Hendecahedron

Last that’s left, far as I know, of the fci. Maybe. Could be that they are only underground and they’ll be back again some rainy day when it’s not worth being an American again. No use being an anti-patriotic, pacifist-terrorist group if you actually like the country. Whatever. We’ll see. So this is what we’re left with, now, at any rate.

Well, besides the various secession plans and urban-centrism, the anti-car rhetoric and scheming, and all, besides that, they had this culture crucible thing, where they were trying to re-jigger the ways of logic and language. Like a foreign culture. Like they were trying to invent a foreign culture. Or make this one foreign. Or something.

Anyway, they developed these systems of language and mathematics that sort of mirrored the norms and standards of the good old U S of A, but were different. Like, for one, they used base-eleven in their number system instead of base-ten like normal, and they had clocks that had eleven hours days and tape measures that that went in powers of eleven and that. Which was functional inside itself, but kind of busted at the same time. For everything that was measured or recorded there was this lengthly and awkward conversion/translation that had to be done for it to be understood outside the system, like, as if you were using inches and everyone else in the world was metric, like that but with everything you said and did. I mean, the idea was to point out how jinky our own habits of communication were, but at the same time, I think they genuinely hoped that those weird systems might get used for real in the world.

Course, they never did. But them at the fci used it, them, the systems, and the longer they did, the more insulated an obscure the whole thing got. I mean, both them and the language. Eventually, it wasn’t even a language or a logic system at all anymore, in that they didn’t much talk about or refer to anything else, like it was a whole bunch of signs giving directions just planted in a field and pointing at each other, or like the meanings of the words just dried up out of them and all that was left was the fossil of that sound.

So that’s what these are, I suppose, if you want to know. Just eleven-sided calcified fossils of some dead language that never really was. They’re a nice size though, a nice weight. Real good for throwing or something.