Illustrated by Luigi Serafini | Novel based on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities

Marco Minghetti & The Living Mutants Society	The InVisibile Corporation – A selection of Episodes

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode n.: 01/128 On Air (Beginning): Miles Davis, Kind of blue Link to Invisible Cities: Chapter I. Intro. “Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing.” Category: Frame.I. Side: Recto. Exagram from the Book of the Organizational Changes: 2, K'un, The Recepteive Trunk of the Organic Plant: Boaz Position within the Astrogram: Empyrean On Air (End of File): The Cure, In The Between Days	It is very unlikely that Bill H. Fordgates believes all the lies shot by Sam Deckard when the latter describes him the companies he has visited during his missions, by indicating them one by one on the Astrogram and by taking omens out of the Book of the Organizational Changes. What is certain is that the big Corporation Managing Director keeps on listening to the young (or maybe young-looking) Human Resources Manager ─ who is gifted with ubiquity for company cases and with omnipresence for the most murkiest business ─ while getting less bored with him than with any other manager. In Managing Directors’ lives there comes a time which follows the pride for the huge amplitude of the companies we have conquered, both associated and controlled, which also follows the melancholy and the relief of knowing that we will soon give up the idea of understanding and knowing them. It is as if one night a feeling of emptiness would get hold of us with the pungent smell of smoking chimneys under the dirty rain, of the exhaust gas spat by the limousine which is driving us towards the anonymous suite where we are staying at. It is a vertigo which makes the decorated procedures crack on the Intranet pages, which rolls up one on the other the printed e-mails announcing the collapse of the competitors defeat after defeat and which fades the headed mail paper of unknown entrepreneurs who beg protection from our advancing departments to obtain annual tax in forms of share holdings, real estates and cash. This is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed the sum of all wonders, is a break-up with neither limit nor shape: its corruption is too infectiously deep-rooted for our logo to find a safe way-out. It is the moment when we discover that the triumph over the opponent Boards of Directors has turned us into the heirs of their long ruin. Deckard provided Bill H. Fordgates with bi-cephalous reports: Deckard was his trusted Otro, the man who examined the ecologic paths of vine as well as those of genetically modified wheat on his behalf. It was only in the bi-needs ─bi-dreams─ expressed in those bi-cephalous reports ─ almost as if they had been triggered by Osiris’s hybrid mental engine, or else mystically received through the Iacco Enterprises one- and bi-telephone console ─ that Bill H. Fordgates succeeded in glimpsing, through the factories and the manufacturing plants destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the polluting exhalations registering much higher levels than those allowed by the Kyoto Protocols.

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode n.: 02/128 On Air: Lou Vega, Mambo N. 5 Link to Invisible Cities: Cities & Memory. I. Diomira. “For the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman’s voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.” Category: Companies and memory. I. Side: Recto. Exagram from the Book of the Organizational Changes: 51, Chen, The Thunder Trunk of the Organic Plant: Jakin Position within the Astrogram: Equuleus constellation – At 2 Astronomic Units from the Winged Hermes Orbiting Radio Beacon	Business Communication Services. Going on eastwards, one arrives at MyRadio. It is a company specialized in Services for the Company Culture which had already been a successful broadcasting radio among young people. MyRadio has sixty Arab-style offices, guarded by the statues of show heroes ─Michael Jackson and Madonna─ which are located at both entrance sides. They are constantly immersed in the golden light lit on the many domes which are lowered as if they were satellite dishes defining their architectural profile. MyRadio offers its customers the study and development of communication plans both through traditional and new informatics channels, the organization of incentives, conventions, seminars, workshops, exhibitions, the creation of company institutes designed for employees and their families like gyms, nurseries and rehab centers for drug addicts, touristic offers. MyRadio also provides press office activities and, of course, the innovative use of radio channels to broadcast management messages (Business Radio). Customers are used to these services because they have already experienced similar ones provided by other companies. But MyRadio specific characteristic is that, arriving on Saint Crispin’s Day, when the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the canteen doors and when from a second floor window ─like in a poem by a postmodern Leopardi─ a woman’s voice is heard exploding in a loud ooh!, exactly when the rap version of Mambo n.5 begins: that is the moment when one feels envy for those who will remember they have once before worked for some hours in a happy place.

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode n. 03/128 On Air: Nicola Alesini, Diomira invisibile Link to Invisible Cities: Cities and memory. I. Diomira. “A city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a crystal theatre, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower.” Category: Companies and memory. I. Reverse side: Back. Exagram from the Book of the Organizations Changes: 28 Ta Kuo, Preponderance of the Great Trunk of the Organic Plant: Boaz Position within the Astrogram: Dolphin constellation – Beyond R Variable Star	On stage He told me that three days later, when we saw at Mocambo for that cocktail. We were sitting in the backroom. Miranda: - As I arrived at the end of the great court of the castle which standed out on a very abrupt cliff in front of the most stormy sea, as profound as time is, the sliding doors opened. Then Ariel, the graceful receptionist, such as light as a guiding spirit, leaded me through a wide and very long golden hall. On the 3D LCD walls were reproduced views of ancents Greek cities with temples and amphitheatres, thermal baths of Ancient Rome, villas and exotic gardens, Egyptian Pyramids and the beautiest cities of art all around the world. I was conducted into the room assigned to me for my stage. The style was still that of the hall, with very beautiful plants. I touched the Maltese Falcon, Odara’s logo, upon the touch screen desk. The dark bird took off and disappeared together with the Company’s pay off. ‘It takes many lives to make one!’, after displaying the file “Prosperus”, the on-line course introducing the Company. I understood that the Society within the Section HQLE (High Quality Life and Environment) of Odara specialized in building and managing Esthetics Offices for certified Companies. HQLE Offices, with their frantic and unstoppable comings and goings, are productive laboratories for the making of esthetics: concerts, festivals, symposiums taking place in the most suggestive locations in the world, stage shows, water games, fireworks, acrobatics and magic performances, cinemas, creative writing courses through dedicated blogs, business poetry readings, pasquinades for business television, philosophical debates and technoethics, simulations of Game theory through tournaments of on-line chess, brainstorming for the making of imaginary solutions to improbable issues: entertainment services to keep the HQLE standards high. There you can find employees getting in a continuous touch with artists, intellectuals, ingenious people of different origin and inspiration. Yet, even if Odara’s HQLE Section is pulsing with life, it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist but there it is or, better, there it is in a parallel community. There it isn’t but it does exist because, even though – as it happens with thoughts – you can’t see its structure in real world, it’s right here that its effects unfold themselves. As thoughts, it materialize happening, scenes, situations. And so, it does exist. I listened to her captured by her look so new and opened to the world. Something reawakened inside of me. Just like my memories of my mission in Odara came back to me vividly. The HQLE Offices…From HQLE Offices there come along enterprises and go down claims and complaints. At a minimum signal of imbalance, they activate themselves to restore the configuration secured by the Chart of Business Principles the Companies must adopt to satisfy HQLE standards. Each office keeps on speaking with all levels of reality it is put in, but responds to the Director of Production of the client society, since the Ethics Resource was catalogued by the Legislator as the first point in Business Plan, and that’s because it isn’t just a value itself but drives the production of 90% average of the entire Company value. Sam (in a professional tone of voice): - Moreover, every single HQLE Office is virtual at all, though it’s always in touch with the real Company through the Intranet. In this contact it moulds it and changes its foundations: attitudes, perceptions, mentality, individual and collective memory, until the Company remembers anything of its infancy, but in a confuse, vague, indistinct way. HQLE Team then narrates her her history, reconstructs her memories and her past, drawing it from all possible pasts, defining the real one. A collection of spectacular rites: a symbolic representation that doesn’t represent but is the whole life. Miranda (sighing): - Odara is the stuff dreams are made on. Lucky is who’ll work at it – was I thinking wistfully. I knew that the stage would have been finished in three months and that a new recent graduate man or woman would have taken, for the same brief time than mine, the place that used to be mine. And I knew that, wherever I would have been afterwards, the authorized HQLE Office would have erased this happy memory at the right time, locking it up in some mental sarcophagus and burying it in the bowels of the unconscious, in order to substitute it with an image that should be more useful to my résumé’s development.

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode no.: 04/128 On Air: Billy Idol, Cyberpunk Link to Invisible Cities: Cities and Memory. II. Isidora. “In the square there’s the low wall where the old men watch the young ones pass by; he’s sitting in a row with them. Wishes are already memories.” Category: companies and memory. II. Reverse side: front. Hexagram from the Book of Organisational Variations: 33, Tun, The Retreat Trunk of the Organic Plant: Jakin Position on the star chart: Constellation of Aquila –Planet Altair IV (neighbourhood)	ICT. So that afternoon, too, I was in for a surprise from Hermes’ optical mouse. The tennis star, who never missed an ace, turned off and rebooted my mind with a boot-strap from his remote access. One click: from the creatures of the dark, a ghost emerged in a mist which had formed around the multiple layers of the applications resident on Level 35. That ghost had just mutated from its previous Swablu shape; that ghost was me. Wandering around uncertainly I crossed the internal domain of ZeroTolerance, the forbidden company in which managerial dreams turn into reality. In order to consider it more, I crossed the large USB gate with its inlay made of corno and ivory; then, as light as I was, I placed my hand on a file of obsolete data, with an agile leap I jumped over and quickly clambered up to a platform which brought together all of the company communication systems. The pulsating interaction of a group of computers with the GSM network attracted my attention. A software system chatted simultaneously with thousands of mobile phones, monitoring critical mission services, receiving instructions and handling them through e-mails or mechanisms of collaborative architecture with other services. The grand sum total consisted of the ZeroT ONE apparatus and an infinite series of accessory configurations. The Mega-Server recorded the messages from the LAN and turned them into SMS format prior to sending them to their recipients on the GSM network. The enormous files of ALT-AIR 8800, the centralised database with names and groups, twinkled in the darkness. The database was updated by a search engine which, using a secret algorithm, identified and classified every potential client on the network: at each variation, that is around every 2.4 seconds, an blue electric flash was emitted. In their turn the GSM users, all possessing their own Ip address to be able to communicate with the domestic media centres, sent light blue messages to their Clients. A bit further south, the ZeroT GPU technology, attaining the powers of calculation of videotelephone cards, encoded banking transactions in Xbrl, while long columns of packaged data containing vocal information encoded in digital format were sent on their way along the dusty connections of a network which stretched as far as the eye could see. To the West you could, with a good telescope, spot ZeroT ALARM the analogue link module to obtain alarms or signals in general, select the data which was then sent to recipients specified in the central database. The synthesized voice of the ZeroT RADIO card, installed on a spiral backbone near the northern bastions of the old Arpanet fortress, responded automatically to mayday calls. Even further away, gigantic Firewall pushed back the attacks of innumerable lines of Trojans on horseback, burnt piles of lethal Viruses and poured boiling oil on the hordes of Spam which lay siege without a truce. The perfect mechanisms which were stretched out in front of my eyes did not anticipate, nor did they commit, the slightest of errors. Then it was that I understood I was ready for the pensioners’ wall. Because human beings aren’t admitted to ZeroTolerance, but only microprocessors, synthetic voices in Mp4 format, graphics, Javascript, avatar, aidoru and virtual memories.

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode no. 05/128 On Air: Vangelis, Hymne Link to Invisible Cities: Cities and Memory. II. Isidora. “Isidora is the city of his dreams, with one difference. The city he dreamt of contained him when young; he arrived in Isidora when he was already old.” Category: Cities and Memory. II. Reverse side: Back. Hexagram from the Book of Organisational Variations: 32, Heng, The Long Duration Trunk of the Organic Plant: Boaz Position on the star chart: Visible when the Sun and Moon are in the sky and can shine lastingly; when the Four Seasons mutate and transform themselves and for this reason may end lastingly; when the Saint remains lasting in its orbit and the transformation of the world lasts until the conclusion	NewCo., The Origins of the Corporation. Version of the Company Myth authorised by the Board of Directors and published in an Additional Note to the Financial Statements of the Impossible on the occasion of the Centenary of its Foundation. The man who desires such a company only gets it in his dreams. NewCo. is the dream company and the company of dreams: there, everyone – white and black, yellow and half-caste, small and big – dreams with their eyes open. And the dream is vision, it returns to each, guarded – as planned – at the top of a tower, in the forbidden garden, and harks back to its origins. It’s the dream of the primitive wave. It’s the dream of NewCo., put on that wave by the god Aeolus. There mysteriously, taking its life from the deep and far-off ocean, while the wave, unaware, advanced. Aeolus shipwrecked and homeless, blinded by its beauty, decided to make it his own. It blew there on a strip of land and NewCo. dragged, from the hidden world of the sea tuff, granites, pearls and coral. The moon shone, and NewCo. took on the shape of a majestic spiral shell, mother-of-pearl, open on the sea, since NewCo. has its womb in the sea: endless horizons, opening, future, planning, everything forward. At the reawakening of the sun it shone with harmonious richness: a symphony of reasons and emotions, where time isn’t time which inexorably flies by, and the newly-graduated thread together pearls, coral and nautilus which then become carillon, the female workers on golden beaches collect snow-white marine lilies to decorate their offices, the managers argue about agreements and development. But dormant and imperious the nightmare assails: the possibility of a devastating nothing, an alarming guest. All feel it, all fear and – an incredible syndrome – they all fall in love with it. To remove the fear, the nicest Meeting Room, where the Organic Plant flowers, is dedicated to the Butcher, to the Process Re-engineer and to the Great Rationaliser. They couldn’t stand being happy, because of the risk of falling and getting lost. Now they worry about dreaming different dreams and at the same time clash in wanting to dream the dreams of others. An annihilating competition looms, since they stopped knowing how to dream the common dream. Insignificance and Selfishness drag Malign Progress onto the banks of NewCo., the Enchanter who sends it to the bottom amidst deafening noise, in a foul miasma of putrefaction. The pebbly beaches are ribbons of tins and remains of an excessive meal. Hills of poseidonia ferment in the sun. Fossilised and drowsy employees in a shady life await the wake-up call, hoping for a new wind. It will come, it will come; it will surely come. The man who wants to arrives dreaming, as an elderly man, a confirmed Top Manager or maybe a humble worker in redundancy: to recall his origins and give voice to the future. In his maternal breast gestates that common dream, of a wave which advances and leaps over the abysses, to bring fullness of life, eternal renewal, rebirth. A new Corporation.

Episode 12 Personal flashforward

The landing is on a garden, longer rather than large, a strip between the sea and a rock face red more than grey. Palms, paulownia and jacaranda trees, climbing bougainvilleas and passion flowers cover the low buildings and climb the control tower. It’s an airport.

The way out from the terminal is hindered by a fence of elderly black dressed ladies, their faces carved with an ancestral pain. They chant a stifle cry for joy: “That’s him, yes, it’s him. For certain! Leaving is full of danger, but there, it’s him coming back!” And they are pointing at a passenger, older than old, who reminds them of a child long since gone.

Once at the taxi rank you arrive at a brawl, which is actually just a lively discussion about sport or TV programs, wirh digressions on who should pick up the fare.

The highway to town runs along the rock face, which hides a fleet of nuclear warheads and submarines, says the taxi driver in a low voice, glancing sideways and at the rear-view mirrors. “Nobody has ever seen anything but it’s there, for certain!”

The Riviera is an architectural anthology of seaside villas with swimming pools, minigolf courses, mown lawns and barbecues.

On the outskirts of the town are castles of composite styles featuring turrets and battlements, but the notice symply reads: SUPERSTORE.

Within the city walls shop-windows glitter with gold, silver and gems, others with early produce and DELICATESSEN from the countries afar, but the confectionary is strictly local, gaudy and Baroque in form. The goomy elegant suits are never reduced in price.

The society’s holding company is located in a period building. The interior is a gallery of unique furniture pieces, old paintings, statues, porcelain and ceramics shimmering darkly in their Hispano-Moorish glaze.

The fleetingly smiling President and CEO is imperative: “No problem with financing your project but, dare I ask: When will we yeld some profit, if ever at all? The manufacturing is slow and here we are swift. We tap into value generated elsewhere, no matter where or how, and we multiply it by 10, 100, 1000. Only symbols of wealth give rice to true wealth. Minimal investment, zero risk. Please rework your proposal and come back. Meanwhile, do join us for lunch.

Standing at the departure gate, weighed down by a heavy meal, he was thinking back to those magic words and wondering whether he should persevere or convert to the relgion of the symbols: those that are pure and self sufficient, lost in the chain of returns untl those invisible anthills where things are born. However, however he pondered: 10, 100, 1000. For certain!

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode no. 15/128 On Air (Beginning): Soundtracks Playlist – Blade Runner, Strange Days, Johnny Mnemonic, Total Recall, Minority Report, The Manchurian Candidate, The Bourne Identity, Sim0ne, The Final Cut, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Link to Invisible Cities: Cities and memory. IV. Zora. “Obliged to remain motionless and equal to herself in order to be better remembered, Zora languished, fell to pieces and disappeared.” Category: Companies and memory. IV. Reverse side: Back. Hexagram from the Book of Organisational Variations: 29, K'an, Water Trunk of Organic Plant: Boaz Position on the star chart: Constellation of the Whale – Coordinates: Record deleted On Air (End of File): The Cure, Lullaby	The M.D. of Mnemonia, already Director of Oniria Labs, goes in search of lost time. - So this is the report which he made at Fordgates about Zoramem?, he enquired of me, sipping his Martini, while around us the office party was coming to an end. At my nod he said, - I’m afraid it will have to be revised quickly. - Why? What do you know about Zoramem? He knocked back the remaining contents of his glass in one go. - It was my father who told me about Zoramem, long before I ever saw it – although what I saw wasn’t the same as what he’d told me. He fell silent. I waited. He looked in my direction, through me, behind me. His eyes seemed to be looking for something beyond the visible. - I was just a child, he continued. Dad had been working there for a fair bit. Every evening I asked him for some news, and he, sitting in an armchair, told me that that armchair was Zoramem, and so was the table and the rest of the house, built and furnished thanks to Zoramem alone. It was thanks to Zoramem that we could put eat and buy clothes to wear. “Remember it well”, he said. “You’ve no idea how important it is, Zoramem, and what we do in there.” “I do know”, I said. “Chickens, you run a chicken factory.” He inevitably laughed. Chickens! You have to be a real chicken to believe such a thing. Zoramem’s business was quite different… “What then?”, I asked my father. He replied that people were losing their memories – I’ve told you a million times – since they had to keep moving to find work, they no longer had the villages of their childhood, the land of their birth, or at least cities in which they’d lived long enough. “Memories need precise places and concrete details, he said. And at Zoramem, we did this: we built places in which memories could be set.” “I don’t understand”, I said. Dad stroked my head. “At Zoramem, we design and sell places, on the basis of the summary descriptions which our clients manage to give us, places with everything, roads, squares, buildings, fountains and shops.” He opened his briefcase and showed me a steel plate of the size of a finger-nail, polished and smooth, a minute mirror. He said it was enough to insert the plate, nothing much, included in the price, to have a place which you could link your memories to. After inserting it, you could say: in this coffee bar I saw a beautiful woman; in this kitchen, I saw my father die; in this classroom, I thought that I might discover something as an adult. In this hospital I saw the eyes of my new-born child. And only like this, in your memories, could you say you had been really there. “Let’s sell a lot”, my father finished, “and do something really useful.” He was convinced that I’d take his place when he retired. He too had had the plate inserted: because of this, he remembered meeting mum, every moment of that first day – at Saint Andrew’s, both young doctors, he a neurosurgeon, she a cardiologist, both burning with sacred passion for a job experienced like a mission -, everything they’d done in the place where they’d done it. “You’ll have one too”, he said, “when you’re old enough”, but I answered that I wouldn’t need it, because I remembered mum very well and the short time she’d spent with me. “You’re so young … you’re right, and yet you’ll see, when you’re on the other side of the world, in one of Zoramem’s thousand branches – because Zoramem will send you far away from here, that’s how the company works – and you’ll look for your mum’s face amongst other things, and you’ll just find mist, nothing else.” I don’t remember the moment of my father’s death. I don’t even remember where it happened. I just remember that it happened. I was just a boy. It was then that I decided to go to Zoramem, certain that they’d find me a job. I put on my best suit and I went but, where Zoramem should have been, there wasn’t anything any more. Only the skeleton of an old building, columns and slabs, weeds pushing up through cracks in the asphalt. A sign missing some letters – Zora, those that remained spelt out. I tried asking around, but nobody could give me any information. Only one women told me she’d heard people talking about it, she didn’t remember where nor when, but added, “I’m just passing through this town, I don’t really know anything else about it.” I think that quite soon I, too, won’t know what Zoramem means any more. The variable light of its memory is growing weaker with every passing day, now I’m on the other side of the world, looking for work and money, as someone said whose face I do not remember.

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode no. 18/128 On Air: Budda-Bar, Nature Link to Invisible Cities: Cities and Signs. II. Zirma. “Memory is redundant: it repeats the signs so that the city starts to exist.” Category: Companies and signs. II. Verso: Ante. Hexagram from Book of Organisational Variations: 23, Po, The Shattering Trunk of Organic Plant: Jakin Position on star chart Pleiades – Right Ascension 3h 47m, Declination 24° 7′	Oil & Gas Industry – Negotiation. I only went to Zebrania once. I took myself off to the Zebra Company, whose offices stood in one of those cities, born capitals, planned under the banner of redundancy. You saw six or seven Palaces of Civilisation, I don’t know how many Castles of the Desert, yellow sand, innumerable Zebra houses with black and white windows, empty. Out on the streets many consultants, all black, and a handful of white kids with ghost writers on leads. A multiplicity of tattoo centres with designers on work experience and PRs who, in the general indifference, shouted communiqués while leaning out of the cornices. A procession of seven taxis accompanied me, not even had I been a head of state, at the petrol barons’ palace, built in the centre of the refinery, in white marble originally, but by now splattered by innumerable discharges of hydrocarbons at various stages of processing. President Zebrano, chief of the state oil company, just wanted to discuss commission, as they call it, which, from the times of the Seven Sisters, was traditionally due to him and his family on all the hydrocarbons extracted. The haggling lasted an entire week, with exhausting banquets in the various Palaces of Civilisation, Desert or Zebra, and President Zebrano who was always introducing new members of his family to me. Usually in the evening an agreement was reached, but a night-time telephone call from a parent shareholder sent us back to the drawing-board. It had to be considered again, this was the conclusion. I wondered if the postponements also helped to make out my possible night-time companions as stakeholders or opponents of the regime. On returning to the company, I found out that my other colleagues had been to Zebrania, to the Zebra Company, but hadn’t gained the same impressions. They’d only seen one Palace of Civilisation, only one consultant on the streets, black like all the others, no ghost writers on the lead nor any tattoo centres. No shouting PR. Then, as far as the shops were concerned, the capital of Zebrania is so monumental that boutiques, outlets or emporia are unthinkable under those solemn marble porticos, and of cornices there is not a trace: only architraves with mosaics and gilt capitals. I then asked myself if it’s memory which is redundant. Maybe it multiplies the signs of the world in order for it not to be smashed to smithereens. What about my time with President Zebrano? Are these memories too, or were they real in all their excesses? Or did redundancy hide a nucleus of reality, maybe the secret of lasting itself?

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode no. 19/128 On Air (Beginning): Audioslave, Be Yourself Link to Invisible Cities: Cities and signs. II. Zirma. “The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something turns up to make it stick in the mind.” Category: Companies and signs. II. Towards: Back. Hexagram from Book of Organisational Variations: 55, Feng, Abundance Trunk of Organic Plant: Jakin Position on Star Chart: Atlantis – Coordinates: One, none and a hundred thousand On Air (End of File): The Cure, Why Can't I be You	The other one, the same one. However it may be, since I returned it has been reassuring in the mornings to remember, one by one, the seven Buildings which made up the Company headquarters, in the heart of its citadel. At any moment of the day a recollection of my colleagues’ faces and gestures, their roles and the features of their work, all calm me down. While I’m here I remember the expressions, the mannerisms and movements. Some stamp yellow forms to a regular beat, others tirelessly run up and down the corridors linking the offices to the Meeting Room, carrying black-covered sets of forms from the Blue Room on the east side to the Red Room, at the far end, passing through the Purple, Green, Orange, White and Violet ones. Others are cataloguing the samples of hydrocarbons coming from the collection sites. Yet others are filling in classification forms, while some re-supply their offices with simple or multiple forms. I like moving around with the thought from one HQ area to another, bringing back names and faces. And I remember much besides, everything eccentric, in its appearance, to the life of the buildings and the Company: the cages holding big cats with glossy coats bred for the whim of the wives of top managers and the hordes of employees with mahogany skins who run intoxicated up and down the corridors of the refinery throwing papers and samples to the wind; the hot-air balloons crowding the skies above the Buildings and the railway convoys headed for the Company Citadel, loaded with women of excessive proportions fanning themselves in the humidity and lean out of the carriages onto the platforms. All told, my recollections of the Company are considerable, abnormal, excessive, exorbitant: it’s difficult to contain them. But in proportion to its incalculable being my memories strengthen and become sharp. Useless, in the final analysis, the opinion of others, who have a different memory of the Company. Everyone limits the Company in the recollection of a Building, and a Palace of Civilisation, and a single employee with skin as dark as mahogany running intoxicated and throwing forms and sets of forms to the wind. Everyone remembers seeing a tattoo centre, certainly unusual, but only one of them, while I can distinctly remember at least five, if not a couple more. And differing memories cause me no concern, another person’s memory refuting my own, because in fact it confirms it. It does not discourage me, to hear from time to time that the largest and most frightening meeting room isn’t red, and that the Building’s seven spires are in fact just a short pinnacle. I continue to remember everything with great clarity. Strengthened by a meeting. There is in fact only one person who has been to the Citadel and who remembers what I remember. It is a person who is identical to me in every way. Remembering distinctly, precisely, the appearance of all the Buildings, and the processions of ebony-skinned employees going crazy in the corridors and throwing forms and sets of forms to the wind, and railway convoys converging on the Citadel, loaded with women of excessive proportions leaning out onto the platforms from the carriages, and a meeting room entirely decked out with red furniture and red curtains, and cages containing glossy cats bred for the delectation of the wives of top managers, and an endless line of employees and their duties. Like me, he knows that everyone who has been to the Citadel does not store up the same memories. Apart from one person who, identical to us in every way, members exactly what we remember.

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode n.: 22/128 On Air: Ottmar Liebert, Sudden Shadows Link to Invisible Cities: Chapter I. Exit. “- On the day when I know all the emblems, - he asked Marco, - shall I be able to possess my empire, at last? And the Venetian answered, - Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems.” Category: Frame. I. Side: Verso. Exagram from the Book of the Organizational Changes: 14, Ta Yu The big possess Trunk of the Organic Plant: Boaz Position within the Astrogram: Empyrean	“Making management by walking around?” Bill H. Fordgates did not like it at all. He preferred to stay in his office on the top floor, next to the ficus. He sat silent, motionless, petrified behind the huge Carrara marble while listening to the managers’ long reports. They were streetwalker engineers, expert in international finance, generic flattering lawyers and blandishment professionals. The Managing Director is the person who is a real stranger to each of his employees and only through foreign eyes and ears the Corporation could make its existence manifest to Fordgates. Managers, General Managers, Presidents and Vice-Presidents reported news to the Managing Director speaking incomprehensible languages which were alien to them as well. This dull sound thickness let emerge the figures cashed by the Corporation, the names and the patronymics of the dethroned and beheaded executives, the thin dimensions of the allotted budgets which fed the operating Branches in times of crisis. But when it was the responsible for the Human Resources to make his reports, a different communication got set between the Managing Director and him. He was newly arrived, slightly lame, descendant of Sicilian emigrants and well aware of the Corporation languages. Sam (Thomas) Deckard spoke by presenting monstrous reports where prose, poetry, photography and journalism were mixed. He also used computerized image footages which he kept pulling out from his laptop files: a video-clip shot by using the company mobile, a standing out activity made on Amazon, the parallel existence lived by a General Manager in Second Life, a virtual meeting in Mpk20, displaying in front of himself the windows he had opened on the screen as if they were on an electronic chessboard. Even more often, coming back from the missions his boss had assigned him, the witty talented newly employee improvised a simulation game with his Playstation 5 which Fordgates had to interpret, connecting himself to it by wearing a crash helmet and special gloves: a company was appointed to a man who the more his age progressed the more his aspect got younger; another company was appointed to a naked hacker who went through a firewall without getting burnt; a third one to a ghost who did not read the news on the newspapers but he breathed them instead, in the shape of images, music and movement. Fordgates got over game levels which got more and more difficult, still the link between these games and the visited places remained uncertain: he never knew if Deckard wanted to represent an adventure he had experienced while he was travelling, an enterprise of the Company founder or the prophecy of a planning officer. Yet, obscure or evident as it might be, all that Deckard showed had the power of virtual reality, which cannot be forgotten or mistaken once it has been experienced. In the mind of the Managing Director the company got reflected in a desert of fleeting and interchangeable data as if they were grains of sand from which the pixels emerged which animated the characters evoked by the human resources man. Season after season, mission after mission, Deckard got to know the “companidiom”, the many idioms spoken in single Companies and the specialized dialects of each function. Now his reports were precise, detailed and there was no question or curiosity they did not answer. Nonetheless each piece of news regarding an organizational unit reminded the Managing Director of that first film segment, videogame or image fragment the unit had been appointed to by Deckard. The new data acquired a sense from that and also added to it a new meaning. Fordgates thought that maybe the Corporation is nothing but a zodiac of mind ghosts. - On the day when I know all the images, - he asked Deckard, - shall I be able to possess my empire, at last? And the Human Resources Manager: - Fordgates, do not believe it. On that day you yourself will be a virtual reality among virtual realities.

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode n.: 23/128 On Air: Pink Floyd, Speak to me Link to the Invisibile Cities: Chapter II. Intro. “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not and will never have.” Category: Frame. II. Side: Recto. Hexagram from the Book of Organizational Changes: 6, Sung , The quarrel Trunk of the organic Plant: Boaz Position within the Astrogram: Cavern of Kaminia	Stars would have sparkled magnificently in the night he was surrounded by, but, as it seemed, they were all busy doing something else. Hence Deckard was immersed in a blind vacuity, only filled with aplomb, secrecy, forgetfulness, oblivium: and thus with desire. It was the typical sailor-like and disorienting desire generated by the separation (de) from the light of the stars (sidus/sideris). And therefore it was filled with regret: desiderium uxoris defunctae (desire for the deceased wife), as one can read on a Roman tombstone. All things considered, that vacuity was filled with nostalgia, though of a strange kind: melancholic, placid, motionless, devoid of nostomaniac tension. With no warning at all, that burnished tranquillity was attacked, cracked and then ripped open by the dull beat of paddle strokes which ploughed through the primigenous water by dispensing life at the binary rhythm of a beating heart: zero-one, zero-one, zero-one. So as Leibniz extracted a calculus system from The Book of Changes, which would then become the one of informatics, in the same way the double downward blow outlined on that metamorphic Ocean the trail of a gurgle which, hanging in the void, was playing the thin music of the sneering purrs of a Chesire cat. The gurgle turned into the scream of a cut-throat bull, which became the source of the logos liquid flowing: a torrent, a meander, a river in flood, an uproarious waterfall of words pouring into the black sea wrapping up the world, which was now filled with a variety of vibrations, a croacking of music, or maybe a symphony from beyond this world performed by mouth hitting the eleven strings of a multidimensional electronic violin, producing a style in between the best Jimi Hendrix and a paraplegic Paganini. The nature of the mysterious cosmic performer began revealing itself. The voice echoed in his head with the deafening humming of a trembling and confused horde of wasps, wrapped in the smoke and giving forth a gloomy smell of death, while —seeming to have gone crazy— they sweep away their waxed factories in the desperate attempt at finding a way of escape from the bitter fire of their own hive: in so doing they screech and murmur incomprehensible “himenopteral-esque” swearwords. -Will you shut up? Will you shut up, please?, Deckard yelled at his subconscious, which was so obliging as to fall silent immediately. The Human Resources Director took the chance of trying and awakening while asking himself where the hell he happened to be. Disclosing his eyelids seemed to him a good idea. He did it, at least in the extremely reduced way he managed to, but he gained only a partial improvement of his psycho-physical condition. Prey to a slight squint, his half-opened and half-closed eyes —as if they were in the REM phase— began a private investigation of the surrounding environment, by pausing their absent-minded attention onto the torn wallpaper, the filth crust accumulated on the Venetian blinds, on the block of flats where prolific cockroach families were living: indeed he had considered that as his file collector. Every detail indicated —without any doubt— that he was in his office. He examined the shelves filled with books, with their bindings either made of parchment or Morocco leather (The Principles of Scientific Management by Taylor, the complete works by Peter Drucker, Il Libro delle Sorti by Lorenzo Spirito Gualtieri), the bronze statuettes, the small antiquarian collection, the astrolabes, the turning music stand, the sphere representing the Astrogram, the sand-glass, the music scores, the weekly stick by Mnemonia Special. He knew each detail of those objects which nevertheless seemed to be lined up strangely to him, as if they had been located that way by a mediocre descendant of Morandi who wanted to obtain an extravagant still life. And this strange arrangement made him feel a confused feeling of strangeness towards that place. He perceived the same indefinite sensation of dissolution as the one felt by those who had been faraway for many years and, while remembering it, he had transfigured it, originating this way a new cognitive model causing that the surrounding space would appear to him divided into two fields of vision: one before his eyes and another behind his shoulders. Such model defines the first field as a deception screen and the second as an elusive vacuity, still the true substance of the world. Or else, it was as if a clumsy Charmer had first made him descend to his lowest psyche levels to then have difficulties in making him return into his original status of conscience. And even the objects on his desks —an inkpot, the computer ultra-flat screen, a pair of scissors, the anvil with the hammer, the pen drive container labelled LedInc, a small afanizaniese hand bell, the mouse, the Blackberry, a shell depicting NewCo — had acquired an elusive meaning, making him stay in an unstable balance between the striking impression of having already lived that experience in the past and the cognizance that the present perception did not correspond at all to any real remembrance. While attempting at recovering his alertness he stared at Fordgates’s hologram floating gently in front of him. Thus it was not his subconscious mind to pester him with questions. It was his boss calling him from somewhere else, over there inside the Corporation. He wanted verified information, definite data, algorithms which might provide univocal brilliant flashes of inspiration about the future. With the same bitter smile Jack Nicholson had in Chinatown, Deckard addressed his look at the flickering reflex of Fordgates’s conscience, to that spectre who was not grasping the essential point. And the essential point is that the world, either the company or the individual world, is made up of worlds, of different options, of subtle influences between what is visible and what is not, between real remembrances and imagined memoirs, between the possibilities which we would have liked to realize but which we have rejected or missed or failed and what we have chosen instead, or what others have chosen on our behalf. This makes us aware of what we are: each of us is an unstable —because based on a conjecture— potential, multiple uniqueness, which nonetheless we must be consciously responsible for so as to be able to renew it every day. - You are talking about dreams, Deckard: I will not be so crazy as to prefer those blurred images to the clarity of the waking, said the hologram fluttering about. - Do as you prefer, answered Deckard, still do you remember Caesar? “Pay attention to the Ides of March”, the fortune-teller warns him. And Caesar: “Dream. Never mind. Let’s go.” We all know how it ended.

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode n.: 34/128 On Air: Billie Holiday, Solitude Link to Invisible Cities: Chapter II. Exit. “A new kind of dialogue was established among them: in their conversations , most of the time ,they remained silent and immobile.” Category: Frame. II. Side: Verso. Hexagram from the Book of Organizational Changes: 5, Hsu, The Waiting Trunk of the Organic Plant: Jakin Position within the Astrogram: Cavern of Kaminia	Miranda Sharpe, Fordgates’s assistant, was standing there, in front of his desk: she neither say nor hide anything. She might have hinted at something, at least. No way: nothing. She remained seated, as if she was waiting for some exceptional event: a pestilence, an earthquake, a grasshoppers’ invasion, who knows? Deckard ─ill-starred but persistent investigator of souls and facts ─ was wondering what that woman wanted from him. He was not able to interpret the quality of her silence. Silence is related to peace as it is with anguish or fear, or with the feeling of solitude, of liberation or obligation. Silence can be an instrument of selfishness, of withdrawal from the world, of indifference, or else it can be an extraordinary means of research, of introspection, of self-exploration, of meditation, of listening, of confession, of commitment with oneself. Silence can be the real beginning of the change of one’s own way of being and acting towards our neighbor. This is the silence which opens, the full silence, the silence which imagines. Silence can be extremely articulated and talkative, like the silence of young people who prefer to speak through their outfits, consumers’ goods, objects or ways of decorating their own bedrooms, by using an assembling technique which constantly changes and which adults cannot generally understand. Moreover, silence can be an escape from the impossibility to confess fear, repugnance, hatred, discouragement, desolation, disappointed love, generic or specific unhappiness. If no tears are dropped, if neither sighs nor even screams are made, if no curses or recriminations are said, no complaints are reported, maybe evil can be eliminated, melancholy can be forgotten, suffering can be eluded, the existence of a god can be ignored ─a god who would be cruel instead, if he existed ─ envy can be chased away, the triviality of life can be defeated together with the meaninglessness of dying. What is not said does not happen. To be is to be said…. In short, silence, the nature of silence, depends on the mood, on the character, on the age, on a potential complex and on situations. In the present situation, Deckard ─after trying to approach somebody by using chosen forms of greetings purposely ─ could exclude to be in front of the silence of a person who trembles, turns pale and remains dumb as if she was feeling the panic strangling her throat. That woman seemed to be alien to fear or intrepidity, or to any other feeling whatsoever. The typical standard of women I usually bump into, thought Deckard. Besides, during the Extraordinary Board Of Directors held in Magonza some years before, it is true that the Corporation had admitted that women do have souls: though it was a resolution taken for one vote in favor only. Anyway, it is true that they may be brunette and sophisticated, ginger so as to make anyone dizzy or blonde with icy looks, but they all share one thing: they cannot be trusted. Pretty or ugly, all women are total liars. Women equal infidelity, mockery and pain. Maybe even death. And Miranda was the last woman left in the Corporation. All the remaining employees were men, including the female figures he saw wandering about, who belonged to the savage old male world. This situation was extremely clear to him, yet it was not simple to solve the ambiguity of her non-speaking attitude without revealing emotions. Was it a silence who rejected communication, a passive tacere ─choose not to speak─ ? Or was it a silence in a listening attitude, an active silere ─choose to remain silent─ which left him the option of the first move: the opening of a new contact, which would be different from the usual forms of dialogue? In the first hypothesis, that woman’s silence was maybe an exercise of power, connected to her possession of an essential knowledge which she wanted to keep concealed though, so as to determine an unequal balance of potential between them. Her silence was meant to create anguish, aimed at making him regress to a childish, defenseless condition, so that she would then be able to manipulate him, humiliate him, exploit, squash him and to escort him ─motionless─ into a secret pavilion of hers after clamming his mouth up. The silent honey-made moon seemed to suggest this, with her face concealed for three quarters by an Arabic veil of sugary clouds: from the window, she was looking at him with her eyes dripping tears. And everybody knows that when the moon cries her sweetish tears, “each small flower cries with her, as if it was for some violated chastity”. That was a bad sign which gave access through the window to the impossible eco of the silence coming from the outdoor. A silence which was made of other endless windows, either closed or empty, and which was entering the whole office to fill it up to its last angles and interstices. That same silence threaded its way along the corridors, climbed up the walls of the conference rooms which were empty at those desert hours; it spread on the polished and naked desks, it wrapped up the computers which were sleeping now and standing like horses do after they had stopped chafing at the bit with their keen thought efforts. Meanwhile, the Assistant’s silence was overflowing outside the office, flooding the buildings, the city, the universe, soaking both the light and the shadow. But Miranda’s silence might also be a silence practised with the purpose of making emerge something unknown to both of them: a silence which was still beyond, or before, or beside a shared knowledge. Maybe what life was about to give him that moment was something which very few are allowed to stare at with wide-open eyes, like the most dazzling heart of the sun. And maybe silence was in the heart of this sun. If this was it, he had better crown that inexplicable icon as his queen and leave together, silently, to chase the night, by steering their route with her around the world. He stared at her inaccessible face: the face of the marble, of the sphinx and of the enigma. He had directed his question along paths which that inscrutable mask had made inaccessible. His request was moving, creeping temptingly and flatteringly. At the same time he was aware that if unicorns may be deceived by trees, bears by mirrors, elephants by chasms and lions by unicorns, human beings cannot resist those who appeal to their vanity. Yet the question was wrapping up along the knowledge tree which refused to offer its fruits. Did the colleague think that silence was a way of having a conversation? Or else was it a mere custom in a Wittgeinstein style? They remained immobile, waiting.

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode n.: 35/128 On Air: Joshua Redman, Wish Link to Invisible Cities: Chapter III. Intro. “I have neither desires nor fears,” the Khan declared, “and my dreams are composed either by my mind or by chance.” Category: Frame.III. Side: Recto. Hexagram from the Book of Organizational Changes: 49, Ko, The Change Trunk of the Organic Plant: Jakin Position within the Astrogram: Empyrean	Deckard remembered that Bill H. Fordgates had become aware of how alike the firms he was telling him about were, as if the passage from one to another was nothing else but the circling around ─in a kaleidoscope─ of pieces which are always the same: the customer care, the sustainability, the quality, the human resources ... They were challenging each other at Tetris, with the silent ancient passion of Moctezuma and Cortés. Their gazes fixed the laptop screens. Each of them was nestled in his position at the opposite sides of the headquarter roof-garden which was entirely cabled for the Wi-Max connection. They were aware that the game represented the real relationship between them as well as that their personal destiny, and the Corporation’s, depended on the outcome of that game. - Eureka!, Fordgates had keyed in suddenly, by using the videogame chat modality. Everything resides in the weaving, in the music score, in the architectonic drawing. Management is made up of elements to assemble, like the silk threads of a carpet to sew together; like the musical notes to compose in a symphony; like the weights, volumes and dimensions of a bridge. Needless to say, these elements must generate a coherent whole every time. Yet it is not them, as themselves, which define the uniqueness of a firm, but the ever varying way they fit together instead. Therefore, from now onwards, I will suggest the schemes and patterns to disassemble and rebuild by combining and varying their internal structures. You will check that everything connects to them. - The Corporation shape, had answered Deckard, does not belong to a logic order, but to an intuitive one instead. First it must be carried out, and then, only afterwards, it must be ordered, because the shape resides within its setting up route. - And so, which is this form? Had retorted Fordgates out of patience. - It is the one which is built as time goes by, as the warp of human projects becomes visible ─ jointly with their persistency─ beginning from the desire which has generated them. - I do not have desires. I have strategies. They are based on a formula, on a given combination of products and markets; on the choice of entering new business areas, of leaving the old ones and of expanding the present position. - Prescriptive rationality does not suffice: the Corporation takes a shape which is moulded also by the desires of those who write its history every day. Also, desires do change along the ever different evolving of the moment. They generate a changing geography, the geography of innovation and creativity, which does not coincide with a flat image of the world. - What happens to the genius loci then? - Places do matter because each of them is a whole, unique set of experiences, competences, languages, liasons, shared prospects and share capital. The reliance on this context makes a region and a firm, or a Branch of the Corporation in that region, more or less genetically prone to generate creativity, more or less rich in a unique kind of its own creativity. And then each creative centre must connect with the others, by sharing its own specific know how while getting hybridized at the same time. In so doing the Corporation acquires its own consistency stemming from the twofold horizon made up of past and future, an horizon within which it places itself. And it is a real horizon indeed, because of its mobility.

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode n.: 36/128 On Air: Jevetta Steelf, Calling You (From Bagdad Cafè Soundtrack) Link to Invisible Cities: City & Desire. V. Zobeide. “The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.” Category: Firms and desire. V. Side: Recto. Hexagram from the Book of Organizational Changes: 59, Huan, Dispersion Trunk of the Organic Plant: Boaz Position within the Astrogram: Quadrans Muralis Constellation – During the Moon transit, in the night of 3rd January	Food industry – Organization The Sleep Angels bestowed on a Yemenite to dream of the holy beverage having the power to keep him awake and make him pray longer. That very night, a Brazilian danced a wonderful samba, while he was sleeping, after he had sipped the same brew. A very slim Abyssinian man and an obese German woman declared each other eternal love in front of the vending machine providing the same beverage in the hall of a dream motel. The following day, the four of them were chatting by chance on the Internet when they discovered they had dreamt of the same dream. They decided to produce the dark liquid providing ecstasy together. They named it Bagdad Caffè. The media from all over the world announced the advent of a revolutionary organization, using manufacturing processes which had never been tried before, applying daring management criteria and logistics which had been reckoned impossible until then. Being part of the Bagdad Caffè became a mythical ambition for any manager. But the Wake Demons soon imposed their final procedures, the cult of efficiency, the dogma of standards. The vision dissolved and the Bagdad Caffè became similar to many others. The offices and the factories acquired the appearance of an incomprehensible labyrinth which was covered mechanically every day. And even today, the newly employees are still hanging around in depressing rooms and luxuriant plantations, which are now only visible in the old posters covering the dusty walls of the corridors — it has been years since the cultivations on the tablelands in South America were sold to an investment company— , while wondering how a legend like the Bagdad Caffè had possibly been born out of that hell.

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode no.: 40/128 On Air: Keith Jarret, The Koln Concert Link to Invisible Cities: The thin cities. III. Armilla. “The water pipes rise vertically where the houses should be and they branch out where the floors should be: a forest of tubes finishing with taps, showers and siphons…..” Category: The Thin Companies. III. Towards: Forwards. Hexagram from the Book of Organisational Variations: 29, K'an, the Water – the Abyssal Trunk of Organic Plant: Jakin Position on the star chart: 11 light-years from the Earth, in the cosmic dust of Epsilon Eridani, a star around which the planet Vulcan, and the mother star of Baleyworld revolve, which then changes its name to Comporellen. The space station Babylon 5 is in orbit around it	Liquid identity. After a lengthy crossing of a dusty and desert-like landscape, you arrive at the Commercial Port of Liquor. A place of liquid, without a drop of water. A place with wooden bridges spanning metaphysical canals as in a painting by Giorgio De Chirico. The inhabitants move lightly through the streets of the village of an Andalusian whiteness, and appear and disappear like lights in the night. Men, women and children all present indistinct outlines, as if it were difficult to set fire to their single and singular images. It hasn’t rained for centuries, or maybe here it’s never rained at all. The air burns the traveller’s throat. You look for water, you dream of wells, you imagine rivers which may once have cut their way through the desert. Anyone arriving cannot survive and must leave again immediately if he doesn’t want to die of dehydration: and yet men have been here for time immemorial. This is the mystery of Liquor. The minimum conditions of survival in this city are not clear: in any other part of the world you would have to drink, to quench your thirst, in order to survive. Not here. As if the inhabitants lived in a condition of mental liquidity. Those who live in Liquor do not need to drink, since they know the existential condition of the liquid identity. Even though dust reigns as the product of a sudarium, relations have been liquid in Liquor for centuries: everyone meets everyone else in a permanent flux of emotions and experiences which are lived with intensity, but immediately forgotten. When you meet someone, you don’t know if he has already been a part of your life or not. Stories are intertwined, they overlap and they lose themselves in the dimension of amnesia. People’s identities melt into the amniotic liquid of the Port, which occasionally gives back personal fragments comparable to the finest sand produced from the pieces of shells which go to create the most spectacular islands in the world. Fragments of identities which cannot be reconstructed or remembered and which contain a fulminating intensity of momentary, unique and unrepeatable experiences. This permanent veil of biographical dust is thus created, which does not turn into sediment or calcify. Thus Liquor becomes the goal of meetings which multiply the collective emotions but lose themselves in personal memory: whereas everything is recorded and filed in the boundless and inaccessible memory of the Port, which records names and recounts biographies. In the underground passages accessible only to the Captain – it seems to have been the same one for hundreds of years (some say he’s only a dummy) – the incarnated memory of Liquor and its population is housed. Its history, the events which have shaped its collective life, the origin and construction of buildings: high towers made of clay which look like houses in Saana, in the land where the Queen of Saba ruled. Thus Liquor has become the place of liquid identity, life flows, disembodied stories, bodies without memories. But at the time, this great archive, this place which never forgets, inexorably catalogues the lives of all. Only power can read. The Captain is certain he is keeping everything under control in this way, knowing every detail of everyone’s life: but in reality he isn’t controlling anything, since people forget their identity and are therefore can be neither predicted nor blackmailed. They experience everything for the first time and their brains are a clean slate on which you can write as you can on water.

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode no.: 43/128 On Air (Beginning) : Santana&McLoughlin, Love, Devotion & Surrender Link to Invisible Cities: Cities and exchange. II. Cloe. “At Cloe meetings, seductions, embraces, orgies are sued up, without lifting a finger, almost without looking up.” Category: The thin companies. III. Towards: Forwards. Hexagram from Book of Organisational Variations: 27, I, Il Support Trunk of Organic Plant: Jakin Constellation of El Dorado – At ten days’ walk from R Doradi, near to a meteor shower called the Paitites On Air (End of File): The Cure, Just Like Heaven	Paradise. Odara has become a real gold mine. Its shares are flying as high as swallows over the Nasdaq. Each morning hundreds of young people coming from the best universities of the most distant countries in the world, meet on the lawn in the sunny park surrounding its headquarters in the hope of being chosen, of being able to have a work interview, and of entering the richest company in the world. Sitting at the feet of the red flowery stains of the flamboyant, these kids scan the ivory towers. They patiently wait for the majestic gateway to open its doors. They spend hours waiting for the arrival of the five Angel Virgins. They carry on waiting without ever realising just how long. The moment lasts forever. The catchy rhythm of the Olodum drums stirs the heart. The gateway opens, and here they are. They gracefully descend the marble staircase barefoot, robed in white linen clothes. They reach the lawn with light steps, as fresh as green shoots and ready for the daily harvest. The five virgins, with pure smiles and peach skin, pass through the restless hordes of examinees, dancing seductively and chastely yet subtly lecherous amongst their sighs. Full of kind energy, their dark, lively eyes exchange glances with the admiring youngsters and carefully measure the features of their souls. Only five candidates will be deemed worthy of the bow of the Iabas. Only five candidates will be taken by these beautiful girls and led through Odara’s ivory gates. One for each continent of the earth. Each day Odara takes on five new employees. Undisputed talents, great hearts as serene as Baha skies. After an accurate training program the young people chosen become Guiding Angels. Their task will be wonderful and terrible. They will watch, with their Avatar, the choices, the anxieties and the joys of five of the millions of exclusive clients of Odara – the greatest Spiritual Web Concierge Provider in the world – specialising in the supply of spiritual support and comfort to those with lots of money but feeling irremediably afflicted by a devouring solitude. To those who spend a sleepless night surfing the web. To those who are ready to spend two thousand dollars a month for a subscription enabling them to exchange dreams and anguish with a virtual friend. Axe’.

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode n.: 50/128 On Air: Beyonce Knowles and Mekhi Phifer, The Last Great Seduction Song (From: Carmen, MTV's Hip Hopera Soundtrack) Link to Invisible Cities: Thin Cities. IV. Sofronia. “And so every year the day comes when the workmen remove the marble pediments, lower the stone walls, the cement pylons, take down the Ministry, the monument, the docks, the petroleum refinery, the hospital, load them on trailers…” Category: Thin Firms. IV. Side: Recto. Hexagram from the Book of Organizational Changes: 1, Ch'ien, The Creative Trunk of the Organic Plant: Boaz Position within the Astrogram: North-western Area of the Constellation of the Toucan	Technology, Finance and Marketing. Everybody calls on the phone anybody at all times, and nobody manages to speak to anybody. Calls keep on wandering up and down the automatic research circuits, on flapping the wings like butterflies which have gone crazy, without managing to thread a free line. At most they manage to rest on an answering machine. Until…. “So, this is my proposal. And I don’t want to boast, but it is an excellent proposal…Not only is this the best that I could think of in such a little time…however one knows that time does not matter in the end because the best ideas always come unexpectedly, although they are the result of great experience: and this is for sure, because they do not come to mind to everybody…Anyway, as regards the idea for the name, SofroniaTech(k), what do you think of it?....No, better, if it was possible, if we managed to convince them, I would only make Tech(k): it is an essential name, clean, piercing as a spindle, but it is also complex, it has great meaning behind itself. It is immediate but at the same time you need some reasoning to get the jist of it……But now I shall explain to you how I got to that, and everything will look clearer. In the end we are talking about a new technology, aren’t we? And with the name they have, Sofronia, it is difficult to think of technology. It is also a name for women, something in between the name of a Scottish princess and a farmer, or maybe of a saint virgin and martyr. Anyway, it is known that women are not good at technology. Yet it is a beautiful name, it has its musical appeal, and music in this case is also part of the business…Therefore the simplest thing, I thought, was to add this small attachment to the name, “tech”, which stands for technology. This is clear: everybody immediately understands this, so at once it becomes self explanatory. Additionally it also has a musical rhythm, but more like a syncopated rhythm, I would say rap, which therefore creates a beautiful contrast with Sofronia, that instead might be a symphony by Mozart, rather by Verdi, Bellini, La Traviata, Aida, Sofronia… Yeah, yeah, you are right: I am getting to the point….Do you want me to explain why I chose the mathematical parenthesis with the letter “k”? My dear, this has been the real stroke of genius! Because the brief, or to tell the truth, the slip of paper which you passed me with the two strategic lines said “the name must contain the new message of a strong, solid firm with a notable past, which is opening towards new business sectors “at the frontier”….Yes, for sure, it really read like this: “at the frontier”. No, I do not know where I have put the slip of paper: maybe I have thrown it away. However, trust me: I have learnt it by heart. No, I do not really know what they meant by this story of the frontier. Well, you could have asked them if you had any doubts on that. It is you who spoke to the Marketing…Anyway, as for “at the frontier” I personally thought they meant they want to develop the foreign trade, you know, the export, and mainly with Asian countries, which are those going stronger within the global market: China, India… This is what everybody is doing then…Therefore, the stroke of genius is the following: Tek, teak wood, which, as you well know, is a valuable wood, a tree which comes exactly from the Asian countries, I think; and the trunk can reach big dimensions. Some time ago I have been to Thailand to go trekking and there were hundreds of very colourful toucans perched on each of these teak trees. Anyway, it is a very robust wood, but at the same time it is also very flexible and can be used to make anything: furniture, objects and even houses….“What has it got to do with it?” You haven’t understood it, yet? The durability, the thickness of time, the value of making things right, the hand-crafted tradition….don’t you think? It is the dimension of the durability which combines in a perfectly harmonic way with the speed of technological changes, the capability of changing along with persistency, of keeping pace with time, of giving an original interpretation of the advanced present by conjugating the past and the future….Yes, of course I have read it somewhere. No, I do not want to explain it myself, it is you who will lead the meeting, won’t you? What did you say? Is it an acquisition? Have they been acquired by a Japanese firm? Well, it is even better, don’t you agree? Then it is really perfect. But how is it possible that you never get it? I have just said that teak wood comes from Asia. Therefore it seems as if we had thought of it beforehand. And then everybody knows that Japanese people love nature, tradition, rituals and think that technology has a soul. Therefore it will not be difficult to them to understand this story of the time jump…There is only one problem: it is maybe better to make Sofronia disappear, then. Let’s make only Tech(k), what do you think?...”

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episodio n.: 52/128 On Air: John Lennon, Nobody Told Me Link to Invisibles Cities: Le città e gli scambi. III. Eutropia. “Their life renews herself at every moves.” Category: The Company and the Exchanges. III. Reverse side: front. Hexagram from the Book of Organisational Variations: 7, Shih, The Army Trunk of the Organic Plant: Boaz Position on the star chart: Constellation of Argo Boat – Down There, On The Right	We are such stuff the music is made on – B Side “Nobody told me there’d be days like these/strange days indeed – strange days indeed”. “I see you’re enjoying yourself, Art. Heaven helps the light-hearted ,” I said, bursting into the office. “Oh Deckard, it’s you”, said the man on the other side of the door with a start. Raising his eyes from the papers spread out in front of him he said, “I can’t seem to get that John Lennon tune out of my head …”. That often happened to Arturo Bandini. Not the startled bit. The singing, is what I mean. This time, however, was different from the other times when he would play along with a guitar, as he might do over the weekend, perhaps with a band (The Primitives) he had put together with the R&D Manager. This time, he told me, the song popped in his head just as his eyes fell on the new Industrial Project for the Bank of Eutropia, which had been annexed the previous year by the Trading & Banking Division of the Corporation. This last merger made it “his” bank, as it became the first national credit institution within the sector of the regional area, Italy, to which he had just recently become manager and of which he had been an author in the deal. It couldn’t be said, after all, that that Project was much different from all the others that came before it or those that would come after it: all bank mergers looked the same, not the least because of the consultancy firms that contribute to the drafting of these plans are always the same. But now it was his turn, it was “his” bank’s turn … And John Lennon kept playing in his head: “Everybody’s talking and no one says a word”. That’s how it was, I thought flipping through the 128 pages of slides that Bandini had on the table. In the end, the message that came out was quite simple: “Kick up a hullabaloo” … precisely like the commanding staff of Ferdinand’s Bourbonist navy. I smirked like Harrison Ford at that recollection from the profound South of Italy where I had my roots. When you wanted to give a big show of efficiency to visiting dignitaries on the ships … all one had to do was move the sailors from prow to stern, port to starboard, from the deck to the hold (and vice versa) nonstop. “Kick up a hullabaloo”, and on with the shuffling of the top management in (apparently?) a random way from one role to another, and with a domino effect on the rest of the troops ….. “I wonder”, I pondered out loud, “if the big wigs from marketing have thought up a name for the new bank.” These days it was very trendy to have a name with a classic origin, latin or greek: and most likely, the experts couldn’t believe their luck in finding a name that expressed the beauty, or better yet, the goodness of change, given that “tropos” can derive from two Greek words which in the first case means “the way of doing things” and in the other means “change”. Then, with a prefix like “eu”, which means “good, goodness” … it seemed the perfect name, the squaring of the circle. As if to say that the merger had placed us in a parallel universe where the organization’s structures, the financial resources, the human capital, in other words all the tangible and intangible goods filling every space, changed quality and dimension, while the flowing of time is filled by case histories of success springing up and in turn creating other virtuous cycles … “Right,” Bandini replied, “and who knows if they’ve taken into account the second law of thermodynamics, according to which every time that matter is transformed into energy, a part of it degrades losing its ability to produce work. It doesn’t take much to pass from Eutropia to Entropy, the state in which matter is at its utmost disorder, and there’s no more movement… In short, death…...” “Death in a bank? You American-Italians are always so negative. Like in the novel of that fellow countryman of yours … Ponteggio, Pontiggia, what’s his name…” “No, no, it’s not a matter of being pessimists … and you can cut it out with the fake soothsaying about Pontiggia, that would be like confusing Robert Frost with Robert Freeze …. Anyway we all know your maternal grandfather’s last name was Del Cardo”. I gave him a spiteful look; what a meddlesome busybody. After all Renato, my grandfather’s grandfather was of French origin and had Italianized his last name to Delle Carte, not Del Cardo. As for the merger he was dead right. In these Plans, Bandini said, all the while humming, “Everybody’s running and no one makes a move”: and yet, invariably what came through was “Everyone’s a winner and nothing left to lose”. That’s to say, potentially everyone would have something to gain from the operation – the market, the customers, the bank personnel – the synergies of both revenue and expenses between the two former institutes would carry the new entity towards a perfect world, towards a “brighter and better future”. However it wasn’t usually that way, in fact it was hardly ever that way in any of the previous bank mergers: “Everybody’s flying and never touch the sky”. Perhaps this time would be different: but as for him, personally, he very much doubted it. Nevertheless, as a good film buff, Arturo caught at least one pleasant aspect of the merger, although a completely secondary one: “There’s a place for us in the movies/you just gotta lay around”. Naturally, to handle Bank Eutropia’s new ad campaign they hired his favourite director; winner of numerous film awards. It had already been announced that the actors of the television ads would be selected among the bank employees. Although maybe this decision was made in light of the expected cost cutting of all those activities that were “not strictly tied to commercial operations.” And yet “life is not like the one you see at the motion pictures: life is a lot more difficult”, I remember hearing some place or other. No truth was more obvious. “Nobody told me there’d be days like these/strange days indeed – most peculiar, mama”, Bandini sang while I got back to my own work.

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode n.: 57/128 On Air (Beginning): Editors, Spiders Link to Invisible Cities: Cities & Names.I. Aglaura. “[…]but what was bizarre has become usual,[…]” Category: Firms and names I. Side: Verso. Hexagram from the Book of Organizational Changes: 60, Chien, The Limitation Trunk of the Organic Plant: Jakin Position within the Astrogram: Sky of Io - At 0,001 Parsec from the Imaginary Stellar Object Aamon On Air (End of File): The Cure, Never Enough	“If time has to end, it can be described, instant by instant, “ Mr. Palomar thinks, “and each instant, when described, expands so that its end can no longer be seen.” He decides that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think of being dead. At that moment, he dies.” To become a member of the big community of Selfya ─which has been for years at the top of the most desired working places in the world ranked by «Fortune»─ what you need is a self-portrait. One must take a picture of oneself, alone, by using any technique, as long as the result is a sincere and essential self-portrait. The image is to be sent via Internet, with no need to indicate anything else: no user name, no key words, no bank data, no personal or biographic data. You just need a photograph to start interacting with the firm and with the other people being part of it. Once the photograph has been sent, anybody can hope to join to his/her group of work. However this passage does not guarantee to get employed or the chance to earn something. The candidates’ self-portraits disappear in the web as soon as they are sent, but nobody knows exactly what happens to these photographs. Someone maintains that Selfya’s heart is a processor, an hyper-complicated device (a scanner), equipped with a software named BPR, which can retrieve an incredible quantity of data on a given person from images: age, tastes, history, future, desires, illnesses, fears, ambitions and even the whole of his/her life instant by instant. Both the life other people see and talk about, and the life which really exists —even though a little less— replacing the images and the story. The admission to Selfya is by election, the selection takes place according to very complex and mysterious processes. The one and only certainty is that not everybody can enter, even if Selfya’s detractors fear that behind this philosophy hides the desire of an expansion beyond any control: even if you are told that you cannot be employed, one day you will be asked to and you will not have any choice left. Up today thousands and thousands of people are employees at Selfya, even if they do not know what their commitment really is. They have neither an office nor a desk, but they can stay at home or travel wherever they want. They do not receive any programs, they do not see strategic indications: the only thing they must do is dedicating themselves to Selfya full time, refusing any other job proposal. All employees are paid regularly and receive a salary which increases constantly, in proportion to the country where they reside, and allows them to live with all the comforts they want. The slogan by Selfya is “Give us your self”, which its adversaries mangle as “Give up your self”. Such adversaries maintain that it is harmful to devote oneself exclusively to an entity which absorbs and cancels any minute of a person’s existence. Yet those who work at Selfya consider this choice as an amazing abundance of time, a precious chance to have time only and exclusively for themselves. And this is how Selfya is taking control over the job market, with such a quickness as to leave dumb its adversaries. But who is the real Adversary of Selfya? Temporary job agencies? Head hunters? The firms on the web? Advisors? Research institutes? No firm is really an adversary of Selfya, because Selfya is the only working place where the job does not exist. The Big Adversary of Selfya is only Time, each Time, all Times.

IN-VISIBLE SCORECARD Episode no: 97/128 On air : Muddy Waters, Hoochie Coochie Man Link to Invisible Cities: Cities and the name. V. Irene. “Irene is the city which you see standing out from the brow of the plateau at the time when the lights come on.” Category: Companies and the name. V. Towards: Back. Hexagram from Book of Organisational Variations: 17 Sui, To Follow Trunk of Organic Plant: Jakin Position on star chart: Constellation of the Clock – in the Machine of Anticitera	The Big Factory. By leaning out and going beyond the mountains, and the surrounding lakes, down at the foot of the plateau you can see what a local singer-songwriter has called ‘the valley of traffic lights where telephones grow’. A phantasmagorical place where all of those people living on the edge see the ghosts of everything they haven’t got and the allegories of their dreams. They advance after dusk in an attempt to give shape to what they don’t have and substance to their desires. They return at dawn. Worn out by their illusory pursuits, they look at the changing land. The factory appears where traffic lights and telephones are needed to regulate goods and men going from one warehouse to another, assembling screws, bolts, chairs, sofas, ham, drugs… Everything necessary, or seeming to be necessary, for humans to live. People used to think that producing was concentrated in large spaces. As orderly as barracks where armies were quartered. One writer born in those parts called it the Big Factory. The first rays of the sun which pierce the smoke show a myriad of small factories where a multitude work who, once inside the Big Factory, were described as classes. Nowadays they are nameless. The only name they have comes from the goods they transport and help to put together by wandering from one factory to another. Some have tried to count them: places and multitudes. Some say they’ve counted more than 200,000 factories, those who’ve climbed higher to get a better view talk of more than 400,000, 500,000… And people dream that the number working exceeds 2 million. As many as an army; but they aren’t that. Because there’s no common home, no common flag, and because in counting them it is difficult to distinguish what was easy to distinguish inside the Big Factory: the boss and the worker. One single, the others plural. Today the plural, indistinct between those who have, or as it used to be said, those who control the means of production, and those who make, characterises the open-air factory. When they reach the bow from where they can observe, the old people explain how once it was all more orderly. The factories were separated from the village and everyone knew when to work and when to live. At the end of the day, before the night is lit up by traffic lights, what was an enormous anthill of producers changes its appearance. It becomes the infinite city. Alongside the workshops with their lights there are one-family houses with small gardens which are only a memory of the green spaces of yesteryear, inhabited by garden gnomes put there to guard what isn’t there any more. Then they peer even more intently from the brow of the hill to see whether, in this continuum of village, factory and city, three places in one, you can see and distinguish the multitude: whether it lives, speaks, communicates. But all stay inside their houses, many even in the warehouses and enormous places called hypermarkets where they’ve now rebuilt the squares which used to be found in the town centre. Only then can anyone following things from on high really understand that the territory consists of a gigantic city without limits which is made up of three towns in one. By night, the traffic lights and telephones turn it into a truly phantasmagorical place; by day, the Big Factory in the open air is a hyper-place where everyone is lost and shipwrecked in bitter infinity.