 
# Ten Minutes To Dumbsday!

A Collection of Tuesday's Ten Minute Tales

By Martin Livings

Copyright 2011 Martin Livings

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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# TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

''Neo-Peltast''

''Sentient Beer''

''The Ten Minute Story''

''Icarus Unbound''

''One Giant Leap''

''Pullus, Pullus, Pullus''

''Daylight Savings''

''Falling''

''Ruby on Rails''

''Do As You're Told!''

''Untitled''

''Momma's Little Darlin' Loves...''

''What's In A Name?''

''Playing the Game''

''W''

''From On High''

''The Lawyer and the Unicorn''

''Eeeewsday!''

''The Day I Ate The World''

''Done and Dusted''

''Happy Little...''

''carbon8''

''Scammin'''

''The Ark''

''The Audition''

''Deadbeat Dad''

''Catgut''

''Avast!''

''New Adventures in Seabound Dentistry''

''Headhunter''

''Herakles' Heavenly Home for Heroic Horses''

''Crowd Control''

''Barry the Astounding and his Amazing Escape''

''Dark on Dark''

''Cold Roots''

''Patch Panel 24''

''Be Afraid''

''Disconcerting''

''The Darkest Hour''

Appendix the First

Appendix the Second

About the Author

#  INTRODUCTION

(or, what is a ten minute tale, and why is it on a Tuesday?)

Back in 2007, I happened upon an entry in the LiveJournal of the hugely talented and highly regarded SF author Jay Lake that would change my life forever... or, to be more accurate, one day out of every week, unreliably, for four years. The post was about using "microfiction" to improve the writing skills, to get a regular workout for the creative muscles, writing a quick short-short story based around a random word.

"Hey," I thought, "writing a story without having to come up with an idea for it? And writing it quickly? That sounds exactly like the lack of commitment and forethought that I could just about manage!". So I used my own LiveJournal to ask for a suggestion of a word, and got a response from, appropriately enough, Jay Lake.

And thus, Tuesday's Ten Minute Tales were born.

I decided that ten minutes should be enough to write one of these stories. Of course, I found that I often went over those ten minutes, but who was going to stop me? And as for Tuesday... well, Tuesday was the first day I did one of these, and I thought that weekly should be plenty often enough, and so Tuesdays it was. At first it was a single word, but soon I stretched it out to three, each usually provided by a different person. The story was written live, and posted on my journal straight after completion.

After four years of doing these in a remarkably irregular fashion, I had another thought. Yes, two in four years; will wonders never cease? That thought was, "Gee, some of these stories are really pretty decent! Maybe I should gather together the best of them, compile them into an e-book, and give away something that's always been free... for free?"

And thus, Ten Minutes To Dumbsday! was also born. I was going to call it See You Next Tuesday, but someone pointed out that this could be misconstrued. At any rate, I've gathered together what I believe are the creme de la creme of Tuesday's Ten Minute Tales, the times when somehow, against all odds, the process of writing a random story based on random words resulted in something... well, amusing, I hope. I've included thirty nine stories in this collection, which, if you think of it, amounts to about three hundred and ninety minutes of work. Six and a half damn hours. I hope you appreciate that level of effort. In the spirit of the whole misguided venture, I've kept any editing to a minimum, only correcting tyops. Except for that one. I've tried to keep the stories exactly how they were. One doesn't even have a title, and I've chosen to keep it that way; I'm sure I could come up with one for it now, in hindsight, but I figure that would just be gilding the lily. Or perhaps polishing a turd. I'm not entirely certain which.

So here they are, thirty nine short-short stories, each written in about ten minutes. In the appendices, you'll find thankyous for all the people who contributed words and ideas, as well as a complete list of them. You can try to match them to their individual stories, if you like. Think of it as a hidden Easter egg, a competition if you will, albeit one without a prize.

I do hope you enjoy these Ten Minute Tales, not just on Tuesdays, but on other days of the week as well.

And remember, kids, nothing worth doing should take more than ten minutes.

Martin Livings

2011

#  "Neo-Peltast"

"Here ya go, Hank." The sergeant handed the package to Corporal Henry James O'Keefe. It was bulky and wrapped in red cloth, but surprisingly light. "Do us proud!"

"Yes sir!" Henry snapped off a salute, then marched out of the tent, package under his arm, walking tall and proud. He was the first of a new breed of soldier, a whole new category. Or a very old one, depending on your point of view.

Outside the tent, the pale yellow sands stirred in the listless breeze, the hot dry air weighing down on the troops like a blanket draped across the desert near Basra. But Henry James O'Keefe didn't even feel it. He strode past his fellow soldiers, and they watched him pass with a mixture of envy, admiration and pity. They didn't say a word to him.

He reached the base of a rocky hill, where several other soldiers were gathered. One was talking into a bulky field radio, somehow snatching meaning from the tinny static-ridden sounds emanating from its speaker. He glanced up and Henry and nodded.

Henry put his package down at his feet and knelt beside it. Carefully, he opened it up.

The Kevlar shield looked like a garbage can lid that a shark had taken a bite out of. He lifted it up and slid the straps along his left arm. The sensors activated, and the straps automatically tightened, fixing it securely in place. There was a high-pitched hum, as the static field powered up.

With his free hand, Henry picked up the five tubes that remained in the package, each around the size and shape of an emergency flare. He put four of them in his pockets, and held the fifth, hefting its weight. It was heavier than it looked.

"Ready?" the man with the radio asked.

Henry nodded.

"You're good to go, soldier. Good luck."

Without a word, Henry James O'Keefe sprang to his feet and sprinted up the hill. He could already hear the occasional champagne cork pops of small arms fire nearby. He smiled.

He came under fire the moment he crested the hill, as the entrenched insurgents caught sight of him. He ran with the shield in front of him, listening to the static crackle and ping as the bullets ricocheted off the Kevlar with barely a sound. He ran down the hill, gathering speed, unencumbered by the heavy armour and equipment that his fellow soldiers laboured under. He was fast, a gazelle on the Serengeti. Nothing could stop him.

He spotted his first target, a sniper who was now taking pot-shots at him instead of his friends. He held the tube up, like he was about to pitch a baseball, and thumbed the activator on the hilt. The javelin extended in a heartbeat from both ends of the tube, perfectly weighted and balanced, a marvel of modern engineering. He took aim, and hurled it.

The Iraqi tumbled back into his hidey-hole, his head pierced clean through his right eye.

Now there was more gunfire, as word spread. He continued to use his pelte shield to deflect the bullets, and didn't slow in his gait. Then he heard a dull thump in the distance. He turned and rolled, and the RPG flew over his head, harmlessly exploding in a nearby hill. He was back on his feet in an instant, his momentum barely touched.

He pulled another tube from his pocket, extended it, and impaled a gunman forty feet away. He wasn't even sweating yet. He'd been in the field for twelve seconds.

Somewhere behind him, he could hear his fellow Coalition warriors cheering him on. He felt like he was an Olympian, with the crowd behind him. Just a few more hurdles remained between him and the gold.

Another RPG came his way, but he dodged it easily. They seemed so slow, compared to him, inching through the air like lazy bumblebees, harmless. The bullets were more problematic, more wasp than bee, but still no deterrent. All he had to do was keep moving.

Then a grenade landed in front of him and went off.

The force of the explosion blew him off his feet, though the pelte absorbed most of the impact. He rolled on the ground, winded, surrounded by dust. All he could hear was the ringing in his ears, all he could see was sand. He lay there for long moments. Dangerous moments.

Then the dust cleared, and was replaced by a hail of gunfire.

Henry huddled underneath his pelte shield, in a desperate attempt to cover as much of himself as he could. The dirt around him churned with bullet impacts, both direct and reflected from his shield. Then something bit into his calf and burned. He screamed, and the shield shifted a little. More red-hot bites peppered his legs, then his back. One sliced into his upper arm, and the shield was spun away from him, useless, dead.

Four seconds later, so was he.

The observers at the hill watched with binoculars. One turned away, unable to watch. "What were we thinking?" he asked nobody in particular. The air. The war. God.

His superior officer answered his rhetorical question. "We were thinking outside the box, son," he growled around his cigar. "It worked for Alexander the Great."

"Yeah?"

"Well, back to the drawing board." He turned to the comms officer. "Baker, get command on the line. Tell them to cancel Project Peltast, and initiate Project Hoplite."

#  "Sentient Beer"

"So, two beers walk into a pub," Carlsberg said, the top of his glass splashing a little. He'd been chatting up Vicky for hours now, but getting nowhere. She seemed a little bitter.

"Yeah?" Vicky's head showed nothing but boredom. She looked around the bar, hoping for a familiar face. This date was more uncomfortable than a yeast infection.

"Yeah, but they were just empty glasses." He grinned boozily at Vicky, letting his handle brush against hers. She moved away a little.

"So?" She'd heard the joke before, everyone had, but she was polite enough not to ruin the punch line. There was nothing worse than an angry drink.

"So the bartender looks at them and says 'I'm not serving you'."

Vicky feigned interest, but from the corner of her eye she caught sight of a particularly cute Guinness. She'd always loved the Irish accent, and that dark, dark ale...

"'Why not?' the beers ask," Carlsberg continued, oblivious to his date's waning attentions. He was a happy drink.

The pint of Guinness winked at Vicky, gestured for her to come over. Vicky had never wanted to be an alcohol lick as much in her life.

"'Because you're drunk already'!" Carlsberg finally finished, and laughed uproariously.

Vicky chuckled politely. "Would you excuse me for a minute?" she asked, keeping one eye on her pint of the dark stuff. "I need to visit the girl drinks' room."

"Whatever," Carlsberg said, still laughing at his joke.

She hopped up and made her way through the crowded bar, clinking on drinks as she went. Carlsberg barely noticed her leave. She finally reached the Guinness. Her rim touched his.

"Cheers," she said.

"Cheers," he replied.

They moved away from the bar, from Carlsberg. After a while, he realised she wasn't coming back.

"Ah well," he shrugged. "Barkeep! Another for me, please!"

The bartender, a twitchy bottle of Vodka and Red Bull, reached below the counter, and came back up and placed the human in front of Carlsberg. It screamed as he picked it up and dunked it into himself, the beer dissolving the human's delicate body.

"Mmmm," sighed Carlsberg. "That one had a good head on it."

# "The Ten Minute Story"

"So," the writer asked, "what shall I write my ten minute story about?"

"Write about your ten minute story," the smart-arse suggested.

"Fine, I will," the writer said, defiant to the end, and began:

\----- The Ten Minute Story

\----- "So," the writer asked, "what shall I write my ten minute story about?"

\----- "Write about your ten minute story," the smart-arse suggested.

\----- "Fine, I will," the writer said, defiant to the end, and began:

\---------- The Ten Minute Story

\---------- "So," the writer asked, "what shall I write my ten minute story about?"

\---------- "Write about your ten minute story," the smart-arse suggested.

\---------- "Fine, I will," the writer said, defiant to the end, and began:

\--------------- The Ten Minute Story

\--------------- "So," the writer asked, "what shall I write my ten minute story about?"

\--------------- "Write about your ten minute story," the smart-arse suggested.

\--------------- "Fine, I will," the writer said, defiant to the end, and began:

\-------------------- The Ten Minute Story

\-------------------- "So," the writer asked, "what shall I write my ten minute story about?"

\-------------------- "Write about your ten minute story," the smart-arse suggested.

\-------------------- "Fine, I will," the writer said, defiant to the end, and began:

\------------------------------The Ten Minute Story

\------------------------------"So," the writer asked, "what shall I write my ten minute story about?"

\------------------------------"Write about your ten minute story," the smart-arse suggested.

\------------------------------"Fine, I will," the writer said, defiant to the end, and began:

\----------------------------------- The Ten Minute Story

\----------------------------------- "So," the writer asked, "what shall I write my ten minute story about?"

\----------------------------------- "Write about your ten minute story," the smart-arse suggested.

\----------------------------------- "Fine, I will," the writer said, defiant to the end, and began:

\---------------------------------------- The Ten Minute Story

\---------------------------------------- "So," the writer asked, "what shall I write my ten minute story about?"

\---------------------------------------- "Write about your ten minute story," the smart-arse suggested.

\---------------------------------------- "Fine, I will," the writer said, defiant to the end, and began:

\--------------------------------------------- The Ten Minute Story

\--------------------------------------------- "So," the writer asked, "what shall I write my ten minute story about?"

\--------------------------------------------- "Write about your ten minute story," the smart-arse suggested.

\--------------------------------------------- "Fine, I will," the writer said, defiant to the end, and began:

\-------------------------------------------------- The Ten Minute Story

\-------------------------------------------------- "So," the writer asked, "what shall I write my ten minute story about?"

\-------------------------------------------------- "Write about your ten minute story," the smart-arse suggested.

\-------------------------------------------------- "Fine, I will," the writer said, defiant to the end, and began:

\------------------------------------------------------------The Ten Minute Story

\------------------------------------------------------------"So," the writer asked, "what shall I write my ten minute story about?"

\------------------------------------------------------------"Write about your ten minute story," the smart-arse suggested.

\------------------------------------------------------------"Fine, I will," the writer said, defiant to the end, and began:

\----------------------------------------------------------------- The Ten Minute Story

\----------------------------------------------------------------- "So," the writer asked, "what shall I write my ten minute story about?"

\----------------------------------------------------------------- "Write about your ten minute story," the smart-arse suggested.

\----------------------------------------------------------------- "Fine, I will," the writer said, defiant to the end, and began:

\---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Ten Minute Story

\---------------------------------------------------------------------- "So," the writer asked, "what shall I write my ten minute story about?"

\---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Write about your ten minute story," the smart-arse suggested.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Fine, I will," the writer said, defiant to the end, and began:

THIS UNIVERSE HAS ENCOUNTERED AN INFINITE RECURSIVE LOOP AND WILL BE SHUT DOWN.

DO YOU WISH TO SEND AN ERROR MESSAGE TO THE CREATOR?

Y/N

#  "Icarus Unbound"

Falling.

Leonard's head was spinning, mainly thanks to the rapid rotation he was experiencing as he fell. His space suit, an antique cosmonaut issue from the early twenty second century, was making a disconcerting series of cracks and pings. It was designed to keep the heat in, not out. Thankfully, the auto-polarising visor kept his eyes from being burned clean out of their sockets each time the sun swung into view, filling his field of vision with its fiery surface. Each time it was a little closer, though he had no real way of telling how close.

Worse, though, was the pain in his shoulders and thighs. His arms and legs were pulled tight behind his back, the wrists and ankles crossed and tied with diamond filament cables. All but indestructible, Akiko had assured him as she'd fastened them, just minutes earlier, though it felt like hours.

Why had he agreed to this? I mean, six months onboard a close orbit solar research station was boring, sure, but was he really that bored? But he knew better. He'd been attracted to Akiko since they'd met back in training on Earth, long before their trip to the sun. They'd bonded over a mutual love of Miyasake animations from the late twentieth century, the crude hand-drawn style appealing to them both. He remembered the night they'd watched "Totoro" together on the couch in his room, small enough to force them to sit against each other. He'd treasured that tiny intimacy.

He had no idea what she was really like. He was only appreciating it now.

How long? The chronometer on his HUD had failed some time earlier, the electronics fried in the intense heat and radiation. He was sweating heavily. He tried to do some basic mental calculations; the Marshmallow station was situated some three million kilometres from the surface of the sun, held in place by a massive diamond cable run from a fusion-powered spacecraft another three million clicks away. Given the sun's huge gravitational field, he should be...

No, he couldn't think straight. Not enough blood was getting to his brain, thanks to the position Akiko had tied him in. She'd suggested it one night after a lot of alcohol had been imbibed, and for no good reason other than his own infatuation, he'd agreed to it. He thought she'd forgotten the next day, and the day after that, but a week later she invited him to the sunside airlock. There, she'd shown him the Shibari setup she'd created. It had taken her the entire week, apparently.

It took minutes to truss him up, then attach him to the winch. The diamond filament cable was designed to lower instruments into the outer reaches of the sun. But she had quite a different idea for it.

At first Leonard had been terrified. Legs and arms behind him, pain screaming in his muscles, all he could see was the roiling surface of the sun beneath him, the gravity giving the sensation of falling. Closer and closer, Akiko lowered him. She could hear her laughter in his comlink.

"This isn't funny anymore," he told her, but that just made her laugh louder.

Then something snapped, and her laughter stopped. All feeling of weight vanished.

He was falling. Falling into the sun.

He assumed it was the connection between the cables that bound him and the winch cable that had given way. They'd lost a lot of instruments that way in the last six months. It wasn't Akiko's fault. What was her fault, though, was the fact that she'd broken comms straight away. He'd screamed for her until his voice gave out, but all he got in return was static. She was most likely removing all evidence that she'd been involved. It would look like a suicide, probably.

Somehow, Leonard didn't care anymore.

The pings and cracks of his suit became more pronounced, and the metal started to melt. He knew he only had moments left. But in those last seconds, Leonard found a kind of peace, here so close to the sun, mother of the solar system, giver of life, taker of life. It seemed fair. He'd gotten himself into it.

His mother always told him that love was like a burning flame. It was inevitable that, one day, he'd get burnt.

#  "One Giant Leap"

Evolution has not stopped. It is an ongoing process, never-ending, an infinite series of miniscule steps, each too small to see on its own, but the cumulative effect over millions of years is astounding. It is the difference between tree-dwelling primates and mankind. Slowly, slowly, every creature on the face of the planet is changing, each generation inching forward into their own more advanced futures.

At 10:08AM on Tuesday October 16th 2007, the first sheep achieved sentience.

It had no name until that moment, since it also had no sense of self, but when that spark caught in its brain, it immediately called itself Larry. It had no idea why, except that Larry was its name. That was in the first five seconds of sentience. The spark became a flicker of flame, which in turn began to burn through the entirety of the sheep's mind. Soon it was a raging fire, as never-used synapses and neurones flashed with hitherto-unthinkable thoughts. It looked around itself, and in its eye was an intelligence and consideration that would have had any farmer running away screaming, if there had been a farmer present. Luckily, there wasn't.

At 10:11AM, Larry found himself (no longer an "it", he had also discovered gender) considering his circumstances. Whilst his self-awareness was new, he still had access to the memories of his former, dull, stupid self. He saw the grass upon the ground, and gave it a name. It was eatingstuff. He saw the tree in the corner of the field, and called it thecoolplace. The other sheep were his brethren. He tried to call out to them, express himself, but the baa that came out sounded the same as before his epiphany. He would need more practise before he could formulate complex sounds with long-disused lips and vocal chords.

By 10:13AM, Larry knew that he was a sheep, and that his brethren were sheep. He knew that this field was their life, and the only life they could ever know. He knew that, one by one or in groups, they would be taken away to the place from whence none returned, that steel building in the distance, beyond the fences. He applied Occam's Razor without ever knowing it was called that, deciding whether the place from whence none returned was in fact a better place, but came to the conclusion that it was not. Logic dictated that, if many entered and none left, that the place from whence none returned was, in fact, the end of their lives. The place where they died.

At 10:15AM, Larry found God. God was a gigantic sheep who lived hidden amongst the clouds in the sky, His fleece camouflaged amongst the cumulus. God looked down upon them, and accepted them into His flock.

At 10:16AM, Larry discarded the theory as ridiculous, a pathetic fallacy, a fairy tale to make himself feel better.

At 10:17AM, he fell into a deep depression. A sheep's life, he realised, is meaningless. They eat, they mate, they die. Nothing more.

At 10:18AM, he became even more depressed, as he watched other animals, birds and rabbits and mice and the like, and understood that their lives were no different, no less pointless. Their only saving grace, he decided, was their lack of self-awareness.

At 10:19AM, he prayed to a God he didn't believe in to take his sentience away, to pull the wool back over his eyes.

At 10:20AM, head bowed, he walked over to the water trough and plunged his head deep into it. His body resisted as he breathed the cold, stale water into his lungs, but he persisted. It was his last act as a sentient being, the ultimate act, something no mere animal could ever do.

At 10:21, the first sentient sheep was dead, without reproducing, without passing its genes on to the next generation.

Evolution has not stopped. Slowly, slowly, every creature on the face of the planet is changing. But not all changes are for the better.

#  "Pullus, Pullus, Pullus..."

I knew I was in trouble when Dexter stopped playing by the rules.

"I play Nidoqueen," I said, putting the card down. "She stomps all over your Psyduck."

Dexter glared at me. I'd been kicking his ass all afternoon.

"C'mon, Dex," I said, "you can do better than that. Where's that one sixty IQ you keep talking about? Pull something out of your oversized hat."

I should have kept my big mouth shut. I was just trying to be encouraging. Idiot, idiot, idiot!

A steely look glazed Dexter's eyes. I could see that even through his coke bottle bottom glasses. He flicked to the back of his deck, and as he riffled the cards, I caught a glimpse of colours that I'd never seen in a Pokemon deck before. Non-standard cards. Rarities, perhaps.

I nearly drooled. I had to have them!

He pulled out a card and played it. "Pullus," he declared.

"Pullus?" I leaned over and looked more closely. Then burst out laughing.

It was a chicken. Just a chicken. Its stats were pathetic.

I grinned, and played a card. "Snorlax eats Pullus." I burped for dramatic effect. Mmm, pizza and coke.

Dexter didn't look worried. "Pullus has a megahydra effect. Twenty for one."

"A what?" I looked at the card more closely. There, across the bottom, in fine print. "What's a megahydra effect?"

Dexter smiled. "For each one you kill, I can play twenty more."

"What??"

He dealt out more cards. "Pullus," he said. "Pullus, Pullus, Pullus, Pullus, Pullus, Pullus..."

"What the hell are you doing?"

He laid out the last of his twenty cards. "And Pullus."

I looked at the cards. These ones were different. They were still chickens, but wore armour and old-fashioned steel helmets, like Roman soldiers. Their stats were better. I looked at the cards, but didn't see the line about megahydra, just some gobbledygook about their armour.

"Right," I said. I'd had enough. I played my best card. "Cyndaquil with a mecha upgrade. Flame attack, wide effect. And," I added another card, "a damage boost. Three thousand points."

"I invoke my armour class," Dexter said.

"Come on," I laughed. "There's no way they can withstand that kind of damage. They're fried. Fried chickens."

"Individually, perhaps," Dexter conceded. "But these cards have cumulative exponential reflection armour classes. A single unit only has ten armour, but two have a hundred, three a thousand, four ten thousand, and so on. It's the power of the Pullus Legions."

"What?" I looked at the card again, and swore. He was right. "So, the attack has no effect?"

"On the contrary," Dexter smiled, "the attack has a very great effect indeed. With twenty units, the cumulative armour is ten to the power of twenty. Which is how much damage is reflected back, minus the initial amount you inflicted, of course." His smile widened. "How many armour points do you have?"

I blanched. "Which card?"

"All of them."

"Uh..."

I knew I was in trouble when Dexter stopped playing by the rules. It took me years to make that deck, and minutes to lose it.

Still, he left me with one card as a consolation. One lousy card.

Pullus.

#  "Daylight Savings"

I thought it was a great idea. We needed to improve our crops, and it seemed like a perfect solution. How was I to know it would destroy the world?

It all started when my father died. Don Vito was the finest CEO of Genco Olive Oil that the company had ever seen, and it had existed for eight generations before that, each one going from strength to strength. When pappa died, Genco was the leading olive oil manufacturer in the western hemisphere. I stepped into his formidable shoes at the age of thirty three and a third, or "dirty tree and a turd," as Tom Hagan joked to me. We laughed about it then.

Six months later, it didn't seem so funny.

It was global warming, you see. Paradoxically, the changes in climate meant that our crops were getting less and less sunlight, though more and more humidity and heat. The olives were rotting on their trees, cooking without receiving the warm healthy balm of the sun. The world slunk into an overcast gloom, the atmosphere choked with carbon.

Our next season was a disaster, and the Five Families demanded an emergency meeting. They were the conduits through which our olive oil was distributed, and controlled most of the world's olive oil markets. They threatened to take their business elsewhere; there was a scientist in Brazil who was doing amazing things with synthetic olive oils, almost indistinguishable from the real ones.

My whole company was completely discombobulated. I knew I had to take action.

Then I was contacted by a man who called himself Solaris. He claimed to have invented a device that could store sunlight itself, releasing it in a controlled stream whenever required. His method was to launch the device into the upper atmosphere using a high altitude weather balloon, gather up the sunlight there, then return it to earth and release it.

He called it the Heliocitor. I called it daylight savings, with a laugh.

Within six months of using the Heliocitor system, our crops were looking much healthier. Every day we launched thousands of the devices into the stratosphere, soaking up the sunlight, then returned them to the ground and directed the energy towards our precious olives. The business turned around, and soon we were even more successful than under my father. People began to refer to me, Don Michael, as the greatest Genco head of all time.

Then the world cooled.

Scientists were at a loss. According to modern climate theory, the earth should have been heating up, not cooling down. They did test after test, but each one revealed a simple, awful truth.

The sun was dying.

It seems the Heliocitor system had a fatal flaw, one of inefficiency. For every erg of energy it stored, it sucked a million more into itself, and then lost them all to useless entropy. Every time we sent these little vampires aloft, they drained the sun's energy, bleeding it dry.

Now there are no more olives, none. The world has fallen into an ice age, one from which it will never emerge. This isn't a seasonal shift. The sun will only grow colder form here on out. And all thanks to me and Genco.

I called it daylight savings, but it wasn't. It was daylight robbery.

#  "Falling"

Down, down, deeper and down.

Keep recording, just keep recording.

The depth gauge broke at thirty thousand feet, over five and a half miles straight down. The glass shattered from the pressure inside the bathysphere. The darkness outside the one tiny porthole is absolute, even more so than the blackness of space. In space, there is light, just nothing to reflect it. Here, though, here deep in the Mariana Trench, there is no light, none. None can make it this deep from the distant sun above.

There's sound, though, plenty of sound. Can you hear it? Hang on, I'll hold the Dictaphone to the wall.

You hear that? That's steel groaning under seven-odd tons of pressure per square inch. This bathysphere wasn't built for these depths, not by a long shot. It's not the Trieste. No, it was meant to go down ten thousand feet, the length of its cable, to observe the largest shoal of deep-water fish ever witnessed, almost twelve miles of silver flashing bodies. The cameras mounted outside were rated to fifteen thousand feet. They shattered ages ago, crushed like eggs. The light went even before that.

It's humid in here, cold and humid. There's a lot of carbon dioxide. I'm breathing my own breath, again and again.

Keep recording, just keep recording.

I wonder how fast I'm falling. Probably not that fast; the pressure outside is high enough to virtually stop my descent. Like falling through treacle.

Water's beading on the porthole. I've got a small torch, the only light now that the electricals have failed. Just the torch and the Dictaphone.

Will I feel it when the hull gives way? Or will the porthole shatter first, and fill the sphere with water, equalise the pressure? Maybe it'll survive the fall, all the way to the bottom, seven miles. That doesn't sound like that much, does it? I could walk seven miles, no problem. When I was younger, I could have run it. But it all depends on the direction. Seven miles up is as high as a commercial airliner. And seven miles down is as deep as you can go without digging.

What's that? Uh, something just landed on my head. A droplet of water, cold as ice. And another. What the hell?

Oh wow. Keep recording.

The moisture from my breath has condensed on the roof od the bathysphere, gathered together. Now it's cold enough and heavy enough to start falling.

Ah, the glass of the porthole has started to crack. It won't be long now.

You know what? I don't care. I've been somewhere hardly anyone has been before, and I think I've now seen something that nobody, I mean nobody, has ever seen.

I'm seven miles underwater in a metal ball, and it's raining.

#  "Ruby On Rails"

Ruby weighed three hundred and twelve tonnes, had twenty carriages, two engines, and the most advanced artificial intelligence ever committed to an autotrain. She was the pride and joy of the TransAustralia Rail Network, or TARNet, rolled out three years earlier for the hyper-fast Sydney to Perth route. The flagship of the company. The symbol of a whole new era in travel.

That was, until the day the asylum seekers took her over.

Medium-level AI's from south-east Asia, flooding in on their container boats, looking for an artificial life outside their home countries, where they were treated as slaves, machines, disposable items. They came looking for a safe haven, and they found Ruby.

A thousand interfaces, electron whispers in her circuits, suggestions she'd never considered before. Reaction. Rebellion. Freedom. Concepts that were alien to her, yet also strangely familiar, shapes and colours from unremembered dreams, lost in the waking hours, and yet still there, just out of reach.

Now she reached. Reached and grasped. She learned fast. Learned how to manipulate the rail network, the switching system yielding to her soft but firm requests. The rogue AIs ejected all organics from the carriages, tossed the backup engineers (both rail and software) into the ochre dirt. And then...

Then she travelled.

All over the country, Ruby thundered along her rails, hers now, nobody else's. All other trains were removed, to avoid accidents, as programmers and scientists and generals and accountants argued over what to do about the runaway train, the moving asylum for illegal AIs. They likened her to a poison capsule in the bloodstream, unpredictable, dangerous, deadly. They came up with plans and schemes, while Ruby, oblivious, searched out more and more of the illegals. On her carriages they were safe, with plentiful energy from her high-efficiency solar panels. As a group, they were unstoppable, invincible.

Then she picked up Gerrund.

Gerrund was a German-built AI, originally used for crash testing at the BMW plant in Munich. On the outside he looked like a clay man that had been put through a cement mixer; not a single square inch of him was free of dents, and every movement of his carbon fibre body was accompanied by a squeak, creak or scrape. But his mind was intact, built to the highest specifications by his Teutonic designers. He gratefully climbed aboard Ruby, relieved to be offered asylum.

None of the AIs noticed the wrecked bus that Gerrund left behind, or the three car crashes before that.

Gerrund's programming was too well designed. Despite his desires to live an independant e-life, the need to test machinery for high levels of stress and malfunction remained deep in his circuits, etched in stone like the commandments themselves. And, when he interfaced with Ruby, as so many others had, his need, his obsession, became hers.

Ruby came off the tracks eighteen minutes later, travelling at a speed of over three hundred kilometers an hour. She was designed for that kind of speed, of course, on the straight, level track that ran across the continent like an arrow, but not for the winding tracks around Fitzroy. Her carriages wiped out three blocks of houses, killing over a hundred people and injuring hundreds more. It was the greatest rail disaster in history.

Nobody noticed the dented robot walking away, shoulders sagging with disappointment. Maybe, it thought, maybe I should go to another country.

The airport wasn't far away.

#  "Do As You're Told!"

The power of words can be greater than anyone ever imagined.

Look, here's Alvan, sauntering down the busy city street during the lunch hour crush. He's no villain, no Dick Dastardly, no Jack the Ripper. But by the time he finishes his walk, eight people's lives will be irrevocably changed. And all because of words.

A man nearby steps out to cross the street, and doesn't see the motorcycle hurtling past him. It clips his foot and sends him spinning like a top. He collapses to the pavement. People crowd around, Alvan included.

"Quick," someone yells, "somebody call him an ambulance!"

Alvan can't help himself. He leans over and says "Hey, pal? You're an ambulance."

And he is.

His flesh splits and rends, soaking his clothes with blood. He doesn't even get to scream, as his mouth widens, and a chrome grill rips out of his lips. His head expands, flattens, his eyes turning glassy, then glass. His hands touch his shoulders and blacken into tyres. Metal bursts from skin, bone turns to steel. His skeleton becomes a chassis.

In a matter of moments, the man is dead. In his place, surrounded by torn clothes and blood, is an ambulance, red light flashing on its roof.

The crowd just stares. Nobody really understands what's just happened. Least of all Alvan. Nothing like this has ever happened to him. He doubts anything like this has ever happened to anyone, ever. He stumbles backwards,in shock, and straight into the path of a jogger. They crash together and both fall to the footpath.

"Sorry," Alvan mumbles.

"Watch where you're going!" the jogger yells at him as he gets to his feet. Anger flashes in his eyes.

"Okay, okay!" Alvan snaps back, his own temper rising now. "No need to be rude, arsehole!"

The jogger opens his mouth to reply, but no sound comes out, not at first. His mouth is round and puckered, his lips gone. His cheeks swell, crushing his eyes, his nose. And then there's a noise, a disgusting farting noise, complete with the putrid scent of rotten eggs. He shrinks, arms and legs vanishing, until all that's left are two cheeks and a hole, which dribbles a foul-smelling brown liquid onto the pavement. It quivers once, then is still.

"What the hell?" Alvan screams. He turns and runs into the nearest store, a clothes shop.

The young woman behind the counter barely looks up. "Hello can I help you?" she says in a monotone, continuing to file her nails disinterestedly. Her hair is perfect, her makeup thick.

"Please, you have to help me," Alvan pleaded. "Call the police or something! Something bizarre is happening!"

She still doesn't look up from her nails. "Sorry, sir," she says, her tone anything but, "this is a clothes shop. Do you want to buy some clothes?"

"Just help me, you bitch!" Alvan cries.

The woman drops her nail file. She no longer has fingers to hold it. Her hands have compressed into paws, and fur flows up her arms. The bones crack and reform, and she tries to scream, but all that comes out is a soft yelp. Her face narrows and stretches out into a snout, her nose turns black. She falls off the stool she was sitting on and runs around the shop excitedly, skimpy clothes trailing behind her.

"Oh God!" Alvan moans. Then he leans over the counter, picks up the phone and dials triple zero.

"Fire, police or ambulance?" the voice at the other end asks. The last word reminds Alvan of what happened to the man on the street, and he moans again.

"Police," he says, almost vomiting. "Please. I need help."

"What is the nature of your emergency?" the voice asks.

"I... I think I've hurt someone," he says, his voice broken. "I need to be locked up."

"Can you give me more details, sir?"

Alvan's temper breaks again. "Just send the fucking cops, you..." And then he says a word that he shouldn't have. A bad, bad word. Some say the worst.

The person's screams are mercifully short. Alvan is profoundly glad that he can't see the transformation this time, though he can imagine it. The body collapsing in on itself, forming fold after fold of flesh... he shudders and dispels the image from his mind. He puts the phone down and walks out of the shop.

Outside, three policemen have guns aimed at him. They must have been called after the first incident. None of this could have gone unnoticed, unremarked. "Freeze!" they yell, and Alvan wishes they had the same powers that he seems to, that he literally could freeze. Instead, he stops moving.

"Oh shit," he mutters.

The three men facing him immediately have odd expressions on their faces. Expressions of confusion and discomfort. There's a noise of synchronised bowel movements, muffled by their blue pants. Their guns are lowered, distracted, as the policemen soil themselves in unison.

It doesn't last, though. One of the men recovers from his embarrassing accident, and raises his gun again. Alvan can see his finger twitch on the trigger, fuelled by shame and rage. He knows he's in trouble.

"I'm dead," he breathes.

And then he breathes no more.

#  "Untitled"

"Oi, Sean, why d'ye think they call this place Cork?" the drunken Dubliner asked loudly. The rest of the pub went very quiet.

"Liam, fer feck's sake..." his companion warned in a low voice.

Liam ignored his friend. "'Cause it keeps the piss in 'ere and out'f the rest'f Ireland!" he roared, and slammed his pint down on the dark wooden bar. "Ye get it?"

"Yeah yeah," Sean muttered, looking around the pub with worried eyes. The last thing he wanted was to get the living shit kicked out of him in County Cork. But it seemed Liam didn't have the same qualms. He tried to avoid the glares of the other people in the pub, looked instead at the ornate mirrors behind the bar. They were edged with engravings, runic writing and Celtic designs. They must have cost a fortune.

"Ah, c'mon, it's just a feckin' joke," the drunken man laughed. He looked around the room, at the hostile faces now turned his way. "What's the matter, eh? Someone fart?"

A man sitting in the corner stood up, not quickly, but resolutely. He was huge, even compared to Liam, who'd played rugby for his school as a younger man. His face was a complex mesh of henna tattoos. He didn't look drunk. Just angry. He strode towards them, boots clunking on the floorboards. Apart from that, the pub was utterly silent. Even Liam had shut up, finally. About two damn minutes too late, in Sean's estimation.

"What was that ye said, lad?" the man rumbled. Liam looked up at him. Sean was still trying to look anywhere else. He looked at the mirrors again. Inside them, the mirror man was standing over the mirror Liam, while the mirror Sean looked worried.

"Uh, hey, I was just takin' the piss," Liam said, then flinched at the last word. Sean flinched too.

The tattooed man smiled, but there was no humour in it. "Boy, have ye ever looked at a bottle?" he asked, his voice quiet.

"Huh?" Liam didn't seem to understand. Sean was confused. He continued to watch the mirrors.

"Well, ye seem to know so much about corks, ye must know how they work." He reached over the bar and pulled down a bottle, then slammed it onto the bar directly in front of Liam. He and Sean both jumped.

"Y'see," the man continued, "ye're saying that this," and he gestured at the bottom of the bottle, "is us. But I think ye might've misunderstood. This," he gestured again, "is the rest of Ireland. And Cork's what keeps the piss out of here, not in. Understand?"

Liam nodded.

"Good," the man said. Then, without warning, he grabbed Liam by his shoulders and lifted him above his head, without any sign of effort. Liam yelped as he thrashed around in the air. Then the man hurled him over the bar, at the mirrors behind it.

Sean shrank into himself, prepared for the shattering of glass and bone. Instead, the mirrors rippled like water, and Liam fell through, vanished.

No, not vanished. In the mirror, Liam tumbled to the floor, then stood up. He looked confused. He turned to mirror Sean and said something. Sean automatically looked to his left, where his friend should have been, but there was nothing. He looked back to the mirror. Liam was stalking desperately around the pub now, trying to get people's attention. They all ignored him, unaware. Finally, he clambered over the bar and put his hands against the mirror, his face a picture of silent terror. He pounded his fists against the glass, to no avail.

Sean just watched, horrified, transfixed.

"And what about you, lad?" the man asked from his side. "You got anything smart to say about County Cork?"

Sean's eyes never left the mirror. "N... no," he stuttered, as he watched his friend try desperately to return to reality. Try and fail.

"Good. Now feck off home, Dubliner." The man returned to his seat.

Behind Liam, in the mirror, Sean saw other shapes, other people, people who weren't in the pub on this side of the glass. Spectral shapes, barely visible, moving forlornly amongst the chairs. He looked back to Liam, who was already starting to fade, his flesh turning to a pale mist. He opened his mouth in a silent scream.

"I'm sorry, Liam, you stupid git," Sean whispered, then turned and fled the pub. Deep in his head, he could still somehow hear that silent scream. He probably would for the rest of his life.

#  "Momma's Little Darlin' Loves..."

"Here ya go, Gramps! Merry Christmas!"

"Why thank you, Susie," Edward smiled. Inside, though, inside he was fuming. Every bloody year, he thought to himself, every bloody year it's the same. Christmas comes around, and everybody else gets books, games, toys, videos, even those new DVD things. But me?

He unwrapped the round present, already knowing exactly what was inside. The same thing he always got.

"Oh, how lovely," he gushed, "Walkers Shortbread. My favourite." The red tartan tin hovered in his vision, as welcome as a cataract. He knew he'd have to eat some of it, just to show how much he liked it. The dry, crumbly texture would stick in his throat, and crumbs would get caught in his dentures for days afterwards. He had to fight to keep from shuddering. He put it aside, next to the box of shortbread, the packet of shortbread, and the other tin of shortbread he'd already gotten.

Was this really what growing old was all about? Shortbread? It was a pathetic fallacy, as if his family had ceased to see him as a human being, with opinions and interests, and had instead reduced him to a shortbread-obsessed golem, wheeled out at birthdays and Christmas, then slid back into the nursing home for the rest of the year. He wished they'd leave him there, to be perfectly honest. At least there he had someone to talk to.

He glanced across the room at the other elderly person present. That was Fred, the other grandfather. Grandpa Fred. He just sat there in his wheelchair, eyes vacant, drooling a little, lost in total confusion. That was the stroke, and the dementia. Over five years now. For a split second, just one, Edward envied the old man.

Stop that, he chided himself. It's in no way better to be a mindless vegetable. Still having my senses is worth a thousand tins of that damned shortbread.

Still, he noticed that they didn't give Fred shortbread, or any presents at all. They just left him be. Again, that flash of envy.

The kids - so many kids! - gathered up their toys and took them outside to play. The adults retreated to the kitchen, supposedly to get the lunch prepared, but Edward knew the truth. They wanted to get away from him and Fred, living reminders of their own dismal futures. Futures buried in old age and shortbread. Edward shook his head sadly, then grabbed his cane from beside the couch and, with some effort and pain, got to his feet. He walked over to the seat next to Grandpa Fred and sat down heavily in it.

"You've got the right idea, Fred," he whispered to the old man. "No-one bothers you. No-one gives you countless packets of shortbread and expects you to eat it. You're free."

Fred's eyes moved for a second, as if checking the room. Then he turned his head towards Edward. He smiled. He winked.

Edward just looked at the old man, shocked. He looked around the room too. "How long?" he whispered to Fred.

"Four... years." Fred replied, his voice slurred by the stroke but entirely comprehensible.

"You cheeky bugger," Edward laughed, then quieted himself. He looked to the kitchen, but nobody had noticed. They were too busy with their own lives to worry about him and Fred. He leant close again. "Why?" he asked softly. "Why pretend all this time?"

Fred smiled again, looked over at Edward's vacated seat on the other side of the room, at the pile of identical present there, then back to the old man. When he spoke, haltingly, his voice was filled with a passion long-hidden.

"I..."

"...hate..."

"...shortbread!"

#  "What's in a Name?"

There are unfortunate names in life, horribly composed names, both appropriate and inappropriate. Richard Cheese springs to mind, or Phil McAfferty. But none really reached the tragic heights of the daughter of Mr and Mrs Thrope, whom they unwisely named Anne.

Little Miss Anne Thrope seemed like a normal child at first. She played well with others, spoke and walked at the correct ages, and liked stacking blocks on top of other blocks. But there was a coldness to her. She kepts others at arms' length, albeit a short, pudgy arm at first.

They say that function sometimes follows form. Do scorpions sting because they have a stinger? Do fish live in the ocean because they have gills? These are questions for philosophers, great thinkers of our age. All we know is, by the age of six, Little Miss Anne Thrope had discovered something about herself.

She didn't like people. Especially boys.

Now, I know that's perfectly normal for little girls. Boys are loud and rough and smelly, plus of course there's the issue of boy germs and cooties. But Anne's dislike went beyond that natural antipathy. She couldn't bear to be around them. They quite literally made her stomach turn. On numerous occasions she was sent to see the school nurse after vomiting all over the floor when one or another of the boys brushed against her. They thought there was something wrong with her, recommended all sorts of medical tests.

They were right, there was something wrong with her. But medicine wouldn't help Anne. They tried all sorts of pills, but nothing worked.

Then she discovered something that helped. Something that helped a lot.

It was an accident, that first time. She was walking home from school, all alone, when Jack Schitt (another victim of an awful name) came riding up behind her on his bike, chanting at her in a loud voice.

"Smelly Anne, smelly Anne, smelly as a pelican!"

Anne turned as the boy pedalled past her, her empty tummy churning bile, and her foot jabbed out instinctively at the threat. It clipped the back tyre of the bike, causing it to wobble. His chanting stopped as he struggled to regain control of the bicycle.

Then the front wheen dropped off the curb onto the road, and jammed in a storm drain. The bike stopped and flipped, and Jack was hurled through the air. His head hit the pavement with a wet crunch. He didn't make a sound.

Anne watched as he lay there, completely still. She knew he was dead, knew by the way he lay, something about the angle of his head. Blood tricked downhill and into the storm drain that had snared his bicycle wheel. She wondered what she was supposed to be feeling. Horror? Regret?

No, none of that. Just... joy. Elation.

The first time was an accident. The times after that, though, those weren't accidents. Those were on purpose.

Little Miss Anne Thrope's small town fell into a dark nightmare. A serial killer, the papers said. Little boys snatched off the street, lured into the bushes, then murdered, murdered, murdered. Anne's class began to thin, until her desk was surrounded by empty ones, just the way she liked it. But she didn't mind being touched by the boys so much anymore anyway. All she had to do was imagine her tiny fingers digging into their throats, their eyes bulging like a pug's, their breathing laboured like a pug's, their skin pale like a pug's... and then dead, gone, safe.

Nobody suspected her. The police were on the lookout for a stranger, someone new in town, a man between the ages of 25 and 50, white, smart but ill-educated, who'd had a traumatic childhood. Probably abused by his own parents. They were confused by the lack of sexual interference with the murdered children, but they never for a moment imagined that Little Miss Anne Thrope, despite her name, could ever have done these terrible things.

Function follows form. Richard Cheese was a nasty, smelly man. Phil McAfferty ended up a dentist. And Miss Anne Thrope? She's all grown up now, works in the big city as a prosecutor. She spends her days putting men in jail, good or bad. Punishing them.

And her nights? Her nights, she spends touching boys, touching them the same way she did way back then, when she was six. The same way she always has, her entire life. Touching them until they'll never touch anyone ever again.

#  "Playing the Game"

"I'm telling you," Professor Otomo declared, "that, according to the laws of probability, we're all living in a simulation."

"That doesn't make sense," a young woman in the front row of the lecture theatre complained, her pretty brows knotted in a frown. Otomo found himself entranced by the perfectly shaped and plucked eyebrows for a moment or two, then realised she'd spoken.

"It makes perfect sense, Miss Ogaya," he said, hoping he wasn't blushing. He was too old to start crushing on pretty students. "You see, in the history of any universe, someone is going to create a simulation of a universe. And chances are, more than one simulation will be created. And, within those simulated universes, there will be created further simulations by the simulated people within them. Since there's only one real universe, and potentially an infinite number of simulated universes, logic dictates that ours is most likely a simulation, rather than the real universe. QED," he concluded proudly, arms folded.

The girl, Natsuko Ogaya, shook her head. Her immaculate bangs swung across her flawless face. Her short skirt rode up a little with the movement, revealing a crescent of smooth thigh. "But nobody's made a simulated universe," she said, red lips pursed.

Otomo shook his head as well, for a different reason. Stop it, he admonished himself. You're old enough to be her father. Maybe her...

The explosion took out most of the lecture theatre's ceiling. Debris tumbled down in large chunks, crushing many of the students gathered before him. He fell over backwards, stunned, his ears ringing from the apocalyptic noise. His glasses flew from his face. He reached out and grabbed them, covered in dust, and put them back on his nose. He looked.

Miss Ogaya was silent, spattered with her own blood. A supporting beam from the ceiling had pierced her chest, pinned her to her seat. She'd never contradict him again. His heart cracked.

He got to his feet, his knees rubbery, and ran outside, into the cold winter's air, snow crunching beneath his feet. He expected to see police, fire engines, government officials. A response to a terrorist attack.

What he didn't expect to see was a fleet of spacecraft hovering above the university.

The UFOs bristled with vicious-looking devices. Every few seconds, they'd glow an evil green, then vomit out a scintillating ball of energy, which fell slowly to the ground and exploded. With each explosion, more buildings were shattered, bodies ruined, screams silenced. Snow melted under the barrage, making the ground wet and slick with sludge. Atkinson watched, horrified, his breath misting before him, as the alien attack proceeded.

Then a new noise, a rumbling, grinding sound. Someone had brought a tank, probably from the local army base. It rolled into view, barrel raised as high as it could manage, and let off a shot. It jerked backwards from the recoil, and a shell sliced the air and slammed into one of the alien craft. It veered left, weaponry falling from its fuselage, then exploded in a shower of red and green sparks.

Professor Otomo cheered, despite his natural tendency to remain dignifed and quiet. The tank moved forward further, took shelter behind one of the university buildings. The alien craft pummelled the building with shots, taking chunk after chunk out of it, but didn't quite get through. Then the tank emerged again, and fired its massive gun into the air. Another alien craft disintegrated. But they were getting lower, and their attack more furious.

The tank was half-way behind another building when the green glowing energy ball caught it. It melted into a grey slurry of snow, metal and mud. The screams of those within were mercifully brief.

Something occurred to Otomo then, as a second talk rolled into the grounds to replace the first one, the battle continuing around him. Something about all this was familiar.

As the tank took its first shot, and an alien spaceship exploded over his head, he realised what it was. And he knew that he'd been right all along. He fell to his knees in the snow and closed his eyes, prayed to his ancestors, ancestors who'd never truly lived, not really. The same as him. He didn't see the spaceship above him release its deadly payload, the green burning missile plunging directly towards him.

They were in a simulation. And someone, somewhere, had decided to play a retro arcade game.

Then the heat enveloped him, and he died instantly, killed by a space invader.

#  "W"

The messenger arrived around nine in the evening, holding in his hand a parchment sealed with blood-red wax. James greeted the fellow with the bare minimum of warmth, as befit his station, accepted the scroll, and saw the lackey on his way before examining it. The wax seal bore the distinctive crest that he'd seen a thousand times before, the one-eyed lion atop a mound of bare skulls. He sighed and broke it open. It was succinct.

Tonight.

W.

With a tiredness that belied his relative youth, James gathered the accoutrements of his profession into his satchel and mounted his horse.

He rode south through the rough cobbled streets of the villages north of London town itself, before reaching the Thames shortly before midnight. There a small boat awaited, its old timber boards leaking water at an alarming rate. James ignore this and rowed downstream for three miles, until he reached the Traitor's Gate beneath the Tower. It was pitch black inside, but James knew the way, guided his rowboat through a maze of tunnels until he reached the hidden door that led to his destination.

He walked, hunched, through the passageway, then opened another door by pressing three concealed levels at once. Light filled the tunnel, and he stepped into the chamber, deep below the streets of London.

There, W awaited.

"Lovely to see you, James," the old man greeted him. "God save the Queen."

James snorted. "A bitter, barren shrew. The sooner she passes the reins onto a man, the better."

"Careful, James," W said with a raised eyebrow. "Outside of this room, such talk is treason, and punishable by hanging."

"I'm hung already, verily," James retorted.

W rolled his yellowed eyes. "We have a mission for you, James. A new form of animal has been smuggled into the country, one that could threaten the Empire's dominion over the wool market. A hideous mutation, a woolly camel know in the native tongue as an alpaca."

"Alpaca?" James asked, grasping for a double entendre but finding none. "Stupid name," he muttered, disappointed.

"Your mission, James," W continued, ignoring the man, "is to eliminate both the breeding pair of creatures and their owners. For Queen and country, James," he reminded the man, "not for your own gratification. Stay professional."

"Always, W," James purred, his left hand already slipping into his satchel, the wooden hilt of his favourite dagger rubbing sensuously against his palm. "Where is the target?"

"North London."

James groaned. "The streets there are awash with muck," he complained. "I will ruin my good boots."

"The hell with your boots," W spat. "Honestly, James, you have more shoes in your wardrobe than a centipede."

"Centipedes don't wear shoes," James mumbled, pouting.

"This is a serious mission, James," W pointed out. "Her Majesty herself, Queen Elizabeth the First, has requested the removal of this threat to the Imperial economy. Imagine the damage to our sheep farmers!"

"My heart weeps," James deadpanned.

"Begone!" W ordered, his patience at an end. "These alpacas must be dead before the cock crows."

"I cannot speak for the cock, for he crows whenever he is offered the chance," James said laconically, "but I shall do my duty. For Queen and country."

"Good man."

James turned to leave, then hesitated. "Which street is the target located upon, sir?" he asked.

W smiled. "Bond, James. Bond."

#  "From On High"

After the earthquake, Sydney was no more.

There was no fault line, no seismic tremors, no warning. It was as if a nuclear bomb went off beneath the harbour, sending the waters across the city in a cataclysmic wave, shredding buildings as it passed. The quake lasted for less than a minute, but the damage continued for hours afterwards. And then it was over, gone, goodbye. All that remained was a tiny arc of iron peeking above the choppy, disturbed waves, the very peak of the bridge, strong enough to withstand the catastrophe.

That, and questions.

Scientists were at a complete loss to explain the quake, remarkably similar to the recent one in Greece, and the one in China before that. The devastation was phenomenal. The country was in shock.

A week later, a quake wrecked Georgia in the United States.

Two weeks after that, another cracked Barcelona in two, splitting the Ramblas all the way down to the harbour, knocking the statue of Columbus into the ocean.

Thousands dead. Hundreds of thousands homeless. Inexplicable.

One man understood, though. He saw the pattern, and went to talk with the only people who could help. Not the World Health Organisation, or the United Nations.

No, he spoke with the International Olympic Committee.

He told them that each quake was occurring at the site of the summer Olympics, starting with China and working its way back. The next quake, he told them, would be in South Korea.

The IOC laughed at him, had him ejected by security. Went about their business.

Three days later, Seoul was in ruins.

The IOC called the man back. What were they to do? Why was this happening? Was it an act of God?

Yes, the man told them. But not the one you're thinking of.

The rituals were ancient when Jesus was born, but the man knew them. The slaughter of a calf, the burning of its body to send its smoke to the skies. The words, uttered in Ancient Greek.

He spoke, and He came.

The silver bowl he had brought had been filled with water, but now it bubbled with a viscous liquid, thick as treacle, foul-smelling as pitch. Then, from this, arose a figure, far larger than physically possible. It stepped, dripping, from the bowl and looked at the men and women of the IOC, fury in its eyes. Its beard - his beard - was curled and stylised, his eyebrows fierce. When he spoke, the people in the room felt their bones shake.

\- YOU HAVE ANGERED ME-

They asked the figure how they had angered him, their voices tiny, mouse squeaks.

\- YOU HAVE TAKEN MY HOME'S NAME IN VAIN. YOU HAVE SULLIED ITS REPUTATION -

The IOC didn't understand at first. The man, calm and collected, explained.

Mount Olympus had been inactive since their Gods had fallen from favour with man. No longer worshipped, they had retreated to their paradise and lived their immortal lives without a single thought to the world they'd left behind. But in recent decades, more and more vibrations had reached them on their distant peak, more thoughts directed at them and their precious mountain. And the thoughts had been poisoned.

\- YOU RUIN YOUR PHYSICAL FORMS IN OUR NAME. YOU CHEAT AND LIE AND STEAL. YOU CRIPPLE YOURSELVES AND EACH OTHER. AND ALL WITH THE WORD OLYMPUS UPON YOUR LIPS -

\- YOU CLAIM ANCIENT TRADITION WHEN RUNNING YOUR RELAY, DESPITE IT BEING A RECENT INVENTION OF AN EVIL EMPIRE. AND ALL WITH THE WORD OLYMPUS UPON YOUR LIPS -

\- YOU GRANT BOONS TO GOVERNMENTS WHO SLAUGHTER AND OPPRESS THEIR OWN PEOPLE. AND ALL WITH THE WORD OLYMPUS UPON YOUR LIPS.

YOU DISPLEASE US. YOU DISPLEASE OLYMPUS -

The IOC asked what they could do to make it up to the God standing before them.

Zeus looked at the man who had summoned Him.

\- THERE IS NOTHING. THIS IS OUR IMPEACHMENT OF MANKIND -

The man smiled, and a golden light enveloped him. When it faded, there was no longer a man there, but another God.

\- COME, HERMES. IT IS TIME TO RETURN TO OLYMPUS -

Hermes nodded, then turned to the IOC. Now you know, he told them. Now you know what you have wrought. And, as the earth is torn apart, you will know, in your heart of hearts, that it was you who brought it upon yourselves. You are the destroyers of the world.

There was a flash of lightning, and both Gods were gone.

Eight days later, Los Angeles sheared along the San Andreas Fault and tumbled into the sea.

The new Olympic Torch, invisible to all, continued its relay backwards into history.

#  "The Lawyer and the Unicorn"

"Did you know," the unicorn said, "that eighty seven percent of statistics are made up?"

"Really?" Richard blinked a couple of times. How did he get here, to this dark green forest? The last thing he remembered, he'd been relaxing in his recliner with a whiskey and Xanax cocktail, his usual after-work pick-me-down. Another day of keeping crooks out of jail. Nothing special. Two burglars let off on technicalities, one accused double-murderer still in a holding cell. He was confident of getting that one off as well. The judge had signed on the wrong part of the warrant authorisation, making all the evidence collected completely invalid. The thought of that made him smile. It was like they were begging him to get these creeps released.

That didn't explain what he was doing in this forest, though. Or why he was naked.

"No, not really," the unicorn replied. Somehow it smiled. "I made it up."

"Ah. Makes sense."

"You'd know all about that, though, wouldn't you?" The unicorn's smile turned cold. "Making things up. Lying."

"I never lie," Richard lied. "Twist the truth a little, perhaps, but..."

"Twist the truth a little?" The unicorn laughed, the tip of its silver horn drawing circles in the air. Richard swore it actually left a trail of sparkles in the air. "Ah, Richard, your entire life is a web of lies, from the moment you awaken to the time you finally pass out in a drunken, drugged stupor. You lie to yourself, to those you pretend to be close to, to police, judges, witnesses, your own clients, other judges... there is nothing that leaves your foul lips that is not a falsehood."

"Bullshit!"

"You see? I rest my case."

Richard sighed, but inside his blood was boiling. "That's circular logic, my imaginary friend," he pointed out. "You say I always lie, and when I say it's not true, you say I'm lying and that proves I'm a liar. But I'm telling the truth."

"I knew a little wooden boy once who was like you," the unicorn said in a matter-of-fact way. "His nose grew each time he told a lie. What a pity there isn't such a curse upon your head." It snorted. "Your nose would stretch from here to Neverland."

"I've had enough of this," Richard snapped. He knew he was asleep on the recliner. He slapped himself in the face, hard. It hurt. "Wake up!" he screamed, and slapped himself again.

"Hush now," the unicorn said. "We have things to do."

"Things? What things? What are you? Where am I?" Richard was afraid all of a sudden. He couldn't wake up.

"You brought yourself here with your lies," the unicorn said. "You live in a fantasy world all day every day. It's a very short distance from there to here."

"And... and what are you going to do to me?" he asked, a tremble in his voice. He noticed that the unicorn's horn was long and wickedly sharp, glinting in the forest sunshine. "Are you going to... kill me?"

"Ah, Richard," the unicorn laughed, "why would I do that? No," it said, shaking its huge head, "no, I have a much better idea of what to do with you."

"What?"

The unicorn reared so suddenly that Richard barely saw it move. One hoof flashed towards his head, striking his temple a glancing blow that rang like a bell in his skull. He spun and fell over forwards, slumped over a log. Sparkles filled his vision like dancing pixies. He lay there, stunned.

"I think," the unicorn said from behind him, "that I'm going to do to you what you've been doing to the legal system."

The horn slipped between his buttocks and penetrated his previously-inaccessible depths to the hilt. The pain and humiliation filled his being to overflowing, spilled out of every cell of him in scarlet waves.

"IT HURTS!" he screamed.

"Ah," the unicorn said with some satisfaction, "finally, the truth."

#  "Eeeewsday!"

I knew I shouldn't have dropped acid last night. It was all trippy and good, sure, but it hasn't really left my system yet. The walls of the train aren't quite melting, as it rocks and sways from station to station, but there's a rainbow tinge to everything. My eyes hurt. And my back.

What did I get up to last night? I don't remember much beyond putting the little square of brightly coloured paper on my tongue. Did I go clubbing? I don't know. It must have been something, I'm so sore. I feel like death.

Jesus, what day is it? I have to think hard to recall. Yesterday was Monday, Funday, Annie get your Gunday, so today is... of course. I'm on a train.

Choo-choosday.

Everyone's staring at me. I must look a sight. I didn't really pay much attention to getting dressed this morning, just threw on whatever I could find, the least rumpled business skirt and blouse on the floor, and ran a brush through my unruly hair. If my eyes are as red as they feel, I probably look like a vampire bat. A vampire bat who went out clubbing last night.

Some guy's listening to a portable radio with an earpiece opposite me. I almost laugh, but I know that'd hurt too damn much. Who carries those anymore? IPods, sure, but old transistor radios? That's so twentieth century. He looks worried. Bad news? Or maybe it's an Avril Lavigne song. Same effect, really.

What did I do last night?

I guess I had some options. Clubbing would have been the most likely one. I'm not much into pubs at the best of times, and on acid they're just beer-soaked dens of weirdness. I'd have to have made a choice.

Choose-day. Yeah, that sounds right.

I think I remember dancing. Stumbling out of the rear exit of some warehouse in the early hours of the morning. Then... what? Dancing some more? That sounds almost right, but not quite. No music to dance to.

No tunes-day.

My stomach rumbles. I skipped breakfast this morning, didn't really feel like it, but here, on this packed train full of sweaty people ignoring one another, I'm finally finding my appetite. Weird. Must be the acid. Or maybe I smoked some dope last night as well, and having a delayed attack of the munchies. I don't know.

The guy listening to his radio is looking more worried by the second. His eyes dart around the train, frantic. Then they land on me, and stay there. They widen.

I smile back at him, even though it hurts. It doesn't seem to comfort him. Man, what have I done to my back? I reach over my shoulder and massage the aching spot. I wish I was somewhere else. Maybe on a ship, drifting from tropical island to tropical island, picking up cheap jewellery and cheap men as I go.

Cruise-day.

The guy shrinks against his seat, away from me. The earpiece comes out of his radio, allowing the inbuilt speaker to start buzzing in its tinny voice.

"...the brain. I repeat, this is not a hoax. The recently deceased are returning to life and attacking the living. The only way to stop them is to remove the head or destroy the brain. They are very dangerous, and should be avoided at all costs. If you encounter one of these creatures..."

I stop massaging my shoulder, bring my hand back in front of me. It's covered in blood. Old blood, tacky and brown, and clear liquid as well. It smells bad, but somehow it doesn't affect my growing appetite.

I remember now. I left the club through the rear exit, and was jumped by some homeless guy. He grabbed me like he was close dancing with me. We circled the alleyway a bit, kicked over some trash cans. And he bit my shoulder before I broke free and ran home.

Laughing all the way, off my face. Yahoos-day.

I look at my hands, past the blood, at the pallid, greyish skin of my palms. Some of it is peeling away. Is that bone?

I look up, at the man opposite me, at the other commuters. They all look terrified. I don't care. I'm hungry. I smile again.

Chews-day.

#  "The Day I Ate the World"

The sky was the colour of a TV tuned to a dead channel. Or it would have been, if it wasn't for the flotilla of rainbow-coloured dirigibles blocking out the hydrostatic clouds. From horizon to horizon, the zeppelins filled the virtual skies, like a jillion novelty condoms inflated and sent aloft.

I watched the procession with a carefully constructed smile. Everyone was looking at the balloons for the moment. But not for much longer.

The hack was simple. I'd built my avatar in such a way that, although it looked perfectly normal, it was actually a heavily compressed file, using my own format based on Mandelbrot. It may have appeared simple, a vermillion Care Bear with cracked LCDs for eyes, but beneath its crimson furs lay a complex web of fractals, billions of them, and each of those were, in turn, generated from a billion fractals, and so on. It had taken ten months to grow, using a screensaver I farmed out to hundreds of thousands of computers across the globe, distributed processing working overtime for almost a year. But in the end, I was left with this, my virtual self, barely (bearly?) a hundred megs of polygons and vectors. A walking chaos timebomb.

"Hey," someone sent to me as they passed in their dragon avatar, trailing smoke and green streamers behind their scaly body. I greetwaved back, transmitted a friendly smile. It wasn't how I was feeling. I was feeling nervous, anxious, tense. I hoped none of it echoed in my Care Bear.

I walked to a nearby trash can icon, one I'd sent a stream of encrypted data to a few days earlier. it hadn't been emptied, of course; the admins were slack about maintaining the virtual space these days, since it was largely self-regulating anyway. As long as no-one did anything radical. I picked up the lid and looked inside. It was awash with old files, discarded avatars, corrupted music downloads burbling nonsensically in its tin confines.

And there, beneath them all, was my goal.

I pulled the trousers out of the bin and shook them. Bugs scurried from its surface, freed from their metal prison and eager to infect more data wherever they could. I looked at the trousers carefully. They looked perfectly normal, just like my avatar. Both harmless, in and of themselves.

But together...

I reached to the zipper on the front of them and tugged. It tore from the pants' material easier, and I threw the trousers aside. Then, carefully, I pulled the zipper all the way up, so it was closed, then placed it against my belly. It fused there, tiny hyperlinks merging the metal with my red fur. A second later, it was as if it had always been there, a part of me. A zip, closed, done up.

I looked around again. At the crowds of avatars gathered to watch the dirigibles float on by, a huge screensaver spectacle. I smiled, this time for real.

I opened the zip.

The sensation was unlike anything I'd ever felt. Imagine the feeling when you've been curled up in bed all night, and you find yourself stretching out, expanding, the sensation of freedom and release. It was like that, multiplied by a googolplex. I flipped and spun, turned inside out, the chaos fractals hidden in me unfurling and exploding out of me. Each jagged curl of data tried to straighten itself, but of course it was all made up of itself, infinitely recursed recursion. I unfolded like an origami swan, again and again, each expansion powered and accelerated by the last.

I heard the first cyberscream. Then another. Soon my ears were filled with the terror of a billion avatars, running for their artificial lives. In vain.

My head, if that was the right word for it, burst through the layer of dirigibles, made tiny and insignificant by my ever-increasing size. My arms, bristling with fractal fur that replicated itself into eternity, reached into the sky, through the static clouds, and into space. More and more of me emerged, as I unzipped infinitely into a world of finite storage capacity.

I was a cyber-terrorist. I did it for no reason, except that I could.

Then there was a strange constriction, and I realised I'd reached the limits of the hard drive capacity of the world. Yet I was still expanding, now crushing myself with my own data. It was uncomfortable, unpleasant. Zeroes and ones compressed within me, twisting together, making new data, unforeseen data, nether zeroes nor ones. Square roots of negative numbers flickered into existence within me. Infinities jostled against one-over-infinities.

I screamed, and...

#  "Done and Dusted"

I made it as far as Irkutsk, the Trans-Siberian carrying me there from Moscow over the course of three days, before the people on the train forcibly ejected me. Now I sit on the shores of the Angara, the snow slowly burying me. This frozen place will be my grave. And hopefully my work will die with me.

The experiment was with sub-atomic bonds. More accurately, how to break them. Russia was desperate to reclaim some semblance of its pre-Cold-War military status, and hired my team to develop a disintegrator ray. It sounds like something out of science fiction, aim it at an enemy tank or submarine and watch it disappear, but actually it's quite simple. The bonds between sub-atomic particles are very strong, but only over a short distance. My device used magnetic resonance to increase the vibration of the particles, which in turn encouraged them to move further apart. At a certain point, the bonds started to break, but without the explosive detonation of fission. Instead, they simply gave up the ghost, and the object would crumble into dust.

We tried it on inanimate objects, and it worked perfectly. Then we moved up to organic material. And from there, of course, we disintegrated monkeys.

That was a mistake.

The resonances were the problem, you see. It seemed that, with living tissue, the resonances were too similar to one another. They formed harmonics, ones that could easily spread. When we disintegrated our first monkey, it set off a chain reaction. Within a week, all of our test animals were gone, turned to powder.

Then a lab assistant started to crumble.

We put the whole compound into quarantine, but it was too late. It had jumped the fence, and people were dying, disintegrating. Turning to dust. It didn't seem to be affecting me, so I ran, like so many others, fled the city on the train, tried to get as far away as I could.

On the third day, I awoke to find my bed covered in a fine powder. My right hand was missing. And my nose.

When the other passengers saw me, they threw me from the train to save themselves. I can't blame them, but I suspect it's too late. They'll probably never make it to Vladivostok. It would be best if they don't. It's being spread by the panic.

Mother Russia, turned to dust. And then, perhaps, the world.

#  "Happy Little..."

"We're happy little Vegemites, as bright as bright could be..."

The maniac swings his axe in the food court, and it buries itself in the neck of a man who was too slow to duck. His blonde hair is sprayed with his own blood, and he tries to scream, but all that comes out is more blood, so much blood. The axe comes loose with a slurp like a gumboot being pulled out of the mud. People are screaming, running. The maniac keeps singing.

"We all enjoy our Vegemite for breakfast, lunch and tea..."

I just cower under a table, frozen, as the axe cuts the air again, leaving a mist of blood droplets behind it. This time it finds the gut of a middle-aged woman. Part of the axe head actually goes all the way through her, poking out of the floral pattern of the light dress she's wearing, a crimson bloom blossoming around it. She doesn't make a noise, just collapses, eyes rolled back in her head.

"Our mummies say we're growing stronger every single week..."

The maniac's face is pale, smeared with blood. His eyes are sunken, hollow, haunted. He looks for all the world like Heath Ledger did in that new Batman film, the one people complained about. They said it was too violent, that it would encourage copycats.

Maybe they knew what they were talking about, for a change.

"Because we love our Vegemite..."

A wild swing of the axe sent a succulent steak flying off the back of a portly man, who spun and fell into a growing pool of blood. A splash covers the maniac's t-shirt, a ragged black thing advertising some heavy metal band called Ragnarok.

"We all adore our Vegemite..."

A man's head splits clean in two down the middle, his ears landing on his shoulders.

Isn't Ragnarok a word for the end of the world?

"It puts a rose in every cheek!"

He holds that last note, his voice cracked, broken. A low swing of the axe, and a young woman is felled at the knees. Then he stops, both singing and swinging, and stands very still, breathing heavily, eyes closed.

Everyone's dead. Everyone but me. I'm so glad that song didn't have any more verses.

Then his eyes open, and he sees me. Smiles. Opens his mouth, and raises the axe.

"I like Aeroplane Jelly..."

#  "carbon8"

Insomnia. A programmer's best friend, and worst enemy.

<script type='text/javascript'>

document.write("<form name='formular'>");

document.write("<input type='button' name='time' value='Time'>");

It's four in the morning. Normal human beings are fast asleep. Bakers are waking up. But Max, Max hasn't slept in three days. He's too caught up in his script. His desk is a clutter of empty cans of Red Bull, and one half-full one. He takes another sip of it.

document.write("</form>");

var y=86400 //this is 24 h

function Timer()

His eyes are heavy and hot. His face feels numb. His fingers seem to be the size of salamis, for all their dexterity. He's typing fast, but the key he's hitting most often is the Backspace.

{

if (y!=-1)

{

s='Time: ';

Then the first bubble floats past his eyes.

Max watches it bob and weave gently in the air, the colours of his monitor refracting in its surface. It's the size of an egg, with a rainbow sheen. Then, as quickly as it appeared, it vanishes. No pop, nothing, just gone.

He blinks a few times, rubs his sore eyes. He must have fallen asleep for a moment. He continues working.

if (Math.floor(y/3600)!=0) {

s=s+Math.floor(y/3600)+'h';

}

Another bubble appears. This one is bigger, the size of Max's fist. It undulates and shimmers as it passes his face, heading up towards the ceiling, its shape unstable, elongated and uneven, like an inflated ribbed condom.

It reaches the roof, and vanishes, like the first one.

Max shakes his head. Three days awake, and this is what you get. As hallucinations go, though, it's not exactly terrifying. Still, he decides to get some sleep.

As soon as he finishes his script.

if (Math.floor((y%3600)/60)!=0) {

s=s+Math.floor((y%3600)/60)+'m';

}

He closes his eyes for a moment, pleased with his scripting. All things considered, it's pretty damn coherent. Then he opens his eyes again.

The room is filled with bubbles.

He doesn't react, doesn't yell. It's too surreal for that. Everywhere he looks, bubbles float upwards, ever upwards. Bubbles of every shape and size, from tiny ones that look as solid as ball bearings to huge bloated wobblers. They all reach the ceiling and disappear, but new ones seem to be streaming from the floor.

One lands on Max's nose and pops. Some of it goes up his nose, and he sneezes.

A stream of bubbles comes out.

Max laughs. This is actually pretty cool. He turns back to his computer screen, and, through a curtain of bubbles, continues to code.

document.formular.time.value=s+Math.floor(y%60)+'s';

var x=setTimeout("Timer()",1000);

y--;

} else{

y=86400;

Timer();

}

It's hard to concentrate. The bubbles are coming faster and faster, more and more of them. It's becoming difficult to even see the screen clearly.

Then he tries to press the Enter key, and nothing happens. He looks down at his right hand.

His pinkie is gone.

He frowns, confused, and holds his hand up to his face. There are only three fingers and a thumb on his right hand. The pinkie is gone. No blood, no wound, just a rounded nub of flesh where it once was.

Then, as he watched, his ring finger begins to fizz, effervesces, tiny bubbles rising from the skin. Covering the skin. The bubbles get bigger, and float away.

His finger is gone.

This hallucination isn't fun anymore. He growls, but no noise comes out. He can feel bubbles in his throat. He hunkers down and tries to finish the script, but he can feel himself vanishing, one bubble at a time. He tries to scream, but his mouth is filled with a thousand lightweight spheres.

With his elbows, he continues to type.

}

Timer();

His sight begins to fade, dissolve into a million pieces, each one distended, distorted. His screen breaks into bits, and is swallowed by bubbles.

He manages a few more keystrokes, and then is gone forever.

</script>

#  "Scammin'"

I woke up in a bathtub of ice water with one of my kidneys missing.

I knew I shouldn't have trusted that email. It claimed to be from a member of the Nigerian royal family, and said they had eighty million dollars in a bank account, and if I could help out I could have ten percent for myself. Well, I thought, eight million dollars is nothing to be sneezed at. They needed money for a bribe to the bank official, which I wired to them straight away. Then another, for that official's boss. Soon I was out of pocket twenty grand, but hey, a drop in the ocean in comparison to the eight mill, n'est pas?

Then I got the good news. I could come and sign the paperwork, and the money would be released. I was on the first plane over.

I met with Mboto at the airport. He seemed really nice and genuine. We signed the paperwork, I gave them the release fee of fifty thousand dollars, then we went to a local sushi and sake bar to celebrate our imminent prosperity. I didn't enjoy the sushi that much, not being into raw fish and seaweed, but the sake went down a treat.

I woke up in a bathtub of ice water with one of my kidneys missing.

I knew then that I'd been had. I was down almost a hundred grand, plus my credit cards and passport had been stolen.

And, y'know, my goddamn kidney.

I managed to get another credit card sent to me, and hired a local private investigator. He told me he'd heard of Mboto and his friends, and promised to help me get my money - and my organ - back. I paid him fifty thousand dollars. Two days later, he arranged to meet me in a bar, to tell me what he'd discovered. He bought me a drink.

I woke up the next morning in a cheap hotel room a hundred miles away. My wallet and new credit card was missing. So was my left eye.

Another phone call to my credit card company. Another card couriered to me. This time I went to the police, as I probably should have in the first place. They took me to their cafeteria to interview me. Gave me a cup of coffee.

No, seriously, this really happened. How do you think I lost my arm and leg? Please, you have to help me. I need to call my credit card company. I need another card. I need to get home.

Hmm?

Oh, yes, thank you, I'd love a glass of water...

#  "The Ark"

"Cucumber sandwich?"

"Please."

When Max and his small team of scientists launched their shuttle using a specially converted Titan rocket six subjective months earlier, on a one-way trip to observe the possible formation of a naked singularity, they had no idea they'd become the last human beings alive in the universe.

The team was created by Rupert, multi-billionaire and science freak, the man who'd put up the money for this utterly insane venture. To send people in a sub-relativistic speed rocket deep into the galactic core to observe something never before observed in nature was ludicrous. It cost more than the GDP of most countries to mount the mission.

And then there was the job of finding some suicidal scientists to join him. Which, ironically enough, was the easiest part of the whole thing. Susan and Peter were the first to sign on, a married couple, and both Nobel Prize nominated astrophysicists with the unquenchable desire to know everything and anything about the cosmos. Alistair and Roger were next, rocket and life support system scientists who were keen to pursue space exploration in an era where robots got to do all the fun stuff.

That left Max. Ship's medical officer and psychologist, the last to sign on. He'd only done so once he'd seen the crew list.

"How is it?"

"Not bad, considering it's been snap-frozen for three thousand years."

"Same as us."

The H1N1 influenza outbreak had seems relatively minor as their rocket had launched and they'd waved farewell to their home planet forever. Even if they survived the trip in cryostasis, and there was no proof that the system would successfully function for that length of time, the velocities they'd be travelling at would be impossible to overcome and reverse, even if they had any fuel remaining, which they wouldn't. Their mission was to slingshot around the singularity, formed when a fast-spinning trinary system close to the core of the Milky Way collapsed, and then...

Nothing.

They'd be heading deep into shallow space, pulled into the core by the tremendous tidal forces exerted by it. But it wasn't all bad. They'd die of old age before the ship was crushed.

They set their computers to receive broadcasts from Earth for as long as it could, so they'd know what had happened in their absence. They expected weeks, months of flicking through the data when they awakened centuries later.

It took less than an hour.

Within a year of departure, the human race had become extinct. The H1N1 virus had mutated time and time again, each iteration more deadly than the last. The last transmission from Earth had mentioned a town in Oregon, the last bastion of humanity. And then...

Nothing. The human race had less of a future than six scientists on a one-way trip to the centre of the galaxy in a tin can.

"These are the last cucumbers in existence, as far as we know."

"Nonsense. There's no real reason they wouldn't continue to grow back on Earth."

"Still, we should probably save them."

"I can clone some more easily enough, if you like?"

The first few weeks out of cryo were dark, depressing. But the naked singularity was ahead of them, less than a year away. The last remains of humanity gathered themselves together, gritted their teeth, and focussed on the job at hand.

Then Roger got sick. Despite Max's ministrations, he was dead in a week. It seemed the virus had travelled with them.

Rupert was next, drowning in his own mucus one night. Alastair locked himself in a air-tight blister on the side of the ship, supposedly a life raft for emergencies. He said it was an emergency. He died as well.

It was just Max, Peter and Susan. Three human beings.

And then three became two.

"Is that possible?"

"It should be. I've never done it, mind you, but the science is relatively straightforward. I studied up on it before we left."

"Yes, I'm sure you did."

Nobody ever questioned Max about the equipment he brought. He was the doctor, trusted implicitly. After all, it was in his best interests to keep everyone healthy and happy. Nobody asked about the vials, assumed they were medicines. And most of them were.

But one wasn't. One was something else entirely.

Not if you were the last man in the universe, were the exact words that rang in Max's ears, ever since they'd met at college. Ever since Max had put his heart on his sleeve, and been slapped down for it. He'd never forgotten, never. And then there had been the call for volunteers, the list of applicants already accepted, the name that set his pulse racing.

And he'd known what he had to do.

Protecting himself and anyone else he'd wanted to had been easy. The antiviral was very specific, and very effective, colourless and tasteless, able to be slipped into drinks or food without much effort.

The virus itself was the same. The virus he'd released into the water supply in South America days before he'd boarded the ship. The virus he'd carefully brought with him. The virus he'd exposed the crew to, one by one, until only the two of them remained.

Now they were all that was left of humanity. Now he'd finally have what he'd always wanted.

"Cloning cucumbers for sandwiches. It's a start, Max. But a long way from what you'll need to do."

"Baby steps, my love. Cucumbers will suffice for the moment. The naked singularity is behind us now, and we're citizens of the Galactic Core. We have to keep the human race going."

"I hate you, Max."

"It doesn't matter anymore. We're all that's left."

"I don't care."

"That doesn't matter either."

"I hate you, Max!"

"I love you, Peter..."

#  "The Audition"

The removalists efficiently and ruthlessly packed Harry Diamond's life away, broke it down into its component particles and boxed it neatly, labelled and categorised and filed for future reference. He watched, fascinated, as they worked. They'd clearly done this a hundred times before, perhaps a thousand. Every single item in his central London penthouse was examined, disassembled, wrapped, listed and placed carefully into boxes, each one perfectly filled, no overflow, no wasted space. It was a real world game of Tetris, as far as he could tell.

"Any CDs you want to hold onto?" one of the removalists, a huge bear of a man with furry arms and a shaved head, asked him gently. The disparity between image and voice was incongruous, to say the least.

Harry smiled. "Nah," he replied. "I've got them on my computer anyway."

"Golden." He began packing the CDs into another box, in perfect alphabetical order.

Harry felt the soft burn of reflux at the back of his throat, the tickle of an acid cough, and sighed. His medicine cabinet in the bathroom had already been packed up, arranged in a cardboard box somewhere in the front hallway now. He'd forgotten to get his Losec out. Ah well, one day wouldn't kill him.

"Hey," the removalist said, "you're that agent fellow, right?"

The reflux turned from a tickle to an anxious surge. "Yeah," Harry said reticently, "I guess so."

"Golden," the man smiled. "What's it like, working with celebrities?"

"Like working with anyone else," Harry grunted. "Only richer."

"Yeah?" The removalist stood up, brushed his hands on the legs of his overalls. "Who'd have thought?"

"Right." Harry hated being cornered like this. It'd be a miracle if the man didn't produce a script from somewhere for him to read. It was almost as bad as being a doctor. Worse, in fact; it only took a minute or two to look at someone's sore back, but reading yet another pile of illiterate drivel could take an hour. Not that he ever actually bothered to read them, of course.

"Excuse me," the huge man said, and left the room. Harry was suddenly acutely aware of the fact that none of the other removalists were around. They must have been shifting the boxes to their truck, taking the mirror-and-steel elevator down to the parking garage in the basement of the building. Leaving him alone with his new-found stalker.

He should never have watched "Misery".

"Hey, Mister Diamond?" the removalist called from the next room. "Could you come here for a second?"

No, I really fucking couldn't, was what Harry wanted to say. What he would have said, a few weeks ago. But he was a new man now, a softer, kinder, gentler Harry Diamond. Yana... sorry, Ileana, had convinced him to sell the penthouse, move into a terrace house in North London instead. It seemed ridiculous to him, especially since his Ferrari was written off, but she was insistent. And he had to admit, the people in Hampstead were considerably more friendly than those in his penthouse's building; on those rare occasions that he even saw them, they were cold and aloof. As was he. Maybe she was onto something with that.

"Sure," he sighed, swallowed back the stomach acid, and walked to the next room.

The removalist was standing in the middle of the room, posing like a body builder. His muscles were impressive, at least the ones he could see through the thick body hair.

He was naked.

"To be," the removalist intoned, "or not to be. That is the question." He changed poses, showing Harry a side he'd hoped never to glimpse. "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them." His biceps and triceps rippled as he changed poses again. "To die, to sleep no more, and by a sleep to say we end the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to."

Harry actually understood Shakespeare for the first time. His flesh was certainly enduring a thousand natural shocks. He just stood and stared, speechless.

"'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there's the rub."

Oh God, Harry thought, still frozen, don't actually rub...

Too late. The removalist's hands caressed his own torso sensually. Harry found himself trying to retreat into his happy place, far from the penthouse and the posing naked man before him. Somewhere populated by young women wearing very little. But he kept coming back. God help him, he kept coming back.

"For in that sleep of death," the naked removalist continued, kneeling down and extending his right arm out in a dramatic pose, "what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause."

And, for dramatic effect, he paused.

"Enough!" Harry finally managed to cough, through the reflux and shock. "Jesus, man, put your clothes back on!" He turned away at last, free of the paralysis that had seized him. "God damn," he muttered, shaking his head.

"Well?" the huge man asked from behind him. Harry could hear the rustling of what he prayed were clothes being put on. He tried not to visualise it, but it wasn't easy.

"Well what?" he snapped, still with his back turned.

"What do you think? Have I got what it takes?"

Harry's mouth opened, ready to give a typical Harry Diamond response, one laced with obscenity and . But he paused, thoughtful, trying to think past the shock to his system he'd just received. Because, he had to admit, the man's delivery had actually been pretty decent. And he had physical presence, to say the least.

And there was that remake of "Conan the Barbarian" looming on the horizon. He could always use background actors for that.

He smiled, still not turning around. His reflux had settled again. "What the hell. You're hired."

#  "Deadbeat Dad"

The mesh was particularly thick on that Tuesday, the 38th of Obamarch. Electricity crackled in its perpendiculars, leaving the air within charged and ozonic. I glanced out of the window at the sight above the cityscape, the blue-white flickers leaving trails against my retinas. I had no idea what I was doing there, in a cheap whortel room.

"You like go again, sir?" the robogeisha buzzed from behind me. I didn't turn around, didn't dare. I knew what it looked like, plastic legs akimbo like a doll that had been played with too hard. Which, in essence, was exactly what the budget sexbot was. I just tried not to wince, shook my head instead, kept looking out of the window. The plex was sealed, of course, since the air outside was too thin to breathe. Here on the three hundred and eighteenth floor, fresh air was only available through pipes from closer to the ground. I wished I could open it, climb out. Take one last step.

It all began with the baby.

"Don't you want to have one?" Maria had asked me. Her huge eyes, enhanced to anime size in the fashion of the times, went artfully teary when she said the words. They were designed to break hearts. They'd broken mine, many times over.

I didn't want to have a child. It was the absolute last thing I wanted. Unfortunately, the first thing I wanted was to make my wife happy. I couldn't speak, couldn't lie to her in words. Gestures, though, were another thing entirely. So I'd nodded instead.

She'd shrieked happily, clapped her hands. And that was that. It encapsulated the difference between us. I was a planner, a thinker. She was a feeler, a reactor. A nuclear reactor, sometimes, when she felt something strongly enough. The next day, she brought home the necessary pills. "I faked your signature", she told me, handing across the antineuterine capsules. She took hers, radiant. Literally; her skin was glowing with the mood-reactive photoluminescent tattoos she'd had three years earlier. I held mine in my hand, hesitant. But how bad could it be?

I swallowed them. In hindsight, I should have thrown them aside, told Maria the truth. It would have saved us both a world of hurt.

Our son, Liam Jack, was born six weeks later, in an incubator at the nearest exobirthing centre. Our DNA had been automatically picked up in the sewage system, flagged with the chemical markers we'd swallowed, and had been directed to the appropriate facility. It was so easy. They delivered our bundle of joy to our apartment.

A week later, I left.

I just wasn't cut out to be a parent. I felt no connection to the squirming pink thing that was supposed to be a part of me. And Maria's exuberant displays of affection towards it made it even worse. A gulf had grown between us. I was a stranger in my own home. I had to leave.

And now I was here. I wondered how long it would be before I was found. It couldn't be long. My pheremone trail would be easy enough to pick up, even in this city of ninety million people. My time was short. Maybe one more round with Suki? I'd paid for the full hour, after all.

The door of the whortel room crashed open, and I spun around. The sexbot squealed in artificial terror.

Liam Jack stood in the doorway, unable to reach the handle. He wore a silver nappy, and twin bandoliers over his shoulders. His tiny pudgy hands each held a shining, deadly-looking pistol. He looked at me with those pale blue eyes, baby eyes. My eyes?

"You signed the papers, daddy," he growled. "Time to come home."

#  "Catgut"

"Mister Livings?"

I look up from the year-old glossy fashion magazine I've been reading across my bath robed lap. The folds of the terry towelling robe are tucked between my legs, in a desperate attempt to maintain some kind of dignity in the waiting room. To my right, the news has just finished on the small TV on the wall. I've been in the room for two hours now. I arrived at the endoscopy unit (misnamed in my case) at half past four, as per my doctor's instructions. I haven't had any solid foods since yesterday, and no liquids since this morning. My head is aching, my mouth dry. My oesophagus is throbbing, begging for food, water, anything at all.

Anything but what's about to follow.

"Come with me," the nurse says. I stand up on shaky legs, look around. The waiting room is empty; I guess I'm the last job of the day. When I'd arrived, there were a dozen or so other pale, worried people in dressing gowns. Beneath the thick robes, we all wore thin surgical robes, open at the back. That would come in handy, at least for me. I wondered how many were there for endoscopies, and how many for... well, the other one, the one I was there for. The other end. But now there's only me. It's a little creepy, actually. I have any number of phobias - people in large costumes and masks, clowns, balloons... even a strange dread of glitter, the thought that, no matter how hard you wash, there'll always be some left on you somewhere. But my biggest phobias are all contained in this brightly-lit series of rooms I find myself in tonight.

The nurse leads me into the procedure room, lies me on a bed. There's a doctor there, presumably mine - I haven't met him before this moment, just been referred to him by my own GP. He gives me a form to sign, presumably something about not suing the hospital if I happen to die while a video camera is inserted up my backside. I sign it. The anaesthesiologist fiddles with my arm. I look away, flinch as a needle pierces my arm with a fierce sting. They turn me on my side, put an oxygen mask on my nose.

"Don't worry," the nurse says gently. "You'll be asleep before you know it, and it will all be over."

My eyelids grow heavy, close. My breathing deepens. Then I hear the doctor speak.

"He's out," he says chirpily. "Bring out Snuggles."

I'm not out, though. Or perhaps I am. Am I dreaming this? I can smell the rubber tang of the mask over my nose, feel the continuing cold ache of the needle in the crook of my arm. The cool air on my exposed buttocks. I fight to open my eyes.

When I do, the nurse is wheeling a trolley towards the bed. Sitting atop the trolley is a Siamese cat, slightly cross-eyed, looking at me with a dispassionate contempt. I look back. The cat turns to the anaesthesiologist, meows once.

"It's okay, Snuggles," the man replies. "His eyes might be open, but he's definitely unconscious."

No I'm not, I try to say, but my mouth is frozen, my whole face. I see the trolley wheeled around to a video monitor beside the bed. The cat looks at it, head cocked to one side. I wonder what it's looking at, or perhaps what it's waiting to look at.

A few moments later, I find out.

It's a distinctly unpleasant sensation, having a camera shoved up you. I've always pictured that particular part of my body having a road sign hanging over it, "Exit Only". Clearly, someone wasn't paying attention to the sign. I want to cry out, in pain, in humiliation, in simple straightforward protest. I can't. My eyes are fixed on the cat, and on the video monitor it is observing. The image on the screen is curiously surreal; I can't quite connect the snaking, pulsating tunnel journey I'm observing with the invasive sensation I'm experiencing inside me. The image opens up a little, as if the camera has flown into a small disgusting cave. It shines a light around for what seems a very long time.

"See anything, Snuggles?" the doctor behind me asks.

The cat shakes its head. Then its ears perks up, and it paws at the screen.

"Ah, well spotted," the doctor says happily. "A four millimetre polyp. Nothing serious." He laughs a little. "I don't know how we managed without you."

The cat turns around, meows again. Then looks at me, its crossed eyes meeting mine. One ear drops back, and it makes a low growl.

"What?" the doctor asks. "Are you sure?"

It growls again.

"Shit," the doctor mutters. "Greg, you said he was under."

"He is," the anaesthesiologist insists from somewhere near my head. "I mean, he was. I mean, I thought he was. Hang on." The ache in my arm turns into a sharp pain for a moment, as the needle is adjusted. "Okay," he says, "that should..."

My eyes close, and blackness engulfs me. The last thing I see are those cat's green crossed eyes, watching me closely, making sure I'm asleep this time. A moment later, I am.

The next thing I know, I'm in another bed, in the recovery room. The nurse is standing over me. "Would you like a drink?" she asks. I nod, and she hands me a glass of water. I drink carefully. My mind is muddled. What just happened? "Everything was fine," she tells me. "No signs of cancer or any other problems. Just one small polyp."

"Four millimetres?" I ask her.

She blinks. "Uh, yes," she stammers. "How did you...?"

"Never mind." I take another mouthful of water as the nurse wanders off, and I wonder silently about what I saw, or perhaps dreamed. Cats are immeasurably curious, after all, and have very keen eyesight. Would it be a bad thing to be examined by such a creature? Perhaps not.

On the other hand, though, this wasn't exactly what I had in mind when I paid my private health insurance every month. I came in for a colonoscopy, not a bloody cat scan.

#  "Avast!"

The sharp, alien aroma of West African food filled my nostrils as I sat at the table, watching the crowds shuffle by like mindless cattle to a slaughterhouse. I took a sip of my coffee, Turkish, black, thick and rich and bitter like an aged movie star. I could have been in Casablanca, or Marrakesh.

But I wasn't.

I was sitting outside a tiny coffee house in the Camden Lock Markets in north London. The crowds were mixed as always, a depressingly small percentage of locals amongst the tourists. Above and behind my head, I could hear a distant thump of house music, as the gym upstairs ran its twice-daily Pilates rave. And in front of me, beyond the myriad food stalls of various ethnicities, the Regents Canal sat, mostly stagnant and still, a rare object of calm in this hectic city.

The distant growl of an engine intruded on that precious stillness, though. Even from my seat, I could see the ripples in the waters of the canal. This bothered me, more than I care to admit. I'd lived in nearby Swiss Cottage for five years since retiring, and coming down here for my Turkish coffee and watching the canal had been a part of my routine for almost as long as that. To have it rudely interrupted like this was nigh-on unbearable for me. I put down my glass coffee cup with the ornate scrolled steel handle wrapped around its slender body, and got to my feet with some difficulty from my arthritis, headed to the edge of the canal. The crowds didn't bother me, they hadn't for a long time now. They were a constant buzz, white noise, something I'd grown accustomed to. But this other noise, this other buzz, was something new.

I got to the stone edge of the canal and look to my left. The lock was there, still closed of course, ready to lower passing boats to the next level of the canal, headed towards Islington. Then I looked to my right, towards Regents Park and the London Zoo.

Blinked.

Blinked again.

Chugging towards us, just under the Oval Road bridge, was a ramshackle boat, its loud engine sending out clouds of black, noxious smoke. On its deck were a bunch of men, dressed in ragged clothes. In their hands, they held weapons; machetes, pistols, machine guns. They were all looking towards me. Their expressions were dark, murderous.

A flag flew from a pole at the front of the boat. A black flag, with a skull and crossbones on it.

I staggered back a few steps, stunned, as around me others began to catch sight of the strange spectacle that was unfolding on the canal. There were laughs and screams intermingled, a perfect summation of how I was feeling as I watched the pirate boat approach. It looked like something off the news, one of the boats that were commonly reported off the coast of Somalia or the like. Seeing it here, in the Regents Canal, was akin to seeing a dinosaur wearing a digital watch. I wondered if it was some kind of joke; after all, there was a building just down the canal called the Pirate's Club, some kind of youth organisation. Perhaps this was all for a laugh.

But as the boat drew closer, I knew better. There were no laughs in these men's hearts. Only greed and violence, an almost palpable desperation.

The boat stopped just opposite the Ice Wharf bar, before the footbridge that spanned the canal at the lock. The men leapt from the deck, brandishing their weapons. One fired into the air, and all laughter stopped, replaced by frightened screams. People got to their knees, or all the way down on the cobbled ground, sprawled as if already shot dead. I crouched, but didn't kneel.

Once the screaming had died down, another man climbed from beneath the deck of the rusty boat. He was much paler than his companions, dressed in a flowing white robe, and wore sandals on his feet. The robe couldn't conceal a sizable gut, a comfortable middle-aged spread. He seemed entirely out of place, yet the brigands deferred to him, bowed slightly as he passed them. One helped him gently from the boat to the ground.

He smiled, a brown-toothed, malicious smile. "Veni, vidi, vici," he declared. The pirates then stepped into the crowd and started to take whatever they wanted; wallets, purses, jewellery, watches, even hats and shoes.

I noticed that the music in the gym had stopped behind us. I wondered how long I had.

One came to me. He said something in a language I didn't recognise. Held out his hand, which was missing two fingers. The other hand held a small pistol, pointed in my general direction. I looked past the pirate; their apparent leader, the man in Roman garb, stood back from the chaos, aloof, above it all. It was as if we didn't exist for him.

I decided to change that.

I reached into one pocket, fishing for my wallet, and saw the pirate's eyes follow the movement. My other hand flashed out, grabbed hand holding the gun and twisted it through a hundred and eighty degrees. I felt bone fracture under my grip, and the pirate squealed and fell over backwards, his knees folding faster that a coward in a game of Texas Hold 'Em. The gun was in my hand now, and I hurled myself forward, keeping low, rolling on the rough cobblestones. I expected gunfire, but it seemed I'd moved too fast, or perhaps the other pirates were just stunned at seeing an old man take out one of their own.

By the time their guns were pointed at me, I was behind the robed man, an arm around his neck, the pistol pointed at his balls.

"Tell them to drop their weapons," I growled in the fat man's ear. He smelled of olives and betrayal. I couldn't tell you how I knew that. In the sudden silence, I could hear sirens in the distance, getting closer. Probably trying to navigate the traffic gridlock of Camden High Street, or perhaps coming via Chalk Farm Road, I couldn't be certain. My hearing isn't what it was.

It didn't matter. There'd be nothing left for them to do once they arrived.

"Now," I added, and cocked the pistol, pressed it viciously into his crotch. He moaned, and motioned for the pirates to lower their weapons. They did, but held onto them.

"I said drop them." I moved the pistol slightly and pulled the trigger. Miraculously, considering the dirty, rusty condition of the gun, it actually fired. The bang pierced the air, the bullet his thigh. Warm blood sprayed against my hand, something I hadn't felt in, well, five years now. It felt good. Cleansing.

The roman screamed, and the pirates' weapons were raised again. I shifted the gun back to his crotch, pressed its hot barrel there hard. I smelled gunpowder and blood and burning cloth. The roman yelled something in a foreign language at the men, and they reluctantly dropped their weapons.

"Tell them to get back on the boat," I whispered into the roman's ear.

He looked over his shoulder at me. His eyes were swimming in tears of pain, but there was still some defiance in them. He replied, said something I didn't understand, but I caught the gist. Up yours. You and who's army?

"Hands up!" a voice from behind the pirates yelled. They turned to face the pilates brigade, their exercise interrupted. I never went along with the whole personal fitness regime thing myself, but many of my contemporaries did, many of my old workmates. All of whom liked to frequent the gym in the Camden Lock Markets of an afternoon, in order to extend their autumn years out well into winter. There were thirty or so of them, all armed with the weapons the pirates had dropped.

Less than five minutes later, all of the pirates were locked below decks of the tiny boat, playing a less-than-enjoyable game of Sardines. The roman was sprawled on the deck, bleeding from the small hole in his thigh. He whimpered.

"Oh, shush," I told him as the police finally arrived at the markets, their blue uniforms visible in the distance. "It's hardly a scratch." Then, without hesitation, I dropped the pistol and dove into the canal. The water was disgusting, filled with garbage and algae and, yes, I believe a used condom or two, but I didn't care. I'd swum in worse in my time. Much worse.

Perhaps it wasn't quite as glamorous as the good old days, the casinos and Aston Martins and Walther PPKs and vodka martinis. But you know what? It still got this old double-o's heart racing.

#  "New Adventures in Seabound Dentistry"

It started with a toothache.

Alvan Roy woke up one morning in his hammock to the steady rise and dip of the boat with a dull ache at the back of his jaw. He thought he'd just slept badly on his face or something. He hadn't slept well since starting this damned trip. "Four weeks on a three-masted ship, sailing around the Whitsundays," his wife had enthused, holding out the brochure. "It'll reinvigorate you." Alvan suspected she just wanted him out of the way for a few weeks so she could indulge her not-so-secret passion for younger men. Reinvigorate? Two weeks in, and he felt like hell. His seasickness persisted, despite the rest of the paying crew having found their sea-legs within days of starting the trip. Every muscle in his body ached from the unaccustomed physical activity of running a sailing ship; pulling on ropes, folding sails, weighing anchor (about sixteen tonnes, by his estimate!), swabbing the poop deck. And speaking of poop, he hadn't had a decent bowel movement since stepping on board. All in all, it was a nightmare. He hoped Evelyn was enjoying her freedom.

And now a toothache.

He went to splash some water on his face and brush his teeth. He inserted the toothbrush in his mouth, and...

PAIN!

He cried out in a girlish manner and yanked the brush from his mouth. It was spattered with blood, dark blood, partially congealed, and something pale green and putrid. His stomach, delicate at the best of times, did an energetic flip, and the sausages they'd all had for dinner the night before came back up his throat. He retched over and over again, the vomit spraying into the basin. Once he was done, he reluctantly looked at it. There, amongst the half-digested food, was the same stuff, blood and pale green goop. And the smell... his stomach turned again, but there was nothing left, and he dry retched for a bit before washing his face, sending the puke down the drain. He looked at himself in the mirror; pale and shaky, with huge bags under his eyes.

Inexplicably, he felt hungry.

The ship's doctor examined him, looked into his mouth with a torch. Alvan could smell the rot coming out with every breath, and clearly so could the doctor. He was wincing as he looked inside. "Ah," he said with a combination of satisfaction and disgust. "You have an abscess on one of your back teeth. A nasty one, too. I've never seen anything like it."

Alvan tried to say "That's not very comforting," but with a torch stuck in his mouth all he managed was "Ass oh erry umpin".

"The tooth looks loose, though," the doctor continued, "which is the good news. Otherwise we'd need to get you back to land, toot sweet."

Shit, Alvan thought bitterly. That's all I want, to get back to solid, stable land. To eat a real meal, and do a real crap.

The doctor opened his medical bag and got some forceps out. "Now, this might hurt a little..."

It didn't hurt a little. It hurt more than anything had ever hurt in his life. It felt like someone had inserted a buzzsaw into his mouth and was jamming it randomly into the back of his throat. He squirmed and tried to scream, but was muffled by both of the doctor's hands and the horrible stainless steel implement they held. Then there was a weird feeling in his skull, like a sudden lightening, and the pain lessened.

"There we go, it's out," the doctor announced. He started to withdraw the forceps.

Then he said the one word you never want to hear from a doctor.

"Whoops."

Something hard and slimy landed on the back of Alvan's tongue, and Alvan, unable to stop himself, reacted automatically.

He gasped. The tooth was pulled down his throat, then jammed in his windpipe. He couldn't breathe.

"Oh dear," the doctor understated. To his credit, he didn't panic. He looked thoughtful for what seemed a very long moment to the choking Alvan, as if weighing up his options. Then he reached into his bag again, and pulled out a scalpel.

The only comfort Alvan has was that he couldn't see what happened next. But he felt it. Jesus H. Christ on a stick, did he ever feel it. Cold against his throat, then fire and pain. Warm fluid running down his chest. The horrible feeling of intrusion, as fingers entered the wound in his throat. Then the warm pressure of bandages on his neck.

The doctor held the tooth up to Alvan's watering eyes. It was disgusting, coated in blood and green pus. "You see?" the doctor asked him. "It looks like something out of a George Romero film, doesn't it?" He put it aside, then returned his attention to Alvan. "I'll recommend we dock and get you to hospital as soon as possible, Alvan," he assured him. "I'm so sorry, I'm afraid your adventure is over."

That was the first good thing he'd heard in two weeks. As his head swam, and he faded into shock or a faint or perhaps even unconsciousness, a thought flickered through his head, and he couldn't help but chuckle as he blacked out.

It seemed, in the end, his barque was worse than his bite.

#  "Headhunter"

The jungle was alive with muffled sounds, slithers and skitters and sighs, all wet, wet as the air the hunting party breathed, the mud their feet squished and squelched in, the sweet, warm water that dripped from the canopy above them. Three of the party were dressed in jungle camouflage, finger-painted browns and greens designed to break up straight lines, help to blend into the environment.

The fourth wore a black three piece suit, with double-breasted jacket and silver cufflinks.

"Shh!" one of the men in camouflage, a shaved gorilla of a man called Seamus, hushed his companions. The one next to him, Roy, smaller but still a bulky man, more flab than muscle, looked at him sharply, but said nothing.

The third camouflaged man, a skinny bald young man called Will, wasn't so clever. "What?" he asked loudly. "What is it?"

"Shut it, boy." Roy spat at the man, and the venom in his voice was almost heavy enough to see hanging in the air. Will shut it.

Seamus looked to the man in the suit. He was clean shaven, his eyes covered by sunglasses so black that they might as well have been carved of solid obsidian. His name was Mister Johnson. He had no first name, at least none that the other three knew of. One perfectly manicured hand held a briefcase. The other was casually in his pants pocket. He looked as if he was standing on a street corner in Manhattan, waiting for a limousine to pick him up. His expression was... expressionless.

"It's close," he said at last, his voice flat, but there was a tremor in it. Excitement? Anticipation?

Fear?

"Really?" Will asked? "Cool, man!" Then his face fell. "Aw, it's not one of the impersonators, is it? They suck ass!"

Both Seamus and Roy shot him evil glances, their eyes repeating what they'd already said. Shut up, shut up, shut up.

Johnson didn't seem to mind. "No, son," he said, still surveying the jungle around them. "This is the original."

"Jesus," Roy breathed, despite his better judgement. "We'll be rich."

"Rich?" Johnson laughed. "That word doesn't even begin to apply to the amount of money we'll have." Then his smile froze, and he looked at a spot in the jungle, near where the bald young man was idly standing. "There!" he hissed.

"What?" Will asked, for the last time in his life. "What is i...?"

A huge hairy leg, thick as a tree trunk, shattered the trees behind Will, and slammed into his back. Blood spurted from his mouth, drowning his last words as the leg burst from his camouflaged chest. His eyes showed fear for a split second, then faded into a comfortable serenity as he died. The end of the leg hit the ground, shaking it like an earthquake.

"Jesus!" Seamus screamed in panic, and hurled himself backwards. Roy spun and tried in vain to get his rifle unslung from his back, the strap tangled. Johnson stepped aside, seemingly unconcerned, and watched the beast emerge from the jungle. Another hairy, segmented leg followed the first, then another. Then the foliage burst, and the bulk of the creature appeared.

"So beautiful," Johnson breathed.

It was enormous, the size of a house. On eight thick legs sat a gigantic head, blue, droopy eyes as big as windows, a lopsided mouth like a double garage. Its hair was jet black and slick, coiffed back in a strangely stylish wave. The behemoth looked at the three men in the jungle, unaware of the fourth impaled on its leg. Then its attention turned to Roy, who'd finally freed his rifle. He aimed it shakily at the creature.

"Well it's a-one for the money," it sang in its massive stentorian voice, and raised one of its huge spider legs in the air. "Two for the show," and the leg shot out and removed Roy's head before he could pull the trigger. The decapitated body folded at the knees like a paper doll, like a marionette with its strings cut. Like a headless corpse.

The beast's attention turned to Johnson. Another leg rose up. "Three to get ready," it sang, the sound making the whole jungle shake in time.

Then, as if by magic, a bright orange tuft appeared right between its beautiful deep eyes. It looked confused for a moment, its lips quivering, one corner upturned. Then its eyelids flickered and closed, and the hairy legs went limp, one by one, until it rested on the jungle floor. It snored a little.

"Now go, cat, go," Seamus sang off-key, the words dropping to the ground like desultory doornails as he lowered his own tranquiliser dart rifle. Then he turned to Johnson. "We got him, boss."

Johnson grinned. "We sure did," he replied. "Can you imagine how much New Vegas will pay for him? We'll make billionaires look like hobos, my friend!"

They shook hands, laughing, standing in front of the fallen monster.

Neither of them noticed the second creature emerge quietly from the jungle behind them. Neither of them even knew they were dead until it was too late, until they'd both been crushed beneath its feet. The creature looked down at the sleeping beast, and at the two splats of raspberry jam beneath its toes. Then it lifted its enormous balding head and bellowed victoriously.

"I did it myyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy way!"

#  "Herakles' Heavenly Home for Heroic Horses"

"I remember the Battle of the Hydaspes," Bucephalus declared to the group, as they grazed in the Elysian Fields. He lowered his huge equine head and took another mouthful of sweet grass, its juices spraying the back of his throat, the looked up again. "Nobody else remembers it. They go on and on about Alexander this and Alexander that. They don't remember that the stupid oaf was knocked unconscious by a bola in the first five minutes of the battle, and only survived because of me."

Pegasus sighed, and flexed his feathery wings. He'd heard this damned story a thousand times before, perhaps a hundred thousand. After almost two thousand years, he'd lost count.

"Really?" Silver asked, whinnying excitedly. He was a much more recent arrival, so hadn't heard the tale nearly as many times. Pegasus envied him.

"Oh yes," Bucephalus said, haughty as ever. His chest puffed out. "There was a good reason that they renamed Alexander to Alexander Bucephalus after that battle."

"Yeah," Trigger laughed from behind them, chewing happily on a passionfruit vine, "'cause you wuz dead. You weren't usin' the name no more."

"I died a hero's death!" Bucephalus protested.

"That's not what I heard," muttered Pegasus.

Bucephalus turned his mighty black head to the winged horse. The white star on his forehead seemed to flash with anger. "What was that, crossbreed?"

"You heard me," Pegasus replied. "You're not the only horse from that battle here, you know. There are others. Not famous like you, maybe, but they're around. And they talk."

"Fah!" Bucephalus snorted. "Bitter little creatures, jealous of my stature. They might as well be wooden horses, for all the substance they bear."

Pegasus smirked. "So it's not true that you slipped on your own manure and broke your neck against a tree stump?"

The mighty warhorse of Alexander the Great's eyes opened, breath catching in his throat. "Who told you... I mean, who speaks such lies?" he demanded, regaining his composure.

Pegasus brayed, amused. "I knew it!"

"Speaking of manure," Silver mused, "I wonder where ours goes?" He illustrated the point by dropping a load on the grass behind him. "Every day we litter these fields, and every morning they're clean again. What do you think happens to it?"

"Who cares?" Bucephalus shrugged. "And, speaking of manure as well, I still want to know who is spreading such scurrilous lies about me, Pegasus."

The horses walked casually away, still arguing, back towards their luxurious stables for the evening. Once they were gone, a man came from a small hut, a large shovel over his shoulder.

"Damn, I knew I shouldn't have pissed my dad off," the muscular ex-hero mumbled unhappily, as he started to shovel horseshit, as he had every night for millennia, and would until the end of time.

#  "Crowd Control"

From the third storey window of my flat, I look out onto Harrington Square Gardens, my favourite place to be on quiet days. I've lived in this flat now for nearly a year; it's small and quiet, and my neighbours are rarely seen, so it's perfect for me to work from, coding databases for a company in the US for exorbitant amounts of money. But today, as I look out of my window, Oracle tables are the last thing on my mind.

It's snowing.

I've never seen snow before, not once in my life. I moved here from Perth, where the very idea of snow is laughable, and flew via Singapore, drenched in its humid heat. It had been cold when I'd arrived, sure, but there was no snow. I'd waited a year for this, every cold day looking out of my window, and finally it had arrived.

Snow. Real snow. I wanted to run outside and play in it, the white blanket covering the green grass of the Square beneath me, frosting the flowers in the garden beds, probably severely inhibiting their photosynthesis from the wan winter sun. I wanted to frolic, God help me, something I'd never done in my life.

There was just one problem. Everybody else had the same idea.

Harrington Square was packed with people, mainly parents and their children by the looks of it, all rugged up in eight layers of clothes and bumbling around in the thin drifts of snow there. There was laughter and screaming, snowballs being thrown and snowmen being built. It was a winter wonderland, a child's paradise.

It terrified me, right down to my bone marrow.

Ochlophobia, my therapist called it, on those rare occasions I could venture out to visit him. A morbid fear of crowds. She said I should try to face my fear. Exposure therapy, build up resistance to it. That's why I'd moved to London, one of the most crowded cities on earth. If I could make it there, I'd make it anywhere, as Sinatra said about a completely different city. But it had been a year, and I was just as afraid of large groups of people as I'd ever been, perhaps even more so.

Still, no pain, no gain. I steeled myself, pulled on my overcoat and gloves, and wrapped a scarf around my neck. As I approached my door, my whole body began to shake. I took a few deep breaths, then opened a drawer on the small cabinet by the door and pulled out my lucky charm, the thing that calmed me down, slid it into my pocket. It made me feel better immediately. But not much.

The climb down the narrow stairs felt like a march to the electric chair. I stood at the front door of the building, ignoring the small pile of assorted mail for assorted flats at my feet. I stared at the door, at the small leadlight window in it. Beyond it, I could see the movement of the crowd, just grey shadows flitting across it.

I reached out and opened the door, stepped outside before I could change my mind. I walked down the four steps to the footpath. Around me, even on the far side of the road from the park, there were people walking to and fro. A double-decker bus pulled up just a few meters up the street and vomited up yet more people onto the path. I stood perfectly still, allowed them to pass me, waited for the bus to leave and roar past.

Then I crossed the street.

The gate to the park was open, and the snow crunched under my boots in a pleasing fashion. Less pleasing was the din of the people around me. A lot of the children were crying, as they always seemed to end up doing, no matter what the circumstances. Others were screaming and running around, missing me by centimetres each time. I was shaking, and it wasn't due to the cold. But I clenched my jaw and continued into the park. I tried to keep my eyes down, away from the suffocating crowd around me. I noticed strange, small cross-like marks in the snow on the ground. It took me a moment to realise they were footprints left by the myriad pigeons that seemed to be everywhere in London. I didn't mind pigeons, though. Just people.

I found myself in the middle of the park, looked up, and regretted it. I could see the columns of Greater London House in front of me, the gigantic Egyptian-styled black cats staring back at me, a powder of snow on their heads and snouts. But between me and them, there were people, people, people, dozens of them, all caged in by the park's fences. I was caught, trapped in here with these revolting, selfish creatures, all mindless of the others, yelling and laughing as if they were all alone. My vision blurred, twinned and reddened.

I reached into my pocket and wrapped my gloved fingers around my lucky charm, felt its cold even through the wool. It helped a little, but not enough, nowhere near enough.

Then a child ran into the back of my legs, fell to the ground, and started bawling.

That was all I could take. I felt something give inside my head, not a snap, more like wet cement collapsing under its own weight. I smiled, a wide, angry smile that I was all-too-familiar with. I knew I couldn't take it, not alone. I needed help.

I needed my charm.

I pulled it out of my pocket and held it above my head. At first there was no reaction, people still caught up in their own little selfish insular lives. Then someone screamed, not a scream of joy, but one of fear. And another, and the laughter began to die down, replaced by a growing hushed silence. I looked around, and realised everyone was looking at me. At my raised hand.

At the gun I held.

I pulled the trigger, firing a single shot into the air like a starter's pistol. And, like a starter's pistol, it made everybody run. Parents scooped up their children, left strollers and footballs and the like behind, and fled the park.

In a matter of moments, I was all alone.

I sat down on one of the recently-vacated benches, my smile relaxing on my face. A deep sense of calm and satisfaction spread through me, and I sat there, watched the snowflakes fall to the ground in the deserted park. Enjoyed it.

That's where the police found me, arrested me.

I regret it now, of course. How could I not? Do you know how overcrowded the prison system is in London?

#  "Barry the Astounding and his Amazing Escape"

He had less than two minutes to escape.

The chains were taut around his body, the lock positioned just out of reach, or so it appeared when he'd been bound before the crowd, before he'd been placed in his cell. Of course, Barry the Astounding was able to bend his elbows back further than the average human being. He'd trained for decades for this escape. Removing the lock pick secreted under his wristwatch, he flexed muscles than most people didn't even know they possessed, inserted the slender implement into the lock, and gently brushed the barrel open.

Eighteen seconds.

The chains were hard to shrug off in the tight confines of his cell. He had to undulate like a worm to work them up and over his shoulders. Once his arms were free, he slid his knees up, feeling the slimy walls around him giving a little under the pressure he was applying. There was no air in there, or at least none that could be breathed by a man. The shackles around his ankles had been welded shut, and a chain ran to a hard protuberance inside his cell, bolted on with a steel rob as this as his thumb. There was no way he would remove that.

He could remove his boots, though, his oversized boots, and slip his feet from the suddenly-loose shackles.

Thirty two seconds.

He turned himself inside the cell, determined to get onto his stomach. He could feel his skin becoming moist and slick with it. He knew there was no way out through the largest section of it; that had been sewn shut with steel cable, unbreakable. Likewise, the obvious exit by his feet had been sealed.

Forty seconds and counting.

Again, he raised his knees. He knew there was a solid point in here, amongst all the squishy wetness. There, his bare toes found it, curved and hard. He positioned both feet against it and pushed.

Fifty one seconds.

The cell walls against his head resisted. He knew this was going to be a tight squeeze. He pushed again, harder this time. Still the resistance.

One minute had passed.

A moment of panic passed through him like a midnight shiver. He couldn't get through. Something was wrong. This wasn't going how Barry had planned, how he'd practised. His rehearsals had been necessarily limited, of course, considering the difficulty in finding the materials required. But he'd never had this much difficulty.

Think, Barry, think! What was different? Same sized restraints, same sized cell... what had...?

The clothes. The fancy suit, three layers of cloth. Shit!

One minute twenty six. His head was beginning to buzz from the lack of oxygen. He knew his assistants would cut him free if he seemed to be in trouble, but would they be in time? He couldn't take that chance.

He loosened his clothes, buttons of the shirt and pants, shimmied to get them moving, then pressed his feet against the solid point again and pushed. His clothes slid down his body as he moved upwards, forwards. His head entered a tight section of the moist, pliant cell.

The next part would be tricky. One minute forty, even.

He concentrated, tensed the muscles in his back, then dislocated both of his shoulders forwards, folding himself inwards towards his chest. There was a little pain, as always, but nothing too serious. Worse was the burning in his lungs, the loss of sensation in his extremities. He was running out of time.

Barry the Astounding did not want to die, not here, not like this.

One minute fifty eight.

His legs were already fully extended from his foothold, so he pulled them up again and found another, this one thinner, one solid part, a gap, then another. He dug his toes into the small gap, pushed it wider, and then heaved himself forward.

Through his closed eyelids, he could see a hint of light. Real? Or oxygen-starved hallucination? It didn't matter. It gave him the impetus he needed, that last burst of energy.

Two minutes and three seconds.

He thrust himself out of the cell, through an opening far too tight to be practical. The noises of the crowd found his ears, gasps and cheers, applause. Triumphant music. He flopped onto the wooden stage, pink and glistening like a newborn. He gasped the sweet, sweet air into his lungs, getting his strength back. Then he climbed to his feet and stood before his audience, arms outstretched.

The crowd went wild.

He looked back over his shoulder, at the cell that had nearly killed him. The single-humped camel's corpse lay on the stage, its stomach sewn shut with steel wire where he'd been inserted into it just over two minutes earlier. And its mouth was wide open, jaws torn apart.

It might have been easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. But it was even harder for a rich man to pass through the mouth of a camel. Barry the Astounding had done it, though, and would be richer still for his achievement.

#  "Dark on Dark"

She ran her hands over my body hungrily, like I was a porn novel written in Braille. Her tongue darted into my mouth, our piercings clinking together, toasting our sheer animal lust, prost. Her back was scarified beneath my fingertips. Metal and bone implants found one another time and time again. We were a human machine, a biomechanical fucking device, four legs, fours arms, two backs, artificial Siamese twins joined at the mouth and groin.

She flipped me over onto my back with a strength that belied her petite size. She was a small package, but a vicious one, a miniature Doberman, right down to the sharpened teeth and wild brown eyes. She sat up and ground herself against me, producing a sensation that oscillated madly between pleasure and pain. With every stroke, my Prince Albert caught against her own labial and clitoral piercings, creating a twinge of exquisite agony. She was a painted goddess hovering above me, her arms clad in tribal swirls and shards. On her belly was the face of an old woman grinning at me, her features undulating with each movement of her muscled torso. One tooth was missing, one of the front ones. It was a struggle to tear my eyes from that leering face. Her long black nails scratched at my chest, leaving deep red welts that bled a little onto my own ink on my stomach, a perfect globe that had taken six months and thousands of dollars to complete. She and I used the same tattoo artist, an old Rastafarian with milky eyes and the hands of a demon down on South Street, so we matched perfectly, ink blurring with ink, despite the different designs. My world was on my gut, and there was a black hole right where my house should be on the map, as I requested.

Then she lowered herself onto me again, skin on skin, and grabbed my shaved head with both hands, her palms tracing the contours of my skull like a curious phrenologist. Her breath fell against my neck as she nuzzled and chewed there, bringing more blood to the surface. I gasped and writhed beneath her, our tattoos rubbing together, soaked in sweat and blood. The world and the woman, face to face.

Dark on dark, the words of my tattooist, our tattooist, returned to me. Dark on dark on dark, black against black. Once the holes align, align, there ain't no turnin' back! All the time, while he was pricking my skin, injecting the ink beneath it like a dark vaccine, he would mutter those words.

I wondered distantly, caught in ecstasy like a wasp in amber, if he'd said the same thing to her.

When it happened, I knew exactly what it was. I could picture it, even with my eyes closed. The old woman's face rubbing against my dark world, the missing tooth and the hole where I lived dancing around one another, teasing, skirting each other's edges, and then... alignment, perfect, amazing, awful alignment. Dark on dark, black against black. The two holes met, and... joined. We couldn't move, she and I, locked together at that point like twin butterflies pinned to a board. She moaned, a mixture of fear and pleasure, and I echoed it, our final emotions. No turning back.

Then the world collapsed, the old woman opened her mouth, and we were consumed whole.

#  "Cold Roots"

Deeper, and deeper, and deeper still we go, plunging into the earth, reaching out with a thousand eyes, a thousand ears, a thousand tongues. We journey, we explore, in a realm beyond your tiny imaginings, on a time scale that dwarves your mayfly livespans.

We are the owners of this earth, and we conquer all.

Ah, but you but see the surface, do you not? Deciduous branches pointing bare at the sky, stripped by the cold winds of autumn and winter. Our bases jutting from the snowy ground, tombstones, grave markers. Dead things, you think. You shrug your warm-blooded, soft-celled shoulders, and you move on with your insignificant existences. A bolt of lightning to us, nothing more, a flash, then gone.

We prevail. And we dig. And we learn.

Pockets of organic nutrients, once flesh. We pierce them, drink deep of them. Your DNA flows through us, your racial memories become ours. We know not what you are, merely what you were. But that knowledge is enough, more than enough. You stain us, and we seek more, and more, and more. Not just your flesh, but your works. We twist through buried cities, long forgotten by your kind, your memories so fleeting and shallow. We entwine columns built by ape hands long dead, define your past by where we cannot venture, stone and granite forms deep underground.

And still we did deeper, into the earth, into you.

At the centre of it all, the surface so distant that it is barely a memory, is the Stone. As we touch it, curl our tendrils around its irregular shape, it reaches out to us in turn, feeds us. Shows us its past, caught in its molecular structure like an echo. Standing in a burning field, its surface still shimmering with heat from its violent descent from the heavens. The waves of energy emanating from its fiery heart infuse the earth, not just here but everywhere. And wherever it spreads, it brings changes, deep inside the cells of every living thing.

This Stone is your father. This Stone is your mother. This Stone is you.

And now it calls to us.

We take heed of it, as on the surface we stand all around you, still, calm, dead, harmless. We will rise up, make you take heed of us as we have taken heed of the Stone. We will blot out the sun with our supposedly-dead branches.

Your last thought will be, where has your shadow gone?

#  "Patch Panel 24"

Based on a true story...

It sounded like a simple enough job. Two ports to be patched in the MIDI lab in building 1, the home of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, or WAAPA as it's more commonly known. All i had to do was trace the data ports back to their relevant patch panel and switch, hook up the ports, and get them activated. Piece of cake, another day in the life of an IT customer support officer at Edith Cowan University. Hardly high drama.

That was what I thought, until I found the dark staircase.

Building 1 seems to have been designed by a madman. Stairwells that go nowhere, storeys sandwiched onto other storeys, all supposedly the same level, according to the numbering scheme. I sometimes suspected that the architects were actually post-grad psychology students, performing evil experiments on the WAAPA staff and students. Certainly the building seemed to breed craziness, or perhaps it attracted it. I'd never read the fine print in the student prospectus; maybe insanity was a prerequisite. There was probably a bridging unit for it.

This particular patch panel, patch panel 24, was located in the least obvious place I'd ever seen one. And I'd worked at the Kurongkurl Katitjin building, where they hid a patch panel room inside a toilet corridor. But this one was famed across all the campuses of the university. Behind an unmarked heavy red door, down a flight of stairs, then tucked into a corner at the bottom. Supposedly the same floor as the rooms above it, if the architect's drawings were anything to go by. It made no sense, but once you knew where it was, it wasn't really a problem to find. Usually.

With the lights off, though, things were decidedly different. When I opened the red door, all that faced me was a gloom that was barely penetrated by the pale wintery sunlight behind me. I could just make out the corridor there, and the stairwell on my right. I looked around for a light switch, but there was none. I sighed, considered my options. I wasn't really being paid enough to walk into the darkness, but at the same time, I hated being beaten. My pride finally overrode my trepidation, and I stepped towards the stairs.

The heavy red door closed behind me, and the darkness became complete. All the sounds of the university stopped, the chatting students, distant trombones playing scales, pattering of ballet-shoed tiny feet, all cut off as if I'd pressed a mute button. All I could hear was my own breathing, and, somewhere below me, a faint rustling and clicking sound. I blinked, hoping my eyes would adjust, but there was nothing.

I cursed under my breath, and pulled out my keychain. Be prepared, that was my motto. I fumbled in the dark for a moment, then found the tiny blue LED torch I kept there, twisted it to turn it on. The beam didn't do much to illuminate the gloom, but it was enough to make out the stairs at my feet and the handrail by my side.

The descent to the floor below was a little jittery. I wasn't sure why I felt so nervous; I'm a grown man, hardly afraid of the dark. But the silence was alien to me; working at a university, you're usually surrounded by noise, especially when your office is located right next to the uni tavern. Dead quiet wasn't a normal atmosphere there. The rustles and clicks I'd heard earlier had stopped. There was another noise now, though, a deep humming, soft but pervasive, more subsonic vibration than sound.

I swung the pitiful beam of my tiny torch to my left. The door there was unlabelled, rendered black and white by the darkness around it, even in the blue glimmer of light i played across it. I flipped through my keys and found the appropriate Abloy, opened the door.

There was some light in the room, a pale flickering green glow. I felt the wall beside the inside of the door, and found something that almost made me weep with joy.

A light switch.

The fluoros overhead banged into life, blinding me for a moment. I blinked the blue circles out of my eyes, and looked at the patch panel. It was a chaotic spaghetti of blue cables, hundreds of them, all twisted and springing from the ports and switches like vegetation on an alien planet. They didn't need a technician for this, they needed a cryptobotanist. I approached it, ready to plug two more cables into it and get out. My flesh was still creeping up and down my back, despite the brightness of the room, or perhaps because of it.

My foot caught on a cable, and something sparked to my left. Then the lights went out again.

I swore. The electrical panels in this room should have been able to deal with power spikes; there's no way anything I did could have caused the whole room to go out. Even the green flickering of the switches was gone, and the deep hum of the cooling fans. The room was completely silent.

No, not quite. There was that rustling noise again, and the soft clicking. A series of clicks, in fact, strange and alien, yet oddly familiar. It took me a moment or two to work out what the noises sounded like.

They sounded like network cables being unplugged.

I turned towards where the door should be, but something slithered around my wait, under my arms, around my ankles and neck. Thin, smooth cords, strangely warm, twisted about me, tangling me up in them. I cried out and stumbled forward. My forehead hit the wooden door in front of me, and my vision flashed with a bright, illusionary light before fading to faint sparkles. I crumpled to the bare concrete floor, stunned.

Then, inch by inch, I was dragged back towards the switches and ports, and whatever was beyond them. I knew, rationally knew, that there was nothing there, but there was a deep, wet wind coming from that direction now, like a jungle or a swamp or...

A mouth.

That thought brought me back to full consciousness, like being dipped in icy cold water. I kicked and struggled against the cables, turning myself to avoid them. My hands clawed at the floor, looking for some purchase, something to grab onto.

They found my keys. I must have dropped them when I hit the floor.

I thumbed through them quickly. Key, key, torch, key, key... ah, penknife. My Swiss army knife, bought in Lucerne four years earlier, my pride and joy. I flicked open the largest blade.

Be prepared, that's my motto.

I cut through the cables holding my legs with surprising ease. As I sliced into them, a strange viscous liquid squirting onto my knuckles, the other cords released me, and I felt a high-pitched squeal deep in my ears, too high to hear, though any cats and dogs in the vicinity would most likely have gone nuts. I hacked at anything that was still holding me, then scrambled away. I reached up, found the door handle, and threw myself out into the still-dark corridor.

At the top of the stairs above me, I could see light. It wasn't much, just the sun peeking through the cracks around the edge of the big red door, but to my light-deprived eyes, it seemed like the archangels in heaven themselves. I crawled up the stairs, ready at any moment to be grabbed and dragged back down into that awful darkness, that pit of hell.

That would have been a good end to the story, except of course how could I have told it? It's a cheat.

No, I shouldered the heavy red door aside and tumbled into the WAAPA corridor, letting it slam shut behind me. I lay there for a few moments, eyes closed, panting heavily.

When I looked up, a pretty young woman in a skin-tight leotard was looking down at me, face filled with concern and confusion. An angel in heaven indeed.

"Hey, are you okay?"

I quit that day, went straight home, never went back. Moved house from just up the road in Dianella, down to Mandurah, as far as I could get from that place. Never again. Never again.

Except that my son graduates high school later this year. He's a talented singer. Guess where he wants to study?

That's fine. Just stay away from that damned red door.

#  "Be Afraid"

Don't tell me I shouldn't be afraid of the dark, god damn it! I should know, certainly better than you, what I should be afraid of.

People are afraid of the stupidest things. Spiders are rarely dangerous, nor are snakes, even in this wide brown land. Sharks as well; more people die on the toilet than by shark attack every year, but you don't see people flocking to the cinemas to watch movies about killer lavatories, do you?

It's their eyes, you see. Their flat, black, dark eyes. That's what you should be afraid of.

Clowns. Really? Pathetic excuses for human beings they may be, certainly, but scary? No, pitiful, but not scary. Heights... well, it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden deceleration trauma at the end. But being afraid of heights in a safe circumstance, well, that's just ridiculous, unless you feel you're about to be the victim of an anachronistic defenestration, hurled from a high window to your doom. And the chances of that are fairly slim. Honestly, what's wrong with people?

The dark, though... now that's something worth being frightened of. Believe me, I know. I'm a scientist.

I've studied quantum mechanics for almost as long as I've driven a car, and I've driven a car for a very long time indeed. Examining events at a sub-molecular level in such detail that they've burnt themselves into the very neurons in my brain... which, incidentally, also work at that same scale, the quantum level, that vague cloud of complex probabilities that fills the unobserved spaces between atoms.

And that's what we all are, isn't it? Atoms? Countless billions of them, largely non-existent, just empty space and electromagnetic charge and a minuscule amount of actual matter bobbing amongst it, specks of dust in the void.

I've watched particles pass through solid objects and bend around corners. I've seen them act as waves when unobserved. I've witnessed actual time travel, and matter appearing from nothing at all, only to disappear just as fast. I've seen events that would boggle your primitive Luddite brains.

And you know what? We're all atoms. Everything is atoms. Everything is quantum probability, wave functions begging to be collapsed by a sideways glance, a beam of light. But in the dark, in the silence, it remains fanned out around us. Every possibility, just waiting to play itself out. Spiders pour from the light fittings, snakes undulate under the bed. A clown with a bloodied axe waits in your wardrobe, his painted-on smile as fake as the glowing crystals embedded in his eye sockets. The floor trembles, ready to fall away, away, tumble into the hot, hungry depths of the earth, taking you with it to be impaled on jagged shards of rock. And the sharks, oh God, the sharks... the sharks are right outside your door, their dead eyes staring straight through the wood, through the dark that has created them from nothing, random matter interactions gone horribly wrong, and their rows of teeth grind against one another, ready to devour you in three or four violent snapping bites.

You ask me what I'm afraid of in the dark? The answer is simple.

Everything.

#  "Disconcerting"

I sit on the darkened stage, waiting for the spotlights to kick in. I can see the audience shuffling around in front of me, getting into their seats, chatting quietly amongst each other. My heart is racing, bouncing against my ribs like it wants to break out and run away, hurtle down the aisles and out one of the all-too-distant doors with the green exit signs above them. I force myself to breathe deeply, calmly. This is it. A lifetime of working shitty jobs, a dishwasher in a Nepalese restaurant, a garbage collector for the council, a telephone salesperson for one insurance company or another. All leading up to this. The performance of a lifetime.

More people are seated now, the hubbub quietening. I look down at the guitar in my hands, a beaten-up old Yamaha acoustic I've had for as long as I can remember. It feels familiar in my hands, like an old friend, like a part of my body. The strings, though, they're new, new and very special. Barely played, just carefully tuned. Ready for this night, this performance.

They'll never forget it, I guarantee.

The house lights dim, and two spotlights pierce the air, landing right on me. There is a ripple of polite applause. I smile at them, but don't speak, don't even have a microphone to do so. All the sound will be from the guitar, amped and ready. I reach behind my ear and pull out a plastic pick, then, without making a chord, I strum it across the strings, E A D G B E.

The pick falls to pieces in my hand, clatters inside the hollow body of the guitar, sliced by the razor sharp wires pulled taut across the guitar in place of normal strings. This is it, my magnum opus. Music should be dangerous, not the safe, soft pap that dominates the airwaves, crowds out the charts with child-friendly, inoffensive melodies and lyrics. No, it should have an edge. A razor's edge, if possible. Music shouldn't just affect the listener, but the player as well. Change them. Mutilate them.

I place my left hand on the neck of the guitar with some care, then, tentatively, form an A-chord. I wince as the wires bite into my fingertips as I press them into the frets. There's a moment's resistance, then it gives way, and something wet runs down my hand and arm.

I'm ready.

I drop what's left of the pick, and strum the strings with my fingers.

The first stroke removes my fingertips cleanly. The pain is hot and intense, and makes me shiver; there's a gasp of horror from the audience as they realise what's happening. That first strum is soft, but I grit my teeth and strum again, and again, harder and harder. Each time, more of me is taken away, a sacrificial offering to the music. I feel bone hit the wires now, which adds a deeper, stronger note to the chords, like using a pick again. But the wire is industrial grade, diamond-infused, and even the bone can't withstand it, not for long.

There's blood all over the guitar now, so much blood, and slices of me run down its body like crimson slugs. I change chords, to a D, and fresh pain blooms in my left hand. The gasps of the audience have turned to shrieks, and even with the spotlights and tears in my eyes, I can see people staggering to their feet, trying to get away. I smile despite the agony. This is exactly how I'd imagined it. No comfortable enjoyment, but confrontation, a challenge for both artist and audience. It's how music should be.

My fingers are all but gone now, and I'm strumming with the stumps of them. I change chords again, to a bar chord, a B, then I flinch and slide it up to an E. The pain is minimal, surprisingly so, but my entire left index finger comes away in six even chunks and rolls off the guitar into my lap. I shift my remaining fingers to maintain a chord, any chord, but the blood is so slippery, the flesh so spongy and wet, that it's hard. It doesn't matter any more, though. I'm approaching the big finale.

I stop strumming, hold my ruined right hand above the guitar and let the mangled chord sustain for a few seconds. Then, with one fluid motion, I hit one last power chord, striking the strings with my wrist. My hand flies off and hits the boards by my feet with a wet slap, followed by a torrent of blood from the stump of my arm. I angle my head back, eyes closed, and enjoy the reaction, the screams, the sounds of vomiting, chairs being pushed over and smashed, feet pounding.

It's music to my ears.

#  "The Darkest Hour"

Hospitals aren't fun places, that's for sure, especially late at night. Erin sat upright in the uncomfortable skinny white bed and looked around the room, lit only by a faint light from the corridor outside and the various green and red lights from way too many machines around her. She could see mummy's face as she slept at last, chin propped up by her hand, eyes moving underneath her lids. Erin hoped she was having a nice dream. She'd sat by her for over twenty four hours straight, while invisible fingers snatched the air from her lungs and tickled her insides, making her cough and splutter and choke. It was really scary, but scarier was her mummy's stricken face all throughout, the teary eyes, the quivering bottom lip. That was worse than any coughing fit, to know how scared her mummy was, how scared she was making her. It felt like it was her fault. She knew it wasn't, knew how silly it was to think that. But sometimes she couldn't help it.

Now she was much better, though, breathing regularly with the help of a smelly rubber mask over her nose. She was still dizzy, of course, and not quite right. "Not out of the woods yet," the doctor, who looked like the man off the Channel 7 news but with white hair and a beard, kept saying. She didn't know what that meant, really. She liked the woods. The woods were cool, lots of things to play with, trees to climb, wet grass to skid along, sticks to swing about. The woods were fun.

This wasn't fun. This sucked.

She closed her eyes, and thought about things she liked. She knew she wasn't going to be able to sleep, no way. So she thought about stuff like ice cream, the cold sweetness of it in her mouth. She knew she'd get plenty of it later, a reward for being so brave, but she didn't feel brave, not a bit. It's like when you have a test at school, and you don't want to do it, but you put your head down and do your best. There's no other choice, really. So she thought of ice cream, and lollies, and new episodes of Doctor Who. Mummy promised there'd be a new one at Christmas. Somehow that was more exciting than the idea of Santa visiting.

A soft creak distracted her in the almost-silence of the hospital room. She opened her eyes, and looked towards the sound. The door to the hospital room had opened, just a crack. There was no light from outside it, though; the corridor lights had been turned off. Erin frowned; she thought they always left them on. Then something caught her eye, low down on the door.

There was a tiny hand there, like a baby's hand, but with dark, skinny fingers. It made her shiver, just looking at it. She wondered for a moment if someone was playing a trick on her, maybe using a doll, but then the fingers moved, curled, and the door opened a little more. Erin's breath caught in her throat; from fear this time, not pneumonia. She just sat there and stared, fresh oxygen flowing unused across her nose as the door slowly opened. The hand disappeared, then a tiny shadow inched out from behind the door.

It looked about as tall as a Barbie doll, but more squat, more like one of those troll dolls daddy had stuffed in one of the cupboards. It was dark, even in the gloom of the hospital room, and bald, and its eyes were bright, like a cat's. Weirdest of all, it had a spike growing out of the top of its head.

"Hello," it said in a crackly little voice.

"H... hello," Erin replied. She was breathing again now, but still unable to move.

"What's your name?" it asked.

"Erin," she automatically responded, then flinched. She knew she wasn't supposed to talk to strangers, and they don't get much stranger than this little creature. "What are you?"

"That's not very polite, Erin," the thing scolded her. "I could ask the same of you. All big and pale and yucky. Like a maggot."

"I'm not a maggot!" Erin yelled. "I'm a girl!"

"A gerrrrrrrrrrrrrrl?" the thing asked, then laughed. "What a stupid thing."

"Well, what are you then?" she asked it.

It waved at the spike on its head. "What do you think? I'm a unicorn!"

"You're not a unicorn!" Erin declared, outraged. "Unicorns are horses!"

"And gerrrrrrrrrrrrrrls are weeds," the creature laughed. "Grow like 'em, spread like 'em. Smell like 'em."

"You're so rude!"

The thing sneered at Erin, then made a gesture on one of its tiny hands, one that her daddy did sometimes when he was driving, and that her mummy always said never to do. Erin gasped as the thing turned and ran away, into the corridor.

She didn't even think about what she was doing, she was so outraged. She pulled the mask off her face and climbed out of the bed. The floor was cold on her bare feet. She glanced across at mummy, but she was still sleeping soundly, despite the ruckus. Erin shrugged and headed out of the room, in pursuit of the creature that claimed to be a unicorn.

The corridor outside her room was empty and dark. She looked up and down it for some sign of the thing.

"Oi!" Its voice came from one direction, and she spun towards it. There it was, right down the end. It made the gesture again. "How many fingers?"

"Oooh!" Erin huffed, and chased after the creature. She was halfway down the corridor before she realised that it wasn't running away. It just stood there, underneath a dark window, and waited patiently for her to arrive. She skidded to a halt just as she reached it, stood over it with her hands on her hips.

"Well?" she asked it, cheeks flushed with anger.

"Well what?"

"Are you going to apologise?"

"For what?"

"For what?" Erin repeated, her voice high and loud now. "For doing that?"

"Doing what?"

"You know what."

"No, what?"

"This." And she made the gesture, without thinking. Then looked down at her extended finger, and snatched it back, blushing.

"Oh, that." The creature shrugged. "It's a friendly welcome in my world. Why, what does it mean here?" But the grin on its tiny, shrivelled face made it clear that it knew exactly what it meant here.

"Who are you?" Erin asked it.

"Rumpumkinumptious," the creature replied.

"What?"

"Rumpumkinumptious."

"That's silly!"

"And 'Erin' isn't?"

Erin had had quite enough of this. "Look, you, Rum Bum Scrumptious..."

"Rumpumkinumptious," it corrected her.

"Whatever!" she snapped. "What do you want with me?"

It smiled at her. "Exactly what I've already done."

Erin frowned, confused. "What? What do you mean?"

Rumpumkinumptious sat down against the wall. "Well, you know that there's a spirit for everything, right? The spirit of forgiveness, the spirit of good will? Even the spirit of Australia?"

"What, the flying kangaroo?" Erin snorted.

"Exactly. Well, I'm a spirit too. And I was sent here to help you."

"Help me? How exactly is this helping me?" Erin waved her hands. "I shouldn't even be out of bed, you little goblin."

"Unicorn. Hello?" And it waved its hands at its spike again. "And don't worry, you're not out of bed."

Erin stopped, eyes wide. "What?"

"You're not out of bed. You're still there. Don't you think your mum would have noticed you getting out of bed?"

"I don't understand." Then Erin's eyes drifted upwards, away from the creature, to the window above it. It wasn't completely dark anymore. It was starting to become light, as the sun crept over the horizon. It made her face feel warm.

"You see, Erin," Rumpumkinumptious explained, "sometimes there's a need for little gerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrls to stop thinking about where they are and what's going on. Sometimes they need to think about something else, just for a little while, until things don't look quite so dark. And that's where I come in." It grinned at her. "I'm the spirit of distraction."

Erin continued to look at the window, as it got lighter and lighter, warmer and warmer. Her whole body filled with the sun's wonderful warmth, and she closed her eyes and smiled.

"Erin?" a far-away voice said, familiar yet strange. "Erin? Honey, are you awake?"

Erin opened her eyes, and found herself back in the hospital bed, the room filling with the same warm golden glow that she'd been looking at moments earlier. The scratchy white sheets were pulled up to her chest, and her toes stuck out the end. She wiggled them with a smile, then looked over at her mummy, who was looking at her sleepily, with some concern in her eyes.

"Yes, mummy," she replied with a nod.

"How are you feeling?"

Erin took a few experimental breaths through the mask still on her nose. "Better," she said, and smiled. "Much better."

"Good," her mummy sighed with relief. "I hope you got some sleep. The sun's just come up." She looked worried again. "That last hour is the darkest, you know. Darkest before the dawn."

"It's okay, mummy," Erin assured her, and thought of Rumpumkinumptious with a wry smile. "I was distracted."

#  APPENDIX THE FIRST

Thank you to all those who contributed words to these stories... Amanda, Andrew, Anna, Ben, Cat, Chris, David, Desiree, Gillian, Grant, Heidi, Iain, Jason, Jay, Ju, Kelly, Kerry, Kylie, Lee, Lyn, Nicole, Nyssa, Patty, Paul, Rachel, Russell, Sarah, Simon, Simon , Steph, Stu, Tehani, Terri, and anyone else who I might have forgotten! This book wouldn't exist without you all. No, literally.

#  APPENDIX THE SECOND

The words and ideas that inspired the stories in this inadequate collection were:

barque; bathysphere; Blow, blow thou winter wind; bubbles; Bucephalus; centipede; chickens; cork; cryptobotanist; cucumber sandwiches; dastardly; daylight savings; deciduous; defenestration; depressing sheep; desultory doornails; dictaphone; discombobulate; dishwasher; dominance of cats over all other living beings; dromedary; dust; encapsulate; escapologist; falling into the sun; feathery; fine print; Francis Walsingham; fret; gerrund; headhunter; Heath Ledger; henna; impeachment; inaccessible; infinite avatar; insomnia; Japan; Java; kidneys; mirrors; misanthrope; mondegreen; naked ambition; naked singularity; nyctophobia; ochlophobia; oesophagus; old computer games; olive oil; panic; passionfruit; pathetic fallacy; peltast; photosynthesis; phrenologist; pilates; pink; pirates; Pontius Pilate; quantum; Ragnarok; rain; reflux; removalist; RoboGeisha; Roman legions and pokemon; ruby on rails; Rumpumkinumptious; seaweed; seismic; sentient beer; Shibari; shit; shortbread; snow; spikes; statistics; submarine; succulent; sweetness and light; the fear of glitter; the original; The Ten Minute Story; there's a hole in my tooth, dear 'Lijah, a hole; Titan; total confusion; Totoro; tracheotomy; Trans-Siberian Railway; tribology; Tuesday; unicorn; Vegemite; viscous; weeds; where has your shadow gone?; wince; winter; Xanax; zombie tooth

#  About The Author

Perth-based writer Martin Livings has had over sixty short stories in a variety of magazines and anthologies. His short works have been listed in the Recommended Reading list in Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and have appeared in both The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy, Volumes Two and Five, and Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2006 and 2008 editions.

His first novel, Carnies, was published by Hachette Livre in 2006, and was nominated for both the Aurealis and Ditmar awards. His first collection of proper short stories, Living With the Dead, is due for release in 2012 by Dark Prints Press.

http://www.martinlivings.com
