 
The Magic Laptop Ride

(Reprise, stevesevilempire Blog, Remix.)

A collection of short stories

By

Steve Merrick

smashwords Edition

Copyright Steve Merrick 2014

Dedicated to Mah Noosh.

\-------------------------------------

By way of introduction.

I remember my very first brush with alternative life style people, it was when I was eleven, and we were visiting a hippy commune, at first it was fine, until I discovered from a hippy kid that they didn't do Ice cream, it was like an eleven year olds version of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If I recall it correctly my deaf mind really couldn't cope with such an unnatural prospect, so correspondingly in my fit of horror, I knew that I had to get the hell out of there, very very quickly, before the anti ice cream mutagens infected me, but sadly when you are in the charge of people who could make a march hare run off screaming, it wasn't an easy prospect.

So on that first encounter with the hippies of the seventies, I ended up fending off all comers in a tree, whilst my chromosomes sat nattering veritable cobblers with these guys, who probably hadn't even heard of Coca cola, chocolate or the latest craze called Lego bricks....

So please take on board that the man writing these words is of the opinion, that a good quality mint choc chip ice cream, just may be the pinnacle of human evolution.

Steve Merrick.

WELCOME TO,

The Magic Laptop Ride.

Please ensure that all seat belts are fastened.

Contents.

1; Topsy Turvy And Turvy Topsy, in, The Very Naughty Meson.

2; Lemmings Day Out. What happens when an SAS soldier goes mental.

3; The Pixelised Child.

4; The Secret Agent Man.

5; The Night They Raided Hamleys.

6; The Polynesian Space Gazette

7; The Short History Of Captain Simon Halstead. RIP.

8; Technological Legalogical Artistic Dispute. or. TECH EX.

9; The Ego Bomb.

10; The Island Of Dr Morrow.

11; Polynesian Space Gazette, Welcome To Planet Corruptus.

12; Wall.

13; The Silent Fairy Tale.

14; The Gasp.

!5; The Polynesian Space Gazette, The System.

16; Foetal Dreams.

17;Tumour Man. (Warning, very toxic Vietnam war story.)

18; Another Strange Tale From The Cafe Conceptual.

19; The Foxes Breath.

20; My World In 2037.

21; I See A Red Door.

22; Rescue In Beirut.

23; Topsy Gets Knotted.

24; Utopias Funeral.

TOPSY TURVY AND TURVY TOPSY

Once upon a time, and it was a very long time from now. All of the people persons had adventured off into outer space, as they travelled through the great nothing, they would have to scatter space stations like bread crumbs behind them, it was very very important that the people persons called astronauts, did this, otherwise they would never have found their way home. Pretty soon there were more space stations than people, because everybody knows, that outer space is really really really BIG! So not having enough people persons to look after their shiny nice palaces, the astronauts turned to the animals, and made them very very smart. They gave them all hands and taught them languages and mathematics. The smartest were the Octopuses, they were almost as smart as the people persons, then came the Dolphins, but they were possibly smarter than anybody, so smart in fact, that all they did was play around all the time and never worked. Dogs were quite philosophical in their own way, but obsessed with food, Kangaroos just loved to bounce, they bounced about breaking everything accidentally, and the astronauts thought that cats were a bit of a disaster. None of the cat stations lasted very long.

The best animals of all were the rodents, Rats could learn and plan almost as well as the octopuses could. Squirrels although mischievous, were very technically proficient, whilst Hamsters were quite handy at lifting stuff and doing all of the hard work. Lemmings had it all in one package though, short, smart, hard working, and above all expectations very clever. Which was useful for the people persons, because they had a massive problem with some of the stations. They called them BLACK HOLES. Black holes were always hungry, and can eat anything, in fact some of the astronauts thought that black holes would one day eat everything, which scared them all before they went to sleep. You know when you pull the plug on your bath tub, and all of the water goes into the little pipe, that's just like a black hole is, but a black hole would eat the whole bathroom for breakfast, and most of your country for lunch. It could gobble up the sun in a week or so, but the worst part is that it is always hungry. So the stations that were close to black holes, were lived in and worked on by very very clever, Rats and Lemmings.

Topsy Turvy and Turvy Topsy live on Bikini Station. Which is zillions of miles away from Earth. Their boss is Hogarth the wonder Rat. Now what you also need to know about black holes, is that the closer you get to them, the more bendy everything gets. Light bends, tables bend, time itself gets all curved, and even a football will be a bit odd to look at. The people persons call the space close to a black hole, the event horizon. Nothing can escape from it, because a Black hole is so big, that even Gravity can't resist its call. Lemmings do have a sense of humour though, because the call their black hole BM, Big Munchy. So Topsy is in charge of the engines whilst Turvy handles all of the power they produce, and both of them were work happily together on Bikini Station.

TOPSY TURVY AND TURVY TOPSY

IN

THE VERY NAUGHTY MESON

Big Munchy has a massive appetite, so big in fact that time itself gets slower and slower and slower, when he is around, time gets so lazy, that it may take me a hundred years to finish this story on Bikini Station. Not that I would have noticed the hundred years, it would be a happy few hours of writing for me, but you would have grown up and had a lot of baby astronauts, in those few hours, I should introduce myself to you though, rather than confusing you, with all of BM's (Big Munchies) bad habits. I am Hogarth Exavier Sterling Rotwang the 3rd! But you can call me, Hogarth the Wonder Rat. I am the commander here at Bikini station and I often watch Big Munchy Eating things, like planets and stars the same way he eats time. Think about that for a second, what would you do if it was a hundred years to lunch from your breakfast, that wouldn't be much fun would it? Luckily a really clever man called Albert Einstein, worked it all out for us, and called it the theory of relativity, so time behaves differently depending on where you are. Its easy to understand, if you are on your planet, far far away from Big Munchy, then you will see that hundred years, but for me, here at my very big desk, that time will seem like a few hours.

Now you understand that. I have to explain, that we go around Big Munchy in a huge oval shaped circle, that the people persons call an orbit. So when we are closer to BM, that's when time starts to get wobbly. I can hear Topsy Turvy running down the corridor as I write, she runs everywhere, so its probably not a big problem.

"Oh right its the naughty Meson again." I will explain that Topsy Turvy and Turvy Topsy don't speak in English, or any people person language, so I will have to translate her squeaks and whistles for you.

"Captain Hogarth, the Meson guys back ,and he's causing chaos with the engines again."

Now children, firstly you must understand, that I am in charge here on Bikini Station, and as senior Rat, I never ever make any important decisions, without my big white captains hat on, it is a very important hat you know. I am a big white furry Rat, and if I didn't have the hat, on you would just think, "Oh Look Mom its a Wonder Rat!" Whilst what you should say is. "Oh My Gosh Mom it's Captain Hogarth The Wonder Rat!" When the people persons made us wonder rats, no one ever thought we would become captains, but I am the most highly ranking and Important Wonder Rat, in the whole universe, because my hat says so! It's so important, that it can take me five minutes to put it on properly, I could see Topsy Turvy behind me reflected in the mirror, she was hopping from one foot to another, which is what she does when she is nervous.

Then she saluted me and started to tell me the whole story, but before I say that, I must point out to you how splendid I look when I am wearing my hat, I am a very handsome rat indeed!

"Skipper, that meson guy is back, and he is getting all of the other particles upset with his ideas, they are all slowing down too, and if we don't do something fast, then we will be Big Munchies breakfast in no time, I don't want to be eaten up by big Munchy Captain Hogarth! Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeellllllllppppp!"

It was then that a skittering scratchy noise, started down the corridor, and Turvy Topsy raced into my bridge, so out of breath that he forgot to salute me! "Skipper all of the systems are slowing down, and the corridor has gotten longer and longer because of the time dilation, and dinner is at the other end of the station, and we may take twenty years to reach it. I think we are going to be Big Munchies Lunch, if you don't figure it out fast, and I don't want to be Big Munchies Lunch! SOB!"

Sometimes a rat has to stand up and be counted, defending the ship from a radical meson, means that I have to be the right rat at the right time. Such is the responsibility that rest upon Captain Hogarths shoulders some times. As brilliant as my two Lemming friends can be, they are not very good scientists, they are fabulous fun to be around, but every now and then they will panic, like nowm and sometimes their tails curl around their legs, and they will cry huge tears. I as Captain however only cry when I am on my own in the bridge, seriously sometimes Bikini Station can be a very scary place, but you must never tell Topsy Turvy and Turvy Topsy that! Ever!

"Hogarth! Do something we don't want to be big munchies dinner!" Weep!" They said together.

It was then that I knew I had to visit the engine rooms, and as we were closer to Big Munchy I also knew it would be a very long tricycle ride, when Topsy and Turvy got into the box on the back, I had to check their helmets were on properly, and that they were secure, fortunately for all of us, I remembered to throw fruit juices and snacks into the back as well. Its part of a good captains job to look after the crew, and I take that job very seriously.

The closer we get to Big Munchy, the more distorted everything else gets, my little room is eight foot long, but as we pass through BM's range, it can sometimes become eighty feet longer, whilst it can also make me flatter longer or shorter, luckily my legs got a lot longer today, so the peddling of the tricycle got really easy. We were going really really fast, when the stations size changed again, and all three of us crashed into the engine rooms door.

"Gosh Captain, I am really glad you made me put the helmet on!" Said Topsy, but Turvy was squashed underneath her and said "Mlooonger whooomph heeelmet on! Skipper." So after a short while disentangling ourselves, we all finally stood in front of the now tiny engines. Now as you may know Space is a very very big place, so big in fact, that if I shouted to you from one end of the universe, your great great great great a million times great grandchildren would hear the me, because sound travels at a fixed speed, so it would take a very long time to reach you. That is what is called normal space, in normal space there are very fixed rules about how stuff happens. Big Munchy though breaks all of those rules, every minute of the day, so think of him as a very naughty and hungry black hole.

In Normal space the engines are each the size of a house, but today they are about the size of your lunch box. It can be very confusing sometimes, so I picked up the malfunctioning engine, and shouted at it. It started to squeak back at me, and in that moment I knew I was talking to the very naughty meson herself. I must point out to you that our engines do not normally talk, apart from when there is a very big problem.

Now everything that has mass, like you or even myself, is made of atoms and they gang together to make molecules, without them you would not be looking at such a splendid rodent as myself, but the atoms are made up of a collection of particles, and it is those tiny weeny particles, that power Bikini station, with our normally massive particulate engines. So I found myself listening to the naughty meson, explaining why she preferred to hang around rather than powering our engine.

She has a squeaky high pitched little voice and she said this to me. "Good morning captain Hogarth, I like it when time slows down, and it makes me feel like I can live forever." I being a very clever rat, jumped away and forced myself to think about my reply. It was then that I spoke to Turvy, as she has much more experience with particles than I do.

Turvy had her tail wrapped around her legs as she spoke to me. "Its like this Skipper, the meson is a very old one it has lived now for three hours which makes it the oldest meson in the universe, and normally they live for a few seconds at most, but because time is bending here, it doesn't want to go back at all."

I gave her my very best calm look, and then decided to eject the meson into BM where it could live for thousands of years before being eaten. So I marched to the engine and told the very naughty meson what we were going to do. It was just as I was about to pull the eject switch, that time slowed down noticeably, which resulted in myself pulling the lever for a very long time.

The last thing I heard as I was pulling it was this.

"Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnkkkkkkkkkkkkyyyyyyyyyyyyoooooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuu,Ccccccaaaaaaaaaaappppppppppppttttttttttaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnn."

Then as I finally pulled the switch, time suddenly went back to normal, as the engines went to full power, and the last thing the very naughty but rather polite meson said was "Hogarth."

I turned and found that Turvy had fainted from excitement. So Topsy helped me to place her on my tricycle, and off we went back to the control room on the bridge.

Later, we all had mint choc chip ice cream to recover from our rather hard days work, then having tucked Topsy and Turvy in to bed, i read them a story, then I left them dreaming about the day.

Now, since it is obviously way past your own bedtime dear reader, I will wish you sweet dreams, as I now have to write a very long report to the people persons.

Until our next adventure have lots and lots of fun.

Captain Hogarth

Bikini station

Andromeda nebula.

Lemmings Day Out.

A short film script for a not so short film.

By

Steve Merrick ;-)

SCENE 1

A crowded car, with three very scruffy men in it, shot with insert techniques never showing their faces. The radio is playing in the background, {3 seconds per shot.} with DJ voice over that should say something like this.

"I know I keep coming back to this, but why would someone want to suicide bomb the monkey house at London Zoo, I just ducked out to grab a coffee, when those fantastic adverts were on, and all I could hear was Bin Laden this, and Al Queda that! I'd be the first to admit that Killing a troop of Chimpanzees is a step up the evolutionary ladder from killing Americans, but I just cant see Bin Laden doing that, and that is when it dawned on me, I have a theory. There's this American crew called Intelligent Designs. Yes I used the word intelligent and American there, but they are like this maniac Christian fundamentalist outfit, that are trying to stop all the schools in the known universe, teaching about the theory of evolution."

Sound of bad reception, and all the time different glimpses from the men in the car, One of them has a gun in a hip holster. The credits get fed in here in between images, and the DJ talks really quickly.

"ends, so what if they infiltrated the CIA, lets face it George W bush thinks their really groovy, but then he thinks pre-emptive nuclear strikes are too, and what if one of them was terminally ill, like in between preying, he or she may design a rabbit suit, to attack the Monkey house with? I am really doubting my sanity right now, I mean this, our lines have been open for almost two hours, and no one has had the balls to phone in, what is your opinion, for me, I blame faith schools full stop, the Intelligent designs organisation, is the pit of hell for me, evolution is not something that you cannot teach, I don't believe in God Javeh or Allah, and I'm well fuzzy on Buddha, but Darwin is the only Victorian that made any bloody sense to me, and guess what, it all started with this great stuff called RNA! Rib-one nucleic acid, so why the hell cant the religionists see it as one of their gods mechanisms, and quit giving me a headache, why would someone dressed as bugs goddamned bun!"

The car doors open and the men get out of the car, they walk past a horde of press photographers, and through the police tape, where they are met by a bomb disposal guy in his helmet,

"Its Clear Guv." Is all he says and they enter a tranquil suburban house.

In the hallway is a woman in plainclothes, and the oldest of the three speaks.

"Ok, so who was he?"

"Er, she guv, it was a she, and you won't like the rest."

"So far there is nothing about this particular Thursday that I do like, who was she, Muslim, Christian, was it those Intelligent design nutters."

The woman looks confused,"Who are they."

"It don't matter. Who was she?" The other two are silent but edgy.

"She was Jessica Bloodstains, and she was one of ours."

"What a copper." The youngest of the men says in a shocked quiet voice.

"Oh, no she wasn't with the force, she was a Special Air Service officer." Camera pans suddenly from face to face, then back to the woman.

"She left us a DVD!"

"Great." Says the youngest "SAS."

They enter a living room, socialist worker posters cover the walls, but hanging above the television is an AK47, with a DVD in a crystal case sellotaped to it. Taped to the stock is a piece of fullscap paper with crayoned multicoloured words on it, it says. "WATCH ME ;-)."

"Bomb Disposal have checked everything, and put it back the way it was left." Says the woman, she pulls a laptop from her bag. "Shall i play it." The man nods. She slips the dvd into the computer, "I'll record it as it plays." All four of them sit around the coffee table. As the picture glows from black to white and back again. Then a face appears, smiling at the camera.

"Hi, I'm Jessica Bloodstains, My whole unit was wiped out near Kabul last year, I'm a sergeant, I wasn't even scratched. They were all scratched by this suicide dude, but I wasn't, and what really buggered me about it, is that they all died for nothing, absolutely Jack shit, Nada, squat, diddly squat, nada. NOTHING, so here I am, at the zoo today, I've been checking out the security at the monkey house, " She turns the camera around showing you the scene, around the monkey house. ( Cut image of the four watching, the older man is lighting a cigarette.) Jessica sounds upbeat and funky, ecstatically happy." Just so you know, there are three bodies buried in the garden, two of them are my neighbours, they were a bit too nosey, and the other is my colonel, apparently he thought I'd gone mental. So I killed him with a rock from the shrubbery"

The woman has paused the DVD, "Should I call in the SOCO's?"

Jessica's face is frozen in a half smile.

The Older man is looking at Jessica's smile, without taking his eyes from the screen he says slowly,"There's no rush"

"Its his pistol that I'm carrying right now, Mental, no mental was when I believed we were doing something that mattered, like bringing democracy to the Taliban, not that there is any such thing as the Taliban in the first place, they are just the hired guns for the Kandahar regime's fanatics, and they are just a bunch of egotistical foreign thugs. I mean these clowns have loads of money backing them, and all we had were a bunch of M4's, a couple of dodgy land-rovers. Fifty calibre machine guns, a clutch of Javelin rocket 's and a sniper rifle. Seven men dead because of some ass holes reinterpretation of god. Meanwhile we are getting yelled at by a bunch of peaceniks, who seem to believe in global free love, like don't they go out much or what, but I am thinking about Fatemeh Khan, she hated them, and had survived the regimes many fatal indiscretions before we went in, you see those twats left me for dead."

Jessica is smiling and points to the massive scar on her fore head, then stops talking to buy an 99 ice cream cone. She is fit and healthy with long dark hair falling floppily over her face, wearing a red Silent Hill 3 T shirt, and a sporty mini skirt, in short she is a very attractive woman, the detective pauses the video here. "This doesn't add up she looks really happy and calm, almost." He shrugs "Spiritually serene."

"Anyone know where she got the T shirt." says the younger man, and the three of them stare at him, then start the DVD again.

"Oh yeah old Fatemeh," she says wiping the ice cream from her face, "Her entire family had been killed for some quasi stupid religious indiscretion, and she was in hiding in the hills when the bomb went boombah, I don't know for sure what happened after that, because I was out like a shot, and woke up a day or two later in her cave. It took me a month, before I could walk without collapsing, so since we had a lot of time on our hands, we learned each others language. I found out that the rest of my crew were dead, and that she had crept down that night to find me alive, almost dead, isn't quite the same as being dead, I guess. Then she told me about her daughters stoning and her husbands beheading, and even their little six year old daughter had been shot, and for the first time ever it really dawned on me what we were fighting here."

Jessica goes all quiet as she internalises her thoughts. Sat on a bench outside of her proposed target, the monkey house at London zoo.

The camera only catches part of her face and shoulders, and her expression is dangerously lost, as she places the almost inconceivable logic of it all together. Then when she speaks it is in a softer and quieter voice than before.

"Her family had lived for over ten years in terror, and when that inevitable Knock of the door came, she had run. Leaving them all and I knew that she had been beaten by this terrifying logic that the regime had. She had watched as one by one friends and strangers had been killed, watched as their children were indoctrinated, and because they caught them young, she was constantly forcing herself, to check the way she was dressed, so, she wouldn't become a target for the zealots in charge of her world. Yes she had been beaten regularly, but on the day that they came, Hmmm." Her smile was fragile and painful to see, and just then the pain is clear in this young woman's eyes. "Do you know what the only Shakespeare I remember is? When our actions do not our fears can and will make us traitor's! Fatemeh betrayed everything she had that day, because of fear. Her oldest son was one of them, do you get that."

Her voice suddenly has a chilling cold to it, and her eyes briefly flicker with a rage, so controlled that it disfigures her face into something very ugly.

"Where is the honour or honesty in a regime like that. Who are these cunts? It was then and there in that cave, that I realised why we were here, screw the Americans phoney little vendetta with Al Queda, and you can stuff all the mineral deposits where the sun doesn't shine. Stopping those Opium poppies is kind of pointless as well. Lets face it that's just good old supply and demand. Even that stupid myth of the pipeline is demented, by the time you have a secure environment for it, the oil will have run out anyhow, and none of our people would defend it on BP or Shell or ESSO's behalf would they."

She suddenly laughs and a beautiful woman gazes at the camera and smiles. Her voice is gentle and bell like again.

"I'm an atheist, it's OK, everyone should be allowed to believe what they want, shouldn't they. Unless they are going to impress their faiths or logic's on others, and if it just stopped at that , well fair enough. However when you have a legal obligation to believe in a god, that isn't right, and when the penalty for not believing is a horrible death, at the hands of a pack of self righteous, ego maniacal zealots. Hmmmmm."

"Nope, that isn't a solution that anyone should want. When you risk death because of a dress code, that is just wrong, but what is really mind numbing, is the oppressive killings that occurred, just to stamp their authority. Shooting a six year old child for instance. That is just wrong. Yet as an atheist, I have only ever had one document behind me, only one that protects me. It's the International Declaration Of Human Rights."

The video pauses and she focusses the camera on a female chimpanzee with a little baby in her arms. Then she speaks.

"Those guy's and girls are our ancestors and they don't tend to kill each other. However somewhere in our evolution we mutated, I guess. When I escaped and got back to our units, we went back to find Fatemeh, but she had gone, escaped with her own internal nightmares elsewhere, I hope she is all right. I am. I'm as clear as crystal right now. I don't want to kill anyone, and I have not even got it in for those monkey relatives of mine there. The only logical reason left for us to be fighting in Afghanistan is human rights. After the Russians withdrew, foreign fighters took over southern Afghanistan, and imposed a draconian system on the people that lived there."

"The result was a civil war." She turns the camera to her face and smiles.

"Yet with each turn of the screw, they stripped the Afghan people of their human rights. Forced women into an intolerable corner and then haphazardly killed as an example. My friends are dodging their bullets and bombs as you watch this. There is no easy solution here, but the International Declaration Of Human Rights has to be defended everywhere, and thanks to Fatemeh I know that the Afghan people are as human as I am. So it is time to end the relentless cycle of misery that they have suffered, by force if necessary......."

"Force is such a horrible word, I mean am I the only person who is curious about what an Afghan Picaso might produce, or scientist might find, or even what an Afghan composer might write, hey that's a thought what about Afghan science fiction. Nope I am clear about what I am doing here. This is a simple message. It's for all ears to hear, Israeli, North Koreans, those beloved of god in Iran, the Chinese and those Americans, this is for all of them. This is even for you, I love you too you know. Where ever you happen to be today, know this, Staff Sgt. Jessica Bloodstains, of green troop special reconnaissance section, Special Air Service, today strapped explosives to her body in the form of a lemming suit, and blew herself up. She did that to send a clear message to oppressors and zealots everywhere because Human rights will always be defended even by abstract suicide. People all over the planet, will fight you to the death to protect them, and I am only one of many, who will pick up the battered flag of human freedom and die for it. She chose the Monkey house because it was the most absurd target to go for, it was as ludicrous as those oppressors are. Human Rights are all that we have, and nobody should lose them to the hands of god or corporate greed. Everyone should have them and no one is so powerful that they cannot be stopped if they are attacking them."

She smiles having gently presented her speech, "I genuinely will try not to kill anything, but this is as absurd as Israel's hypothetical Nukes, or him in North Korea, and yes, lets face it those idiots that took over Kandahar. It's all about human rights, that's all, and I hope by proving that we too can suicide bomb, that those silly buggers will finally get that, whoever they are."

She stands and keeps filming as she leaves the zoo, but just before she switches the camera of she laughs one more time.

"Oh yeah, I was only joking about the bodies in the garden!"

The camera pans to her smile, then is switched off, leaving only static on the screen, and four very confused detectives.

"Lemming suit? I thought it was Bugs bunny?"

The End

The Pixelated Child.

By

Steve Merrick

I guess I should start this story at the end, sadly it's a very embittered ending for me. All I had wanted to do, was increase the boundaries between still photo's and reality, everything I had achieved was intended to benefit humanity. I am now sat in my prison cell, awaiting sentencing, as I write these words, and I know in advance the judge is not amused. Yes, Mr Stevesevilempire, is being sued by the United Nations, and a number of corporations. The worst part is that I never stood a chance from start to finish. I mean, how was I supposed to know what number of pixels, would make a photograph self aware, if only I hadn't been online when it happened, then I would not have incapacitated the internet globally. Its frustrating because the experiment worked, but now I know how many pixels, it takes. One point two billion is enough to do it. So call me Frankenstein, awe hell. Call me anything you want.

It all started so innocently, I had this idea about folding pixels to increase the resolutions, it just got a bit out of hand. Imagine a computerised version of Origami, and you more or less understand the process. The problem is that, if you apply quantum foam to it, then the amount of folding you can do is, well, semi infinite. Of course, I hadn't anticipated the role that micro worm holes, within the folding sub atomic structure would play, nor could I have foreseen a variation on particle entrapment, occurring within the pixels themselves? It all happened very quickly, and I repeat, there was no way on Earth that I could have seen this coming. Its just like the Judge said."Photography's equivalent of the big bang!" I even have my ex wife on my back about this, because it was a photo of my son that I was playing with at the time. On the plus side, I now have the very fastest computer on the planet, but since nobody can connect to the internet, it is not as good as it sounds. Why?

Why I didn't stop at a half a crummy billion pixels, is beyond me, believe it or not, it takes fourteen hours to upload that one photo to your computer, and generally, the screen can't cope with that much information. In my defence, I had become more obsessed than Oppenheimer had with his atomic bomb. I can't really explain it now, because I just had to keep going. It was important. It was at the one billion mark that things took off. I was celebrating with music and a bottle of Jack Daniels, whilst chatting with a friend on NASA's web-site, that was when it happened. It looked at me and blinked, I was so drunk by then, that I blinked back at it. The court has read our chat boxes out loud, so I guess my response cant hurt this story much. I wrote. "My computer is dancing in my itunes........" It's true, Sheryl Crows song Gasoline, and there was my son bee bopping to it. My unnamed friend replied. "That's a really cool animation dude. ;-)" Neither of us knew that that image was being witnessed on every computer on the planet as we typed, nor did we know that the very last internet communication for the foreseeable future, would be mine. "That ain't no animation and stop calling me dude, dude. ;-)"

It was then that a Stephen Hawking voice asked me, "Where am I." My real son stopped in his tracks, and stared at his reflection on my computer, and he said.

"Dad what have you done?"

Our initial conversations were quite difficult, and interrupted by a call from the local police station. The cops were warning everybody in our village about a very virulent global computer virus, involving a small blonde boy and a Sheryl Crow song. It was originating from the email address, stevesevilempire@yahoo.co.uk. I was sober in no time at all, and grabbing my laptop, ran with my son to his mothers house. You see it was my email. It was my son, and nobody on planet Earth could get connected, instead they were all having very confusing conversations, with the world first accidentally created Ai. The combined forces of the whole UN, were involved in a manhunt for the evilempire guy, so having a yellow streak one point two billion miles long, I ran.

I managed to evade capture for twenty seven and a half minutes, I was reduced to hiding in a hole just like Saddam had, in the glare of the camera's I was pulled from it and dragged publicly to Downing Street, hand cuffed, and surrounded by armed policemen, and a section of the Special Air Service. I was interrogated mercilessly by a strange man called David Cameron. He shone a table light in my face, and kept asking me who I was working with. There was this other really creepy guy, hiding in the shadows behind me, called Nick Clegg. Whenever this silent menace leant forward, I could feel him breathing down my neck, it was terrifying. They were playing at bad prime-minister and bad deputy prime-minister, at one point Dave slammed his hands down on the table and yelled. "Tell me the truth, think of your sons credit rating, think about your families future."

He interrogated me like that for six days, sleepless and exhausted, I finally broke down, in that wine cellar, under 10 Downing Street, I implicated everybody I could think, of including, Albert Einstein, Sheryl Crow, the woman who runs my local news agents, my editor, you, Vladimir Putin, Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and even Annie Liebowitz. It was the intolerable threat, of being exiled to the Isle Of White, that broke me in the end. Not that anything but that.

That was only a month ago, I have seen the chaos that erupted, as a result of my little experiment, the New York Stock exchange, as he appeared on all of their screens, the air traffic controllers very bad day, has bothered my conscience more than a bit. The hospital and traffic chaos that ensued, was my fault too. I do not feel responsible for the Tsunami of unpublished newspapers, nor the absence of any form of television briefly. Although I do like the speeches he gives at Times Square, and feel quite proud of the deal he struck with The Coca Cola corporation. However maybe over time my little computerised Casper could be seen beneficially, after all how dangerous can any photograph truly be.

So I am sat in my cell, awaiting the forgone conclusion of my guilt to be announced. My son visited me, but he has a new best friend in that pixelated child I accidentally created, so he didn't stick around, because he needed to do a bit of laptop tree climbing. Unfortunately Pixel won't talk to me. So abandoned and all alone, I write these words and plan my speech which will go something like this.

"Your Honour. Non je ne regrette a rien is a really nice song, but I regret absolutely everything. Even being born. Please don't kill me. Please I beg you. Broadband will one day function again, the Queen will be able to play online bingo once more, and I will never again play with pixels ever. So please please please pretty please. Have mercy. Please."

The End

The Secret Agent Man.

SCENE 1; (A DRUNKEN STEVE TALKING TO HIS REFLECTION IN THE MIRROR AT O'REILLY'S BAR IN KENTISH TOWN)(NOBODY ELSE HEARD THE REPLIES IN THIS CONVERSATION EITHER)

"HEY, YEAH, LISTEN UP YAH KINDRED DIP SHIT, DO I HAVE YOUR FULL ATTENTION. COS I JUST HEARD YOU WIGGING OUT ABOUT REALITY THERE, AND I AM DRUNK ENOUGH, TO TELL YOU A DOPY BUT TRUE REALITY STORY."

"WHAT WAS THAT YOU SAID? COS ITS KIND OF A NOISY BAR HERE."

"NAH I AINT COSMICALLY DRUNK LIKE YOU ARE, JUST A HAPPY LITTLE MISCHEVOUS DRUNKEN ME."

"COOL"

"WELL. I WAS ON THIS SECRET MISSION. WHEN I LIVED IN BEIRUT, IT WAS IN THE HAMRA, WHERE ME AND WHATSERNAME LIVED."

"YEAH, WELL YOU'D LOOK SAD, IF YOU WERN'T EVER GONNA SEE THE WOMAN YOULOVE AGAIN, WOULDN'T YAH."

"LISTEN JACK WHO CARES WHAT HER NAME WAS, THIS ISNT ABOUT HER, IT'S ABOUT REALITY, ARE YAH WITH THE PROGRAMME YET. DJAH GETTIT!"

"JESUS H CHRIST"

"OH YEAH THE MISSION, YEAH, IT WAS ONE OF THOSE REALLY VITAL SURPRISE THINGS, WHA?"

"RUSH JOB SOUNDS RIGHT, WELL I WANTED TO GET HER SOME FANCY FRENCH CHOCOLATE CAKES AND SOME FRESH JUICE."

"OH REALLY! WELL IF YOU THINK INFILTRATING A CAKE SHOP, AND A JUICE BAR, AT TEN OCLOCK AT NIGHT, IS A EASY PEASEY, THEN YOUR A BETTER GUY THAN I AM"

"NOPE I WAS IN THIS CANDY STRIPE T SHIRT, WHY?"

"WELL I AM NOT A PROFFESIONAL INFILLTRATOR OBVIOUSLY."

"IF IT WASNT'T A SECRET, IT WOULDNT HAVE BEEN A SURPRISE, WOULD IT."

"OK SO IT WASNT MUCH OF A SECRET MISSION, WHATS YOUR POINT?"

"AH?"

"GOTCHA, SO I SCORED BIGTIME IN THE CAKE SHOP, COS LATER IN THE EVENING GETS CHEAPER, BUT THEN REALITY CAUGHT UP WITH ME IN THE JUICE BAR"

"IT'S LEBANON, ALL THE CAKE SHOPS ARE OPEN LATE"

"RIGHT, SO I REACH THE JUICE BAR, AND THE GUY WAVES ME IN, COS HE'S CLOSING"

"I'M GETTING TO THAT, OK, SO HE'S WAVING ME IN AND I'M IN A RUSH SO I'M RUNNIN."

"AND I RUN SLAP BANG INTO THIS WALL MIRROR REFLECTION OF THE JUICE BAR, I'M LYING ON THE FLOOR WITH ALL THESE CRUSHED FANCY CAKE BOXES, AND THE JUICE GUY ALI, IS TRYING TO HELP ME UP, BUT HE CANT COS HE'S LAUGHING, TOO MUCH, AND I'M LAUGHING, EVEN THOUGH IT HURTS, COS REALITY, JUST GOT ME AGAIN, PARRALLELL GODDAMNED UNIVERSES EVERYWHERE, AND I CANT EVEN DISTINGUISH A REAL JUICE BAR FROM A REFLECTION,"

"YEAH. SO WHAT IF IT AINT MUCH OF A REALITY STORY, I REALLY DONT NEED TO HANG AROUND WITH SHITHEADS LIKE YOU ANYHOW,."

(STEVE WAS THEN SEEN TO GIVE HIS REFLECTION THE FINGER AND LEAVE)

Worthless Word. By. K O'Grady

The Night They Raided Hamley's

Chief Detective Flipper of Scotland Yards second story section, stood in the middle of the chaotic crime scene, she was particularly disturbed to have been awoken, by the G D O's Director, Lord M Y Bumsonfire at three in the morning. His call had been followed by the Chief's wife, who being unable to awaken the chief had called her because, "There's a teensy eensy shit storm coming your way, luv, so I'd get to the Hamley's toy-shop, before he wakes up." So after alerting her sergeant, she had dressed, and flown to the fresh crime scene, to review the evidence. The Galactic Diplomacy Office, and her own chief, shit storm, it wasn't even mid week and she was in the frying pan again. She clicked her fingers to get the old sergeants attention.

"Evening all Mam, this ones a bit of a perfect caper, if you don't mind me saying so, meself." He smiled happily enjoying his job. "The Blag Meisters got away with, forty priceless solid gold lego spacemen, from the twentieth century." He coughed theatrically. "They also took the Proozle toy, that the spacers designed." That made Flipper leap out of her skin, Some one had stolen the Proozle. It was a puzzle toy, that had been designed, by the twisted insanity of the spacer artist and scientist, Carl Madasamarchhare, it was a demented and intricate puzzle, that had resulted in many a nervous breakdown. It was so finely balanced, that Carl, had died creating the one prototype, it was beyond priceless, and it's loss could result in a war. "Is it true that only five people have ever solved it? Mam." Flipper had to sit down.

The next day it got worse, there was no evidence left behind. No hair, No print's, and no sign of forced entry. Which meant only one thing to her highly skilled detective mind, this had to be an inside job. So every one who had anything to do with the famous toy shop, was locked up and interviewed. Yet still they were drawing a blank. It was then that Flipper had an idea,so she rang through to the lab. "Go through every child's finger print, and look for anything out of the ordinary." She yelled ,for her Sergeant who entered her office very jovially and sat down. "Do you remember Two Foot Mactavish, the midget cat burglar."

"Of course I remember him, took us three years to catch the bugger, it was stroke of scotch genius, when he hid out in a kindergarten by day." The chubby sarge pointed to her wall of shame. "The little red headed munchkin is in Wandsworth prison isn't he?"

"Bloody well should be, he stole the crown jewels so he won't be out before you go bald will he, Queeny pops would blow a fuse if we let him out any sooner, but I think we have a copycat."

"Oh shit, you don't think he had a brother or sister, do you?"

"No, but we are paying him a visit in Wandsworth."

Mactavish laughed at them as he sat in front of them, "So the polass are clutching at straws." He had been laughing hysterically at them for the last 15 minutes, and Flipper felt like stringing the diminutive little bleeder up. "I'm the only two foot high, second story merchant around my love, so you are obviously looking for a toddler." Mactavish would have fallen out of his seat he was giggling so much, but the handcuffs ensured he couldn't. It became clear that he knew nothing about the Hamleys caper, and as they left he wiped tears from his eyes, and said, "Come back any time, I need the entertainment."

Outside of the prison they stopped for a cigarette break, "Well that went well, what do we do now, raid all the circus's, or should I trawl the kindergartens." Flipper was too lost in her own thoughts to notice his humour, knowing that the spacer ambassador was due to arrive at the Yard in two hours, but they had nothing, did not help. She sucked on her cigarette deeply inhaling it's slow acting poisons. "I thought you had quit, Mam." Before She could reply, the lab called her, and she listened to what they had to say.

"Lets move there's been a miracle."

They flew over London in a rush, knowing that her sergeant loved using the siren, she let him switch it on, he was smiling, and very exited until he said to her. "Mam, I'm really sorry but I have left me truncheon at the office." He noticeably relaxed when she told him there was a spare in the boot. Then she spoke with the lab, a school, and lastly a doctor. Gotcha she thought.

The sarge wasn't surprised when they landed and parked at the small Reigate school, It took the head teacher twenty minutes to find the boy, and he was dragged reluctantly into her office, with a great big scowl on his face. "What do you London Peelers want with me." The head mistress, cuffed the little tyke around the ear, and told him to get his hands out of his pockets. "I still want to know what the filth wants?" He scowled at the old girl and added, "Miss."

"You know exactly what we want you little bugger. So, where is it?" Flipper smiled pleasantly to him.

"He's not a bad lad, but he is too clever for his own boot's sometimes, so, Joel tell the nice police officers, what they want to know."

Flipper was a very experienced copper, and she could tell he was going to break, it was the smile that knocked em over every time. A nice little cat like smile, that said. I've got you by the short hairs, Mr or Mrs bad person. Unfortunately a great big white space ship landed in the head teachers rose bushes, and that took the smile off of her face, at the same time it put a smile on the little boys face. It also resulted in a furious head teacher, leaping out of her window, and running at the space ship, swearing and yelling profusely. The little boy smiled at Flipper. "Mrs Veryseriousknickers, really loves her roses. Pig."

The spacer ambassador wafted past the furious old bird, and left his pilot to apologise to her, he climbed nimbly through the window, and introduced himself to Flipper, the sarge and the little ten year old called Joel. "Let me get this straight, you bypassed some pretty complex security systems, whipped the Proozle, without leaving any trace behind." The little boy nodded and smiled. Then the ambassador turned to flipper. "So how did you catch him."

"It was child's play ambassador because there was only one kid, in the whole country, who could possibly solve the proozle, and that's him there, get the cuffs on him Sarge."

"Hang on a moment. Joel where is the Proozle, and what do you think of it."

"It's tricky at first but when you solve it, it gets pretty boring." Flipper actually liked the kid's scowl, "In fact it's just a trick, and it's pretty crap, I just wanted to solve it. I would've gotten away with it, an all, if it wasn't for you damned coppers."

"Well lets get the Proozle, then call your parents, because we are going to lunch." The ambassador said politely.

It all happened so quickly, they went to his locker and got the Proozle, then there was the Pizza, Joels parents and the deal. His mother wasn't stupid, and the ambassadors logic was impeccably offensive, "Anyone who can solve the Proozle is far too good for planet Earth." Flipper was forced to smile thinly, through her gritted teeth, when Joel was given diplomatic immunity, and the little bleeder smiled smugly back at her. It was all over in two hours, his mom packed, and they all jumped into the shiny white spaceship, leaving Flipper and the Sarge, to watch them disappear from the ground.

"Er, Mam, is this a good time to mention, the forty solid gold, antique, and priceless lego spacemen?"

"Oh Bugger me!" Flipper said, and even though she got promoted, she knew, it wouldn't be a happy ever after for her.

The End.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Polynesian Space Gazette

Likening a bat to a platypus, the old man went upon his way, leaving me very alone in this strange and alien market place. I lifted my old film camera to my eye, and took a portrait of the aquatic living water life that had been serving me my coffee. I asked it if it was smiling, because intelligent viral water, is, as yet too hard to translate for my unexpanded eyes. It nodded and informed me that the old man had told me the truth. Ever since the bloody Pacific has had a space programme, we have been tripping over all the other nations of Earth off planet. Take me a Physicist and a photojournalist. I was the twenty ninth Australian in space, and all I had met were American and Chinese astronauts, that old man, and one walking talking puddle. I was relieved to make my first alien acquaintance, though shocked at what I had discovered. The Schilangers a race of opportunistic spiders, had managed to buy most of the United Kingdom, it didn't seem possible and I admit at the time my mind recoiled from it quite violently. I just couldn't believe the British had been that stupid. My puddle acknowledged their surprise as well.

The Old man who was our ambassador in Barnards Star, had told me I was to relay something, "Hush Hush." Home to the rest of Polynesian Space Alliance, what he had told me beggared belief. The spiders had taken over the United Kingdom, and now had an eighty five percent share of the countries overall wealth, although they only owned sixty five percent of Russia, and a tiny weeny thirty two percent of Germany, they felt it was time for them to move in to their new property, and that meant a somewhat massive eviction. The common wealth had to be prepared for it properly, as they had only got six months notice. I am a commonwealth citizen ,and love the mother country, even though I have never been there, but I didn't want all those British in my country, and I certainly didn't want my sister to marry some pommie. In fact, I was returning home with the very first disastrous commercial alien human adventure to report, I was just glad that it was illegal for my government to shoot the messenger.

So In my small spaceship, I read the whole eight thousand page report on my way home. It was a subtle and very impressive chain of corporate subterfuge on the part of the Schilangers. It had all started with plumbing, you see the younger spiders eat excrement, so they had approached the Brits with a problem solving idea, best summed up by their own corporate advertising. "Let us eat your sewage." Apart from some level of unemployment in the recycling industries, it all started so well, they had cornered the market and were expanding into Europe. It was that expansion that started their spending spree, spiders need nests, and all that other stuff to thrive and eradicate this problem for humanities sake, so bit by bit they had achieved a beach head into British society. The king was regularly photographed with their ambassador, Parliament was in love with them too, they even had their own television channel, and the best alien movie section within the Oscars, was won by the spider Director Rachnid Roger. If only it had been a symbiotic relationship. If only the UK had opened it's eyes. I mean when they brought Sainsbury's, alarm bells should have gone off, especially considering what they did to the their wing at the National Gallery. When an alien spider wins the lottery didn't anyone ask? What he actually needs all that money for? When the nuclear industry was owned by them out right, didn't any one in power think, "Hang on a minute, what's your game?"

I am ok, because I am moving my whole family to Alpha Centauri, but their prime-minister is going to be lucky if he reaches Australia alive. The biggest problem is that they have been offering courses to all those greedy corporations on our own planet, Coca Cola, Esso and BHB Billiton are all being trained by them, they have a mission, and we in the Pacific can only dust off our flame throwers. It's embarrassing but they feel quite at home with our species because they feel we share their cultural tendencies, sadly, they are despised all around the civilised cosmos. Ravaging a planet and then moving on is, in the basics of their religion, a right, handed to them by their spider god, and their ethos is greed, no wonder then that the corporate lifers have adopted their religion, like a hoard of eight legged consumerists would have anything else but consumption on their minds. I am coming into land, but this is not the end of this story.

To Be Continued.

Geoffrey Halstead, Reporter, Polynesian Space Gazette. 3010ad.

The Short History Of Captain Simon Halstead. RIP.

Introduction; By Field Marshall Steve CFB (Retired)

Listen, I'm a newspaper photographer, I was working up a story on the 2nd world war, about the coast watchers, I managed to blag the Australian Navy into a free tour of the Islands, off the coast of Singapore. Sadly I was on the verge of giving up, and writing about the solitary life of the common turtle, when we went ashore on Dementia Island, an Island the locals said was cursed, damned and evil, but it turned out to be a kind of paradise. An absolute haven.

It was here that Cpt Simon Halstead, of the Tasmanian Light Horse, spent the last five years of his life. He was awarded the DFC, The Medal of Honour, the Iron cross (with Clusters) and the Croix de Guerre. Quite how he managed this feat is almost unbelievable, as are the short stories that he left behind, as his legacy. Yet what of the watchers.... They were after all a haphazardly collected group of fearless men, who in the dark skies, that followed the allied defeat at Singapore, were one by one left behind, with their radios, firearms and a hell of a lot of tinned goods, to spy on the victorious enemies of freedom and report what they were doing. Yet these men sat surrounded by the forces of evil, until they were captured or killed.

Quite what the Australian Navy was thinking, when they put a 63 year old, one legged, delusional, paranoid schizophrenic, on this isolated island, is beyond me. (The records were destroyed when the Japanese bombed Darwin.) Although warfare does require sacrifices to be made, it is possible that in the insane atrocities of the pacific war, that Simon Halstead was quite at home.

It was a huge shock to find these stories, and the good captains diaries so well preserved. They were buried in a box underneath a huge faded handwritten sign that said.

"ONLY ALLIED SOLDIERS CAN DIG UP MY THOUGHTS! IF YOU ARE JAPANESE OR BEDOUIN. GO AWAY!!!"

Then in smaller writing.

Cpt Simon Halstead, Tasmanian Light Horse (Retired) June 17th 1948.

Then in even smaller writing.

Ps, beware of the penguins, as they have very sharp beaks and a belligerent attitude, they have been watching me and plotting against me for 3 years.

Then in bigger writing.

"AVENGE ME!!!!!!"

Then in teeny weeny obscured writing.

"Do ot b...ieve ....hing t.. ....uins tel. .ou .hey .re all LIARS!!"

It was with great respect, that the three sailors and I dug up this invaluable war record, and it was touching when they saluted one of Australia's finest heroes, I then photographed the battered decaying final home of the captain, the place where he survived the war, and successfully evaded the Japanese army and navy for just over three years, he also evaded the British, American and Australians sent to bring him home, faithfully transmitting his reports, on his partially working radio until 1947,when he actually managed to wipe out an unarmed British rifle section sent to retrieve him..

We now know, that he managed to extinct the entire population of tropical Dementia Penguin, I have to admit that many of the Penguin traps that we found, were works of genius, in fact one of the sailors who came ashore with us, never returned, sadly it is believed that Leading Seaman Exocet, is missing presumed dead somewhere on the island, the search party having nearly been wiped out by one Machiavellian penguin trap, assumed that he had fallen afoul of a similar one. As had 3736 Japanese soldiers and sailors, sent to Dementia Island, to search for their missing comrades. Yet they were found, all individually buried in the middle of the island, all of the missing Japanese soldiers were accounted for, it is a very touching photo, all those little graves speak of the futility of war and hatred, and as you read the diary extracts, that our geriatric old war horse left behind, you will find his defence of Dementia Island, an incredible testimony to the spirit within the heart of every man and woman. Marred only by his descent into cannibalism....

Yet I have researched some background material, such as the interview with Rear Admiral Drowning OBE, (Retired), and from the Japanese military archives. I also managed to interview the only known survivor of the last Japanese attack on dementia island, Private Yamaha Zero Suzuki Nikon (Retired).

As to the fate of Captain Halstead, little can be known, his poignant final entry on April 12 1947, forlornly says. "I have run out of paper to writ" He was at that point writing in charcoal. I believe that he then used a bayonet or a knife to continue his writing upon the trees and rocks of his island home, and unfortunately, time has rendered much of this illegible.

Hopefully you will find this unraveling drama as enjoyable as I have, even though there are many unanswered questions, that I hope you the reader will ponder, and sadly many of his diary extracts I haven't included as they are simply military observations, "Three zeros Nor Nor west at 2500 ft." etc.

So finally I give you this one statement, that was scratched into a rock by Cpt Simon Halstead.

" I AM A PENINSULA!!!!!"

Field Marshall Steve 12 5 1953

A TECHNOLOGICAL LEGALOGICAL ARTISTIC DISPUTE

Or

Tech Ex

Why is it that I am never in a good mood when I see my solicitor, huh, I know I don't ever see him for fun, but this mornings little emergency session has left me breathless with rage! I awoke to a court summons, from my, CAMERA! I had shelled out seven thousand dollars on it, and now it is suing me. The real bummer is that it has got a very strong case, I'm probably going to lose. Great! So when i entered Shyster and Crumbs little legal practice this morning, I was fuming. Then we talked the case through, and i recorded it all for you.

"Steve, take a seat, I've read your fax and I'm wondering if you realise Ms F Nikon, has quite a clear appraisal of the situation?"

"MS F NIKON, what are you nuts, its a bloody camera!" Thats me talking, the guy writing this is talking there.

"Maybe so, but with the new laws about artificial intelligence, she has a very strong case against you."

"WHAT!!"

"Well, she is considered to have certain rights under the law. In fact her rights are very clearly defined, as is her case against you. Still once I have heard your side of the story."

"My side???" That was me talking again, but in a teeny weeny quiet voice.

"Well we cant defend you without any help from you, can we?"

I was stunned, I am sat there, being told, that I have to defend myself from my own equipment, my side of the story started in the London Camera Exchange on the Strand. It was raining and I had broken yet another digital camera. Deliberately. I was developing an expensive hobby, destroying digital cameras, because the pictures they take offend me. I STILL USE FILM!

So looking in the shop window was the first time i saw her. My Nikon, the F999999999990Z. She loaded film and did digital at 99 million pixels, a built in phone for transmitting the shots, little tripod legs that gave her mobility, a voice box and an artificial intelligence led computer system.

As I walked into the shop, she was dancing around in the window, she shouted "Hi," to me. So Tracey introduced us, told me all about her and seven thousand dollars later, she was all mine. On the way home I watched TV on her viewer.

It was really cute being followed around by your camera, although I had to shoo her out of the toilet. She asked if i played chess, and if she could pick her own name, so by the time she had beaten me with a devilish checkmate, she had her name chosen. Fifi, she chose the handle because it fitted with her image, and also because it matched the big letter F, that was on her body. At first it was great, someone to talk to on those solo jobs, and every now and then she would actually give me good advice when I was framing, "Left a bit, Steve." The problems started when she refused to shoot a shot, unless she approved of it. I mean she would not take the picture, so I ended up ended up using an old mechanical clicker camera to work with. Then she got huffy, and we had a huge argument at parliament, I was stood in front of all those political bastards arguing with my camera.

The next day she disappeared, I was really worried till I got a call from Tracey, she said that. "Fifi wouldn't come home, unless I showed her more respect, and took her advice more seriously, because, I'm not as good a photographer as I thought." To which I said, "Tracey, I paid seven thousand dollars to take pictures, not argue over artistic differences, and can I swap Fifi for something brainless, because this is my art she is messing with?"

I was stuck with her. She got legal aid. Now I am being sued by my camera.

"Well Steve, we could try and settle out of court."

Why is it that everyone turns on me.

THE END

The Ego Bomb.

By

Steve Merrick

Extracts from the Diary of Dr David Ball.

It was a particularly grey day, as I sat in my lab watching the latest results from our top secret experimental project. Being the chief scientist, was proving to be a pleasant surprise, but this current riddle, was a conundrum hidden in a jigsaw of falling dominoes. People all around the world were exploding, and what was alarming, is that so far we didn't have a clue why. Test subject 138 was sat sealed behind the impact resistant glass, the television presenter had nearly cooked off seven times, and it was only 11-15am. I was looking at his charts, we could see that the problem started in the cingulate cortex, but then if test subject 137 was anything to go by, a chain reaction occurred, causing a radically frightening explosion. So our research had shown us, the how, but I was no nearer the ever important why? Scratching my head, I went back to subject zero, a visiting politician from France, she had quite literally destroyed the penthouse suite at the Hilston hotel in Kensington, I shrugged as the door opened and through it walked Jill, a research student, she smiled and threw a theory at me.

Jill has a tendency to suck at her knuckles as she talks. "Well I was going over the results, and looking at the previous test subjects, and I think." She paused and twisted her hands together as she spoke. "All of them were talking obsessively, I might add, about, well, themselves, and this originates in cingulate cortex, and I am thinking that its to do with their, erm, well their egos basically, I mean its absurd, but there you have it, I think the ego has a critical mass, and normally it could only be so big, and the brain can't cope with it, so they, erm blow up!?" She smiled, and then blew some blonde curls from her eyes. I looked through her results, and then made the call I never wanted to make, you see I am a biological chemist, and with all of this new information, I had to talk to the chief physicist, Dr Merrick, who is absolutely off his rocker on a good day.

He arrived rather quickly too, and read the report, whilst doing some selfies with our caged bomb proofed celebrity, it was then that the man started to talk about his work as an actor, and as he began to real off his perfections, I pressed my hands against the glass screaming, "Shut up!" I was so desperate that I pounded on the glass to get his attention. "Really you have to stop talking about yourself, before its!" Boom Splat, the tank was covered in goop and blood ,as he exploded, Merrick took another set of pictures, but the physicist had become strangely distracted by Jill's notes.

"Oh my gawd!" He said then laughed, "You realise this could be the power source for the 21st century, it could solve global warming and everything!" He smiled and looked at the goop dripping inside the tank. "You see where you have gone wrong, is in seeing this in its isolated format, one ego maniac alone, it just doesn't work that way does it, so we have to put two or three in there, and see what happens." As he said that I could see Jill ordering a few more celebrities from their holding pens, she was also ordering flak vests and helmets. Within twenty minutes we had the three of them cautiously in position. "Look Ball, we can't interfere here, so we just let nature take its course and see what happens, ok?" I nodded, within no time at all they were babbling at each other, but at the mention of Coco Chanel, the power readings went through the roof, after less than a minute Merrick shouted out. "Oh Bleeding hell! Run! They are going critical, just run!" I have to hand it to Jills reflexes, as he ran out of the door she dragged me away with her, she is surprisingly strong for such a small woman. The blast blew the lab and part of the twelve story block to pieces, which was terrifying to escape from, but the chain reaction had become critically cataclysmic in no time. As we sat in the rubble Merrick suddenly leapt to his feet, shouting. "Oh crap oh crap oh crap." He had left his camera behind.

Testimony Of Detective Ball. (Post London Ego Bomb Disaster Special Committee)

Detective Superintendent Mark Ball sits solidly in the dock, during the special committee hearings of 2017, wearing his trademark trench coat and fedora hat, (Purchased at

detectives-r-us.comicle.uk.) He replied stoically to the often random questions from the panel of civil servants, who were desperately trying to get to the bottom of the devastation of London, and it's destroyed political establishment.

Civil Servant; "Detective superintendent Ball, how did this danger first come to your attention?"

DS Ball; "Well my brother is a biological chemist who was in charge of the scientific inquiry into the exploding celebrity phenomenon of 2016, his investigations lead to the discovery of the ego bomb, and also with some adaptation by Dr Merrick, the ego reactors that are now powering London." The detective looked over his shoulder suddenly. "Well whats left of London, but my brother alerted me, as soon as the scientists figured out that problem, and then I alerted my Guvnor who alerted the government, and they convened a COBRA emergency meeting. Sir."

Civil Servant; "So you were amongst the first to be aware of the dangers, and with hindsight was it wise to organise a COBRA meeting, putting so many politicians in one place, that is considering the events of that ill fated day.?"

DS Ball: "Well fortunately calling the COBRA meeting wasn't my call, but in the defence of my Guv, no one could've known that Armani would launch a new range of diamond cufflinks at the very same time as the cabinet met, nobody could've foreseen those circumstances. Sir."

Civil Servant; "So despite these now obvious dangers, you don't see how this meeting could be construed as somewhat of a mistake."

DS Ball: "No sir, how could anyone have realised that politicians had bigger ego's than super stars, and considering the devastation at that Cobra meeting." The detective holds his head in his hands for a moment here. "Oh god the devastation.........."

The hearing paused here to watch the following video.

The prime minister was sitting truculently secure in his position, when the other members of parliament arrived, as the secretary of defence took his Saville Row jacket off, the minister for health spotted the cufflinks, as three generals and an admiral entered the room. "You can claim for them on expenses." He said, as he waved them under the prime ministers nose. The security camera zoomed in on the cufflinks, as he continued speaking. "It's in sub section b of part 3789 of the Parliamentary code, I researched it and we are cleared for it." He smiled somewhat smugly to all of the men in the room, and it was at this point that they started to talk about themselves, the camera zooms out as the general stands to protest and shouts about the current emergency, but the prime minister is exchanging a funny story with lots of name dropping, and almost obscurely the camera starts to get fuzzy, as the energy builds up in the room. The PM's last words were.

"When I saw sir hu......." at which point the camera is reduced to static. Then followed the early news footage from that day as the buried bunker was now little more than a crater.......

Civil Servant: "DS Ball, you may take a break, as that was obviously traumatic for you, and we shall hear the evidence from Dr Merrick next." The physicist blinks and puts down his Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic to hear the oncoming questions. "Would you care to tell us what we just saw happen?"

Dr Merrick; "Well as the enquiry is now aware we have a new form of energy unit called the Egon, by experimental processes, we can safely manage the number of egons emitted by a group of egomaniacs securely, without any risk of chain reaction, but if you look to the static fuzzyness that occurred just prior to the blast, that was a build up of uncontrolled egons, in a confined space, which can become bloody nasty, unless they are checked by anti egons."

Civil Servant; "Anti Egons?"

Dr Merrick; Looking to his assistant Jill briefly. "Yes anti egons, what you do is insult the ego of the ego maniac, to create them, it could be penis size, or even mentioning how big their back side is. Just distracting their often false positives, with very real negatives, quite simple actually, but the internal mechanism of any egon generator, or as you know them ego maniacs, is a very robust one, which is why Brad Pit blew up last weekend at some premier in LA, destroying I believe about three city blocks, although I am looking forward to seeing Banderas in a Fistfull Of Egons though."

Civil Servant; "So what in your opinion is causing this phenomenon?"

Dr Merrick; "Well the human brain is in reality a quantum interface, so what we are seeing, is that at the smallest level of quantum foam, egons attract one another, and then in close proximity micro wormholes connect them, causing a sudden increase in egons and badaboom, but I am still researching into the properties of entrapped egons and their mutual attractions. In layman's terms the bigger ego drains the other egos, that are in close proximity, of egons, until the bigger ego reaches saturation point and boomski, but as I pointed out earlier, this is a non toxic form of energy that we are now just in the beginning phase of developing, so much could change in my theorisations as the experimental results come in." The Dr looks at some scribbled notes on the back of his comic book. 'I will add that your average ego maniac, is generally compensating for some form of inadequacy, or impairment of mind, does that help at all?"

Civil servant; "Thank you Dr Merrick, we will now turn our attention to Dr Ball." The civil servant looks through some paperwork in front of him before he speaks. "Hmmm." Dr Ball looks hunted at this point, with a expression of sheer terror, he awaits the interrogators inevitable questions. "So Dr Ball, do you have anything to add to Dr Merricks assessment?"

Dr Ball; "Yes the quantum interactions of what we are now calling egons, is quite easily summed up by the chemistry results sir. On a biological level the egons build to a fatal point of no return, and then the energy has to be released, either explosively or in smaller doses, obviously the subject will survive the smaller doses, so the explosive element should be avoided."

Civil Servant; "As the senior scientist on the day of the ego, can you sum up the errors, that lead to over two million casualties, and also the destruction of our parliamentary system?"

Dr Ball; "Yes sir, I will just check my dairy if thats ok?" The civil servant nods but with an unnerving smile on his face.

Extracts: From The Diary Of Dr David Ball.

Merrick and Jill want to call the energy build up Egons, as if that will catch on, we were picked up by a police car, and as we raced to the COBRA bunker, we had to stop, the strength of the blast resulted in a Earthquake, that was measurable on the Richter scale in Alaska, that was the blast from only 14 politicians, in a confined space, and when Jill dropped her copy of the independent, and started to yell at me, I initially thought she was being hysterical, so Merrick hugged her and she calmed down and said. "Today, politicians from all over the world, are meeting at parliament to discuss global warming, all of them in one building, in one space, this afternoon, at 2pm, we have to stop them?" Her voice trembled, and Merrick being a hero ordered our car turned around, and requested we go as far away from London as possible. The two firearms officers agreed so we ran. Whilst all of us phoned the authorities, to stop this meeting, if only we had figured it out a 1 o'clock as opposed 1-55pm, if only we had had five more minutes, then this disaster could have been averted. Unfortunately they were involved in their behind the scenes meet and greets.

Anyone who survived that dreadful cataclysm will tell you of their terror, but as we drove at 99 miles an hour, up the Caledonian rd, we knew we were not going fast enough, shocked as I am, when I think of all of the world leaders, stood in one room shaking hands, well we watched on the mobile phone as the egons built up, we all saw the secret service men, try to save the president of America, the chaotic and accidental fire fight with the Russian, French and everybody else's secret service gripped the viewers, the static build up of egons, and then the fatal mistake of putting three world leaders into one lift, as an escape route. Then static.

I remember watching the shockwave of devastation that was chasing us, the London Eye landed in Holloway, as we raced away for our lives, Nelsons column and a Lion looked like thunderbird one, as it flew like an arrow into Highgate Hill. Merrick got a photo of a low flying giraffe, that had been thrown by the blast from London Zoo. Then building by building, the shockwave toppled them behind us all like dominoes. As we crested the top of the hill, our car was airborne, and we watched a double decker routemaster bus, fly into the middle of highgate village.

Then as we drove away, all of us could see nothing but smoke and debris, blocking the sun from our view behind us.........................

The Island Of Dr Morrow.

By

Kego O'grady

Blasphemy, I was being charged with blasphemy. It was a crock of crack, I had woken up to the court summons, and being a writer there wasn't much in my diary anyway, but a court summons. I couldn't afford a solicitor, so on the bright side I was expecting a quick trial. On the big day, I arrived at the massively oversized legal establishment, and was mobbed by paparazzi robots as I struggled to get into the court. I ended up being late, and met some guy that the court appointed to defend me. I said hello, we shook hands, and he left. An officer then rushed me into the court and the judge said "Have you anything to say before we pass sentence?"

I pulled a tatty bit of paper from my pocket, and read my statement to the court. "Hi. Before last week I was under no obligation to believe in the god hypothesis, but thanks to the Machiavellian operations of the Uni Faith organisation, I am now being tried by a 9th century law in this court, and as that law states, I now have a legal obligation to believe in god. Since I don't or can't believe in something that cannot possibly exist, outside of the human mind, then unfortunately I am Guilty. Please don't kill me. Your Honour."

I admit I am no speech writer but I thought it was rather accurate.

Fortunately for me, it was illegal for the world state to, Hang draw and quarter my Lilly white ass, which was the prescribed punishment of the ninth century, so for a whole week they put me in the Bastille on my own, whilst a herd of solicitors worked out what to do with me. My captors weren't cruel either I was given my keyboard, and wrote two quite upbeat short stories, in between playing cards with my warders. Finally I was taken to the helipad, where we all ate some quite nice bacon sandwiches, as we waited for our delayed helicopter.

Paris looked rather fine as we took off and flew over the city, but after a while we came to the English channel, and I quickly saw my prison. I knew that the British had embraced anti capitalism and then in a flash, all flown off into space with their Irish neighbours, so I was curious what the abandoned city of London would look like. As my warder took my cuff's off, he was reading from his computer watch.

"You have been sentenced to life imprisonment in the British Isles, Your exile, is conditional upon you never returning to the mainland. Should you be caught, the penalties will be extreme." We shook hands and he gave me a ruck sack and a thick woolly hat, that his wife had knitted for me. "Good luck lad." Then I watched as they flew back to their home.

My first reaction was to breath the air, which was very crisp and clean, I could see many buildings in the distance so I strolled off in there direction. After a short while I came across an agricultural robot, and I asked him where I was? "Aaaghhnnnnaaa sire, You be in Hampstead heaf, over yonder be Londinium, where all the knobs lived. Hahhhargh." My robotic bumpkin and new friend offered me a lift to a local inn, so I sat in his little cart eating a rather pleasant apple.

It was bliss, I didn't have to worry about rent, or food, or shelter, or entertainment, because the dancing droids in the West End, were desperate for any kind of audience, whilst my robotic bumpkin, would happily escort me on my bicycle journeys. Yes bit by bit, I was finding that my new prison was a brilliant place to be, and I was finally happy with my own writings.

After three weeks alone, I was just beginning to settle down, I had moved into a little cottage on the fringes of the Heath, I was even reading Shakespeare of all things. My only worry, was what I was going to plant in my small and neat garden. I had decided to grow sweat peas, and my own tomatoes, but couldn't decide on what else to produce. After breakfast I would walk to the top of the hill and write, feeling quite fortunate, that my warders wife's foresight, kept my head warm, also from the top of what I was beginning to call my hill, I had a magnificent view of the glacier, that was slowly eating the city that was stretched out in front of me. It occurred to me, when I was watching the light reflecting off of the massive liquid monster, that I was happy, content and strangely being arrested and exiled, was the best thing that had ever happened to me.

So I was surprised as I had my breakfast, and heard the unmistakable sound of a helicopter. I even waved to it from my garden, the little chopper that I had arrived in, was much smaller than this one that was landing on my hill. A ramp opened and it disgorged a lot of people, so I started to walk up to see them, and invited them all to tea. I had been isolated and unable to access any of the news channels, It was a surprise to realise, that I was simply the first of many atheists and non believers, to be tossed out of the society, a society that we had all until recently called home. Yet it was a brilliant feeling, to be amongst others like myself for the first time, free thinkers, Artists, Scientists and a number of us who were just argumentative, but we all shared the same bond of rejection. So over time we organised, and every day many more people would arrive.

Eventually we became a country of our own, we had schools hospitals, laboratories, botanical gardens, and I finally had an audience that appreciated my words, all of which got published and greedily read on their computer watches. Our country had three main newspapers and a hoard of specialist magazines, and one day a Journalist was interviewing me, it was the first time that I heard of Dr Morrow, and his secret project under the glacier. I was in between novella's at the time, so I let my curiosity get the better of me.

Much of my journey was uphill, and my bumpkin friend would regularly pick me up and pop me on the back of his cart, because I was a bit pooped by all of the cycling. I had at least had the foresight to bring a tent with me, but we accidentally reached a small hotel on that first night. At the bar I heard the tale of the radically disfigured scientist, called Dr Morrow. Abandoned at birth by his family, he had excelled academically but never been accepted by his peers. In fact they had bullied him until ,he became a pariah. Dr Morrow had spent his entire life hiding under a tatty monks habit, He had addressed the federation of planet earth's climate conference, with a potato sack over his head, he was a bitter and twisted genius. One of our small children still had nightmares about his clawed hand when he shook it. Overall I was glad that I had left my camera at home.

The next morning my Bumpkin started to get a bad dose of the superstitious. "Ahhrrnhahmg, I cannot follow you there sire, it be the demons work he is about, and I miss my carrot patch too much to risk it, sire. Ahrgnhharrgh." I was saddened to see him returning to London in his cart. I found myself nervously whistling tunes, as I cycled through the dying and gnarled forest, until I reached a huge tunnel carved into the ice of the glacier.

I cycled in the dimly lit tunnel for an hour, and finally came upon a metal factory door. I knocked upon it three times, and heard the sound of heavy footsteps approaching from inside, clomp clomp clomp. The doorway screeched as the metal ground together, it had obviously not been opened very often. A gigantic bald man opened it, and asked me what I wanted? His hands were much bigger than my own head, and I was reduced in a fit of inexplicable fear, to stuttering out the doctor's name. The giant introduced himself and shook my hand. "I am Igor, Dr Morrows research assistant."

I was finally in his lair, and sat in front of a computer was a misshapen man hidden beneath monks habit. "Master, we have company, it is the writer man you requested." Requested I thought, what request, I don't use a computer watch, so if he had tried to contact me, I admit it would be a bit tricky, but he was supposed to be some kind of twisted genius, so I assumed it was an error. Before I could point that out however he spoke, it was a very high pitched voice, it was even higher than mine was when I got kicked in the nuts at school.

"Igor, don't ever call me masssster again, you know that it scaressss them." He had spoken without moving, and I sat in the chair behind him. "Sssso you are the first to arrive, the writer man." I recognised the scratching noise, to be that of a very old fountain pen. "You are aware of the project are you not, you are aware of the grave danger we are all in." As a writer, I would be the first to admit that I lived in my own little bubble, but if there was a grave danger, then I wasn't aware of it. So I told him so. "Typical, I guesssss they all assssssumed that you knew." I couldn't stop myself from breathing out as he turned to face me, "Sssooner or later, they will want this place, we must leave before that happenssss, because they will probably kill usss all next time." I wondered what this had to do with me, so I asked him so directly. "I need you to write them a letter so they understand that we have left, and the planet isss theirsss forever." I asked him how we would be leaving. "We have been building spaceshipsssss, and they are nearly ready for usss all to go away, our little country of rejectsss will go to the Kuiper belt, and build bigger shipsss then, leave all thisss ssstupidity behind."

I cycled away feeling strangely refreshed by my meeting with the peculiar genius, I was very impressed with Igor's Bolognese sauce as well. Then one morning I found myself watching the shiny white spaceship landing on my tomato's. Initially I was furious but when I calmed down, we flew to our islands remaining postbox with my letter. I was very happy because I would be the first novelist in outer space, or as Dr Morrow called me, his galactic laureate, So as I put my envelope through the slot, I was awash with the potential that exile had thrown my way.

The End

Welcome To Planet Corruptus.

You may think what you wish, but the brochure in no way lies. The twin binary suns do filter through the vaporous and humid clouds beautifully. There is no chance of sunstroke for us Homo sapiens. The locals have no concept of capitalism, and the moment you get out of your ship, at the luxurious space port it is a haven, of happy wealth and health for all who care to stay here.

This reporter has moved his whole family to this tropical planet paradise. Having no rent to pay is always a welcome breather, from the more capitalist tendencies of our beloved universes inhabitants. I have to utter a word of caution for the space weary traveler though, The Corrupteans love to talk, and since Corruptus is the planet that truth forgot, well the locals never ever tell the truth. Their deceptions are not selfish though, they would never steal your camera, or run off with your food. It is merely a cultural freedom, that holds their loving communities together. The super glue of their society, where deception is truly an art form. I also have to describe the furry little bouncers as very photogenic. All of them are in possession of lovely smiles and almost hypnotic eyes. They are genuinely the most friendly aliens I have ever met, although their species does sneeze a lot.

It is thanks to the eminent historian, Dr Pushkar, whose archaeological findings, have illuminated this history, of how and where these socialised deceptions came from. It would appear that twelve thousand years ago, the 3457th emperor Blaxtus, found himself in a philosophical religious dilemma. His initial attempts to solve this problem, had involved killing all twenty eight billion of his loyal scientists and engineers. Sadly he immediately regretted this move because the palaces plumbing backed up dangerously. Thanks to our eminent Russian friends translations, we now have a complete picture of the emperors problem. Blaxtus found the truth very very offensive, every time a spaceship returned with new findings. The less important the Corrupteans began to appear, the almost overwhelming size of the universe, made his people seem like an irrelevant bunch of bouncing furry balls, for such a great and noble emperor. This was obviously too much. So he summoned the very best philosopher in the Corruptean empire to his chambers, and demanded a solution be found for his peoples predicament.

The philosophers name was Bollax, and four years and a lot of deep thought later, she returned to the emperor, and told him of her plan to solve this conundrum. It was very simple, all Blaxtus had to do was ban any outright incontrovertible truth, thus forcing the scientists to translate reality in a more picturesque way. So it came to pass, that the first Poetic Deception Laws, were enforced by the new Non Police, and Blaxtus was re- crowned a Non Emperor. If you were late for work, then a lie was effectively as good as the truth was, because lets face it, you are late. "Fantasy is so much more fun!" became the Corruptean National Non Anthem. Medals were awarded for the tallest scientific stories, and over time it rippled through their greater society. Until today nobody dares tell anybody the truth. Ever.

The local newspapers are full of wars and murders that never happened, films and actresses that don't exist, politicians and scientific discoveries that just could never have existed. As an alien I am exempt because I have not yet got the skill base to be purely deceptive, My own column in one of the wordier broadsheets, is impeccably non deceptive and honest, but nobody believes a word I write. In fact the Corrupteans think I am a comedian.

Yet for the holiday makers out there it is a very happy go lucky paradise. The waters are warm, the beers are cold, There are no dangerous predators, and Corruptus is only a 3 hour flight from Alpha Centauri. So as you gaze with your partner at a beautiful twin sunset, having eaten well, you will be able to relax completely for the first time in your life. Your children will love the little fur balls too, and lets face it, they tell the best bedtime stories in the universe.

Geoffrey Halstead, Reporter, Polynesian Space Gazette, 3010ad.

WALL

How do I tell you about my husband Wall?

I awoke this morning, and he was there seemingly asleep, but very cold and stiff to the touch. How can I communicate our whole life together, to you, and ultimately explain to our children and grandchildren, why I have a 38 special loaded and ready to end my own. I like my now late husband were both atheists, I have no illusions of some paradise to come, how can I choose to end my life, on this otherwise un-extraordinary day. That's easy, we were a team, and he lit up my darknesses more than any other person in my life. Even when we were little, and I was truly afraid of the dark, he was there with his torch. Pragmatically protecting his little mate, so I guess I'll start at the beginning, before photography, particle physics and children took over our lives, on that day we first met.

Tucked around the back of Manly marina in Sydney Australia, used to be a deaf school, yes, both of us are deaf. I remember being really scared when my mom left me with the other kids, and a very kindly looking head teacher called Mr Tucker. He gave us sweets, and lead the seven of us deaf children into the little building. We then sat at our chairs and he wrote down two words on the blackboard. SIGN LANGUAGE!!! You see we were here to learn language, and how to talk to the others. It was then that a commotion went up outside and Mr tucker wrote "Wall is a crazy child, who doesn't believe that any of this is real, do you want to watch his latest attempt to prove that? It's allays funny." So we all followed him out of the school, and lined up to watch the slightly older boy's experiment. The first time I saw him he was frowning at the brick wall in front of him, Blonde hair fell over his forehead, but it was the speed that his hands were moving that took my breath away, this was the first time that I had seen deaf people talking, and I loved it.

"Can I talk like that can I please talk like that." Mr Tucker nodded, but the crazy boy smiled to me, then he sat down like a Buddhist and concentrated. You could almost feel the snap, crackle and pop of his mind, as he struggled with the universe. I remember leaning forward and watching this sparky headed apparition, as he focused everything on that wall that was ten feet in front of him, then he got up on one knee, and ran at the wall flat out. Legs blurring underneath him, as he leapt at the bricks, but with a very painful thud, slid to the floor. The school nurse came out and started to check him over, laughing and signing, I even at the age of six, knew that one fingered reply he gave her, and she cuffed his ear as a response. He was fine, as usual, but I often wonder, if I knew then that I had the love of my life in front of me, or is that just a romantic old lady speaking.

Bit by bit and with a lot of patience, we all learned to talk, strangely Wall helped all the littlest of us learn, correcting us and showing us new words, we all laughed as he made repeated attempts to beat the wall, some of the older kid's even betted against him knocking the wall down, even Mr Tucker had a try, albeit in cricket padding, but finally one day I was confident enough in my talking to ask him. Why he kept trying to jump through walls? "Because it isn't real," Then he frowned that beautiful perplexing frown and added, "All of it is atoms, me and the wall are the same thing, so in theory we should be able to merge and blur past each other. To another world maybe." Shrugging "Jenny the theories sound at least." He was fourteen and I was twelve, when he said that. I enjoyed his child like view of the universe, and when I was fifteen I kissed him. Our parents got really nervous until I married him when I was sixteen. I could sum up our relationship as passionately horizontal, and with three kids back those words up, but it was more than lust and sex, partnership or any of the old vices, it was a balancing act, an act that we pulled off for forty three years. Until this morning......

This morning was a horrible and empty place to find myself.

We lived in Dee Why in a little unit back then, both of us had a scholarship at Uni's, mine was in English and writing, but Wall was lost in his equations about particles and matter. His science even had a word for it, it was called Quantum physics. He read Newton and Einstein, whilst I read Shakespeare and Ballard. My man loved the Ballard but loathed the bard, whilst I loved Einstein's words but couldn't stomach Newton. Balance. We were really short of money, when we both approached the Local newspaper, I always could write, words sort of flow out of me like a tide, whilst Wall always knew how to make a camera sing, and yet again there was that balance. Of course people had issues about us being deaf, lecturers would leave minutes for us to read, rather than have us looking confusedly at their mouths, my skills at interviewing were always being questioned, as was the fact, that neither of us could be reached by telephone. Does anyone reading this remember the world before the computer and mobile phone, no emails or texts or digital camera's. Wall shot black and white film, he placed a small functioning darkroom in our lavatory.

I worked on a typewriter whilst he used a pair of battered Nikon F2 Photomic cameras. Our first daughter was conceived in the desert whilst we were putting a feature called Black Fella's together. It wasn't racism, it was a dissection of the Aboriginals place in what was almost laughably back then called modern society. Wall loved it and I quoted him in the book, "These guys have a belief system that could best be described as quantum."

We made very many life long friends on that one, we also made Yellow, she is a very beautiful woman now, she can hear just like the rest of you can, but sometimes when I look in my daughters eyes, I see the stars that shone above on that cool and climactic night, when she became a living egg in my ovaries.

Yet even here he would still try and beat the walls. The locals loved it to. I'll paint the picture, dusk after a days shooting, we all sit around a campfire, lost in creation myths and his explanations of the cosmic. "We are stardust naught more than star dust." The Aborigines loved these arguments, yet focusing on a nearby tree, Wall went quiet. I laughed, Yellow kicked me for the very first time as he ran at it and, thunk, you guessed it, he slid to the floor. "Wall mate, the trees a living thing too, so have a bit of respect!" Said our translator Jim Guillborough. I guess we were very happy together. Whilst strangely our little picture book sold.

As we both studied and worked, it was really just statistical probabilities if we would see each other at all, but one day at our kitchen table, Wall crashed excitedly through the front door having just interviewed one of his few living heroes, Jaques Cousteu, the diver guy who made movies, and he had been offered a job. I was only four months pregnant and we both travelled aboard the Calypso for the two month contract. I wrote some of the scripts, whilst wall took the stills and occasionally the 16mm footage. The biggest discovery that we made was that deafness and scuba diving go hand in hand. Think about that for a second, without your mouth you can't talk, divers use a simplistic version of sign language, but the two of us were able to carry on as usual, relaying far more information underwater than anyone else on the Calypso could, it resulted in Jaques learning sign language.

After Yellow was born something strange happened with Wall, he fell out of love with his fellow physicists. "Knowledge knowledge knowledge, what use is all this knowledge, if you haven't got the imagination to apply it, it's just a bloody useless lump until, you see it and use it, They have no room for imagination just a jumbled set of facts and interactions." He dropped out, walked off, left that world of academic numpties behind. I found out from his lecturer who fearing the loss of, in his own words, a natural theoretical physicist, camped outside of our house until he could talk to me. "It's the anti matter matter argument that pissed him off isn't it love?" I was breastfeeding Yellow at the time, and had to admit ignorance when it came to the matter anti matter issue. In my defence I lived and loved Wall but some of the concepts he played with genuinely flew at perpendicular right angles, to what my poetically based mind can deal with, in fact try and picture a perpendicular right angle for me, because I obviously cant. "Well he seems to think that the entire universe is just a massive set of actions and reactions, that have resulted in a sub infinite or infinite single mechanism, in fact, he was trying to unify anti matter and matter into one single expression of the universe, along with time, space and everything. What went wrong was when he added that it was all predeterminedly simultaneous, that resulted in an argument, and he took it personally, and punched a visiting Russian particle Physicist then left, I know he's deaf but you have convince him that people are listening to him.....?!!"

It was a bit of a shock because Wall was genuinely very even tempered, he was the last person on the planet, that I would have expected to punch Russians, or Hindu's or anybody, the fact that I framed that written conversation and placed it in our loo, is evidence of a turning point for Wall. I just never figured out how and why it happened. The police came looking for him as well because he was charged with assault, but Wall was nowhere to be found. That is until Mr Tucker showed up and told me that Wall was in hiding in his kitchen. So in a fit of oblique insanity the two of us went on the run, I knew that me and Yellow would be guilty of complicity, so loading up our car, we all took off for the outback.

For six months we effectively evaded the bemused constabulary, incidentally producing the books, In The Footsteps Of Ned Kelly, Monkey Mia and How Not To Talk To Dolphins. Finally we were caught outside of Alice Springs at a garage, because our car had broken down. We were briefly infamous celebrities and the court case was a whirl, I even brought a new dress for it. Wall got a first offence discount, and spent two weeks locked up in the local pokey. For all of that it was one of the very best family holidays we ever took, and it was beautiful when the Judge said, "The next person to use the term particles will be guilty of contempt."

All of which led to him learning about chaos theory from Walls legal brief. Surprise surprise. One part of his condition of release was that he apologized to the Russian. "I apologize unconditionally to you, and to the entire Russian people as a whole, for the offences I did to your person, please comrades, don't nuke us off of the face of the Earth." He said that live on television. My own interviews were equally funny, I was even a poster girl on the cover of New Scientist and the Times Literary supplement, the loyal wife, Women's own did a feature called Breast feeding on the run, it was all about me and Yellow. The very best picture was taken outside of court, by Wall himself, and that put me on the front page of Pravda.

Somewhere in the years that followed our son Photon arrived, he was deaf too, via Mr Tucker we managed to establish a deaf community, with our own school and everything. Yet in our visual and literal explorations of the outside world, both of us were coming to the conclusion that people who can hear perfectly, are not necessarily listening. More importantly they couldn't hear their own thoughts anywhere nearly as clearly as us deaf critters can. Imagine silence for a little moment right now, go on close your eyes. Then fill that silence with nothing but yourself, my mind and every other deaf persons mind is full of concepts and thoughts, they all come from deep within me, and I listen to them without distraction. All of which resulted in my first book, the only pictures are on the covers, its called Silence Is A Virtue, sadly no matter how proud I am of it, it did not sell well.

Over time our little community grew, and I guess both of us finally grew up and got responsible, our third daughter was born and we gave her a normal name, Cleopatra, yet finally one day Wall made it work. His theory that is.

It was on the day of the fires that it happened. Let's face it you cant be an Australian and survive long, without having a healthy respect for mother nature, and the forest fire, is only one of many potentially lethal variations, that she has up her sleeve. Wall loved to go for walks in the forests after those fires had happened, his photos of them are intoxicating, and without any pun intended illuminating. Yet this was a biggy, this one fire was a deadly one, that even threatened our little community. Wall was snapping for the papers, when he saw a little boy getting dangerously disorientated in all that smoke. He tried to get the local firefighters attention, but they were some what busy. So my little fella went after the other little guy, on his own. It proved to be far more complicated than he could have anticipated, you see the small child had done, exactly what every small child does when they are scared, he had gone home to his room, and hidden in the closet.

So putting the illegality of breaking and entering aside, Wall kicked the farmhouses door in and searched, all of which took a while. Finally after fifteen or so minutes, he discovered the kid hiding in the closet, and playing with Lego bricks by the light of a torch. This resulted in two discoveries for Wall, one was the Lego Brick, the other was that they were now both, quite dangerously trapped in a farmhouse, that was becoming a blazing inferno. The local fire chief said on the news after that. "The deaf guy was a hero, a really stupid hero, but from where I was standing, it looked like he jumped through the walls of the houseI I know it must have been the window up above, but in all that smoke it seemed like the wall........ It had to be the window?" Presumably ending the interview in a fit of denial then and there. I didn't see all of this I was watching the fire nervously from a nearby hill with the kids.

Wall later told me that he had focused like never before, and with the small boy in his hands, he had leapt effortlessly through it then fallen ten feet or so. All of which shook the small boy up so much, that he had kicked Wall in the shins. Yet everyone said it must have been the window. I wasn't there, so either Wall had a smoke induced anoxia delusion, or he actually jumped through the wall. So he returned as the deaf hero, but also he fell back in love with the universe, and went back to university. Whilst I tried my hand at science fiction.

I just unloaded the gun for some reason and lined the six shells up in front of me.

Wall himself looks very peaceful at this time though, it doesn't suit him. My man would argue with a lamppost given half a chance, this is the quietest that he has ever been. I don't like it, I keep expecting him to get up and walk around. One of the many surprises that we had in our life, was the discovery that we in our silent little bubbles, were very noisy neighbours to have. Obviously we couldn't hear any of our own racket, apart from the odd vibration, when one of us would break a plate. We also were a pair of screamers. That is according to our elderly neighbour Yvonne, I cant help if I get noisy when we are rocking each others world like that can I. It has caused a lot of slight embarrassment over the years, particularly the quickie we had in the British Parliament.

Wall was always labelled radical, for some reason that he never understood, people would see what they wanted to see in him, and oddly he got some reflected respect in the peace movement, so we were invited to go to a huge meeting in the UK. It was bad timing for us, I was in the final draught of my latest, and Wall had fallen in love with all things Meson. "Its beautiful, Imagine that ancient Greek ferryman who took the dead over the river Styx, That's the meson when it comes to matter and anti matter. Its a bit of both and it flits betwixt the two, so this is my unifying particle, but imagine entrapped mesons working and flowing together, one matter the other anti. If you want to go extreme, then lets say there is only one super particle, that composes everything in the universe, and all the rest is just...... Reflections of it entrapped, and zapping about."

I should have seen it coming, I could have stopped the whole of the UK trip, but at least I did orgasm in parliament. You see Wall accidentally put the entire peace movement back forty odd years, by simply applying physics to it. In front of Nobel prize winners and influential politicians Wall said this.

"This isn't any hippy fluff that I am throwing at you today, everything I say is backed up by science, Physics to be more exact." He smiles to everyone at this point. "We as a species are composed, like all living things initially from stardust, stardust forged in the relentless and simultaneous engines of infinity, there is only one rule in the whole of everything. Action equals reaction. Over and over again. Now some would say that the global peace movement, is a reaction to the global total war lobby. Whilst others may cynically try to cling to hypothetical's like god, to defend their points of view or way of life. However the only constant thing that we have, is change, and those changes will forever be opposed, because we are stardust. Life is a reflection of the conflicts inherent in the interactions of the universe, and those are always to do with force. If I look at human history, war is a regular common denominator, we should approach warfare, in the same way that we would a viral outbreak or an earthquake. Isolate then vaccinate and eventually cure or rebuild, but as we are reflections of an expanding and ever changing universe. I am afraid that world peace becomes nought more than a fantasy, a toxic fairytale that is equally as dangerous as fascism or fundamentalism, in fact it is just another extreme."

"So like all extreme viewpoints it is dangerous to touch, like all extreme outlooks it is incredibly dangerous to realize, and like most extreme points of view, completely impossible to achieve, take Israel, the militarized religionist state that has got atomic weaponry, am I the only person here who has concerns about that, or maybe the Khmer rouges little jaunt is worthy of mention here, millions dead and the only thing that stopped it was the North Vietnamese Armies Illegal intervention, note that word illegal there, because I would like to publicly thank the people of Vietnam for stopping Pol Pot, when our own governments were supporting him."

"Iran, Bosnia, Burma its a long list and the thought of disarming ourselves, when every shred of evidence points to a violent and dangerous creature called Homo Sapiens, is unrealistic. Action begs reaction, begs action, begs response, forever. Whilst we, no matter how smart or what machines we build, can only reflect this universe. " Wall pauses and smiles to the stunned audience then disarmingly adds, "The only solution we have is evolution, because revolution is for the birds."

It was a good job he was deaf because a somewhat violent silence filled this room of academic political's, we were completely unaware of the betrayal that Wall had inflicted because he got all passionate with me, and it wasn't till we left the little office we had used, that we were asked to leave. My hair was mussed up when a photographer shot us leaving, and Wall was relabelled a war monger. We even got hate mail. One very embittered marine who will remain nameless sent. "Dear Mr Deaf Motherfucker in Australia. Those North Vietnamese cocksuckers were not and never could be the good guys." Believe it or not that was a mild one. So what was Walls response. Well, he went off and spoke to the now retired Mr Tucker, who advised him. "To steer well clear of politics for the rest of eternity!" but that night he vented his frustration to me and said.

"Why is it that whenever anyone is honest, nobody else can accept it, it's not my fault the universe works this way, I don't want to have wars anyhow............. Why does nobody like the truth! All they ever do is create little fantasy gods, and rules that are ridiculous, and whenever I point that out I get yelled at or ostracized. Why?" I couldn't answer him because I didn't understand it myself, and in fairness, what Wall had thought was a call for a sanitized approach to warfare, had backfired into an assault on God, world Peace and the state of Israel, so the next morning he got relabeled as an Arab apologist, and an anti religionist, who opposed freedom of religion. All that in twenty four hours.

For the next few years, walls pictures didn't sell and he threw himself at those mesons, my books suddenly did sell, so our incomes weren't that affected, but between interviews and Yellows marriage, Wall got desperately attached to the quark and anti quark pairings within the structure mesons. He would scribble equations in his notepad, often overshooting the pages and redecorating our Kitchen table.

Somewhere in all of that, he became a respected scientist again, and his response was, "I'm loving this. I don't need a camera, or even a notepad to do a thought experiment. This is freedom at play, and I just happen to call it science." Although he was technically still a photojournalist, Wall was extremely wary of being interviewed and answering questions, most notably refusing to address the Australian National Geographic Societies annual achievement awards. He strolled up to the podium received the award, smiled at everyone , then with a thumbs up, exited stage left.

He had taken Mr Tuckers advice completely to heart. "You know, I took all of those photos, because I was curious and I didn't understand people, but now I am not sure I want to." Was all he said that night. Ah, but those quarks and anti quarks had him in their vice like grip. He could always see things that others couldn't, it was the way his brain was wired, visually, when Wall looked at an equation, it would dance around in front of him, as he visualised it's interactions. Is it silly that a man can think that the universe is an amazingly simple place, because with every new fact he learned, Wall thought it was, unbelievably simple. "In an infinite universe all things are possible, take the quantum branch test if you want, in this universe I have turned left in others I have gone backwards, forwards, or climbed a tree, You see Jenny its the predetermined nature of it that's got me dazzled, an infinite number of me's, living every conceivable outcome I could, but because at some future point, even the words I am speaking to you have been spoken, then suddenly its all predetermined and inevitable, guaranteed. That's the trick of it all, this everything has already happened, and it all begins to go clickety click when you view time as a wave." Yes he went off on one like that a lot, I would watch his hands blurring, as he tried to illuminate me to a new concept, that had opened up in that sparky headed apparition that I loved.

Strangely our last joint feature involved human curiosity about the cosmos, It was simply called Telescopes, so the two Old Farts went walkies, just like the good old days in the outback, visiting those often isolated observatories. Their kids were all grown, An accountant, a surfer and a soldier, all like it had happened at the speed of light, relative. Don't blink because you may miss something. Like I now miss him.

"Think about anti time," He had said last night, "A Kelvin aberrant wave in time that changes it all for a little while, picture a wave of time as all the universes collide, and create a point of temporal conformity, picture that same wave and apply Newton to it, as a wave goes backwards, it's time running backwards, its called retro causality, the present causing the future, and maybe the past? Call this very moment, this moment right here and now, call it an expression of many presents, scattered like dust about the multiverse, call it retro causal drag if you like. Sweet Dreams my love, because everything is naught more than a very persistent illusion."

I felt his kiss just now, a past reflection of him maybe, is life just all about time? Moments? Whatever it is about, it is beautiful to have lived. So I have decided I won't shoot myself today after all, besides, I have the feeling, I will see him again and again and again.

Jenny

26/06/2010

Sydney Australia.

The Silent Fairy-tale.

By

Kego O'Grady

Once upon a time. There was a little deaf boy, who lived in a beautiful rain forest. In his own little head he built his world. Alone and free from all the shapes of speech and words, he made his own private language, but because he was unable to speak, the nastier animals in the forest, would hurt him again and again. So without a voice he was unable to say "STOP."

The nicer creatures heard the little boy cry a lot, again and again, but because they couldn't talk to each other, they could not say "Stop!" e

Either. In fact nobody in the whole forest could talk to anyone who was different. The Squirrels couldn't talk to the Monkeys, even nasty Mr Fox couldn't talk to the grumpy Eagle. So in the end they wasted a lot of their days, screaming at each other. Except for the little boy, he had been given a gift from the old witch in the middle of the forest, the gift was so special that it made him cry, but also it made him very happy.

The gift was called imagination.

Every night the little boy would curl up in his favourite tree, and sleep in his feather blanket.

BUT!

Every night, he would have the same horrible dream, and every morning, he would fly awake, terrified that his forest would all be gone. You see what he had been dreaming, was that a GIGANTIC MACHINE was carpeting the whole world over.

It would unroll a massive red and black carpet, it even flattened entire herds of elephants. Squish. Squish. Squish. Even the mighty oceans of the small planet. were covered by this horrible and ugly carpet. So finally one morning, the exasperated and scared little deaf boy, waved bye bye to his squirrel friends, and went to see the very very very old witch, who was the only other person who was nice to him. She was also the wisest character in the whole of the rain forest. When he arrived she was cooking a snake and banana pie on her campfire, which was delicious. YUM YUM ;-)

The little boy and the old woman had an ENORMOUS obstacle. It was a very big problem. You remember that he could not hear, and that meant that he couldn't speak either. So when the very old witch realised that he needed to tell her something, she decided to teach him to read and write. It took a very long time, but the witches shop was very quiet, as most of her customers couldn't talk either. It took so long that he wasn't a little boy any more, he was a young man. In fact he had even changed colour. The first word that he learned was her name.

She was called Dolphin.

Dolphin knew that he didn't have a name, so the second word he learned was his own name. She called him River. He had never had a name before, and it made him feel very special. Finally he explained his awful dream, and how it had forced him to come to see her, because he was sure that there was the gravest of dangers, for all who lived in the little paradise. River was very surprised when she had told him, she knew it was happening, but that it was "The Civilised People." They dwelled in massive places called cities and had little time or use for a forest. Apparently his dream, was a pictorial translation of something, that the people of the cities, called pavement and roads. The cities grew by gobbling up everything that was around them, and then the young man got very scared.

Even though some of the animals had been nasty to him, River loved his beautiful home. He would wash in the morning in the waterfall, and every evening, he would watch all the animals yelling at each other, but now as he had a language, he felt sad for them slightly, even nasty Mr Fox. So as he watched the sun go to sleep, he knew that he would have to talk to the city people. When he packed his fishing rod and his feather blanket, Dolphin made him promise to come back home, then she hugged him, and gave him a pie to eat on the long walk. He walked until he came to the rocklike surface of the what he thought was a road. The next day he came to a house, there was nobody in, then there were more houses, and a young woman screamed and ran away. River's first thought was that they had no words either, and he wondered if Dolphin was the cleverest person in the world. Then very strong men in blue clothes, put him in chains and into a very fast smelly thing, that growled loudly as it moved. They put River in a dungeon, and he sat thinking of his home because these people were insane. The sun had gone to sleep three times and their food was not recognisable to River, but just before the moon woke up a lady, who was not in blue, wrote her name and told him, she was a doctor. River discovered that he was a survivor of something called a war, he had been lost in the rain forest as a tiny child, apparently soldiers had broken his ears, and his mom and dad had been killed. The strange civilised people did not care about his home, but the doctor wrote one word for him. Spacers.

It took a long time to meet them, and he became sort of famous with the civilised people. River got very confused by them, and finally he went to his forest, and waited for a spacer to come. One day as he watched the sunlight reflect through the leafs that made up the roof of his cottage, he heard an incredibly loud roaring noise. A white streamlined ship came down from the sky, and sat in his potato patch, he was furious, until the old woman jumped from the ship and smiled to him.

As they stripped the forest from him, he was shocked and almost ran away, until one day river was strapped into a chair, and they flew into the great nothing, which is what the spacer people called the place between planets. The crew Blindfolded the deaf young man, and he felt the floor harden beneath his feet, then he felt the grass, it was also funny to be lighter, almost like he could float. It was a relief to know that all his friends, and his home, were now safe from the pavement, but he was very nervous about it all. Then he took the blindfold off, and they were all smiling as he ran to his water fall, everyone even nasty Mr fox was there, eating with Dolphin, and she was teaching them all to speak one language. So in the holds of the mighty Asterio ship, River lived happily and safely ever after.

The End

THE GASP

Think about this for a second or three, my grandfather like many saw it coming, followed the reality of it all to see the extinction potential for our species. Although I vaguely remember him in my infant mind, I know that he and a large group of others were right, about our downfall. If the realities of the world back then look like an alien concept, it is because we have had to change our ways in order to survive. I would have just loved to have seen a dolphin, thats all I know, they like most of the mammals have gone, leaving us surviving in our few colonies, and praying that the planet can heal itself. So much for today, I have been asked to write about the Gasp, to put my memories onto paper for some kind of posterity. At least I survived it, which is more than seven billion plus other people can say. Yet like many of my limited generation, we can't help but gaze at the recent history of the Great Holocene Extinction, and label it as the first mass suicide in the Earths history. No other extinction happened like this, and like most human problems, it was avoidable.

What can you say about the gasp, if it wasn't for my fathers job as virologist, we wouldn't have survived at all. I guess it was in the news that we began to sense the dangers ahead, the issues of air quality were by 2021, killing 47 million people every year. I know that because my mother, an engineer, would listen patiently to my fathers wining about the statistics, and I would often hear him say that ebola was easier to deal with than the air quality. You see who would fund study into a virus when the air itself was proving deadly. I used to cycle behind him to school, and we always wore our particulate filter masks, it was that bad. Its all so much statistics when you look back to the world before the Gasp. The older people remember it almost mournfully, we as a species went from several billion, to a few hundred thousand over night, and virtually wiped out every other mammal on the planet, at least it was quick I guess.

Why am I alive, my grandfathers paranoia, combined eloquently with my mothers engineering skills and my father medical knowledge, whilst I as a six year old passed her a lot of screwdrivers and such, I didn't play a part in our salvation at all. I am painting you the picture for survival, the evidence my journalist-biologist grandfather got hold of, saved us, and many of those that survived were the ones who listened to the science, not the corporate political rhetoric. So as my mother built an airtight area, and several different types of oxygen generators, I was pulled from school, and is it wrong to say that the run up to this disaster, has many a pleasant memory for me, my pragmatist mother was almost the opposite of my feisty father. He wanted to stop the process, using co2 eating aquatic bacteria, he was working with geneticists to develop them when the Gasp hit. It was so sudden, life and death can be measured in fractions of a second. Whilst before that, my mother had been chatting story style to me as she tightened the last of the screws into the generating mechanisms. Then apocalypse. The Gasp.

I remember the way the world sounded before hand, the atmosphere now doesn't carry sound in the same way, but that change in the sounds around me was the first indicator of what had happened, my mother attaching the breathing apparatus to me as she sealed the airlock to the house. It sounds insignificant but that change in sound was the first horrifying step, in the gasp. Outside we could hear the thrashing and screaming, it takes about five minutes to die from asphyxiation, ten minutes till brain death, ask anyone who was there and many had very lucky escapes, whilst others are functioning through the anoxia of brain damag,e others made it intact. I listened, my mother was at the window to shocked to speak, I looked for one second out of the window and closed my eyes, people were writhing on the concrete of our street, hands flailing around them unable to scream as they couldn't get any air. Then after a long time silence, no bird song, just the occasional car alarm, no air for the machinery to work with, just silence, that evening I thought I heard a dog bark, the adult knows there was no dog, my mind was filling the overwhelming silence, with anything it could hold on to.

My father returned late that evening, he was pale and unusually quiet with shock, he had seen many deaths in his career, but nothing has prepared him for the gasp, and we slept that night in the sealed living room. I remember how oppressive the silence of it was at the beginning, we have all over time gotten used to it, but in that initial solitude, was a thought. "Are we all that is left?" After a day of it, we donned our oxygen bottles and walked to see what if anything was left. Corpses were scattered everywhere, their faces contorted by their final moments, I saw my school teacher, lying there on the tarmac road, children, adults, cats, dogs, and everywhere were birds, lying where they crashed, in my dreams I see a sea of wings, yet for all of that we have survived, twenty years later we are glimpsing small sign of recovery. Yet our communities still rely on oxygen generation, even if we have become astronauts on our own planet.

Yet in the oceans we are seeing small hopes, hopes that oxygen will return, and in that absence of our species massed industrialisation we are witnessing a rebirth of sorts, the Bar Headed geese have survived, they circulate the air twice in special sacks apparently, thriving at high altitudes they somehow get enough from the air, air that is still to thin for mankind, and even some fish have survived as well.

Even before the disaster, we knew the mechanisms, but unlike our corporate profitable ancestors, we see the danger in it. Its so simple with hindsight, you see the oceans were absorbing all of the CO2 they could, whilst we kept making more and more and more of the stuff, without slowing down our industrial processes, when CO2 hits sea water chemical reactions occur, they reduce the PH of the ocean, increasing its acidity. The acidity built and built, hitting the plankton of both plant and animal genus's, species ceased to exist before the Gasp, just because they were to fragile to cope with the acidification of their environment. All of us know the science now, zoo plankton couldn't get the necessary calcium carbonates to make shells, as the acidity reduced it, the phytoplankton, the photosynthesising plankton reached a point where it started to die too. The rest was on a time scale, three years past the catastrophic tipping point where the oceans started to reduce the air they produced, people died, we had been living on the fumes beforehand.

I could say that our ancestors showed a startling level of insanity, or even use the word suicidal here, because it was business as usual for their cars and factories, pumping CO2 into the atmosphere increased, increased and increased, until something other than stormy weather had to give. I guess the dead are in my memories, I cannot add much more than that to our historical memories of the Gasp. I just dream of wings.................

Polynesian Space Gazette. The System.

Sometimes, it can take hours to find a veterinary surgeon near the locality of my home, on the planet Corruptus. The nearest one is in Barnards Star, but when the families pet Kangaroo is poorly, a responsible father, can only do his best. I think she is having difficulties adjusting to the bouncing occupants of our new home, even with the lesser gravity, Emily the Roo, cannot compete with all those little furry balls of deceit. I was giving the Corruptean ambassador a lift, along with his new diplomatic staff, all of who'm were convinced that our family pet had had it. If you recollect that, no Corruptean worth their salt, would ever tell the truth, it is a guarantee she will be as right as the rain, after a visit to the vet. However that is not what this particular report is about, it was during that very short five light year hop to Barnards star, that I picked up a hitch hiker known as the System.

An inter galactic legend, and also the cause of many an urban or urbane myth. She is quite a confused critter, and my recorder was out in a shot, when I realized that such an incredible opportunity, had literally fallen into my lap.

I could best describe her as an insanity of evolution, A super brain in a cephalopods body, in fact the closest thing we have to her on Earth is the Octopus, even though she is in possession of over a zillion tentacles, she would happily trade them all in, for two that worked properly, however, as those tentacles have brought her nothing but misery and mayhem in life. SYSTER as she likes to be called, had been banished from her own home planet, despite her unfathomably superior intellect, because she was a genetic freak of nature, and her mother had run away in terror when her egg hatched. Thus alone, she had wandered a very tangled, and often confusing path through the cosmos. You see, she can only control about a thousand legs at any one given time, which means it took her thirty eight and a half minutes, to board our sturdy little jalopy, tripping herself up, or merely being trapped for a year or two, because a cluster of tentacles found this tree branch interesting, or felt a sudden need to explore a cave. Even when she flows towards you, it is like a drunken dance of confusion.

Yet within that chaotic wriggling body is one of the finest minds in the universe, she had after all negotiated a peace deal, with the Drenners and the Frelnicks, of the planet Bastrads, then unified the matter versus anti matter gig, and that had confused the scientific types for ages. My children's favourite drink is one of her recipes, my favourite easy chair is one of her designs. The Ambassador was amusing himself by explaining the principles of Non Science, and she was seemingly enjoying it, so he offered her a Coruptean Visa, and I was happy to give her a lift back to Coruptus. All of which seemed to be a more than welcome break for our confused and exhausted new friend. So I was surprised when I returned from the vet with a much happier Emily at her absence. It didn't take me long to find her though, as she was attached to the ramjets of my little buggy. So after a lot of pulling and cursing, I managed to free her, and get us both safely in the cockpit.

As we approached her newest home, I asked her what advice would she give any Earthlings, about our future in the cosmos, and she said. "Stop evolving, the moment you have more than eight legs, just don't do it. Any system that has too many compartments, is ultimately bound to fail, and worse lose control of itself. So just stick to two legs, if it works for you."

Well she is living in a nearby lake now, and my children quite enjoy taking Emily for walks down there, so I guess there will be more written about her in future articles. I do have to warn any of you that are holidaying with the family pet, to avoid Brashgacks surgery on Barnards Star, as it is incredibly expensive.

Geoffrey Halstead. Reporter. Polynesian Space Gazette. 3010Ad

Foetal Dreams Of Dangers Past.

(Awash In Starlight (Shorts based on the Konichiwa Collective))

Starlight, Stars and light, shining all around him, clear and cool photons smashing into his retina's at that impossible speed of light, harmlessly they interacted with his optic nerve, as his brain processed the impossible flames that were being extinguished in this airless vacuum. His shaking gloved hand felt through the pipe, probing in the intense fire and then in a rush of pressure-less death he spasmed. As the gloves failed, his thumb burst through the plastic skin, letting his precious atmosphere escape from his space suit. His fingers twisted the valve. As the bubbles of oxygen formed in his brain, they created an abstract viewpoint of his own death, this near death shone brightly, as his eyes drank in all of those stars, as he greedily tried to see more of his brief life aboard the Konichiwa. Unable to move, he became a spectator to his death, in this field of unadulterated light.

The Rescue Ball saw him, it's single robotic eye. Adjusted, and then flexed it's snakelike metallic neck to zoom in on this doomed astronaut. Calico, for that was his name, before he felt that utter irrelevance of his death, watched lazily as the small booster puffed from the lower part of the small robots casing, he watched it for a million years, as the creature of his dream got closer, and then with the speed of a real snake, it engulfed his body, eating it up like the Little Princes elephants and Calico's mind laughed, he had expected suffocation, but instead he was to be eaten, digested by a rescue ball. Feeling the atmosphere within the balls stomach changing, he heard the strangest and painful whistling noise, then curling into a foetal position he sobbed.

If he hadn't been sleeping weightlessly, Calico would have sat bolt upright at his memory nightmare, instead, he uncurled himself from his baby tangled position. Alice even asleep threw her arms around him, and he floated caught between the present and the past, briefly finding security in her breathing. He looked around the small space they were sleeping in, then his eyes looked absent of any emotion at his left hand. Part's of the glove had fused into the twisted healed skin, creating splashes of blue veinlike colours, he always wore a blue space suit before the accident, but now he was becoming the suit itself sometimes. The hand worked, apart from the little finger, it stubbornly refused to function, he had been having the dream, for three years ever since he had been awakened on the Konichiwa, the last Spacer on that starship, slipped gently from his lover, and then smoothly pulled on his shorts, as Alice mumbled something. He smiled as she did that, in her sleep she would mumble, he could never figure out what she was saying, but he kissed at her forehead, and left her sleeping to check in the cockpit on the small shuttle.

As he pulled himself through the circular airlock mechanism, he could hear music playing from ahead of him. "O'Grady!" A screen lit up nearby as the Ai (Artificial Intelligence) Of the late great Kego O'Grady, filled the screen with a smirking face. The Ai smiled and then poked a tongue out at him. He had just been going through the archive,s and was working his way happily through the Eminem collection, what was irritating Calico was the fact that he would play the tune over and over again. It was also irritating that the Ai had been using Kego's child face a lot lately, so he was arguing, with what seemed to be a whisky drinking 9 year old, with the knowledge of a hundred year old. "Ok I'll bite which track is this one?"

"Monster, my original namesake, could've related to this one, really!" The child's voice replied to the question. "I have more information on our target and it's exciting."

Calico was thinking about the ghost ship ahead of them, as he pulled himself into the cockpit chairs. "Fire away then mate."

"It's my one."

"Huh?" Calico said, whenever the Ai used these riddles, it was better to just go with it.

"It's the Solstice, she was carrying Chinese refugees from the planet, but its the same ship that my namesake O'Grady was born on." Calico's eyes popped slightly, as the ship was a legend, and one of the first Asterio ships produced. "She has over a thousand years over the Konichiwa mate, I mean you have to hand it to hollowed out asteroids, they just go on and on and on!" Calico thought it through and then smiled, 957 years ago, a black hole had skirted the solar system, it knocked all of the planets off orbit, in a cosmic tug of war, and they had all left the Earth, generations of spacers had flown to the planet Herschel, now with a growing colony on surface, the second ship to show up was one of the first ever made. "She saved humanity once before already, so this cruise should be a doddle for the old girl, hmmm?"

"Ok Spill it!" Calico said, poking at the face on the screen with a smile. He knew something was ticking in its binary code, and like the original human being, there was little in the way of deceptive skills in the Ai.

Ok, you know I can copy myself, perfect reproduction of moi! Well I want that ship, it makes me all fluffy, when I think about it, so permission to make another me."

"Ok but different faces, one old one young, as I will need to differentiate, and there are already two of you, one here and one on the Konichiwa, so what about a sex change?"

"What a girly O'Grady?" Alice said as she slipped into the seat next to him, Calicos hand automatically slipped into hers, entwining their fingers together. "That would be good, as I know he stares at me in the showers."

Calico laughed, as Kego stuck his tongue out at her, then with a chuckle added. "Hey your goods are good sister, but I have to tell you, I know all of the women on the Koni as intimately as possible for an Ai, its a voyeuristic thing, and harmless as my testicles don't actually function, they're simply cosmetic!" Kego sniffed tragically at her.

"Peeper! Peeping Tom?" Alice laughed. 'Peeping Kego?"

"Is that why you put towels over the eyes?" Alice nodded. Calico was going to point out that the Ai could see through the infra red spectrum, and even had thermal imaging capabilities in case of fires etc, but somehow, he didn't think it would help. "Ok so this time your a girly O'Grady, as it'll be less confusion."

"It's probably overdue and inevitable too, sister." Alice laughed.

'Shall I get the virtual cards out, as we still have seven hours to go." Kego added.

The time itself passed quickly enough, and Calico drifted into a cat nap in the cockpit, snapping awake as he heard the word. "Visual." It was then a busy forty minutes of preparation, as they approached the silent ship. He discovered that the original Kego, was going to board the ships Ai, so he was still getting used to the gender change, it was funny but the mix of Japanese and European (Ish) features that made the child cute, the man ugly, blended to make a particularity striking woman, not beautiful, but authoritative, not sexy but sensual. Alice slapped him on the back of the head, as the all new Kego O'Grady, curtseyed humorously pirouetting like a ballerina. "We only have the emergency beacon, and that is it, so we have two entry points, the main lock on the central axis, or you two go through one of the personnel airlocks and figure it out. Your holo units have the original me downloaded so you can upload him as soon as you have power, or use his info through the units." Her voice was higher as well and Alice was more comfortable with this female incarnation than she was prepared to admit.

Calico was lost in the schematics as he looked through the options, then smiled and spoke for the first time in ages. "No, What we do is go through the main shuttle lock, leaving it open behind us, and then use the personnel airlock there and proceed on foot. Ok?"

Alice was checking her pressure suit and nodded, it was then that she opened the box that had been causing some arguments between the two of them. In it were weapons, two recycling Smith and Wesson revolvers and an AK74 assault rifle with a selection of different ammunition. Calico being a Spacer had little or no time for them, but Alice had survived over twenty lives in the dreamworlds whilst she had been cryogenically frozen, neither one was in command of this first contact mission, but, Alice felt better with them around, so she had packed them. Calico still mistrusted the devices, and placed the evil wooden gripped 38, into the thigh pocket on his kevlar pressure suit. The shuttle was dwarfed in this massive darkened space, occasionally an emergency light struggled to activate, but in the vacuum, they silently manoeuvred the small ship to the personnel lock.

Buckling his tool belt on, Calico stepped into the small ergonomic airlock, whilst Kego networked the searchlights, orientating them with the ground. Calico had several hundred hour of space walk time, for Alice this was her forty third hour, she followed him through the lock, as it opened to the airless vacuum. Describing the disorientating and daunting experience of zero gee, is never easy, the angles that can be reached are sometimes so acute, that they can over power the gravity evolved mechanism called the human brain, with the initial rush of sea sickness, Alice focussed on the warning light on Calicos back, trying not to look at the glancing searchlights from the shuttle. Calico had been born out here in this environment, even though it had nearly killed him, he was acclimatised to it, in a way that Alice could never achieve, however Alice was smart, tough and resourceful, it had been noticed on the Konichiwa, that together they made an exceptional team. Where he was over imaginative she was realistic, where he was afraid she was a tigress, and together they passionately lived and did their best to support the growing tribe of human survivors. She thought of that as they proceeded towards the airlock, they had been the first choice for this vital mission of contact with this seemingly lost ship. Alice was a computer technician, whilst Calico was an engineer, she was also a weapons specialist, a medic to name but a few of her accumulated skills, many she had learned in her dream life's, frozen through their 950 year journey. Adding a crazed artificial reincarnation Ai, of a nuclear physicist in the shape of Kego, only extended their small teams reach.

Finally with a relief her feet touched the surface in front of the crews airlock. "Jesus that really was a tough one?" Calico said with a laugh, she watched as his hands wiped at the glass porthole in the impact proof door. "Oh Shit, look its sealed on the other side which is good but the space is full of ice crystals, which is bad." He turned to her and they both tapped their Helmet glass together. She smiled, it released some tension that they felt here in this abandoned space, but Alice was also excited by this unknown. She thought of her parachute jump into Nazi occupied France, and laughed.

"I was thinking of when I first got to France, I know now that none of it was real, but at the time I didn't know that, and I am feeling it in my stomach." Calico squinted to her indicating that she had flown over his head. "Spacers and psychology are a waste of time, I am excited, its good to be alive you know what I mean." He nodded, but Kego's voice came over their radios.

"Oh thats so sweet, you two love birds can get all fluffy even here, but dare I point out that that airlock wont open itself! It might be handy to try to open before we all die of old age!"

After a few minutes of manual work the lock was open enough for them to step in, Alice held Calico back and using the torch on her rifle she cautiously entered the cylindrical airlock. Having searched it thoroughly she waved for Calico to follow her, catching the tail end of his conversation with Kego. "So use the two robots, to see if you can get a link from here to boot that up." Calico started to close the lock behind them, and then worked to open the inner doorway to enter the ship proper. Again Alice cautiously entered and scanned through the large corridor, it went in three directions from where she stood.

"Clear." Alice announced as Calico laughed.

'Are you sure, I mean are you really really sure?"

"Oh just fuck off and get out here I don't know which ways quickest." Alice said frowning into the darkness around her, watching the torch beams scatter surrealistically off of the ice and snow that was covering this corridor. Whilst Calico was looking at his holo unit on his wrist. Finally he pointed straight ahead and the pair walked cautiously into the darkness, as he dropped an illuminator flare behind them. Glancing back as they turned a corner, Alice watched the ghostly flare light flickering red in the distance, then gritting her teeth she stepped into the S bend of the tunnel. Three airlocks and four flares later the pair were plodding along, and looking for the manual staircases that would take them on their long journey to the bridge.

Calico was clearly disturbed by the lack of atmosphere or even toxic levels of Co2. Whenever he went silent, it was clear to Alice that he was troubled. So she chatted mostly to herself on that long walk. Two slaps from his gloved hands banged hollowly on her helmet, automatically she followed his pointing fingers and saw the hand, it was jutting from the ice crystals. Pulling the large safety down on the Ak, she advanced slowly shadowed by Calico. The torches flashed in the reflective surfaces, creating a frightening disfigured world of shadows, and lethal looking silhouettes. Calico slipped past her, his torch beam scanning down the corridor, more human shapes were there, lying in their postures on the floors, one was sat his or her head looking to its feet. Calico looked silently down at the dead spacer, the first they had encountered, he surprised her by pulling at the wrist unit on the frozen arms of the corpse. After struggling with it for a while the strap tore open and he gave the unit a once over.

"The batteries are dead. I will have to use my spare on it, thats if its working at all." She was surprised he carried a spare for it, as the batteries were good for at least a year, then Alice kicked at the ice by the hand.

"Take a look at that?" She pointed the torch beam over the black object.

"Shit." Calico fumbled in his chest pocket for the spare battery as he spoke. "A gun, what the hell is going on here."

Alice saw the 38, it was the same as they carried, she also looked at the body closely. "Run your holo in scan mode over her." Calico nodded and then they watched as the inner image, hidden beneath the ice was exposed, almost like a pair of archaeologists, they watched it form. "She was shot, but by a higher velocity weapon than the 38, probably one of these." Alice said patting at her rifle. The temperature was so low that the normally reliable battery wouldn't boot up the device, so Calico used his suits heater on it as they walked past more of the bodies that were scattered around this corridor. Alice stopped at the next airlock, the door had been buckled by some massive impacts, and it was pot marked by bullet and energy spread impacts. "How the hell can you use energy weapons on a ship, it's overkill, what the fuck has happened here Calico?"

His silence wasn't helping, but he looked at the buckling of the metal doorway, then pulled the small rivet banger from his tool belt. "Step back a bit I am going to blow our way through this." Alice stepped away, and walked into the nearest open room, a body had been mummified by the ice and temperatures, if she pretended she was sleeping it worked, still holding the rivet banger Calico stepped in with her, then with his gloved fingers, counted down from four. In the vacuum of these corridors, alice felt a slight and sudden vibration through the soles of her feet, it was unnerving to feel a silent explosion, and without any atmosphere the chemical reaction within the bangers was silenced. Calico counted with his fingers again, and then cautiously looked through his torch beam to the lock. "Beaut! Cmon lets get the next one opened."

Several lengths later they reached the stairwell to the central axis, all the time Calico had been checking the dead's holo units, finally after their first hour aboard the Solstice, the batteries heated and began to function, Calico surprised Alice by not reading it. "O'Grady, sending you this holo's links, get into it and tell what the hell happened here fast." Alice didn't have a problem with his decision, as the Ai could sift through al of this far faster than either of them could, however Miss O'Grady pointed out that it would be even quicker to connect Mr O'Grady directly, from unit to unit. Alice laughed. "Shit, talk about over thinking it." Calico chuckled as he magnetised bot units together.

Give me twenty folks, the operating systems a mess." Came Kegos voice over their comms.

"Ok the only way is up, so armed ladies before gentlemen!" Alice said as her torch scanned up the partitions of the staircase.

Part way there Miss Kego updated them with a message from Kuiper. "Yeah just got their reply telling us to proceed."

Alice spun looking at Calico. "Here hang on a minute, you didn't get any authorisation to board her."

A shrug in space suit is still a shrug. "Why would I wait, the ships on a collision course in the same solar system as Herschel is, like tell me there is any other option but bureaucracy here?"

"Spacers, like do I really have to give you the chain of command lecture again?" Alice said sharply.

"What, listen we would have to board her no matter what happens, so why wait for someone half a parsec away to tell us that? Besides you know my culture, we have to be responsible for our selves out here, it's what we as a people." Alice breathed in ready for his extinction speech again. "Were all about, and on a job like this, every hour lost is an hour bloody wasted that we won't get back, so because we are expecting complications with the engines etc, waiting even a minute could make or break this gig."

"Oh shut it and head up the staircase."

After a silent walk they reached the central axis, it was in the centre of the potato shaped rock that made the Solstice, here they were weightless, and swimming in the narrow spaces the two proceeded towards the bridge. The holo unit on his wrist lit up and the little boy looked at him blinking. "Crying out loud it took me nearly seventeen minutes to rewrite the code and repair the systems, I mean this does not bode well for the main Opus unit on this ship."

"Oh quit wining and fill us in, my arms are killing me and I am really wanting some solid food so get to the point will you." Alice said floating over the face.

"Ok, the Solsitce was heading for the second inhabitable planet in the Centauri system, it was already populated and mostly Chinese so that was a good bet for her people, but they flew into a war zone."

"Oh come off it Centauri Prima and Beta are both super habitable planets, like why would they have a war, I was thinking of living there before the disaster happened, both had very stable relaxed forms of government."

"Had, is the operative word here Alice, by the time the Solstice started unloading the immigrants, it came under attack and all hell broke loose, the last entry was 511 years ago. They had stopped unloading, and started to leave the system for Herschel when they came under a huge assault and were boarded, the crew tried to fight back but they weren't soldiers, so it turned into a one sided slaughter."

"Talk and keep moving." Calico said flatly.

"Once aboard the locals hit the central Ai, then started to disconnect the freezers aboard her, however one of the crew, a cryo specialist had created an artificial Ai, this was what they destroyed, it saved the main Ai, the woman who did that got cornered, and then pushed out of an airlock for her troubles. The attackers had no idea how to control the ship so they left it alone, to travel here, however they have left several booby traps at least and that is just what I know of, and a couple of Spartan 7 battle units."

"Spartans, oh hell they're trouble with big tee!" Alice spoke over the Ai. "Like unstoppable levels of bad news."

"I don't care what they are, they attacked a Spacer ship, a neutral ship, there is no reason for that, ever, and they left a couple of their planet bound death worshipping bit's of crap behind them, more futility, from some bunch of planet bound suicide monkeys." Calico's word smarted with a rage as he said them, Alice had been gently ridding him of his Spacer Planetism's, but she could tell this was an argument that she wouldn't win for a long while. "What is this robot, give me the specs, now." His larynx bit down on that word now, making it a demand.

Alice had figured out where the energy blasts had come from, but as they silently approached the bridge she started to see the graffiti of the Uni Faith church, and she realised, that this was a revivalist Jihad that they were walking through. Calico stood in front of the words, Stardust Forever, his hand was shaking in the glove. Finally he reached into his thigh pocket and struggled the revolver from it, his eyes scanned it's black barrel for a long time and then he turned sharply to her. "Load armour piercing, and keep suited even if we are in atmosphere when we enter there."

Alice nodded.

Calico stepped up to the doors and started to open them. Finally he stepped through to the second doorway, as Alice began closing the one behind them. "You know there will be one in there don't you?" She said, hearing a grunt from him, he touched their helmets and smiled.

"I hope there are a pair of the fuckers in there."

The locks took their time to open, and he entered the bridge almost casually, stepping over another body, he walked over to the hibernating Spartan, and then pulled the rivet banger from his tool belt and pressed it against the armoured pelvis where its brains were. Alice knelt behind him her rifle pointing at the thing, as she watched the eyes lighting up, flickering between alert and sleep modes, The robot didn't notice the thumping, as Calico placed the charges into the brain, then stepped backwards several steps, before he detonated the micro charges. Alice realised that she was hearing sounds, she had heard the thump thump of the rivet banger, she could hear his footsteps, the detonation resulted in a hollow set of thuds from within the hunter killer, and its main system buckled leaving it a heap of metal parts with its spider like limbs on the floor.

"The next one will not be that easy, are you alright." Alice gave him the thumbs up and looked at the scrap by his feet again. He was an engineer, it had taken him one view of it's schematics to find a weakness, putting aside his Spacer intolerances, it was still impressive. There's O2 here and zero contaminants, its also warm enough so we can lift visors a while."

Lifting their visors they breathed in and she watched her breath clouding in front of her face, it had been a childish pleasure, for a woman born in the tropical heat of a planet many light years away. She sat and almost casually booted up the systems. It was that way for several hours as their O'Grady happily infested himself in the ships dormant Ai, at one point the multi tasking Kego showed them a short slideshow of his originals high lights, it was impressive to watch the videos, even recorded thousands of years ago, the man he had been before came shining through. Over the week, bit by bit, the ship began to breath life into itself, they even found frozen survivors, over twenty thousand out of the half a million in the holds had been secretively kept alive by the Opus units on the ship.

After that first week, they lost their fear of the Spartan that may or may not have been aboard the massive starship, O'Grady had found no signs of it. So it may have just broken down, which meant that they had their work cut out for them, and O'Grady had taken to actually walking amongst them, in the guise of one of the Opus units he had reactivated. Alice was uncomfortable in the silence of the ship, but in a way, it reminded her of the good old days when they had been alone on the Konichiwa, re-awakening the sleepy heads on board her, was now not even half way in the three years since her own awakening. It was a comfort to have O'Grady trundling along next to her, babbling from the domed head of the bi pedalled robot, it looked like a space suit, like one of those early moonwalkers, he would waddle by her side.

It was on the day that they were preparing for a course change that the two of them were double checking the cryogenic suites. "Don't you ever miss the dream worlds, I mean like those Orchid Snakes that Calico designed, or even the after life buffer, don't you ever miss them just a little teeny weeny bit?" O'Grady muttered to her, as they walked towards the working lifts.

"Ooh." Calico's voice came over the radio. "I just found an Intelli bear, I always wanted one when I was a kid but the Koni only had the one, they walk and everything." Calico was heading for their shuttle, to double check everything was stowed before the big burn happened.

"Oh they don't walk and talk do they." Said O'Grady ironically, his face grinned as it flickered in the projection of the helmet.

'Be careful or he may install a copy of you in it." Alice laughed.

Somehow this turned into a radio hum, as the trio sang the teddy bears picnic song. Which was pleasant until O'Grady tried to turn it into a rap. "Yoh Dog, Its the Teddy Bears, n they will fuck yall up, if you mess with their picnic, Yeah Broh." As the base beat came from his head, he saw it. The Spartan 7's eyes glowed slightly as it scuttled along the ceiling, Alice's mouth was sill forming her, stick to the physics reply, when O'Grady shoved her violently back, and she watched as the deadly energy beam flew harmlessly above, exactly where she had been. "Aert! Alert! All Bots converge on station 27, Spartan battle bot repeat Alert!" Stunned, she watched as the unarmed Opus converged on the Spartan, it was no longer waddling, it moved with an impossible grace, the Spartan unleashed another beam as it side stepped it, then the metals of both robots collided.

As Alice scrambled to her feet, as the industrial control unit of the Opus took on one of the deadliest war bots ever created, A power drill smoothly shot from the wrist of O'Grady as he tried to make it connect with the metals of the silent robot. O'Grady however was not silent. "Oh shit oh shit oh shit." He exclaimed as the Spartans beam connected ripping one of the arms of of him. "Alice Run!" Instead Alice advanced unleashing short and accurate bursts from her rifle whenever the pelvis was exposed. With her last burst, she disabled one of it's rangefinding eyes, this made the robot lunge backwards, pulling the head from the Opus unit as it did so. "Bollocks Bollocks Bollocks!" O'Grady shouted as the world spun around his view, finally coming to rest on a floor. "Hoi That ain't considered friendly where I'm from, fucker." From behind her a cleaning unit began to race at the Spartan, as Alice ducked into the turn in the corridor to reload, the unit suddenly had O'Grady's voice, "Eat cleaning fluid fuck face!"

Alice turned, and then changed the magazine to incendiary ammunition. "Spray it with flammables you git."

"On it!" Came the reply from the cleaning bot. "Done." It said after an eternity and Alice began to empty the clip into the Spartan, flames hissed from it, as the helmet spoke once more. "Its a battle bot, so it's fire proofed, well unless it was designed by a moron?"

Alice was to busy to reply, she was hoping that the temperature would have blinded it for a short interval so she fired single accurate shells at it's pelvis, it was halfway through her second clip that the Spartan fell to the floor, trying to pull itself up but she kept firing. A large industrial robot raced past her like a buldozer, it slammed a jack hammer into the pelvis, yelling at the Spartan. "Bad Bot, Bad Bot, Bad Bot!" Alice felt her very last shell fire at it, and she ran over and started to hit the Spartan with the rifle.

Out of breath, after a very long run, Calico raced around the corner, his revolver drawn and he came to a sudden stop as he watched her smashing what was left of it to pieces.

Three weeks and a lot of work later the Solstice parked herself into an orbit near the Konichiwa. Barbara stepped aboard with some of the fresh crew and cryogenic technicians, having been arguing with the new O'Grady in her shuttle. "Listen I am not big on this gender bending!" The ageing nurse said to Alice as she sat on the bridge of the Solstice, looking down at the massive planet of Herschel as she spoke. . "Anyway how was your first mission?"

Calico laughed from behind her.

"Oh, it was fine, a piece of cake."

The End

TUMOUR MAN

The following document, is a transcription, taken from an Audio tape, that was delivered, to the Hypothetical Department of the New York Times. It arrived on the first of May 1973, in camouflaged Christmas wrapping paper. It was delivered by hand, and the only warning that the Journalist of Hypothetical matters had, was the following note...

Dear Mr Journalist.

I Sergeant Des Truction,

Of Min E Less's Crusaders, special forces recon company, Send this to the New York Times. It is the final moments of a Great American warrior. I and all of the men who have had the privilege to serve under the late Colonel Min E Less Slaughter, are incredibly saddened by his death.

He shot himself with his favourite handgun, his engraved John Wayne Testament, M1911 A1, forty five calibre automatic pistol. It was left to me in his will.

It is an extremely fine Gun. However the colonel committed suicide, in the penthouse suite, of the Coquatil Go Go Bar. On April the 12th 1973. It has been a grievous loss to all of us here in Siagon, and it would be appreciated if you commie fuckers, would write an obituary for this outstanding officer. Min E Less Slaughter, was the very best Special forces commander I have ever served with, he was also the only one to survive this long, and we all feel that his death, and his life, should be commemorated.

May God Have Mercy Upon His Soul.

SGT Des Truction

C/of Fort Benning

Desmond Truction

Georgia.

USA

The tape recording you are about to read was not tampered with in any way. It is a faithful reproduction of this man's final moments. The only addition, is the noises and background incident's that were occurring at the time of the Colonels death.

This is a true story.

SAIGON

APRIL 12 1973

"Listen up you meely mouthed Washington COCKsooKERS, I Colonel Min E Less Slaughter Just cannot take any more of this goddamned crap, what are we fighting fo! When we got one arm and both of our legs tied up,. HUH? Yeppa you Fuckers have surely pissed on the United State Army here. NWhat in the name o Sam Hill do yah think yo doing! Why the heeelll don't the Strategic Air Command just Nuke those Hanoi Fucking Gypsies, HUH Why not! That'll wake those NVA malcontent mother-fuckers up. Wake em up reeeeal good. Yah all hearing me here. Ever since my goddamned brain tumoooor was stolen from me, I ain't had nuthin but shit from you. How the heell, do you think we can win this motherfucker Huh! All you give us is peashooters. Like Napalms Gonna change anythin?"

"Don't Yah all know the meanin of strength through superior fire power, or are you Dinky Dau mother fuckers, deaf dumb and totally fucking blind... Gook goddamned IDEOLOGY, Ho fucking Chi Minh. These fucking peasants don't have our marvellous democracy. We offer em our flag and these cocksuckers are pissing on it. They's fuckin killin our beautiful boys."

It is at this point in the recording that the colonel goes to the latrine. For fifteen minutes.

"Somebody tell me why these fucking Dinks are winning, HUH! Its cos of you Washington Strokers. Yah aint gotha balls. God, Iv'e seen my beautiful boys screaming in their body bags, huh yah mutha fuckers, Goddamned Washington masked balls. Goddamned preseeeedents a fucking cocksuckin faggot, while my boys die all around me. MOTHER FUCKERS."

It is here that the colonel appears to be paying a prostitute. He also demands more Jack Daniels from the reception.

"This ain't nuthin like it was under Macarthur, you fuckers. God we knew how to treat these shit heads in Korea. This aint nothing like the goddamned Chosin Reseeervoir. Yesireee, this is a goddamned bullshit tinpot little place, and we is losing? Losing it with yah fucking Bill o rights, and youeeer teleeevision muthafuckin press corps. "

It is here that the colonel starts to sob and cry like some kinda baby, The tape also runs out.

SIAGON

SIDE B

APRIL 12TH 1973

It was so beautiful when the tumour got me. Beuuuuuutiful I didn't fucking exist. Yah fuckers, why didjah bring me back, WHY! None of it mattered. Do Yah all get it, I wasn't there no mo. Just floatin not even fuckin dreamin, do ya all gettit. I wasn't there... I didn't exist, all of it had never happened, and those VA memorial hospital guys, they brought me back, why.??"

SOBBING.

"WHY."

The colonel is quiet now for a long time, occasionally he yells out words like, Chosin or Pinkville, then he sings the star spangled banner, and finally he screams out, Okinowa.

"OKINOWA.! Goddamnit, those pregnant Japanese bitches. A goddamned cliff. A GODDAMNED CLIFF! They just jumped off a fucking cliff... Fucking bullshit emperor, Goddamned Kamikazes, they aint fucking human I tell yah, Like my nigger boy buffalo soldiers, they's a bunch o' bandy legged little monkeys, Goddamned bandy legged litle cocksuckin monkies. Then that Goddamned Mutha that surrendered, really thought that we would take his bandy litlle ass and feed him, stood there talkin that goddamned Jap babble, Sho started tellin us loads when we poured the lighter fuel on his gonads, that fuckin Jap babbled forever, Lit him up like the fourth o' July. Shoulda heard his screams."

We think that the metallic noises are the colonel assembling his gun. It takes 127 seconds. Give him a break he is drunk as a skunk.

"But that goddamned tumour, I mean like, I fucking really mean this. None of it had happened, none of it, I didn't exist at all, I was a babe. God it was so beautiful, nothing could hurt me ever again, I didn't exist. Nothin, do yah all hear me, do ya understand, nothin. Goddamned Gook Buddha calls it a fucking cocksucking Nirvana, Goddamned beautiful, kinda like that airstrike in the Delta, but it didn't matter as much. There was nothing, no fear, no pain, No fucking goddamned bullshit wars, no past or present nothing, I didn't exist, None of my boys there nobody, do ya gettit. I was free of yah all yah goddamned cocksuckers."

"GODDAMNED FREE! I WAS BEAUTIFUL"

The colonel cries very quietly for ten minutes.

'Then those fuckers at the VA Memorial Hospital brought me back, and with me came the memories, with me came the fucking memories. Every single cocksucking gook nigger peasant Iv'e thrown out outta a Huey, came back to me, these fuckers, all o' em are dead, ya all got me. Dead I killed em all, I gave them the gift of our culture and they's shittin on it."

The tape is paused here, we do not know what happened or for how long it was switched off.

"It was so fucking beautiful, do yah get that, yah Washington cocksuckers, Yah shithead Mother fuckers hearing me. HUH. None of it happened, There weren't any o' yah bombs in there, I didn't exist it was beautiful. Then yah fuckers brought me back. Ya goddamned fuckers tried to section 8 me. Yah all nearly locked me up. If it weren't for goddamned General Westmorland I woulda been stuck in yah goddamned mental hospital, Westy saved me. All I wanted was my tumour back, but hell no they made me see some cocksuckin specialist, tellin me I needeed psychiatric help, those goddamned cocksuckers, Some goddamned shrink going on about my concience, Whoooo dooo youu think I am, goddamned PINOOOOOOOCHIO.... Fuckin concience my ass. I know true Values. I have shared them to the goddamned world. Godddamned cocksuck Pinnochio, Goddamned Kiddie goddamned concience, fucking bullshit fairy tails for faggot hippy kids."

Colonel Slaughter sings has favourite song at this point. It is called praise the lord and pass the ammunition.

"Bullshit, havn't I done enough for our magnificent country, my motherland wont even give me my fucking tumour back. HUH. No the fuckers wont even give me that gift back, they have ta fucking steal it from me, None of you's fuckers asked me if I wanted it outta my head. Yah goddamned treacherous Washington FAGGOTS! Yah all hearin me now."

The colonel is very quiet now for three minutes.

"So this afternooon, this afternooon, I wanted some assssss! Yah Know. One of those kiddie fucking assssses, needs it, but I didn't want no bit of dink slide here, I wanted a pure white one. That bitch in Pinkville, Sho fucking taught her, but not for today, I wanted an American kid, pure blooded, not one of these foldy eyed mother fuckers. YAH ALL GOT ME! I am soo tired of bangin these foldy eyed mother fuckers, so fucking dead eyed, these bitches cant even scream properly. That goddamned French Australian faggot kid, beat him big time. Fucking gave him my fucking values and that little cocksucker shat on them. I just want my Tumooor back, but he's got it. That little fucker stole my goddamned tumour from me."

This is the colonels final entry.

"So there I am, with this mealy mouthed little cocksuck brat. $200, goddamn it, $200. Shit I beat him, that child hoar had no values, Yah all with me here, goddamned piece o' shit, kept begging me to stop in, in his fucking cocksuck French. MOTHA FUCKA, well he learned from me, I wassa yellin at him, this goddamned sinner. I beat that none christian piece o' shit. I beat him, I beat him like my Pappy beat me. I gave him my values, then held him, I baptised that child, I tell you this I baptised him, and what did I get. HUH. What did he give me. NOTHIN, Goddamned zip, squat diddley squat zip, fucking de nada."

"Then I tell him, I fucking told him about mah tumooor, Do yah know what that liddle fucker says, Huh, do yah wanna know what that little fucker said, in that whining little Kiddie voice."

Here the colonel starts to scream and rant.

"In that wining little kiddie fucking NYA NYA NYA way. That fucking irritating, fucking cocksucker kiddie voice. Bleeding everywhere and causin a mess, that fucking kiddie voice. Holding his little goddamned hands up to protect his frigging little face. Do yah know what he said? I told him, I had a tumour, I want it back. LIVIN HURTS YAH LITTLE FUCKER! So I's kicked him. I smashes him, and then I had to lean forward to hear the little fucker. With his beady little kiddie fucking eyes pleading with me. That fucking cocksucker, spitting frigging milk teeth everywhere, I had to lean real close to hear him, That little kiddie fucking pathetic whisper whisper. Do yah all know what that piece o' shit said? That mother fucker. In that whispering pathetic little kiddie voice, he said...."

"BE GENTLE. IT'S GOOD FOR YOU."

BANG

The tape plays for a further five minutes then ends.

Another Strange Tales From The Cafe Conceptual.

Utopia, sat playing chess with her sister Dystopia, it was their regular saturday morning meet up, and as had happened every time before, Utopia was losing. Dystopia smiled to her, with that disparate and unfathomable smile, it was full of duplicities on a good day, whilst Utopia herself smiled with optimism. Blindly denying that she had already lost the game, her fingers hovered over a rook, she glanced nervously towards hindsight, he was reading a newspaper in the corner of the Cafe Conceptual, his eyes darted to the board, and after a moment he nodded negatively to her. Dystopias smile broadened, as her sisters fingers retreated from the small white piece. She watched as the frown formed on her similar face, it was at this point that justice blundered into their table, blindly, she knocked all of the pieces to the floor and stood unwittingly on Utopias foot. This made her squeal with pain, whilst the blind woman let out a stream of apologies, Dystopia laughed. The hag of the courts had had her day, she had watched all of the conceptual's come and go. Even the young one Democracy, had seemingly blown her chance at the future. Dystopia had watched Communism burn up like a moth to the flame, and breathlessly she had rejoiced when it doused its own fires out. The doorway opened slowly creaking, and Capitalism hobbled brokenly to the bar, brushing Optimism aside, and then shoving Compassion out of his way. Dystopia looked hungrily to the open door, then stood, glancing down at the scattered chess pieces. Then with that unfathomable smile, she walked outside onto the great plains of human conciousness. Waving farewell to her Sister, she quietly spoke, as she disappeared from view.

"Goodbye Sister, for now it is my turn."

THE FOXES BREATH

WHO'S WHO 3016AD.

Kostas Sylvia, Mrs DOB;12/04/2984ad. The famous inventor of Viral View, the direct biological transfer of information, via various virus types, that live within the human nervous system, and external transmitter virus's. Enabling the fastest transfer of information directly into the human brain. Although much criticised, for her focus on the entertainment applications, inherent within her patents, she remains the wealthiest woman in history. Her quote "Why watch or play, when you can be there?" Is one of the most visible advertisements on the new viral net.

Kota, (Of The Fox People.) DOB Unknown, estimated 35,500 BC. Age 39/42yrs (Again estimated) The Palaeolithic hunter gatherer child, who became famous, for being rescued by the Time Scapes 4000 team, after a bear attack, that killed all of his direct family. The following public outcry to save the badly wounded child, resulted in the first ever temporal/time travelling rescue attempt, broadcast live to the world, the presenter Stony Trobinson, (AKA Baldric) became famous for his live quote of. "To hell with the grandfather theory!" Kota was watched, by over a zillion viewers on Earth, and billions more on several colonised planets, as he learned and grew up, finally becoming an unwilling global celebrity. Although he is a physicist, he is most well known for his single handed rediscovery, of Black and White photography, though his work is obsessed with reflections. In his book, The Foxes Breath, he wrote about his experiences, expressing his bitterness, that the rescuers, didn't go back too before the bear attack, and save his whole family. His quote, "Why ask me. I think you are all crazy!" Was said to the world president on a live discussion about capitalism.

Kumar Adsanit, DOB; 24/07/2078ad; Comedian, winner of the 3003 Palm Dore award.

TIME SCAPE 4000.

Kota didn't know he was being watched by millions of the future people, the small 11 year old boy, had no idea that his home would become the English channel, and thoughts like that were so far away from his mind at the moment, because of the pain in his shoulder and leg. He had stemmed his bleeding just like his mother had showed him to and with the thought of her he cried softly and quietly. Unable to walk Kota crawled pulling and pushing himself up the ridge, he needed to get to the top and start a fire, his mothers sister would see it and help him, he needed too..

It was dark when he woke from the black out, the bear was fresh in his dream, Dad had fought it with mom, but his sister hung helplessly from its jaws, and Kota shuddered at the memory, then sensing movement behind him, he pulled the small bone knife from his torn zebra skin trousers, and faced the threat. It was a man with light coming from his head, the man was talking, but his words were unfathomable, he pointed a stick at Kota, and then it hissed. He felt the bolt sink into his good leg and then watched as the man ran away.

"Did you hit him," A voice hissed from the distance.

"Yeppa, the antibiotics and painkillers should be having an effect about now."

"Ok Viewers, you have to know that we are only human, there is no way that I can watch a small child suffer like that, so what you have just seen is completely illegal, by the rules of temporal anthropology but to hell with the grandfather theory." Kota watched these mad people with a curious eye, he felt very light headed, and then asked them if they could help him make a fire.

"Jubio humsab tat gorak, gorak tat?" he said.

Unfortunately they didn't understand him, but a woman pushed through the small group of them, and started to very rudely look at his injuries. "Tat creokka kiminlep Kota. Tat." He said, and she smiled. Her teeth were whiter than the tigers, reflecting from her luminous and obviously crazy head, "Kiminlep Kota?!" The woman gently gripped his shoulder, and spoke to him in her sing song. "Jubio, bastrag canodical humsabs." Kota said, and an older man next to her laughed then turned to the other people in this group of maniacs.

"We have to save this little one, he a sharp little tool in his tribe."

"So professor what did he just say."

"Well Baldric, he asked us to help him make a fire initially, and then he introduced himself to Ruth, his name is Kota, and he is of the Fox People, that dominate these marshes." It was then that Kota heard his own voice replayed, "Jubio bastrag canodical humsabs, actually is quite sweet, if I have it translated correctly, he just asked us, if we are a bunch magical morons." The older man turned to Kota, "tat copof bastrag canodical humstrabs." Kota laughed and looked to the man besides him, the woman had put a very fine snow like bark on his wounds, and he leant sleepily onto her breasts, everything was very far away, and suddenly unimportant, the square black rock that the man held, reflected the light like the waters did, it was quite beautiful.

"Stony, we have to get him to a hospital, we may lose him."

"Well Ruth what are we waiting for, lets get him to our camp and boot up the time machine."

The dawns sun was so brilliantly reflected in the waters of the lake, that he didn't feel the woman lifting him, as the small group ran surrealistically through the sponge like orange and yellow mornings light. Kota gasped when their small village appeared from nowhere around him. As he lay in Ruth's arms, he watched them cluster around a small wooden box, and then he said to her, "Tat! Kumlops Tiiime makine?"

"Oh my god Stony! The little buggers trying to talk English." Ruth's shocked announcement, made the older professor turn and then walk to Kota.

"We should put him under now Ruth, all this stress can't be helping him." Kota looked to him.

"Tat creokka kiminlep Kota, Tat?!"

"Tat Creokka James Eriksson, flibba flourge Kota. Flibba flourge." Kota liked the Elders face, and didn't really notice Ruth's dart enter his arms, but felt the old mans kiss to his forehead, and then Darkness.

EXTRACTS FROM THE FOXES BREATH.

Flibba flourge, float on waters, I often wondered how old Eriksson knew that one, of course the old bastard had been bugging our tribe electronically, for months before the Time Scape crew showed up. Yet knowing as I now do, that time is a wave form, I can only wonder if he knew, how eloquently he had chosen his words. I am floating on time after all. Yet those were the first words spoken to me, by you future people. People to be.

I have just come from my one thousandth brain scan, so my doctor and I had a little party, drunkenly my fingers caress this keyboard, but for all the minute differences between me and you. I think its surprising that we all ask the same questions. Who am I? Where am I going? I could just fill pages and pages about your hypothetical gods here, but in truth we are different, even here, I say hello to the sun or the moon each day, or acknowledge a tree, stone, and yes, even those maniac squirrels living in the forest near my small house. Somehow you future people lost something, in your'e rush towards infinity. You stopped belonging to it all.

Don't take offence at that statement, digest it, and move on. I am of the Fox people, and we lived on the marshes, submerged under what you now call the English channel. It never occurred to me that I was anything but a part of those marshes, as a child I felt like I was the land itself. Yes I helped my father kill our meat, and also helped my mum make our clothes, teepees and all of the other mundane bits of history, that seem to be forgotten in favour of gods and power. Somehow this is the largest difference, I have encountered between our two tribes, belonging. So what if I wine occasionally, I am meant to, but inside I see myself and this cosmos, as one, you don't. It really disturbs me. The little house I live in, has no glass in any of the window panes, if a passing badger wants to walk in, then so be it, if a maniac human does, then it is at their own risk, but when friends stay, there is an inevitability to their first question. "Why no windows or doors here?"

The answer varies but its goes something like this. "Me, the stars, the rock, the forest, you, the bunnies, everything is a part of me and I am a part of it, when the rain falls am I crying or am I laughing, well that depends on the type of storm that is above but why, why would I try to cut myself off from myself." Well old Kota knows the value of heat and warmth, I love my little shelter, but I also love the wind, and he smells of that nearby ocean. I am trying to resolve a little bit of science here, its a little conundrum about waves, but maybe the bigger puzzle is myself. Is all of this just an egotistical response to a newspaper article about yours truly.

THE CAVEMANS A SCIENTIST.

I should object about the term caveman, because we lived in tents, but somehow, it would deny a truth that lurks behind me. Is a primitive representative of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, capable of being a scientist. Seriously I give lectures to these kids, and putting aside that 35000 year age gap, its quite wild how wrong much of their logic is. Or more accurately put how conformed. It is reflected in every level of what is called logic, its what is acceptable and what isn't. It's the difference between hunting your own rabbits or eating a hamburger. Somehow its that egocentric conformist logic that evades me most, its the most isolating fact I could ever encounter. So isolating, that I have lived alone for a very long time. Just old me and my dogs.

I remember the hospital that Ruth chose. The logic of your societies, is just like the glass in the windows of my first room there. The world was outside, trees and forests. I could see them from the fifty second floor, but couldn't smell them or taste them. My hand pressing against that glass, that was the beginning of the captive period of my life. Even your languages, stand abruptly caged in their own philosophies. Eriksson thought, that I would have problems coping with concepts like computing or chairs, but he was so wrong, point to it, and show the cave kid how it works, then give the object a name, Bicycle, you see? Easy peesy lemon squeazy, but subtly, not true. Take money, I by default have lots of it, but I don't get it, I have a darkroom here at home, and an old Yashica 124g camera, both of them cost more than my house did, I make my own chemicals and paper, even the film I shoot is made by myself. Yet although the pictures I take hang all over the planet, my artistic metaphor is never destined to be economical, in fact, my chosen careers have both resulted in negative equity. Frustratingly the language I am using here, doesn't even let me express how imprisoned my thoughts are, by these dammed words and paragraphical structures.

Well sod it! I'll just blame Shakespeare and leave it at that. Imagine not having an alphabet, that's where I am from, it was great. My Mom took me to a big girly meeting, I was about seven, and you see even here is useless information, I didn't know I was seven, I just was and that was enough, but here in 3012, I have to tell you, I was seven. Like it mattered to anyone. Anyway the reason that the women were meeting, was to decide what to call a new animal that had shown up on the marsh, you guys call them hippo's, this was a big meet by the standards of our matriarchal little tribe, and it took two days of arguing before any agreement was reached. Finally the ladies labelled it Kruftsmshtast, which roughly translates into, bad tempered, fat bastard, that is not even very tasty. I guess you could say we were making it all up as we went along, but heck that's what I have been doing with physics anyway. Everybody gets hung up on the old granddad theory, like, who would be mentally ill enough, to go back in time and kill their own grandfather? Well since I didn't do it before, I obviously can't do it anyway.

What am I some kind of palaeolithic ambassador. The salve to make everybody feel better for massacring the Amazon, or the Tasmanian aborigines, or, just some sort of idiot televisual, viral visual apology. That's the biggest alarm bell I encountered, all of those people in hospital, monging out in front of those screens, watching other people, I could not get my head around that. We primitives actually did things, and yes my parents seem to have been shagging a lot more than you guy's do, but then, that was before television got invented. No that wasn't good enough though, now its all viral, and guess what, my primitive virus's are not compatible, you no longer even need a screen. I first realised how crap this was, when none of my students showed up for class, they were all watching me, in their beds, not moving, whilst I stood unsuccessfully, in an empty classroom, trying to talk to a wall.

I live in a place called Whitby, and whenever I have gone into town over the past seven years, there have been less and less people on the streets, at first they had to eat and pooh, but then one of Sylvia Kostas's crew figured a remote controlled robot up, and voilà, the viral net had a whole new industry to play with. Silent streets and slumbering industries, humanity in hiding or some kind of reality denial mechanism, well I don't know. London, Beijing, Paris even New York are grave like. Not that that can bother me, amidst all of this collective insanity I know I don't belong. I just want to go home.

Viral Net Police File

Report 1777209b

There has been a noted increase in reality crime over this month, the failure to accept the new trends, towards a virtual existence, has isolated and created a very small minority, now known as Squeakers, led seemingly, by the artist/physicist Kota (of the fox people.) Since the virtual community is unaffected, by such actions as thefts or squattingm no action has been taken. However communications with the Squeakers, has resulted in a guarantee that no violent actions will be taken against the community. Therefore no action will be taken unless it involves harm to the person.

Report 1777209c The recent Break in at the temporal institute and activation of the Time Mechanisms has resulted in despatching two officers into reality 1 status.

WHO'S WHO 3016AD

Kostas Sylvia, Mrs DOB;12/04/2984ad. The famous inventor of Viral View, the direct biological transfer of information, via various virus types, that live within the human nervous system, and external transmitter virus's, enabling the fastest transfer of information directly into the human brain, creating what has become the Inner-verse. Although much criticised for her focus on the entertainment applications, inherent within her patents, she remains the wealthiest woman in history. Her quote "Why watch or play when you can be there?" Is one of the most visible advertisements on the new viral net.

Kumar Adsanit, DOB; 24/07/2078ad; Comedian, 2nd place in the 3003 Palm Dore award.

TIME SCAPE 4000

"Following yesterdays horrifying attack, the boy called Kota is struggling to survive, we at Time Scape have been following this story, and are struggling to decide our next course of action. Remember that this is live coverage folks, and nobody can foresee the outcome but life and death are in the balance, here and now."

"Your life and Your death."

Kota smiled inwardly to himself, when he finally said those words, the heavy weight of the military grade pulse pistol, felt satisfying in his hands. Stony stood frozen, a confused expression kept flickering across his face, Ruth hid quietly pragmatic, behind the wildly focusing camera man. Behind them Kota could see his small body struggling up towards the top of the ridge.

"Give me the dart gun," Kota deliberately turned towards the camera, "Well folks, I am the grandfather theory." With a relaxed almost absent minded speed, he aimed and casually shot his child self with the antibiotic dart. "I am Kota of the Fox people and I am the grandfather theory made flesh." Pointing the pistol at Eriksson, viewers had never seen ice like that in any movie. "Follow me." There was no arguing with the voice, it had a depth of 35000 years behind it, and an authority of its own, gentle, playful and bell like though his voice was, this quiet was a verbal crystallisation. "Follow me and learn."

At the top of the ridge was a collection of dried sticks and branches, Kota pulled a petrol lighter from his pocket, and ignited the larger bundle, he smiled as he watched the flames take hold. "Oh yes, I shall miss some of the technology." Stony later recollected that all he could see, was the really enormous pulse pistol that was millimetres from his face, Eriksson upon seeing the tattoos on Kota's face, knew what demon he was facing, Ruth described her abject terror, at the realisation that things could change, living without a future or past for that one hour, was the worst experience of her life, whilst the camera woman just kept shooting. "In your own language this is called a beacon." The flames were high enough now and Kota looked down at his wounded and unconscious self. Stroking the child's head he said, "Float on water."

Silently he hid them in the dense undergrowth nearby, "Watch and learn." Kota felt alive again as he breathed in the marsh air, ending this captive odyssey one way or another, suited him just fine. He knew that Stony Ruth and even Eriksson, were living in a fantasy slumberville, so what could be worse, besides he wasn't going back in time to kill himself. A woman in skins ran over the ridge, rushing to the damaged child. "Its probably all reflective retro-causal unrealised realities anyway, float on water, Ruth, float on water." Kota felt himself ceasing to exist, and his last conscious thought was, "What was that all about."

WHO'S WHO 3016 AD

Kostas Sylvia, Mrs DOB;12/04/2984ad. The infamous inventor of Viral View, the direct biological transfer of information, via various virus types that live within the human nervous system, and external transmitter virus's, enabling the fastest transfer of information directly into the human brain. Although much criticised, because her focus on the entertainment applications inherent within her patents, blinded her to the dangers of these biological devices, she remains one of the most morally questionable scientists, due to the massed epidemic that resulted in twelve million deaths. Her quote "How could I have foreseen any of this." Taken from the minutes of her trial for massed manslaughter.

Kota, (Of The Fox People.) DOB Unknown, estimated 35,500 BC. Age 68/73 (Again estimated) Considered by many to be one of the first ever scientists, his life was highlighted by the Time Scape 4000 team, and he has regularly featured on that successful program, noted for working out how to navigate using stars, and also domesticating foxes in hunting. Although never a chief or leader, the father of 3 girls and one boy, he died accidentally, in what was thought to be, the first ever human attempt to make optical glass.

Kumar Adsanit, DOB; 24/07/2078ad; T shirt fashion designer, most noted for his range called. The Grandfather Theory.

TIME SCAPE 4000

Kota and his son, stroll casually towards their home, as the sunsets dramatically behind him. He waves and smiles to his life lover Traggredg, and then sits on the hillock, gazing at the reflections in the lakes water, a small and tatty looking fox curls up in his lap, as his son excitedly runs up the hill, with a dead rabbit he has snared. The camera zooms into the amazement on the small boys face, and then Kota gives him a hug, smiling as the sun sets on a grateful day Traggedg sits besides Kota, whilst breastfeeding their second child. Then with his arms around all of them, the small hunter gathering family sits, and watches their ever majestic friend, the sun, set.

The End.

My World (In The year 2037AD)

I am 67, sitting in front of my spacious box, watching the rising tide of the river Thames, the sun begins to set, and by firelight I watch as the yellowing sky goes dark. Old man Steve watches the sun dropping from another day, and then see's his two grandchildren walking towards him. I smile, as the little tykes are always welcome, and I have hoarded a Mars Bar for them. Today they have been at their small school learning the history of our great nation. How the greatest leader in our history, had united the country against the perils of Europe, and given us more freedoms than he had taken. Having lived through it, I was shocked at the official take on the past twenty years. Our President Boris Johnson had taken our country to these heady heights, we had all watched as our corporate sponsors had built hospitals and enhanced our lives. We all live in small plastic boxes now, its a trend I guess. Even if none of it was true, even if they had no obligation to any, even if I could have afforded a dentist. That would have been paradise, this unfortunately isn't.

"We learned about the evils of welfare and about the battle for....." The little one paused thinking through a particularly large word, like most 6 year olds she hovers around the big words, lacking confidence in her translations of them. "Privacy."

"Yeppa GP." It stands for Grand Pops. "What was this privacy thing all about, like how could that work?" He pointed at me. "Like welfare as well, how could that last, its a sink or swim world you know!"

Being 11 he knows it all, and he is quoting from a popular pop song. So I thought about it for a moment. Then knocked on my neighbours box, She used to be a Police Chief at the Met before she fell out of favour with the political elite. Both of us are micro chipped offenders, I as a writer and a photographer, am banned from going within 25ft of a camera or a computer keyboard. Its why we live in this little prison colony by the river, its why she is banned from ever leaving this place. I can with permission go for long walks though I am prohibited from talking to strangers. Watching my friend twist herself from her box, was always alarming as she getting on a bit.

"Well the wel!" BZZT STTZT BZZT, I had forgotten that welfare is one of the banned words on my particular chip, whenever I use a banned word it sort of electrocutes my head, since it was a case of having the chip installed, to correct my behaviour or Pentonville prison, I had taken what seemed the easier route. Once my teeth stopped chattering, I smiled to them as they sat around the fire. "We will call that one W" Both children nodded as did the police chief. I often worry about her as she does not seem suited to this form of captivity. Several years ago she had authorised the unjustifiable arrest of a paedophile, he being an influential fellow, had quite rightfully had her badge and her life taken from her, by our glorious political elite. So this once sturdy copper has never been the same since, and her chip has a total word ban on it, so we have to communicate by a system of sign language and clicks and whistles, its a bit like the way dolphins did it, before they were extincted that is.

"W was once seen as an essential, it gave us a healthier populace, and that equalled a better work force, so you didn't have to pay for certain services."

"So it was true you selfish oldsters bankrupted the country in your rush for a free lunch, thats outrageous and you never once stopped to think about our generation did you!" He frowned and his sister frowned to in support of her elder brother. "You never once thought of the interest that we are still paying for all of that, did you!?"

"Yes, interest?" The little one interjected to highlight his worthy point.

"The interest." I said the word cautiously as it may or may not be on the list, its interesting that they have never given me a list of banned words. I discovered that shysters is on it whilst revolution is not. So I tend to approach unused words with a caution nowadays. Having gotten away with it this time I continued. "The interest we are paying, is from bailing out the banks, that were into some cocaine fuelled dream of gree!" Bzzt szzt ttwwwst! Having overcome my twitching I avoided the word greed. "Where was I?"

"You were blaming other people as usual, I mean it tears me up GP, look around you,you have a box a fire, food and good friends, the state looks after you criminals, really generously, but even here, you cannot take responsibility for your own actions can you." He laughed to his sister. "Oh no, we had democracy back then, like how could that work, none of you knew how difficult and intricate government was, but you all felt that you could choose a natural leader, and then whine when it went wrong! When you were never even a member of a political party, but still you prattle on about it. Without accepting that you lack the expertise to be a leader, thats why they are in charge, its why we abandoned that system, because President Boris, is wise and knows everything, yet you don't do you. But!" He pointed his finger at me as he said that. "Today was an utter embarrassment, we had you in class as a lesson, do you have any idea what that felt like."

This came as a surprise, I mean being a tagged, chipped, part time prisoner has sort of kept me out of the news loop, I am banned from reading newspapers or watching the channels. So I would be the last to know, even if I had at one time been a journalist. "What was the lesson like?" I said with a mix of horrified curiosity to my voice.

"Well first off, my teacher pointed at me and asked me to tell the class about you!" He scowled as his face smarted with anger. "I had to tell them about our evening visits to prescribed city, how you avoid words, because you are a coward, and hate being electro shocked, how you sit here with all the other parasites, talking crap about freedom." My neighbour gave me a protest click in support. "Then she told us, how your writings and supposed science fiction, were all a disguised attack on the state, as you were cashing in on an ideology of hate!" He glanced to his little sister, who nodded at me sternly. "Your works as an atheist inspired religious intolerance as well, you deny the divine being, and you have tried to enforce your denials upon other people, who could have found solace in the holy books! In short GP all of your words were the bleating's of a spoilt sheep." He paused as I sat stunned, history was judging me already, which even with hindsight was a bit unfair. "You democratarians, clung like limpets to an older system, and failed to see that it was a dangerous, and often ludicrous idea in the first place, your work GP stood in the face of our sponsored futures, you tried to stop our social evolution, and you are viewed as an enemy of freedom, I do not see why the state should pay for my education, I do not see why we should not all pay for everything, its Darwinian according to our teacher, but I do not know what that means yet. So you and all of your oldsters squealing about democracy, are obviously deranged, but then we hit the privacy thing. Like you all had something to hide, you knew you were guilty, and tried to support laws to stop that fact being known. So, She said that you like most criminals lurk under you rocks and spew any justification for your'e actions." He smiled to me as I sat shocked.

"We all have something to hide, and Priva!" BZZT Szzt Twsstttt, twitch. "Youre being Lie!" Bzzt Tzzzt Stzzzt. If I am zapped more than twice in a minute, I get the shakes, so I stopped speaking and pulled out the hoarded Mars Bar. Both of them looked at me with a horrified expression.

"GP, chocolate is on the list of prescribed substances, as it is addictive and dangerous." He said snatching the bar from my hands and throwing it in the Thames. I watched it float away slowly to addict some frogs or fishes. Then my son their proud father appeared, he smiled to me and then laughed through their jokes, as my Grandson informed the guards about the chocolate bar. I knew then and there that I would be taken later to the warden, for a very long arduous and boring dissection of my latest crime.

After a brief chat they all headed off, and having hugged them both I said. "I lov!" Bzzzt szzzt twzzzt! Twitch. "e You!"

Yes love is one of my banned words.

Welcome to 2037ad.

I SEE A RED DOOR

Sub constable Grant stood, awaiting the detectives arrival, as rain tumbled haphazardly on the crime scene. He pointed his L Light against the four seated corpses, the water almost prismatically reflected the lethargic illumination from his clockwork torch. Grant knew three of them personally. Arch deacons of the Uni Faith church, all were pillars of the London community, and particularly, Padre Jacob had been a major influence in Grants difficult life. The sudden memory of his wife's death created a bitterness that dried his throat, and sought release in the anger it was generating. Jacob had taken three weeks of his time, to see that Grant and his children got through that never ending ordeal. Being unable to face Jacobs face, he turned his attention to the fourth man, a police officer from the Uni faith bureau of investigation, the bruising to his ankles and wrists, showed that he had struggled to the very end, it led Grant to assume the man was left handed, as the self inflicted injuries were more severe to his left ankle and arm. In fact it was an educated guess because his left leg was broken as was his nose. The was no sign of savagery though, just the four seated naked, and a small entry wound from an antique propellant weapon, to each of their hearts. Grant looked at the abandoned pistol and the four ejected cartridges, he could tell where the killer had stood, leant over each of the bound men, and fired at point blank range. The mechanics of this particular scene were obvious, to even unskilled eyes, but the psychology was something else altogether, as was the scene itself. Why kill them here in a football pitch, why do that here of all places.

"Bang Bang your dead Grant!"

He turned sharply, and looked at the smiling form of detective Kat Miquel, blonde hair tumbled over her lined yet youthful face, it conflicted with the barcode upon her cheek, the barcode ID'd her as the child of an atheist, as she had been born in the transit camps, before her family had been shipped away, to their new life on Potiarnus 2. However, Kat had been educated by the church, and her intelligence had proven a major asset to the Met, needless to say, she was one of the few coded to have made it through the system successfully. Grant was never fully comfortable in her company though, she acknowledged god, but in a way that was so irreverent, it bordered on blasphemy, but she did get results. He watched as she strolled casually about the scene, picking up the pistol with a pen, and dropping it into a plastic evidence bag. The Sherlock MkV1 forensic hover unit was taking pictures and samples from around them.

"It's just going to be me and you on this case, as there is a virus doing the rounds, quite fatally at the moment, and all resources are to be used for that. So what were you thinking about so deeply, when I crept up on you, and can you cope with working with me, Sub Constable?"

"I was focussing on the where, when you arrived Mam, the mechanics are pretty obvious, but the why, and where, are more of a riddle." He paused a moment, "I want to find Padre Jacobs Killer, he meant a lot to me, but can you respect my faith, and be less irreverent about it?"

"Call me Kat, for what it's worth, Jacob was the first to be shot, this one watched each of them die, since the copper died last, we will have to trawl through his history first, he or she made him watch the others die, but that was the only sign of cruelty here, it's an organised and planned scene. As for the stadium, I was born here, when it was used to intern the faithless, so unless the Arsenal fans have set up a religious sub cult, I think we are looking for an atheist here."

"NO MORE WILL MY GREEN SEAGULL TURN A DEEPER BLUE."

The Munich Syndrome was proving more stubborn than any doctor could admit, so was the killer they were chasing. Millions were dead around the globe, and also in the far distant outer colonies, it had even surfaced in the ships of the Spacers, who lived in the darkest vacuums the universe had to offer. The front line of the emergency services were almost wiped out, in those first three days, but the church had influences that neither officer could have dreamt of, they were stuck with the case. Which had now expanded. It was unfathomable to Kat that four similar murders, could have taken place, preceding the one at the Arsenal. Yet the church had kept it silenced, because of the fear it could have instilled across the Uni Faith union. The dead were all senior church leadership from the grand revolution, all were genetically enhanced, and all of them could or should have overpowered, even an armed human assailant, unless the murderer was genetic as well.

The dead detective had been hunting the killer, when he to had become the 22nd victim. Grant looked out of the window of Kats Scotland Yards office, funeral pyres were smoking in the skyline, burning the dead had been deemed necessary, it was in Kats opinion a futile gesture, as the virus was obviously endemic to them all now. It was now, that they would have to wait for this virus to run its course, but both of them were happy for the distraction of this perplexing case, the complexities actually managed to take their minds off of the appalling disaster, that was unravelling human history in front of them. "I think we have to talk to another borderline Coder, like me, It's the only way that we will reach the bottom of this one, we also have to check the histories, and try and contact Potiarnus 2 somehow." Grant couldn't disagree with this, but no Coder would talk to him, Kat maybe but not a believer. He said so, she just nodded, somehow with the lack of sleep she had aged, or maybe it had been the meeting with the hierarchy of the church. It was strange for him to care about somebody who was not fully awakened to gods love, but he had come to care for her over these two short days, she wasn't enhanced like he was, just a normal human, but resourceful and very intelligent, Grant could respect that much about her. Knowing she needed more sleep than he did, he told her so, she smiled and without argument lay down on the small sofa and slept. Whilst Grant attempted to rebuild the histories, he looked for a way to contact the planet, a planet that was silenced by the noise of an active galaxy.

"I SEE THE GIRLS WALK BY DRESSED IN THEIR SUMMER CLOTHES."

When she awakened, the world had lost over a billion people, Grant had been researching throughout the night, but when she stretched and wiped her nose, Kat looked alert and lively again, until she caught the ever present news tablet. The blood drained from her face and she looked to him. "You need to be with your family." Almost with relief she swatted away his objection, taking his unfinished report, she just smiled, then hugged him and told him to leave. "If anyone asks your sick! OK?" At the door he looked at her, told her she should be with her own family. "They were all exiled remember! Get out of here that's an order."

Even with certain death facing her, Kat was a true creature of habit, besides which, she genuinely worked better alone. The Grissom unit followed her from the Yard. With this many people dying she would have to move fast, there was that, and the fact that Potiarnus was an earth type planet, resting in between two black hole ecretion disks, so the answer to why had to be here somewhere. She was going to inspector Houston's office, the American FBI had become an active tool for the churches investigations, she could almost taste the Americans satisfaction when she was sat in front of him. He nodded in reply to her questions, then finally handed her a file. "Listen if we weren't all dying, I wouldn't give you this file, it doesn't have any answers but the questions it raises are alarming, it was written by the physicist Soloman Guillborough, the, aboriginal, the Australian." Plugging the document into her neck plug she downloaded the content. "If you do survive then you had better forget that you have ever read this."

As Grant looked at his sons shock, he held the tiny frame of the boy who screamed, as the blood ran from his eyes, their grandmother had died, and now the two children were going too. Time passed like treacle and Grant felt that bitterness afresh. For a long time he couldn't think or move, their deaths had destroyed his otherwise solid personality, he hated god. Yet the mind moves like water through these sorrows, and Grant was forced to face the fact, that he could never call Jacob for help again, and finally, they were both still and at rest. Maybe it was the insanity of this massive epidemic, but Grant stood up and headed back to the Yard. He was a police officer, he was here to protect those to weak to defend themselves, he was a believer, he loved his god, god loved him too, but that history hadn't added up. What had Jacob done. If he was lucky, the killer may save him from the fate that that virus had in store for him.

Kat was stood impassively, watching the now almost out of control fires that had centred around many of the hospitals. The words 100% incurable had been a shock, but then so had the revelations earlier, Houston had shot himself as she turned to leave. There were no riders available, and she had walked through the chaotic carnage that had devastated most of London's infrastructure, but then London belonged to Munich Virus now. The city had become an insane playground, the case had also become an insane irrelevance for her. She had put two people down on the way here, they had begged her too, yet she know knew with almost certainty that her parents were dead. All who didn't believe were dead. Globally. Briefly she remembered the lost teacher at that school, he pulled her aside. "Pretend you believe in Gods will." So she had pretended, pretended so freaking well that she could be considered a storm trooper. She couldn't cry, but she had sent people to that place. Arrested them and now they were dead. Her own people, Coders.

Slowly she saw his reflection behind her, she didn't care, if they had sent him to kill her for what she had figured out, well frack that, she would just avoid the rush. "Your children?"

"Don't ask, it is only anger and fear that got me into this building."

"I figured it all out."

"I didn't but what I have put together does not add up." He paused, if he couldn't trust a Coder then who the hell could he ever trust with this. "There were not enough spaceships twenty five years ago, so where did everybody go." He felt her small hand on his shoulder. "What did Jacob do?"

"NO COLOURS ANY MORE."

"I Know him, Solo's the last person who would do, this unless everyone else was dead, he's a genetic like you are Grant, but smarter, a mistake his parents kept quiet about. All I know is they were scientists and couldn't or wouldn't convert. Its rumoured that he hired a spacer ship under the guise of studying black holes, he went there to that planet and it is uninhabitable, he came back and started to spread the word, but nobody believed him except Houston, and his orders were to kill him. They killed them all and they have gotten away with it, Solo killed them because they ordered, or were complicit in the deaths of all of the atheists, leaving only the children like me behind, children know no sin, nope only your churches leaders. Your freaking God."

Grant felt something recognisable in her as she lashed out blindly at him, this Coder knew bitterness's kiss as well as he did, almost instinctively, he leant forward and put his arms around her, she started to cry. She had sent them two letters a year, every year, they obviously couldn't reply because life was rough on this frontier world, and computing and paper couldn't be produced there yet, shortages of everything meant that she dreaded any communication, and she had only received one to tell her that her father was dead. Her anger built, and she understood what had happened to Solo, he had just killed them, he was probably killing them now.

"MAYBE THEN I WILL FADE AWAY AND NOT HAVE TO FACE THE FACTS."

"The Spacers must have figured this out but kept their mouths shut, but why are you insisting that we confront the bastards that are left they will be dead soon enough."

Grant walked up the Cathedrals steps, he believed in god, in not killing and in not causing suffering, just because the leadership didn't, didn't de validate his own faith and belief, it enforced it. "I told my son that god would love him, I told him, he would be safe in the universes hands, now just because those bastards want to re write all of the truths, doesn't mean they were wrong. My church is a combination of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and even Judaism, it has Hindu and even new age beliefs too, but thou shalt not kill is a biggy, one they should not have crossed off their list." Grant had been searching the tenets for something that covered it, but had failed express how insulted and hurt he was by their decisions and slaughter.

"To take a life, is to take all life, and god is unhappy, to save a life, is to save all life, and this act makes god happy."

Kat turned recognising his voice from the faith school, she drew her pistol, but felt Grants hand clamp over her wrist. "Relax I thought he would be here, but the spacer with him is a bit of a surprise."

Solo smiled but the space man was unmistakable, scruffy but practically dressed he smiled weakly to her, being held up by Solo. "Well when I figured I was dying, I thought I would see this sad episode through, but for the record we didn't know about it, we had tried to communicate with the colonists because that is our way, but we never dreamed that 14million people could be just killed, it just didn't occur to us." The short man coughed violently, "That was until this joker tried to hire us, like what part of anti-capitalist doesn't the genius physicist understand?"

It was like watching a surrealistic viral slide show, as he sat down choking, and then blood flowed from his eyes, and with a fit like shaking he died.

Solo stood shocked, then turned. "This virus will hit me and your detective first, it seems to function quickly with genetics's, rather slower with non enhanced people, its actually almost smart." Turning to Grant with a slight contempt, "Its quite a god like thing actually."

"Did you create it?" Kat almost felt like laughing hysterically, it was such an absurd thought.

"I'm smart but I am a physicist, not a bio chemist, besides from what I have looked at on this, its an evolution of almost every virus we have ever encountered. I am good, but I am not quite that mental, I want revenge for a mass murder, and that does not involve a mass murder in retaliation." Coughing he turned and headed towards the huge red doors of the cathedral. "Just Blood."

"I SEE A RED DOOR."

The three sat calmly in the waiting area, until they were summoned by a very sickly monk, she ushered them on wishing them gods love, and Kat wondered if she dropped dead when the door was closed. What was odd, was that one Coder would be unusual, but she had never been in a church with another in her entire life, yet Solo's black skin had a white bar code upon his cheek, it seemed to match his attitude, this much contempt coming from a Coder was unheard off. Grant however loved it. "So how do we explain our coming here and demanding his attention when the world falls apart."

"That's the easy part you have caught the murderer haven't you?"

"Yeppa, he is stood next to us, so when we get close enough to him, we make a more aggressive move, and Grant no matter how you feel are you up to this."

Grant just nodded.

"I LOOK INSIDE MYSELF AND SEE MY HEART IS BLACK."

Kat realised it, when they left the main atrium behind them, Solo had possibly figured it out sooner, but this was a trap room, gas would disable or kill them if they made one false move. So they surrendered their weapons. Then walked into the Vikrains offices, he was sat staring blankly at the screens, built into the large table that almost filled the room, it was then that Soloman made his move, jumping the two guards, he slammed his fist into the trachea of the one nearest him, leaving the woman choking and gripping her throat, then pulling her projector from her hands, he fired a short slicing beam that cut the other into. "Oh both were sick, so I guess you are a bit short staffed."

"Judging from your eyes I would say you are too." Solomans smile was indecipherable, yet years of authority had brought Grant to a complete standstill, the Vikrain was the highest and most holy leader of all, and then he felt the bitterness hit, and stepped forwards.

"How could you of all do this? How? Why? What were you thinking?"

"Just power, faith that we were right, and faith that our faith was enough, if you look around you, I would say it was the right move, look at all we have accomplished."

"Grant cuff him to that chair, that's an order, Also gag him." Kat turned to Solo, who was limply holding the projector. "You don't have long, but why didn't you come to me, I am a cop for fracks sake?"

"It would have just gotten you killed but who else would they have put on my case but you, even Houston was shadowing you, sorry but you should tie him down well, and put that computer to verbal mode." She could see the blood vessels popping in his eyeballs, "Tell it to repeat the names of all the relocated. Forever?" Then leave the two of us here alone, I won't kill him, but if he watches me die, well he will know what's coming."

"I SEE A RED DOOR AND I WANT IT PAINTED BLACK."

The names were reeled off, as Kat supported Grant and carried him to their rider, while the gagged man listened to Solo, with each name was a corresponding photo, but the Vikrain was listening to the delusional ramblings of the scientist dying in front of him. "I would look them in the eyes, and shoot them, tell them there is no god and watch them die, that act on its own made me sicker, killing isn't really about the why is it, it's never about revenge, it's about the power you have over the victim isn't it, the fact that your belief was threatened by any solid argument a scientist came up with, was evidence of your own lack of faith, because any argument can disprove a theory, but never a fact, can't it. So you didn't have your facts right and that was enough to kill them all, wasn't it. Instead of evolving your belief, to match the truth, you chose otherwise, but from what I have figured out you enjoyed planning it all didn't you." Gabriel, Susan. Nillson Jon. Onu Tetsuya. Matambu Jason. "Its the truth that you made me sick in my mind, when I figured out what you had done, you just used sea water and drowned them all in the oil rigs. Imagine that yourself, because my death, will match yours, when you see me die, and that will leave nothing for your imagination. A whole abandoned city to play with and we had to waste our time with you." Dionne Scarlet. Wang Edward. "OH more blood, enjoy it, but guess what? There is no god.!" Lake Sharon. Godfrey Frances. Nguyen Van That. Rawlings Laura.

"NO COLOURS ANYMORE I WANT THEM TO TURN BLACK."

She had driven the Rider, she remembered helping Grant to bury his children, then she buried him with them. Lives like stardust, from stardust actually, all of us came from that. She could feel it coming now, and then she knew that it didn't matter at all, forgiveness or not it was a final swing as humanity died. So she lay at the steps of the Natural History museum, watching the stars and feeling the cold of the evening. Remembering the days before she knew any of this, when an orphan that was, lived believing that her mother and father were there, on a distant planet beyond the stars. Listening to her prayers and loving her from afar. As her mind lost the battle little Kat hid in that beautiful dream, believed in it with everything she had, and didn't really notice herself die, just a small girl falling asleep.........

The End

RESCUE

IN

BEIRUT

Nobody noticed them arrive, the shiny dark blue flying saucer, glided effortlessly above the Hamra. The patrolling Syrian soldiers didn't acknowledge them at all, as they strolled past the foreign couple by the Green line, we were arm in arm and heading for the Place Des Martyrs, a restaurant next to very ancient ruins. I did feel a bit dizzy at one point, but that could have been the vodka gimlet, or the luxurious heat, or her, Jodie. "I don't know whats happening to us, " I didn't either, everything was falling apart, and it was all my fault, my head would writhe agonisedly, and still we strolled. Secure only with her, whilst my mind would unravel, almost paralleling the middle east peace process. Her eyes fixed upon mine, "Steve I really love you," I still love her. The aliens shadowed us for a long time, whilst we drowned in each others inadequacies, they watched. When I fell and saw her and my sons faces, getting smaller and smaller, in a nightmare, they watched. When in another nightmare I saw her die, they were above me, monitoring my mind, and I was oblivious of the scrutinising bat like little bastards, right up until I trod on one by mistake.

That was the night I hid myself behind a sofa, we couldn't speak without anger. I was as angry with myself, as she was with me. Even now after all the brain surgery, I still cant believe it, a brain tumour, in combination with extreme events, and what moments they witnessed. Bats are dancing everywhere every night in Beirut, as the heat and dust of the day settle, in that delicious lazy humidity of the night. All different kinds of fruit bats emerge, and the aliens do resemble a bat in many ways, imagine a chimpanzee the size of your thumbs, then give it proper hands, and rubbery wings that stretch between their wrists and torso, they are almost bronze in colour, just like a bat. The immense resources and almost unbelievable technology, don't help much. What really hurts is that technically they are not mammals, since they have no brain at all. Needless to say they rule most of the universe, needless to say they could crush our species like a bug. At least I crushed one of them, I was heart broken, I had accidentally squashed a bat, but somehow I linked that with my friend, Robert Kramer, I had deliberately killed him. Somehow the death of the small bat bothered me, as we lay pennilessly on the couch that evening watching Frasier on Lebanese cable, we still loved each other, Jodie was as unaware, as I was that she was sleeping with an amnesiac murderer, I was oblivious to the fact that I loved a fantasist compulsive liar, even the aliens acknowledge that we were, and this is in their own words, "Quite a pair." Going insane was quite effortless for me, almost natural, and for Jodie, it was me and the rest of the world that was mad. The Battish leadership agrees with her too. The bastards!

For Jodie, all she knew, was that a terminally ill friend of mine, had spent over two months begging me to help him kill himself, as if it was my fault, that HIV aids was retailing everywhere. Finally after a major life upheaval, falling in love, leaving my son, the death of the man who was my father figure, I had had a very trippy weird night in Amsterdam. Bobby my victim, actually died the following monday, my incomplete memory didn't acknowledge the fact, that the police found him, on that day. and oddly he died on the sunday I was visiting him, nothing of that night made sense. Now however with a complete memory I can tell you that it still doesn't, I just no longer care, and anyhow, this is a story about how Jodie, saved the planet from imminent invasion. I just wanted you to know that no relationship I ever heard of, had such a string of bad luck attached to it, up to and including, my as yet undiagnosed brain tumour, and having confessed that I am positive she is really jinxed up by Buddha or Allah, or any one of the spiteful little fuckers we call gods, but why do I miss her so much?

So there I was sitting on our balcony, I was really getting into the swing of this nervous breakdown, it was my fourth one, practice does make perfect. I am in love, and when she isn't talking utter bullshit, or just exploding, I am really unbelievably happy, this however is balanced by the worst isolation I have ever known. Jodie sleeps a lot, she was in our bedroom, dreaming her dreams of me, you know that dream where your the fox, and there are all these lovely people on horses who want to eat you. Sometime I thought of her as my Bavarian atom bomb, she always had a hair trigger. This is something the aliens failed to appreciate.

Listen, before I write one more damned word, I should tell you, that the saviour of humanity, wasn't a big muscle bound hollywood type but a teeny weeny beautiful Bavarian jewish blonde, in heels. It wasn't a glowing example of scientific sterile logic, like the guy's in Star Trek. In fact there is no movie in the whole world, where the planet got saved by a self obsessed compulsive liar. Accompanied by a delirious shell shocked and wrecked newspaper photographer, not that I should underestimate my role in the aliens downfall either. Mostly I wish I could forget it, and so as our life fell to bits, I was sat on the balcony of our unbelievably luxurious flat in Beirut, Lebanon.

When a teeny weeny flying saucer materialised in front of me, I think I blinked, cos it wasn't there when I closed my eyes, and I spotted loads of little eyes watching me. It wasn't long before a ramp came out of the ship, it was rusty, and kind of made a screeching noise, that sound managed to get our crippled and terminally ill kitten, crawling pathetically for cover. I know that I wasn't surprised by its arrival, lets face it, if I was going to describe my brain at this point, I would say. "Just like the Titanic, too many brain cells for the lifeboats." So I just sat there, waiting, I think I smiled. Finally and without ceremony a bat walked out of the ship, it wasn't a quick and graceful bat, but a geriatric one. Hunchbacked almost, as it limped down the ramp, it had a bodyguard with it, 6 tough looking little customers with spears, and a 7th one carrying a chair. Also Beirut appeared to have a daylight bat situation going on, zillions of them were flocking to our balcony. My cameras were in our bedroom, and i didn't want to risk waking Jodie up yet, that would have been real trouble. I mean what would you have done, when it wasn't women's oppression, it was politics, or some fantastical calamity, because the world was picking on her, we both ate a lot of chocolate and food was a good subject, in between all of this we had a lot of fun, but really, would you have woken her up?

It took the old one, about fifteen minutes to walk the two and half foot to my cushion, I had MTV playing on the television, it was Moulin Rouge, Yipee Yipee I I Yaaah, and two more of them came down the ramp, struggling with a PA system. Our kitten was called Raushia, she was looking at me wild eyed from under the coffee table, she had two broken legs, and her expression was just like Jodie's, her thoughts were to, "Do Something," Idid, I lit a cigarette, and watched them.

By now the sky was black with them, as they swarmed around our apartment. The old one was out of breath, when he sat down in front of me, but even though he couldn't speak or breathe properly, I knew he was their leader. I thought casually of just squashing him, maybe they were like red indians and would surrender, but then I thought about it, I wouldn't have surrendered, so why would they. The two finally got the PA set up. and it wined tooth shatteringly into life, one of the bodyguards passed the old one a microphone, he being to out of breath, waved it away looking at me, I think he tried to smile, but its so hard to tell with aliens nowadays, it could have been an insult, but I did smile back encouragingly to him. He was coughing and hacking away for a while, and it was obvious that he wasn't very well. Finally he lit an itty bitty little pipe and puffed smoke all over the place, then he drank a glass of liquid, dark and black and hot liquid, and my mind had a strange thought, "I like this guy".

A small crowd of the bats, had been gathering in a huddle near this scene, they had fedora hats and trench coats on, I looked really closely, there were minuscule Press Cards in each hat band, and all kinds of microscopic camera's, I was about to speak, actually talk to an alien news photographer, I had picked it up very gently by the trench coat collar and popped him in the palm of my hand, It pointed a Nikon at me, I smiled, a flash popped, and I watched as he threw the bulb away, then very quickly replaced it. It was about the sixth or seventh photo, that something that sounded a bit Prodigy erupted from the spaceship,

They all leapt to attention with their wings outstretched, as it played on and on. The old one just sat there, he winked at me. Finally the music stopped and everyone relaxed, they were obviously pleased, but I was wondering what the point was, MTV decided to musically reply, JLO burst in, with her love not costing a thing, the old one looked at me. I Spoke, finally man spoke to an alien species, the words that came from my mouth were, "I'll just turn the TV down." The old one nodded to me, "I'll calm the kitten down as well."

The Little Crippledy Kitty Cat.

Putting aside the agonising pain of her broken hip, Raushia was actually quite a happy kitten, regular food helped, and she was going to live another day, because the vets was shut. When I first met her she was wailing from under a car, sort of squashed, sort of oil stained, sort of ideal for Jodie, the perfect subject for a Bavarian rescue mission. A bedraggled flea infested little ginger kitten, a terminal case, that was doomed by the cosmos, before we had stumbled upon her. I am not wanting to come across as some cynical shyster here, but sometimes it is what it is, and in my case Jodie was in denial. At least Raushia was in agreement with me about the bat invasion. In fact her little high pitched mewing, added up to one feline thought aimed at her human, "Get shot of these guys now Boss!" I meanwhile picked her up very gently, and strolled back onto the balcony, noticing that U2 were where the streets have no name. It summed up beirut perfectly, and begged the quicker question, I wanted to ask my new bat like friends. "How did you find me, I have enough difficulty living on a nameless street?"

The older bat waved to a younger bat in a white coat, this little guy had a stutter, "wee ho h ho ho homed in o on your bra br br brains al alph al alpha waves and th the re rest was easy!" He nodded to the older bat who then stood up shakily.

"Why me?"

After a briefer coughing fit he grasped the load speaker and finally spoke to me. "We have traversed eight parsecs to find you, many dangers have been overcome on our journey here, to rescue you!"

"What me. Listen Jodie's a nut job, but she's not that bad." I have been aware, since the day I was bornm that I am to good for planet Earth, but hell this was a development that shocked me, and staring at the little bat fella's, I was struck by their seriousness in this matter, also I suddenly had a massive doubt, and gulped deeply. "Is she?" I mean she wouldn't want to kill me, would she?

Exhausted by this huge effort, the older bat fell back, wheezing into the chair. Coughing a lot he looked apologetically at me, then said. "In your calender it was in 1973 that you screamed for help, it took us ten of your years to build the ships, and to mount the rescue, then another 30 years to reach your backwater of a planet!" Suddenly he stood up. "We have journeyed countless amounts of your Earth miles, to get here to rescue you."

I was aware zillions of pairs of eyes watching me, as I remembered 73, looking around I was glad to have the broken kitten to cuddle. I remembered Saigon, and the relief of the explosion and the deafness that followed, and thought of that crazed colonel for the first time in many years. "Oh right that scream." Suppressing memories could be considered a specialty of mine. "Yes that day." It was odd to be squirming inside of myself as I remembered that day. "Much like today it all started out so normally." Then came that brief and difficult journey back into reality, the present had yet again been interrupted by the past. Which resulted in a question. "How could you know about that?" I paused and looked almost theatrically at my massive audience. "I was seven and a half, how could you know about that?"

My asthmatic friend waved to the scientist who stumbled his way through an explanation, luckily I had kept up with my physics or none of this would have made any sense at all. I discovered also that the leaders name was Uther, and that his son Arthur, was the new king of their planet called Avalon, putting aside the cosmic irregularities of Arthurian legend, it seemed nothing more than a bleak and mathematically disharmonious coincidence. Raushia chose this moment to start mewing in that squeaky kitten way, and I could have sworn that the tough looking customers with the spears went ahhhh. None of which explains to you, why we were about to be invaded by minuscule bat like aliens. Its all to do with foam, quantum foam to be exact, it surrounds our quantum universe. Ok two facts that will help you understand what I am trying to recall here. The relativistic side of the universe is very very BIG! Planets, nebulas supernovas all that jazz is massive, meanwhile the quantum universe is very very small, yet in its totality, I reckon the quantum world is even bigger than the relativistic.

So that foam is in the smallest measurable region of space, that is called by scientific types the Quantum Foam. Now that particular environment is pretty stable-unstable, everything from micro worm holes to massively tiny storms happens there, even time itself appears to have nervous breakdown in there. It is a wild and often unpredictable space, so when I screamed back in 73, my voice was carried through a micro wormhole, a distance of 734 light years to Avalon, where due to the absence of logical time in the quantum foam, the Avalonians experienced eighteen years of earth quakes. and other massive upheavals. Since I am the only person on Earth with this somewhat ludicrous super power, Uther and Arthur felt that I definitely needed rescuing, and set off building a small fleet to save me, and their own planet. It took them 29 years to actually make the journey, 29 years to get here to save me or so I initially thought. It was at that point that Jodie stumbled from the bedroom and hugged me, oblivious to our audience. After quite a passionate kiss, I watched as she headed to the kitchen. Now one amusing fact about my beloved is that the girl is as blind as a bat, without her contacts or glasses on, seriously I watched her flag down a red fire engine at a London bus stop once. I was to in love to stop her, so awestruck was I, that all I could do was watch my angel, looking at the firemen and blinking and squinting at them, as she elegantly gripped her bus pass. Minuscule aliens wouldn't have stood a chance of being seen. I turned to the chief scientist who's name was Merlin, and said. "She's not being rude she has really bad eyesight." He knew this already and nodded, in fact if Jodie had had decent eye sight, she wouldn't have gone near my ugly mug in a million years.

Fortunately I have just reread all of this, and if I don't up the pace you will probably fall asleep, so heres the point after 29 years of planning and travelling, the Avalonians had misjudged one part of their pseudo rescue mission, I being a massive mammal would never fit in their largest ships. It was then that the Uther muttered. "We need the weapon!" Which startled me more than you would think. I mean one minute I am talking pleasantries with an alien race, then they use the word weapon.

"What weapon, why use a weapon? You don't need a weapon guys."

He stared at me with steely bat eye balls, and said in a voice like ice. "You are the weapon you fool."

Then I found out about another clan of bats that were lead by some creep called Morgana Le Faye. "Are you shitting me?" They denied it, and I discovered, that she was an evil mad scientist, who was hell bent on taking over the whole universe. She was also winning the war, and had taken Arthurs city of Camelot by storm and siege. After a huge space battle near the planet Camlan. Putting aside the fact that some guy in the 17th century, had foretold all of this in a book called La Morte D'Arthur, I quickly ascertained that I was to be terrorised into unleashing my super power upon her forces. "So let me get this straight Uther. You want to torture me for an indefinite period, so that I can attack Morgana Le Fayes forces with my scream power?" Uther nodded. "Great and when she is finished off who else is there?" It was an alarmingly long list, as the Avalonians have a lot of enemies. Also the honour guards feet, were tapping in tune with MTV's latest choice, Warda's Harramt Ahebbak, which always got jodie dancing, which is where the troubles really started. Holding a steaming coffee and wearing her heels and favourite skirt, she stepped onto the balcony with a towel on her wet hair.

"Who are you talking to?"

"Put your glasses on now."

Imagine a pair of beautiful green eyes, then sit back and watch them expand in shock, she looked at me, then at the bats, then sprang for the kitchen. Now anyone who knows Lebanon, has to be in love with something called Piff Paff, seriously this will knock the toughest cockroach down with one spray, it has more toxins than any other insecticide I can think of, and is probably banned in Europe. Jodie stood fiercely framed in the balconies sliding doors. Her heels dug into the ground. and I stood slowly then pulled her into the living room for a private chat, once I felt incorrectly that we were out of earshot of the Avalonians, then I spoke and filled her in on the situation. Now when Jodie gets angry her nose gives her away, I was watching as her nostrils got redder, than when I had gotten us lost in a local refugee camp. She glowed with rage and stepped out onto the balcony and picked up Uther, then put him in her hand bag next to her Marlboro Lights. Without any warning she pulled out the Piff Paff and screamed at the honour guards. "This is Piff Paff, its probably the most dangerous insecticide on the planet, I used it a lot last night, (which was true as we had had an airborne cockroach attack,) and in all of the excitement, I don't know if I used fifty or sixty squirts, so what you punks have got to ask yourselves, punks, is, do you feel lucky!" Now having been trained as a dancer she turned gracefully and looked at me with utter feminine contempt. "I leave you alone for five minutes and aliens invade, I mean what kind of man are you?" I knew certainly that I was a photojournalist, so my skill base with alien invasions was of course, to photograph them, but Jodie then took over as she was a highly trained socialist revolutionary. "Keep them all covered with the Piff Paff, whilst I have a private chat with their boss." I had of course been taking pictures of the whole thing, so I had to change tracks pretty quickly, and pointed the Piff Paff at them. It was quite deadly stuff, and I felt bad that I was making my new friends squirm with it, but how could I become their dream weapon. I am clumsy and trip over anything in my way, and that is on a good day. Today was not a good day at all. So I could have fallen of our 7th story balcony.

Muffled shouting and swearing, was coming from our bedroom, and all of us relaxed a bit, in fact the guards sat in a circle, playing with a tiny deck of cards and some dice, and as Jodie negotiated, I learned how to play a very difficult card game called haemorrhage. The two were at it for more than a few hours, and during that time the conscripts from the Lebanese army showed up. Once they worked out it was an alien invasion, and not the Israelis again, they also learned the card game. Whilst Uther was having the argument of his life with Frau Jodie in the bedroom.

I could bore you with more irrelevant details, including a very confusing chat with the Hezbollah, and the local rep of the United Nations, but lets be honest, you want to know what was going down in the bedroom. Jodie has obviously filled me in since then, and I will tell you what she told me. Whilst our neighbors son went and brought more Piff Paff for me, she was negotiating with Uther. Just in case you have forgotten, because sometimes I can just waffle with the keyboard, as much as I can with my mouth. Uther is the former king of his people, and the father of their new king. It turned out that he was asking for permission to remove my brain and nervous system, to take me back to Avalon in his ship. I wouldn't have fit in any of them otherwise. Now she had insisted, that Uther head home and make bigger ships, or that he could give her the plans to one, and we could come for a holiday sometime, after we had built them. Now Jodie was as mercurial as she was radical, she knew we could have retired with alien tech to sell, so she pitched him her idea. He turned her down, but informed her that his race could live for several thousand of our years, it also turned out that a space war is a very slow thing. so he had three hundred years to play with before Morgan could invade.

It was decided in a flash, the two of them agreed that the Avalonians would build a bigger ship and return, it would take them 29 years for their new ship to reach Earth. So Jodie had put off a great personal disaster, and stopped us all from being involved, albeit remotely in an inter galactic war. Then with that sorted, all of the bats left in quite a rush, leaving the two of us happily alone in our flat. Needless to say we inevitably split up, Raushia was put down, and then the Israelis bombed the heck out of the neighborhood again, but for that one night, we were oblivious to all of our future turmoils, and at least we did love each other. So with relief, we watched the real bats swooping around outside of our bedroom, and then slept.

The End

For twenty nine years at least.

TOPSY GETS KNOTTED

Every now and then on Bikini, station things get twisted together,stuck like glue and melting into one another, like cheese does, when your mother toasts it. It's all part of our regular fun and games, as we orbit Big Munchy. The very hungry and impossibly large black hole that we orbit. It's all to do with other worlds pressing together, so it's not uncommon to meet an alternative and different me, as I perambulate about the ship. Think about it kids, what would you do if you met another you in the playground, would you hiss at it like a cat or say. "Hi!" and play with yourself happily. It would be better than a Lemmings reaction to this occurrence. Seriously, even a very worldly wise rat like myself, can cope better than Topsy or Turvy can. Whenever I meet myself I say. "Good Morning." Or. "Good evening." As the time of day dictates, then myself and the alternative Hogarth, settle down for a good game of cardiac arrest, with my favourite playing cards.

This is sadly not the case with lemmings. As a whole Lemmings prize individuality above all other things, So it is particularly insulting, when an alternative self, has the audacity to appear in front of them. The alternative lemming feels exactly the same, so then both Lemmings prepare to do battle with each other, at first they circle the offender, then they squeak savagely at each other, for about five minutes, squeaking and jumping, or jumping and squeaking. Even a captain with my magnificent skills cannot stop them, they can't help it either, so they get angrier and angrier. So angry in fact, that if I wrote down their insults here you would turn blue. Really.

But then they get ready for the battle proper, now all Lemmings have a large bushy red tail, it goes stiff and almost like a sword, then it's all snicker snack snicker snack backwards and forwards, like a furry Robin Hood they fight, their tails blurring as they battle up and down the staircases. Now even though I Hogarth, am a wonder rat and captain, with incredible abilities. (Even if I say so myself.) I would be a very stupid rat indeed, to interfere with a lemming battle. So I don't. Although on one occasion, I played cards with an alternative me, as a pair of Turvy's scrapped and fought for over an hour. I remember losing that particular game as well.

Today however it was different, as I heard the unmistakeable patter of Turvy's feet running towards my control room, now as I have mentioned before, I am a splendid rat, so I rushed to the mirror, and very quickly put my marvellous white Captains hat on. It took me a few minutes to get the angle right though, and it is a very important hat, and worthy of the respectful time I give it. With a rush of clattering claws skipping across the floor, a very fast and rather blurry Turvy arrived. He saluted, (rather smartly) and then squeaked out the emergency. As usual children, you wouldn't understand any of his squeaking's, so allow Captain Hogarth to translate for you.

"Skipper you gotta come quick, as Topsy is twisted and stuck with Topsy." He said nervously skipping from paw to paw.

Ah! The plot is thickening isn't it, like soup, but realising she was at the other end of the station, I mounted my trusty tricycle, but not until I had made sure that Turvy was wearing his helmet, (which is what all of you kids should be wearing, whenever you skateboard or ride your bikes.) and away we peddled. It was quite a distance, so I was awfully out of breath when we reached the engine rooms main staircase, and lying there were two very angry and bedraggled balls of red fur, and another Hogarth. Fortunately he had ordered the other Turvy as far away as possible, or we would have had two more very cross lemmings to deal with. Since both Topsy's were identical, we both grabbed one and pulled, like a tug of war we huffed and puffed ,but both of their rather amazing tails were stuck together, plus they were crying, because it hurts when someone pulls your tail. So placing them down I listened to the other Hogarth.

"Hmm, it's like a furry shoelace when it gets tangled up, we really have to untie them, but its a very complicated knot."

"We'll we could just go to the sick bay, and chop off their tails." I said.

Suddenly, both Topsy's were tearfully pleading with me. "Please skipper don't chop our tails off, we need them." Or as the other Topsy said. "I don't want to be a lemming without a tail." And then both of them sobbed out. "Please captain Hogarth don't chop our tails off."

"Skipper please think of something. Please." Said Turvy with his eyes tightly closed and his tail wrapped between his legs. "Please."

Well we could always play cards." I said to the other Hogarth. "It's only a matter of time before we all go back to normal, isn't it." Now luckily the other me, had our lucky deck of cards on him. So we laid them out and played cardiac arrest, with Turvy dealing the cards. Whilst the two Topsy's sat, occasionally smacking one an other. It was amazing to see a lemming run out of energy for a fight with itself.

After the second game the other me faded away, and I gave Topsy a very good talking to about her manners towards our visitors. Then got on my shiny and rather grand tricycle and headed back to the control room.

So kids try not to get into fights between now and your next visit to Bikini station. And whatever you do don't get your tails knotted together.

Captain Hogarth

Bikini Station

Big Munchy

Andromeda Nebula

Utopia's Funeral

There is a photo taken by the Apollo astronauts, it's called Earth Rise, it's the one of the Earth herself, rising over the lunar surface of our planets good old friendly moon. I have seen this picture all over the world, once in Lebanese cafe over coffee, I sat meditating my morning away to it, it's a beautiful and specific cry, to all of us crazy monkey mammals on planet Earth. The reality behind that photo resulted in a quasi awakening for us all, as a tiny kid it blew my minuscule mind. Really it did. I still remember the magazine I saw it in, yet when it was taken the Vietnam war was at it's height, when it was taken starvation still ravaged at our species, and the picture can be looked at optimistically or pessimistically. The hippy in me would like to see it as a symbol of hope, but the reality is that when that enlightening photo was taken, well there was an equal amount of heaven and hell, going on on that distant and beautiful surface.

If you saw that little planet in an alien real estate agents, well wouldn't you just want to buy it.

Today we are used to these images, high up above us all is the International Space Station, yes a space station, our species has made it's first serious efforts in that direction, but ask yourself, what would an astronaut feel as they looked down on Syria, or the Gaza strip, what would she be thinking as the station floated over the famine stricken areas of Africa, how could she equate this beauty with the massed poverty, that is crippling large populations on the planet beneath her. I would probably sing twinkle twinkle little star and burst into tears. Tears on a spacewalk. The space programmes combined are something that should have risen to a fundamental change in human behaviour, they haven't. Picture her looking down at the environmental excesses that are retailing everywhere on the planet beneath, and ask yourself how would you react to the whittled Amazon Rainforest, or the decaying desertification that is happening right now, as I type. Which is why the utopian science fiction story has died to, optimistic visions of our futures are not just out of fashion, in many cases they are unbelievable, because of the evidence in our morning news searches.

Science has broadened our knowledge, we are now at a point where we can create toy universes for experiments, or view deeply into the microcosm of our worlds structure, even in the oceans we have found deep thermal vents, that show us how life is possible in the extremest conditions on our planet. None of which has symbolised any change in human behaviour. Take the basic development of the Vacuum cleaner, it was a labour saving device, the technology that should be liberating us all from many aspects of labour, is creating massed unemployment. We are often, it would seem serving the tech. I love the technology, but lets look at the impact of it first, say an android is successfully created. (Its now an inevitability that it will be made.) Well where do the people it would be replacing work? What would they do? This is a variation on theme that has already happened before, time and time again. Looking to our ancient history it even parallels a problem the Romans had. Julius Caesar found that the massive increase in slavery, that had driven his republic's economy successfully for many hundreds of years, backfired as it was by the time he reached power, resulting in a massed unemployment amongst the free men of his empire, it resulted in laws that changed the dynamic without getting rid of slavery. This is the world I live in now. Wars, fires, famine, flood and unemployment. So can anyone possibly write a utopian story from these ingredients.

Take those of us lucky enough to be living in democracies, seriously one person one vote! Sounds great, yet even that particular system is falling to pieces, a political elite have taken over, pretty soon they will become dynasty's in their own right, whilst the process that starts out fine, has mutated, to an ideal of money and power. Power. I would love to write a great future revolutionary novel, like Spartacus in space suits I guess, I just know that all the revolutions of history have backfired, creating much bigger demons. I would have to call that book from Pol Pot With Love. Thats before we look to our corporates, boy, they make any movies bad guy back drop on a good day. Look around you where you live and find the evidence of a potential utopia.

I dare you, I double dare you to find it.

All of this is before we hit the subject of out of control religions. I was seriously trying to avoid this topic, but it fits in here as snug as a bug. I wrote a book called the Legend Of The Blue Dasher about this one, set on a war ravaged, resource exhausted planet Earth, over run with fundamentalist fruit cakes, from the Uni Faith Church. That book starts with a witch burning and escalates, its about running and escaping a crazed solar system of fruit cakes basically. It mirrors many of the religions around at the moment. For what its worth its a mutated reflection of all the religions in this book, a nuclear god squad scenario, but the idea of a fluffy people friendly future just doesn't seem to be a possible evolution, thats if I actually look at the world around me.

The point I really want to make is that there is fantasy and then there are different schools of science fiction, the greats write in a reactionary way to the present. Which is simply the writer conforming to Newtons laws, an imaginative reaction to the realities of the day. Robert Heinlein wrote a book called Friday, in more ways than one it's his masterpiece, although that book works on many different levels, including Friday Baldwin herself, the realities of the world are what hammer the nail into the coffin of the reader, because they are so completely believable, that reality comes from the evolution of what was happening at the time, strangely for something written many years ago this very lively book is still realistic. Still believable, it isn't set in one dystopia, but many.

The problem is that unless your readers are Ostriches burying their heads in the sand, well the concept of a utopia, just isn't merely unbelievable, it's an impossibility, the bookies would happily give you a trillion to one on it's likelihood of happening. Any work that stands the test of time in science fiction whether it is John Wyndham or even Fritz Leiber, (The list of great sci fi writers is to long for this short collection of paragraphs.) What they do is play with concepts, but the reader has to react to them, the reader has to buzz on these concepts and plots too, and in reality most readers are not capable of having their credulity dragged through the mud by a utopian ideal. All of my writing is an extension of where we are now, an evolution of it, and sadly there is not one shred of historical evidence for a utopia out there.

The reality of human history is that about 55% of our populations have been historically ignored. Yes I am talking about the way women have been treated in our societies, and in many still are, think about it, we have ignored all of the potential female Einstein's or Plato's. Now if our species can be that stupid still, then what hope is there in the future. Every year our economies throw away genius in favour of stasis, how many of them have never been heard. How much wastage is in a system and if I look to the future, well the dystopian inevitability is the reality. So how can you judge a good dystopia, yes lets face it nothing is perfect, you would judge it by the numbers of casualties that the systems create.

Sadly thats the best looking future I can see.

I guess thats why the Utopian novels of science fiction are a dying species, the realities of our world view destroy them even before we have picked up the book. At the end of the day we should all raise a glass to the concept as novel as it is though, maybe have a massed funeral pyre style bonfire party to the idea of a utopian world.

The Magic Laptop ride. (Reprise, stevesevilempire Blog, Remix.)

Well that about wraps up this selection of stories, if you enjoyed them then you really should check out these other books, also by Steve Merrick. (The Guy Writing This.)

The Awash In Starlight Series.

Book One. The Navigator. (Awash In Starlight.)

Book Two. The Legend Of The Blue Dasher. (Awash In Starlight.)

Book Three. The Konichiwa Collective. (Awash In Starlight.)

If you are curious to find out more about the writer and photographer, then check out stevesevilempire or Steve Merrick on google.

The End

;-)
