When Zero, the hero of our story, stumbles upon a mysterious manuscript, they’re thrown into a journey across centuries, continents, and concepts. They travel throughout the Muslim world, from Sumeria to India to Baghdad. They learn about Europe as other and outside. They’re guided by the cryptic mirror the manuscript provides as it traces a history of the number zero.

A Jamali Rad’s No Signal No Noise is a playful poetic hybrid, sitting somewhere between philosophical treatise, epic poem, and experimental novel. It is the first installment in The Self-Inscribing Machine series, a speculative history of the binary and its prototypes, that traces concepts of Self and Other as well as the mathematical, cultural, and philosophical foundations of the machines that drive the contradictions of capital.