NOTE: The following is the unredacted first chapter of Against Superheroes, reported here for completeness of the historical record. Footnotes as per the original.
Z3 begins with a fragment from Sinister’s earliest recollections of the initial transformation:
The fear began with the realization that my right arm was becoming unusually heavy. The weight of the bracelet had not changed dramatically, but it seemed that my arm was thickening and I feared I would lower my arm and the combined artifact would slip off, risking possible damage on the tile floor, and so I reflexively swung my left arm to stabilize my wrist. The blank, formless face of the figure was less tarnished than the rest and the dim bathroom light dancing across the visage gave it a strangely animated swirling quality. Soon the weight in my arm moved through my shoulders and into my neck. I staggered and dropped to my knees.
All Z collectives know this passage, but we disagree with Z2’s reading in Peregrinations of Mythic Specialness1 that the inclusion of the specific details concerning the type of light amongst the picturesque imagery in the passage is a deliberate effort on the part of later redactors to try to concretize a mythic passage. It is equally possible to simply conclude that the author was not concerned with the overall flow of the writing but instead intended to convey facts while capturing aspects of his internal state.
Thus, Z3 opens with the strongest hypothesis to date concerning the historicity of Sinister: we believe the evidence supports the conclusion that such a being did in fact exist and that his narrative connections to certain technologies similar to those present among the Collectives were an accurate portrayal of events that transpired, or at least rose to the greatest level of accuracy he could achieve. This thesis is built on a fully developed Element 5 model that employs minimal support theory to reason to the best hypotheticals, and we demonstrate in later that the conclusion warrants a rating of E5 3.6 rather than, for instance, Z2’s alternative model that presents no more than a likelihood of 1.9.
We therefore need to reanalyze the entire extant work using a newer interpretive framework that emphasizes the consistency of the factual aspects of the narrative flow. In support of this thesis, we further contextualize the archaeological evidence that was recovered from the sixth moon of planet four of our system. Though the capsule itself had been rendered down by thousands of cycles of exposure to the harsh atmospheric conditions of the moon, the remaining plastic and other bits of material that accompanied both the body and the manuscript provide additional support for the argument for historicity and away from mythicism. He was, put plainly, a real entity who had uncovered predecessor technology that has been speculated to be of our own making. That this would result in the collapse of his own civilization and its entire destruction, when taken as a historical fact, calls us to search further for and investigate remnants of additional materials that might cause harm in other areas of the universe.
In developing our thesis, which we call Against Superheroes in reference to the self-characterization by Sinister of what he believes he is not, but which he also alludes to extensively as being a collection of mythologized entities that he is being compared to, we use a new extension to the translation framework previously developed by T7. While it is not normally Z3’s prerogative to indulge in automatic translation algorithms or extensions, in this special case we believe to have added a unique semantico-probabilistic enhancement to the standard eliding descent techniques for arriving at likely translational candidates. We explore methods further in Section 2, with specific applications to the manuscript as well as stronger dialogs with T collectives that have validated the methods used.
This conclusion has strong implications for the S2 collective in resource allocations. While S2 has devoted only 0.4% of total asset accumulations to the Z collectives for the past 500 cycles, the raised threat level of E5 at 3.6 almost doubles the previous models’ likelihoods, thus we suggest that the Z collectives receive additional support in proportion to the magnification factor, scaled by the regressive discount factor, or around 0.55%. Final sections of this report details the suggested allocations of new resources.
Let us continue Against Superheroes with a complete retranslation and reinterpretation of the first chapter:
I suppose I should start with my origin story2. All of us do3. Or, more correctly, I should start with my origin description. I sometimes wish I had merely a story. If it was just a story I wouldn’t be where I am now, a man without a home world, without a people, trapped on a caustic moon far from what I have brought about.4 That it would begin the way it started but end up here strikes me as laughably improbable even now. I have the capacity to write this out, to translate the improbabilities into something that might be meaningful someday, though I can’t imagine to whom, for the consequences of what I wrought also brought about the end of the world. It is from this perspective that I begin my memoir and that I declare myself no more a superhero than a supervillain, despite what happened. I am a ball5 bouncing from one circumstance to the next. I was never predestined or created by higher powers. I was an accident.
It is from this tenuous perch of improbability that I record my origin description, how I became The One and then Sinister, believed at first to be savior to people of the desert but then, increasingly, becoming a creature of distrust and alienation. And I couldn’t and can’t control the powers that have hold of me. I am a victim but also, ultimately, a victimizer. That there would be such an incredible unity between the two is a testament to the unfathomable alien powers that once ruled over [our planet]6 and that infected me to turn me into what I have become.
But who is left to even care? No one. The planet collapsed into some kind of singularity, like a black hole [Point Mass Anomaly, Type 1], and has consumed the moon. Before liftoff, they told me that Mars’7 orbit was disrupted and it was beginning an ineluctable descent towards the singularity. No one survived but me, that is certain. And I am impervious to hunger or pain here in my simple sarcophagus8 that was originally built to fly us to kill others, but now has launched me far enough away that I can no longer cause harm. The worst part is that the [malevolent] forces still swirl within me. I write because I can do almost nothing else except to listen to the winds and the pressure changes on my vessel. I hurled parts of it into space to push me towards this Saturnian9 moon, and have just this plastic seat left inside. Even the skin of the capsule is wearing down and will collapse in due time. What will become of me is unknown. I have been attacked many times but my powers protects me from most things10. The possibility of being forever suspended, naked, in the soup of this atmosphere, among the chemical seas, unable to even write, and without the protective cocoon of the capsule around me scares me most, now.
If I seem to pity myself, it is because I am. I don’t expect any readership, so why not indulge a bit? But my goal is just distraction in my eternity of entrapment. I have to write in a tiny little script11 to fit everything on the limited paper I have. I have to control the flow of chemicals through the paper. I also expect to run out of the few functioning pens and the remaining pencils soon. They were kind enough to include what I have in the capsule—a last minute request for the dying monster ejected from a dying world—and so I want to get as much down as I can, to honor my world and to keep my mind from imploding.
So I begin with my earliest recollections of digging in the dirt, my little sister at my side, burying and uncovering plastic army men. It was the backyard of our house in Tucson and I remember the heat of the desert would turn the air shimmering, amorphous ghosts rising off every sunlit surface, lasting even into the evening after the sun had set, the cement and the rocks of walks carrying the heat inside them into the night. The houses, the streets, the trees, the hills—everything—were blends of ecru and talc. Even the saguaros seemed to lose their green and blend towards khaki in the relentless, parching heat.
We dug in a mound in the shade of the roofline that morning, I think, and would need to move inside after the sun swept upward in another hour. Bethany, only five12, asked what I was doing and I showed her how to gently unearth a figure, mimicking the television program13 I had seen the night before about an archaeological site in Turkey. We blew the dust away and I sliced with the edge of a trowel until a tiny hand emerged, and then we delicately sifted, filtered, and picked at the tiny crumbles of clay and sand, revealing more and more of the figure. I was whispering to Beth as we worked the site, our faces so close our breaths intermingled, until he was finally revealed, a grenade held back in one hand and a rifle with a curved barrel in the other. “Ancient warrior figurine,” I told her and she grinned and poked gently at the plastic base of the soldier with a pencil I had brought out.
“Who buried him here?” she asked as he rocked from her stabbing.
“I don’t know. Ancient people who buried their warriors.”
There was a magic of the unknown buried in those primitive cairns, sarcophagi, crypts, mausoleums, tombs. The old worlds preserved their dead and ancestry in a quilt around their daily lives, embossing protective gods to preserve them against the ravages of the afterlife. It was a secret chthonic network crowding through the rocks, embellishing the short, brutish lives with mythic symbolism. I watched my sister’s fascination and looked across the gray of the xeriscaping and wondered what was below, what mysteries of old Apaches or Zunis or disappearing Anasazi might be layered down through fire pits and carved stone axes, bones and the traceries of feathers. I stepped out towards the edge of the morning sun breaking across the yard and there was a buzzing mystery to the world trapped in the cool of the deep, under the sand, below the sticky argil.
We moved away from the edge of the sun until we were left with nowhere to go. I gathered together the tools. Bethany liberated a hand towel from the kitchen that we spread out on the concrete patio and lay the tools side by side along it, finally rolling each up to create a bundle that we tied together with shipping twine. The dirty ancient warriors were set up on the windowsill like figures in a museum display and I would watch them sometimes when I entered the room. We went to the library the next morning and I found the aisle for archaeology and sat on the cool tiles among the stacks, reading captions from images. There were the dry escarpments of Egypt and Greece, wooden boxes from Etruscan villages, Carthage, family hearths from vibrant Rome, Turkish temples, Babylonian steles, Minoan octopi, Sumer, strange Celtic bog bodies like muddy zombies, and then back further into the creases of history between cave dwelling apes and civilization, with small hand axes, rock paintings, and bosomy Venus figurines.
I stuck with that fascination for many years, though it may have faded into high school as I latched onto the life sciences and considered studying evolutionary biology14 in college. There was a symmetry even there, however, since the strata of bones and dinosaurs and layering and uncovering was no different than what the archaeologists did, though it seemed more distant and alien, torn away from the lives of people and how they changed over time. I came back, though, due to a chance encounter with a friend who was attending a lecture about regional petroglyphs. I didn’t recall those early interests as I sat, mesmerized, and watched the slides crawl through depictions of Painted Rock, Hopi Rock, Sedona, McConkie Ranch, Hohokam sites, drawing out the geometries, the glyphic animals, the stick figures marching up against turtles, the endless spirals tied to one another by angular spines. There was a feeling of displacement and wonder that emerged from the slides, a transcendent and illuminative network of unknown motivations; why would anyone bother to decorate stones? The effort required, creating pigments or lightly scoring the surface of the rock, all seemed alien against a modern palette of interests and identities. I wanted to learn who they were and what drove them. I wanted to unravel the braid of scholarship that led through the hall of these ghosts.
My parents were mixed about my revived interest. The field of archaeology was certainly interesting but it had limited job prospects. Still, like most parents, they wanted me to be passionate about what I was studying and so were accepting of my choice in the end.
Writing out this early history is eerie. The Force15 (I use that farcically) that overtook me separated me from that world in many ways, not the least of which was the eradication of much of the fine-detailed structure of my memories. There was also the heightening and transformation of emotional memory into synesthetic color spectra that washed over the episodic features causing a loss of neutrality in my understanding of my past. I suppose that no one is ever really neutral in trying to order and interpret their memories—there is always a theory or hints from friends and loved ones drawn from conversation—but the distinction is that in this case the theory felt like it was being imposed from the outside, without consent, and the invader had chosen to wash away the existing maps from the territory and build a wild oneiric fortress of colorful walls around and over everything. I can’t really escape from this imposition but I have learned to discard it as I write by trying to imagine that I am someone else looking in from the outside on what happened and translate the facts out from the heavy sadness or anxiety or joy that is layered over like sparkling colored snow drifts. I can see just enough to draw out a separate little diorama, like writing requires, pulled away from this odd ego distortion that pervades all of pre-force thinking. The post-history is hard enough to extract from this bubbling cauldron of mental specters, but the pre-history is agonizing.
Chapter 1 can be seen to paint a strongly historical map of relationships between the protagonist and his intended audience. He begins with an admission about his circumstances and the motives for writing the document itself. He doesn’t deviate from that narrative structure, gradually constructing a series of self-admonishing homilies that transit into a personal history. This, we know, continues through the entire volume, with the exception of the remarkable events of the transformation and the accompanying visions. Those visions are self-analyzed as comporting to the linear description of the other ancient documents described within the context of the explanatory testimonies themselves, and so we disagree with other analyses that suggest that in developing abstract parallelisms the author was trying to convey a fictional consistency with the other forms.
Indeed, we assert quite the opposite. It is highly unlikely that these suspected formal fictional methods were deliberately chosen as a form of textual mimicry. The idea that there could be an art form that uses symbolic distractions as a way of drawing attention to the text itself is unknown in our own history. So we invoke Z4’s argument from the Similarity of Remains. Where there is a bifurcation among the interpretative pathways, the least unlikely choice is governed by our similarities. This has been applied perhaps too aggressively in the past, as when we, Z3, argued that the existence of any entertainment via fictional narratives was impossible under Strong Similarity of Remains. We agree now that the enjoyment experiences concerning “…a fairy tale like she had read in her English storybooks,” with the compound noun reflecting a fictional form, does imply that such interpretations are possible. We only distance ourselves from the Strong form of the argument, therefore, but assert that a subtle variant remains valid, and only the Strong condition is unsupported by any textual rendering.
The facts exist separately from the ancient stories, especially when the author tries to contextualize them among those mythologized tales. He was really searching for explanations and really did believe that the narratives were relevant to that search, although with a distant, dilutive filter—a shady gauze—that obscured the realities experienced in those narrations from the translations that they had been rendered into. It is worth reflecting on the value of our modern capabilities to achieve networks of translational consistency (more on this in Section 2), and also on the limitations that Sinister worked under, relying on suppositions and contextual analysis that was limited to individual human scholarship shared through textual forms. The combinatory accelerative capabilities that the Collectives provide were seemingly unknown and impossible due to technological and biological limitations of these creatures, suggesting further that a Strong form of any similarity arguments must be suspended in favor of a much weaker, support-driven form as a codicil.
Of special note is the closing paragraph and its admission of personal difficulties in even achieving the confessional narrative that he is writing. This is in stark contrast to the ancient texts that he uses later in explanatory exegesis of the context and facts surrounding his transformation. The first person narrative is completely unknown for the ancient sources that he reports were structured in poetic stanzas, some even with meter and rhyming schemes. Later comparisons to Superman and Batman seem to have been unlike the more paradoxical texts, but the references to artistic renderings of the events of these later figure’s existences do bear close resemblance to the descriptions of pictographic renderings in some of the evidential early sources, including the petroglyphs described in this chapter.
We remain convinced that the first person narrative form, lacking imagery or strong poetic structure, further diminishes any arguments towards similarity by mention or context. A continuation of a tradition of mythicism would naturally also include a continuation of that tradition’s forms of presentation. Without it, we can only argue for a more radical interpretation.
So, for our introductory development, Z3 concludes that the case Against Superheroes is supported by the facts and evidence of the text, the archaeological clues, similarities and differences in physiology, and broad considerations of pragmatics and interpretation. We continue this development surrounding Chapter 2 in Section 3, but now take a brief detour to elucidate some of the advances that have brought about this improved translation and supporting interpretations.
The development of any new interpretative framework is driven by a methodical traversal of the space of hyperparameters that confine and extend the formalisms that we use to express the ideas that motivate and support the arguments that underlie that framework. This is how it has always been done and has not been shown to be intrinsically wrong in more than 400 Passings, yet it is precisely where we see breaks in this strong tradition that also lend to us the conclusion that randomization and disconnected wanderings in the mazes of those parameterizations can produce unique and varied additions to our entelechy. All Collectives share in this tradition of mastered local search combined with carefully tuned global exploration. There is even the title “maverick” attached to the unique position for assigning both hope and blame within the fabric of a Collective. We cannot exist without them, yet they present a bit of an optimization puzzle when we encounter radicalized distortions of the normal process when that normality is being remarkably productive. We want it to stop, but know that it is during periods of calm and stagnation that the fervor these unruly wizards bring to the Collective are also how we restart the process of forward progress.
That this is well known also implies that we can openly describe it without unseemly disruption to the special position we accord the process. This is who we are and always have been. It was within this framework that we chose to reinvestigate the translation methodology as a Z Collective and not a T unit. Such mixings of capabilities are rare but not unheard of and are generally well received when proposed as a bridging entrée with new possible findings or interconnections as the potential outcome. Thus, a key element of our revised thesis rests on the translation that we present here, with special emphasis arising in later chapters of the manuscript. A total of 36 words were reconsidered, but these words were strikingly polysemous in the translation models, presenting an average of three possible interpretations that were within a few percentiles of one another in the standard model of T7. It is worth noting that the critical translation, changing “comic book” or “comedic book” to “graphical image book” provides support at 65% for our thesis in the overall merged Element 5 model. The structural equations are available as a supplement to this report, but this lynchpin has to be called out from the other translation variants because of its significance to our thesis.
It has always been held that there is a significant inversion of meaning apparent in the manner in which Sinister describes the sources for the descriptions of Batman, Superman, and others. The easy translation is based on a comparison with other uses of the prefixing term in the manuscript that include “comic relief,” “comedy,” and “comic” to describe humorous, unexpected events that caused mild joy. Indeed, he refers to his interrogator and later lover, Dr. Sakara, as “humorless [that] obscured a clearly joyful personality and even a lover of good comedy,” establishing the antonymy between “humorless” and “comedy.” Thus the rendering of the rather dark and non-humorous stories about Batman as “comedy” or “comic” established an interpretative tension that existing translations failed to relieve. It was from this initial conundrum that Z3 approached the translation problem by increasing the variability allowed in multistage semantic resolution. This began by establishing a nonlinear modifier to the surface-token associations that mimicked other examples that appear in the manuscript. For example, the term “text” has high polysemy (12 variants) in the document, including signaling via personal communications device, a document, the content of an electronic mail, and even a highly abstracted use in reference to interpersonal relationships and the way people appeared to behave. The resolution factors involved in disambiguating those contexts were based primarily on the surrounding meanings, parts-of-speech, and certain pragmatic, intentional speech acts that provided subtle shifts in clues. While the entirety of these clues was not as rich with respect to “comic book,” we renormalized the supporting network in a manner that provided the following possibility: comedic books were often graphical and the term was linked to the un-comedic books by the similarity of the presentation formats. Thus the term was semantically loaded due to history. This renormalization was accomplished primarily because of the seemingly unrelated description of the security guard at the desert Aesir base “amusingly scanning Peanuts inattentively at his post.” The capitalization of course turns the item into a proper noun, but it is also semantically identified as a food item related to plants or tree seeds (a nut) by both decomposition and additional references within the text. The overloading of meaning here—and seemingly related to reading something that might be a comedic or “comic” book—supports the re-rendering of the support in this part of the network.
The effects flow outward, as they always do in semantic-variable space, with the minimal support field distorting not just in the local region but also across many references to entertainment, to reading, and to mythic interpretation. It is the latter that remains critical for us, for “graphical image book” that is shorn of the association with comedy removes the problematic association of Batman, Superman, and so forth with entertainment altogether. They instead are entities that were as real as Sinister himself, and further evidence of the widespread availability of technologies that transcended their existing capabilities and were derived from foundational technologies.
Other than the choice of Assyrian versus Aramaic scripts, Semitized Greek versus Hellenized, steles versus hieroglyphic walls, and finally graphic books versus papyri, the content of the stories that Sinister describes seem remarkably consistent. There are subtler versions of human transmogrification into natural phenomena, other people, animals, even gold. There is the use of proxy armies to fight among the entities, often considered gods by the humans of their eras. But mostly there are the anachronistic capabilities and powers that deal with natural phenomena, with weather, with beasts, with stellar events, and with humanity, raining deluges from the sky one moment and feeding the hungry at another. As Sinister alludes, “They worshipped and I absorbed. But I felt the weight of the history of the god experience hanging on me like a heavy, wet cloak. I was supposed to guide them and direct them, for their greater good.” His confession may have a similar tone to the descriptions of lament as Yahweh repeatedly destroys whole human civilizations, but they are, we must remember, told from a vantage of ultimate destruction. None of the other narratives quite achieved the holocide that Sinister presided over. Thus his story becomes the quintessence among all the reports.
The impacts of this translational recalibration resonate further for the text. All of the ordinary efforts of governing bodies to try to control Sinister and to create Nemesis get revisions by the change in the meaning of “entertain” itself. Where it began as a broad semantic categorical that also seemed to include a meaning “to consider,” the latter meaning may have greater precedence in this re-rendering where a broader landscape of amusements may not have existed. This possibility was always puzzling under the Similarity of Remains. In reducing the role of “comic,” possibly to a neural game played among a different class of humanity—children and non-knowledge workers—the role of entertainment changes as well. The probability is thus much higher overall that entertainment as we have previously understood it was of lesser importance and we can further diminish the spectra of interpretative options for Gilgamesh, Torah, Revelation, The Iliad, or many of the other sources mentioned by Sinister.
The strongest impact of this is to further cast doubt on the hyper-skeptical Z7 thesis that the capsule was ejected from the Singularity at the time of its formation due to a wormhole and that it represents no known actual events but is an accumulation of mental images that appear to cohere into some kind of consistency by dint of our own biases and apophenia. While this theory was a necessary corrective to some of the other theses that may have strayed from mainstream scholarship, the elimination of core inconsistencies as described herein concerning comedy and darkly serious events increases the likelihood that the text is at least genuine and not an oneiric construction by unknown stellar powers.
Other exotic alternatives like Deception Theory (Z1) that posits a complex and remarkably sophisticated conspiracy to manufacture the document and evidence for unknown reasons rely on the coordination of too many variables for a modern individual, as was later admitted by Z1 themselves. The translation subtleties that we calculate would require approximately as many variables as there are unique words in the manuscript composed into chains with an average entropic predictive length of 28 words, resulting in more combinatorial possibilities as there are quantum states in our energetic computational framework. Now, it has been argued that greedy methods can reduce this complexity by orders of magnitude, and we agree that such is possible, but the fact that reconfiguration of combined semantic and pragmatic relationships like the comic/graphic interpretation results in coherent probabilistic fields that, in turn, reduces the probability of manufacture to very near zero in the Element 5 model.
It is worth further elaborating on the proposed zeitgeist for Deception Theory. The central supposition is that by entrancing significant resources among the Collectives with this puzzle, the deceiver is in turn protecting its own agenda from discovery. The fact that there is no puzzle or problem that might rise to the level of this deceiver that has not received adequate treatment by the Collectives is considered further proof that our attention is distracted from sufficient effort at discovering it. Though this appears a self-fulfilling tautology, there might be some merit to the resource allocation argument. When DT was initially proposed, there was a pan-Collective council that considered this possibility, resulting in a final realization of a Q3 threat marker. Unlike other Q3 threats (supernovae, singularities, translational hard quantum breakage, etc.), the requirement for hyper-intelligence to drive this deception represents a new and novel threat surface. Dovetailing with Z7’s thesis, multiverse connectivity might provide additional novel considerations for investigating the combined arguments.
In balancing the possibilities, we conclude that threat monitoring and additional theorization does not preclude the current chain of evidence that leads to a stronger threat possibility of additional diaspora beings like the humans described in the manuscript being present in the known universe and having access to early technologies that make them, in turn, a threat to the Collectives and to themselves. The latter is the greater threat by a 35 to 1 odds ratio and must be considered with greater application of resources.
Note also that there are irregularities concerning the field generators and power sources of the described artifacts. These considerations are revisited later in the analysis.
1. IO763999-A: Collections in Memory of Z2
2. “story” is 0.45 in the new model (see Methods, Section 2) versus 0.3 and 0.4 for “myth” in previous works. The distinction plays on the broader claim developed in the next section that stories were common in Sinister’s recollections of his era and were not myths about demigods but served a distraction function.
3. Z2 has always asserted that this is uniquely telling in claiming a context for Sinister among other, like entities. This is an unnecessarily broad interpretation, however. For we know Sinister claims another similar entity, and he is also ambivalent throughout the text about whether they both should be compared to other, mythic entities. That is the milieu in which he structures his memoir.
4. “brought about” as distinct from “inherited” which we argue makes no sense in context.
5. Unknown adjective without any repeat precedes “ball.” Probabilities place it as “game” or “weapon” with equal likelihood, so we leave it out until and if additional support is discovered.
6. Standard translational pragmatics via T7: U6777-89: Realizations of Empirical Standards for Sinister Translations, Rule 41.
7. Transliterated, presumed to be nearby planet.
8. Paired with descriptions of human remains and death procedures in archaeological notes. The use of the word here has been a source of several alternative theories about parallel textual development. We support the theory that the use of this term is deliberate to draw attention to the author’s detailed enumerations of finds during his professional scholarly career, not that it is poetic allusion towards myths accorded to the same focus of his scholarly investigation.
9. Transliterated, but later identified as the ringed planet.
10. The reference to being attacked does not appear to extend to his habitation in the capsule. No life forms have been discovered on the moon he was found on, nor is there evidence of life having lived there in the past. Moreover, the closing chapters of the document do not indicate life forms.
11. We have always held that the description of computers and typing in the manuscript, with minimal reference to writing using instruments as here, and the uneven qualities of the thermally-acquired transfer from the original, preserved paper points to a strong corroboration of the authenticity of the work as a historical description. The counter-argument developed by Z4 that entertainment may have been recorded this way—since the author only describes technical and scientific matters being typed on computers—has always seemed an unnecessary assumption. They could record such things in many ways. That much is clear. The choice of instruments does not lend themselves to assignment by genre.
12. Dating at 0.2 cycles, estimating maturity to 20 years and death at between 200 and 900 based on descriptions provided in Septuagint during later excavations and analysis by Sinister. Z6 has provided an argument about the rarity of such lifespans, however, noting the lack of influential older people in the volume. The argument that there may be tiers of intellectual achievement where the older cohort is more focused on advanced studies unrelated to their own history seems unsupportable speculation.
13. One of the few references to media sources besides professional books, notes, and papers. The highest ordered translation/transliteration is presented here, suggesting the conveyance of educational information over distances. Though an argument from silence about other media is not conclusive, it certainly contributes to the alignment of priorities as being more focused on knowledge and analysis than Z2’s rather radical reading of a vast entertainment culture built around mythologizing.
14. This concept of evolution or biological change that appears in numerous places throughout the manuscript has been the topic of extensive debate among the Collectives. We will have more to say about this later, but attribute to it a process misunderstanding among the scholars of Sinister’s era (although it should be noted that there appeared to have been large-scale social disagreements about the topic). Instead of knowledge of bio-essence fields that drive spontaneous cosmological creation and change, the scholars aligned with a more mechanical perspective on how change manifested in the universe. Notably absent and commented upon later by Sinister himself was the problem of the origination of both the artifacts and abiogenesis for his world.
15. Uppercased version of common term throughout volume combined with parenthetical following clause has been the source of numerous theories. Most importantly to our thesis is the suspicion that this is referring to another common force present among people but of lesser significance since except for Nemesis there are no other examples present in the work. Sinister continues to refer throughout the manuscript to “the force” and “forces” but never again capitalizes it in this way, instead casting it as something that is unknown and external rather than the implicit qualification that the representation here reveals. We believe that this was a cultural reference, possibly to other mythic ideas, and not of special relevance to our thesis.