As a hypertext narrative, the text cannot be linear.The story is dominated by the intersections of a conglomeration of memories and histories. It is on a essential level a story about the devastations of war and nuclear energies on human beings on both micro- macro levels.The text opens to a page that clarifies the title: Kokura was the primary aim of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki instead. The inhabitants of Kokura escaped this desaster, but the effects of the war and the abuse technology are far-reaching.No-one of the globe is truly immune.The following page sites and types acroos the top of the page and an epigraph by Jenny Holzer “The beggining of the war will be secret”.

The story from this point can be read any of a variety of ways. Six hyperlinks are available options for the initiation of the reading experience, three in numerical language—10010101,11011011, and 01101001-- two in English—Providence and Yakima sandwiching one in Spanish—Jornada del Muerto. Jornada del Muerto connects readers to a map of Nevada.The reader has to click on the hyperlink each time he or she would like to continue the reading experience, like turning a page. When the "end" of the thread under one link is reached, the narrative kicks out to a catalog of links that function as a gloss or as sources for the information included in the hypertext story.

The subjectivity of the voices collide in the "reading" of the story, clearly the emphasis is that a single story is not as crucial as the combined effect of the voices. In fact, it is impossible to put the pieces together, to faultlessly determine which voice belongs to whom, whose story is whose.At the heart of what exists of a narrative, especially in 10010101, 11011011, and "Yakima" is a daughter's voice, a husband's voice, and woman's interior monologue.

10010101 reads at first like prose poem, short passages with an intimacy of voice that conveys fear and a catalog of "things" left behind by the woman's loverand co-activist. Within this section, the woman dwells on memory, of being left by a lover in the midst of a demonstration. She remembers crucial moments in her daughter's life—the initiation of her menstrual period, their finding a cat together, planting a garden. The intensity of these pleasant moments collides with her memories of activism, a brutal and desperate activism that she devoted her life to. The woman eventually dies of breast cancer and husband, daughter, and possibly thelover who abandoned her react to this woman's presence in their lives in other sections.

A man's voice, a husband and possibly the lover, though there are implications that he is not the one the woman longs for, dominates the "Yakima" link in form of journal. The daughter's voice also enters here as she writes of her mother's confinement in the hospital and her eventual death.

She also seems to write of her own activism, the continuation of a battle her mother began but never shared with her. Moments of activism are remembered again in this section and the husband brings in world news, including the discovery of a 5,000 year old woman who houses her own history, just as the woman, Y, will leave her body as witness to her battle.

The middle numerical section—01101001—documents the global impact of war and nuclear testing, sometimes impersonally in the form of news stories and sometimes in shocking images. The thread of "narrative" in this section emphasizes nuclear technology as both science, and thus removed (and kept distant) from the general public, and capitalistic venture. Readers get lost and disoriented by the objectivity and technicality of the thread just as human beings get lost or distanced by the objectivity of media reports, capitalistic explanations, and scientific jargon surrounding nuclear technology.

[second paper] [general view] [spatial space] [conclusion] [bibliography]

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© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
Universitat de València Press