What the hell is he building in there?

Riddled has already apprised readers of the mysterious Black Orbs. Visible they are, but impalpable and intangible, and not for lack of palping and tanging.

Now there are fresh sightings! Whence come they? What do they seek?

We were mulling over the question last night at a special meeting of the Unsolved Mysteries and Cockroach Racing Working Group (convened in honour of the late Leonard Nimoy), resulting in large quantities of hot spiced red wine which it would have been a shame not to drink. In the process, the answer came to us... Black Orbs are Cultural Arks from another plane of existence -- the Unseelie Court perhaps, or the Fictive Realm -- seeking refuge from their cultural decadence and collapse (and those motherfuckin' snakes) until it is safe for them to return to their own reality.

Here are more cultural arks, all sorts of shapes but they all seem to be space-going. It must be a tradition, or an old charter or something. Safe in interplanetary orbit* they will survive the Collapse, to return to Earth when the stars are right after a millennium to re-seed a new civilisation with arts and re-art it with seeds.

But we are not slavishly bound to tradition, and the Riddled Cultural Ark (even now taking shape on its cradle in our Experimental Literature Workshop) will use captured Black Orb technology to transfer itself into the abstract domain of Jungian archetypes, where it will blend in with all the mandala symbols. To endure the crushing pressure of Depth Psychology it is spherical in the manner of a pathysphere.

Soon the highest products of human ingenuity will begin to board!

Meanwhile at the New World Supermarket they are unclear on the concept of "ark", with their "hand-rafts". We question the suitability of hands as construction material; we can only suppose that the managers were misled by Bellmer's use of hands for millinery purposes. As for the cargo capacity of a raft compared with...

...mmm, sausages.

* Hence Alternative Title:

The Ark of the Moral Universe, bending