unforum

[The First Speaker]

[UPDATE] May 27 - New Sentinel Article

[Muffin]

[sixsidedsquare]

At least there seems to be as much confusion over there about object transfer as there is at our end.

[brat-sampson]

The cube must be a very special case then.

I can't help but wonder what sort of artifacts we have over here that they would be so interested in as you would expect them to already have all our technology and more.

[DrPiranha]

[bearq]

[SPEC] Artefacts

[Leeravitz]

Don't know. There *could* be genuine earth artefacts held within the City somewhere, but I don't think we have any proof for that. What is clear is:

1. There is a booming fad in earth replicas

2. The Academy is the sort of institution that might hold genuine artefacts of this sort

3. To sell replicas with the suggestion that they are genuine requires a good back - up story, and the idea that they have been stolen from the Academy is thus useful. It could only be done on the underworld market, because there is evidently a vital trade that operates out of the Old Town specialising in products stolen from the Academy, no questions asked.

The Cube, I am assuming, *is* a very special case - from what we know of it, it is like nothing else that the Perplexians are aware of, let alone ourselves.

As to why the Perplexians are so fascinated in Earth culture - I have two theories.

1. They are interested because of the suggestion of 'convergent development' - they realise that Earth is rather like, but rather unlike, Perplex City, and they are fascinated to get a taste of this exoticism.

2. It's literally the 'in' thing at the moment - especially since Sente's announcement that the Cube has gone to earth. Now everything Earth based is a must have.

Their tastes in Earth culture seem eclectic - on the one hand, there are people obsessed with shoe types, and on the other, those who want replica first editions of 'Alice in Wonderland'. It would be interesting to know what Perplexians take to be 'priceless' Earth artefacts in the first place - when Violet spoke about Ruth Coralhouse, she mentioned that Ruth possessed some of the first replicas made, and they seem to have included some African masks, what sounds like a piece of Ming porcelain, and something that might have been an Andy Warhol, or could literally have been a replica of consumer goods, like humble soup tins (see Violet's blog!).

The background to the replica trade is interesting: Coralhouse is said to have had some of the first versions (although these could have been custom made), and, if a quote given on the opening of Earthworks is to be taken literally, then one young man had wanted to get hold of a copy of Lewis Caroll for years. This certainly implies that he'd become aware of the *existence* of the writers' works much earlier, but, perhaps, that a consumer replica market has only started to flourish fairly recently.

Another minor point worth noting: non - functioning electronics are mentioned. As if the replicas cannot interface with whatever powers Perplex City technology?? Maybe that's why they don't have TV?? I find it hard to believe that Perplexian society progressed from making crude carvings to utilising keys without having some interrim usage of bound books, but maybe such things haven't been in common circulation for a very long time. The implications we have that 'diaries' from the past can be found appears to indicate that Perplexians had books at some point - unless I'm reading things wrong, and we're talking about black box recordings from an earlier era

[BrianEnigma]

[Leeravitz]

Fair enough. I suppose the question is really whether the sellers failed to make the replicas 'work' because they are essentially con - merchants, or whether they genuinely don't know enough about Earth tech to actually make their replicas function. If they had sold them on successfully, would nobody have thought to complain about this? Do Perplexians not 'get' how Earth tech actually works? Do they see it as museum piece material, and prefer merely to use it as ornamentation? Is it simply the case that sellers of shoddy goods are never very easy to track down again once they've foisted something on you, particularly in the Old Town quarter??!

[JebJoya]

Or perhaps they don't have electricity as we know it... Hmm...

Jeb

[Crane]

What could they possibly use as power other than electricity? Maybe I'm just being ignorant, but it seems that almost everything has to either use electricty as a standardised power source, or you have to construct different power sources for different items: e.g. A cooker would need a "heat" source, and a screen would need some other means of heating the filament in the CRT...

[JebJoya]

Maybe they have some other system that is not electricity in the same way? Some sort of pure energy transfer or something (going all sci-fi there)

Jeb

[toongoon]

Re: [UPDATE] May 27 - New Sentinel Article

[Spankit]

[sledgecallier]

The logical option would be that the Cube isn't on Earth and that the people of PC have been fed a red herring to stop them searching for the Cube in their own space, thus keeping it safe from discoverery? The cube could just be hidden down within the catacombs under the city and no-one would know any wiser. Of course this would mean that the whole hunt (and to an extent the whole game) would be an over elaberate ruse and that Sente was involved.

The more I think about this the more unlikely it sounds, but we should never rule out any possibility until it can be catagorically disproved