Negative Worlds is set in the present, and in the world of 2190. Many new realities abound in that far future but these briefing notes have been downloaded from the Data Sea of the time to guide those first arriving.
Glossator
The Co-Creation
One of many names for the global interconnection of communes, slow revolutions, settlements and insurrections, used from around 2120 onwards.
Solidarity Key (SK)
A combination technology - a successor to crypto and ‘proof of work’ valuations to shift clandestine funds during the ‘dual power’ period of capitalism’s long civil war with its antagonists (the so-called Red Thread Era with its emphasis on ‘knowing together’). Later, SKs became relics, seen as symbols of past revolutionary moments.
Theleme
A city built on the ruins of London and its surrounding valleys. During counter-revolutions, the north of the city became the first place identified as The Citadel, a hub for the co-ordination of new wage labour.
Flowchart Tech
A way of thinking about revolutionary hope - and the idea of a long road running through history, into the present, and on into the future: flowcharts of potential. In one experiment, a time travel of sentiment was proposed, based on these conceptualisations. The Flowchart tech transported people who longed for the future forward in time; and when their desire to return was stronger than their desire to stay, it opened return portals for them.
The Data Sea
The Co-Creation’s restoration of global communication after the old ‘internet’ was destroyed, sabotaged, and withdrawn. Using a combination of re-appropriated satellites and new underwater ‘reef servers’, the Data-Sea grew into an open source net.
Bog.Dream
An upland bog area in what was once called Derbyshire 2. The site of dreams, and once of fuel, as well as the Kinder River, subject of many poems from the Red Thread Era as it became the site of a great meeting of the nascent Sheffield-Manchester commune.
SH2
City which emerged as the shadow of, and then successor to, the old city of Shanghai. As decentralised cities started to take on multiple names, sequels and prequels to cities also began to mark Co-Creation affinities and revanchist tendencies respectively.
Ponza
A small island in the mediterranean, with a moon-shaped cliff and beach, and a Roman tunnel. Towards the end of the Dual Power Era, it became a popular retreat for self-described Silicon Valley founders, venture capitalists and bankers. Unlike other islands where these communities faded away, the capitalists of Ponza were able to seed new wage labour and trading hubs, supported by reactionary groups across the Co-Creation of the 2130s onwards.
Dual Power Era
The flight from capital and state power as systems of support broke down led to splits in the capitalist world network from 2050 onwards. An uneasy, shifting truce was tacitly agreed, and when it eventually collapsed it came to be known retrospectively as the Dual Power period.
Ghost Shrimp Drift Lander
A class of small aeroplane/ spaceship. Named after tiny ghost shrimps that cling to seaweed - warekara - which also provided a long-running pun in classical Japanese waka poetry on ware-kara, ‘It’s my fault’. The elongated, skeletal forms, able to cling to the slightest wind and sea currents and therefore drift between cities and communes, made them an iconic ship of the nascent Co-Creation.
Star Fall Portal
Experimental transport technology - drawing on high computation power. Could it be possible to ‘move through colours’, in and out of mirrors, over cobwebs or to ‘wish upon a star’? The Star Fall Portal was the first result of the Ebijuro Lab collaboration, which later developed the unstable time-space-solidarity portals of the Flowchart Tech.
The Citadel
Nebulous capitalist revival network which came to shadow the Co-Creation. Seeded from revanchist islands such as Ponza, The Citadel exploited failures in the Co-Creation such as local breakdowns of health systems, communication, and transport networks, and the uneven linking or even delinking of zones. The Citadel developed a fascist turn and began long-term plans to replace Co-Creation ideals with authoritarian, fantastical, and biological levels of new power.
Bradford Megacity
A strong hold of anarchists in the 20th and 21st centuries centred on the 1 in 12 Club, Bradford became a diffuse, miniature model for what the Co-Creation as a whole would become: a system of alliances, communes and co-operatives; social spaces, apothecaries, care centres, and gardens.
The Blossom Wars
The first extended conflict of the Co-Creation era - a mysterious, protracted war across the islands of Japan. Subject of much myth making. Poisoned cherry blossom trees led to sakura zoning and mass hallucinogenic experiences. The source of the bio-war poisoning became the subject of fevered debate - capitalist activists, other more radical parts of the Co-Creation, or ‘the madness of utopia’ (the idea of a new malady conjured up by bored dialecticians in a time of luxury.) Historians have pored over the available evidence, and many new groups and conflicts have come to light - The Blossom Wars in this sense being a truly modern phenomenon of ‘the struggle within the struggle’.
Occam 3D
A short lived PR and communications agency of the early 21st century - one of several projects created by travellers who returned from 2190 through the Flowchart experiment.
Co-Ordinate Stone
An untracked, jewel-like navigation guide.
Thessa 3
An old port city abandoned, half destroyed and then inhabited again after the initial climate disasters of the 21st century - flourishing into elegant concrete strings.
Takara V
The Floating Weeds are ruined oil rigs and refuelling stations become makeshift anchors for container ship cities to combine into new communities. Takara V is one of the oldest such city, anchored around a defunct wind farm. In Takara V, algae rafts and new communication hubs were developed as the Co-Creation’s networks began to find replacements for the old global communication internet. As the Citadel gained power, Takara V became the command centre for new fossil extraction and oil rig programmes.
Modori
A Co-Creation scientist, photographer and self-described party monster, whose contributions to Ebijuro Lab projects such as the Flowchart Tech, to new communal forms of photography, and to some of the best and longest parties were all decisive.
Theleme Server Farms
Nestled among the moorlands, these server farms use vines and fruit to encode data.
Ebijuro Lab
Collaborative group of researchers and scientists who, freed from capitalist pathways of development, were able to develop new technology, from sound-speed cruisers, to infra-red vision, to the first prototype re-incarnation fretworks.
Self Heal
An ongoing party - located in the grasslands beyond Theleme. Its origins are now unclear, but it may have started as a celebration of mutual aid formations, or to mark a solar eclipse. Some people are born and grow up at Self Heal; and some never leave.
The Strong-House of Sorrow
A Citadel lab, hidden in an old university archive.
Ingestibles
Protective and adaptive on-board bio foundries chosen by some people across Co-Creation zones. For example, these can augment and speed up the immune system, reacting to and neutralising poisons within seconds.
Wall Houses
A building and city form which took the Byker Wall in Newcastle as its model.
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