STAY IN THE ISRAEL IN MANCHURIA IS AWAITED.” The group flees through the eventual exit, emerging onto Inari Avenue, running toward a volcano rim above a lake.
Story Three: The Underground Mars Discovery
A third narrative thread follows miners who venture deeper into the Earth using advanced alien technology. The Ming dynasty (referenced anachronistically) gained access to “strange and powerful technologies” from other planets, including “rays of material light that cause magnetic fires at a distance” and propulsion systems possibly stolen from Flash Gordon by Betty Boop.
Using this technology attached to antique boats with periscope holes in their bottoms, miners descended into what they believed was empty earth. However, the underground reveals itself to be inhabited by “big old blue retreating Cherenkov starlight” attached to iron balls left over from old stars. The earth is not empty—the miners simply haven't reached these deeper regions yet.
In their subterranean journey, the miners encounter a “strange proto-Soviet planet Mars”—described as the previous fourth planet from the Sun that lost contact with the solar system after the explosion of the fifth planet. Mars had wandered and found itself in Earth's mines, creating an inverted reality where up and down, inside and outside lose meaning.
The narrator references a documentary called “Aelita” (an actual 1924 Soviet science fiction film) starring “the 34th wife of the strange retrograde director Dovzhenko.” This film supposedly documented finding Mars inside Earth through public works projects in central Moscow, though the narrator suggests it should have been made in Tokyo for greater accuracy.
The Chinese miners, having fled from “above ground and now rather annoying regions of their former and now foreign country,” tell the Soviet Martians about their underground flight. Both groups have become well-accustomed to life in the mines, preferring this subterranean existence to surface complications.
Story Four: The Circus Administration and the Lost City
The fourth major narrative thread involves a vast circular circus that serves as both entertainment venue and governmental structure. This circus owns various administrative buildings, including the Department of Criminal Crimes and Criminal Causality, and provides access to the “Atomic Energy Bureau” (or “Automatic Energy Bureau”), which doesn't actually exist but can be entered through the North Wing.
The circus is located “somewhere between France and Spain at the limit of the crack world on the 93rd planet.” As the sun descends, one can still find “Perdido” (the lost land), “the last mountain,” inhabited by “the lost tribes” and featuring a submarine perched on a mountain lake. The submarine is also called “the lost tribes,” creating a circular identification between people and vessel.
Mount Perdido houses buildings “full of compressed water” that rise into the Manchurian Sky, though some leak and become useless. The water contains “active radio sources” apparently from “lost atomic reactors in the sky under the ground.” When these water-buildings are punctured and drained, explosions occur underground, followed by black rain falling on unprotected workers who remain indifferent to this radioactive precipitation.
The buildings grow under pressure from the sky and sunsets, which compress both architecture and atmosphere. At noon, the heat becomes intolerable because “the sun was hungry and coming closer”—an idea the narrator dismisses as something “only dead people would believe,” yet notes that none of the specified numbers of dead (47, 300, 5000) are actually deceased according to the “tomb bound body of the unknown grotto.”
Story Five: The Bridge Wanderer and Urban Infrastructure
A parallel narrative follows a wanderer searching for the source of thoughts calling from “another brain” while traversing various bridges constructed along railroad streets. The searcher moves across “mine bridges” (bridges over mines where miners work in darkness) without initially realizing that these “brains” might actually be trains trying to communicate.
The wanderer observes how administrators have marked the city with a “Time Zone Color Plan”—bright lines alternating with areas of invisible paint, carefully applied along streets, sidewalks, building edges, and rooftops where screams can be heard. This “invariable engineering” must have had a purpose when originally planned, though that purpose remains mysterious.
The search leads to “Artificial Street,” which exists only as a painted backdrop draped across government buildings filled with boxed canned food—though the cans might be empty and possibly just part of the painting. Large gaps between canvas segments could theoretically serve as doorways, but no one enters these buildings, leading to extensive speculation about their contents.
The journey continues to Church Street, where administrators live and emit occasional screams in “inchoate tones” meaningless to others who don't speak “the language of screams” and have been paid to remain ignorant of it. The wanderer passes the “Previously Useful Sign Factory,” where yesterday's signs—covered with wrong characters, indecent smears, and peeling patches—are hung to dry after atomic rain, then fade to black in the following day's sun.
Story Six: The Waterfall Child and the Woman of Steam
The final major narrative thread introduces the “Woman of Steam,” a mysterious figure who declares while smiling: “Build this city. This is a documentary and also reflects my personal religious beliefs.” The waterfall is identified as “the child of the woman of steam,” establishing a mystical genealogy connecting natural phenomena with human consciousness.
The Woman of Steam guides the narrator through a landscape where buildings are “made out of light and shadows,” some flying around “like little animals that know nothing,” others existing as “cow pies,” “manganese nodules,” or “singular trees that carry their own little brains on them.” This architectural ecosystem lives and moves independently, creating a city that breathes and thinks.
Within this environment, the “Atomic Energy Bureau” or “Department of Automatic Energy” doesn't actually exist but can be accessed through bureaucratic navigation. The entire administrative structure belongs to the circus “for some reason or other”—a cosmic joke where governance, entertainment, and reality administration become indistinguishable.
The narrator, describing himself as “an usher stuck to the screen and a submarine,” can read things that he and others may eventually recognize through “a variety of recognitions here on our earth.” This suggests that understanding comes through accumulation of perspectives rather than linear revelation.
Recurring Themes and Circular Structure
Throughout all these interwoven narratives, several themes create unity within apparent chaos:
Circular Motion: Trains running in rings, story arcs that curve back to their beginnings, the circus as a circular backdrop, and the overall structure where ending approaches beginning.
Commercial Capture: Whether through forced train transfers, bookstore-stations, or sign factories, commercial systems capture and monetize human movement, time, and attention.
Administrative Absurdity: Bureaucratic structures that don't exist but can be entered, screaming administrators speaking meaningless languages, and departments with contradictory purposes.
Underground Inversions: Reality inverts below ground where Mars exists inside Earth, miners flee surface complications, and up/down lose meaning.
Hybrid Identities: People who are also submarines, books that are poisons, buildings made of light and shadow, and frogs whose bodies serve as promotional text.
Documentary Truth: The narrator's insistence that everything is simultaneously documentary fact and personal religious belief, creating an epistemological framework where subjective experience becomes objective reality.
The overall structure suggests that all these stories are happening simultaneously in different dimensions of the same reality—a reality where transportation, administration, commerce, religion, and natural phenomena have become so intertwined that they can only be understood through their circular relationships to each other. The ending always returns to the beginning, but with the understanding that linear progression is itself an illusion in this carefully constructed maze of meaning.