Ben Marcus - The Age of Wire and String

BRIAN, treated to a delicate meal, a method of keeping travelers at bay. Most instances of travel will offer several opportunities for sleeping within a short time; the rising traveler will encounter the sleeping or eating traveler during this period. Denying Brian food can be used to encourage the travelers to sleep, or to remain lying down until Brian is fed.

The energy of travelers is supplied vertically, through the feet; therefore, the sleeping traveler is temporarily cut off from this supply, and Brian remains hungry. Locomotion installs sleepiness, and a field, called a somnalian area, is generated in the doorway of the dining car.

The dichotomy between the sleeping and nonsleeping traveler extends beyond states of alertness. When the traveler is vertical, he will be resisted by the somnalian field in front of the dining car because of his high content of energy, and a positive charge will be issued within the dining room, enabling a delicate meal to be served to Brian.

This field is, in part, generated by the horizontal (sleeping or nonsleeping) traveler, who, because of his low or nonexistent energy, is the only traveler able to eat. For the sake of keeping Brian fed, some travelers are kept sleeping at all times. A traveler who resists sleeping but remains horizontal for three passes through this cycle will briefly ascend the chain, and pass a rising traveler and go on to eat.

The brother is built from food, in the manner of minute particles slowly settling or suspended by slight currents, that exist in varying amounts in all air. There is least food-printing over the ocean and most at low levels over cities; food caused by airplanes is a serious addition to a radical new man-making practiced in versions of Detroit, and explains at least partially the heavy food-fall there. Sources of atmospheric food that can be utilized in the assembling and fall of men are:

1. Winds blowing skin from birds (the skin is a wrap-bag for grains).

2. The various products of combustion at festivals (the brother process in the seasonal Americas requires sufficient picnic heat or flak from any food fires).

3. Mountain breaks releasing flukes of grain (air matches fractures in the mountain and attracts food winds to seal the terrain).

4. Salt spray from the oceans (the strongest glue of food forms is salt in its glacial stage).

5. Bread and other material from plants (as ever, plant breads and their accompanying food posse allow the body to feed upon itself in times of famine).

6. Bits of rain containing beef seeds (rains of the Americas derive from the cattle colonies of the South, often stealing beef from the livestock to thicken the water coverage of storms).

Food sometimes settles quickly on surfaces to precipitate the arrival of persons, but vast assembled dinners are delivered to the layered uppers of the air and suspended there until clouds of wheat and beans breed forth men parts to bond in the salt rinds of lowest air. The effects of an eruption of tree bread such as that in Larchmont have been observed three years after its occurrence. Anthroscopic food particles (those to which men adhere) are the nuclei of man-making in free air; the nucleus of each head in a fogbank or cloud and of arm-seeds in each rainball and snowshard is one of these invisible particles of first foods. Jason Marcus, the original brother, who in 1990 invented a device for counting the air, first correlated food particles and persons. The food that he discovered comprising his person is also chiefly responsible, through its scattering effect upon light (sun stalls), for one type of darkness that is observed when he takes his falls through and above the land, eating and rebuilding parts of himself in a small cyclone of black seeds and grains.

The chief legal problem connected with hidden food is that of title. A scavenger cannot acquire title to chicken that he has discovered abruptly, and therefore he cannot transfer title even by barter to an innocent dining man who has requested a stew. Hence the rightful owner of the chicken may take it without compensation from anyone who has not properly tracked it according to the rules set forth by the Topographical Legend and Location of Food Nooks . The innocent dining man, however, may challenge the scavenger for breach of his implied warranty of good title as it applies to edible objects, in this case the promised delivery of a chicken bisque with definite ownership. These rules invariably apply to food hidden within houses, churches, and other recognizable structures; in certain townships, they obtain also when potatoes and bread are camouflage within a manufactured landscape. Artificial food (Carl) is often used to disguise the presence of real food in these settings. The law respecting the transfer of dough and sugar suspended from the hips of a citizen differs somewhat. There, if the scavenger has authentically scented the pastry using the traditional methods of tracking (the crab walk, odor spiraling, or simple persistence with the food map of Yvonne), he takes an absolute title. To be such a purchaser, he must pay for the sweetened dough with something of value (usually a loaf of sugar-soaked grain or a spore wand from the food spring of the Kenneth sisters) and must not be aware of anything suspicious concerning the citizen on whom the confections have been hidden. The person from whom the dough was initially procured may recover it (paying with a pound of custard) from a holder who is not a bona fide scavenger, but, rather, a passive recipient of food that has not been concealed. Such a holder — e.g. one who received flugals or eclairs as a gift, or else reconstructed crum pets from the throat wall of a sleeping scavenger — is within his rights to criticize openly the prior endorsers of the pastries (residents who presented the snacks as “objects that were carefully hidden and then discovered”) for breaching their implied warranty of good title, unless the endorsers had protected themselves in writing, carving the word “Mine” into the husk of the food treats in question.

A. Blain

B. Carl

C. Choke Powder

D. Eating

E. Cloth Eaters

F. Food Spring

G. Food Map of Yvonne

H. Food Posse

I. Fudge Girdle

J. The Mouth Harness

K. Gervin

L. The Kenneth Sisters

M. Stinkpoint

N. Shadow Cells

O. Speed Fasting Experiments

P. Storm Lung

Q. Topographical Legend and Location of Food Nooks

R. Odor Spiralling