A brief description of the nullfilms

Being as this was my first week in the Outer City, I hastened to acquaint myself with local customs, a task outlined by Manahem in his principle work, with which I presume many are already familiar. The gist of his reasoning is that in order to subvert a community, one must do so as an insider, as a member: it is of no great consequence for an outsider or newcomer to critique the values of direction of a community, but for a member of 'us' to dissent is to require an examination of one's self and of the community at large; thus, individuals will be more open to contentious relationships and suggestions, and additionally the communal feedback mechanism to check and contain dissent is weakened as individuals look inward for confirmation instead of to external authority. It is ironic that I should now use those faculties with which he fashioned our community to reclaim the one he fled so many years ago.

Scholarship aside, I had heard much about the nullfilms from certain members of our desert community who, despite their preference for their newfound life among us, find themselves drawn to the recollection of the nullfilms even years later. It may be important to note that the only ex-City dwellers who report no further nostalgia are those inducted into the prophetic order, and moreover those who have survived the requisite exile.

The nullfilms are transmitted (it is impossible to say 'shown,' as the transmission space, while contained, is essentially non-directional and in a contradictory sense, non-spatial, as while within the bounds of the nullfilms one's perspective is sufficiently skewed to render determination of spatial orientation impossible) within, well.. what to call that strange area?

I asked about the nullfilms while purchasing some basic items from the corner store, a shop where the aisles and goods sit askew, fog rising from meats in an open freezer, dry goods piled haphazardly in the back, and where even recently restocked items seem to cloud the air with dust when picked up. My selection of goods was inconscpicuous enough: dehydrated milk, bread, and coffee, one or two common spreads and a few narrow jars of pickled vegetables. But the question I asked was itself suspicious: there is no one in Autopia who lacks an instinct which guides the aimless to those.. spaces of consciousness.

The nullfilms are a vacuum to those who refuse to kill themselves, which in this city is a sizable number. After seeing them, I cannot say how it is we live with those who have been there. I still wonder how I managed to leave.

I wandered along a spit-spotted sidewalk which perpetually stank of urine and vomit, all the while surrounded by a chorus of retching and coughing. While the Inner City is reputed to be literally spotless, with gleaming surfaces comprised more commonly of energetic fields than solid matter, the Outer City is a different manner. Its construction is that of the era before ours, pre-cataclysm. One can find entryways inscribed with dates, like the muddy brick building in which I have taken residence. It reads, '1906 A.D.' I understand this was a common moniker of the christian era before the geopolitical rise of secular humanism and of the corresponding capital reduction. To see something written in such letters was a peculiar experience, which I could only call something like stepping into a myth. But such surreality was not to be limited to details like that.

Ahead of myself, as I passed beneath an elevated railway (indeed, here such transit systems still use tires, still made from rubber, now generally compressed soot from the carbon rendering plants), I noticed a sort of fog descending. I cannot find a suitable term to describe the experience. It was as if with every step the sky grew darker, but it was not only the sky. Though it was evening, it was not simply the sky that darkened, it was also any light around me, and the highlighted edges of ambient light at nighttime were to be found nowhere as I headed in the direction that I had been pointed, my groceries still in hand, contained in a rumpled canvas bag.

I felt a certain opiate weight to my body, a stiffness which gave me the sensation of being skeletal, which slowly passed and the weight in my muscles evaporated, along with any sense of having a body, or of having anything in my hands. I felt no bag in my hand; I felt no hand with which to grasp anything. I became aware of bodies in the deepening dark, a sort of milling crowd, sedate and listless. Though I gradually grew to be able to discern faces, this did not last: instead, I felt as though the ground had given way, in an absurdly slow motion, and felt myself laid back, though my visual orientation with the other faces I could see had not changed.

There were, perhaps, thousands of us. As I felt my attention drift skyward, my thoughts ceased and I witness a visual refraction, as though a prism was dividing and redirection the darkness around me.

Then, as if in a vivid, almost lucid dream, a story into which I became interjected. I cannot recall the plot, nor the characters, but only the quality of the experience: vivid, but detached, as though I was experiencing a tactile hallucination. Events seemed predestined, though something in the story had not yet happened, bit would, because, as I have grown to realize, the audience desired that the story do so: we were making the story. It was a gradual cycle of conflicted desires, somewhat democratically constructed, with the unexpected twist of farming the unconscious mind for plot elements, personal attributes of the characters, who were us, or we them, as we dreamed ourselves to be.

To say the experience was engrossing cannot provide adequate description, and while I have been vague I have done the best my memory will permit me: to those in our community with whom I have spoken, this is a crucial element of nullfilm addition. It is a complete sensory experience which captures every aspect of the typical conscious mind. Perhaps it is our collective peculiarity which resulted in my escape, though you all know that common knowledge recognizes my initiation into the lesser prophetics, which involves refinement of those aspects of the mind which grow so slavish in the nullfilms.

I emerged, or rather found that I had emerged, for I was unaware of myself until I realized once more that I had a body, that I could see my surroudings, and that I could clearly orient myself spatially.

I know now that the nullfilms were not created for any particular purpose; rather, they are the unintended (?) result of the massive fields which the City's cradle exudes as a result of the great energy coursing though the matrix which supports the City. For those who are unaware of this architectural masterpiece, the Inner City of Autopia, that part of the city which is properly meant when one says, 'Autopia,' is actually not married to the Earth but is rather anchored to it, being suspended by an electromagnetic concourse which redirects the very gravity which draws the massive structure downward to propelling upward.

I have yet to find out whether the increasing incidents of shockrot in our community have anything to do with this force, but the parallels between the nullfilms and the vastness spoken of by the greater prophetics are impossible to ignore. Indeed, there seems to be a common element connecting the technology which powers the teleospheres, the nullrifles (which additionally share nomenclature with the nullfilms, though this may not be so much an epistemic relation as an experiential one, being that the creator of the nullspace technology was driven to do so by recurring nightmares of time spent in the nullfilms before his adventitious departure, here speaking of Manahem, of course) and additionally between the encounters of the prophetics in that which is called vastness and those trapped in the nullfilms.

I returned to my cubicle directly thereafter, and upon finding that the milk had spoiled and the bread had molded in the span of what turned out to be fifteen minutes (presuming the mechanism of my watch was uncorrupted) proceeded to drink some unsweetened coffee and dine on pickles and olives. To those who are following my progress in the city, I swear to not delay in pursuing the course of the disease we have hastened to name shockrot. I will report again as soon as there is some meaningful content to relay to you all.