Karma Sutra

The Karma Sutra is the foundational text of the Antisense Universe. It is also known as 'The Florian Manual, or How to Build a Survivarium'. It was written by Zigsa and her Survivors between 2072 and 2088, with some updates after that. It is organised into six Puzzles.

Inception

Zigsa probably had the germ of the idea that became Antisense as it is laid out in the Karma Sutra when she was still in the Slag School at New Kashgar. Her unarticulated dissatisfaction with hanyo town and its ways was probably crystallised by her finding of her trunk of treasures, which exploded for her many of the myths about the twentieth century that her hanyobait teachers in Slag School were repeating like scripture. Once she was sure her superiors were lying, Zigsa began to wonder what the truth could really be, but before she could work on this further she was externed to Test to Destruction Centre 8.

After she escaped, and as she began to gather together Survivors in the caves of the Murduk valley she started to see the structure of Antisense and karma very clearly. Also the problems that cropped up in their little community, and the solutions they came up with, began ot become part of Antisense in her mind. As the Survivors healed themselves through the early Hopscotch and began to build the survivarium, their practice and ideas started to form up into a philosophy. Zigsa's Nest, the first survivarium, became the laboratory in which Antisense was put together and embodied in the Karma Sutra.

At Zigsa's Nest

As their numbers grew, it became more and more necessary to write things down and have it available as a handy reference in times of need. Once the survivarium was running and the Survivors had moved underground, their way of life had to become completely self-sustaining. It had to be what Zigsa called 'perfect in the pinch', this is, a perfectly balanced mix of nurture and protection, labour and rest, renunciation and benefit etc. new Survivors, rescued from the surrounding radiopoisoned desert, also had to be taught the ways of the Nest with the minimum delay and effort. From the beginning, Zigsa made space in the text for voices other than hers, and though the main vision and organisation in Zigsa's, there are many individual points of view represented in the Karma Sutra, thus making it truly the voice of the Survivors.

In 2088 the Survivors sealed the blast doors of the Nest for the foreseeable future. This meant they could rescue no more Survivors. To make up for this, they began sending out the Karma Sutra hidden in a virus to reach people still trapped in hanyo town.

Structure and transmission

In order to insert the Karma Sutra into the corporate systems of the hanyos, its six chapters were disguised in a number of puzzles and encoded into a chrysanthemum virus that embedded itself in corporate servers and endlessly sent out the chapters. At that time many corporations would stream little puzzles and memes to their slags' phones and haldheld devices, to keep their employees occupied and out of mischief in idle times. The 'Puzzles' of the Karma Sutra were indistinguishable from this datastream, and would appear like any other corporate content if you didn't have the Antisense Decoder on your phone. You got the Decoder if you were given Puzzle One by a rootkitten and passed the rootkit test. Rootkittens would choose the recipients of Puzzle One with great care, and would explain the basics of Antisense to their new recruits before they took the test, to see whetehr they had the courage and the rage to make the journey out of hanyo town and into the desert. As Zigsa says in the introduction to Puzzle One:

To escape hanyo town, you have to leave their rules and their punishments, your revenge and your rewards behind. They call those things ‘common sense’ and say that anything else is ‘nonsense’, and in hanyo town, those words are true. That is why we call our way of thinking Antisense, because it’s neither sense nor nonsense, it’s something entirely different that cannot exist in hanyo town.
If you have ever felt disgusted at the things the hanyos offer you, or their threats have made you laugh in derision because they have got it all wrong, and you’ve seen through the bluster to the weakness and foolishness hidden inside your masters and you’ve wondered by what black magic they ever made you believe they were smarter and stronger than you, then you have briefly existed in Antisense. Above all of those turbulent feelings, you have felt an iron certainty that you do not belong in hanyo town. 

Zigsa goes on to explain the philosophy of the hanyos and its dangers, before presenting the prospective Survivor with the rootkit test.

Effects in the Radical Age

The Karma Sutra and its readers crated an underground movement that became known as the [rootkit]], a term they borrowed from the shortlived Corporate Wars of the 2040s. In several service territories, underground-raillroad-type networks were set up to get vulnerable slags nd chicks out of hanyo town and into the wilderness, either to join existing survivariums or set up new ones. Rootkittens shared technology and intelligence and worked hard in their undercover roles to make refuges for as many people as they could. Right up until the Comet Strike of 2123, rootkittens were working to destabilise hanyo town and free its inmates.

The Florian Age

After the Flowering and first contact with machines, Puzzle Seven was added to the Karma Sutra, detailing the guidelines for machine conduct and person-machine interaction. Through the difficult times of the First Florian century and the hazards and cahllenges of regreening the earth, the Karma Sutra provided guidance and solace. It remained required reading for all kids and one fo the most important repositories of Florian culture.