{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2459",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 2459,
    "subject": "5HC: VRT/Number 5 link",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2000-11-13T07:54:31+00:00",
    "last": "2000-11-13T07:54:31+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0030-0116@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi",
        "address": "mantis at sirius.com"
      },
      "date": "2000-11-13T07:54:31+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) 5HC: VRT/Number 5 link",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Spectacled Bear wrote"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Compare M. Million's lesson in which he asks No. 5 and David about\nthe supposed abo artifacts. David argues that the artifacts were not\nimportant in the lives of the abos compared to their religion and\nculture, and appears to make up some examples - but those examples\nagree in every detail with the descriptions in \"A Story\"! The trees\nare there, and the flails made of sea-shells, and everything. This\nis astonishing whether \"A Story\" is true or not - if not, how did\nMarsch pick up those ex tempore bits of colour from David's lesson,\nand if so, how could David possibly have known them?"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "This has to do, I think, with the weird chthonic/cryptic linkage between\nthe narrator of \"V.R.T.\" and Number 5, the narrator of \"The Fifth Head of\nCerberus.\"  Both heads seem to share that information: which means it is\n\"true\" (and many others know it as true) or there is a private bond between\nthose two heads. This link might be only my imagination (as usual!), but I\nused it to trace the details you have mentioned, and I think that the\nstrongest textual evidence for a private psychic link is the fact that in\nstory #1, Number 5 sees robots gone berserk, killing prisoners in the third\nyear of his sentence at the frontier prison (70); in story #3, the narrator\nVRT/JVM has a dream of robots going berserk and killing him (210), yet\nthere are no robots in evidence at the urban prison where he is located.\n\nThese two guys have only met a few times, and yet they have the same sort\nof eerie twin telepathy on display in story #2.  (And they are both young\nmen guilty of murdering older men, etc.)\n\nIn addition to all the other loops, I think that the internal order of the\nstories is reversed: #3 (all or at least most) was written by its author\nfirst, then #2, and after he was released from prison, Number 5 wrote #1.\nSo reading them through in order presented amounts to moving backward in\ntime.\n\nAs we read it the first time, we take story #2 to be an anthropological\nreconstruction/daydream, that is, we understand it to be a fiction written\nby an Earthman Ph.D.  Revelations in story #3 change this impression.\n\n=mantis="
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}