ONE: A THIRST FOR ADVENTURE These three dead months, devoid of what I have come to regard as adventure. When I have painstakingly drawn and encrypted the treasure map and gone, proudly yet anonymously, through the ritual of delivery, there is a period of waiting. Long days, their minutes ticking ominously like an unexploded bomb until I am delivered of a new letter of marque and will embark on a new mission. In the absence of adventure a pirate is completely unmoored. I hold the climactic final moment of the last mission in my mind and tell it to myself over and over in order to keep the thunder in my blood. Swords were blazing - in a manner of speaking - I remind myself. I exhibited fine footwork as fancy as anything called dance. A certain amount of clever words were hurled at those I would vanquish. Oh, for a few of these fine moments again. The old part of Tbilisi reflects, more than any other, the crowded, teeming life of this busy trading centre. Overhanging the banks of the Mtkvari (known in Russian as the Kura) the houses perch on top of one another like a circus acrobatic troupe. If one goes, they'll surely all go. With haphazard steps, rickety, canopied balconies and narrow, tall facades, they climb higher and higher up from the tree-lined cobbled streets. The more durable ones have curving wrought iron balconies, reached by decorated spiral stairs. Equally elegant are the wooden houses that lean towards one another like drunks trying to keep their balance. (Source unknown) An atmosphere of moth-eaten grandeur permeated the courtyard of the grand old tattered old Hotel Rustavelli. Outdoor armchairs covered by carpets were pulled up to the curly iron tables ringing a fountain, with fire trees standing beside them for warmth. The vegetation was rainforest rich but drooping, as if it were drunk. It was an early winter morning and a pink halo was still cast around the feeble mouse grey sunlight that would be rolled aside in an hour or two by the heavy clouds and thunder and expansive lightning that contribute to the drunken sailor sea tossed mood in what is still considered a pirate town, but not in the costume drama way the tourists think of pirates. It is a city in which, within the Bravo District at least, you will still find a great pageant of crooks and gangsters, idealists, statesmen, criminals, diplomats and geniuses. Rats dance along the power lines and bask in the momentary light which has no warmth. By afternoon the sky will be an upside down ocean and Bravo Avenue will resemble a partially submerged shipwreck, with all of the outdoor displays by all of the antique stores filling with water and threatening to float away. May I offer you complimentary use of our newslink? You may use the password Albatross, Tuesday, said the tall pale rope thin young man who had walked at an eager pace that was almost running, dragging a rat-bitten and inexpertly patched communications cord to one of the tables. He tied a knot in the cord around the leg of one of the outdoor armchairs. Thank you, you're so kind murmured the recently arrived hotel guest whose name was Gallifrey. She smiled not at Au but at a point just north of him where water splashed in the fountain. Gallifrey spoke pure Georgian as beautifully as if it were Shakespeare, but slowly and deliberately as if she'd not spoken it for a long time. There was a lucid fragility about her, a paleness as if all life had been systematically drained from her. She appeared so self absorbed that no-one else was altogether real to her. She rubbed her hands across her eyes, registering only random details, aware of a leaf that had fallen onto her table, aware of the frosted glass double doors into the main hotel, fixated on a rat scowling at something in the fountain, but completely unaware of the other tables, the other hotel guests, the courtyard, the Bravo District and the city of Tbilisi beyond the hotel and its garden. She plugged the communications cord into her engraved silver filigree exobrain, a piece of old outdated beautiful technology re-configured with the newest operating system and began writing again, with a stylus fashioned from a late 20th century fountain pen. Georgian is a difficult language to learn. Though it shares the same basic parts of speech as most Indo-European languages, it uses distinctive word formations with moiphemes, and a complex set of rules governs its verbs. Foreigners are mostly struck by the tongue twisting cluster of consonants that are present with dazzling variety: Mtkvari (the Georgian name for the River Kura), brtskinvale (brilliant) or the sentence that foreigners are most often asked to say for the amusement of their Georgian friends: Baqaqi tskalshi kikinebs (the frog is croaking in the water). The Georgian Republic. Roger Rosen I recall an episode of Dr WHO where a pirate planet materialises around a host planet and drains it of all its energy and minerals. Pirates are written in the margins between old and new worlds. It is possible to regard the pirate as an explorer, a fearless dreamer sent Out into new worlds to bring back strange ill-gotten artifacts, an explorer with an outlaw spirit. In a hundred years theorists and psychologists and those who assess history will have fashioned studies that claim to explain all that we do, but they will be misguided for ours is an instinct and intuition that decays and dies if examined. Our mission is to write the first maps of new worlds and bring back representative artifacts of pertinent cultural value for those who would otherwise be all at sea in these oceans of new thought. Not unnaturally, our contemporaries fail to appreciate the romance of our mission, but I say, is it theft to spirit away a thought that has been kept out in the open, and is it not merely cunning and timing to take this thought, transform it and profit from it? We live only for the danger running through our blood and forfeit the stillness and sweetness of quiet lives? In the 1857 Treaty of London, piracy was condemned. In 1950 Air Piracy was condemned. Today the ascendant nations and corporations are masters not of land and material resources but of ideas and technologies. The global network of telecommunications can carry more valuable goods than all the world's supertankers. Wealth comes not to the rulers of slave labour but to the liberators of human creativity, not to the conquerors of land but to the emancipators of mind. Paul Davies. "The Mater Myth" U.S. Panel to Focus On High Tech Piracy: Computer networks are hardly the first technological challenge to copyright holders. Decades ago, the introduction of photocopying machines as well as audio tape recorders raised copyright concerns. But those technologies hindered would-be pirates in important ways: copies could be time consuming and expensive to make, and of lower quality than the original. However, modern digital equipment - which converts text, pictures and sound into a series of zeroes and ones that are read by a computer - can be used to easily and speedily reproduce works ranging from sound recordings to database indexes, making copies that are virtually identical to the original. July 7, 1994 NY Times Gallifrey's mind drifted, she put down the pen and stared off into space. Abruptly she lifted the pen again and wrote, ACCESS.ALBATROSS, TUESDAY.F. "ADVENTURE" - "PIRACY" - "TREASURE" - COMMAND. DISPLAY FINDS DAILY IN FILE: PIRATE'S LOG. She shook the exo-brain vigorously from side to side, thumping one corner to activate its send function. She was searching out of habit, not knowing what use she'd make of any entries that came up, it was a reflex action to follow several threads at once and wait for a pattern to emerge. "You discover treasures where others see nothing unusual" Fortune Cookie I realised I had what Robert Graves calls adrenaline poisoning. You get speeded up on danger, and addiction to danger becomes obscene, narcissistic. It was time to call a halt to all that. Gita Mehta, Vanity Fair They plundered and pillaged on the Caribbean seas, claiming 'tender young males' as their booty, but ultimately they were saved from the hangman's noose by the babies in their bellies. They were women pirates, contemporaries ofBlackbeard and Captain Kidd. They too sailed under the skull and crossbones of the Bloody Flag, but unlike the men, they were all but forgotten by history. Their names were Mary Read and Anne Bonny. They dressed like male pirates, swore like male pirates, even duelled like male pirates. Read and Bonny were among a haif dozen or so female pirates recorded in history. They were never as powerful as Ching Shih, a woman who controlled 800 junks in 19th century Asia, but they may well have been as fierce. New York Times "The Sea Hawk "(1924) Falsely accused of murder, betrayed, enslaved, and brutalised, Sir Oliver Tressilian denounces Christianity, and the former pirate embraces his former enemies, the Moors, and becomes "the scourge of Chnstendom." Sir Oliver Tressilian is now Sakr-el-Bahr, the Sea Hawk. The Sea Hawk featured four full scale galleons. Once in 1947 the radio announcer Henry Morgan asked parents to step out of the room, then advised children to run away from home and become smugglers. "It's exciting, it's healthy, it's a wonderful life," he told them. "Get out now, before it's too late." May 20, 1994 New York Times So why did Mario Vargas Llosa run for office? For a moral reason, he says. But, he concedes, his second wife Patricia, had a diffrent explanation. It was the adventure, the illusion of living an expenence full of excitement and risk, she said, of writing the great novel in real life. New York Times. 5/15/94 One egg whispered the girl with acres of hair red as blood and skin the colour of milk. She had an otherworldly face compiled from strange old paintings and wore a white billowing lace shirt with black and white velvet striped tights, and velvet shoes with jewelled buckles. It was impossible to concentrate on her face, to imagine what she looked like, even when you were looking at her. The boy at her table had bakelite curls that hung down way below his shoulders, a scar running down one cheek, and eyes which were as large and deep as undersea caves. He wore an enormous ruffled shirt and tight black trousers and dark blood red suede boots that came up to his knees. His fingers were full of gems embedded in gold. One egg, she emphasised. It's that! don't have the energy to consume two. They're dressed like marauders Au whispered to an elderly woman at an adjacent table. It's the thing. I have a fine smuggelrs jacket, of course I'm not permiaed to wear it at the hotel, it would give entirely the wrong impression. The old house creaked with the accumulated spirits of several hundred years, ghosts so detailed and gaudily costumed that Miss Henrietta, the housemaid who claims she was a child when gentleman artists built the house 400 years ago, sweeps up after them and ministers to their needs, leaving long dead Lady Caroline's favourite flowers by her favourite chair. The furniture is so old that each piece is presumed to be a ghost as well. Unravelling now, and shabby, the furniture was fancy once and came from France says Miss Henrietta, but nobody knows for sure. Long before the house had been sliced up into an 18 room hotel and long before Winsome and Dino Bravo owned it, breakfast had become a ceremony, not any one kind of ceremony, but several ceremonies tied together with string and no longer resembling any specific ritual at all. Aged waiters spin noiselessly around the tables, delivering huge collarbones of yellowtail on fine English china, and rice, and fish soup as brightly coloured as a tank of goldfish, and big bowls of green tea with lillies wilting on their surface and berries the size of hens eggs. There is a continual cacophony as the silverware, as big and difficult to weild as garden implements, slips from the tired hands of the diners. Au, would you please show Senor Carlos D'Armado de Granza, the famous cattle baron and land pirate to his table? Senor Granza we're honoured to have you back amongst us, you do lend such vigour to our little hotel, said Winsome. Send this boy off to fetch me a morning vodka it's the only thing to guard against seasickness, he commanded. Winsome nodded at Au and he charged off in the direction of the restaurant, on a mission to find the vodka, and a bottle of the bittersweet Azerbaijani cognac with which Senor Carlos D'Armado de Granza washed down his morning vodka. Winsome continued gliding alongside Senor de Granza towards the most ostentatious table in the courtyard, set with candelabra and tea cakes. Whole goddam town's full of fish pirates, he bellowed, staring goggle eyed at two collarbones of yellowtail being delivered to another table. Serving sturgeon are you, damn fool mistake that, hard currency with fins that sturgeon. You'll have all of the goddamfish pirates in here snatching the food off your tables if you don't have your wits about you. It's yellowtail said Winsome, but perhaps we should be more careful. Food can be so misleading. Winsome moved through the courtyard like a warm breeze, so sweetly and tenderly morbid, so fluid and ethereal that she might have been one of Miss Henrietta's spectres. No one is exactly certain what she does but during the month that she leaves each year to visit the swamps in Wales the hotel will be absent of glory and the place will go to hell. Winsome walked through the courtyard, greeting the guests, her long black dress trailing, catching treasures in its hem: flowers, pebbles, stray room keys, day old tea cakes. The occasional rat would dive on to the wake of her skirt, sink its claws into the stitching and smugly surf across the courtyard to the wall that is shared with a banquet hall that fronts onto Border Street. Winsome floated over to Gallifrey's table, and put a handful of chamomile flowers from one of the garden plots into her teapot. That child could benefit from some tranquility she thought to herself. Gallifrey kept on writing and didn't look up. Our minds create not a calm string of discrete ideas imagined but rather a howling collection of memories that interweave, permeate, blend into, draw down, and gnaw on present experience. The swashbuckling in adventure stories is only one side of the story, only the highlights. A pirate is all adrenalin and no heart and soul, gutted of a complete and central narrative and character development. The plot remains, the action is intact, and we pirates are written larger, perhaps to compensate for the our limited stories. Our costumes are bold and diverting. But I remind myself that there is never a central story with a resolution, only scenes of wild adventure. St Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great, who asked him "how he dares molest the sea." "How dare you molest the whole world?"the pirate replied: "because I do it with a litle ship only, I am called a thief you, doing it with a great navy, are called an Emperor." The pirate's answer was "elegant and ecellent," St Augustine relates. Pirates and Emperors: International Terrorism in the Real World. By Noam Chomsky AP 06/23 19:43 EDT V0031 Copyright 1993. The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP)-- They are tiny, easily hidden and in demand on the black market. Computer chips, the fingernail-size silicon wafers that run computers, are being targeted by brazen robbers seeking big bucks, authorities say. "It's the dope of the '90s. Pound for pound, it's more valuable than cocaine, "said Julius Finklestein, a deputy district attorney in the Santa Clara County's high-tech crimes unit. Thousands of dollars worth of chips can be tucked into a pocket. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth can be carted away in a pickup truck or van. - The Albatross Suite was tacked onto the outside of the building, up a series of winding stairs and along a sloping balcony that lists as if it were the deck of a ship in a high gale. If Gallifrey stood on a chair and looked out of the top of one of the windows in the direction of the daytime sound of a calliope she could just see a segment of the river that runs along the edge of the Bravo District. It was a long room in which everything was long, the long windows of a greenhouse on two sides, a long almost outdoors table with curly iron legs, a long bed tucked into an alcove, billowing with long thick pillows and milk coloured cashmere rugs, and on every surface some kind of ungodly artifact: ancient empty liquor and perfume bottles, an empty birdcage, big bowls of bat coloured dead roses the texture of decaying velvet, books of surrealist collage, and illustrated childrens adventure stories. Gallifrey coveted complicated hotel rooms, rooms so dense with their Own decoration that it was never noticed and never mattered that she travelled only with two small bags, brought little with her besides a few small nonsense items and shards of stories on pieces of hotel stationery, notebooks, and discs. All of her shards of stories were a curious still life with words, silent and economical. Gallifrey seizes upon shards of stories but they don't gel into anything larger that has any stability. Her stories all come apart, settle back into segments and leave her adrift. The thirst for adventure is played out in pursuit of treasure, but the treasure is never the thing, the excitement of life is always somewhere else, not in the treasure itself. It's the adventure, the adrenalin. Adventure is never being bored. The everyday never intrudes. It is never clear to me if any adventure takes place over days, weeks, or months. Any narrative progression is haphazard, occurring through chance or co-incidence. The pirates of storybooks purloined goods. The Black Sea Pirates take only stories, but what can be more lasting and more valuable and more affecting than a story? There is no camaraderie between us, we are all lone pirates, loosely aligned to our cause and completely uncontrollable. We do not know each other. We can only guess who might be another black sea pirate. We are extremely rich and wild and unencumbered by family. We have no fear. Only imagination, the quality and abstractness of thought, are our weapons. We wield words as if they were weapons and we need to speak poetically, there is nothing more important to us than language. The desire to tame a threatening landscape by subjecting it to the control of language can be seen in the old Greek name for the notoriously treacherous Black Sea: the Eurine, or hospitable. The Georgian Republic. Roger Rosen Gallifrey is Sentimental, even superstitious, about staying awake until 3 a.m. and reading several stories, the same stories over and over every night before she goes to sleep, to give herself luck. At the Hotel Rustavelli her stories mix with a savagely slapstick vocal version of "Someday You'll Be Sorry" coming from The Blues In Orbit, the jazz club located across the road on Rats Alley where oil black puddles the shape of skulls gather in the cobblestones in front of the club. Gallifrey comes to rely upon the song as much as her stones, waiting for it, at 2.49 sharp each night, to add to her lullabye of written down words. What IF Robert Louis Stevenson had known in 1883, when he wrote "Treasure Island," that his book's treasure hunt would take place more than a hundred years later in a lavish casino hotel in a desert resort called Las Vegas? Basically the arc of the story is where Robbie learns that the real treasure lies in your imagination. I should like to rise and go, Where the golden apples grow; Where below another sky, Parrot islands anchored lie. When Robert Louis Stevenson scribbled those verses, years before he wrote about Jim Hawkins, Long John Silver, the good ship Hispaniola and the buried booty of Treasure Island, you'd have to travel half the world across dangerous seas to slake your thirst for adventure. Now you can go to Vegas. The visual details of the pirates village: skull and crossbones chandeliers, scavenged icons and ornamental elements from Spain, Italy, China, India, the Moslem world - from every part of the globe, the time of 17th & 18th century pirates. Pirates of the Caribbean. Watching the numerous screenings of the movie "Hook" They conceived of a grand old ship hijacked by pirates who in time turned it into their own. Similarly, they imagined a Caribbean village not built by pirates but overrun by them, adding bits of booty here and there, scavenging their ships for home furnishings. They gave the village a history to create layers of eclectic styles. First in their minds, it had been a Portuguese settlement, conquered by Spaniards, then seized by a rag tag band of pirates from around the world. Los Angeles Times, 1994 Treasure Island, The Adventure Resort, opened its doors on October27, 1993. It is the newest property of Mirage Resorts and features an hourly sea battle between the Treasure Island pirates and British naval officers aboard full scale ships, using 30 stuntmen and actors. Treasure Island is billed as a multidimensional resort and is part of the current $2 billion in construction taking place along the Las Vegas strip. The 36 story Treasure Island is adjacent to The Mirage and features 2,900 guest rooms, including 212 suites. The standard room rate is about $65 per night. All of Treasure Island's public areas maintain the theme of a pirate village. "We want the guests to feel as if they are taking a step back in time and are standing alongside Long John Silver and young Jim Hawkins," said Steve Wynn, the chairman of the board of Mirage Resorts Inc. The signature of the resort is Buccaneer Bay, the facade at the front of the property, where the 90 foot long pirate ship Hispaniola is docked. Hourly, the British frigate Royal Briaania sails around Skull Point to confront the pirates. A full scale battle ensues. Los Angeles Times A moonlit beach. A man. A boy. A peg leg. The leg's owner speaks: "aharrh, Jim. Now it pains Ol' John somethin'fierce to have to leave 'ee, suddenlike. But there's a load of Sony Watchman's sailin' through the Java Straits tonight. Fat ones Jim - shiny as pomegranates they be, and ripe for picking." Sound ludicrous? Think again. Pirates exist. And they don 't just steal Watchmans, they steal whole ships. These aren't the depressing amateur pirates whose predation on helpless boat people sometimes gets them into newspapers. These are real pirates - for profit brigands with cutlasses, grappling hooks, coloured rags wrapped around their heads, speedboats clocked at 40 knots, explosives, and plenty of good financing. Real nasty guys, says a former freighter captain who escaped them. And they're men who have an eye for fine electronic equipment, among other things. The ringleaders remain almost constantly in motion, flying first class between Asia's ports, staying in the best hotels, gambling, drinking, and surrounding themselves with clouds of mistresses. The cash necessary for whoopee, bribes, salaries, and faked documents moves through an underground banking system that can transfer cash amounts of up to $3 million in afew hours. Fortune, July 15, 1991 At five each afternoon Au goes up into the attic and leans out the window with a ship's bell which he strikes five times with a more or less regular rhythm and people from the neighbourhood begin to gather in the Hotel Rustavelli's lobby for High Tea. The three theoretical mathematicians, Bluebottle (feral and furry, his eyes always rolling), Eccles (a pantomime medival king in a bankers too small suit) and Bloodnok (exuding a drollness strangled by good manners) rush into the room and grab two glasses of sherry each, one for each of their paws, and take up their station by the fire. Blueboale: What time is it, Eccles? Eccles: Um, just a minute, I got it writted down here on a piece of paper. A nice man wrote down the time for me this morning. Bluebottle: Euh! Then why do you carry it around with you, Eccles? Ecdes: Well, um, if anyone asks me the time, I can show it to them. Bluebottle: Wait a minute, Eccles my good man - Eccles: What is it fellow? Blueboale: It's writted on this bit ()f paper - what is five o'clock, is writted. Ecdes: I know that, my good fellow - that's right, when I asked the fellow to write it down it was five o'clock. Blueboale: Well, then, supposing someone asks you the time when it isn't five o'clock? Eccles: Well, then, I don't show it to them. Blueboale: Well, how do you know when it's five o'clock? Eccles: I got it written down on a piece of paper. Bluebottle: I wish I could afford a piece of paper with the time wriaed on. Here, Eccles, let me hold that piece of paper to my ear, would you? ....Here's this piece of paper ain't going. Eccles: What? - I've been sold a forgery? Blueboale: No wonder it stopped at five o'clock. You should get one of those things my grand-dad's got. His firm gave it to him when he retired. It's one of them things what it is that wakes you up at five o'clock, boils the keaule and pours a cup of tea. Eccles: Oh yeah - what's it called Blueboale: My grandma. Eccles: Ah. Here - wait a minute - how does she know when it's five o'clock? Blueboale: She's got it written down on a piece of paper. (The Goon Show) There is something genteel about the pace of life in a city that considers gamblers hours its daytime, there is something about an afternoon before a long night that has the tone of the beginning of the day. Dino Bravo rarely comes downstairs in his hotel before high tea, and he walks through the lobby, swinging a golf club. He sits down to his afternoon breakfast of Black Martini's and fried eggs at the coffee table in the lobby while his guests take tea. He used to be the most relaxed man in show business whispered one of the hotel guests. At 55 Dino Bravo still looks like a young Elvis Presley and smiled a great, young man's fearless smile at any of the guests he found gawking at him. The golf pants and sports jackets that he always wears are as fluid on his body as if they were water flowing over him. Dino Bravo has the kind of charm that seems responsible for the sun coming up. Gallifrey sat amongst the high-spirited tea-time gathering calling up stories on her exo-brain, reading with a single minded absorption. By being quiet Gallifrey drew attention to herself. This is a city that will believe any improbable story but is suspicious of silence. Gallifrey, may I introduce Exapno Map case, a man who lives inside out, who lives imaginatively in unimaginative times, said Dino Bravo. He owns The Blues In Orbit. Well, I'm charmed, said Gallifrey. There's a particular piece of music that your fine band plays that I've come to rely upon for puaing me to sleep. Don't say that so loud, I don't want it getting around that I've got a band that's a real snoozer, replied Exapno Mapcase, a tall disordered looking man with an eyepatch and who wore a warrior's tattered red cardigan and a kilt. He was like a calm and deeply flowing river stocked with a lot of wild and colourful fish that occasionally lurch to the surface. Dino Bravo sat with Exapno Mapcase most afternoons in the lobby of the Hotel Rustavelli and they talked about jazz as if they were encyclopaediae falling open at pages that contained obscure references. It was difficult for anyone else to follow their conversations, so steeped are they in arcana. It's a particular kind of Dixieland jazz that Exapno Mapcase's house band plays at The Blues In Orbit, a savage kind of Dixieland, stripped down and infused with shadows and dark edges. It takes the tradition of jazz along a never before trodden path. It is only to Exapno Mapcase that Dino Bravo will ever reminisce about the days when he used to sing and was the biggest name in Las Vegas. Mr Bravo, will we ever hear you sing again? is the constant refrain from the hotel guests who remember his breezy supper club television series and long to sink back into that kind of cocktail era glamour. He only smiles enigmatically, and they are so bowled over by the smile that it is only hours later that they begin to realise that he hasn't answered their question, indeed never answers any but the most basic of questions. Once in a while he becomes riled by their questions, by music buffs who give the impression that they feel that his kind of breezy ballads were fluff, hardly the stuff of the serious music of the type that one hears at The Blues In Orbit. No crooner has the range I have, I can hit notes a bank couldn't cash, he says, by way of defence. Spec Sheet for the Pirates! Gold game. (The features listed are tentative at this time.) Information Retrieval: Improve information sequence, making it easier for the player to find out what's going on. Screen should be split into multiple text boxes, one showing current political info (France is at war with Spain, Dutch at war with English), one showing current personai info (Don Leugo spotted in Cartagena), and one showing current missions (Carrying secret letter for Governor of Belize's brother in Havana). Record Feature: Under pirate's diary in information screen, pirate can find a listing of all actions he's taken during the game: every battle, casualties on both sides, etc. This currently exists in the game, but it only keeps track of the last ten or so things the pirate does. Pirate should be able to scroll through page after page of diary. Apparently there's aflaw in the city economy algorithm. If the pirate doesn't pillage a city for a very long time, it will become obscenely wealthy. This must be corrected. City menu to be replaced by graphic map of town. Map to show flag of city plus buildings representing locations. To go to the merchant, for instance, player would click on the building labelled "Ye Merchante's Shoppe" or the like. Map is mildly interactive. For example: if pirate came into the city by land, the docks location is inactive, and possibly removed from the map. If pirate cannot meet with governor, gates to the governor's mansion are closed; etc. Compuserve, 1993 TWO: THE LETTER OF MARQUE