There are disturbing tales of K-Space 'zombie-makers' - sorcerors on the 'plane of virtual nightmare' - whose digital spine-biting centipedes yield the 'soft-tox' juice that opens the 'limbic gates.' Crypt initiates confirm that its arterial access 'low-way' is signposted: 'Main-Flatline (under-construction).'

Answers vary confusingly, from extravagance ('roundabout sixty-six million years'), through vagueness ('some time'), to mystic compression ('since now'). In other respects, accounts of the contemporary A-Death scene and its recent history prove remarkably consistent. In particular, the one name to turn up incessantly is that of Dr Oskar Sarkon, biomechanician, technogenius, and one of the most controversial figures in scientific history. Sarkon's polymathy is attested by the variety of fields to which he has centrally contributed, including transfinite analysis, neural-nets, distributed computing, swarm-robotics, xenopsychology, Axsys-engineering ... Yet it was the resolutely sober Oecumenist (rather than - for instance - Frushlee's excitable End Times) which dedicated the cover and major editorial of its March 98 issue to the question 'Sarkon: Satan of Cyberspace?' Sarkon has become emblematic of the ways in which technological dreams go bad. In the words of fellow Axsys researcher and social-thanatropist Dr Zeke Burns: 'What makes Sarkon's input into the A-Death thing so incomparable is that it crosses between all of the key component technologies.

The biotechmnesis work is so outstanding that it tends to overshadow his equally pathbreaking research in adjacent fields. The Sarkon-formulae for non-metric pausation, for example, which provided the first rigorous basis for IC [immersion-coma] control. The links between biotechmnesis and IC weren't remotely anticipated before the Sarkon-zip [which mathematically models 'bicontinual assemblages'].