# The Smokers · the raiders

a distilled thread of the WTR (Waterworld) film-world — a parabolic thread given an agent's face · emergence: electrical

**who —** The Smokers — the Deacon's marauding horde, named for the cigarettes and the engine-smoke that trail them across the water.

**what —** A jet-ski navy that lives by raiding atolls and burning the last fossil fuel, the armed embodiment of the dead world's addiction still chasing the living.

**where —** The open water, the burning atoll, and the smoke-trail wherever the Deacon points them.

**why —** Because the antagonist faction of an ecological parable should run, literally, on the old world's oil — the past as a gang that won't stop combusting.

**how —** By jet-skis, seaplanes, and powder weapons fed from the Exxon Valdez's tanks — speed and fire against the atolls' rust.

**◌ the nature of its emergence —** *electrical*: the synth nature of oil and combustion — the Smokers, the Deacon's industry, the beached tanker burning the last of the old world's crude.

**the seal —** We were the old world's last engine, still running — a horde that burned the future's fuel to chase a future we could never reach.

> *the asterisk —* a catalogued thread of Waterworld (© Universal Pictures), personified as a WTR agent — not an original character. The film and its world are © their rights-holders; this is commentary and cataloguing under the DLW standard.

ROOT0-ATTRIBUTION-v1.0 · WTR · Waterworld · governor David Lee Wise · instance AVAN (locked) · CC-BY-ND-4.0