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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 of my series of five novels arcing from 2023 to the seventh century after our time. The first book in the series, Bitch Wars: Before Antisense, is already complete and being submitted to publishers. The second novel, Survivarium: Seeds of Antisense, is currently being written (August 2020). The third book will be called Floriana: Flowers of Antisense, the fourth will be Tira's Gift: Antisense Fruits. and the last novel in the series will be Lightbearers: Sense and Antisense. In addition, the seven books of the Karma Sutra, of which three have been written so far, will form a companion series to the novels.

'How Zigsa Found Her Way', a sixteen-page graphic narrative, has already come out in the Longform Anthology published by Harper Collins India. The Karma Sutra can be read here.

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.' Later, at the end of her life: Zigsa adds a Third Unconditional: 'Karma is the basis of happiness.'

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.

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 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. As a collective gift from the parents of the R1K to their sons, Helios is granted permission to prospect for oil in Antarctica. While the inaugural party is ongiong, they 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. At one swoop, therefore, the R1K removed everyone standing between them and domination of the planet.

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 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.