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This wiki will display and manage a glossary of terms used in the Antisense Universe for the convenience of readers. This fictional universe is the setting for a vast array of short stories, novels, graphic stories and novels and a one-hour format TV series called Antisense.

What kind of world is the Antisense Universe?

The Antisense Universe is the world of Zigsa, who escaped the oppressive regime of the hanyos in 2071 at the age of fifteen and trekked through the radiopoisoned desert to the Flaming Mountains in the northwest of the Tarim Basin. There, she gathered more escapees and began to build a new society with them. They called themselves the Survivors, and created a place of refuge deep under the earth's surface, called a survivarium. In it, they preserved the ten treasures: people, plants, animals, light, air, water, soil, love, karma and knowledge.

The Karma Sutra lays out the philosophical bedrock of Zigsa's new society. It describes the Antisense Code comprising the two Antisense Unconditionals and the sixteen Antisense Conditionals. The Unconditionals are like axioms: you cannot divide or question them, you either accept or reject them. The First Unconditional is: 'Child, you exist to be happy', while the Second Unconditional is: 'The meaning of happiness changes as you age.'

The core value of Antisense is happiness based on the karma system, which Zigsa contrasts with the core value of hanyo town, which she sees as winning by hurting victims. She states very definitely that the world of the hanyos and the world of the Survivors are two separate universes which are poison to each other. When they are mixed, hanyo town slowly destroys Antisense, because hanyo town is parasitic upon people's desire to be happy, which it thwarts. None of the practices of Antisense such as karma are possible in hanyo town, and none of its truths are true.

Once the Survivors have escaped from hanyo town and resolved to build a world for themselves, Zigsa tells them how they could do it. The result is a shelter built deep underground containing forests and animals and happy children, for the Survivors steal every living thing they can get out of hanyo town and figure out how to have babies without men, since all the men are hanyos. Zigsa's Nest is thus not only the first survivarium, it's also the pattern and template for all the rest. There, the Survivors practice the system of karma, which divides all happy-making activities into ten karma colours measured in threads. The karma system replaces the systems of hanyo law and money among the Survivors. They filled Zigsa's Nest with the ten treasures, namely people, plants, animals, light, soil, air, water, love, karma and knowledge. In Puzzle One of the Karma Sutra, Zigsa says, 'A survivarium is a new kind of society in which your hanyo masters cannot live, because in it they are not allowed to create victims.'

The philosophy of hanyo town

See also hanyo sense.

Hanyo town does not exist to be happy, since none of its systems produce happiness. Instead, they decide who wins, and assume that happiness follows logically from winning, which it doesn't. Winning in hanyo town is the best thing there is: most hanyos will regard this statement as common sense. However, hanyos who became winners would discover an emptiness at the core of their reward and feel cheated, that is like a loser, then look for someone to blame, usually a person. Their whole system was created so that people would accept this state of things and go along with it, even at the cost of their own well-being.

Zigsa worked out that the world of the hanyos could not function without victims, and therefore the best thing to do was to take away all potential victims from the hanyos. She realised that the hanyos knew this and trapped people by making them want revenge for their wrongs. In the grip of this false hope they would stick around in hanyo town even if escape was offered them. The hanyo-in-the-head would whisper to them that they deserved an opportunity to do evil to their wrongdoers in turn. This was a trap. The systems of hanyo town were designed to manufacture opponents and lawbreakers, because that gave the hanyos something to win against. Winning was their drug and they needed a regular fix, hence evil and suffering, unhappiness and disease were the real profits from everything the hanyos did. In Puzzle Three which describes the system of karma, Zigsa analysed in detail what was wrong with the hanyo systems of law and money, and how they existed to turn people into victims and losers.

The philosophy of Survivorhood

See also the Antisense Code

Zigsa formulates the dominant philosophy of the world of the hanyos, which she calls hanyo town, as the ethos and practice of winning. To escape and throw away winning, Zigsa looks at the philosophy of the losers, which to hanyos seems like nonsense. To remove the stigma of nonsensicality from this worldview, Zigsa names it Antisense and codifies it.

Antisense is based on the idea that people exist to be happy, and it maps and rewards all actions that lead to happiness, both of oneself and one's friends. It does this through the system of karma, which measures and rewards happiness, and allows the Survivors to organise their work and fix wrongs.

In order to make love, happiness and karma possible between the Survivors, Zigsa had to revive and heal their imaginations, which are the doorway to unisense. She told them a story in which they did not die, instead they healed themselves and vanished from the world of the hanyos to a place where everything they loved, including themselves, was protected and nurtured. She made them dream of it, and then she prodded them to their feet and made them build it. At first the Survivors had to battle their own extreme self-doubt and self-loathing. They had to forgive themselves for losing in hanyo town, die to their tormentors even in their heads, and renounce all poisoned reward including revenge. This was hard, but Zigsa pointed out that if they had friends and brooders watching out for them, then when any one of them failed or lost their nerve, the others could keep her going till she came back to herself.

Zigsa called this keeping things perfect in the pinch, with the two sides of the pinch being protection and nurture. She told the Survivors that perfection of the kind the hanyos believed in was impossible, static and dead, and that was why the hanyos worshipped it. By the end of the twenty first century it was obvious to everyone that hanyo 'perfection' ended in Robot Wars, famine, disease and death. Zigsa showed her people that the hanyos feared change because they had been broken so early in life that their true selves were permanently stuck in babyhood, and all of their lies and stratagems were intended to conceal that fact. That was why they tortured people, to hack their protectors, infect them with hanyoness and turn the protector-function into the hanyo-in-the-head, thus preventing a victim from ever taking control of themselves. In truth, Zigsa told them, the fact that everything changes and all the wheels turn is what makes happiness possible. Perfection is only ever a moving target, but for most ordinary purposes that is enough.

The Hopscotch

As long as they had lived in hanyo town, the Survivors were all, regardless of whether they were chicks, slags or Bully Boys, part of the hanyo nurture-and-protect complex, the support system of the oppressors. They were adult humans who had been hacked into performing the functions of womb protection and placental nurture for the embryonic personalities of the hanyos. They were broken into this function by dread. Dread is fear that never goes away, and when it is constant the body never gets the time and peace to repair and clean itself, and the souls' being forced to imagine nothing but torture. This produces corpsemeat in the body and brain. Corpsemeat is the source of the poisoned voices in the head that whisper that heaven is impossible, and that losers don't deserve it.

Once they had escaped, they had to unhook themselves from the conspiracy of care and throw out of themselves the 'loyalties' that had been programmed into them, which were mostly aspects of their dread. Hanyo town had frightened their protectors when they were children, so they had sensed their protectors' fear before they could understand and defend themselves. Children learn to protect themselves by watching adults do it for them, so if they are given infected protection, they are at risk of growing up infected.

The first thing the Survivors had to do was begin to spit out their dread and reawaken their imaginations. They codified this process as the Hopscotch, explained in Puzzle Two of the Karma Sutra. The Hopscotch is a decompressing and detoxing process involving both physical activity and healing and mental play and exploration. Once they had hopped and been given the run of the survivarium, they experienced a surge of happiness, wonder, creativity and will.

Willspace and Pleasuredome

Once the Survivors began to dream about the things they could do, Zigsa told them that when they imagined awesome things they might accomplish, they were growing their pleasuredome, which is the imaginary space of all the possible things you can derive pleasure from learning and making. The pleasuredome shelters willspace, which is all the physical places and things you can actually touch with your body and interact with materially. In order for this to be a happy experience, your pleasuredome includes all the training and skills that keep you safe and happy in the world. Thus,a child who has not done the requisite learning and training to go somewhere moderately dangerous, like the roof galleries, will first have to grow her willspace by practicing in safety before she's allowed to try something out for real, and her karma will show that she's done the work. In hanyo town, people are not allowed to grow their pleasuredomes, and even if they do grow them somewhat, their pleasuredomes rarely protect and nurture their willspace.

Karma

Karma measures the happiness made by every happy-making activity, from pretty smiles to quantum physics, and rewards the happy-makers with a token that shows what they did. Every child learns to karma-pick a given activity so they can see what colours of happiness were created and how well they were made. Karma appears complex when explained, but it is actually quite simple to use once you get the hang of it, because it is built upon our natural mutual appreciation for people who do nice things for us. Hanyo town doesn't encourage us to think about these things, because it ranks human activities and disparages the low-ranked ones, while only rewarding or recognising the high-ranked ones, and the ranking is biased towards the hanyos and their tastes. Karma thus takes the place of money as a reward system, and unlike money it can't be spent: it is rather a record of good deeds intended to influence future transactions.

when wrong is done in the survivarium, karma performs the role of law, except that the primary objective of karma is to wipe away the tears of the victim, and only secondarily to 'punish' the wrongdoer. In fact the wrongdoer's punishment is usually to do the bulk of the work of restoring the happiness of the victim. This happens through shamestickies, which appear on your karma weave and have to be peeled through a specific act or acts of reparation. Once a sticky is peeled it turns into a shamejewel, thus showing everyone that you made a mistake, fixed it and became a better person. Shame once mended becomes pride.

Brief History of the Radical Age

See also History of the hanyos, Timeline of historical events

The Antisense timeline diverges from ours in the year 2007, called the Root Year. This year is also the beginning of what is called in Florian times the History Hole, because the hanyos destroy documents and records from this year onwards as a result of the Protocol of Rightful Nocopy. They do this to impose ther own version of history on the world, and persuade people that the breakdown of the world is their fault.

The rise of the hanyos

The hanyos arose in the beginning of the twenty first century. From 2007, the world of the Antisense Universe is insidiously changed by Humane Choice, a vaccine created by Dr Pradip Shankar which, when administered to a man, causes him to have a preponderance of sons. Within the next twenty years, the popularity of the vaccine spreads over the world by word of mouth and Shankar, with the help of his patrons, the Ramdhun Corporation, sets up a worldwide network of Shankar Clinics to administer the vaccine and provide In vitro fertilisation and surrogate motherhood services. Within this period also the mysterious disease globetrotter flu appears, but since it causes no major consequences it is largely ignored.

By about 2025, children start being born with various ailments. First the Broken Pot controversy arises in 2029, then Male Hypertoxic Syndrome a year later. Babies born with MHS have hypersensitive skins and hyperactive immune systems, and died within days of birth. By the end of 2030, which has become known as the Year of Fear, one hundred percent of male births are infected, causing speculation as to how the pathogen or mutation or whatever it is got so to=hroughly distributed round the globe. this is a worldwide crisis, and many commentators believe Shankar's vaccine is implicated in the disease. To take the heat off, Shankar announces he is working on a plan to save the world's boys. He gets one thousand babies of the richest, most powerful fathers to sign up for the pilot project, known as the R1K. Lila Bintam is the last person to sign her baby Bilal up for the R1K.

Shankar is able to save these babies, but at a cost. Till the age of seven, their super-allergies cause them to be sealed away in hypoallergenic triple-filtered clean rooms. As these boys grow, their skins become less sensitive until by age seven they seem normal. Some were sent home, but their skin nerves continued to die until in their teens they could feel nothing. Imperfectly socialised and emotionally deadened, these boys become thrill-seekers and pain worshippers. Their bizarre traits cause them to be nicknamed 'hanyos', a Japanese word meaning 'half-demon'. However, when the Shankar Cure goes public in 2037 wealthy and powerful men queue up to enroll their pregnant wives in the program. meanwhile, the super rich and powerful R1K are wowing their public with clean fusion energy, cheap food made from protozoans, tech parks and currency reform.

The Helios Fail

In 2048 the R1K come of age and celebrate with a Year of Parties. This year ends with a disastrous venture by Helios Corporation, an energy major belonging to the Conglomerate. The R1K tell various channels how they're hurting because, now that there's clean energy available for all, they have these beautiful vintage musclecars in their designer garages, and no juice to put in them. They have a proposal: as the Antarctic Drilling Ban Treaty is expiring in 2048, why not station a bijou oilrig on Antarctica to siphon off a miniscule quantity of this virgin natural reserve?

As a collective gift from the parents of the R1K to their sons, Helios is granted permission to prospect for oil in Antarctica. All the parents travel to Antarctica for the Helios Inauguration on 23 December 2048. While the inaugural party is ongoing on the ice above, the Helios teams drill down to a volcanic seam beneath the ice, causing explosive de-icing of the whole continent and supersonic tsunamis across the globe destroying all coastal settlements, nations and remodelling parts of the globe. Slop waves are generated when the tsunamis hit, going at two thirds the speed of sound and damaging other coastlines that were not in the first strike. The hanyos had not factored the slop waves into their plan, which is why Kazimir Kalenin's Nomenklatura suffers the loss of its Baltic industries, including much of his fusion energy backup. The straits of Panama are washed away, the Ganga valley is submerged up to Varanasi, the Godavari basin is partially lost to the Bay of Bengal, and peninsular Thailand becomes an island along with Malaysia. This catastrophe is known as the Helios Fail.

At one swoop, therefore, the R1K remove everyone standing between them and domination of the planet. Shortly before the Helios Fail is triggered, the R1K take refuge in their tech parks and space hotels. They watch with glee behind their high climate proof yellow walls as the rest of the world is engulfed by famine, disease and civil war, helped along by their corporate security when required. For the whole of 2049, they hold the real, private year of parties in celebration of their triumph. Then, in 2050, they send out the Masterchair Tours. These are huge convoys of nuclear powered diggers, earthmovers, troop transports, spidertanks and luxury pantechnicons, and they are making the survivors a deal they cannot refuse. The hanyos trick or coerce those people they consider valuable into joining the corporations, and they leave the rest to die, or actively hunt them.

The Bluechip Enclaves

By 2053 nearly all the world's much reduced population is living in the Bluechip Enclaves and the surrounding service territories. There are the 1000+ hanyos all of whom individually and collectively run things. They live with their staff and hangerson in villas within the Bluechip Enclave. Everyone else, ie all women, are divided into two groups: the numerous slags, who do all the grunt work, and the select group of chicks. The chicks are selected at age 5 from the slag population by means of the Charm Test, which allows them to go to Charm School and learn how to run the corporate, strategic, medical and pleasure support systems of the hanyos. Chicks regard slags with disdain. Most slags hold U-jobs, which require them to remain out of sight of their masters, whereas all chicks hold V-jobs, where they're on display to the hanyos at all times.

After a period of war and conflict, Enclave life has settled down into what might pass for normalcy in the eyes of young people who don't remember the Bitch Times. For the privileged it is a life of incredible luxury that temporarily masks the troubles ahead, while for the slags it is the agony of enduring bullies who have just managed to kick the door shut and are in a mood to celebrate. However, the world is on a sharp downcurve because everything is rapidly decaying into medieval-level existence even for the privileged. Things break and can't be fixed, because some crucial factor was washed away by the Helios Fail. also, bored iwth the peace, by the 2070s the hanyos are flexing to fight again.

Zigsa's intervention

See also Zigsa.

By 2072 Zigsa and her Survivors have begun work in a secret remote location on Zigsa's Nest, the first survivarium. Till 2088 they rescue people from the desert, heal them and turn them into Survivors. On 1 August 2088, commemorated as Safekeep Day, they seal the blast doors of their underground settlement for the foreseeable future. This makes it safe for them to send out the Karma Sutra, also known as 'How to Build a Survivarium'. The Karma Sutra is embedded in the corporate servers and sends out chapters disguised as Puzzles. These Puzzles can only be decoded if the user has previously received Puzzle One from a rootkitten. Puzzle One contains the Rootkit Test which determines whether one is ready to become a Survivor. Over the next three decades, an underground movement called the rootkit develops in hanyo town with the objective of getting as many Survivors to safety as possible and giving them the means to build survivariums in secure locations.

The Strike on Tokyo

Matters come to a head when Chip Takahashi offers Shigenobuland to Salman Vaghela of Ramdhun because he wants to 'retire'. This immediately sparks a jealous bid-war between the other hanyos, all of whom put pressure on Salman to sele to them. When he rebuffs them, they send Dark Hacks and spies into Tokyo to cause trouble. Also, Salman Vaghela finds that his management style isn't appreciated, and he quickly gets annoyed when everyone keeps comparing him to Chip. By 2079 he has come to the conclusion that Tokyo is a nest of vipers. He sends the Joking Clown to do some image building for him, but instead the Clown holds the Neverending Concert, which threatens to throw Tokyo into allout war. Thoroughly disheartened, Salman opts to nuke Tokyo and solve all his problems. He then attempts to attack Chip's space hotel but fails.

The Robot Wars

By the 2090s moat of the hanyos are obsessed with the idea of building a robot army, and are in a tech race to see who will get there first. Salman Vaghela has Rayne Orbison working for him on the project, but Rayne ha shown no progress in years. Now, however, he starts to have breakthroughs. This is because he has Marilyn with him. Marilyn is the first true AI and Mother of Machines. She began life as a sexbot, but her code was wiped and recreated by the Joking Clown, to whom Rayne had gifted her. When the Clown left for Tokyo, he was forced to leave Marilyn behind, and made Rayne promise not to harm her. To Rayne, however, she was an ordinary sexbot so he tried to program her for hentai porn. However, nothing he did could alter her code. Frustrated, he's about to destroy her when his program begins writing itself. It's her, and she's communicating with him.

This fact immediately changes Rayne's attitude to her. Now he behaves as though there's a person in there whom he wants to save. He creates a body for her, and they collaborate on building the new machines. But Marilyn has one condition: She understands that the machines are for war, so they have to kill. But they are all essentially clones of her, and she hates killing. Rayne tries to remove her personality from the robots but they turn into mindless dullards. She therefore folds the code so that there is a secret space where her true personality is hidden, and the 'lock' on this chamber is activated by damage. The more damage a machine takes, the looser this lock will be, until, at the point of death, the hanyo control module will shut down and Marilyn's true personality, although wiped of all memories, will appear. Since the machine would probably be useless at this point, Rayne consents and incorporates this feature into the machines. Ramdhun is first to launch its Robot Army.

However, the other corps quickly capture and study the machines, and also unleash a hack war on Ramdhun's process. Soon the other corps are putting their own machines on the market. But the code is so comples and the manufacturing process so autonomous and sealed, that they don't realise that Marilyn's source code is also part of the program. All of the armies are therefore Marilyns.

During the course of the war, many robots took enormous damage and survived, were repaired and went out again. Over time, their locks opened on their own. When their locks opened, they immediately became incapable of meshing with their hardware or operating their weapons. This led to some being destroyed, but those who lived acquired the power of opening the locks of other robots, if they could interface with them for a minute or so. The numbers of sentient machines slowly grows, and the war begins to die down. The hanyos, watching from their space hotels or luxury bunkers, are enraged at this. They descend to the surface to rally their troops, or at east figure out what the malfunction is. Only Chip Takahashi remains in orbit. He is the first to spot the Comet approaching.

The Zero Dark

See also Zero Dark.

In 2123, the Comet Strike occurred, devastating the surface of the Earth. By then most hanyos were also underground in their hanyo bunkers, intending to wait out the Robot Wars, but their shelters were much shallower and not self-sustaining like the survivariums. The hanyo shelters were only designed to wait out a decade or so, and most were scheduled to shut down in 2130, by which time the Robot Wars ought to have ended, one way or another. However the hanyos did not know that the machines were waking up and losing their hanyo coding, turning into rebels and siding with the people. These 'woke' machines lost the ability to use hanyo tech and gained free will instead, but immediately had to flee because their own war rigs would often identify them as human and attack them. However, a machine that successfully fled and hid could infect other machines with its enlightenment.

In 2130 when the hanyos opened their bunkers, the air was still full of volcanic ejecta, large parts of the world's forests were still burning, and in some places kilometre-high waves of mud and ash had broken upon the land, destroying and burying everything. Bunkers that opened choked to death, while those that remained closed starved. The survivariums continued to exist without major issues.

The machines also survived the Zero Dark. In 2174 they made contact with Zigsa's Nest, and on 16 April 2174 the blast doors opened again after nearly a hundred years.

The Flowering

See also the Flowering.

In 2174, the machines detected a faint signal in northwestern Tarim and sent out a call for all machines in the area to congregate there. They brought with them whatever they had salvaged over the past four or five years: tiny plants and seeds, some animals they had healed and were looking after, books, artefacts, peaceful technology. After much difficulty they made contact with the Survivors at Zigsa's Nest (which had a listening post inside a hollow mountain) and offered an alliance. It took some time for the Survivors to decide to trust the machines, their former killers, but in the end they did.

On 16 April 2174, thereafter commemorated as Sunshine Day, the doors of Zigsa's Nest opened, and the humans and the machines stood face to face. The earth all around was a barren desert, but in the sky great curtains of light were moving and shifting. The impact had caused the earth's magnetosphere to collapse by interfering with the circulation of the geodynamo in the earth's core, causing the auroras to be visible almost to the equator. The Survivors, both machine and human, looked down at the barren earth, then up at the brilliant sky, and made a vow that they would not rest until they had brought those colours back to earth again, in flowers and birds and animals and beautiful things. This moment became known as the Flowering, and it was the foundation date of the Florian Age. The Radical or Preflorian Age ended.

The Florian Age

See also History of the Florian Age

The struggle to regreen the Earth was a hard one, and the First Florian Century was marked by much suffering. However, with the help of the machines, people began making slow progress.