Hello and welcome to Letters From the Knot, an an extended exercise in worldbuilding. Each piece comes the Knot, a mess of tangled spacecraft, an inverted city kept spinning to provide some semblance of uneven gravity, a place both figuratively and literally coming undone. My aim with this project is to gradually populate the city over time, creating and discovering new parts of it as I go. Each piece will be different: a story, a dream, a character sketch, a slice of life, a fragment, an object from the Knot.
Recently, I’ve been experimenting more with found objects, building the world by imagining written materials that exist within it. This piece, then, is a political pamphlet.
And if sci-fi’s not your thing, I also release a more traditional newsletter on the off weeks. Enjoy!
Commons
~TidsplanAhndras55LGS~
Designation - [Catalogue of seized items//raid//SelmaDownspin//6617//]
Plain language description -Political pamphlet seized as part of loft raid in Selma Downspin neighbourhood. Found in box of c. 10000. Matched to printer discovered Adisa Street event. Majority of pamphlets destroyed except for purposes of criminal investigation and archiving.
Time sensitivity - A
Official sensitivity - AA
WHO OWNS THE KNOT?
The structure of the KNOT, a turning jumble, a tangled mess, is central to one of its longest running socio-political debates, the issue that has defined its ugly history. That issue is the question of ownership. The Knot, in many ways, is unique in human history. Unlike the cities of Earth, it has not grown organically from some ancient fort or mediaeval village. It was not colonised for its natural resources, nor hard won in a war. It is, in other words, an accident. Nobody was ever meant to live here. It’s a conglomeration of mistakes, a cluster of spacecraft bound together by ill circumstance. It was very nearly abandoned entirely, left to spin out into the null. And it would have been, had not the refugees from that war been trapped here. They, with little other choice, formed this society. They gave it value. They turned this space junk into a city, and they created value in this city, and only when that value was obvious did the Earth folk return and claim it.
TRASH < TREASURE
If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to stretch out a metaphor. Think, if you will, about your garbage. You go about your day to day life and all kinds of waste accumulates. Food and packaging and things, and it all ends up in your garbage. Now think about a building’s worth of people, all producing waste, each and every day, stim-packs, busted ullufilters. Everyone’s garbage - say a hundred households in the average hab-block - is thrown in a chute and collected in a tank and then it gathered up and combined with garbage from the other blocks - thousands of households now - and it’s all ferried off to the Farmlands and the compost is drawn out and then what remains is combined again, with the waste of many more tens of thousands of households, ever more intermingled. Eventually, in the compactors, the waste is pressed into bricks - containing traces of perhaps a million people’s waste - and this brick is fired out into the null, unusable.
But what about this? Just imagine that, moments before that brick is blasted out into space, some worth is discovered. It turns out that this brick isn’t a useless hunk of shit at all, but actually somehow immensely valuable. So who created this value? And who is owed what? Do each of the households who contributed to the waste-brick get each their share? Or does the brick now belong to the faceless administrators responsible for the garbage infrastructure? Might there be a process of arbitration? Could the brick be painstakingly teased apart and tested and each person returned their waste, each recieving their fair share of the value?
Or might there be a simpler way, in such circumstances, to distribute this value? To accept that the brick is a sum of its myriad parts, and that the value has been created incrementally, collectively. Where ownership is so distributed, cannot the value not belong to the people as a whole? For the good of the people as a whole?
GOLD RINGS
The brick in this metaphor, in case it was not already clear, stands for the Knot itself. A 300-year old conglomeration of waste. Debris, detritus, junk, all slammed together and left to rot in space. But, like our imaginary brick, this ball of waste has generated some value. It has a labour force, has become a key player in the knowledge economy of Earth, an unlikely jewel in the crown of its colonies, all the more characterful for its imperfections. So from where does this value derive? Is it the people? The people who for generations have clung to this husk, thinking not of its general value, but of their own lives and communities? Or is it the faceless administrators, who, seeing this nascent value and wanting some of it for themselves, have encircled the Knot with their civilising infrastructure, their great gold rings, and in so doing have laid claim to all its wealth?
SUM OF ITS PARTS
The core of the Knot was once a great orbital Gliesan station. The spurs, so feared, are its tendrils. The Kettle Twins were once minings vessels. The Peg a Gliesan landing craft. The Lind was once a passenger shuttle. The Larson a military craft. The Grace/Hoffa was an ice hauler.
They are all the Knot now. The Knot is all of them.
IT BELONGS TO YOU
This is the political question that has defined our age and the age of our parents and their parents. We have watched as politicians equivocate and drag their heels. On occasion, they’ll tweak something around the edges, granting tax relief or renaming a street or perhaps opening a new park. But they fear the question of ownership because they’re scared of losing the Selma, and all the progress they imagine it has brought with it. The Selman rings are a threat, a gun to the head.
But the time has come to reckon with the question at last. The time has come to unravel the Knot. Not to destroy it, but to reweave it in a new form. A common form. The Knot belongs to you!
DEMONSTRATION
FREITAG 2nd SPIN
CALAH SQUARE