Story 1: The Surviving Haitian and the Submarine Narrator
The narrative begins with a submarine-bound narrator describing a surviving Haitian sailor who has escaped from a sinking, God-tilted boat. This figure is characterized by his human anatomy - two lungs flanking his spine (described as a “telephone exchange for human thought”), a single heart that beats through time despite being broken by “wheels of thought,” and a nervous system likened to a “one man band.” The Haitian carries with him “The Truth,” described as his own version of a tablet of truth that floated toward the outer lands at the beach.
The story establishes a mystical geography where “when you're on the shore, the edge and far away is the beach under the beach - that's the outer land where the outer water” exists. A mysterious “miniature non-human good thing” has caused the weather to “puff and burn,” breaking boats but leaving the survivor's essential organs intact. This divine or supernatural force is compared to gods who “blow down boats” but spare human hearts, lungs, and brains.
Story 2: The Liquid Book and Atmospheric Waves
The narrative shifts to a cosmic event involving a “liquid book” whose interior pages contain speaking characters with faces that turn in different directions. A massive wave mounts and collides with “dangerous and dark interplanetary voids,” creating a “great popping bang” against the edge of planetary atmosphere. This wave is described as having “atmospheric vocal planetary speech” that speaks continuous vowels despite the absence of air in space.
The wave, of mysterious origin, detaches from Earth to pierce the sky, leaving a hole in the atmosphere that quickly closes behind it, as the atmosphere is “used to such interruptions.” This event occurs at “the speed of speaking light,” after which the world returns to normal, though the narrator and others remain uncertain about what happened or what will happen next. The story exists in a realm of “worlds of time which are spoken part, never always known and never quite always unknown.”
Story 3: The New York Public Library Reactor
A significant narrative focuses on the New York Public Library's research division, which contains a mysterious reactor in its watery basement. This reactor sends up beams of red light that shift to blue, illuminating empty books arranged around it. The library is described as having “empty books” that are “book versus book” - volumes that have been emptied and placed on shelves.
Red laser veins scatter in shorelines, burning those who pass through them like “thieves going through laser lights.” The light emerges from people's hands to tell stories from burning books, projected continuously by the reactor. This creates a system where “red light shifts to blue, burning the future in accelerating directions which are the other way from here.” The narrative ends with the departure of a submarine, suggesting this is part of a larger aquatic journey.
Story 4: The Headless Robot Capital in German May
Set in a location identifiable by its specific flower species, this story describes the “headless order of the robot capital” becoming apparent in “some German.” The narrator stands in the spray of a blood fountain containing “jerking noisy robot” figures dancing a “planetary ballet” above. From the vapor of dancing royal headless robots emerges a frog, while the narrator checks a watch that burns in flames on their forearm.
The setting shifts to Paris as the characters cross from the 59th to 60th division, heading toward poles on “squiggle routes” toward antipodal vacation homes. A future “royal decapitation” will replace calendars throughout the zone with those of “French Revolutionary astronauts.” These revolutionaries also replace measurement standards, transforming human feet into “meters of mechanical gears” connected by paper chains, extending these changes from particles to “figure eight zones” danced through in the sky.
Story 5: Columbus and the Lost Tribes
The narrative introduces Rabbi X, a “Sino-Talmudic scholar who carries all books in his head” through “Book Time Memory,” allowing communication with parallel worlds. He searches for buildings that help him “remember the future” while experiencing backwards dreams showing the future past, spanning from the 1952 Shinkyo World's Fair to the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris.
The character identifies as Columbus, “a Jewish scholar of the Japanese language” whose life's work is “to lose the Lost Tribes.” He has developed a method of making movies through thought, showing all the stars in the sky. He carries a book capable of converting people between religions, containing true stories but not revealing the location of Chinese people. However, it states that Jerusalem was originally in China, with tribes traveling west and becoming lost.
His ultimate goal is to “discover and establish Israel in telepathic Manchuria,” moving world Jewry there so “they will be lost,” believing this will end the world.
Story 6: The Godigo Church and Temporal Animation
The Godigo Church, also known as “Stop, Go Stop” in American lingo (spoken by snow leopards on Mount Everest and Bigfoot), serves as a center for “temporal animation of mysterious time.” This operates through “Super 8 world” technology, preserved in boxes through “notational wisdom” that allows time to be kept, preserved, and reused locally.
The church is named for the temporary emperor of the Lost Islands and represents a “flesh fragment of the Holy Japan family tree.” The Lost and Anonymous king (a “non-nomiz” like Hieronymus) fled his nation and disappeared, becoming the father of Genghis Khan and others. These figures split into fragments of Yashitsune, who tried to prevent Antoku from jumping off a boat during medieval Japan's collapse.
Genghis Khan became conflated with the Tale of Genji, revealing himself as “Super Yashitsune,” a mysterious Japanese entity who wrote novels upside down in the flower language spoken by captive women writing for Lady Murasaki. This language was abolished by 1917 railroad codes, but the stories survive in UNESCO air freight zones, awaiting return of the Flower Family descendants at Shinkyo Station according to the Super 8 clock.
Story 7: The Mud People and Reincarnation Cycles
This story describes how “friends have become mud living mud,” surviving for hundreds of years until dry spells force hibernation. These mud people exist as “patches of plain bloody mud” from ancient battles, living on “conjugal island” where mud marries water, returning as “toad people” making frog noises, as “sometimes you are reincarnated as a frog.”
Some become “templates for other types of thought” expressed through comma-separated values in text files, transmitted via microdot methods hidden behind postage stamps. When viewed, these microdots expand at enormous speed using physical projection, filling entire rooms with comma-separated values appearing like massive light projections interrupted by comma darkness, allowing everyone to see the reconstruction.
These beings survive in the mountains of northern Kyushu, constantly planning “an eventual invasion of the places from which they had arrived backwards.” They plan silently using “transparency of truth to number their thoughts,” as water separates methods from each other. Their target is the “Northern Ireland of southern Kyushu,” extending back across deserts that constantly erupt and melt into snow and ice at wrong seasons.
The tactical Amazon desert contains painted water towers and plants moving rhythmically to sky sounds, dancing to “clock sounds of the Super eight faint sounds formed from falling stars.”
Story 8: The Floating Bibles and Shipwrecked Marines
A whaling vessel, described as “very small and tended to sink a lot,” carries Marines equipped with “self-propelled floating books” - unsinkable Bibles provided mechanically to the crew for emergencies. When the ship is wrecked, the “many, many, many” soldiers/sailors grab these floating books, which serve as both boats and books (“each book was a boat and a boat was a book”), allowing them to slowly float to shore.
Once ashore, they join local populations who barely notice their presence, being too busy with the intellectually stimulating but difficult work of “turning flowers into metal” and “water into lumber.” The locals nod politely and glance quickly at the soldiers, hoping these foreign invaders might help with their laborious transformations.
The soldiers attempt communication through repeated “Hi, hi, hi” greetings, trying to discuss the “unfolding many paged, ear filled books that had saved their lives.” These floating Bibles contain many words and convincing stories lacking legal protection until later. The soldiers sleep with dreams of “theft and lost mothers or cottages under waterfalls and missing electrical storms.”
Story 9: The Time Tunnel and Dimensional Collapse
The narrative describes finding “the truth” through light coming from ceiling or windows, with camera rotation making the viewer become the light passing through the lens rather than through the “Oculus up top.” This relates to future builders who understand architectural terms and spatial orientation, connected to a song by the Fifth Dimension.
This knowledge was sung in episode 37 of the Time Tunnel, described as “after season deluded fan fiction” told as truth to past time travelers who didn't understand. These stories became “solid thoughts” that were “hacked into dinosaurs,” requiring the creation of entire worlds to make words to eliminate dinosaurs. The dinosaurs disappeared not through asteroid impact but as “political prisoners of the mammals” who used other worlds to smash Earth and destroy them, though the narrator suspects it was actually airplanes.
The narrative establishes that terrible substance allows simultaneous knowledge of past and future through observing a single letter. It warns against responding to knock-knock jokes, as this results in being “caught by the scruff of the vowel and hauled off to east and west.”
Story 10: The Woman of Steam and Energy Transformation
The “woman of steam” represents “multi-phase transformative but equally energetic” forms, always maintaining the same energy amount at different times through “dissipating, renovating, consistent energy” as steam, water, and various spiritual forms. This explains how “history is made back then and preserved” for transmission across time.
During boat crossings through “some vacuum,” shipwrecks occur, with the narrator guaranteeing the truth and offering to create “printed attestation” for public retelling. The narrative emphasizes connection through “wires to thoughts and other times,” creating “inaudible ocular lucidity using liquidities” that cannot be used as cash but can be sold, never spoiled, and transmitted whenever thinking about such matters.
The story concludes with references to project documentation, describing “Volume N” with indices extending to “WXYZ,” providing “prosaic nomenclature” for “dispensation of arranged thoughts, actions, forms, imitations and original” works. The narrator finds confusing “the motions of time” and the brief nature of human encounters, noting how people are seen only for “a second and a half at a time” before being forgotten and remembered by others elsewhere.
This creates a system of “subliminal super luminary” connections extending through “Volume H” in “all books and comic books in 26 languages,” forming “verbal and nonverbal forms of all the mysteries of time” related through “transparencies,” concluding with movement “forwards through this, that and the other thing.”
Conclusion
VolumeQ presents an interconnected collection of surreal narratives that blend historical, mythological, technological, and metaphysical elements. The stories operate through recursive time loops, dimensional travel, and transformation cycles involving submarines, libraries with reactors, mud people, floating Bibles, headless robots, and time-traveling scholars. Each narrative strand contributes to a larger meditation on memory, preservation, transformation, and the fluid boundaries between text, reality, and time itself. The work functions as both experimental literature and philosophical exploration of how stories, knowledge, and consciousness persist and transform across temporal and dimensional boundaries.