A native religion is the soil in which native people grow. It enters through the bottoms of the feet, gradually absorbing foreign religions transplanted from foreign soil. Ash Fork is outside Oz (the Organic Zone). It’s a sentient field in Space, and the ground from which native religion grows is an instrument played with conscious intention by Count Bergamo.
(Adapted for reading from a December 2005 Ash Fork: Native Religion)
Podcast: Download (Duration: 7:25 — 3.4MB)
Social life among the Ash Fork clones is complex, because they are a combination of human design and processes, injected with DNA computers. DNA computing as it exists would be fairly slow, but this is in a future where they have been integrated into the tissue of the Ash Fork clones in vitro. The clones are the evolution of humans into Space. Some of them are eccentrics.
(Adapted as a reading from an October, 2007, Ash Fork vignette entitled “Mary Magdalen”)
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The first law of cybernetics is that the system with the widest parameters is the controlling system. That’s why narrow systems tend toward violence. Their only hope of establishing themselves as the containing system is to put everybody else in a prison of some sort. The Priority Chip installed in every clone sent into space is a kind of prison. But nothing has wider parameters than a sentient emptiness which remains when all programs collapse.
(Between the Tracks: adapted as a reading from a November, 2007 Ash Fork vignette)
Podcast: Download (Duration: 10:23 — 4.8MB)
