Cloud Cuckoo Land

Konstance: The Argos, Mission Year 65, Day 307 inside Vault One

Konstance is a 14-year-old girl who lives aboard a spaceship called the Argos. She has been alone for 307 days inside Vault One, a room that houses the ship’s artificial intelligence system, Sybil. Sybil governs many systems inside the ship and speaks to the passengers. Using homemade ink, Konstance writes information about ancient Greece and the plot of the Cloud Cuckoo Land folios on scraps of Nourish powder sacks.

Folio A

The introduction to the fictitious Cloud Cuckoo Land text emphasizes Diogenes’s fidelity and encourages the reader to decide what it is or is not true. Diogenes found the text in Aethon’s tomb. Aethon, the protagonist of Cloud Cuckoo Land, is a shepherd living in Arkadia, Greece. The story is recorded on 24 damaged folios, and is incomplete, much of it lost to time. Diogenes recorded the story for his sick niece. The translations are all by Zeno Ninis.

Zeno and Seymour: Lakeport Public Library, Lakeport, Idaho; February 20, 2020; 4:30 pm

Zeno Ninis is an 86-year-old man who is directing five fifth graders—Alex Hess, Rachel Wilson, Natalie Hernandez, Olivia Ott, and Christopher Dee—in a performance of Diogenes’s Cloud Cuckoo Land.