The French Space Agency Thought Experiment
The narrative begins with a thought experiment presented in the video conference room of the French Space Agency, the Central National for the Study of Space. This establishes the framework for what follows: an unnumbered series of adventures featuring Jacob, a character who wanders through minds and space waves among various floating cities that inhabit the international interplanetary void on television.
The stories are described as loops within loops, designed to be presented on magic lanterns that pass through themselves or are superimposed over each other in time. This creates a structure where viewers can step in front of the projection to travel to other places and see back stories on the other side of the screen. Transparency becomes one of the central objects, delivered through a form of speech that speaks of a past where Manchuria has become America's 55th state.
Jacob Maker and the Electrical Theater
In this future-past world, Jacob Maker has three twins, and together with the rest of their tribe, they find themselves lost in many places at once. This displacement occurs after a failed attempt to communicate with apparently friendly dead people through an electrical theater built by their half grandmother. The failure of this supernatural communication device seems to scatter the characters across multiple dimensions or realities simultaneously.
The narrative suggests that this displacement is both spatial and temporal, creating a condition where the characters exist in a state of perpetual wandering between worlds, always searching for a way back to their original reality or perhaps forward to a new one.
The Alphabetic Characters and Their Mysteries
A significant portion of the narrative focuses on alphabetic characters—letters that have become animate beings with their own personalities, relationships, and conflicts. The storyteller poses questions about these character-letters: their motivations, their friendships among other letters, their prejudices that prevent them from serving on juries for various crimes they themselves have committed.
These letters blow in the wind and have the potential to make their observers famous. Each letter has distinct hobbies and interests—for instance, F and G are mentioned specifically, along with emoji-like characters such as a toaster or a kiss-the-toaster. The letter G is questioned about its educational background and which gods liked or hated it.
The narrative explores whether any of these characters have been lost underground on duck-shaped comets, or if they're under 18 inches tall (making them potential miners or candidates for mining school). Internal conflicts rage within each character, particularly between pronunciation and squiggle writing. The difficulty of being a word that must wink at other words becomes a central theme.
The Nation of Manchuria and the Train-Camera
The setting shifts to the Nation of Manchuria, where telepathic movies use talking pictures to remember films that aren't truly movies until their sound is finished. These then become recordings of recorded recording stories. The movie talker in this scenario is simultaneously a train, a camera, and a projector.
As this train moves through the Manchurian landscape, it lays down its own track while puffing out steam that contains thoughts. These thoughts disappear into the moving air, but as they vanish, they become pictures in the steam. These steam-pictures generate ideas that become the words of the movie.
Tiger, a character in this section, speaks without moving his mouth. The combination of all pictures in the steam becomes the forgotten lines of the stories they tell. Telepathy is revealed to be the retelling of lies that other people have forgotten. When the movie talker finishes speaking, silence follows, then panic, as dolls of sound appear and disappear and the movie returns to a world without speech.
The Underground Mines and the Sun Goddess
The narrative descends into coal mines and carbon mines where the days are dark until the rising sun appears. The narrator mentions that their sister is the sun goddess, creating a mythological family structure within the technological landscape. The storyteller's job is to tell stories to dolls—movies appear on the screen while dolls appear in the ceiling.
When the storyteller sees the dolls, the audience can see them too. The people of Shankill come to watch the dolls hear the stories. This creates a layered audience experience: people watching dolls watching stories, with the movie talker serving as intermediary between all these layers of spectatorship.
The workplace becomes a space where workers talk to each other constantly, and the theater is made up of many words that constitute speech. Despite having many voices available, there is ultimately only one voice—the voice in the listener's head.
The Train-Shaped Cities and Stone People
The narrative introduces upside-down, train-shaped cities that travel in triplets, forming mighty families populated by people who emerged in groups from solid rock under places where cities used to exist before entering tunnels. These people are described as dumbfounded folk who arrive at cities much like everyone else, always about to depart through smaller, more sincere time holes.
These holes exist alongside larger ones—stunted tunnels everywhere under the country, resembling veins in frogs from modern anatomy books. The people themselves are made of a flexible flesh stone, like a serious former Silly Putty, creating beings that exist between organic and mineral states.
Movie Talker Halos and Spiritual Protection
A complex system of halos surrounds movie talkers, each with specific properties and purposes. There are circular movie talk halos that come down to the knees (called Ammeters), turnip-shaped halos that rest on the ground (called cannons), and oval halos with no fixed endpoint that look like tornadoes (called food halos).
Pregnant individuals can display two or four halos simultaneously. These halos have auras with many pretty colors, and polite movie tigers possess thick halos in front of them for protection from demons. The narrator claims to have multiple arms, all of which are their arms, each having additional arms, and all pointing magic fingers.
These halos and auras protect against bad stories, which appear like sword drummers on the left side, while good stories from mothers appear on the right. God is revealed to be simultaneously light, right, and a dog owned by the narrator's mother, who is holy and from outer space.
Alien Invasion and Secondary Souls
The narrative reveals that people from outer space have been continually invading Earth, transformed into protons, electrons, and matter with nothing else to do. Evil dolls put bad bacteria in food, disrupting schedules and creating secondary souls located five centimeters behind and below the navel.
These secondary souls are installed by secondary deities after the first visit to the movies, which only happens twice. Complaints should be directed to “our dad,” who appears elsewhere. The maintenance of these souls is contractual, referenced in line 16 of the second contract that must be signed when joining Manchu Edison, based on the first contract known in this region as the “well-known cripple zone of the revised Republic.”
The Movie Talkers' Performance
The final major section describes the movie talkers themselves—performers who stand in front of theaters, yelling for people to come watch shows. They perform imitations of movie stars and plasma stars that will appear on the screen inside, where they too will appear and reappear via velcro attachment.
Once the audience is inside, the movie talkers speak for the stars above them, becoming the stars themselves. They sing, chant, and change, speaking all at once and telling people what to pay attention to. They make up everything at the moment they say it, creating improvised reality.
In this system, men play women and women play men, movies are shot without directors, and people are shot without guns. Camera operators take charge while prompters read words and actors follow. Monkeys play and fly through the air, mingling with animals in the zone between rock and void.
The Universal Language and Animal Stories
The movie talkers speak names—names here, names there, names in the sky in every direction. They speak words using oxygenated breath that whispers as glottal regions move down through throat and stomach. Seeds of time flowers rotate around them, falling through light and the noises of all words in the wonderful world visible in every direction.
Birds sing, and the performers sing back, hearing “the blue of all that's there.” Dogs are attracted by these tonalities and come to bark, while cats come to kill as they play. The cats tell rat stories to baby rats who plot revenge against chemical companies, learning about rat poison avoidance from superhero-style comic books sold by the movie talkers.
This creates a complete ecosystem of communication between humans, animals, and the cosmos itself, mediated through the performance of the movie talkers who serve as translators between all levels of existence.
Conclusion: The Endless Loop
The text concludes by acknowledging its own incompleteness and circularity. Movies are projected onto actors, shot outside during the day (which is night), then projected inside at night. Government buildings always appear in backgrounds, and insertions through telepathy create incrustations that no one understands.
Different actors play near and far shots of the same character, with more actors than cameras and more movie talkers than actors. Everything is said through the blurring of phonemes and the wonder of leaves, whispered by wind that moves things and movies and wonder itself.
The numerical precision of 3.1425 frames of film per movie talker in this crazy country can only be confirmed by going around and around until falling down. The ride always returns passengers to the same place they started, proving the numerical coincidence that reveals universal truths about miniature sub-representations that are just as true as truth itself.
The narrative promises return—soon or late, before or after—while acknowledging that no one knows what will happen next, creating an eternal present of perpetual possibility and performance.