Year Zero Banned Media

In an attempt to prevent Year Zero, a group of Quantum Computing researchers at Solutions Backwards Initiative calling themselves the Pilgrims have utilized their government-funded experiments to warn the people of the past. A major portion of the data they sent back in time is various media labeled by the government as "subversive materials." Excerpts of the banned media can be found scrambled in the background of the webpages sent alongside them. This page contains every excerpt found to date, sorted by title and including the author and webpage locations.

1984

by George Orwell

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him."

• The Mailstrom - Gallows [1]
• The Mailstrom - Needle [2]

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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

by Mark Twain

"It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming."

• Solutions Backwards Initiative - Pilgrims [3]

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Also Sprach Zarathustra

English Title: "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"

by Friedrich Nietzsche

"Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws."

• The Mailstrom - Flood [4]

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Angels in America

by Tony Kushner

"I see the universe, Joe, as a kind of sandstorm in outer space with winds of mega-hurricane velocity, but instead of grains of sand it's shards and splinters of glass ... You ever feel that way? Ever have one of those days?"

• The Mailstrom - Belladonna [5]

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A Beggar At Damascus Gate

by Yasmin Zahran

"Petra. January 1980 The desert wind was howling across the rocky plateau that surrounds Petra with a hissing cry that swept somewhere from the desert as I climbed through the siq and up to the Rest House, which stood on a rocky ridge near the village of Wadi Musa."

• The Mailstrom - Usurp [6]

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Beloved

by Toni Morrison

"The Women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were it's only victims."

• The Mailstrom - Cleansing (found on background image datamined using l33tspeak)

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Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge

by James Morrow

"Take your cup down to the Caspian, dip, and drink. It did not always taste of salt. Yahweh's watery slaughter may have purified the earth, but it left his seas a ruin, brackish with pagan blood and the tears of wicked orphans."

• The Mailstrom - Atropine [7]

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Brazil

by Terry Gilliam

"Interviewer: What do you believe is behind this recent increase in terrorist bombings?
Helpmann: Bad sportsmanship. A ruthless minority of people seems to have forgotten certain good old-fashioned virtues. They just can't stand seeing the other fellow win. If these people would just play the game..."

• Mining For Life [8]

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Catch-22

by Joseph Heller

"Open your eyes, Clevinger. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead."

• Cedocore [9]

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The Catcher in the Rye

by J.D. Salinger

"I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff— I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."

• Operation Swamp 0000 [10]

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Caution

by Walt Whitman

"To: The States, or any one of them, or any city of The States, Resist much, Obey little; Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved; once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city, ever afterward resumes its liberty."

• Hollywood In Memoriam [11]

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The Chocolate War

by Robert Cormier

"They murdered him. As he turned to take the ball, a dam burst against the side of his head and a hand grenade shattered his stomach. Engulfed by nausea, he pitched toward the grass. His mouth encountered gravel, and he spat frantically, afraid that some of his teeth had been knocked out. Rising to his feet, he saw the field through drifting gauze but held on until everything settled into place, like a lens focusing, making the world sharp again, with edges."

• The Mailstrom - Cleaver [12]

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Civil Disobedience

by Henry David Thoreau

"I HEARTILY ACCEPT the motto, — "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically."

• The Mailstrom - Wretched [13]

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A Clockwork Orange

by Anthony Burgess

"He was in the land all right, well away, in orbit, and I knew what it was like, having tried it like everybody else had done, but at this time I'd got to thinking it was a cowardly sort of a beschch, O my brothers. You'd lay there after you'd drunk the old moloko..."

• The Mailstrom - Wetwork [14]

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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

"Will tourists someday stare bewildered at the rusting hulks of New York’s skyscrapers, much as we stare today at the jungle-overgrown ruins of Maya cities?"

• Cedocore - Hycephamitamyn-η [15]

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The Communist Manifesto

by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

"A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies."

• Judson Ogram Correctional Facility - Moira Waag Psychological Evaluation [16]

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The Crucible

by Arthur Miller

"There is a misty plot afoot so subtle we should be criminal to cling to old respects and ancient friendships."

• The Mailstrom - Hubris [17]

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The Diary of a Young Girl

by Anne Frank

"Have you ever heard the term 'hostages'? That's the latest punishment for saboteurs. It's the most horrible thing you can imagine. Leading citizens--innocent people--are taken prisoner to await their execution. If the Gestapo can't find the saboteur, they simply grab five hostages and line them up against the wall. You read the announcements of their death in the paper, where they're referred to as 'fatal accidents.' - October 9, 1942"

• Secure Broadcast Informatics [18]

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Equus

by Peter Shaffer

"There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out."

• The Mailstrom - Corrida [19]

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The Fate of an Honest Intellectual

by Noam Chomsky

"He's now living in a little apartment somewhere in New York City, and he's a part-time social worker working with teenage drop-outs. Very promising scholar—if he'd done what he was told, he would have gone on and right now he'd be a professor somewhere at some big university. Instead he's working part-time with disturbed teenaged kids for a couple thousand dollars a year. That's a lot better than a death squad, it's true—it's a whole lot better than a death squad. But those are the techniques of control that are around."

• The Mailstrom - Spore [20]

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Fight Club

by Chuck Palahniuk

"Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden."

• The Mailstrom - Pain [21]

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The Forever War

by Joe Haldeman

"You couldn't blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored. The fact was, Earth's economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It was a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unify humanity rather than dividing it."

• The Mailstrom - Fratricide [22]

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The Grapes of Wrath

by John Steinbeck

"Rattlesnakes! Don’t take chances with ’em, an’ if they argue, shoot first. If a kid’ll kill a cop, what’ll the men do? Thing is, get tougher’n they are. Treat ‘em rough. Scare ‘em."

• The Price of Treason [23]

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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

by J.K. Rowling

"Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one..."

• The Mailstrom - Regret [24]

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Heather Has Two Mommies

by Leslea Newman

"Heather's favourite number is two. She has two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears, two hands, and two feet. Heather has two pets: a ginger-colored cat named Gingersnap and a big black dog named Midnight. Heather also has two mommies: Mama Kate and Mama Jane."

• The Mailstrom - Sickle [25]

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Hiroshima

by John Hersey

"At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the girl office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk."

• The Mailstrom - Slander [26]

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The Hobbit

by J.R.R. Tolkien

"For your hospitality our sincerest thanks, and for your offer of professional assistance our grateful acceptance. Terms: cash on delivery, up to and not exceeding one fourteenth of total profits (if any); all traveling expenses guaranteed in any event; funeral expenses to be defrayed by us or our representatives, if occasion arises and the matter is not otherwise arranged for."

• I Am Trying To Believe [27]
• Another Version Of The Truth - Forum [28]
• Be The Hammer [29]
• 105th Airborne Crusaders [30]
• Consolidated Mail Systems [31]

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Howl

by Allen Ginsberg

"Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!"

• The Water Turned To Blood [32]

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Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

"I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth."

• The Mailstrom - Tumbrel [33]

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Leo Africanus

by Amin Maalouf

"In that year, the sacred month of Ramadan fell in high summer. My father rarely left the house before nightfall, as the people of Granada were short-tempered during the daytime. Quarrels were frequent, and a sombre bearing was regarded as a sign of piety; only a man who was not keeping the fast could smile under the fiery heat of the sun, and only a man who had no concern for the fate of the Muslims could remain cheerful and friendly in a town exhausted from within by civil war and threatened from without by the unbelievers."

• The Mailstrom - Scorpion [34]

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M. Butterfly

by David Henry Hwang

"GALLIMARD. Butterfly, Butterfly...(He forces himself to turn away, as the image of Song fades out, and talks to us.)The limits of my cell are such: four-and-a-half meters by five."

• The Mailstrom - Widow [35]

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Middlesex

by Jeffrey Eugenides

"But I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn’t normal. It couldn’t be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people—and especially doctors—had doubts about normality. They weren’t sure normality was up to the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost."

• The Mailstrom - Parasite [36]

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The Naked and the Dead

by Norman Mailer

"But the compassion lasted for only a few minutes. He understood it all, knew he could do nothing about it any longer, and was not even tempted. What was the use? He sighed and the acuteness of his mood slipped out with his breath. There were some things you could never fix. It was too mixed-up. A man had to get out by himself or he became like Hennessey, worrying over every gimcrack in his life."

• The Mailstrom - Venom [37]

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Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

by Barbara Ehrenreich

"Mostly out of laziness, I decide to start my low-wage life in the town nearest to where I actually live, Key West, Florida, which with a population of about 25,000 is elbowing its way up to the status of a genuine city. The downside of familiarity, I soon realize, is that it's not easy to go from being a consumer, thoughtlessly throwing money around in exchange for groceries and movies and gas, to being a worker in the very same place. I am terrified, especially at the beginning, of being recognized by some friendly business owner or erstwhile neighbor and having to stammer out some explanation of my project. Happily, though, my fears turn out to be entirely unwarranted: during a month of poverty and toil, no one recognizes my face or my name, which goes unnoticed and for the most part unuttered. In this parallel universe where my father never got out of the mines and I never got through college, I am 'baby,' 'honey,' 'blondie,' and, most commonly, 'girl.'"

• The Mailstrom - Gasoline [38]
• The Mailstrom - Necrotic [39]

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Orientalism

by Edward Said

"On June 13, 1910, Arthur James Balfour lectured the House of Commons on 'the problems with which we have to deal in Egypt.' 'These,' he said, 'belong to a whole different category than those affecting the Isle of Wight or West Riding of Yorkshire.'"

• The Mailstrom - Flense [40]

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The Origin of Species

by Charles Darwin

"We shall best understand the probable course of natural selection by taking the case of a country undergoing some physical change, for instance, of climate. The proportional numbers of its inhabitants would almost immediately undergo a change, and some species might become extinct."

• Judson Ogram Correctional Facility - John Ferminger [41]

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The Perils of Obedience

by Stanley Milgram

"The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority."

• Operation Chip Sweep [42]

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A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present

by Howard Zinn

"Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log."

• Another Version Of The Truth - Revisionism [43]

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Pleasantville

by Gary Ross

"BOB: [to David/Bud and Bill] 'You are charged with descration of a public building and the intentional use of prohibited paint colors in violation of The Pleasantville Code of Conduct and "Laws of Common Decency." Do you admit that on the night of May 1 you did consciously and willfully apply the following FORBIDDEN paint colors to the North Wall of the Pleasantville Police Station: Red, Pink, Vermilion, Puce, Chartreuse, Umber, Blue, Aqua, Ox Blood, Green, Peach, Crimson, Yellow, Olive and Magenta?'"

• One Country At A Time [44]

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Der Prozess

English Title: The Trial

by Franz Kafka

"Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested."

• Exhibit 24 [45]

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

by Ken Kesey

"MCMURPHY (V.O)

(through loudspeaker) Medication time! Medication time! Rise and shine! Rise and shine! Time to say goodbye... Everybody

up, up, up!"

• Another Version Of The Truth - 0 [46]

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Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

by Stephen King

"Brooks Hatlen knew it. Knew it all too well. All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won't have to be afraid all the time."

• Free Rebel Art [47]
• Act Patriotic [48]

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The Second Coming

by Y.B. Yeats

"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

• Hour of Arrival [49]

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A Seperate Peace

by John Knowles

"I felt fear's echo, and along with that I felt the unhinged, uncontrollable joy which had been its accompaniment and opposite face, joy which had broken out sometimes in those days like Northern Lights across black sky."

• The Mailstrom - Bitter [50]

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Silent Spring

by Rachel Carson

"The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of fall mornings..."

• Grace The Teacher [51]
• Red Horse Vector [52]

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The Simple Art of Murder

by Raymond Chandler

"But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid."

• Viability Index [53]
• Free Rebel Art - You Are A Threat [54]

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Slaughterhouse-Five

by Kurt Vonnegut

"All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names. I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground. I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, and we made friends with a cab driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war. His name was Gerhard Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn't much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much better now. He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes."

• U.S. Wiretap - Case No. 71839J [55]

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Stranger in a Strange Land

by Robert A. Heinlein

"Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit. Sweat over that, instead!"

• The Mailstrom - Infarction [56]

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The Things They Carried

by Tim O'Brien

"First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack."

• The Mailstrom - Pliers [57]

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Watchmen

by Alan Moore

"Rorshach's Journal. October 12th, 1985. Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown."

• Exterminal [58]

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Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

by Gregory Maguire

"The decades - Fiyero thought, in love with her or at least so frightened for her that he could mistake it for love -- the decades looked on and didn't see her passing. They stared from their fixed mounts across at each other and didn't see the revolution striding between them, on her way to destiny."

• Judson Ogram Correctional Facility - Moira Waag Interview [59]

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Wild Thorns

by Sahar Khalifeh

"'Halt!'

The order came from a soldier sitting in front of the wooden walkway. Usama stopped, his heart pounding. 'Open your suitcase!' The Israeli stretched out his hand and rifled [through] the contents. 'What's this?' 'Librium.'

'Yeah, you people are crazy about that stuff.'"

• Brian Tsunoda [60]