SARKO Sun February 20, 1994 Volume 1 : Issue 1 ISSN 1022-1069 How much mass is needed to populate a world.... CONTENTS, #1.1 (Feb 20,1994) 001 <1.1a> Yue Lan - the 14th day of the 7th moon May 13, 1993 Shatin 002 <1.2a> pointing and grouting the Wah To Bldg June 11, 1993 Shatin 003 <1.0> "The vacuum whispers nothing" May 15,1993 Shatin 004 <1.0> the Barrows May 15, 1993 Shatin 005 <1.1> Tivot & The Bishop 1 September 2, 1993 Ha Wo Che 006 <1.0a> "Short-haired goblins" September 2, 1993 Ha Wo Che 007 <1.2> "transients and trolls" August 25, Ha Wo Che 007 <1.0a> Tivot & The Bishop 2 September 2, 1993 Ha Wo Che 009 <1.0a> "Whole Geosectors were left trashed" September 2, 1993 Ha Wo Che 010 <1.0> "network layer packets" July 5, 1993 Shatin 011 <1.2> "The machines were putting out another fire" Aug 25, 1993 Ha Wo Che 012 <2.1> Tivot & The Bishop 3 September 2, 1993 Ha Wo Che Notes: Yue Lan <1.0> December 15, 1993 Ha Wo Che Prins <1.0> December 16, 1993 Ha Wo Che Cisterns <1.0> December 17, 1993 Ha Wo Che Collectors <1.0> December 19, 1993 Ha Wo Che Ma Kok Riots <1.1> September 23, 1993 Shatin Sarko is journal of works-in-progress published bi-monthly. Subscriptions are available at no cost electronically from sarko-request@mach.hk.super.net. Put "sarko-request" in the subject and anything you want in the body of the message. You can find me in Hong Kong by voice (852) 605-7212, fax (852) 605-7238 or by snail mail at: d.i.h. press PO Box 1010, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong. Unless otherwise stated Sarko is copyrighted (c) Brad Collins. All Rights Reserved. This is not public domain, it is Literary Freeware. You are encouraged to copy and distribute these texts for non-commercial use as long as this notice is attatched. These are completely original literary works by Brad Collins, who bears all customary responsibilities for its contents and arrangement. The characters and events portrayed herein are fictional; any resemblance to other characters living or dead is entirely coincidental. --------------------------------------- Yue Lan - the 14th day of the 7th moon. in the Barrows The gates of Hell would soon close, the ghosts having eaten their fill and sent packing for another year. Scattered piles of smoldering ash formed loose rings like necklaces round the cisterns, dotted with the remains of apples, oranges and oblong purple prins stuck thick like pin cushions with the burnt stubs of joss sticks. People, still squatting, fed money into the flames, the eerie flicker projecting dancing shadows and shifting smoke curling round the blackened limestone rustication. --------------------------------------- pointing and grouting the Wah To Bldg. in the Barrows High above, the spiderwork was coming down, piece by piece as each pole is cut free, and hand over hand drops to clatter, muffled, onto a Mitsubishi flatbed bobbing gently in low pockets of mist hanging in heavy pools, growing dim in the fading light. The first stars of the evening were fading into place; another moonless night wrapping the weary figures moving on the bamboo in pale blue hues, masking their determination to fill the load and go home. The floods kick in, casting oblong arcs of illumination, giving the mass shape, welding the fragil geometry of pale bamboo and green netting to the building together whole, even as it's dismantled and left forever incomplete, a labyrinth with no map to guide its way in or out.... For a few precious moments the scaffold balances, poised between worlds. A willful arresting of entropy is at work here, percolating the vast vanquished ether itself, both revealing and concealing something...as yet unnamed and terrible in its lack of actuality. --------------------------------------- The vacuum whispers nothing. There are only clumsy blunt stumps where once there were passions, pains and stridings. No choice but to keep moving, keeping warm, keeping busy, never able to risk stopping long enough for the exhaustion to clear.... Every and all is bashed into submission by the sheer size of the thing. It's part of the service you see. Fiber-optic channels and runnels -- strung along the underground weave, cover the planet in an upholstery of glass, a data fabric of light.... The satellites and sublights -- and the spooky transmitters, talking through the stars... linking the layered gridwork of windows and orphans, of redundant dumps and feeds. It can all be spliced together from any one of a million couplings, interfacing the network of data, of intelligence, of brute mechanical muscle, of gossamer emotive resilience.... Gawd, ain't it all grand, the whole silly organism, and ain't it fried, fried, that no one can ever be alone again. Can't even plow yer 'ol lady without a voyeuristic universe of acronyms being in on it, the FRB, PLO, the BBC, CYO and the NKOA all having it down, down to the exact moment you blow yr wad -- temperature flux, calorie burn, fluid volume, the precise dimension of the wet spot.... No need for death rattles, faked climaxes, holding your breath, wiping that large snot on the underside of your chair -- it's all been recorded, measured, in infrared, ultraviolet and electromagnetic, in precise atomic clumpings and lumpings into and onto infinity. Big Brother? The Big lie -- cause yes he's watching, recording, measuring every drop of saliva with a Pavlovian obsession, marking and mapping the position of every clipped toenail even as they fall.... But he doesn't care.... --------------------------------------- the Barrows The upper galleries were choked with the stench of a generational accumulation of organic detritus: goblin nests full of chicken and rat bones, looted rubbish and grey-green goblin shit, doper's shooting galleries speckled with drops of dry blood and broken droppers, under shifting drifts of used pump sticks and melt-blisters, suicides, in various stages of decomposure or mummification, depending on air currents or disposition, uncountable and undiscovered even by the rats. . . all composting and fermenting, feeding the wretched wraiths and barrow wight's insatiable desire to become tangible, forever wandering the lower galleries, taunted with the promise of substance. . . . --------------------------------------- Tivot & The Bishop 1 "Continental drift my ass," thought Tivot as he picked his way down a greasy wet back alley in the Barrows behind the not inconsiderable stink of Bishop's bulk, blazing a sweaty trail through the labyrinth of cardboard and mounds of sodden, rotting ruffage that smelled like shit in the stagnant heat. "Where the fuck do you get off talking about continental drift? Do you really think anyone actually believes you know what you're talking about?" "It's a known fact that girls go for, you know, intellectual types," Bishop said flourishing a finger as he kicked aside a massive chunk of snot green foam rubber. "Girls aren't that stupid.... continental drift.... shit," Tivot said noticing a slice of mold-riddled white bread that had adhered to his leg like a lesion. High above the squat Soobish stonework rose a scatter of Mooter spires braiding thirty-floors into the humidity, interspacing and contrasting the sharp-cornered colourless Swathu granite and disintegrating concrete towers, encased in a rusting lacework of braces, brackets, pipes and ductwork, he resulting lattice becoming a corroding self-replicating loop. A makeshift patchwork of aluminum cans and discarded wire of varying gauges, shore up the equilibrium, providing grist to rust and molder, precipitating out as fine black particles, coating and coagulating with the acid rainwater then hardening to form the cement holding the barrows together, obscuring and maintaining the sophistry of conduits, cable-drops and railholes, protecting the anonymity of fiber strung haphazzard through and between buildings, masking surfaces with an absorbant non-reflective grease, keeping line of sight clean in the radio, micro-wave and infarred. --------------------------------------- Short-haired goblins, (proudly sporting tunics and breeches crudely fashioned from mildewing yellow polyethylene weave bags looted from a supermarket in Ma Kok during last weeks blackout) and the odd lobotomized Mooter had begun to creep out of their daylight nests and warrens and were picking through the debris, dropping the already half-rotten fruit into canvas sacks, talons clicking and scratching the cobblestone. But it was all strangely quite. Even the obnoxious cackle of Goblins that normally echoed throughout the city at night was absent. The few gangs brave enough to come out this early, moved nervously with muted tension. Occasionally, one would break out in a short crack of laughter, throttled back into silence by their fellows before warily peering this way and that on the lookout for the odd malingering ghost, perhaps trying to get in one last snack before the gates closed. --------------------------------------- transients and trolls, wearing shit-stained trousers and year old beards with more lice than hair, slept on corrugated divans, dozing in modal chemical states, as if the alley were a bunk house, molecular sparks zipping through their veins, burping and farting inflammable anthracite mineral dreams with erratic wait-states --------------------------------------- Tivot & The Bishop 2 An old mangy tomcat sat in a puddle of light, it's tail bobbed, lazily torturing a cockroach the size of a small rat while an old woman, clumsily stalked the cat with a rusty machete, her round leathery face punctured by a fixed toothless grin, crooning, "Mao Mao, Mao Mao" in a thick Swathu accent. "Fucking old bag.... " Tivot mumbled as they brushed past just as she brought down the blade in a smooth deft arc neatly lopping off the cat's head, its mouth stuffed full of cockroach legs. "Tivot, did you see--" "Fucking witch should be put down." "Tivot, she's gonna eat that cat." "Put down like a mad dog. The whole fucking lot of 'em." Tivot picked up what looked for all the world like a giant plastic paddle from a gallon sized Hoodsie-cup for some fat little kid grown to gigantic proportions through the intervention of some mad scientist... and proceeded to scrape off the wet plaster-like slice of Wonder from his leg. "Can't be very safe," Bishop said. "Huh?" "That cat, can't be safe to eat--" "No-fucking-shit Bishop," tossing aside the paddle in disgust. Behind them now, a group of Goblins had materialized and were wrestling with the old woman for the dead cat. Laughing and poking each other in the eyes, one grabbed the cat head and threw it, hitting another Goblin on the nose who in turn threw it at the old woman. The cat head glanced off her ear, smearing the side of her head with cat blood, "Pok kai, maw kwai!" the old woman screeched, waving her machete. --------------------------------------- Whole Geosectors were left trashed after the fracas -- it'll be a knock down, kick 'em in the balls fight to the death brawl now. No room for measured responses or controlled escalation -- this is a war of alembic tensions where there is only the probability wave, a roulette wheel waiting for the magic wand to tap thrice. Tap, Tap, Tap Gotcha! Yr actualized sucker, bend over.... There are tears in his eyes, as the poor bugger, rubbing his raw, red ass, slowly walks offstage, tiny prisms fracturing the light, matrixing and actually correcting his sight. Not just an optical correction but correcting his very soul.... Suddenly, for the first time in his life he is sane. His vision clearing even as his ass is still smarting, tiny runnels of sperm mixing with the K-Y running down his sweaty chill legs, but he is sane! Like a mainline revelation the sanity hits home, momentarily frying his brain before stabilizing, to float high on an epiphanal cloud, starting to solidify, separating from the wave, taking .... form --------------------------------------- network layer packets in the pipe with a beginning and an end --------------------------------------- The machines were putting out another fire, in the Lam Kau Mow Primary School abandoned in the '93 riots just south of Ma Kok station, no one was told -- the system was self-correcting the building woke in time, to document its own demise, each layer taking care of its own, cameras running their spectral hash, recording rats escapeing through corroded melt-sheets, sealing the windows, the grid shutting down in increments, thermostats encased in wire cages in classrooms, blinking dead as each circuit is consummed, each drop ticked off, each loop terminated as they melted, mapping the topology of the growing blindspot. --------------------------------------- Tivot & The Bishop 3 Even at this hour, the crashing tumble of mahjong tiles being mixed, filtered down from somewhere above, bringing the reassurance of annoyance, like the single thin stream of water breaking the tension in a diving pool, staving off stagnation, allowing passage between worlds. It was as if, if the silence were ever allowed to settle, it would solidify and harden, forming another impenetrable barrier that no amount of proximity could break, signaling the final isolation by the demiurge, that ultimate of control freaks, not understanding that it was loneliness that always kills first.... The alley intersected with other alleys connecting to one road or another, framing brief illuminations from bright yellow lamps, the light capturing a jumble of orbiting tiggers high above the occasional lone figure pissing against a wall or gaunt, bare chested hawkers, wearing white cotton shorts and plastic clogs, tapping out a two-four beat with metal shears on the edge of boiling pots of fish balls and various shards of internal organs, shooting shadows to sweep and probe the alleys, forced like ghosts and the light propelling them, to travel in straight lines. All of this cloak and scamper was starting to wear thin with the Tivot who had just gotten word from Gothot that they had to pack up the dig (three months early) and move her precious rig, Yurts, power plants, alcohol and assorted sex toys that Gothot's entourage of Grad students, groupies, technicians and low-rent burglars had amassed to yet another god forsaken hole, probably without the grace of a decent pub. Tivot didn't have much respect for archaeologists, lumping them in with Tapeworms, Accountants and people who ate with their mouths open on his shit list. But then, nobody much cared what Tivot thought and Tivot had the sense to keep his opinions to himself and take the contract when it came along. The Gothot job had saved their ass, no question, but that was now a long time past and Tivot was getting antsy. He wasn't running no goddamn trucking service. Tivot was no company man. It was times like this that Tivot kicked himself for not getting a local interface. It's not as not as if it was difficult, any of a hundred shops he walked past daily sold them. Tivot'd had a socket job when he was a teenager and it would have been easy to replace the hard bump, matching his skin behind his ear with a local splinter. He'd been on Canter nearly eight months and his splinter was only able to pick up one feed. The fundies up on the mesa, had set up their own feed, blasting the entire geosector with a constant barrage of preaching that gave Tivot a headache, and was designed to drown out or preferably burn out any competing net. He could have used a flasher, he had a lovely Motorola model he'd bought off of an AWOL dit on Elwell, which could have filtered out the fundie feed for him. But Tivot never liked having the thing hovering behind him, watching him like that all of the time. It'd been weird, that first few weeks after they arrived, not being able to get a feed on the street. Not hearing Hector mumbling to himself just under the threshold. Not having lookup or being able to close yer eyes and plug into the local e-drops to see what was happening down the street or knowing when it was gonna rain or any of a million things flashing across yer retina, competing with the outside world. It was so quiet, so empty and lonely outside the net. It was a quiet that Tivot hadn't known in decades, a quiet that once you got used to, became difficult to give up.... "Are you sure this is where Barf told us to meet him?" "Yup, this is where he bought those rice cookers and ground dog meat last week." "Fucking Barf." "Why don't you lay off. It's been three, at least three years now, since-- " "Since he screwed-us-over is what. We almost got stuck on this shit-hole fer good. And why? Because of that dried up shit-fer-brains Barf and his get rich quick schemes." "Three years is three years Tivot. I think we should give 'em another chance. If the tables were turned--" "He'd be outta here faster than he could blow his nose!" "No. He--" "Faster than he could blow his nose Bishop." "Not, I mean Barf isn't like that and you know, I mean.... Three years Tivot. Let's hear him out okay? I got a feeling he's on to something. Did you hear his voice? He hasn't sounded so, that excited since.... It's been a long time, you gotta admit. And Barf does have a good idea once in a--" "The man has a whiffle ball for a brain!" "You're no great brain yourself Tivot." "Hah! This from a man who. . . . you and your continental drift!" "Go ahead, laugh. You'll see, the next time we're in a bar and all you can talk about is how big your--" "Fuck off--" "I, I'll start talking about plate tectonics and we will see, We will see who impresses the girls." "Yeah right.... Where the hell are we anyway?" "Dog meat. During the day this is the biggest dog meat market in Canter. You know Barf... he gets real sentimental. Ever since he found out that he was Korean--" "What the fuck does that have to do with eating dog meat?" "I don't know, something he read..." "Barf can't read." "He can too. He just doesn't... very often. When was the last time that you. I mean okay so he doesn't read very... maybe he heard it in a bar or something." "Or something. Korean my ass. Barf ain't Korean. He was born somewhere in the Jushrut." "Maybe his ancestors were Korean," he said as they rounded a corner, obscured by a congregation of stacked toilet bowls and Mooter stink troughs, stained in yellows, browns and greens. "Bull shit... I tell yeah, he's got a whiffle ball fer--" Bishop felt his foot splash slightly in something wet. "Oh shit!" A headless body lay sprawled in a broad expanse of blood and shards of brain and bone. It took a second before Tivot recognized the clothes. "It's Barf." "It can't be Barf." "He's dead." "No, no he's--" "You gotta have a head to--" "We could revive him." "He has no fucking head. He's de--" "He can't--" "Bishop, his head was burnt clean off," he said, grabbing his arm. "I know dead. Barf is dead." Tivot looked around the alley, his heart pounding in his mouth. But looking for what? There were only beer bottles, a half empty jar of cheese whiz, a small mound of mouldy pizza crusts and the frayed remnants of a cream coloured acceleration couch ripped from a Mooter transport being embraced by the widening pool of Barf's blood. The acrid smell of burnt flesh and ozone hung heavy in the thick still air. The alley, seamless slime-covered ceramic walls with bricked up windows or doors, extended up into the gloom. "We gotta get outta here." "We can't just leave him here. It's Barf," Bishop said, lifting one foot from the sticky puddle of Barf. "They may come back." "Poor Barf." "The bastard almost got us killed with him." "It's still Barf. Barf is still Barf Tivot. We just can't leave him for the rats. It's not. . . decent." "Barf musta been holding." "I didn't think Barf would ever die." "It musta been pretty big." "God, it burnt his whole fucking head off!" "Musta been holding something big to get popped like that." "You can't revive him without a head huh?" Tivot shook his head. They made their way down the alley, leaving bloody tracks that quickly dried brown in the hot dry air. Tivot stopped short of the end of the alley, peering cautiously into the near empty street peppered with piles of smoking ash. Several Floxies, in dark tattered robes, glided silently through the puddles of light, their brown fur looking grey in the gloom. A lone rice-paper banknote, having escaped incineration, fluttered and bobbed above a heat vent in the street. There were always eyes in the barrows. It was the eyes that got to you... glowing behind grates in storm drains, from between shapeless piles of rags, cardboard and plastic heaped in bricked-up doorways, from barred windows barely seen over the drip and between holes in corrugated eaves, flashing from turret slits and peep holes in haphazard barricades and fortified doors and gates, through a million cameras and e-drops that were little more than flat matt squares above doors, ringing utility poles, street signs and discarded bits of rubbish left for dead or just to look that way.... "Tivot!" Bishop said in a stage whisper. It was finally beginning to sink in that they were in deep shit. "We're gonna die!" Bishop fell back against a wall, gasping for breath. "Tivot, whatta we gonna do? What if the net--" "This is the backwash stupid. They don't have hardware like that out here. Unless--" "We're gonna die Tivot." "It coulda been the local--" "Slugs? The fucking police?" Bishop groaned, dropping his head into his hands. "We're gonna die. Some flasher will drop outta the smog and pop us. I just know--" "Pull yourself together. We'll get out of this." "This is not good Tivot." "You hear me? We'll get outta this." Tivot took a deep breath. "We just gotta get outta here." Tivot squinted into the gloom, hoping it was clear. "Come on." "Where are we going?" Tivot hesitated, unsure of what to do. "The ship," he finally said, "Screw Gothot and her fucking Pebble Boxes. We've got to get outta here before anyone finds Barf." "But we didn't kill him." "You got any better ideas?" --------------------------------------- Notes --------------------------------------- Yue Lan When Muk Lin's, mother died she found herself traveling down the long road to hell. The road was lined with the ghosts of people who had died of hunger. Every time she tried to eat, the hungry ghosts turned the food in her bowl to fire. Her son was distressed that his mother was in so much pain and went to ask the priests in the temple for some way to help his mother. The priests devised a prayer called the Yue Lan Poon King , to be spoken on the 15th of the 7th month, and give offerings of food to ease the pain of the hungry ghosts. On the first day of the seventh moon (late August or early September) the gates of hell are opened and the ghosts are free for two weeks to walk the earth. On the 14th day, called the Yue Lan Fesitval, ghosts receive offerings from the living. Fruit is offered and paper cars, paper houses and paper money are burnt, and once this occurs these gifts become the property of the dead. People whose relatives suffered a violent death are particularly concerned to placate the spirits, visiting the place where the person was killed to leave flowers and burn incense. People will not swim, travel, get married, move house, or indulge in other risky activities during this time. There are also lots of Cantonese opera performances -- presumably to give the ghosts one good night out before they have to go back down below for another year. --------------------------------------- Prins An oblong shaped purple fruit that looks like a waxy skinned eggplant with a taste and consistancy simular to an apple. Prins grow on high bushes and are thought to have be native to one of the Dauk worlds washward from Bambi along the belt. The success of the plant in such a wide variety of ecosystems strongly suggests some kind of genetic alteration though this view is highly contended by a number of researchers. Prins are thought by many to appeal to ghosts and were quickly adopted as good luck symbols and devices for enticing ancestors into helping to the living pick a winning horse or help in selecting a lottery number. This can be seen especially during festivals like Yue Lan or Mid Autumn Festival, the fruit often is sold in markets at 4 or 5 times the normal price. There is a very old story told to children throughout the Jushrut of a priest called Fan Lai Tai who had spent thirty years working as a government hooker before renouncing her crimes against humanity and became sort of a Johnny Apple Seed character, who traveled through the Jushrut and even up into the San Zi planting prin bushes near temples and, as Zappa said, spreading prins across the land using all of the frightening little skills that science has made available as a form of penance to the thousands of souls she had screwed. Carp, barbel and trout love prins. George Shea Lace and Lures prins are to barbel as catnip to a cat no sooner does the bait hit the water and a veritable feeding frenzy ensues · WWilma Mak Journal of the Jost Angling Society the use of prins as bait is banned by every fishing organization known to this writer as it is thought that prins are not a bait but a narcotic to marine life and is not used by any true sportsmen --------------------------------------- Cisterns Webster's Collegiate cis·tern \'sis-tern\ n [ME, fr. OF cisterne, fr. L cisterna, fr. cista box, chest Ð more at CHEST] (13c) 1: an artificial reservoir for storing liquids and esp. water; specif: an often underground tank for storing rainwater 2: a well like structure at the centre of Mooter villages which is thought to be a window into the world of the dead. 3: a large usu. silver vessel formerly used (as in cooling wine) at the dining table 4: a fluid-containing sac or cavity in an organism OED 1: an artificial reservoir for water, or other liquid; esp. a water-tight tank. 2: A natural reservoir or depression containing water, eg a pong 1606 3: a pit at the centre of Mooter villages, thought to be a window into the Spirit World. 4: Applied to a cavity, or vessel in an organism 1615. Also fig and attrib 1. Broken cisterns Jer. 2:13. A copper c. for the table PEPYS Diary 7 Sept. 1667. a c. of punch 1815. 2. The dead hold conference in the village c. 3. Lakes .. are real reservoirs, or cisterns of water 1796. Hence Ci·stern, v to enclose in, or fit with, a c. The Bible Ecclesiastes Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. 12:1 · William Shakespeare 1564-1616 Othello But there, where I have garner'd up my heart, Where either I must live or bear no life, The fountain from the which my current runs Or else dries up; to be discarded thence! Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads To knot and gender in! Turn thy complexion there, Patience, thou young and rose-lipp'd cherubin; Ay, there, look grim as hell! · Fargo Morris Time and Endings The mass, upended and hanging above the cistern where souls depart in the labyrinth that keeps us from hell · Brill Cheung Barrow Song the warmth of the walls drawn from the lives of Floxie offerings, screaming at the bottom of the Cisterns At the centre of every Mooter village lies a cistern always with the exact proportions of 6x18x6 (one six being the height of the walls above the ground. -- the depth of the cistern is always thought to extend into hell, the depth of which no one seems to know) through which the dead are thought to keep a watch over the lives of the living in their ancestral home. Advice is often sought at Cisterns, as well as offerings given to the recently deceased to help their transition into death. When a Mooter village is moved, or abandoned, it is possible to move this spirit window to another cistern, even if that cistern in on another world. The empty cistern is then no longer under the protection of the elder spirits of the village and can be taken over by any wandering spirit that wishes to take residence. For this reason, the Mooter shun any abandoned village or cistern. These beliefs remain quite strong even today, which explains the Mooter's reputation for being poor archaeologists but excellent archivists and historiians. In a strange way it makes sense. They can never go back, so they are careful to record everything so that they can take it with them. Mooter cisterns are not meant for trapping drinking water and it is thought that those who drink the water from a cistern will fall under the control of the spirits that lay in its depths. The cistern represents death something that traps and once inside cannot be returned, the antithesis of a well, which is the bringer of life. Death is a closed end, like a cistern. The Mooter word for Cistern means roughly, window of the dead. --------------------------------------- Collectors Who washed her hands in the smoke, smoldering ash and the trace leavings of the dead 20 Years in the San Zi Joseph Fong in years of drought, the ash left after the festival, in LoTsuen and other parts of the Barrows, formed great drifts that clogged the air intakes on the collectors which would overheat and start to weave and bump into walls like they were drunk. · The burnout rate for Collectors in Canter has always been quite high. The number of Collectors for the territory varies between 120-195. As Collectors died, they were canibalized for parts and kept going with little more than tin cans and baling wire. The mean life-span for most C Class Collectors during 24th wc(Wongsha Calendar) century was supposed to be about 25 years. Canter seldom saw a Collector last a day over 10. A common passtime, even a tradition, for youth in Canter was to play kick the can -- kicking a Collector to see how far you could make it slide on it's floaters before it's speed dropped within it's brake threshold and stopped or hit something. Class C Collector Purchases ('230-240) 28 Philips Hobo-T9 14 Philips Hobo-T9 18 Ma Yuen Fa-B URC (Urban Rubbish Collectors) 8 Ma Yuen Fa-B URC 52* Gunther Waldaw 441+ (For hostile urban environments) 11 Philips Hobo-T13 20 Philips Hobo-T13 26 Gunther Waldaw 441+ 18 Gunther Waldaw 441+ 12 KaPok City Beauty KP-22 102** Gunther Waldaw 441+ + Drought years * The year of the Ma Kok Riots ** Typhoon Tinker A wide range of the tiny Philip Hobo's (everything from the old S80 on up to the T13's which were the last model before the line was discontinued) were in use for almost 80 years, especially in the Barrows where the little yellow bricks, became integrated with peoples image of Canter During the 230's new Hobos were being stolen, as soon as they were set loose. The new flash boxes were ripped out and sold in the shipyards to be installed on frieghters and other small ship passing through the yards. The government responded first with a ineffectual campaign to catch the "Brick Kidnappers" which proved almost completely fruitless. Subsequently, Marta Exodus who was the head of maintenance at the Hui Lek Pui depot in the West Barrows, out of desperation, began taking the shiny new Hobo's, stripping off the outer bodies and began a program of "pre-trashing" them, denting and artfully scoring the bodies to make the new models virtually impossible to distinguish from the older models. As soon as this program began, thefts dropped by 85% in less than a month and remained low thereafter, it was simply not worth the effort to steal old units and new units just to find a the small number of new flashcans which were not terribly valuable in the first place. Before the first Hobo's were bought, collectors were commonly (and are still often) called flashcans a common enough sight almost anywhere for nearly 800 years. However the Hobo's had a personality of their own and were commonly referred to as "bricks", "yellow bricks" or even "tin bricks." --------------------------------------- Ma Kok Riots Rice Cooker Riots Riots of '93 A shipment Ka Pok Rice Cookers got switched with a run which used an odd chip set which were meant for infiltrating civilian data networks during the Martha wars in the mid '090's. The chipset was designed to insert a worm into local nets. The worm's primary objective was to manufacture events which would breed discontent and misdirection in the local population. The worm would also filter out all attempts to announce the existence of the worm and any negative information about the MLA (Martha Liberation Army) and even go so far as to skew all news events towards MLA interests. All of the rice cookers had been sold, in the Sha Gok day markets in Lo Tsuen during a three week period in August of '93. It's thought that only two weeks later, most of the rice cookers had already been in contact with each other (sending messages disguised as rice cooker reply receipts, cooker repair requests, cooking schedule changes and rice supply orders sent over the net.) and decided to target the opening of a temple at Ma Kok in Shueng Hau. The feeds were altered so that anyone getting information through the net would be told that it wasn't a temple being built, but a crematorium and underground mausoleum. Unfortunately incident coincided with the torching of a Majhong parlour in the same area by a group of teenagers working for a local protection racket. Again, the feeds were altered so that people believed that the torching was really the work of the police to quiet the protest over the mausoleum. The cookers then changed the profiles of the teenagers, making them look like squeaky clean, model citizens being railroaded by the police. The riots that started as a demonstration in Ma Kok quickly spread throughout the barrows. Dozens of buildings in the east barrows burnt to the ground and some 150 people were killed by both police and rioters. The riots lasted nearly two weeks and only stopped after the government was able to completely crash the net. It was months before the real reason behind the riots was discovered and the rice cookers hunted down and destroyed. ========End Sarko Volume 1 : Issue 1========