Story I

 

The first vessels did not leave readily; but conditions in the old world were reaching a critical mass. You see the land was shrinking, yet people were staying the same size. The undulating territories were, of course, nothing new. The only difference was that the waves caused by these endless undulations had reached long around the world by now. The feedback was gradually accumulating, clouding from view where the first stones were thrown (which nobody cared much for anyway.) The interference was stagnating in some places; violently thrashing about in others … folding worlds to unknown thicknesses, stretching them to unforeseeable limits.

The vibrations altered all matter they moved through – perhaps the only effect they had was to arrange a memory, an idea; a virtual altercation. Other times the vibrations were intensely creative, moving actual matter to new locations. These were the vibrations most sought for mass display; digestible, bowel-moving intensities. However once these peaks had passed, It was made easy to forget the people caught by these invisible vibrations, often bound and carried away to places unfamiliar. Dislocated bodies that have been spat out of the machines of flexing territories – subjects of confusion. It was not simply a lack of sympathy from which these dislocated bodies became threats – it was more that territories relishing in their apparent stability could not comprehend how to fit these surplus mechanisms, of which there were many, without creating unexpected vibrations of their own (the fear of many older machines). Therefore, these bodies floated indefinitely; the vibrations had already altered things far too greatly for them to return. Then, a moment came – things had suddenly shifted – some dislocated bodies were to cast vibrations of their own. New movements and connections, that would build unknown machines.

The initial waves moved quietly yet assertively – vessels, lost in the mire of territorial concepts of ownership as boundaries swayed and swivelled, became purposefully directed by their new crew into the great oceans. (Some parties would later use the word stolen – however the word held little significance to the new machines). Oceans had been long forgotten by the older machines, which preferred to fold, over and over, land and sky, distance and time. The dislocated bodies soon found themselves in the in-between; the forgotten space of something once known as international waters. It was here with some courage, no doubt, that a new machine began to grow. A machine which occupied (and in turn was occupied by) only what it could create. The old machines absorbed all they could of the land; the boundaries of territories grew and shrunk across its surface, encoding it, recoding it. This machine of the sea was free to explore directions that the old machines were too stubborn, too entrenched in their codes to pursue – and so it soon became something of wild intrigue, trepidation and hope.