The Fundamental Framework: A Movie Called Wax
The entire narrative of ScriptM centers around a movie called “Wax or The Discovery of Television Among The Bees” (85 minutes, 1991), which has become a living, talking entity. This movie initially exists as a bubble surrounding Jacob Maker, speaking and searching using three fundamental answers: Bees, Artificial Language, and Television. The movie begins in 1991 and describes itself as being two years old in 1993, playing repeatedly in cycles from first frame to last frame before beginning again.
The Capture in the Library
The central dramatic event occurs in the Rose Reading Room of the New York Public Library. An unnamed narrator, who identifies as an amateur movietalker and documentarian, is attempting to help with some undefined search when catastrophe strikes. While working with a 26-volume encyclopedia, the narrator observes the world turning “inside out” for the first time. A dark pinhole appears in the library floor, emitting a brilliant Cherenkov blue beam of light that erases all the pages of the encyclopedia volumes.
From this pinhole emerges an antique spherical Korean nuclear submarine, constructed of Unitarian ceramic stolen from Ancient Koguryo and built by Pyongyang Unitarians from stolen plans. Korean sailors capture the narrator using velcro and take him aboard their submarine, which travels through what they refer to as “the Inter-net” - described as an international fishing zone that functions as an aquatic library.
The Submarine Theater and Captive Movietalker
The narrator finds himself imprisoned in a tiny movie theater called “The Our Lady Cinema Of The Telepathic Vengeance,” housed within a bubble attached to the outside of the submarine's coning tower. Using velcro, he is affixed to the center of the movie screen, where he becomes the submarine's unwilling movietalker. Despite having no training (unlike traditional katsuben in silent movie Japan or bonimenteurs in silent sound Manchurian Quebec), he must narrate the endless segmented television movies projected onto him day and night.
The Korean sailors form his audience, though they only enter the theater on Sundays at noon, staying until 1 PM and expressing their displeasure through angry shouts. The narrator cannot see the movies being projected onto him - he can only feel the flickering light on his face, body, and shoes. He has been trapped in this role for 450 years and faces 550 more years of captivity.
The Reduction from Three Answers to Two
During the library catastrophe, the narrator's three original answers (Bees, Artificial Language, Television) are reduced to two: “The Jews In Japan” and “The Japanese in Budapest.” These become the fundamental answers for which questions must be found. The narrator explains that these are the only remnants of the erased encyclopedia, and they form the basis of his endless movietalking work. He clarifies that these answers must be used one at a time, not simultaneously or in conditional relationships.
The narrator identifies himself as “The First Movie On The Internet” and explains that his role is to speak these answers as they search for their corresponding questions, which manifests as the flickering light projected upon him in the submarine theater.
Volume N [Namur]: The Floating Telescope City
A major narrative thread concerns Volume N [Namur], described as the middle volume of a 26-volume series of movies constituting “THE FIRST MOVIE ON THE INTERNET.” This volume tells the story of a sudden transit across an “interferometric gap” between Jesuit Manchuria and the Floating Island of Namur.
Namur was once a Belgian city connected to the ground but is now lost in the sky, transformed into a floating island equipped with THE FOUR TELESCOPES. Motion Picture Astronomical Jesuits have converted the entire city into an optical apparatus using mirrors placed throughout every street, creating a “Great Silent Sound VOLUME of Cohered and Glowing Time.” This citywide instrument captures and processes stellar light to tell motion picture stories.
The Four Telescopes function as both cameras and projectors, combining into a giant blink-comparator that processes all light and dark knowledge arriving from the sky. Volume N [Namur] travels at great speed through space, observing and speaking about the other 25 volumes that surround it in every direction - each also floating islands in the sky that constantly eclipse each other's beams of light.
The Journey to the Galaxy Center
Volume N [Namur] is on an inevitable trajectory toward the center of the galaxy, specifically to “a gravitational collapse that permanently joints the entire local galaxy into an imperfect unity of topological necessity.” The narrative describes this as a 30-year encyclopedic journey, during which the floating telescope city tells 11-hour serial movies divided into 26 segments of 26 minutes each.
The movietalkers of Volume N [Namur] engage in continuous speech, listening to their audience and determining truth or falsehood in the questions they explore. Through this communal listening and speaking, they create “human fellowship” and “the knowledge of time.” They travel through the sky in murmurating patterns with the other 25 volumes, all moving toward the galaxy center while speaking their stories.
The Electrical Theater and the Many Jacobs
Another significant narrative strand involves Jacob Maker and “all the Jacobs” working at an Electrical Theater within a flight simulation company called the Twin Towers of Babel, located outside Alamogordo, New Mexico. These Jacobs have constructed a two-way television screen on the theater ceiling that allows them to communicate with the dead.
As the Jacobs talk to this ceiling screen, it begins to stretch and bulge down the walls until it covers the entire theater - walls and floor - creating a buzzing pixelated environment centered around a tiny dark pinhole at the floor's center. This pinhole serves as the only dark, unmoving place in the otherwise completely illuminated space.
The narrator describes existing as a bubble movie surrounding all the Jacobs in their theater while simultaneously being present at the library searching for questions. This creates a complex layered reality where the narrator exists in multiple forms and locations simultaneously.
The Documentary and Motion Picture Ocean
The narrator frames his work as an amateur documentary - specifically a “telepathic documentary” or “mentalist documentary” - composed of real documents flying through airless air. He describes being self-taught over 450 years, working at a distance from established disciplines and canons, with results that are both recognizable and unrecognizable, “agglomerated like books whose pages have all fallen up into the air.”
The setting includes a “motion picture ocean contained by circular dams,” with triangular salt houses shaped like words left over from “the end of the word of the world.” These are described as crude crystal buildings abandoned when the flame ocean departed to “the roots of time.” The narrator references being in “the cone of light of time” and moving through various chapters including “the lost ocean” and “the Projector Road.”
Historical and Astronomical References
The narrative weaves in historical elements, particularly referencing Clyde Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto in 1930-1931 through his blink-comparator observations. This real astronomical work becomes a metaphor for the movie-making process described throughout the text. The Belgian Jesuit Georges Lemaître's articulation of Big Bang theory in 1931 is also incorporated into the narrative framework.
The text describes astronomy as “a movie made inside and outside a camera obscura by cameras attached to telescopes that therefore remember time and talk it out loud.” The process of exposing photographic plates to the sky, developing them, and comparing them in blink-comparators becomes the model for how these telescope movies function.
The Milk Road and Queen Betty Boop
The narrator references conversations overheard between the Korean sailors about the location of the first and last frames of the movie. These frames apparently reside “somewhere far away in the center of the Galaxy,” specifically at the end of what he calls “the famous Milk Road” (a reference to the Milky Way). At the end of this road stands the Emerald Palace where Queen Betty Boop lives - though the narrator acknowledges this may simply be his interpretation of the silent sound movie playing around him.
This cosmic geography provides the ultimate destination for all the narratives, suggesting that all the various stories and volumes are traveling toward this central galactic location where the movie's beginning and end points converge.
The Nature of Movietalking and Time
Throughout the text, the narrator emphasizes the cyclical, repetitive nature of his existence: “I speak. You forget.” He describes this as happening every day, noting that “today is everyday.” The movietalking serves as a bridge between the light of projected answers and the darkness of unknown questions, with the narrator serving as an unwilling but dedicated interpreter of flickering light patterns.
The text presents time as both linear and circular, with movies playing from beginning to end before starting again, while simultaneously existing in multiple temporal states. The narrator exists in past, present, and future simultaneously, trapped in a role that has lasted 450 years and will continue for 550 more, suggesting a thousand-year cycle of movietalking servitude.
The Ultimate Framework: THE FIRST MOVIE ON THE INTERNET
All these narratives exist within the larger framework of “THE FIRST MOVIE ON THE INTERNET,” which encompasses the 26 volumes of floating islands, the submarine theater, and the various searches for questions to fundamental answers. The Internet itself is reimagined as an ocean through which the Korean submarine travels, serving as both a physical medium and a conceptual space where documents, movies, and consciousness can exist and interact.
The text concludes with the understanding that this vast, interconnected narrative of movietalking, telescope observations, and cosmic travel represents humanity's attempt to create meaning through the observation and narration of time itself, whether in the form of astronomical discovery, cinematic expression, or the endless search for questions that might explain the fundamental answers we carry within us.