Ten treasures

The ten treasures are the things the Survivors agreed were valuable and should be preserved in the survivarium. They are people, plants, animals, light, air, water, soil, love, karma and knowledge.

People

See also people.

By the 2030s 'people' had come to mean anyone who wasn't a hanyo, and by the 2060s this meant only female humans. Since Zigsa's Nest was founded in 2072, that meant that none of the Survivors who took refuge there were male. In the short run this was not a problem, but in the long run it meant that the survivarium would die with the first generation. This changed in 2074 when the two Survivors who took the names Pushpa and Pia came to the Nest. They were RanDees, or tech workers. These two were attached to Human Resources, creating the embryos that were implanted in slags who signed up for marriage. By then rumours of the existence of the survivarium were circulating among the more rootkittenish slags of hanyo town.

Hoping that they could escape to the Nest, the two had begun work in their lab on a secret project intended to help the Survivors. They had figured out how to extract the genetic material from one egg and transfer it to another while turning off gene imprinting so as to fool the egg into thinking it had been fertilised. They took each other's eggs, created embryos and implanted them in themselves: they were both three months pregnant when they escaped and trekked across the desert. It was a very risky journey, but they made it and brought the Nest one of its most enduring treasures. Their arrival led the Survivors to begin feverish work on building the Circle of Love to receive and nurture the new babies, who became known as Flowers. Survivors who were hopped and ready also paired up and had babies. Soon the Nest was full of baby laughter, and the Survivors felt they had truly come home.

This became known as the Pushpa-Pia Process, and is still in use among the Florians seven hundred years later.

Plants

See also plants

Animals

See also animals.

Light

The Nest is powered by a fusion reactor burning Helium 3, which is still going strong seven hundred years after startup. Power is mainly required for the solar-identical lights, which make it possible for the Survivors to stuff every crevice with plants. Another power-hungry feature is the crackerbox, which the Survivors used to print food, clothing, furniture and tools. In the building phase of the Nest, the reactor powered the plasma sticks the tertons used to crack and grind rock. The reactor column also houses the main air scrubber.

Air

While the Nest was being built, the Survivors used air scrubbers they'd salvaged from a derelict mine to clean their air. As the forests and plants got established and started to mop up carbon dioxide and make oxygen, many of the smaller scrubbers were deprinted, leaving only the main scrubber in the central reactor column, and the subsidiary ones at the ends of the podveins. Air in the pods is also kept set by occasional additions of activated charcoal to the area around the biomass input closet, also called the pink place.

Water

Water circulates in the Nest as it is below the water table. It enters through a giant porous plate at the top of the reactor column and spreads out, saturating the roof of the survivarium, from where it flows through channels to where it's needed, or can be made to fall as rain. It's first port of call is the baths which surround the reactor column on the upper level. The baths are the main healing and recreational area, and naturally need lots of clean water. From there some of the water cascades to the central forest on the lower level. The forest has plateaus of different heights to stop the animals getting in each other's faces, and the water find its own way down. There are also central waterfalls from chutes coming out of the reactor column. The reactor itself does not need water for cooling.

Some of the water spreads out to serve the Circle of Love, the next out from the baths, which is in turn surrounded by the Inu Gardens and the Circle of Games. The outermost ring of the Hub is the crackerbox, which is also quite water-hungry. Beyond the crackerbox we are at the edges of the Hub where the driest regions of the forests are. The rest of the water flows through the podveins. Under each podvein there is a drain for the outfall from the garden pits, which is muddy. These drains, called podrivers, are brightly lit and contain water hyacinth, which filters the water, and catfish, which eat any organic matter. The podrivers drain into the Circle Channel around the edges of the hub, and from there the water seeps through gravel beds till it reaches the root of the reactor column. Three giant outflow pies take the water out of the survivarium and cascade it into an underground lake that lies under the Nest. This lake is inhabited by tiny luminous cavefish, which thrive on the tiny amounts of organic matter tha fall from the pipe mouths. Since the pressure of the water is very strong here, the pipes tend to erode, so they are lined with an evergrowing gel that occasionally sloughs off in tiny pieces, which the fish eat.

Soil

The building of the survivarium produced large amounts of rock dust. Some of this was blown off on the surface, creating and artificial dust storm that protected the Survivors' surface activities from hanyo spy satellites. The rest was kept to be turned into soil. This is a function of pink and green karma. Soil is made in the Hub from the excreta of the inhabitants y various methods, and in the podveins by the residents of pods, who actively mix their shit and piss with the rock dust to make soil and feed their garden pits. The floor of the Circle of Love is lined with layers of gel, bounciest on teh bottom, more absorbent on top. The absolute top layer is tearable by babies, who love to rip it up and throw the fragments about. The gel fragments absorb and lock in any pee, and they stick to and coat any shit. When they absorb anything, the gel pieces swell and become heavy. They sink below the drier fragments, eventually reaching the hard layers underneath, where the weight of traffic overhead slowly liquefies them and drains them into the soil of the gardens of the Circle of Love, which are surrounded by low fences to stop the babies and puppies digging and uprooting the plants.

Love

See also love.

Love is a function of karma in the Nest. It is also the result of karma. Karma promotes happiness, and happiness promotes love. Zigsa was always very clear that love cannot be forced, and moreover it was not the objective of activity in the Nest, Rather, it was a byproduct, since happy people find it easy and natural to love. All of the Survivors knew the evils of being forced to love in hanyo town, and some had been chicken-hunted. Love permeates the entire philosophy of Antisense. The special category of physical love, a very problematic concept in hanyo town, is dealt with in the Blue Code of the karma system. Blue karma is for communication involving touch, which means it includes both healing and sex. In hanyo town, these two are separate. Healing is unloving, and love does not heal the beloved, rather it wounds.

When they arrived at the Nest, all of the Survivors were poisoned by hanyo ideas to a greater or lesser extent. They all had to undergo the Hopscotch, which squeezed the poisons out of them. Only then were they free to love in an Antisense way. Statement 7 of the Rootkit Test measures how infected with hanyo ideas a person's idea of love is. As Zigsa says in Puzzle One,

In the survivarium, only babies have a right to be loved. All the rest of us just have a right to respectfully request our friends and brooders to love us. Even if we are deserving, it is still not in our power to compel the love of another. Nor can we punish someone who, despite our deserving, refuses to love us. We can shame someone who does not acknowledge a favour, but in some karmas such as the blue, which is the karma of bodily communication and healing, we understand that feelings are delicate, that’s why we tend to privilege the opinion of the more passive one over the more active one in any physical conversation. Shyer people need more space to be happy in. 

Karma

See also karma.

Karma is the main activity, system of morality, justice and production in the survivarium, all in one. It replaces hanyo law and money but does not perform the functions of either.

Knowledge

Zigsa says repeatedly in the Karma Sutra that one of the main weapons of hanyo town against people is ignorance.