Rootkit 1
Rootkit 1 states that 'I believe a good world is possible.' It is TRUE. It is the first statement of the Rootkit Test.
Explanation of answer to Rootkit 1
Quoted from Puzzle One
Imagine a group of people cowering in a tiny oasis in the middle of the radiopoisoned desert. We were Factory Shell jeck victims, worn-out good-time girls, RanDees with no ideas left, housekeepers with crumbling bones, Bully Boys running from the bombs and bullets of their own comrades, Pharm Girls nursing their cancers, chicks and slags both ugly with neglect and torture, so many crumbs of spent human resources spat out by the hanyo villas and townships and service territories. We were all meant to die, but somehow, by love or luck or will, we survived. We found each other and clung together as we wept over our wounds. As we wept, our tears healed us.
Sometimes instead of weeping we sang, either songs we’d heard in rare moments of peace, or songs we’d made up ourselves. At first our songs were full of sorrows, but slowly, as the days passed and death or disaster did not come, we started to sing of other things. The songs filled us up with a flickering, wavering energy, and we started to look around us and help each other. We knew we needed each other to keep on surviving, and slowly we began to sing and speak of this need. We all had our down-moments, but as our numbers slowly grew, we found that when some of us were down, others were up, and they kept our heads above water till we could swim again. We felt grateful to our newfound friends, and in time that gratitude became love.
Because it mattered to us that we should all get our share of the love, we began to keep track of the many kinds of good things we did for each other, and this became the core of the karma system, which runs our world. My brooders and friends want me to say I invented all of this, but that isn’t true. Yes, I saw the shape of the good world floating in my mind long before I came to this place, and I spoke of it constantly to my new friends as they smiled or lay moaning, and it lifted them as it had lifted me. As they began to share my dream, they rose from their beds of pain and began in whatever way they could to build a tiny piece of it.
Each of them brought something to it, and as this sutra progresses you’ll hear their voices telling you about it. All I did was show them the good world was possible, convince them that I had seen it and walked in it in my dreams, and that the hanyos had been lying when they’d said that hanyo town was the only possible world. My friends did the rest. Had we not believed in the possibility that we could build a world of good for ourselves, we would have sat around until we shrivelled away to dust. You also will have to believe you can do this over everything else you know, otherwise you’ll never get out of hanyo town. But if you can get out, then the radiodesert will not be your fate. Instead, under whatever cover you can find, use our knowledge to build a sealed home for yourselves as we have done.
At first we burrowed into the earth like grieving children looking for their mother, but as we dug down and found in the comforting darkness all the many treasures the earth had been keeping safe for us, we started also to make a light of our own in our tiny roughcut caves, and to take back the light that had been stolen from us almost at birth. We realised there were many things we loved, and we called the best of them the ten treasures: people, plants, animals, soil, air, water, light, love, karma and knowledge. We decided we would make a space where all of these things could survive, along with us. A survivarium, a place for Survivors.
We protected it from the hanyos with deep digging, labyrinths and blast doors. We stole the parts and built a fusion reactor buried deep within to power it. We made a crackerbox out of scrapped molecular machines, from which we crack all kinds of waste into useful substances and spin from them food, clothing, drugs and medicines, furniture and tools. We heal ourselves and explore our bodies in a bath complex we built full of pools and palms and waterfalls and interesting crystals. Under it we have a central forest full of plants, animals, birds, insects, fungi and worms that gives us pleasure and clean air, fruit and water filtration, food and love and beauty.
You’ll get instructions on how to create all this, but before you can build a survivarium, you have to understand that all this is possible only because we live in an entirely new kind of society. We have no money, no property, no Bully Boys, no prisons, no police, no slavery whether paid or otherwise, no marriage, no law beyond karma and antisense, we work as we choose and we define work very differently from the hanyos, we can’t afford to ever throw anything away, or hurt an animal or a child, and we thrive on it. We live like this because we were thrown away ourselves.
If you’re still in hanyo town, you probably fear being thrown away more than anything else. But we now know it was the best thing that could have happened to us. When the hanyos and their hanyobait servants threw us away, we died to hanyo town and woke up in our own world. In hanyo town, we’re their victims, parasites, dolls, slaves, prey, production equipment. But in our world, the hanyos have no place, no function. They’re no good to anyone. They aren’t even trash, because we all know hanyo trash is our treasure. We’ve built so much of our good stuff out of things the hanyos have thrown away. So the hanyos are not trash: they’re poison. Their world kills ours. When we realised this, we knew what we had to do next: we had to cleanse our minds of the poison we’d drunk in hanyo town. Now that we were together, we had the courage to face this task.
We knew we desperately wanted to make each other and ourselves happy again, as we dimly remembered having been long ago, perhaps only in the womb. But the next thought that came was hopelessness and helplessness. ‘Who are we to build heaven?’ one of us asked, but she said it in the vinegary, pinching voice of a bastard hanyobait floor supervisor, and we all looked at her and burst out laughing. Some of us were shocked by our own laughter, but to them I said, ‘Freedom means being able to laugh at things that terrified you while you were suffering them. The light went out of you just now because the poison of hanyo town is still inside you, telling you to sit back down and get on with dying like you were told, instead of dreaming and talking about any heavens you might build. Are you going to do what it says?’ Every one of us shook her head. This showed us the way forward.
Over time, we found that the processes of healing our wounds, the cycle of hope and despair, the snippy little voices in the mind, the memories and flashbacks and stinging scars, they follow a pattern. Nowadays, when a new person comes to us, we put them through the Hopscotch, which is a ten-level game you play until you’re healed and ready to take an active part in your own survival. More about the Hopscotch in Puzzle Two. If you want to get successfully out of hanyo town, you must be committed to your journey towards your own world, you can’t just be running away from theirs.
