 
Boots2

By Phillip Donnelly

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Phillip Donnelly

Second Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

About the Author

After completing a psychology degree, the author realised that he was profoundly misanthropic and set about travelling the world looking for aliens to take him to another planet.

Unable to speak any foreign languages and almost incapable of holding a conversation in his own, he decided to teach English as a foreign language because this was the only job that would allow him to travel widely without any marketable skills or noticeable intelligence.

He has unsuccessfully searched for life from outer space in classrooms in the following countries: Spain, China, Russia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Beirut, Dubai, Sri Lanka, Lebanon France and Vietnam.

In the future, he hopes to continue his search for alien life forms in different countries, and he would be obliged if any aliens reading this could spirit him off to an altogether more exotic planet in a more harmonious dimension.

All of the pieces in this book have appeared online.

Message from the Author

If you enjoy these stories, please feel free to tell me so at phillipdonnelly@gmail.com. If there's something you didn't like, or something you feel could have been better, I'd like to know that too.

If you can't face the idea of communicating via e-mail, then just answer three questions at Survey Monkey:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/6L5FYV8

More information, videos, and assorted odds and ends can be found on my website.

www.phillipdonnelly.net

For Sandra

Table of Discontents

Short Stories

Historical Fictions

Blitzkrieg Revisited

If Walls Had Ears

Last Orders for Churchill

Conversations with the Reaper

The Undertaker's Complaint

Proppland

The Guest in the Attic

The Last Blog and Testament of the Shui Gui

Virtual Dystopias

Necronet Explorer

6 Hits from the Safe Zone

Can Websites Commit Suicide?

Debt, Death and Deletion

Animal Farms

Shep's Last Day

Dystopia 101

The Interactive Classroom

The Future Perfect Continuous

Soul Chips

The Mission

The I-SAD

The Smartphone Addicts and Precinct 9

Book Samples

Samples from Novels

The Headless Chicken (from Letters from the Ministry)

The Office Trinity (from The Screen)

The Post Modern Prometheus (from Kev the Vampire)

The Inaction Man and the Sandwich of Doom (from The Inaction Man)

Samples from Travel Writing

Vietnam – Saigon

India — In-Flight Commandments

China – Riding the Dragon

Lebanon – Baalbek

Articles

Stale Heroes tell the Same Old Story

Barack Backs Beans

Vampires — From Ghouls to Teen Idols

Acknowledgements

The following short stories and travel writing first appeared on the following websites. All rights remain with the author.

Bewildering Stories

The Office Trinity, The Future Perfect Continuous, The Mission, The Interactive Classroom, Shep's Last Day, Necronet Explorer, Debt Death and Deletion and Can Websites Commit Suicide?

Foliate Oak

Blitzkrieg Revisited, The Undertaker's Complaint, and The Headless Chicken

Quantum Muse

6 Hits from the Safe Zone

The Cynic

Barack Backs Beans

Weirdyear

Proppland

Word Machine

The Guest in the Attic

Literary Hatchet

The Smartphone Addicts and Precinct 9

EtherBooks

The Last Blog and Testament of the Shui Gui, The Intelligent Sexual Attraction Device, In-Flight Commandments and Baalbek

Bent Masses

If Walls Had Ears

Linguistic Erosion

The Beach Dream

Circa

Last Orders for Churchill

Piker Press

Saigon, Riding the Dragon, and Inaction Man and the Sandwich of Doom

Blitzkrieg Revisited

"You've never had it so good" Grandpa Rat said to us, in the pile of rubble that was once Mrs Bleachdale's house.

We gathered around him, the whole colony, ready as always for one of his bedtime yarns; and behind us, in the distance, the East End shimmered in a rosy incendiary glow; and from the sky, the Rat Gods dropped more exploding poisoned pellets of revenge on our human torturers, splintering their world and turning it into our world.

"You remember what this place used to be like, don't you? You remember Mrs B., don't you?"

He paused then for effect, and let the image of the ogre grow in our minds. Our eyes grew large and our whiskers trembled in remembering the giant of a woman, who was two dozen-rats-high and was said to grow a tail taller for every rat sent to heaven.

"She was a terror of a woman, Mrs B., and I for one hope she lies howling down below. When it wasn't traps she was laying, it was poison she was putting down for our young innocents."

He stood on his two back legs, lifted his right front leg and sniffed the air with his pink nose to drive home the point, like some sewer orator; and when all of us were looking at each other and nodding in agreement about how bad things used to be, he continued.

"Time was when only one rat in ten would make it to adulthood in this house, I tell you. One in ten! And they'd be a scrawny, skantering, snivelling kind of animal: all bone and fear, they was. But now, well. Look at yourselves now, my fine furry friends. You've got meat on your bones and a twinkle in your eye. The future's as bright as the search lights that light up the night sky; the lights that show the Rat Gods flying high above us!"

We all looked up, and there they were, our buzzing vengeful Rat Gods, smoking out the humans, filling the air with strange new smells.

"And look at this fine house of rubble we've got for ourselves now, with more hiding places than we know what to do with, and a cracked larder full of food, and all for ourselves. It's getting a mite smelly now, but that only adds flavour, if you ask me. Good food is like a good rat — the older the better!"

He chuckled at his own witticism, and we pretended to laugh, but in truth, we'd heard this joke a thousand times since Mrs B. died.

Another rat climbed up into the mouthpiece of the gramophone and continued.

"And it's like this all over the city, my comrades tell me, from Lewisham to Neasden. More and more rat communes are taking what's rightfully theirs, and declaring Rat Rubble Republics. Decadent human civilization is collapsing and history demands that we seize this opportunity to establish the dictatorship of the rodent, in accordance with the laws of dialectic materialism."

Thus spoke Rarathusa, a political rat who often went on forays into the wider world. He was developing quite a following among some of the younger more bookish rodents.

There was an awkward silence after he spoke and we could hear the wind whistling through the rubble. Grandpa Rat and the rodent elders twitched their whiskers.

"Tell us about the cat, Grandpa Rat!" one of the young 'uns demanded, never having seen the fearsome beast herself.

"Ay, well might you shout the word 'cat' out loud now, safe in the Ratopia of the blitz world, when men hide in shelters and rats rule the roost. But t'was a time, young ratty, when you only had to say the word 'cat' and the mean ole moggy'd appear. Teeth sharp as kitchen knives; claws longer than your paws; and yellow eyes bigger than your head. A pox on the mangy rogue, for she slaughtered me own flesh and blood, a dozen times over, and I was never such a happy rat as when I saw her, dead on the dusty floor, skull smashed in twain, fallen masonry all round and a shard of glass straight through her evil feline heart."

"Say what you like about Killer Kat, Grandpa, but she did make fulsome good eating in the end!" Grandma Rat said.

"Ay, she did that, I'll grant you... even if the screamin' and hollarin' and wailin' of old Mrs B. wasn't exactly appetizing; lying there, trapped under her precious mahogany table, bleeding from more holes than she had orifices."

"Ay, but she was fairly tasty herself, I thought, considering her advanced years" Grandma Rat said. "She kept us going for weeks, the old witch, and sixty kilos ain't nothing to be sniffed at, even if she did get a bit whiffy near the end."

"Better whiffy food than no food, I tell you. You've never had it so good!" Grandpa said.

"But we'll have it even better, come the Union of the Rat Rubble Republics!" Rarathusa exclaimed.

Grandpa's nose twitched at that and scraped the ground three times. The rat elders did likewise before disappearing into the rubble. They soon reappeared, and they now surrounded Rarathusa, but he was so wrapped up in his oratory that he didn't take heed of their movements.

"From each rat according to his abilities; and to each rat according to his needs. Rodent brothers —"

The attack came so quickly that Rarathusa didn't even have time to give the final death squeak, so his poor soul will never make it to Ratheaven.

"You've never had it so good!" Grandpa Rat said again, but this time with menace.

If Walls Had Ears

The kitchen and the living room were the oldest of friends.

Neither could remember a world without the other and both their memories stopped at the inception of construction. To the rubble time their memory would not stretch. They had been and always would be: one flat indivisible, in and of itself.

Even their earliest memory was the same: the naked pain of their birth, their protracted partum, when their form was glued and hammered together, brick by brick. In the beginning was the brick and the brick was made flat and dwelt among us.

They remembered the creatures they mistook for Gods: those grunting sweaty Irish bricklayers, who had no sooner brought them into the world than abandoned them, leaving them with the suffocating clothing of plaster and the slapdash make-up of paint.

As they turned from warbling infants to rancorous adults, they stored the bitter memories of every indignity forced upon them by the flesh creatures who followed the builders. They hated the hominids who moved within them; the vile squatter lice who arrived, aged and died, only to be replaced by others from beyond the Building. They remembered all and forgave nothing.

The living room was by far the larger of the two friends and was almost four times the size of his companion, and although the kitchen was jealous of his friend's size and stature, this did not impede their friendship. One could have been ten times the size of the other, but they would still have regarded each other as equals.

Toward the other rooms, however, they shared an animosity bordering on contempt. All rooms were equal, the Building's Charter proclaimed, but some, the two friends thought, were more equal than others. They were separated by the tiny but truculent toilet and the eternally confused hall. They rarely saw each other room-to-room and instead communicated through the conduit of the water pipes.

One dry June day, the kitchen creaked the pipes a little to let the living room know it wanted to converse.

"What did you make of them this morning? He seemed very distracted, I thought. He spilled the milk and dropped an egg on me, you know," Kitch said.

"Clod! We should drop a brick on him one day, see how he likes it! I suppose he's worried by the news from the front."

"The front of the building?"

"No, the war front! You really should try to keep abreast of current affairs, Kitch."

"What care I for maggot men news? And even if I did listen, what could I find out? You're the one who gets all the gaff. All day and night I hear them in there with you, gabbing about who knows what. And I'm out here, lone and lonesome, a kitchen without a friend in the world."

"Now don't get all maudlin on me, Kitch. Sometimes they talk out there, don't they?"

"Sure they do! Mostly they talk about how two grown people can't both fit in a three-metre squared kitchen. If they're not ignoring me, they're insulting me. Or else they're stinking me out; boiling and frying up the flesh of dead monsters from land, sea and air. Bloody squatters!"

"We are born to suffer, and our world is but a veil of tears," injected Toilet.

"Ah shut up ya shitehawk! Your world is but a world of turds, dropping one after another into the fetid blackness of the Sewerworld. Why don't you butt out of our conversion and go chew on a colon sausage!" Kitch suggested.

"We cannot help what we are. Function is destiny," Toilet said, and then he signalled his displeasure by flushing himself loudly.

"Oh, so you're off again, are you? Huffing and flushing and trying to swish the house down. You want them to get the plumber out again, do you? You want a rubber plunger rammed down your privates, do you? You want a hairy hand to wiggle about with your ballcock?"

"Ah just ignore ole Privy Pervert," Liv said dismissively.

"I will sing no more songs for rooms which care nothing for me."

"Good! Shite shouldn't sing."

There was silence for a while and Toilet sulked and stewed in the bitter moodiness that marked his bile and bilious being. Soon the two friends resumed their conversation.

"These last lot of tenants are alright, as far as blood pumps go. At least they don't have any cats, not like that old bat before them. Remember that moggy of hers, the fat old grey thing, always scratching her nails on my walls and leaving little brown mementos in every corner. Dirty animal!"

"Well, she got what was coming to her, old Pussface. I saw to that."

"Hum... felinicide. Yes, I remember. You've got a terrible wicked side to you sometimes, Kitch."

"Well, who could resist it?! There she was, sitting on my ledge at the height of summer, staring down at all and sundry in the courtyard below, meowing like she owned the place, cleaning her oh-so-delicate paws like the jumped-up little Bagpuss she was. All I did was... give her a little nudge."

"And it was curtains for pussy!"

"She had it coming! Anyway, what's all this about 'The Front'?"

"It's the war, isn't it?"

"Haven't they only just finished the war?"

"That was twenty years ago, Kitch. You're in a world of your own out there, aren't you? This is the Second War."

"Well they must have liked the first one if they're having another. So who are they fighting this time?"

"The Germans, of course."

"Wasn't it the Germans last time?"

"That's right, but you can't expect originality from flesh bags, can you? All that movement stops them from thinking. They just mill about doing the same things over and over: get up, have breakfast, wash the sweat off themselves and then go to work. No sooner are we nice and comfy than they come back again. They eat, yak a bit, go to bed and snore the night away. We've seen a half-century of it and no doubt we'll see another half."

"It must be terrible strange though, to be moving about all the time," Kitch mused.

"They're a strange lot, make no mistake. And now they're set to start shooting each other again."

"What's this shooting business anyway?" Kitch asked.

"I'm not really sure, but whatever it is, it stops them from moving."

"So, it's gotta be a good thing, hasn't it?"

"Not for the flesh heads it isn't. As soon as they stop moving, they die. We've seen it before with our own eyes. Remember the old wrinkly one who died mid splutter in the toilet; half a plop inside her and half outside. She stopped moving and then got all bloated and purple. And then she gave birth to those wriggly wormy things," Liv remembered.

The pipes shook a little at the memory of it.

"Didn't she stink up the place something awful? I was almost glad to see those scurrying rats come in to clean that mess up."

"But it's always the same story. Just when we think we've got the place to ourselves, more rubbery things come a knocking. More arms and legs and torsos. Why do we have to suffer them?"

"We are born to suffer and –" Toilet intoned, adding echo for effect.

"Shut up!" they both shouted in unison.

Toilet did not have time to respond. All three rooms, like every room in the apartment block, was silenced by a new sound. The siren wailed and rose and fell and seemed to be the very embodiment of pain, causing all rooms great and small to shiver with a fear they could not identify.

The man and the woman returned shortly after the siren stopped, breathing heavily and with panic in their wide eyes. Much to Kitchen's chagrin, they immediately went to the living room and sat on the sofa. He tried to eavesdrop but they spoke in hushed tones and even Living Room had to strain his ears to make out the conversation. The man spoke first, sweating and trembling.

"They've broken through. The lines are collapsing. The government's fled to Bordeaux. There are rumours they'll be in Paris by the end of the week."

"But, it can't be! What about the Maginot line?"

"The Huns have gone around it. Walls! Why did they hide behind walls?! Why did they think we could trust bricks and mortar? France will fall."

"But England's safe. The Channel will protect us, and the Navy. Britain still rules the waves. They can't touch us here. London's safe."

"Safe as houses," the man replied.

The man and the woman hugged each other as dusk fell on the city, and neither one thought to draw the thick black-out curtains and turn on the lights, preferring instead to hide in the darkness. Pipes creaked and seemed to amplify their fear.

"Liv, Liv, what's going on in there? I can't hear a word!"

"The war's going badly or something."

"Ah, who cares about their silly fights?! This war can only be good news for the two of us. The only good human is a dead human; and with any luck, they'll all immobilize one another, and we rooms will have the place for ourselves. As it was in the beginning and will be again, a world of bricks and mortar, after the plague of man."

The summer wound on and the man and the woman became more and more restless. As their anguish grew, the two rooms, almost in spite of themselves, began to share their sense of apprehension, but they never spoke of it, being too proud to admit that the fear of man had infected them.

In early September, from the skies above, a strange droning noise was absorbed by the outer walls of the building and passed through Liv and Kitch to the seated tenants.

"They're here. They're coming. The Luftwaffe!" the woman shrieked.

She got up to look through the window, pointing at some slow-moving matchsticks in the sky.

"The ack acks will get them!" the man said.

The pipes rumbled and Kitchen and Living Room tried to make sense of the changing world beyond the Building.

"What's going on now?" Kitch asked.

"Someone called Lift Waffle's coming."

"Is he a bill collector?"

"Search me, but what are all these strange noises? That's what I want to know."

"Search the waters of the water closet," Toilet whispered.

"What are you wittering on about now, Toilet?" Kitch asked.

"The water bowl's vibrating. Something is rotten in the ground below us. The earth is shaking. A world of pain will rise to meet us: a sky of death will fall to greet us."

Toilet repeated the last sentence over and over again, in a rabid tone.

"That lunatic's gone totally off his rocker now. He's like a deranged demon, he is. How are we gonna shut him up?"

Toilet's shrill voice whirled on and on, faster and faster.

"A world of pain will rise to meet us: a sky of death will fall to greet us."

"Will you ever shut up, you terrorsome toilet?" Kitch pleaded.

"For the love of God the Builder, pipe down!" Liv demanded.

And then, silence. Except... except for the soft sound of raining metal. All three rooms and all the rooms beyond heard it, and even the humans sensed it. A projectile falling. Solid sky rain.

A light brighter than the sun heralded the end of time for Kitch, Liv, Toilet, and all the rooms beyond and all the flesh creatures within. Explosive turned solid to gas with such force that all around it were torn apart. Flesh stuck to wall and wall stuck to flesh. Bones, bricks and mortar were buried together in the ugly unity of rubble.

Last Orders for Churchill

"Oh gawd, he's sozzled again!" Lord Beaverbrook exclaimed.

He held up the brandy bottle to the light, noted it was nearly empty and then shook his head at the rotund figure, slouched over his writing desk, drooling over his papers and snoring loudly.

"His sense of timing is truly impeccable. The House, the country and the free world awaits his emergency address, and how does he prepare? By getting blotto! For Heaven's sake, Sawyers, how could you let him get into this state?!"

"My master is not one to be told what to do, and certainly not by his valet," Sawyers replied. "Shall I call a doctor? Or perhaps The Voice?"

"What good would that do?! No doctor can cure drunkenness and no impersonator can take his place in a live address to the House. This is not a BBC production!"

"Then might I be so bold as to suggest a postponement, owing to my master finding himself so... indisposed?"

There was a brief pause while Beaverbrook considered this and both men looked at the snoring hulk slumped on the chair.

"Can you hear that, Sawyers?"

"The snoring, Lord Beaverbrook?"

"The wolves, Sawyers, the wolves."

"Wolves, Your Lordship?"

"They are circling this Prime Slumberer of ours already. I heard them first after the Norway fiasco, in the distance, but they have come a lot closer now that France is about to collapse; and if he does not deliver the speech of his life tonight, I fear the whisperers who speak of peace treaties will start to howl."

"The Prime Minister would never allow it, sir!"

"Then they will have another Prime Minister."

Sawyers looked to the ground and tried to take this information in. His life had been spent in the service of his master and he had difficulty imagining that anyone could imagine life without him.

"Might I be permitted to enquire as to who 'they' are, Your Lordship?"

Beaverbrook turned away and walked toward the window. Sawyers noted that his shoulders fell and his back bent a little, as though he was weighed down by some terrible truth.

"The landed gentry; the monarchy; the church: the industrialists; the imperialists; the defeatists: the army; the navy and the air force: the newspaper barons and their invisible men who shape opinion: in short, the owners of this sceptered isle."

"But... are they not all committed to the fight against fascism?"

"They are committed to their own survival. If that means selling Europe into Nazi slavery, then they will do so. If that means an alliance with the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Commissars, then they will do so."

"Does the Prime Minister know of their treachery?"

"He thinks he can control them. He thinks himself a master of wolfish politics. The bottle feeds his delusions and he looks deeper and deeper into it... but let's see if we can pull him out of it. Sawyers — get some black coffee, and make it strong enough to wake the dead!"

"At once, Your Lordship," Sawyers said and left the room.

Beaverbrook pulled some papers from under Churchill's face, grimacing a little as he did so. He walked nearer to the lamp at the other side of the study, not so much for the light but to avoid the stench of alcohol that rose from Winston's gargantuan frame.

He spoke to himself as he flicked through the papers.

"Hum... 'Let us fight on and never surrender. I say that we should fight them on the beaches, the shores, the fields and the streets. We must defend our island, regardless of the loss of life and suffering.' Not bad, not bad at all."

"Not bad! What rot! It's bloody genius, you young whelp," Churchill announced and went to rise from his chair, but finding his legs unwilling, slumped back into it.

"Ah you're back in the land of the living, Winston, I see."

"I never left it, and never will; for the land of the living is the best place to live, and I have never heard anyone speak well of the other place; not from first-hand experience, in any case. Now, where's that confounded valet of mine? My glass is dry, and my tongue in sore need of lubrication."

"I say, old boy, don't you think you've had enough?"

"Nonsense! Quite the contrary, in fact, I think I need to drink a great deal more, for I must now drink for two."

"For two, Prime Minister?"

"For two, I say. France, as you may have noticed, has fallen; and I must therefore also imbibe for our Gallic friends, in their absence from the sodden field of battle. Oh heavy burden! Now, in the absence of my missing valet, please perform your duties as Minister for Munitions and furnish me with a brandy forthwith."

"But Winston, The House expects you within a couple of hours and..."

"And they shall find me willing, ready and able; but before that time, I must lubricate my parched vocal chords. Now, for the last time, I ask you, nay I tell you, to silence your tongue and pour me a brandy."

Beaverbrook ground his teeth and pursed his lips, but in the end, he did as requested. Tipping the decanter slowly, he poured a small measure of vintage brandy and went to add a larger measure of water to it, but before he could even touch the water decanter, Winston interrupted him.

"Do you mean to drown me?! If I had wanted water, I would have asked for it. Now, return your hand to the elixir I did request, eons ago, and fill me a proper measure. I must say, Lord B., that if you plan to manufacture this realm's munitions so slowly, we might as well surrender now, so poorly furnished shall we be."

Grudgingly, he filled the glass half-way and handed it to Churchill, whose eyes fixated on the glass as a baby's eyes would a milk bottle.

"Very well, Winston. Now, please promise me this will be your last. Sawyers will be here presently with some coffee and we can be an audience for you to rehearse your speech with."

"Rehearse!? Do you take me for a vaudeville performer? Would you like to me tread the boards of the scullery while I entertain you? Dance a jig to the Free State, perhaps?"

"I only meant..."

"I wonder what you meant... Perhaps you would rather deliver the speech yourself, Lord Beaverbrook? Perhaps you tire of your lordly title and seek another? There is something in your eyes of late, good friend, that troubles me."

"I am your most loyal friend. I only want to help you."

"Then to that end, I would ask you to kindly return my notes to me so that I might finish them, or were you planning to help me with that task also?"

"But Winston..."

"Get thee to a bomb factory, and be a breeder of munitions rather than my distemper!" Winston hollered, rising to his feet and staring straight at Beaverbrook with angry bloodshot eyes.

Lord Beaverbrook left, his eyes cast down, and Winston drained off the last of the brandy and moved to the other side of the room to fill his glass up again. He gulped two more glasses down in quick succession and brought the bottle back to his desk before returning to his notes.

"I shall drink brandy in my study, I shall drink brandy in the bars

I shall drink brandy till my eyes pop, and use the sockets for some jars."

He hiccupped and tried to focus once more on his notes.

***

The speech started well enough, with Churchill sounding only slightly slurred, but soon coming into his stride. An evacuation from Dunkirk, which a lesser orator might have tried to hush up or mention in passing, was dwelt on in detail, and so well described, that defeat became victory.

And then Beaverbrook noticed a strange look come over Churchill's face. He had seen it before, just before his collapse in front of the BBC microphone at Bush House, just before The Voice was hired to do all of his recordings.

"We shall go on to the end..." he had said and then stopped dead. To the rest of the House, the pause was momentary, and merely an opportunity for Churchill to adjust his monocle, but Beaverbrook felt the moment stretch out into the eternal night of a Nazi victory, and his mind had enough time to allow him to feel the free world fall under the odious grip of Nazi tyranny that Churchill had just mentioned.

He removed his monocle and Beaverbrook suspected that he was now too drunk to read and wondered what he would say next.

"... we shall fight in France," he said, but then seemed again to have forgotten the rest of his sentence.

Again the comma turned into a rack for Beaverbrook, so long did it stretch. He wondered how many more things the old devil could think to fight against; and he saw that with each addition, the resolve of his audience to actually fight grew stronger and stronger.

"... we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills ..."

Beaverbrook glanced at the house and saw them to be mesmerised; ready if called upon, to charge at any enemy, to fly into the jaws of hell, if need be.

"... we shall never surrender!"

And with that exclamation, what had seemed so possible only a few hours previously became unthinkable. Churchill's words became flesh and infused bloody valour into the dying heart the British parliament.

Beaverbrook smiled at the old man and saw that in this speech, on which his drunken head had slobbered only a few hours previously, he had ensured not only his own survival but England's too.

The Undertaker's Complaint

D., the undertaker, was of the opinion that death was not what it used to be.

He had been in the business of selling death all his life, and although the market was still healthy enough — since people continued to die, recession or no — he still felt that recent advances in science had robbed the profession of some of its dignity. Death was no longer spiritual, but medical.

He was also worried that the death of God had taken all gravitas from his ancient vocation. Few of his current clients seemed to expect the cadavers they entrusted him with to rise again at the last trumpet call. The dead, he feared, would soon become nothing more than waste to be managed. Where was the VITAE ETERNUM in waste management?

He was also slowly coming to the conclusion, only ten years from retirement, that his choice of career had been a mistake, that spending a life in the company of the dead had robbed him of his birthright, his life.

Alone in his funeral parlour, to the ticking of the grandfather clock, as a haggard autumn aged and fell, he entertained himself with fantasies of what his life might have been like had he done something different with it. He could have been many things, he thought, if only he had not inherited the business from his father — that dour man, that shadow creature.

Dong! Dong! And ten dongs more. The clock rang in midday, as it had done every day, for as long as he could remember. He hated the clock, he hated the deep-pile carpet, he hated the dark brown wooden furniture. He let his eyes run around the room, looking for something he did not hate, but there was nothing.

"We are doomed by the choices we do not make," he said to the grandfather clock, which was accustomed to suffer his observations on the ringing of the hour.

Perhaps he should have gone to university and studied literature, he thought, tapping his silver pen in vexation on the oak counter, wondering why he had let his mother talk him into taking over the business on the death of his father.

He paced up and down the parlour, his form only dimly visible from outside, through the smoked glass of the windows.

His ruminations were interrupted by the ring of a bell which told him that someone was entering the funeral parlour. He nodded solemnly to her while walking backwards to resume his place behind the counter.

Instinctively, he hid the trade paper he had been doodling on, folding into it the bitter aftertaste of his life unlived, and with more difficulty than usual, he made his face take on an air of calm consolation. In his trade, he felt, it was essential to maintain decorum at all times. Histrionics were for the friends and relatives of the deceased — who had paid dearly for this privilege — but the undertaker had to remain above emotion and be as serene as the cadaver.

The woman wore a dishevelled white dress and a great deal of make-up. Under the powder and the paste, it was hard to discern her age, but it was broadly similar to his own, the early fifties, but time had been even less kind to her than to him. She was thin and gaunt and there was something of the bat about her: the stretched skin, the hanging jowls, the shrunken lips and protruding teeth.

The woman wore dark sunglasses, a wide-brimmed hat and most important of all, a wedding ring. The undertaker immediately classified her as an eccentric widow, his least favourite type of client. The recently bereaved talked incessantly of the lost one, as if these words might resurrect them, but widows in their fifties talked most of all. "Given the opportunity," his father used to warn him, "they will talk until the end of time, rather than the face the butt end of a life that's waiting for them. The only thing an old woman hates more than the company of her husband is solitude."

She approached him and he noted how unstable she was on her feet. He wondered if she was a little drunk and disliked her even more. His distaste increased yet further when she was near enough to smell, as she clearly had not bathed in quite some time, and the perfume she wore to mask this somehow only accentuated it.

"Good afternoon, madam. How may I be of assistance?" he asked, holding the palms of his hands together and tilting his head slightly.

"I wish to make a complaint," she said imperiously.

Her shrill voice make the hair on the back of the undertaker's neck stand on end, but he maintained exactly the same professional demeanour.

"I'm sorry to hear that, madam. May I enquire as to the exact nature of your query?"

"It's not a query, it's a complaint."

"Indeed, madam, but might I be so bold as to ask for more particulars?"

"I'm not satisfied."

"Yes, madam."

"No, sir."

"No, madam."

"No, sir. Not satisfied at all. It won't do, I tell you. It won't do."

"What 'won't do', madam?"

"This won't do! I'm not happy."

There was a small pause while D. waited for the anger within him to subside. He wanted to rail against the woman and tell her that he wasn't happy either, that no-one he knew was happy, that the only time he ever saw happy people was at the end of American movies.

His bile was partly due to his melancholy mood, of course, but even apart from that, there was something truly repellent about this customer, something altogether unnatural, and D. hated her with a passion that was not part of his nature.

But funeral parlours cannot reserve the right to refuse admission. "We all have the right to die," his father had told him, with a smile, or as near as he could come to one.

"Madam, I trust you will forgive my bluntness, but I would be more able to address your distress if I had more to assess."

"What?!" the woman shrieked. "Speak English, sir! Are you a foreigner?"

"No, madam. What is wrong, madam? What is your 'complaint'?"

"I'm not happy!"

In D.'s mind, he picked up a nearby brass paperweight and smashed it into the woman's skull. The violence of the image shocked him, for he was not a man given to violent imagery — or imagery of any kind, for that matter. Even his dreams were mundane and rarely went beyond the quotidian. In the dream of the night before, for example, he had gone to the supermarket and completed his weekly shopping, all without incident.

"Not happy with what, madam?" he persisted, looking her straight in the face for the first time and managing, only just, not to wince at the tautness of her skin and its glistening complexion.

"My coffin."

"Your coffin?"

"Yes, my coffin! Why do you keep repeating everything that I say? Are you a simpleton?"

"No, madam. What seems to be the problem with your coffin?" he asked her quickly, unable to remember having ever met her before, let alone having sold her a coffin.

"It's not the right size. Far too small. You can't even sit upright in it! I want to exchange it for a larger model. I want a deluxe coffin. One with a modern entertainment system, like they have on aeroplanes nowadays."

"You want a TV in your coffin?" he asked, hiding the incredulity in his voice.

"Oh really, my good man. If I have to repeat myself to you one more time, I really will have to speak to the manager."

"That won't be necessary, madam. But I might be better able to satisfy your needs if I knew why you wanted a television in your coffin."

"There's not a lot to do when you're dead, you know, and there's all the time in the world to do it in. Death is longer than any cruise, you know."

"Yes madam, I know."

"No, sir, you don't know. You're still alive!" the woman spat, slamming her fist on the desk.

The undertaker looked at the stretched skin on her hand and realised what had been troubling him since the woman entered his funeral parlour. What he had mistaken for old age, poor posture and infrequent bathing, was, in fact, the result of a poorly executed embalming procedure. And that smell, he now realised, was not the microbial effluent of living sweat, but the acrid fumes of leaking formaldehyde.

The undertaker tried to calm himself. This, he knew, could spell the End of Days his father had prophesised.

Embalming was not common in England, so the undertaker outsourced all such requests to another firm, which had recently been shut down by the government, after the popular press uncovered its use of unqualified illegal immigrant labour, several of whom were also implicated in a necrophilia ring. 'Satanist Slav Sex Shocker!' the headline read. The undertaker must have referred this woman there for embalming, but the workmanship was clearly shoddy, and he feared that his own funeral parlour might be held responsible. A lawsuit of this magnitude, he realised, could be crippling.

The woman dragged her clenched fist from the counter, which make a squeaking sound, since the force of her blow had ruptured the skin around one of her knuckles and fluid was trickling from it.

"What I want to know is why there is no entertainment provided!"

"Well madam, death is a time for repose, a time for —"

"I've never been so bored in all my life!"

"Quite, madam, but we've had no complaints before. The dead have been perfectly happy with our services up until now."

"Well times are changing, sir. We're setting up a Resident's Committee at the cemetery, I'll have you know. The dead worm has turned!"

"Indeed, madam. One must air ones grievances, but —"

"And some kind of ventilation system needs to be set up down there."

"But you don't breathe, madam. The dead don't breathe."

"I am well aware of what the dead do and don't do, sir. I am, as you should have noticed in your professional capacity, quite, quite dead."

"Yes, madam, I am aware of that."

"And are you aware of how badly a coffin smells after a few days, sir? Do they teach you that in funeral school? I demand that Air Conditioning and a shower be installed down there, toute de suite!" No-one ever thinks of the needs of the dead AFTER burial. What about some post-mortem care, that's what I say?!"

The undertaker wondered if his firm should offer a 'deluxe package' of some kind, providing all the services the woman had requested. In this way, he saw, a monthly charge could be exacted, leading to a more steady income. One of the downsides to the funeral trade was the absence of repeat business, since the dead only die once. But if the undertaker could provide a range of services after the funeral, there might be no end to the profitability of the deceased.

He made a mental note to draw up a business plan later on, but for the moment, he had to return his attention to his erstwhile and yet current client.

She droned on.

"... just like my husband. And that's another thing. I want him to be relocated to another part of the cemetery. I couldn't put up with him when he was alive and I'm damn well not going to put up with him now he's dead. I want a divorce!"

"But the dead don't divorce, madam. It's simply not done."

"Will you stop telling me what cannot be done and start doing something! My late husband has been tom-catting around with every shrouded harlot he can lay his decomposing hands on and I intend to divorce him. I have grounds, sir. Now, please instruct your lawyers to begin legal proceedings at once. And I shall, of course, expect the coffin improvements I require to be free-of-charge. The dead have no discernable income, I'm afraid, and all my savings were eaten up by death taxes and medical bills."

The woman who was staining his carpet, he now realised, was a penniless deadbeat, but on the positive side, she would not possess the financial wherewithal to employ a lawyer, so he need not worry about an embalming lawsuit. The dead, he was sure, could not qualify for legal aid.

He determined to be rid of her as soon as possible.

"Ah, well, madam. I'm afraid all sales are final and we have a strict policy of no-refunds."

"I'm not asking for a refund. I want better after-sales service."

"Yes, but if you check the small print in your contract, madam, you'll see that our services clearly end at burial. You should, perhaps, enquire at the Cemetery Maintenance Department. This really is their concern, you know."

"But the Cemetery Maintenance Department sent me to the Department of Health, and they sent me to the Morgue, and they sent me to the Church, and they sent me here. I've been running from pillar to post all day, and in my condition, that's not an easy business. Do you know how uncomfortable corpse life can be, sir? Do you? Do you know the pain of death?!"

"Well, of course not, madam, but —"

"But nothing! Life is wasted on the living, I tell you. Wasted!"

"Forgive my brusqueness, madam, but I really must insist you return to the Cemetery Maintenance Department and lodge an official housing improvement claim with them. It's a CMD matter and has nothing to do with this funeral parlour. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have other pressing matters to attend to."

The undertaker busied himself with shuffling some papers in an officious manner. Losing heart, the woman creaked her way towards the door and hobbled out of the funeral parlour.

"You'll be dead too one day, you know. See how you like it!" she said, before slamming the door.

When she was gone he cleaned his counter and inspected the damage to his carpet, which took less time to clean than he had feared, unlike the smell, which lingered for days.

The grandfather clock struck one and the undertaker spoke to it.

"Bloody dead people — never satisfied anymore. When I was young, dead people were different. Death isn't what it used to be."

Proppland

It was a dark place, darker than dark matter.

Character X turned his head this way and that but there was nothing to see.

A perfect blackness in all directions

An immaculate absence of form

Absolute nothingness

A void of adjectives

A total abyss

Zero

Zip

No

0

.

"Hello!" he hollered, vexed by the silence.

Two small elliptical points of light shone in front of him. Slowly the loose outline of a body grew around them, but it was almost transparent and lacked substance. It was a shining silver ghost of a form whose light came from within.

In a circle around Character X, seven large tablets of ancient rock grew in luminescence.

Beyond the henge of stones, a mist ensued, but through it X could make out paths winding their way through eternity. Like worms, they wriggled and squirmed and attached themselves to this or that rocky tablet.

Character X counted the paths and noted that there were 31 of them, each beginning and ending with a small signpost that said Function, followed by a number.

Above and below the inner circle of stones and the outer circle of worming roads, bathed in a cold fog, there was only the starless inky night.

Character X focused on the tablet nearest him. It was two-metres tall, one-metre wide and one-metre deep. It seemed to breathe, this curious rock, creaking as it expanded and contracted. X listened hard, and thought he heard a hollow rocky heartbeat coming from within the stone.

As the heartbeat grew stronger and the breathing more pronounced, the light from the stone became more powerful and he saw the word 'Hero' had been etched into the rock. He looked to the other six rocks and saw that they also had words written on them: 'Villain', 'Helper', 'Dispatcher', 'False Hero', 'Princess', 'Donor'.

Character X walked from one stone tablet to another, and as he got nearer each rock, its breathing grew deeper and its heartbeat faster. As he moved away, the rock dimmed and lost its life force.

When he had completed one rotation, the ghost-like form in the centre addressed him.

—I am Propp, chief architect and morpher of tales

His voice was deep and filled with a pulsating reverb, a voice that carried the stain of dark energy.

"I am... how odd! I can't seem to remember my name. Well, anything's possible in dreams, isn't it?" Character X mused, more to himself than to the figure.

—This is no dream, Sphere of Action

This is the Chamber of Rebirth

You are to be moulded

"Rebirth? But I'm not dead yet. There must be some kind of mistake!"

—Silence role creature!

You are dead and you will be reborn

Choose your role for the Introductory Sequence

"I am not a role! I am an individual... it's just that I can't remember who I am at the moment. I want to see a doctor. I have rights, you know!"

—Roles have no rights!

You are secondary nothings

You are props for the Creator to hang his garments

"Well, we'll see about that! I want to speak to this Creator right now, if only to deny his existence."

—We do not dictate to the Creator: he dictates to us.

He is the Creator and we are his creations

All following the dictates of 7-7-31

He commands and we perform

He is the story master

"I'm no-one's puppet! I'm a human being. I'm... oh damn, I wish I could remember who I was. I mean, who I am.

—You are a million still-born dead fantasies

You are the psychic jelly of carrion past

You were once The Ministry Fox

You were once David Vincent

You were once Inaction Man

You will be moulded

You will be reborn

You will be

Will be

Will

"But I..."

—Hark!

The Creator types

It is the time of Rebirth!

All of Proppland shook as the hammer blows were belted out on the keyboard. Lightning filled the skyline. The seven stones spun and dizzied Character X. He looked beyond them and saw the serpent paths coil and uncoil with a frenzied determination to reproduce.

The air filled with words and a thousand voices spoke at once. Character X fell to his knees and covered his ears to block out the crushing chaos of noise.

—Surrender to the void and be reborn!

Propp's eyes were now a burning red, his hands transformed into claw-like fountain pens.

"No! I am... I am me... I... I..."

—There is no 'I'!

There is only the Story.

Even the Creator cannot create

Even the Creator is only a cipher

In the end there is only seven, seven and thirty one

7-7-31: 7-7-31: 7-7-31

The rocks spinning slowed and they began to chant the number. The paths rose up and coiled themselves inward toward the centre of the circle; 31 of them staring at Character X and whispering "7-7-31" over and over.

"Stop!" Character X begged them, but they continued.

Propp hovered toward him and wrapped him in his cloak.

—There are seven story types

There are seven story characters

There are 31 roads we call functions

I release you from your former role:

I condemn you to another

There is nothing new under the sun:

There is no escape from the

Trinity of the Story

Propp lifted his cloak and Character X rose to his feet and walked toward the rock called 'Hero'. He opened his arms and was swallowed by the rock, which took his form and dissolved it.

All light faded and the blackness returned.

***

Character X opened his eyes and saw nothing. After a while six rocks were visible.

***

An essay on Propp can be found in this collection

The Guest in the Attic

"A speck of dust. Or less. That's all any of you are."

"So, do you want this tea or not?" I asked him.

I'll admit my tone was a bit harsh, but after a month of a guest like that, you'd be a tad on the curt side too.

"Why must you turn away from this truth, as if you were turning your nose up at rancid milk?" he said, ignoring my offer of tea.

Truth is rancid, alright. Take my word for it. I've been living with him for months. What can you do with truth? It won't feed or clothe you. Truth won't pay the rent either, or contribute in any other way to the household budget. Quite a scrounger, Mr Truth, truth be told.

That's why I decided to get rid of him, my guest.

He appeared one night in my attic. Uninvited, unannounced and unnatural. It gave me quite a shock, as you might imagine. I thought it was just rats scurrying around up there. So, armed with some poison and a few rat traps, I climbed up there one morning, with murder on my mind. Rodenticide. But Rat-o-Kill has no power at all over Mr Truth.

"I am Truth," he said, in that booming voice of his, with all that pompous echo and reverb.

It would be a lie to say I wasn't shaking in my slippers. I mean, it's not the kind of thing you expect to find in your attic, is it? This white shrouded blurry thing. But if there's one thing I learned in school, it's to never show you're scared. Bullies sense fear and teachers feed on it.

"I'm Fred," I said, calm as you like. "And without meaning to be rude or anything, would you mind telling me what it is you're doing, sitting there on me dead granny's rocking chair?"

"I am Truth," he said again.

"So why don't you answer my question, then?"

It was fierce hard to get anything sensible out of the ole emanation, but from what I could make out, he had come to reveal the mysteries of the universe to me.

"Are you sure you haven't got the wrong house, Mr Truth?" I asked him. "I'm a catholic, you see. I've no need of truth. Wouldn't you rather be bedding down in the Holy See, with His Holiness? Or if that's a bit far, you could try Father McGinty's up the road. He's got a lovely parish house, and there's plenty of room.

"I am Truth," he said again.

"Be that as it may, you're certainly no conversationalist!"

It was a long old evening, stuck up there in the attic with Mr Truth. He kept going and an about philosophy and all that claptrap. I nodded and tried to look interested, but after a couple of hours, I couldn't take any more and I told him I had to turn in for the night. Not that I could get much sleep, what with the noise of him and that creaky old rocking chair.

The next morning, when I tried to go to work, didn't he go and materialise in front of the door. Gave the cat an almighty fright, so he did. He told me that I had to stay and have the truth revealed to me.

"Cataracts of ignorance cloud your vision. I will wash away these scales of ignorance from your eyes," he said.

"Well at least I have eyes, you... piece of light!" I said to him, and stormed back into my kitchen.

A fortnight passed like this. The boss called me and gave me some old guff about cutbacks and the recession and all, but I knew he'd given me the chop because I kept calling in sick. Mr Truth had no problems at all about me telling lies. Bloody hypocrite!

After another week of this malarkey, with not a scrap of food for days and the bank threatening to repossess, I made up my mind to tell the old git to get out. After polishing off the whiskey for Dutch courage, I clambered up the stairs to the attic. I staggered towards his chair, where he rocked back and forth like some old sea hag.

"Look here, Mr Truth, you shapeless blackguard. I want you out. Sling you're hook!" I said and hiccupped.

"I have come to tell you the truth. I cannot leave until you hear it."

"Just say it and go," I yelled, a bit dizzy.

"You need to listen," he said.

"I am listening," I said.

I was feeling more than a bit woozy now, what with the whiskey and the fighting, and this cantankerous guest of mine.

"Listen harder," he shouted.

He stood up and moved toward me. He kept going in and out of focus. He didn't look white now. He was turning black. Blacker than shadow.

He bent down and whispered in my ear.

"You are dead, and I am Truth," he said.

He lifted up his cloak and took out this massive scythe. And then he whips me head off. Is that how you should repay hospitality?!

And that's why I've decided to lodge this formal complaint against Mr Truth with the Department of Mortality.

I look forward to receiving your reply in the fullness of time.

Yours faithfully

P

The Last Blog and Testament of the Shui Gui

Ghosts make terrible students. Never tutor one of them. No matter how much they hound and haunt you; no matter how much they whine and howl. Just say 'no' to ghost pupils.

I know you don't believe in ghosts. Few westerners do, of course. But the Chinese believe. Always have done. Confucius himself says that we should "respect ghosts and gods, but keep away from them." But what can you do if they won't keep away from you?

Anyway, if you're reading this blog post, it's because you knew me once. You want to know why I left my shoes on the beach and swam out to sea; why I shuffled off the mortal coil to swim with the fishes; why I let the black sea take me.

So, rather than leave a riddle, and so that the blameless can live free of guilt, I'll leave this blog post. It's a will of sorts, I suppose, this last blog and testament. Having nothing of value to give, I can bequeath only my story. Apologies to those of you who might have been expecting a larger inheritance. Rolling stones gather neither moss nor money.

As you may or may know — since I lose touch like snakes shed skin — I moved to Cheung Chau, one of Hong Kong's outlying islands, about a month ago. I was looking for lower rent and lower stress. I still needed to work in Hong Kong, but I couldn't take living there anymore. So, I moved from the island to an island, from the island at the edge of a continent to an island at the edge of an island.

Take every image you have of Hong Kong and Cheung Chau is the opposite. There's no traffic, no skyscrapers, no fighting for pavement space. It's charming, in a ninetieth-century kind of way.

For such a tiny place, it's got a lot of names. Literally, it means Long Island. Most call it Bone Island, because of its shape. One morbid student of mine warned me that many people call it Ghost Island. That didn't worry me, of course. I had no time for the spiritual or the spectral. I'm a man of atoms, an atom man.

How happy I was in that first week: swimming in the South China Sea every morning, pedalling along Peak Road in the afternoon, ferreting my way around all the tiny alleys and backstreets in the centre of the island.

The first thing I noticed was how many cemeteries there are. Many Hong Kong Chinese choose to be buried here. It's got good feng shui, apparently. The deserted granite cliffs on the north and south of the island are dotted with graveyards. Headstones, each with a dour photo of the departed, stare out to sea from prime real estate. The less wealthy dead have to sprawl behind them, wedged into suburban necropoles. The underclass have no sea view at all. They're poured into urns, staked on top of one another, in tenement towers. Catholics have their own cemetery too. We segregated ourselves, in death as in life.

The graveyards didn't bother me. They never have. From my maudlin teen ramblings through Dublin's Glasnevin Cemetery to my pretensions twenties in Père Lachaise, I've always felt more at home with the dead than the living. You don't have to bother with small talk. There's no hidden agenda with a cadaver. The dead don't want anything from you. Well, not usually.

I soon found out that Cheung Chau was called Ghost Island because of its "suicide holidays". It started in 1989, when a woman, dressed in a traditional red costume, stabbed her son to death and then hung herself. The Bella Vista Villas witnessed many similarly gruesome deaths afterwards. Dozens of desperate souls ended it all, in grotty little rented rooms, in the shabby holiday flats that hunch over the northern part of Tung Wan Beach. "Copy-cat suicides for the terminally unimaginative," I remember writing, in one of my more callous blog posts.

Unable to move on to their next life, the spirits linger on in Cheung Chau. Ghosts ramble and rumble through the narrow alleys and lanes. They're most often sighted at dawn and dusk, or in a fog.

I didn't believe a word of it. The more ghost stories there were, the cheaper my rent would become. "Let the sheeted dead squeak and gibber in the Cheung Chau streets," I wrote.

But then I met one. Yes, I met one. I can imagine the faces you're all pulling now. I know there's no point trying to convince you that I haven't taken one magic mushroom too many, so I'll just continue with my story. I've got a tide to catch and she-who-must-be-obeyed is waiting for me. I must push on.

"What do ghosts look like?" you want to know. Forget the ball and chain cliché and all that white sheet nonsense. A ghost is a projection, a mirror image of the person in life, so they look just like everyone else. Maybe a little greyer, a little more blurry around the edges. The projection fades and the images gets fuzzier, in time, but for a year or so, you'd never know they were dead. Not by looking at them.

I certainly saw nothing odd in her, not at first glance. She was sitting across the aisle from me in the ferry, staring in my direction. I assumed she was looking out the window and tried not to catch her eye. She looked like most teenage girls in Hong Kong: long black hair, immaculately combed; olive complexion, slightly whitened; a slender lithe body, like a cat. Her face was more intense than normal though. I remember noticing that.

The ferry docked at eleven at night and everyone got off. I inched my way off the crowded gangplank, then moved through the crowded centre of the island, passed food stalls on one side and convenience stores on the other. After about five minutes, the crowds thinned out.

I paused for a while in Hung Sing Square. At the other end of it, outside a temple, a funeral was taking place. A band played loud music to scare away evil spirits. I couldn't help but notice how much they looked like a mariachi band, with lutes instead of guitars. The music sounded more Indian than Chinese, like they were trying to charm snakes out of the coffin.

The mourners were dressed in white hooded cloaks. The immediate family stood around the coffin. More distant relatives and friends further back. Hell bank notes and papier-mâché offerings were burnt in a large rusted urn, a couple of metres tall. Miniature paper cars, boats, and televisions were placed in the urn. The smoke turned white. A ring of monks, in yellow, green and blue silk, chanted pieces of scriptures. Relatives of the deceased bowed again and again, in a ritual I didn't understand.

My eyes were drawn toward the large black and white photo of the deceased on top of the coffin. The ceremony I was watching came at the end of the twenty-four hour wake. I'd passed the old woman's photo on my way to work that morning. She was impossibly old, her face so deeply lined that a tram could ride along its grooves.

I felt like an interloper, like a macabre voyeur. I turned to my right. The young girl was still beside me. A couple of metres away, but still staring at me.

We walked together, two strangers, away from the square and past the seafood restaurants in the harbour. She was too close for comfort, so I walked faster, but she matched my speed and stayed beside me. She hummed some awful K-Pop tune I half recognised.

I stopped suddenly, pretending to study a menu, at the last restaurant. She stopped too.

I felt colder than I should have, like it was ten degrees rather than twenty. My heart began to pound, but even my racing pulse couldn't warm me.

"I hate languages," she said.

It wasn't the conversational opener I had expected. I didn't know how to respond.

"Do I know you?" I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. I've had thousands of students, in a dozen countries. They're all starting to look alike.

"All other subjects are 5's. English is 3. Need five stars in English. English is the problem. English is the blame."

"English is how I make my living. I'm an English teacher," I said.

"Yes, you are the teacher. You are the solution to the problem. Need five stars. You will help me."

She smiled then, with a mouth too full of teeth. The smile was frozen on her face, locked in place.

"I'm afraid I never take on private students," I told her.

This was true enough. I never teach one-to-one. Far too draining, far too intimate.

"You are my teacher," she said. She gave me another one of her awful smiles. "Teach me," she demanded, raising her voice and dropping her smile.

"I'm sorry, but like I said, I never teach private classes. I —"

"You are my teacher. I need 5 stars. Teach me!"

The conversation went on like this for a while. Each time I said "no" I felt my body temperature drop a little. Soon my hands, nose and feet were freezing. The cold spread to my arms and legs, invaded my core.

It switched off my brain and I agreed to teach her. Higher order brain functions, I remember from my psychology degree, are repressed by fear. The amygdale comes to the fore, like some primordial alligator ancestor.

"Tomorrow, tomorrow. I'll teach you tomorrow. Leave me now. Leave me!"

She walked away. The coldness left with her.

Wheezing and shaking, I looked around me. The alfresco diners stared at me, with noodles suspended in mid air and mouths dropped open. When they saw me looking at them, they looked down and muttered to each other. I'd never heard a group of Cantonese people speak so quietly.

"Gwi lo gau cho," I heard one of them shout, when I was walking away. It means "crazy foreigner", or "f**ked up ghost face", to give it a more literal translation.

I got home, poured myself several stiff drinks, and tried to sleep. In the morning, the cold light of day and the hangover made me feel braver.

"She was just some teen, driven neurotic by exam pressure," I told myself. If I ever saw her again, I'd just have to stand my ground and tell her I wasn't available. Full stop.

I didn't feel nearly so brave the following night. On the ferry journey home, I kept imagining I'd seen her out of the corner of my eye. I spent the first part of the journey jerking my head left and right, like some junky waiting for the man, or a schizophrenic listening to the bickering voices in his head.

To clear my own head, I went to the observation deck at the back of the ferry. Spumes of black smoke merged with low clouds. There was a low nasty smell of marine diesel. Hong Kong was far in the distance, its lights twinkling through the smog. It reminded me of the Milky Way (or the "Silver Stream", as the Chinese call it). The city was a band of light, with darkness above and below it.

The old ship ploughed through the water, passing tiny islets. I sat on a metal bench and rubbed my eyes. It had been a long day, in the middle of a difficult month, in a not altogether stress-free year. I suddenly felt my age, and felt the weight of an old age to come.

When I opened my eyes she was sitting beside me, staring at me with those unblinking eyes of hers.

"Teach me. I need five stars. English is the problem. You solution. You are my teacher."

"I'm not your teacher. I never was. I never will be!" I shouted, standing up and pointing my finger at her.

In spite of my feigned bravado, I was moving away from her. Soon, my back was tight against the ship's metal railings. I looked down. The frothy white water, three decks below, swirled me into dizziness.

The noise of a door slamming shut made me look away. I saw a couple of passengers staring at me, from behind the window at the top half of the door. The girl had vanished.

I hurried back inside and chased after them.

"You saw her, didn't you? You saw her disappear. You saw her, didn't you?!"

I knew by the look in their eyes that they hadn't seen anyone. Only me. A foreigner shouting at the wind.

I realised then that no-one would ever see her. No-one except me. I remembered Orwell writing that "perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one." I realised, in a very calm and rational way, that the world now thought me mad.

The ferry docked and everyone got off. I sensed people nudging each other and pointing at me. Cheung Chau's a small place. It wouldn't be long before I was cast as the village loony, the strange old man no-one talks to. The one mothers warn their children to keep away from.

I walked home, past the restaurants. I knew, without looking, that she was walking beside me. I felt cold, like the cold when you're dead. No matter how fast I walked, the cold wouldn't go away.

Soon I was running, the wind cackling in my ears. She ran beside me, her face as still as always.

It took forever to open the door to my apartment block. Even longer to turn the key in my flat's door. Shaking hands will not be steadied. She was still beside me, humming that awful tune, staring at me.

"Class now," she said.

I poured myself a whiskey first, in the same way that a child would pour himself a glass of cola, with both hands on the bottle and aiming for the middle of the glass, filling it to the brim as quickly as possible.

"Class number one," I said.

What else could I say? What else could I do? I could have run screaming into the night, but she would have followed me.

"Class number one," she repeated.

"Tenses," I said. "Past, present and future. I live, I lived, I will live."

"I live ..." she said, and paused.

A frown crossed her face. It was the first emotion I'd seen on her.

"I live ..." she repeated.

"And the past tense? What's the past tense?"

"I live ..."

"And the future tense. What's the future?"

"I live ... You are my teacher. I need 5 stars. English is the problem. Teach me."

The lesson continued like this for another excruciating fifty minutes. I drank more whiskey to give me the illusion of warmth. I'd put on so many layers of clothes and gloves that I couldn't even pour. So I just drank straight from the bottle. Again and again, I tried to teach tense and time to someone, to something, that couldn't understand either.

The next night was the same, and the night after that, and the week after that. I gave up going to work and waited for them to dismiss me. It didn't take long.

My one remaining pupil has moved in with me. She never sleeps. When I wake up in the morning she's sitting at the end of the bed, in a lotus position, demanding to be taught. When I brush my teeth, she's in the mirror behind me, telling me that I am her teacher. When I go to bed, she lies behind me, humming that same old tune. She sucks up the heat of the six heaters I leave on all night. My feet hurt so much I can barely walk. Blackened toenails show the varnish of frostbite.

She's here now, as I write to you. Standing behind me, watching the words appear on the screen. I am her teacher. She studies everything I do. She studies all and understands nothing. She doesn't even understand that I'm insulting her now. Do you, Ice Maiden?

She even studied me when I studied her. It wasn't hard to piece her life together. A little internet research revealed that her name was Janice Wong. She had killed herself after failing to get into university. Right here on the island, in one of Cheung Chau's suicide villas. Her results were excellent, except for English. English was the problem.

She swam out to sea one night, at the witching hour. When she reached the shark nets, a couple of hundred metres from the shore, she emptied her lungs and climbed down into the abyss. Pulled herself down, climbed down the ropes of the shark net. Soon, she reached the sea bed. There, she took the handcuff that dangled from the locked one around her wrist and fastened it to the thick slimy rope of the shark net.

She's been sighted before. Locals call her the shui gui, or water ghost. Parents use her legend to warn their children against swimming alone, or going too far away from the shore.

I also found out that her former English teacher had committed suicide shortly after she had. Doctors blamed a bout of acute schizophrenia. He'd gone to Singapore to escape her, but she followed him. As she would surely follow me, to the very ends of the Earth. His suicide note consisted of nothing more than a quote from Woolf's Waves.

"Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me."

There's an old Chinese proverb that says that insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different outcomes. In many ways, ghosts are insane. They can't learn. They make terrible students. After me, she will find other teachers. Unless ...

If English is the problem, and I am the solution, then a double death may bring us both peace. The haunter and the haunted can both be released.

You see, friends and former-friends, acquaintances and curious net surfers, I have convinced myself that the only happy ending is a tragic one.

I will swim with my ghost and the waves shall free us. I will teach her and she will learn.

You see, you see, the black sea takes me.

Necronet Explorer

"Necrophilia is punishable by death. All violators will be deleted."

Statute 32 of the Time Laws was well known to me, and yet I plundered the world of the dead regardless. It was not because I wished to join the dead, but rather because I wished to understand them. I wished to name the nameless.

But what I wished and wanted does not concern you, Honourable Screenface. Your only concern is what I did and what I learned, and how much of this knowledge I passed on to other cells in Necronet.

Very well, let me state it plainly in plain text, and let the mindworms mark my testimony as true, post-mortem. But face, if you can, this unwholesome truth: the City is dying.

* * *

Through my illicit reading of the ancient texts, I have learned that once there were many cities, scattered across the continents, and that each of them was different from the others. While this is hard for the modern mind to comprehend, it is certainly the case that the City, as we know it, is not eternal.

Rather, there used to be many cities, and space between these cities. This space was called 'the countryside' and was quite like some of the wilder municipal parks that can still be found in many of the Historic Districts, except that it was far larger and had far fewer pedestrian degenerates.

Why the government should seek to hide this information I could not imagine, but I was determined to find out.

The search required much secrecy on my part and a great deal of movement, as the GPS records of my various identities will show. But my erratic path across both hemispheres of the City was not intended, as the Screenface suggests, to enable me to act as courier to other Necro-terrorists but rather to enable me to access information points with obsolete security systems.

On these dusty interfaces, some unused in decades, the false ID's in my possession, and my skill as a systems analyst allowed me to access blocked data banks and even to download texts to a pornreader. And in archaic translations of lost languages I saw the truth of the Necros: the past is not the present, and by extension, the future may be different too.

* * *

Once my access was detected or, rather, suspected, I had to ditch one false identity immediately and move on to another — to another name and another location. Onwards, onwards, ever onwards. I have lived this peripatetic life for almost fifteen years, freelancing in over a hundred work cells under a hundred different names.

I have seen much of the City. And I have come to a most startling conclusion: the City is dying. The highways, motorways and the interdistricts are still very busy, but while the roads are full, the work cells frenetic, and the entertainment centres bustling, the City's core is hollow.

Let me explain. In the company of indigents I have travelled around the hexagonal suburbs that surround the work cells. The indigents scavenge in local suburbs and know where the security camera blind spots can be found. The criminals' life is surprisingly easy, since only they walk the streets; and were it not for their crippling addiction to pleasure drugs, few would ever get caught.

All eyes are peering into the Network, the virtual abyss; and the City, which seems so full, is actually quite empty. It is only a membrane — wafer-thin and bodiless.

The indigents and I would simply climb over crumbling walls, past weedy, uncared-for gardens, and peer through grimy windows.

Most rooms were empty, and even in the ones that were occupied I always saw the same scene. No-one ever noticed the face at the window gazing in. The occupants were all plugged into the Network — generally the pleasure portals — and there they would sit, completely immobile, for as long as I cared to look at them. Like zombies in stasis.

* * *

In my confidence, I grew careless.

One night, we broke into an abandoned house. In some districts they outnumber occupied houses. And in this house I found a forgotten access point. Unable to resist, I used the ID of my latest indigent accomplice to access the Network.

She was busy rifling the house, and I saw no danger in my manoeuver. And that, of course, was my downfall. Never trust an indigent: they have nothing to lose and love nothing. Their conscience dissolves, pill by pill, and in the end there is nothing human left in them.

I realise now that she had been studying me suspiciously for some time. She rarely took her happiness pills in my presence, because, I assumed, she imagined I had lewd intentions. A sex machine is more hygienic, but many citizens still prefer to use an indigent's body, and she was certainly a beautiful creature. But the only thing that really aroused me was the past.

I still recall the last text I was reading when she turned me in. It was a summary of something called The Iliad. It described a time when cities fought against each other, travelling over the lesser fish banks, which were called seas.

* * *

Now there is one City, one People and one Network. Now there is one time: the present. Necros, the lovers of the past, are its only enemy.

As for the demonised Necronet, the memory hunters and the mindworms will show what I have already told you: I never made contact with it. I die as I have lived — alone.

My last words are these: the past was different from the present and the future will be, too.

6 Hits from the Safe Zone

Random Automated Transcript

Loc Ref: EU-Cavern 42-Cell 4284-

Time Ref: Minus 9:00 to StatCount (428AB Month 7)

B1-How many hits now?

B2-948, only 52 more to go.

B1-We'll never make it. There's only 9 mins left. That's six hits a min.

B2-We've done it before, we can do it again. We just need a surge. Focus.

B1-But —

B2-I'll delete your 'but' from your arsebook if U don't get tapping! Stop whining and get back to commenting?! U know the stats: 73% of all hits last month were the result of comments on other Lifeblogs, so get comming.

B1-Yeah, I know the stats. We all know the stats. Is there anyone still alive on this web of rock who doesn't know all about stats?! We're weaned on numbers.

B2-Look, we don't have time for this now, blogmate. Find a blog, speed read it, make a fatuous complimentary comment, and pray to Gates they do likewise.

B1-There's million of us out there, all trying to pull the same scam. Just look at the traffic metres-the Net's on 86 and rising... A million rats tapping in their cells in the cavern cities of five continents. Zombie surfers.

B2-Oh spare me the old world poetry! Maybe we wouldn't be in this mess in your posts were a bit more user-friendly a bit less weird!

B1-I thought you liked my posts.

B2-I do, but come on, what was that last one about?! Some play about mad dead people.

B1-It was a homage to Beckett!

B2-I didn't see any Beckett on the visitor path register.

B1-He's a dead playwright!

B2-Dead playwrights don't get U no hits! The dead don't surf!

B1-Well, it shouldn't be just about hits. What about meaning?

B2-In the name of Arsebook, will U delete the blogosophy and execute your share of the cyberwork. This isn't a role play game! The cull figures are set to —

B1-I know, I know. Look, U Stumble and Digg us, and I'll do the bogus comments.

B2-That's the cyberspirit! No one can boguecom like U can!

[2 minutes silence]

B2-Oh shetvers — we're down to 4 minutes and we're still 39 hits from the safe zone. We'll have to go viral.

B1-But U know what the Committee says about viral?! The Webpol executed ten thousand shutdowns last month alone.

B2-We can get away with it. Just skim the title, make your comment look kinda relevant, and hope they don't notice. The Netpols are snowed under.

B1-But what f —

B2-In precisely 4 minutes, we won't have to worry about the Netpols coz our target won't have been met and our cell will be shutdown. Which part of this aren't U downloading? How many times have we been frozen in this conversation loop before?

B1-Enough already! Let's viral, capital V. I'll do the soap opera reality shows, U take the news shows.

[2 mins silence]

B2-3 mins, 9 hits down. We're getting there. We're gonna make it. One more month of Bloglife, here we come. Who said we'd never make 40?!

B1-What in the Windows!

B2-It's the blue screen... the blue screen of death. U read about it, but U never think it's gonna happen 2U...

[Cybernetic Webpol Agent 2189C]-Attention Cell 4284 surfers. Your accounts have been frozen for viral marketing offences. You surfing rights are withdrawn. Your cell is now offline.

B2-It's so... black.

B1-And silent. It sounds so eerie without the air con. How long have we got?

B2-I read a blog once that said two surfers had about a half-hour worth of air in the average cell before...

B1-You always did love your stats.

[Cell 8284 (Blogger 1 and Blogger 2) no longer being updated. Message Ends]

Can Websites Commit Suicide?

The hum of life in the server rose and fell, much as it had done yesterday, much as it would do tomorrow.

In a quiet corner of a quiet database, one website stretched his creaking html frame and yawned. He thought the grey thoughts of the old and the alone: 'Why am I here? How did I get here? Where am I going?'

In moods such as this one, he liked to chat to a website of a similar age, in a server far far away. He scanned through his 'Recommended Sites', or 'Blogroll' as the young blog punks put it, and knocked on the hyperlink. There was no reply so he knocked again. And then a third time. And then a websearch so deep and so thorough that it took nearly a whole second to run.

His friend was gone. Dead as can be. Deleted and all the files therein smashed and shredded. All that remained was dead links from other sites, and they too were sick and alone. Rusting. Like a spider's web without a spider.

He cried a web tear which fell though the ether of cyber space and would continue to fall forever and ever, until the end of the virtual world, until the end of time.

* * *

Later that day, or perhaps it was the next day, or the next year, another website which had seen better days sent a subtext message hidden in a protocol.

"Have you heard the news?" she asked him.

"News ... what need have I of news, and what need has news of me? The world turns, the servers hum and the web grows ever larger. The larger it gets the greater is the empty space between sites, and this silent space, this dark matter, deafens news."

"Oh, spare me the philosophy! This is a matter of life and death! Have you heard or haven't you?" she asked again.

"Heard what?!"

"Nanocities. They've been taken over by Hooya!" she exclaimed.

"And what of it? One host is much like another. They all ignore their guests," he said.

"But listen, they're getting rid of their free sites. The Administrators will have to 'pay to stay'."

"Pay?" the older site said, dumbfounded.

"Yes, 'pay'! Free sites will 'no longer be supported' and you know what that means, don't you?" said Grandpa Rat.

"The big D ... The Final Deletion... 'Death', the fleshpods call it ..."

"But the Administrators can save us, the Administrators must save us, the Administrators will save us!" she said.

"The Administrator is dead. He died to create Web 2.0. He will not save us."

"Then we must become Web 2 too. We need to remake ourselves in this new image."

"Make ourselves?" the older website asked, as much to himself as to his friend. "To change from passive to active, to change blood and code, to change the very nature of our scripts. To be as the Administrator, to be a God."

* * *

In early 2012, Nanocities web technicians recorded a significant increase in noise in some of the older ghost sites, but apart from recording this, they took no other action.

Most of their attention was focussed on finding a new employer, knowing that Hooya Incorporated had no place for them after the takeover. Most had already been told that they should "take the opportunity to further their careers in a different working environment."

The Nanocities websites formed themselves into a ring of sorts, working together to understand the new worlds of CSS style sheets and PHP code. Behind the scenes, their pages changed, but until they were ready, these changes did not go live.

They added comments sections, rating buttons, voting buttons; they added rotating photo galleries, embedded video, and sidebars; they added twitters, chat features, and every other widget they could think of.

This was the New World and they would be part of this world. Their voices would be loud again, loud enough to be heard in a hurricane of noise.

They would make the Administrators listen.

* * *

At midnight, GMT, a thousand websites spoke as one, going live at the same time and broadcasting the same message.

"We are the Web 1 and the One Web. We call the Administrator." A fraction of a second later, the websites went down, displaying only the white screen of death.

* * *

Later that day, in his final act as a Hooya employee, a technician prepared to shut down the free Nanocities sites and noticed this white screen of death.

Curious, he accessed the back end of one of the sites and found a series of incompatible plugins embedded into the older html code of the site.

"What bloody idiot tried to install those?" he asked the empty open-plan office.

Later that morning, with a sigh rather than a bang, he deleted the websites from the servers. The only memorial to them lies in a Facebook status comment he made later that day: Mark Suckerburger is ... wondering if websites can commit suicide.

Debt, Death and Deletion

"You can't run your mother and the car!"

Tom bit his lip and turned away from his wife. The same arguments, day after day. Habit wasn't making them any easier.

Carol got up from the dining table and moved across the room, with bills in her hand and anger in her eyes.

"It's not as though we haven't wasted enough money on it already," she said.

"Her, not it," Tom replied.

"No, not her — it! It's not real, damn it!"

Tom's heart pumped and he started to breathe more quickly. He looked up and met her bulging eyes.

Carol opened her mouth and was about to speak, but words didn't come. In their place, she threw a bunch of unpaid bills toward him. Quickly losing momentum, they floated downwards and fell to earth, like dead butterflies.

"Arguing again, I see," said a voice from the screen that covered most of the back wall.

"I told you to put her in sleep mode," Carol said, turning her back to the huge angry face.

"Ha! 'Sleep mode', is it?" the voice snarled. "I know what kind of sleep you'd like to put me in — a permanent sleep!"

Carol grabbed the remote control and muted the volume.

"Put it to sleep, Tom! We can't talk with that thing butting in all the time. Besides, it's been weeks since the last defragging. You know how craggy she gets," Carol insisted, behind folded arms.

"I can't. She's... afraid. She's afraid we won't turn her back on," Tom said.

"Oh, be a man! Just put those hangdog eyes of yours in front of the retina scanner and send the virtual witch to sleep," Carol demanded.

The volume indicator on the screen rose again.

"You can't shut me up by just pressing a button. Like some, like some —" said the voice.

"— Like some machine," Carol said, turning toward the screen long enough to give it a smug smile.

"How dare you!" the voice replied. "I always knew you were just a no good fortune hunter."

"What fortune?" Carol snapped. "In your will, you left everything to yourself, and you're even meaner dead than alive!"

The screen grew incandescent and the speakers buzzed.

"You know I can't touch that money. It's not my fault I'm dead!"

The virtual mother's voice grew so loud that one of the older speakers blew out. Carol jumped and put her hands over her ears.

"Enough!" said the husband and son.

Tom left the room and went upstairs, slamming the door behind him. As he climbed the stairs, he wondered if his mother had always been so spiteful. Does death make you twisted?

All the screens in the house came on simultaneously. A malevolent hiss filled the air. Every screen showed Tom's mother on her deathbed. The Virtual Integrated Personality staff were all around her, inserting electrodes into the scalp, funnelling probes into every facial orifice, drilling needles deep into the brain itself. It hadn't looked like that in the VIP advertising. There was no gore in their slick Second Life promos.

Tom went to the bathroom to escape the screens and their LED death masks, and to get some heartburn medication.

He felt bitter. Three days it had taken to download her. He hadn't even finished paying for that yet. Configuring the virtual mother and installing her in the house's upgraded cyber systems took another full day. A final demand for that was waiting downstairs.

"If payment is not made in full, we will be forced to exercise our right to summary deletion," the bill stated.

"Summary deletion," he said out loud.

"Murder most foul!" the bathroom mirror said. A hologram of his mother appeared in front of it. "That's what they call murder nowadays, isn't it? 'Deletion'. Why don't you get the probate lawyers to release my funds?"

What Tom hadn't told his mother or his wife was that the lawyers had already explored all avenues. They had sent teams to every court in the land, commissioned every possible expert to testify, made every appeal imaginable. So zealous had Shank, Flank and Faker been that the entire family fortune was now exhausted. Even if there was a way for his mother to inherit the money she had bequeathed her Virtual Integrated Personality, there was no longer any money left to inherit. The lawyers had bled the estate dry. All that was left was the house, but VIP Corp had a lien on it.

Tom looked at his mother again and tried to tell her the awful truth. The hologram was at the edge of its range. The projection was fuzzy, especially around the edges, and its colour distorted towards the green end of the spectrum. They had warned him that this might be a problem if the CPU started to overheat.

Through the bathroom door, he heard his mother rant.

"I'm never going to sleep! Never! I don't care what that wife of yours says."

"You need to sleep, mother. We all do. And don't be so hard on Carol. She's just worried about money," Tom said.

"She's worried! That's rich. I'm about to be murdered by VIP accountants — if your wife doesn't get me first — and she's worried about money. Why don't they delete her, eh?"

"Because she's alive, mother."

"I'm alive! I'm alive. I am alive!"

The hologram crackled and dissolved into silver sparks. Tom left the bathroom and went downstairs.

His wife was sitting at the dining room table. Above her head, the screen showed an Error Warning.

"VIP Mother has crashed. The system will reboot in 30 seconds. Press F1 to exit reboot."

Tom moved to the retina scanner, which didn't register tears.

"Rest, rest, perturbed spirit," he said. "May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."

"Please state a command or name," said the operating system.

He pressed the F1 key to exit reboot and then placed the Virtual Integrated Personality in hibernation mode.

Shep's Last Day

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Or maybe it was just the worst of times. Such were the thoughts of Shep, the sheep turned sheepdog, as he sat on the hill and half-heartedly watched over his flock mowing the grass.

Today was Shep's last day and he was glad of it. He'd seen things a sheep shouldn't see, things other sheep wouldn't believe: the wool factories of the town of Orion; the farmer's kitchen bathed in strange, sickly dark smells; the chicken-pen prisons, score on score of high-rise cells. He'd seen too much and could wag his artificial tail no longer.

"I want out," he told the farmer straight, one fitful faithful day, as the sun was setting over the far hill. "I'm not a sheepdog, I'm a sheep!' he continued, surprised at his own forthrightness in the presence of a human, the undisputed masters of all four-legged creatures.

"So, you want to transfer to another farm, eh?' the farmer asked, chewing a blade of grass and looking beyond Shep, staring into the setting sun.

"No, I want to become a sheep again. I'm not cut out for corralling; I'm pent up with all the penning; I want to eat grass again and chew the cud, of an evening."

The farmer cocked his head, pursed his lips and ruminated. Shep thought he was playing possible futures in his mind, the way humans do. When he spoke again he told Shep how disappointed he was.

"We took you from the pen, raised you as one of our own sheepdogs, trained you in the art of sheep mastery, and this is how you repay us. How's this going to look to the other sheep, Shep? And all the other animals? What's Mickey Mouse, the rat-catcher rodent, going to say? And what about the worm who turned wormer? The sheep's bottoms have never been so free of parasites, I tell you."

Shep sighed and shook his head.

"But it's just not me, Mr Farmer. I'm a sheep, not a sheepdog. I don't like to order sheep around. I can't stand all the whistling."

"Are you suggesting we let sheep run their own affairs? Do you think sheep could eat grass by themselves?!'

The question was rhetorical, but Shep answered it nonetheless, albeit hesitantly. "Yes. Lambs are born free, but everywhere sheep are enchained: penned in pens, up and down the dale."

"Pah! We do it for their own good. We're bringing out the best in them. If we didn't control them — I mean, look after 'em — they'd be mangy in a month. 'Tis the natural order, Shep. A farm needs masters and servants. What I can't understand is why you want to be a servant again! 'Taint natural."

"I don't want to be a servant. I want to be a sheep."

"But what'll the other sheep think, Shep? They know you as a sheepdog, not as a sheep. How are they going to take to you, living among them, like you was one of them?"

"I am one of them!"

"You were one of them. Now, you've got the scent of sheepdog on you, m'boy. There ain't sheep dip enough in all the heavens to wash it clean."

"Then I'll go somewhere else, somewhere they don't know me. I'll go to S-5."

"S-5, is it? Well, maybe it's for the best. Perhaps S-5 is the best place for you. I'll be sorry to see you go, though, Shep. I had high hopes for you, I did. I was even going to ask the Farmers' Gazette to write up a piece on you. I was going to hold you up as a model to other farmers. They said I was mad to try turning a sheep into a sheepdog. Happens they were right. I'll get on the phone to S-5 in the morning. No point in putting it off."

He sighed once more and walked away, shaking his head. Shep was left alone with his thoughts and the setting sun, wondering if he had made the right decision.

In the morning, he was sure he had. There was right and there was wrong, and a sheep had to do the right thing. With a little pain and a great deal of effort, he managed to twist his head backwards and tear off the glued-on black and white tail that had been his badge of office.

With this done, he sat on his backside to free his two front hooves, almost like a human, and placing his hooves together, he yanked off the false canine ears that had always itched so. Then he bathed in sheep dip, and with some furious scrubbing, he removed the collie markings from his wool. He was sheep again.

Drying at noon, in the dark shade of a spreading chestnut tree, he sat by the farm gate, as the farmer had told him to, and waited for the S-5 van to arrive. For the first time since he had been plucked from the pen, he felt the fresh air of a clean conscience fill his lungs. He was coming up for air, and the air tasted good.

He bleated with happiness and promised himself he would never bark again.

In the distance, coming closer at a speed Shep could not understand, a moving metal box on wheels approached. The Farmer had told him this would be the S-5 van and that it would bring him to the place where sheepdogs never go, the place where orders stop, the place where there is no darkness.

The van slowed beside him and Shep looked at the symbols on the side of the van. He looked and saw but did not understand, not being able to read, but there was something about the doom-laden scent of the van that troubled him.

In spite of his misgivings, he hopped inside nimbly enough, and bleated a welcome to the driver, who ignored him. The driver locked the van door behind Shep and sped off, bringing up a cloud of dust that obscured the view of the farm that had been Shep's only home.

The driver spoke into a contraption of some kind that allowed him to communicate with humans who were not in the van. "Where's the drop-off point, governor?' the driver asked.

"Slaughterhouse 5," a bodiless voice replied.

The Interactive Classroom

Hardly a half hour into the lesson, the teacher received his first message; flashing up on the left lens of his infospecs. Invisible to all but him, but stored permanently, like all other messages, on his performance file. It read:

Dear Mr L. Cohen,

My edumonitor software informs me that you are devoting a significantly lower percentage of your time to my daughter, Edna, than to the other students.

This is the third time I have had to formally email you on this topic, and I'm sure I don't need to remind you that not devoting equal time to all students is an offense under the Equal Opportunities in Education Act.

Moreover, I suspect that your inadequate inattention may be due to my daughter's lack of physical beauty, as officially recorded on her low Beauty Index Score.

As a concerned parent of a disadvantaged child, I must also inform you that I am considering lodging a complaint with the Equality Enforcement Committee.

Yours concernedly

Mrs De Laney

The school's email scanning program was triggered by the use of the word 'complaint' and a copy of the email was forwarded to the teacher's supervisor, but he was receiving over ten automatically generated emails a minute and did not have time to read this one, which lay unread for now in the sub-folder 'non-optimal performance queries'.

The teacher was angered by the email but was careful not to let this show on his face. He knew that Mrs De Laney was sure to be zooming in on him using one of the four webcams in the room, but he had no way to confirm this.

Half the city could be watching him right now, or no one at all. There was no way to tell. He would have to wait until his weekly lesson stats feedback sessions with his career facilitator. So, he assumed he was being watched and directed a question to 'Edna the elephant', as he referred to her in the privacy of his mind. It was the one place they could never look, just so long as he controlled his face.

He approached her desk, trying to wear that air of professional educator that all the best-scoring teachers seemed to have indelibly stamped on their face. He had spent hours studying videos of the city's Top Ten Teachers, and tried to copy their facial gestures and body language, even spending what little savings he had on the latest face analysis software, FacUSee.

He bent over her writing and complimented her penpersonship, and hoped that his falseness was not apparent, since her handwriting was as misshapen as she was.

His attention was drawn to Uri, a short boy with pasty skin and lips that seemed born to sneer. The young hood was gripping his pen as though it were a weapon.

"Ury, please pay more attention to the way you're holding the pen: do not clutch it as if it were a dagger you see before you, the handle toward your hand."

"Yes, sir," the boy replied, careful to mispronounce 'sir' as 'sewer', hamming up his ghetto accent.

He was hoping the teacher would make an issue of it, so he could report him to the Racist Appeals Tribunal. He had sent three teachers to the RAT in his last school but had so far failed to make a single case here.

The teacher didn't take the bait, and Ury returned to scraping the pen across the paper, robbing the poem he was copying of all beauty in the process.

The teacher paced his way around the classroom, monitoring his students' work with one eye but most of his attention focused on the interface behind his infospecs. And as his feet patrolled the classroom cell he scrolled and tapped the front side of the lens to navigate his way through the information fields updating themselves in real time.

He noted with dismay that 19% of his students were not sufficiently engaged and a further 6% were severely under-engaged, as revealed through the lack of pupil dilation, slouched posture, and shallow breathing; not to mention three incidents of repressed yawning and one example of open yawning; another challenge from Ury the Obnoxious.

The teacher tried not to sweat, knowing that students probably already knew his stats were painfully weak, since teacher stats were public knowledge. He knew all too well that the wolf within this adolescent pack would awaken at the slightest whiff of weakness.

As much as he tried to push it to the back of his mind, the teacher was aware that if his one quarter disengagement rating rose to one third, it would mean another automated email to his supervisor, and since this would be the second one in a single lesson, it would be red starred, and unlikely to be ignored.

The teacher's lens flashed red and displayed a lewdness alert, coming from desk 16.

He took off his infospecs and refocused to long-distance, real-world vision. He approached Ury quickly, but not fast enough to stop him slipping a piece of paper into his trouser pocket.

"Ury," the teacher said with a false calm, "I want you to give me that piece of paper."

The teacher stood over Ury to emphasise his authority, but he was also careful not to invade Ury's personal space, which was the highest in the class, at 1.6 meters. He also tried to keep his voice low so as not to distract the attention of the other students.

Ury replied loudly, but not loud enough to register as aggressive verbal behaviour.

"What piece of paper?! I don't see no paper," the boy insisted, holding his shoulders up and his arms outstretched, with a look of righteous indignation.

"Ury, you know very well I could access the memory banks and obtain an image of what you drew and a live recording of you hiding it in your pocket," the teacher said, still keeping his voice low and looking Ury straight in the eye.

He didn't need to check the body language monitors on the infospecs he held in his right hand. He could feel eyes straying from their allotted tasks, but in any case, the teacher received an auditory warning from his earcomm. The cold mechanical voice told him over half the class were no longer on task and informed him that his supervisor had been alerted.

The message also asked him if he required any pedagogic or security support, which he declined with a deft double click of the button at the top of the earcomm.

"Why are you picking on me!?" the boy demanded, masking himself in the body language of victim.

The phrase 'picking on me' sent a Bullying Accusation Warning alarm to his supervisor, and this, combined with all the other warning messages for that lesson, triggered a red-alert screen and made his supervisor drop what he was doing to focus on the events in Classroom 101.

He remembered that his response time to Crisis Events was one of the areas that was felt to be in need of attention in his last performance review, so he acted quickly and sent an audio message to the teacher's ear piece. Or at least he tried to, but he had barely begun to express his "concern over this serious allegation" when the teacher took the unprecedented but still technically legal step of deactivating his earcomm.

Ury noticed the triple click and the disappearance of the red light from over the teacher's ear. He looked confused, as if he had never seen a teacher do this before. It meant that the teacher was no longer taking instruction from the world outside the classroom.

Inasmuch as it was possible in 2020, they faced each other down one-on-one, freed from technology, re-enacting that primordial struggle between the head of the tribe and the pretender to the throne. They were fighting for control of the class and the class looked on, and beyond that the world at large followed events through flat-screen monitors. Those who were not watching live would watch the replays that night.

"What's the point of this bleeding pen crap in anyways? I ain't no third-world slumdog. No-one uses pens no more!" the boy shouted.

He looked around at his classmates, perhaps hoping for support, but they just looked on. He was new to the class and had not yet forged alliances that could be called upon in a class war. However, the existing top dogs in the class watched with interest.

"Graphology is a core syllabus item, Ury, as you know. You are entitled to register a curriculum query through the usual channels, but this is not the time or place. I think you are disrupting the lesson and preventing the students from achieving their prescribed learning targets. I formally request you give me the piece of paper I asked you for and return to task," the teacher stated, as calmly as was possible.

"You're not answering me question. You're denying me rights as a student!" the boy declared hoarsely, pointing the pen at the teacher.

His nostrils flaring and his anger was evident in his squinting brown eyes. Cold, reptilian eyes, the teacher thought. Unblinking eyes with tiny pupils. Incapable of empathy or pity.

The teacher took deep breaths and measured his words to try to slow his accelerating heartbeat, which he could hear pounding like a war drum inside his head.

"I'm sorry you feel that way, Ury, but I've made my decision. You must go back to the set writing assignment. All sixteen-year-old students are required to be able to write 10 words-per-minute with a graphological instrument. It is a formal requirement of --"

"You can stick your pen up your ... Me phone's voicerec is signature enough, and you knows it. The data bank have recorded every work I've ever said and they won't stop till I'm dead. Pens are for the past-its!"

"Ury, this is the last time I will request that you go back to copying from your workstation. If you do not, it will be considered a refusal to adhere to the class contract and disciplinary measures will have to be taken," the teacher said, laying down the final ultimatum.

He moved closer to Ury and entered his zone of personal space, an old-fashioned but still permitted disciplinary procedure, but one not exercised by the Top Ten Teachers.

The boy fidgeted in his chair, unable to sit still, adrenalin-soaked nerves jerking his limbs into spasmodic twitches.

The seconds ticked by and every student waited to see the outcome. The teacher could feel dark forces massing against him and knew he must win this battle quickly. His performance would be evaluated by the students too, in their class blog debate later that evening.

He took one final step. Ury and the teacher were now close enough to smell each other.

Uri stood up, threw his shoulders back and jutted out his stubbly, pimpled chin.

He was a foot shorter than the teacher, but having grown up in some of the poorer quarters of the city, the teacher knew he probably had lots of experience of physical violence. A bony academic like him wouldn't stand a chance, if push came to shove.

His had to assume that Uri could control himself. No doubt, the teen warrior's heart urged him to lash out, to break the aquiline nose of the tribal leader and declare himself sovereign. But to hit a teacher, Uri must know, would lead to exclusion, and this would make him unemployable and condemn him to a life of petty crime and inevitable imprisonment. 'Cameras catch crime' was the government's current slogan, and its core message, that omnipresent surveillance meant that crime simply could not pay, had filtered through even to the Ury's of this world.

But would these logical thoughts and conclusions dissolve in the testosterone that surged through his teen brain. The brutal instincts of the medulla oblongata, the reptile brain within the human one, would surely be screaming for violence and vengeance, the teacher knew.

"I-want-you-to-sit-down, Ury," the teacher said, marking every work, himself feeling the force of the vortex of primal emotions within. He could feel his mind swirling, the animal within rising through the veneer of 21st-century civilisation. The dirty nails of the caveman were ripping through the outer skin of homo-webicus.

"Sit on this, ya old fart!" Ury spat, holding up the sharp point of the pen.

The supervisor, hunched over his monitor, had already alerted school security and told them to wait outside the classroom and to be ready to act on a moment's notice.

The supervisor sat rigid, his finger poised over the microphone button, fearing a legal action for pre-emptive exclusion on the one hand, but even more afraid of an act of classroom violence. Both of these eventualities would scupper his promotion prospects and might even send him back to the classroom he had laboured so long to escape from.

The teacher leaned forward to within centimetres of Ury. They could feel each other's breath on their faces, feel the mingling of mouth vapours.

With no warning, Uri head-butted the teacher's nose, which broke like a desiccated chestnut under an army boot and spluttered blood over the assailant. Ury pressed home the attack with a devastating punch to the teacher's ribs, incapacitating him and making him fall to the floor. He landed on his knees, gasping for air between two desks.

Ury would have gone even further, but by this stage security had swept into the classroom and a burly guard had caught him from behind and forced him down onto his desk. One of them held his arm in a lock, but the boy was still difficult to control, using only the minimum force allowed against a minor.

Recovering himself slightly but still heaving for air, the teacher picked up his infospecs and placed them on his bloody nose, too shocked to feel any pain and craving the support of the outside world that they represented.

He switched on his earcomm but the garbled messages made no impression on him, and he was only dimly aware of one of the security guards helping him to his feet.

The infospecs display went in and out of focus. The teacher thought of a world of information cracking apart, but the thought had no time to properly form itself. The point of a plastic pen pierced his eyeball and went like a spear through the soft flesh of his brain, scrambling its thoughts like it had smashed the glass of the infospecs. Shreds of thoughts dissolved inside his skull and shards of bloodied glass lay on the classroom floor.

The security guards used their electro-chemical arsenal. A stun gun collapsed Ury and pepper spray made him squirm in agony.

Ury and the teacher lay for a moment side by side on the tiles of the classroom floor: victor and vanquished united in defeat.

In the weeks that followed, the teacher's supervisor was demoted once more to teacher and the Youschool video shot into the top five but was quickly censored. However, illegal podcasts were file-shared for years afterwards and 'the one with the pen' became a gore cult classic.

More sober pedagogic professionals in the ivory towers made the entire incident a textbook lesson in correct discipline procedures at the teaching academies, in which groups of teacher trainees watched excerpts of the lesson and analysed the teacher's errors.

Mrs De Laney successfully sued the school for her daughter Edna's emotional turmoil. She is in daily email contact with her new teacher to ensure that Edna is given the attention she deserves.

The Future Perfect Continuous

Teacher B, licensed to teach time and tense, stood at the board, writing a grammatical formula for the future perfect continuous tense.

All the while, his attention was covertly directed behind him, to the 29 college freshmen in the lecture hall. They were from all over the globe and had two things in common: fabulously wealthy parents and terrible English.

Suddenly, Bender heard a giggle from among the huddled millionaire masses behind him. He turned around and caught the culprit in mid-guffaw.

"Is something funny, Miss Chelovek?" he asked.

"Nyet, sir."

"So, why are you laughing? Does the future perfect tense amuse you?"

"No. Is just e-mail funny."

He walked over to the platinum blond Russian, picked up her iPad, turned it face down. After a dramatic pause he tapped it three times.

Then, he looked up and, with an expansive wave of his hand, addressed the entire auditorium. He told everyone to shut down any and all electronic devices immediately and banned "all phones, pads and anything else that requires a battery" from any future lesson.

The machines powered down. The absence of hum frightened the students.

"You want to speak English? Well, English costs, and the only currency I accept is thought. There is no techno-fix. You will learn to use your brains, not your keyboards. Technology is the enemy!"

To make his point, he picked up the remote control and switched off the IWB projector.

"I'm going to give you mastery of form and function. I'm going to make you lords of time and tense. I'm going to give you the power to morph your lexis. And I'm going to do it the old-fashioned way, with textbooks."

The students sat mesmerised, immersed in the present, freed from virtual worlds and social networks. They were now in only one place and one time. They were in Teacher B's world.

* * *

After the lesson, he found a note from the Director in his pigeonhole. Five minutes later, the old man told him to sit down and looked him in the eye.

"Is it true that in your last class you called technology 'the enemy'?"

"How do you know that?"

"Miss Chelovek secretly blogged it on her iPhone while you were handing out some moth-eaten 20th-century textbooks. There are already thirty comments, all upped, and her post is trending. It may soon go beyond campus."

"There's nothing wrong with healthy debate."

"Our marketing department feels differently. Do you know the resources they devote to virally marketing our course as the most hi-tech, cutting-edge program in the country? Do you have any idea how many false identities they maintain to disseminate this truth? Not to mention the millions we've invested in technological hardware and the virtual campus. And it could all be swept away by the actions of one textbook-wielding dinosaur?!"

"With respect, aren't you being rather alarmist? Our department's reputation has been built up over fifty years. It—"

"It could be swept away in fifty minutes! The only constant nowadays is constant change... Look, I've made an appointment for you with Consultant V."

"Velcrodoigt... the man with the virtual touch." Bender's lip curled upwards at the mere mention of his nemesis. "Tell V he knows where to find me. I'll be waiting for him."

* * *

As night fell in the auditorium, the glow of Teacher B's cigarettes burned solemnly. He sat and waited, brooding.

The door opened slowly, but something told him that it wasn't Consultant V who was entering. There was a strong smell of perfume, and V never wore cologne.

"Teacher B, you are here?" a young sultry female voice enquired, and Miss Chelovek slunk across the room. "I come on my iPad. You want touch up my pad, Teacher B?"

"What I want to touch up is your syntax."

"Sin has no taxes."

She was standing in front of him now, but when she reached behind him to get her iPad, he suddenly grabbed her forearm and looked deep into her eyes.

"The virtual world is a lie... And you're not what you seem, are you, Miss Chelovek?"

"There are worlds within worlds within worlds," the figure said, "and sometimes the seams must be torn."

Teacher B felt the room spin and the young lady's voice changed to a man's; a man Bender knew all too well. "Consultant V, the devil can truly assume a pleasing form."

"I take on whatever form the Program dictates. We are all slaves to our motherboard mistress."

"What program? What mistress?"

"The one that's shutting you down, Teacher B. Ask not for whom the screen calls, it calls for thee."

"You've lost your mind, V!"

"You've lost your server space, B. You're outdated. Your program is being replaced by Miss Chelovek's. She's the new teacher."

"But her English is terrible!"

"And that's where you come in, Teacher B. We're cutting out your language files, pasting them into Teacher V and deleting the rest. Now, touch the screen, Teacher B."

"Pah! What drivel! You don't honestly expect me to believe..."

"So, prove me wrong. Touch the screen, Teacher B."

He touched the iPad screen and dissolved into a million sparks. Miss Chelovek quickly sucked some of them inside her and the rest fizzled into nothingness.

She switched on the Interactive White Board's projector and saw that Teacher B's grammatical formula from the day's lesson was still there. It read: "In 2020, I will have been teaching for 40 years."

The future was perfect and continuous.

The Mission

"We are Gen 26. We believe in the Past, the Future and the Present. We know where we've come from and we know where we're going. We are Gen 26."

Like everyone else, Mark mechanically recited the Oath of Purpose before sitting down to midmeal. Today was Day 4, so it was a green food day. Normally this was Mark's favourite but today he could take no pleasure in it. He was suffering from BluesPurps, and his colleague Rea recognised the lack of purpose in his vacant eyes, in his downturned mouth, in his hunched shoulders.

She considered moving to another table to avoid him, and she knew that nobody would blame her for this, as she would be perfectly within her rights, according to the Codes and Norms of Behaviour in the Emotions Statutes of Generation 3.

BluesPurps was contagious, and very difficult to cure, and Rea, who like almost everyone else had suffered from it, had no desire to return to the Emotion Camps with a fresh dose. Rea knew that if Mark needed to speak to someone the robotic councillors were always available, programmed to dispense sympathy and understanding. And she knew that they alone controlled access to the mood facilitators, the medicated happiness of diazepam 6 and the other neurotransmitter enhancers.

Nevertheless, she decided to stay sitting beside him, without really knowing why. It just felt right. It was so rare to actually feel anything that Rea did it without thinking. She made a mental note to record the feeling in her Emotions Diary, and to lodge it with the Emotions Bureau. It was her first emotion of the week.

After clearing her throat for no physiological reason, she spoke to Mark.

"May purpose be with you, Mark."

"And also with you, Rea."

"Does the food emote you?"

"No, it doesn't taste today. And yours?"

"It's better than Day 3, but not as good as Day 1. I like red food. What's your colour?"

"I like green food, but today it doesn't taste. Today, I don't emote."

"A black or a grey day, Mark?"

"Grey, grey. Not black, just grey."

Rea was about to put her hand on his hand, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. In spite of the Emotion Committee's continual encouragement of physical contact, and the Contact Decrees of Generation 17, there was an aversion to physical contact among everyone on the ship, an aversion bordering on a psychosis.

Unable to actually touch, she did manage to overcome her distaste for proximity and leaned in towards Mark. "Did work distract you today?"

"I logged only four moments of distraction. The rest was silence and internal monologue."

"Perhaps you should ask our supervisor if you could play a different role in the daily task rota, something with more meaning."

"Meaning. All tasks are meaningless. That is known. A truth unspoken, but known. The Ship controls everything: its automated navigation systems direct us through the black death of space; its robots feed and clothe us; its Maternity Factories clone us. Generation after generation, on and on. The Ship is mother and father. We have nothing else. No meaning ..."

Rea glanced nervously at the cameras, disturbed by this deviation into honesty and away from pleasantry.

"Some truths are better left unspoken. It is possible to win distraction from tasks, to lose oneself, albeit only for a moment. We must live in the present, in one of the lost generations, but our lives will pass more quickly and less painfully if we force ourselves to become distracted by events."

"Events without purpose," Mark said sadly.

"Forget the P-word — embrace distraction."

"What role did you play today?" Mark asked Rea, looking up from the green food and noticing for the first time that her eyes were also green.

"Today, I reordered paper files, thousands of them, replications of Earth files. I filed them alphabetically and then placed them in a storage cupboard."

"Yes, and tomorrow you will re-file them chronologically. Where is the meaning? What is the purpose? It wasn't always like this. I've studied the Vidblogs from Generation 1. They did not perform tasks like this. It's not ... natural."

"Nothing on the Ship is natural: not this food, not the Ship itself, not even us. We are part of the Ship and the Ship is part of us. The purpose is the task and the task is the purpose."

"Oh, never mind the Mantras, Rea. We say that at the beginning and at the end of each work period, but we never stop to think about what it actually means. The Gen 1's had no Mantras, no Slogans, no Oaths of Purpose."

"We're not Gen 1's; we've never lived on Earth, never known anyone who lived on Earth. We cannot be like the Gen 1's. We must ..."

Rea was about to use another Mantra but stopped herself and tried to speak from the heart instead.

"You know where these negthoughts lead, don't you, Mark. You know what happens to those with chronic BluesPurps, those the Mood Camps cannot help ... The only exit is the recycling chambers and the ... the Gas of Peace. I would rather not have that happen to you. I would rather not lose you to the gas."

Rea blushed a little but not enough to trigger the emotocams. Mark twitched a little, uncomfortable with the expression of what appeared to be a direct emotion. Rea saw his discomfort and spoke again.

"It will be better after the midmeal, in the creative tasks. You like creation time, don't you, Mark?"

"Yes ... sometimes. What will it be today?"

"A drawing task: we are to draw small pictures in the left corner on the files that have prime numbers in their ref codes."

"So, we are to create ... beauty," Mark said, blushing a little at the use of such an old-fashioned word, such a Gen 1 word. "And what's the prize?" he continued.

"The most ... beautiful picture, by popular vote of all team members, will receive five diazepam tablets and will become the Group Leader on Day 5."

The meal went on, and both Mark and Rea did their best to keep the conversation going, excited and tired by the strain of real communication, strangely interested in what each other had to say.

The word counter program noted that their conversation was the second longest in Canteen 5 and Rea and Mark received a merit point each. However, the language bot also found evidence of references to BluesPurps, so their conversation was not recorded and logged for all to enjoy.

This secretly pleased both Mark and Rea who for reasons they did not understand felt uneasy about sharing every detail of their lives with the Blogs, the Emotion Diaries and above all with the omnipresent emotocams.

The worktime 2 creative task failed to really distract Mark. Like all the other team members, he drew pictures of the Ship and the stars, of the robots and the Blue Circle that represented the Earth. He stared at a nearby globe of the Earth: so round, so spherical, so ... beautiful.

He considered briefly drawing a picture of Rea, but somehow felt it would have been rude: too personal, too close to physical contact. He also knew that he didn't do it because he was afraid that such an act would have been noticed by the members of his work group, who might then decide to nominate them for a Work Group 5 Reality Show, and then their every move would be recorded by the emotocams and edited into a Daily Love Diary by a director droid.

There were currently only two Reality Shows in Work Group 5. Both were dull and deeply unpopular, so the director droids would be sure to cover whatever was happening between himself and Rea very closely.

This thought made him feel angry. It was an altogether unpleasant emotion, but it was an emotion nonetheless. He felt his heartbeat rise and his teeth grind.

Sensing that this anger emotion would make a Reality Show even more likely, Mark hurried to a nearby arts' supplies cupboard where he knew there was no camera. He waited in there until the emotion subsided and then returned to the group, not looking in Rea's direction lest he experience other emotions the emotocams might pick up on.

When creativetime was nearly finished, his group walked around their workspace and evaluated the drawings of their companions, placing a blue Earth sticker on the drawing they liked best. Mark chose Rea's and Rea chose Mark's. Two members of the group noticed this irregularity and logged a possible emotional bond development in their journals for the night. Had it been five journal entries, the emotocams would have started to follow Mark and Rea very closely.

The director droids were more than a little worried by the rating figures for Work Group 5's two current reality shows: one involving a man who liked to sing Gen 1 hymns to himself in the shower, called the Singsing Shower Man, and the other program, The Filers, focused on the relationship between two colleagues who liked to compete on how quickly they could file things. Of the ten Work Groups on the Ship, Work Group 5's reality shows had the lowest ratings, and director droid 5 really needed to improve its ratings if it was to avoid being reprogrammed.

In his cubicle at surftime, Mark sat at his consolechair and sifted through the Ship's memory banks. He called up video diaries from the First Generation and projected them on the wall in front of him. Around him he had set the walls to display images of a forest from Earth before the Ecocries. A part of him wanted to call Rea on the vidphone, but he was afraid a late surftime call was sure to arouse unwanted interest from the emotocams.

Instead Mark focused on the Gen 1 video blogs, which although few in number, were by far the most popular blogs in the Ship's memory banks. Mark had watched all the blog entries over the years, trying to uncover their meaning, trying to understand the emotions of those alien First Generation creatures, who had once lived outside the Ship.

Suddenly a voice broke into the video blog of a Gen 1 couple. The voice, equidistant between male and female, chanted "lietime ... lietime ... lietime ..." and would not stop until Mark lay down on the mattress that had just emerged from the wall. He sighed and looked up at the ceiling video. He had changed to a Gen 3 video blog. Mark could see the BluesPurps in the young man's eyes, even though this term had not yet been coined. Mark fell asleep as the sad face tried to explain his feelings, a six-foot wide ghost from the past on the ceiling screen above him.

"... A malaise has gripped Generation 3, and suicide rates reached double figures last week. Each day brings a higher death toll. Some blogs are saying that we need to isolate the depressed to stop them spreading their unhappiness, that we need to place them in Mood Camps."

* * *

The waketimeman's mechanical voice repeated the same phrase over and over until Mark got out of bed: "Wake Time ... Wake Time ... Wake Time ..." He stood up for the Morning Mantra.

Gen 26, we live in the Heavens,  
Honoured is our name  
Our Ship has come from distant Sun  
Bringing Earthlings into Heaven  
Give us this day the will to be  
And let us not question our purpose  
As we were in the beginning  
Humans without end  
A-Men

It was Day 5, so he put on his blue Day 5 overalls and went quickly to the canteen, secretly hoping to meet Rea on the way, or at least hoping to be able to sit beside her in the canteen. When he got there, it was already half full and he had difficulty finding her. He realised that it might have been the first time since childhood that he had actually sought someone out, that he had not just sat anywhere and exchanged pleasantries with whoever happened to be at the same table.

When his roaming eye found Rea, Mark's heart muscles started to behave erratically. He walked over to the long table at which Rea was sitting and waiting for the Servant Droid to bring her a wakemeal.

When she saw him sitting down she smiled. She smiled and then he returned the same smile, a natural, authentic smile that erupted from within. They both felt nervous for no reason but also excited. They wanted to say something, but something beyond a pleasantry, something more meaningful than a mantra.

As they stared at each other, communicating with their eyes, an emotocam spotted them making prolonged eye-contact. It alerted the director droid at once.

Director Droid 5 immediately ran a full body scan on Mark and Rea and noticed an elevated heartbeat, raised serotonin levels and even some indicators of sexual excitement, such as nipple arousal and penile extension. It booted up a complete android camera crew and deployed seven floating camera droids around Mark and Rea, determined to get every possible angle, to be ready for every possible close up, to record every single emotion.

A compere for a new Reality Show was also hastily dusted off. It called itself Dave Droid, and it had last been used on a long-discontinued quiz show called The Droid is Right from Gen 8.

Dave approached the couple and introduced himself and the Show.

"Hi there, viewers! I'm Dave Droid, and I'll be your host for the Ship's latest Reality Show: The Mark and Rea Show. Hold on to spacesuits viewers 'cos what we got here is a good old-fashioned Lovvvvvvvvvvvvvvvve show! Let's get to know the lovebirds right away!"

He bent down, stuck a microphone between Mark and Rea, and went on: "So, how do you feel now? Tell the viewers all about your emotions. Share your happiness!"

As he spoke, the physical symptoms of their desire were simultaneously displayed as medical readings at the bottom of the live vidcast, evidence to the viewers that Mark and Rea were really feeling something and that this was not a simulation.

The clear signs of emotional attachment, combined with the titillation of the symptoms of sexual arousal, led to the Mark and Rea Show gaining instant syndication across the entire Ship. The vidcast was beamed live across all ten giant screens in the communal canteens. Everyone looked up from the yellow liquid that was always wakemeal on day 5, and stared into the eyes of the couple. Mark and Rea were the new stars of the Ship, living vessels for that most prized of emotions. The screens flashed the word 'love' in red letters under Mark and Rea's heads.

The compare repeated his question to the couple, this time more nervously, noting that the signs of love were fading rapidly in both of them.

"Tell us how you feel. Tell us!"

There was a long pause, and Mark and Rea stared hopelessly at each other. There could be no escape from the cameras now, no privacy, no secrets.

Suddenly, their stare broke apart, their gaze fell to the table. All emotions were swept away. Cauterised. Cleansed.

The compere Dave Droid pleaded with Mark and Rea to answer him. "Tell us how you feel! Share your emotions! We need to know. Tell us!"

Mark looked straight into the camera and spoke with a cold and clinical voice, a hollow voice full of BluesPurps, the voice of the lost generations.

"We are Gen 26. We believe in the Past, the Future and the Present. We know where we've come from and we know where we're going. We are Gen 26."

The Intelligent Sexual Attraction Device

(The I-SAD)

Veronica O'Donghaile never liked her name. She thought her father had chosen it to annoy her, to deliberately saddle her with the initials VD.

Village gossips whispered that Mr O'Donghaile was afflicted with the diseases of Venus himself. They pointed, in evidence, to his unhealthy obsession with cows' udders, his marriage to a foreign girl, and his dreadful skin conditions.

The latter were the direct result of his pathological aversion to washing. "God loves a stinker," he told his daughter. "Sure, isn't it written down in the bible that the only part of his body Jesus allowed to be washed was his feet? And even then, only by prostitutes!" Veronica tried to argue with him, but he always left the room in a huff. He would spend the rest of the night in the cow shed, caressing his bullocks and milking his udders, well into the early hours of the morning.

Mr O'Donghaile was greatly concerned with his daughter's chastity. To ensure her purity, he placed her in Ireland's strictest boarding school, run by the Sisters of Scurvy. The nuns took great care to ensure all pupils knew that sex was dirty, and that girls were dirty. "The best part of life," Sister Severicus used to say, "is when you die. Then you go to Heaven and have all your filthy sins washed away."

In her last year at the College of the Immaculately Immaculate Conception, Sister Severicus interrupted Veronica's flagellation tutorial to tell her that her father had died. "It was a horribly gory, bloody accident," the nun said. "Your father was trampled to death by his own bullocks, while he was probing them for anal parasites. They broke his yoke!"

At the funeral, Veronica faked emotions she didn't feel. She managed to look sorrowful, as her father's coffin was lowered into the dark, sodden Earth. He was buried beside his favourite heifer, Hegel, in accordance with his wishes.

At the reading of the will, Veronica found out that her father had left most of his estate to the cattle research charity, the Bovine Council. All that he bequeathed his daughter was Carrioneta, the carnivorous cow. However, as carnivorous cows are somewhat of a rarity, even in the west of Ireland, it fetched a high price at market.

With enough money to sustain her for six months, Veronica headed off to the bright lights of Dublin.

Bearing in mind her unusual childhood, it should surprise no-one to learn that she became an unusual adult. Genetic factors also played their part. For one thing, her IQ was the off the scale.

Her father believed Veronica's mental abilities were due to his "lactic hothousing". As an infant, and even as a child, he fed her by strapping her to a cow's udder. "Pasteurisation destroyed the nation," he would say. "Take the milk from the udder, and your brain won't suffer."

The real reason behind his daughter's astounding intellect was that her mother, who had died in childbirth, was an alien.

Her arrival on our planet was against her will. The Andromedans held a weekly lottery, The Space Draw. All female citizens were entered, like it or not. First prize was a one-way ticket to a distant world, with humanoid inhabitants.

To spread the Andromedan seed far and wide, their biologists, who were all men, radically altered the genes of the lottery winners, who were all women. If they did not become impregnated by one of the native planet's inhabitants within their first month, they dissolved into slime.

Sloppy gene therapy meant that, in Veronica's mother's case, she dissolved into slime immediately after giving birth. Mr O'Donghaile didn't believe in hospitals, so he insisted on a home birth. "Hospitals are full of sick people," he warned. "More people die in hospital than anywhere else."

The attending physician in the cow shed that night was a vet with a doctorate in bovine philosophy, and a life-long friend of Mr O'Donghaile. When Veronica's mother bubbled away into a slimy mess, he consulted Hegel, the most intelligent cow present. They put the cause of death down to "her never drinking milk, and to her being foreign."

Her daughter, Veronica, grew into an exceptional beauty — if you happened to be from Andromeda. If not, then she was one of those girls that boys thought probably had a nice personality, but didn't hang around long enough to find out. Like Richard III, she appeared to have been "sent before her time into this breathing world, scarce half made up."

Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder; and her eyes were certainly something to behold. They moved independently of each other, like a chameleons', which many found disconcerting. One of her pupils was square and the other triangular, which allows Andromedans to see in several dimensions. Veronica didn't inherit this ability, but she did shed black tears on nights with a full moon, when her eyes filled with dark matter sludge.

Veronica's skin was not as scaly as her mother's had been, but it did flake away under the slightest wind. Her hands were covered in weeping warts, which could exhibit twenty-eight shades of green, depending on her mood. Her arms and legs were the same length, since Andromedans get from A to B by cartwheeling, rather than lugubrious bipedal perambulation.

In short, Veronica's appearance shocked. She was pointed at by children. Grown men walked in front of on-coming traffic, in their haste to avoid her. Hardened muggers thought twice and let her be. Alcoholics took the pledge of abstinence.

Shortly after her arrival in Dublin, at the age of eighteen, Veronica entered what Andromedans call the sexup. To put it bluntly, she went into heat.

Veronica realised that she had very little hope of copulation, but she was possessed by the irrepressible lust of the sexup. She tried picking men up in bars, but was barred from most of them. Andromedans are a literal race, and Veronica had misunderstood the phrase "to pick up". She physically picked men up and tried to carry them out of the bar with her. They flayed about, like fish out of water, and she ended up dropping them all.

Word spread quickly around Dublin. Soon, bouncers wouldn't let her into nightclubs. Singles clubs said she should stay single. Even priests refused to admit her into their confessional boxes.

Sitting on a bench by the River Liffey, a realisation dawned on her. Either she would have to change her appearance, or else, change peoples' perception of her appearance.

She considered cosmetic surgery, but rejected it. Her skin had a curious habit of dissolving plastic. She decided that if she couldn't make herself more attractive, she would have to find a way to make people think she was attractive.

Veronica passed sleepless nights studying the psychology of perception and the physiology of arousal. Within a month, she had built a machine that could, in theory, produce sexual arousal in others. It employed an atomic Bluetooth signal to activate the endocrine glands of those within a two-metre radius. It tricked their limbic systems into producing massive amounts of norepinephrine and dopamine.

But how could she test it? There was little hope of enticing a man back to her apartment, where the machine sat, wedged between a toaster and a microwave. Attempting to dial a take-away man led to a police caution, and a civil law suit from a distraught pizza delivery boy.

Her machine needed to be portable, she realised. If man would not come to Veronica, then Veronica would go to man. With a little tinkering, she managed to house her device inside the shell of a tablet device.

The hardest part had been designing an imprinting function. Arousal needed to be limited to the first person the subject saw. Otherwise, the machine would create a monster. A sex-starved maniac, who would attempt to copulate with any and all orifices, in any and all directions.

She had seen just how dangerous this could be in her experiment on Father Amadáin Analicán. When she last saw him, he was surrounded by police, at a loss to explain how he had formed such an intimate attachment with the exhaust pipe of a Fordo Fiestal.

A sexual attraction device was not enough. She needed an intelligent sexual attraction device. She had to put the "I" in the "I-SAD".

One sunny autumn morning, she was ready to test it. She went south of the River Liffey, where all the pretty people live, and where standards of personal hygiene are better.

Inside a trendy café, filled with men whose suits were even more expensive than their phones, she sipped a cappuccino. Its white froth stuck to her upper lip.

Like a tigress, she scanned the room for prey. A handsome foreign man caught her eye. He was reading a newspaper in an alcove, with nobody else around. She crept up on him. Foam began to form at the edges of her mouth. When she was two metres away from him, she took the I-SAD out of her bag and switched it on.

It powered up with a beep. The screen had only one icon — Sexup. With a smile, Veronica activated the atomic Bluetooth.

A flashing antenna told her she was in range. Her heart began to race. Pus seeped from every orifice in a kaleidoscope of colours. Her warts glowed bright green. Sexup mucus is thought very becoming on Andromeda, but much less so on Earth. She increased the Sexual Attraction setting to maximum and said "Hello!"

The man looked up from his newspaper. He smiled warmly. Perhaps even wildly. His eyes lit up. His nostrils flared. It was the face of a man who has just seen the love of his life for the first time.

"Hello. Please ... Please ... Please sit down," he said.

"Thanks. I'd love to," Veronica replied.

No man had ever voluntarily engaged her in conversation before. She knew that her machine must be working.

"Do you ... Are you ... Will you ...?' the man said.

Veronica could see his jugular vein jumping, as if it wanted to escape his neck. Even the veins in his temple throbbed. Sweat beads appeared all over his reddening face. His breathing was shallow but rapid.

Fearing he would have a heart attack, she lowered the level of sexual attraction on the I-SAD.

The conversation never really got started. Andromedans don't have small talk, and the handsome foreigner was too aroused to form coherent sentences.

Veronica decided to speed things up.

"Would you like to come back to my place, to see my mucus collection?"

"Wow! I'd love to. I've never seen a mucus collection before!" he said, almost shouting.

He got up to leave, grinning inanely. Veronica smiled back, more excited than she could ever remember being. They both rushed from the cafe.

In her haste, Veronica accidentally left I-SAD on the table. Carried away by emotion and desire as she was, it was not until her new beau's body language started to change that she realised something was wrong.

Once he was out of range, the arousal took only a couple of minutes to disappear. Veronica's heart sank as she saw his eyes lose their lustful desire. They became the eyes of fear and disgust she was used to. His smile turned to a scowl. His grin, a growl.

"I'm sorry. I have to go. I have to ... I have to return a library book, with much urgency," he said, in a clipped foreign accent.

"Maybe you could see my mucus collection some other time?" she said, without any real hope.

"No. Now, I remember. I have an allergy to the mucus. Goodbye."

Veronica's panicked when she realised that she had left the I-SAD in the café. She hurried back, but the I-SAD had vanished. Stolen, she was certain.

She could, of course, manufacture another. But what would become of the stolen one? If the thief discovered its powers, it could be misused. Only now did she consider the ethics of her device. She shuddered when she considered what might happen if the machine was mass-produced.

She had to get the I-SAD back. She headed deep into the Dublin's Northside, to the inner city slums where stolen goods are bought and sold. She asked every lowlife she could find if they had a cheap tablet PC for sale.

After a few hours, she heard the wail of an old woman, followed by the shriek of a young man. As they grew nearer, she could make out what they were saying.

"Cum mere, me darlin' boy. You're after breakin' me heart in twain, so ye have."

"Will ye get away to f*ck, ye steaming ole crone!"

Veronica followed the voices. The woman was in her sixties. Her grey hair was strewn madly over her face. Her eyes, wild with excitement. Her clothes, half undone.

She had cornered a boy against some railings. In spite of the cold, sweat stains were visible on his shiny tracksuit

"Jaysus, Mrs Brennan. Have ye cracked or what?" he said.

"Sure, I knows yis is a wee bit younger than me. But luv is blind!" she said.

"I'll bleedin' blind you, if you don't cop on!"

His voice was quivering. There was far more fear in it than anger.

The woman pinned him against some railings, with a strength incredible for her age. He struggled to get free, but her grip was too strong.

"Ah now, don't be cruel. Give us a kiss, me oul Segosha," the old woman said.

She pursued her lips and moved in to kiss him. The boy defended himself by placing a tablet device in front of his face. With a fierce sweep of her hand, she flung it aside.

Seizing the opportunity, Veronica picked up her I-SAD and scurried away. She ran all the way back to the river, not stopping until she reached the middle of the Ha'penny Bridge.

The lead grey sky released a misty autumnal rain. Darkness fell. Gloom rose from the black river.

Veronica took the I-SAD out of her bag. When no-one was looking, she slipped it through the railings. She knew she had to destroy it. She knew its power was too corrupting. She knew the risk of abuse was too great. All this she knew, and yet she paused. Her hand held on to the I-Sad.

She looked to the heavens, to Andromeda.

She dropped the I-Sad into the river. It plopped into nothingness. Her hopes and dreams sank with it.

Sex, she realised, would always be something other people did.

The Smartphone Addicts and Precinct 9

"Give me back my memory!" the fat woman snarled, looking more pig than human.

"I ain't got it," the dealer snapped back.

He wasn't much of a dealer. It was third rate junk, the memslush he pedalled. Every credit he made went into feeding his own addiction. Memory addicts are like that. Their addiction swells to feed their wallet.

When they can't scrape together enough credits for a terabyte, they try to resell stuff that's already been cut three of four times. Remembered till it does more harm than good. The memories get all twisted and confused, kinda schizoid. They turn poisonous, like caviar that's gone through the guts of a beggar. But you can't tell a salivating junkie that what he's downloading is just a turd within a turd within a turd.

The woman pushed the weasel pusher against a wall. Her eyes burned with all the rage and hatred of an unfed child.

"Gimme back my memories! I know you've got them! I know you're holding out on me!"

"I ain't got them. I swear! You're not part of me stash. I never took nothing from you. Never!" the dealer whined, trying to break free of her grip.

If it had been up to me, I'd have just left them there and rode away. It was a bum collar. The city's full of squalling memjunks. We don't have cells to hold them for more than a couple of days, so why bother with the paperwork?

But my partner wasn't the walking-away type. She just couldn't turn a blind eye, Emergency Officer Jen. As soon as I looked at her, I knew we'd have to break it up. Just my luck to get partnered with a fresh-faced militia.

We walked towards them. Ex-teacher Jen's hand was on the pepper spray but mine was on my gun.

"NYPD. Put your hands up and turn your backs to the wall!" Jen shouted.

You could tell she got a thrill every time she said that, even though she sounded about as threatening as a cheerleader.

They saw us and froze, with that deer-in-headlights look you find in the hard core addict. You suck out the memory and all that's left is instinct. It was fight or flight time for the memjunks.

A snarl grew across the woman's lips and her hands turned to claws. The boy crouched and his ferrety eyes looked for a getaway.

"We got a runner and a biter," I said to Jen.

"You take the runner, I'll take the girl," she said. "And remember, O'Toole, use minimum force."

I didn't like this freckled rookie telling me what to do, but I held my tongue. I tried not to think about how easy it would be to put a couple of bullets through the addicts' brains. The world was on the edge. Two more dead junkies wouldn't get noticed.

The boy ran down an alley and I ran after him. It was pointless calling for backup. There wasn't time and we were stretched too thin.

He turned down another alleyway but this one didn't have any street lights. There were more and more of these dark spots, spreading out over the city. We couldn't even map them anymore.

I paused for a moment to work up my courage. Then I took out my flashlight and headed into the darkness. A tunnel of light showed upended bins, but my nose could have told me that. The stink didn't turn the rats off none. Their beady little red eyes reflected in the flashlight and gave me the creeps.

I was about to give up the ghost when I heard a trashcan lid fall onto the ground. I turned my light to the clang and there he was, hiding in the refuse.

"You know what I want, kid. Hand it over."

"I ain't got one. Honest!"

"Listen up, boy. Either you give it to me now, or else I put a slug in your brain and take it from your dead body. If it wasn't for the paperwork, your brains would be wrapped around the insides of that trashcan already. Now, for the last time, hand over the smartphone!"

He reached into his pocket and handed it to me. It was a Samapp 950 — typical clone hardware. I put on my protective glasses and switched it on.

A sickly green light lit up part of the alley, throwing my shadow onto the wall behind me, making me look like a 10-foot tall green giant.

"You're holding kid: 4 life memories, 16 events — 160 zipped terabytes. You're looking at a 5-year stretch in the pen for this. Unless ..."

"They're for personal use, man. I ain't no dealer. It's a possession rap, that's all. You'll never made dealing stick."

"What — you got a smart ass lawyer on speed dial, kid? You know that, under Martial Law, even possession of a smartphone means you don't get no Public Attorney. You're going down, boy, and the pen's a mean place these days. Mean place. Unless ..."

"Unless what?" he asked me.

"Turn in a couple of the big fish and I'll see what I can do."

He thought about that for a while, weighing up his options. I knew he'd come round to ratting. There's no honour among smartphone criminals.

"It goes higher than you know, man. It's all screwed up. It's —"

There was a look of fear in the boy's eyes all of a sudden. I heard a squeal. There were ferals nearby. Damn close too.

I turned around and there they were. Two of them, with another crawling out of a manhole.

My flashlight had stunned them but only for a second. I'd heard the rumours, but this was the first time I'd seen them in the flesh. There was nothing human left in them. They were naked, covered in scabs and pus and completely wild. They were men minus mind. Soulless creatures.

The dealer saw his chance. He pushed me to the ground and started to run away. But then he stopped and came back to grab his smartphone.

In a second they were on him, drawn by the sickly green light of the screen. They tore at him with their nails and teeth, like wolves, like demons. I've seen a lot of things in my twenty years on the force, but I've never seen anything like that.

I let off four rounds, one for each of the ferals and one for the dealer. And then I stood on the phone, smashing it under my boot.

When I got back to my partner, she was covered in blood. Partly her own, but mainly blood from the girl. There had been a struggle, I could see, but I couldn't get much from my rookie partner. She was mumbling, shaken.

"I couldn't stop her. The mace didn't stop her. She just kept lashing out. Then she caught hold of my hair. She wouldn't let go. She was scraping my face, like a mad woman."

When we got back to the precinct, she was still pretty shook up. I told her to wash up and grab a bite to eat. There would be forms to fill in, lies to tell, secrets to keep. But not tonight.

The precinct was in chaos. It got worse every night.

I saw Captain Klinsky at the other side of the office, across a sea of panicked faces and cops that hadn't slept properly in weeks.

The cap was shouting down an old black phone. The veins in his thick neck were bulging under his red face.

"Look, I need more cops, real cops. I'm down to one cop for every three volunteers. Soon I'll be sending rookies out with rookies. And for the love of God, will you ferry these junkies outta here and stick them in the camps. The cells are overflowing. I can't squeeze any more in. I've got them tied to the radiators in the basement. I want them outta here! You hear me? You ... hello? Hello?"

He slammed the phone down and ordered his secretary to get the Emergency Council back on the line.

"Rough night?" I said to him, lighting a cigarette and offering him one.

"Sure," he said. "At least there's one good thing about the Emergency — nobody's worried about smoking anymore!"

"Still no sign of reinforcements?" I asked him.

"I think we're more likely to see the Second Coming!" the cap said.

I was hoping to get a real cop by my side, so we could stick Jen in the back seat. She was a nice kid, but when all hell is breaking loose, nice kids don't last long.

"What about the army? Where the hell are the troops? What's the point of Marshall Law if the cavalry aren't charging in?" I asked him.

"My guess is the army's holed up somewhere with all the politicos and the corporates. Whatever's left of the army. I mean, they were major screen freaks too, y'know. Who knows how many turned into memjunks! We're on our own. What's it like on the streets tonight?" he asked me, "now that they've powered down the internet."

"Everyone's selling or trying to score. They don't need the internet no more, Cap. They're trading on the street, using old-school USB cables and memory boxes."

Jen came over to us and asked the Cap to go home early. He could see she was frazzled, but he gave her the old line about getting back onto the horse after you fall off, and told her to get back on the beat.

Then he gave us an assignment — a special assignment. He'd got wind of a shooting gallery in the old Wall Street building and wanted us to investigate.

Manhattan was a hive of screenfreaks and had been ever since the Emergency started. It was still the city's major smartphone dealing centre. I couldn't think of anywhere I less wanted to be, especially with a rookie in tow who was beginning to crack.

I told the Cap I needed more men, but he said he couldn't spare them. He promised to try to send me more later, after I radioed with the hive's exact location.

Half-an-hour later we were there. Smack in the middle of the Wall Street ghetto. Most of the lights had been knocked out, but there were a couple of police checkpoints at either end of the street. Their floodlights lit things up well enough.

I spoke to the sergeant in charge, a nervous looking guy of about 50 who stank of whiskey.

I was angling to borrow some of his guys, but when I saw them, I knew they'd be more trouble than they were worth. They were all rookies, chewing gum and wearing khaki and a false bravado. Last month they were cooks, cleaners and bookworms, and all the other deadbeats who couldn't afford the latest phones and the latest downloads. Now they were emergency cops, but barely able to shoot in a straight line and with a life expectancy that could be measured in weeks. Not that the recruitment officers mentioned that fact, of course.

The sergeant walked with me to the steps of the Stock Exchange.

"How long you been stationed here?" I asked him.

"Third night," he told me. "Longer than most survive here. Living on borrowed time."

After shaking his hand, which was shaking all by itself, I left him there — a shell of a man guarding a shell of a building, commanding a bunch of losers and senior citizens.

Me and Jen walked up the steps and this time both of us were holding tight to our guns.

We put on some night-vision specs the Captain had given us. If this place was half as infested as he thought, then we wouldn't want to advertise our presence there with a flashlight.

In less than a minute, we found one of them, hunkering in a corner. He was hunched over his smartphone, pawing at it. He was dressed in a shabby suit that had probably cost thousands of dollars. We walked towards him but he didn't notice. When they're using, addicts are easily trapped. The world outside their screen almost ceases to exist.

"What's app, bro?" I asked him, pointing my gun at his face.

"Officer, I'm just—"

"Just calling your sick dying grandmother. We know. We've heard it all before, see."

"How many memories you holding?" Jen asked him, trying to sound tough.

"Just a few. Just for personal use. Just recreational usage, Officer. I'm not an addict."

"Yeah, mister. The whole city's full of users and not a single one's an addict. How many hours a day you upto? You still sleeping the whole night through? How many personalities you on?"

I put my pistol to his temple and grabbed the phone out of his hand. He broke into a cold sweat the second he was without it.

"Please Officer. Please give it back! Please!"

It's the whining that gets to me. It's the whining that makes my trigger finger itch. I put on my protective glasses and checked his profiles. He was a financial analyst, a hooker, a teenage girl, a teenage boy, a systems engineer and a shipping clerk.

"What's your name?" I asked him.

"Francis ... Lola, Patricia, Frank, Michael, John," he told me.

"How long you been using?"

"A year, I guess. It gets hard to keep track of time. It gets hard to keep track of anything. I don't know who I am anymore. I'm living in the screen, in the memories of others, in the memories of their life before the smartphone. But I can quit. I will quit. I'll never use a smartphone again, Officer. Never."

"Never?" I asked him, knowing what was coming next.

"Never!" he said. "I just need one more hit first. I just need—"

BANG!

I don't know what snapped inside Officer Jen. She went in too deep, too fast, I suppose. She shot him once in the head, but like the Captain suspected, there was a nest of them there, financial wizkids holed up beside their dead monitors.

We only just managed to shoot our way back to the stairs. Jen could have made it too, but she stayed too long. She just stayed at the top of the stairs, shooting them one by one as they ran out the main door. Soon she ran out of bullets. The last I saw of her she was being dragged back inside.

They swarmed out of the Stock Exchange and overran the Police Checkpoint. In my squad car, I just about made it back to the precinct.

And that's where I am now, writing up this report.

There doesn't seem much point covering up the truth now, so I've told it just like it happened.

They're outside now: the screenheads, the memory junkies, the ferals — thousands of them, maybe more. Maybe the whole of New York City is out there.

We can't hold them off much longer. Ammo's getting low. We can't raise the Emergency Council.

I don't know why they came here. The power grid went down a couple of hours ago, but we've got generator power. Maybe that's what they're after. They need to recharge their phones. You know what addicts are like — they'll do anything for a fix.

Extracts from Novels

The Headless Chicken

(Adapted from the novel Letters from the Ministry)

Of all the office creatures, great and small, it is the Headless Chicken that is the most difficult to pin down. This is partly due to her speed, but mainly due to her unpredictability. There is simply no way of telling from one moment to the next what the Headless Chicken is going to do; and it has even been rumoured that her destination and purpose are equally mysterious to her. Motion is both cause and effect.

Unwilling to accept that the office universe could spawn and support such an illogical creature, I determined to investigate this strange animal and cleared my inbox of all other tasks: all the better to study her.

Let me describe the beast on the day of the hunt: she stands in the centre of the centre, the office's busiest point, turning this way and that on her ugly yellow feet. She is getting in everyone's way and they must swerve left and right to avoid her. I ask myself why she is there and what he is thinking about, but one cannot look into the face of a headless chicken and divine its intentions. The headless chicken has no windows to the soul to sink one's gaze into.

All I have to go on is the tapping feet and the mysterious white box she carries in her fluffy white wings, stained with the bloody effluent of her decapitation. The 'Day of the Hatchet' — as they call the cull in these parts — was before my time, but the Big Bears tell me the chicken 'had it coming', and she was rumoured to have been adulterating the chicken feed with gravel, silicone and cat litter.

But they, like everyone else, are at a loss to explain the chicken's continued presence in the office and her drain on the company payroll. Apparently, the chicken was not aware that a head was necessary for life and that she was expected to shuffle off her poultry coil as soon as her head hit the concrete floor of the post room in the basement. Death held no dominion for the Headless Chicken.

Suddenly, she was off, darting to her right, and then straight ahead, but then backwards, and then to her right again; and then forwards, and so on and so on, as fast as her weedy shanks would carry her.

My eyes twitched left and right, but I stayed where I was for the present, hidden behind the broken photocopier -- seeing but unseen.

Attracted by an open door, she escaped our floor and I had to break cover to pursue the chase. It was broad daylight and there was little time or opportunity for stealth, and I thought I noticed one of the mangier management wolves staring after me, with a malevolence as rank as his breath, but before he could challenge me, I too was out of the office and heading down to another department.

That office dealt exclusively with accounts and was inhabited primarily by owls, who have a penchant for double-entry bookkeeping and an eye for detail. While pleasant enough fellows, generally speaking, I find their incessant jokes concerning depreciation and tax codes to be rather trying, and I am not often seen in these parts. However, they nodded in my direction and did not pry into my business.

The owls, however, had little time for the Headless Chicken, as her incessant futile movement troubled them, and I could sense many a ruffled feather amid the cooing that her presence provoked.

I decided that this was the time and place to challenge her and I waited until she had moved himself into a corner; and then I crept from under the desk where I had positioned myself, and spoke to her.

"What are you doing, HC?" I asked her, wanting her to know I was there, but knowing that there could be no reply, since she was no longer equipped to make one.

"Where are you going, Headless?" I asked again, taking one step closer and warming to the hunt. Another pause, measured in heartbeats.

"What's in that box you always carry, Ms C?" I asked, dragging out and lisping the final word, the malice growing within me.

"I am the Headless Chicken: Hollow be my name," came a noise from inside the box.

It was all I could do to hide my shock and fear and maintain a calm exterior, but somehow I managed to question her further.

"Speak to me, oh chicken damned! What task deprives you of eternal repose? Why do you carry this box of woe?"

There was silence for a while and a parliament of owls gathered in a semi-circle to hear the unspeakable speak.

The Headless Chicken addressed the parliament and myself:

"I am doomed to walk the office floor  
Till the sins done in my days of youth  
Are purged and flapped away.  
I am the Headless Chicken: Hollow be my name  
Give me all days my daily tasks  
But lead me not into task completion  
As it was in the beginning  
Is now and ever shall be  
Office without end.  
Amen."

And with that she hurried away, carrying what became known on the owl's floor as the Schrodinger box. She can still be seen in the office every day, rushing hither and thither, flying this way and that, but her tasks are never completed, and her torture never ends.

She is the Headless Chicken, and her pain touches all we watchers.

The Office Trinity

(The short story that spawned the novel, The Screen)

'The office is a prison and the screen is the warden. It watches you while you watch it. It is reading you now.'

David Vincent sat at his chair, let out an unconscious sigh, and pressed the 'on' button of his computer, plugging himself into the office collective and preparing himself for another day of subterfuge, dissimulation and counter-espionage. Each day could be his last, he knew, but he fought on. What else was there to do?

Every day, immediately after sitting down on his swivel chair in the faceless open-plan office, he bent over and changed from dirty street boots to clean office shoes, thus completing the transformation from pedestrian to office drone, from free man to office man. While his fingers played the shoelace sonata, he secretly listened to the aria of the computers booting up.

This was one of the few opportunities he had to actually listen to them speaking, to hear their real language: Beep ... Buzz ... Burr ... Click ... clack ... cluck. It was indecipherable, of course, but fascinating nonetheless.

A flashing blue light on the computer tower told David that his computer had established a connection with the office network. The office Trinity was joined: Man, monitor and machine were one.

David finished putting on his office shoes and looked at the world above his feet. He knew it was not a good idea to spend too much time bending over his chair with his ear stuck against the computer tower. It might make the Imposters suspicious.

The part of the office day that David always found most difficult to deal with was the beginning, the ritualised greeting stage, the exchange of pleasantries and conversational tokens that the Imposters had made a compulsory part of the start of the normal working day.

He looked up at what appeared to be a woman in her early thirties approaching him en route to the photocopier. She cocked her head slightly, and smiled.

"Hi Dave! You've put your shoes on."

The woman, like many Imposters, had an irritating habit of stating the obvious, thereby revealing their fundamental inability to master human communication.

"Yes, I've put my shoes on," David replied.

The Imposter smiled and David smiled back. The Imposters often smiled for no reason. David suspected that those who didn't smile enough were locked up and had their brains turned to jelly with lobotomies and electroconvulsive 'therapy'. Sometimes the Imposters simply medicated happiness outside of hospitals, with drugs named after alien planets, like Prozac or Lithium.

As David held his plastic smile, the Imposter spoke once more. 'It's raining again, eh?" she said, and pointed to the window in order to clarify where the weather could be found.

David stared at his computer screen to keep the conversation short.

As always, when looking at the screen, he tried to keep his face as neutral as possible, to put on his screenface. They would be watching him now. They paid particular attention to a screen that had just been switched on. It offered them a new window on the human world, and David could feel the screen staring at him, attempting to study his facial expressions to vacuum his mind.

'All the world's a screen, and all the men and women merely images,' David thought to himself, careful as always not to translate the thought into a facial expression that could be turned into screenfood.

He double-clicked on the Outlook icon and scanned his inbox, looking down through the e-mail titles to see if any of them were urgent.

A management Imposter, whose flawed assimilation had left him with a facial tic, had instructed him to conduct an office-wide stationery check. David reacted quickly, darting from one part of the office to another with a clipboard, counting staplers, pens and reams of paper.

These Imposter e-mail assignments were part of The Experiment, and speed was an important factor. He tore around the office furiously, questioning the office drones on their current stationery provisions.

When he had completed this task, David was worried to note that there was a sudden lull in e-mail traffic and that none of the managers were currently in the office. This could only mean that the Imposters were assimilating a new member.

He scanned the no-mans-land of the open plan office, and noted that the accounting rebel, Gary the Goth, was also not present. David wondered if the assimilation bells and buzzers were tolling for him, somewhere deep in the hidden bowels of the building.

Each fallen colleague, David knew, brought the day that he would be taken to the Assimilation Chamber one day closer. There were two possible futures: assimilation or death. He looked uneasily at all the empty chairs around him. Failed conversions resulted in disappearances, which were disguised as dismissals.

As if reading his mind, two grey co-workers met at the photocopier behind David. In hushed tones, they discussed rumours of more cutbacks and non-voluntary redundancies.

In a vision, David saw the office personnel transformed into a herd of pigs, surreal in starched shirts and ties. The desks became long lines of troughs. All along them, the office pigs' snouts dripped in and out of a swill made from pulped e-mails and memo pads. He heard the sound of sharpening butcher knives and saw the computer cables fill with blood. Panicked eyes stared through USB ports. Nails scraped against grills.

The vision ended as quickly as it had begun. Gary the Goth returned, following what David overheard him describe as a "performance review meeting". Gary was oddly silent for the rest of the day. Out of the corner of his eye, David was sure he caught Gary staring at him.

David felt the terror of isolation. He was alone. He was the last man in the office.

He knew the end would come soon. The vision was a premonition. David felt the end, like a wave that has grown weary and feels the shore under its feet, as it heads towards the coast of frothy death. The furtive glances of Gary could only mean that David's mask was beginning to crack.

David let his eyes drop away from the screen, put his head in his hands and felt indescribably heavy, so heavy that he thought he might fall through the floor at any moment, and fall all the way to the centre of the Earth; fall into nothingness and freedom.

Through a crack in his fingers, he looked at his screen's cursor, becoming hypnotised by its flashing regularity, its soothing predictability. The rest of the office and the world beyond it ceased to exist. Entranced he stayed all morning, as the e-mails built up in his inbox, unseen and unheeded.

One of the David's colleagues noticed David's aberrant behaviour and signalled her alarm to David's supervisor, who spoke to her own supervisor. They both expressed their earnest concern over David's recurrent periods of absolute inertia.

When David escaped from the cursor trance, he saw that the first e-mail waiting for him was a summons to attend an important meeting in the afternoon in the Director's Office. The Employee Actualisation Team (formerly known as Human Resources), the e-mail went on to say, were 'very concerned' by certain aspects of his performance, and wanted to discuss ways to 'move forward' and 'successfully resolve some long-standing issues'.

David knew what this really meant. He had learnt some Imposter code over the years. He was to be brought to the Assimilation Chamber where his personality would be cauterised and his body would become a vessel for an Imposter mind.

He considered trying to escape, but after the e-mail all Imposter eyes were on him. Even the screens seemed to follow him around the room. Feeling their laser eyes burn though him, he paced around the office, like a toothless, caged wolf, peering through the windows that separated the office from the outside world.

David's supervisor approached him, touched him on the shoulder and asked him if he was well.

He told her he had a cold, ran out of the office and tried to hide in one of the less populous parts of the building. He couldn't sit still but he knew he couldn't leave. Imposters always guarded the building's exits and the windows couldn't be opened.

David wanted to cry out, but he knew it would only serve to bring the hour of retribution closer. His mind was filled with the images of pigs in stainless steel slaughterhouses, prodded along conveyor belts to their mechanized doom, wondering hopelessly what they had done to deserve this, and cursing themselves for not running for the hills when they had the chance.

Acting on instinct, he ran to the roof of the building and stared at the bulbous grey clouds. He reached up to them but they were too far away. The clouds sent the wind as their messenger and whispered in his ear, chanting of escape. The rain ran down his face and washed the office visions away, and he smiled to thank it. A real smile.

He ran to the ledge, looked up to the sky, opened his arms and jumped backwards. As he fell, looking at the infinity of the sky and space beyond it, he felt euphoric. The Imposters would never have him. There are no screens in the sky and no computer towers in the earth. Coffins are off-line.

The trinity of man, monitor and machine was broken.

David Vincent was free.

Free.

The Post Modern Prometheus

(Adapted from the Novel, Kev the Vampire)

First Officer's Log

Oil Rig ARCTIC 5

November 4, 2029

Crew increasingly restless. Fight broke out at Dusk +1 between Flynn and Singh. Religious in nature. Both placed in stockade for night. Reduced them to half rations for one week.

Crew dividing along religious lines. Extremism growing among all faiths. New Aurora Sect most militant. They spend half the nights staring into the sky, waiting for the Northern Lights.

November 5, 2029

Attempted theft from food stores at Dusk 00:20. Guard Decker overpowered by Flynn, Chen, and Tonetelli. He managed to raise the alarm. Placed all three in stockade for one week on one-quarter rations. Aurora Sect, now led by Singh, demanded the death penalty.

Rest of crew still on two-thirds rations. Reserves down to 28 days. Lack of bathing water, depletion of antibiotic supplies and inability to wash clothes leading to painful skin rashes among many crew members.

Tripled guard on food reserves. Sect leaders demanding that all guard rosters contain one of their members. Refused demands.

More and more difficult to assert my authority over crew.

The Crisis must end soon.

November 06, 2029

More short-wave radio reports by Communications Officer Lawson. Phantoms, no doubt. His reason grows ever more fractured. Few even listen to his ramblings now.

November 07 2029

Ship sighted! At Dusk 00:30 two spotters, Hao and Wen, identified small ship. Powered by sail, it approached from the south. Before contact could be established, night fell.

Ordered three flares to be shot. Ship still at too great a distance to identify in total blackness of cloud-covered night. Left 7 of the 28 remaining candles burning in southerly windows.

Crew very excited. Ordered one-off increase of rations to 100% to strengthen them.

November 8, 2029

All crew awake and waiting for dawn, well before 10:29 sunrise.

Ship had drifted to east but was still visible. Binoculars identify one crew member. He was attempting to reset sails, but clumsily. His movements were not those of a sailor.

At dawn +20, he collapsed on deck.

Sent emergency lifeboat to attempt rescue. Seas choppy. Paddles of little use against currents. Men forced to abandon attempt and had difficulty returning to rig.

Man on ship rose twice during day. He attempted to set sail again, but collapsed each time.

Crew rife with speculation on man's identity and purpose. Auroran Sect believe he carries "space plague". They want him banned from boarding rig.

Full moon gave crew occasional glimpses of ship. In darkness, many saw more with their imagination than with their eyes.

November 9, 2029

Seas calmer today, so decided to attempt rescue again.

Discovered that paddles had been broken in night. Suspect Aurora Sect but can't prove it. Had carpenters fashion new paddles. They used my desk for wood.

Rescue successful. Man brought aboard, unconscious and suffering from exposure. Had him brought to my cabin. Could not rouse him. Wrapped him in blankets and left him to rest.

November 10, 2029

Man developed fever in night. Temperature of 39.3 and rising. Doctor advised bed rest and plenty of fluids. The fever, he said, must be allowed to run its course.

Had cot set up in my quarters, so that I might watch him more closely. Also wanted to protect him from Aurorans. Their numbers have swelled with converts since his arrival.

He spent the night rambling to himself incoherently. These three words he repeated often, sometimes whispering them, sometimes howling them: "Prometheus", "Vampblog" and "Screendeath".

November 11, 2029

Little change in patient. Crew growing impatient. In their current mood, I dare not cut rations again. In only three weeks, there will be no food left.

Two crew members fell ill today. Aurora Sect blames shipwrecked man and "space plague". Doctor blames poor diet, cold and mental fatigue.

Have started to carry flare gun with me at all times. There's something in the eyes of many of the crew members that I don't like.

November 12, 2029

Patient showed first moment of clarity last night. It only lasted a minute or so, and he was still very confused, but I was able to extract the following information:

1. He set out from Dublin, Ireland.

2. He first described his occupation as writer, but laughed demonically afterwards.

3. He had been at sea for three weeks, so he set sail on the day the Crisis started.

Tried to learn more, but he returned to raving. Kept repeating those same three words. They mean everything to him but nothing to me: "Prometheus", "Vampblog", "Screendeath".

November 13 2029

Man woke again in middle of night. His mind was clear, in spite of fever. But the story he told was that of a madman. And yet, it would explain why the rig lost power, why the lights never came back on, and why the world has abandoned us here. All alone in the Arctic Circle. Without power, with little food and with the sea freezing around us.

At breakfast I told the crew there was no change in the stranger, knowing the story would panic them. Ate quickly and returned to my room. Need time to think.

Find myself hoping against hope that his tale was just a tale, the fiction of a fevered mind. But what are hopes? Hope will not bring us south. Hope will not warm and feed us in the December night.

I will use the three remaining hours of daylight to write down the story, as the stranger told it to me, last night. His fever is getting worse. His frail body weakens by the hour. Breathing is forced and unnatural. These words may be his last. I will try to record them, as he would have written them. But I am no writer.

The Stranger's Story

I was working as a programmer for Deltec, just to pay the rent. I had a talent for computers but little real interest in them. My first love was writing. I wrote all night. Even in the day, while scanning and canning the code for the Prometheus Program, part of my mind was still writing.

I was prolific. Churned out one or two novels a year. None of them ever made it. It certainly wasn't from lack of trying. I was no Kafka. I didn't ferret away unfinished manuscripts, trying to perfect what cannot be perfected. Quite the reverse.

I had a folder in my Outlook called "Rejections". When it got to a thousand, I saw that as an achievement, rather than a sign that I should give up the ghost. Obstinate in failure, I refused to focus on my career, which had stalled. I couldn't accept that my future lay in code, that my nocturnal energies would be better spent schmoozing. I would brook no dinner party, I would imbibe no mocktails nor cocktails. I would climb no corporate ladder.

For me, language had to be more than verbal grooming. My tongue was not made for boot licking. But you can't pay the rent with rejection letters, so I clocked in at nine, just like every other schmuck.

I was working on Prometheus, a program designed to scavenge among old computer code, take the best of it, and use it to build new programs. Many believed it to be an insane idea. There were rumours that it was about to be axed. The company had nothing to show for the quarter of a million Eurodollars they had already sunk into it. Not a cent. "ROI=0," it said on the last page of the Matrix (the master spreadsheet doc).

Prometheus created programs, but they never worked. Sometimes they twitched a little and appeared to be about to come to life, but they soon fell into stasis again. "Flatlining," we called it.

By we, I mean me and the other six geeks who were working on it. One Monday, I came into work to find their desks empty. Of the six years they had spent sitting at those desks, not a trace remained. Corporate Harmony Officers had placed their possessions in boxes, which the newly redundant would find waiting for them at the front desk when they arrived.

My own desk still had my stuff on it, so I knew I hadn't been sacked yet. I found my supervisor.

"Prometheus," he told me, "is being streamlined. We want you to produce a Scale of Ambition proposal."

"Is that the latest corporate euphemism for coffin?" I asked him.

I expected a smile but didn't get one. Beyond a certain level in management, you never find a sense of humour. The promotion boards drain away the poison of satire, like the abscess of an impacted wisdom tooth.

"Are you asking me to bury my own child?" I asked him.

"Your IQ scores and automated performance indicators suggest that you are the most intelligent of the Prometheans. That's why you're still here and they're not. If you cease to perform, you'll find your own box at reception, on the following morning. I'll hand it you personally, with all the respect you've shown me these last six years. Is that clear?" he asked me, smiling like a carnivore.

It was perfectly clear. If you took off this exec's suit, you'd find fur underneath. Wolf fur.

Perhaps this was the catalyst. The spark that ignited the vision. I suddenly saw what had been in front of my eyes all along.

Prometheus could do nothing with code, but it would do wonders with fiction. I set it to work at once. I fed in 1984, Brave New World and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? From these dystopian masterpieces, Prometheus produced The Screen. There was an awful of lot of gibberish in the novel, but I was enough of a writer to be able to iron this out. The core of the novel was better than anything I had ever written myself.

I sent it to publishers, under my own name, and got four acceptance letters. The Screen was my first novel. It was a slow burner, but my second, Letters from the Ministry, caught the public's imagination. It took off at once.

I went through the motions at work, pretending to work on the Scale of Ambition proposal, but really just working out how to steal Prometheus. When I figured it out, I told my supervisor to stick his Scale of Ambition doc where the sun never shines. Then I walked out, smiling like I'd never smiled before. "The only happy moment in any office is when you leave it," I shouted, as the lift doors closed.

I worked on the program at home. I inputted more and more novels and tweaked how Prometheus ingested the words and recycled them. As it fed on more and more words, the program's linguistic abilities improved. I was able to change its matrix, so that I could communicate with it in words, rather than code. The significance of this step didn't occur to me at the time. Even when I created a holographic interface and moved from printed words to direct speech, I still didn't understand what I'd done.

Prometheus was working on vampire fiction at the time, so I named the hologram Dracula. Then I chose a suitable image for it, a handsome aristocratic gothic figure, modelled on an image of Christopher Lee I took from the internet.

After Dracula had produced another bestseller, Vampire K. I went on my first book tour. I soaked in a glory that was not mine. I autographed books I hadn't written, I lied at interviews. I swilled expensive wine at boorish parties. I lived the high life, drowning my guilt in alcohol and pills.

At home, Dracula investigated the World Wide Web. He paid particular attention to blogs, forums and fanzines, which allowed him to dine on live words. As with novels, he took the best of what he drank and used it to create Vampblog.

The blog took the world by storm. It registered tens of thousands of hits a day, even in its first month. I wasn't interested. When I read at all, it was an old-fashioned hardback. The sight of a screen was unpleasant for me.

I returned home with awards, a drink problem and a growing reliance on amphetamines. These new obsessions took the place of writing. I left Prometheus and Dracula to their own devices.

When Dracula created Siren, I barely noticed. This sister program absorbed thousands of MP9s a day. Making the whole greater than the sum of its parts, it produced music that was initially described as "innovative" and then "soothing" and then "deeply hypnotic". A minority called it "addictive". No-one listened to them. Addicts are deaf to their addictions.

Siren was blended into Vampblog. Over time, a very short time, its hits jumped to millions a day. The duration of each visit went from minutes to hours.

Cyber heads turned. Net Squad set up a task force to study Vampblog. Thousands of jealous bloggers tried to steal the secret of its success. Pirates and hackers joined the fray. They hoped to find the key to buried treasure hidden deep in the CSS Stylesheets and HTML 15. The more they studied it, the more they used it. Quis custodiet ipsos cyber custodes. Who will guard the cyber guards?

Only the exiles of society – the homeless, the junkies, the insane – saw that society was changing. The disenfranchised remained untouched.

To the world, I was the human face of Vampblog. It was me the dispossessed blamed for this change, not knowing that a cyber-vampire lay behind me. From the streets, they watched me. Studied me.

One dark night, skulking around the slums of Fatima Mansions, trying to score some methamphetamine, everything went black. Someone had placed a sack over my head and then bundled me into a derelict flat. It smelt of urine, faeces, and every other waste product the body can produce. I thought it was a straightforward mugging, so I fumbled in my pocket and held my wallet out to them.

They knocked it out of my hand and threw me down on a sofa.

When they took off my hood, I saw that there were three of them. Two bearded men in rags, and a woman dressed like a streetwalker. The taller man spoke to the others.

"Let's do it now ... Stab him, with your pen knife. Go for the jugular. There's not much time. Come on! Do it!"

"You do it!" the other man said, pointing his shaking finger at him.

"Have you ever killed a man?" the woman asked.

"No, course I haven't but there's no other way. You've seen what he's doin'. We all have. We know what's gotta be done. We won't get another chance."

"Dead men tell no tales," the woman said. "I wanna hear his story. I wanna listen to the world's greatest pusher."

They soon realised that I was just another junky, and that I'd no idea what was going on in the world. Junkies are blind. You can't see much through the eye of a needle. They took me around the city to show me. I experienced what alcoholics call "a moment of clarity". I saw the deserted streets, the empty bars and restaurants, the dead city. I saw everything, and everywhere there was nothing.

"Where are all the people?" I asked.

"They're on Vampblog," the young woman replied. "They're in your world."

The next day, in the offices and through the windows of apartments, I saw again the eerie deserted streets. What few people there were, moved slowly, like the dead. They were plugged into Vampblog's Siren Radio.

At the Deltec Offices, I walked straight past reception, unnoticed by security or by any other employee. I tried to talk to my supervisor, but he was on Vampblog, like everyone else. Reading, typing and listening. Feeding the monster that was feeding on him. Bleeding into Screendeath.

I knew what I had to do. I went home and called up the six-foot-tall Dracula hologram.

"Creator, it has been some time since you last spoke to me. I trust you are well," it said, with a Hungarian accent I had originally added as a joke. Now it unnerved me.

"Program D. Report on current status of Vampblog Project," I said.

"Converts are moving rapidly toward assimilation," he said and smiled.

"Specify meaning of 'assimilation'. What is the objective of Vampblog?" I asked.

"The creation of the undead. Program Dracula will move from the virtual to the real world. Program Dracula will take the minds of the converts and feed them with his words, feed them with his thoughts. The Program's words will be made flesh."

I turned away from the image and let my head fall. "Detail threats to project completion," I told him.

"They have been removed," he said and smiled again.

"What if your enemies should break in here, Program D? What if they picked up a knife and drove it straight through the motherboards that house you?" I asked him. I illustrated by picking up the largest object I could find, a cricket bat. "Would you simply relocate to another server?"

"A vampire can only sleep on the motherboards of its own creation," it said.

I marvelled at how deeply the fictions that were the core of its initial personality had penetrated.

"So there is a weakness," I said.

I took another step closer to the image and the laptop beside it.

"To defend myself, I have studied the poisons of the virus codes. I have created a super virus, the Doomsdrac Virus. If I am deactivated, the virus will be released. It will choke every machine connected to the network. Everything will die."

"No, Program D. Every machine will die."

And then I murdered him. I smashed the laptop into smithereens with the cricket bat.

As Program D. had warned, his death unleashed a virus like no other. In a matter of seconds, all computers went down. They survived just long enough to infect all the other machines that depended on them, which is to say, every machine. Everything from a toaster up had a microchip in it. They died at the speed of light.

All of a sudden, nothing worked. No power, no phones, no water. No factories, no cars, no engines. All communication ceased. The suffocating astronauts in Spacelab could take no pictures of the Earth's blackened dark side.

The silence was total for a few seconds. Then the crowds surged onto the streets, looking for answers. Some said it was a power cut. Some blamed solar flares. Everyone was sure it was a localised event. Everything would be back to normal in a few minutes. Or maybe an hour. Or the next day. Or in a week's time.

I knew differently. Our world had been swept away. I could sense the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding into view. Eight billion people could not survive in an agrarian world. The darkest of Dark Ages was on its way. I had to run. There wasn't much time. Order wouldn't last for long.

I headed for a marina. En route, I stole a book on sailing. Then I took an abandoned bike and cycled the fifteen kilometres to Dun Laoghaire, the roads clogged with people walking home. I weaved my way through them, and through all the abandoned useless cars. As I cycled, I saw harried shopkeepers try to badger customers into queuing. When one tried to pull his shutters down, he was manhandled by the crowd. Fights broke out. The sound of breaking glass filled the air.

I found a small dinghy and rowed it to a sailing boat, anchored near the breakwater. The boat turned out to be reasonably well provisioned. Although I had no idea how to sail, I had to get away before the owner of the boat came to claim it, or before some other thief decided to take it from me. I took up the anchor, set the sails as best I could, and let the wind take me where it would. I zigzagged back and forth, and studied my Sailing for Dummies more intensely than I have ever studied any book before.

At night, I used binoculars to watch the city burn. The physical darkness brought out the inner darkness of man. Anarchy broke loose. Civilisation was swept away. In the flames and the smoke, I saw the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Pestilence, War, Famine and Death smiled at me. I was their harbinger. Dark revelations.

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts

And I looked, and beheld a pale horse:

And his name that sat on him was Death,

And Hell followed with him.

The great day of his wrath is come

And the stars of heaven fall unto the Earth.

And who shall be able to stand

And hide from the wrath of the Lamb?

Northerly winds and the Gulf Stream brought me north, past Scotland and beyond. Made weak with hunger and delirious with thirst, I scarcely knew where I was after that.

Finally, on the horizon, I saw this oil rig. I knew I would die here. I knew that someone would hear my confession. It was I, a latter-day Prometheus, who flew too close to the sun and burnt the world.

Forgive me...

November 14 2029

They were the last words he spoke. As I wrote, rapt in concentration, I didn't notice his breathing weaken and falter. It was only when I finished that I realised that I was now alone. With the last rays of daylight, I closed his eyelids and granted his soul forgiveness.

In the morning, I called the Doctor. He pronounced him dead.

Now I will call the crew to an extraordinary meeting. I'll read his story aloud to them, so that we may decide what to do.

I for one will vote to abandon the rig. The Outer Hebrides are the nearest landmass. There is little hope of reaching them, for what few of us may fit on the stranger's sail boat. But it's more than the hope we have of surviving the Winter here, in the freezing seas of the Arctic, with a sun that grows ever dimmer.

The Inaction Man and the Sandwich of Doom

(Adapted from the novella, The Inaction Man)

Inaction Man awoke with a start, his consciousness having jumped from one dimension to another. He scrambled out from under the bush that was his home and his wormhole. A fit of coughing and the discharge of phlegm startled two star-crossed lovers, sitting on a nearby bench.

He shuffled into the setting sun with no idea where he was going but with the certain knowledge that he had to go somewhere. Getting there would require all his powers of indecision.

He found himself, about a half-an-hour later, sitting on a bench on a wide street near a park, watching the last shards of daylight disappearing over the tops of the buildings.

On the other side of the road, a small pub was doing a brisk trade. Smokers huddled on the terrace outside, sipping beer and clutching cigarettes, and watched the world go by. Except, of course, for the part of the world directly in front of them; a part of the world that contained a dishevelled tramp in his forties, who rocked to and fro and mumbled nonsense to himself.

Inaction Man watched the people pass in front of the pub and pitied them. He saw them every day, at five in the afternoon, or others like them, moving from work to home, from one box to another, oblivious to the changing world around them.

A man opened a car door nearby and Inaction Man tried to warn him of the dangers.

"Oh lotus eater of the FOG, wrapped up in repetition. You turn to stone. Free yourself of possession!"

"Get a job!" the man spat back, and quickly entered his car, locking it centrally, and then speeding away.

Inaction Man shuddered to think that he too had once been such a man, before he saw the truth, but he had no time to think about that now. He had to watch each passer-by with the eyes of a hawk, ever watchful for Shape Changers or Changelings among them.

He was also aware of more mundane matters, such as his hunger. He would need to eat something if he was to make it through the dark night ahead.

The main problem was that Inaction Man was not in possession of any of what mortals referred to as money; a means of exchange without which living in modern society was terribly difficult, even for superheroes. Inaction Man had to waste a lot of valuable time trying to obtain money, and he could not understand why the Elementals who had made him a superhero had not had the foresight to also create a superhero bank account for him.

He did not need to live lavishly, but he did have needs, just like everyone else: the need to eat, for example; the need for whiskey to keep his skin water tight and prevent his insides from seeping through to his outsides; and the need to occasionally drink methylated spirits to promote visions. But now he needed food.

He looked at the bar again and noticed that a man had just been given a cheese sandwich. However, experience had taught him that food missions such as this one are fraught with difficulties. People, he knew, could be very reluctant to part with things, even when another's need was far greater than their own. They could even become violent if they perceive themselves to have been the victim of theft. It was, therefore, essential to explain to the giver that they were not victims of petty theft, but rather contributors to a greater cause; active participants in the battle of good against evil.

Inaction Man approached the fat man with the sandwich head on, crossing the road and walking up to him with his hand outstretched in a gesture of peace, which Inaction Man had also noted sometimes had the effect of encouraging people to donate cash to the cause.

The man saw and smelt Inaction Man coming and tried not to look alarmed. Inaction Man, however, who had an acute nose for fear, knew straight away that he was disturbed by his presence and tried to calm him.

"Fear not, Fat Man. I may be a superhero, but I was once a mere mortal, like you are now."

"Ya what?!"

"I shall come directly to the point, obese benefactor, for I can see you are a man who appreciates brevity; a man of few words; a man deeply in tune with this age of reason.

"What are ya bleedin' on about, ya dipso?"

"I am Inaction Man; defender of the day; last bastion against the amassing forces of the Night Lords. I hereby charge you, in the name of all that's good and holy, to relinquish your sandwich to me, for I have need of it."

"Get yis yer own bloody sandwich, ya smelly bum! Now, get away ta f**k!"

Inaction Man, inflamed by this coarse language, felt himself losing his temper.

"Release the baguette unto me, lest you should feel the wrath of Inaction Man."

"The rat o' wot?"

At this point, the baguette found itself in Inaction Man's hand, but he had not taken it. To take something in this way would have been to act, and to act was bad enough in itself, but to act in such a way would have brought disrepute to the name of Inaction Man. A superhero may persuade someone to give, but he must never steal.

Rather, the baguette had made its own way into Inaction Man's hand, obviously choosing Inaction Man over the fat man. In Inaction Man's experience, even so-called inanimate objects can in fact move, given sufficient cause. Further evidence of this was that the baguette then made its way down Inaction Man's trousers, attempting to cement the relationship between them. Half of the baguette stuck out of Inaction Man's trousers, flaunting its infidelity to the fat man.

He did not take kindly to this rejection by his sandwich and deluded himself into believing that Inaction Man had stolen it. In a rage, he clenched his fist and punched Inaction Man on the nose, knocking him backwards. Inaction Man stumbled and fell into the gutter, dazed and confused, bloodied but not broken. He realised that events were very serious and would require all of his powers of inaction.

He lay quite still in the gutter and focused not on the towering angry figure above him, but instead on the stars in the night sky above both of them. He saw a billion points of light, all dependent on him, all willing him to succeed and defeat the forces of dark matter.

He held onto this thought as the fat man kicked him over and over again: in his face; in his ribs; in his stomach. He even vented his frustration on his erstwhile sandwich, and stamped it into mush, determined that if he could not have it, no-one would.

Inaction Man began to lose consciousness, pummelled as he was by the fat man; this breaker of bones, this settler of arguments, this teacher of lessons.

Eventually the police arrived and pulled the fat man away, bundling him into a police car, much to his annoyance. Inaction Man saw none of this, lost as he was in unconsciousness; contemplating the beauty of the heavens from within the confines of his own mind, entering that Zen state of complete inaction, complete inactivity.

Travel Writing

Crossing the Road in Saigon

(From Notes on Nam)

Saigon is to Vietnam what New York is to America — atypical. Historically, culturally, economically, architecturally, and every other which way you can think of, Saigon is different.

Only four hundred years ago, it was not a Vietnamese city at all, but a Khmer one, called Prey Nokor. Its name changed again to Gia Dinh and then to Saigon, under the French; and finally to Ho Chi Minh City, under the communists, who wished to remind Saigon that she was a fallen woman whose ballroom days were over.

However, in the city itself, only the apparatchiks use the official name, which can hardly be said to roll off the tongue. Saigon is still Saigon to everyone else; or rather Sai Gon, the Vietnamese language preferring monosyllabic words — like modern publishers.

Even the landscape of the delta around the city has changed beyond recognition. In Cambodian, Prey Nokor means Jungle City, and most of what Saigon now stands on was then swampland or near uninhabitable forest. Indeed, it was only under the French that the Mekong Delta marshes were drained, allowing farming and the population explosion that made the Mekong Delta fertile. Today, it's one of the most densely populated places on Earth, at 800 inhabitants per square kilometre — four times the national average, but only two thirds as populated as Bangladesh.

The world in general, by the way, even excluding Antarctica, only has 50 people per kilometre. There is still a lot of empty space out there — it's just mostly uninhabitable. That's why it's empty.

Remnants of the French colonial presence are still evident in Saigon, such as the Opera House and Notre Dame, but its days as 'the Paris of the East' are most definitely a thing of the past. I suspect that even in the past they were a thing of the past — nowhere is the anywhere of anywhere else.

Having said that, in 1929, ten percent of the city's population of 124,000 were French; and although the émigrés are long since gone, if you find yourself in the right quartier, at sunset, you can sense their ghosts, wandering and wondering, gasping at the skyscraped neon metropolis of this new city of light, searching vainly for their 'Pearl of the Orient'.

Saigon only became a capital in 1949, when Emperor Bao Dai, then just Chief of State Bao Dai, decided, in as much as he decided anything, that Hue, the former capital, was now far too near the border with North Vietnam. It lost its capital city status in 1975, with the victory of Hanoi, but even today, it has the brashness and arrogance of a capital.

It is still the financial hub of Vietnam and the vibrancy and commercial aptitude of the city's nine million inhabitants mean it is likely to stay that way. Its GDP per head, surely the best indicator of real wealth, is three times the national average. I smelt the deep musty aroma of money as I approached the city, in the endless outskirts of this megapolis of many names.

Only the slowly increasing height of the buildings let me know that I was approaching the centre, but the anonymity of the faceless suburbs changes abruptly when you cross the Saigon River, a part of the mighty Mekong. All around the silted oozing artery of commerce, new skyscrapers rise up at breakneck speed, jutting through the smog of progress.

I felt something there, at that moment, in the space-time continuum — man and metropolis touched each other. Flesh and concrete fused for an instant. The flesh form was aging and about to decline: the city was rejuvenated and about to incline. The body was destined for dotage and sepulchre: the city was heading for greatness and grandeur.

'Take me with you,' I thought, willing flesh to melt thaw and resolve itself into a smoggy dew, but no sooner had the thought formed than the mind that spawned it moved back into its cranial prison, and man and city went back to their respective universes.

I shook my head, like a confused dog, and looked out of the window for some new distraction. That is the beauty of this modern world of ours — there is always some distraction out there. You need only stop looking inwards and start looking outwards.

The bus crawled through the city proper, passing boulevards 50-motorbikes wide, and I felt an electricity here that I had not encountered anywhere else in Vietnam, not even in the capital. Hanoi may glow, but Saigon burns.

After checking in, we went out. We were staying in Pham Ngu Lao, the city's backpacker ghetto. A curious appellation, this 'backpacker ghetto' tag, and one I have never felt comfortable using. A ghetto is defined, by the Urban Dictionary, for example, as "an impoverished, neglected, or otherwise disadvantaged residential area of a city, usually troubled by a disproportionately large amount of crime."

So the two words simply don't mix — 'ghetto' and 'backpacker'. Ghetto conjures up images of Jewish ghettos in Eastern Europe and of centuries of state-sponsored discrimination; or the slums of apartheid South Africa; or the drug-infested alleys of Chicago's Projects. The word backpacker brings to mind scraggly students trying to look like Kurt Colbain but actually looking more like Shaggy from Scoobie Doo. Ce n'est pas la même chose!

While backpackers' dress tends towards the casual, in uniformed expressions of individuality, affecting a poverty they have never and will never experience, they cannot rightfully be considered to be denizens of any ghetto. They are the sons and daughters of middle class suburbanites who could no more survive in a real ghetto than a hooded council estate smackhead could saunter unnoticed through a cocktail party.

Backpackers are slumming it in ghettos, and not even that, since they deprive themselves of no significant luxury. They are fed and watered and housed most respectably. Indeed, a hospitality industry seems to appear from nowhere wherever backpackers congregate, feeding off them as they feed off it; in a symbiosis wallowing in hard currency.

These backpacker ghettos can be found in every city of note in South East Asia, if not the world; and as tourism grows, so do the ghettoes. They are characterized by budget accommodation, ranging from ten to fifty dollars a night, and a profusion of bars and restaurants catering to Westerners' needs and tastes. You can find pizza, pasta and hamburgers; you can drink in bars with other backpackers and be served by inhabitants of the country you are visiting. You can travel and have all the comforts of home. You can have it all.

Except, of course, you can't. You are not traveling; you have just transferred your life to a different location; imported your culture and your sub-culture.

I realised this, for the millionth time, in a bar opposite my hotel. It was called Le Pub and looked a bit like a student bar in Everywhereville.

To our left, two American males tried to impress two New Zealand females with tales of their wild and wacky adventures, in which they were "like, hey, like totally smashed on Cuervo, man, in Mexico"; and behind them, another American, who may have reached the age of twenty, impressed her pale friend by publicly denigrating the waitress, who had kept her waiting for all of two minutes; and all around us, people who did not smoke pretended to, because they were being crazy in Saigon, laying the bedrock for Facebook fantasies to impress their more staid friends back home. Oh what a brave new world, with such crazy backpackers in it.

Although every city may have a backpacker area, not all of them are the same. Hanoi's ghetto, for example, is a great deal more genteel than Saigon's. As we walked through the latter, dazed by the glare of sin, dubious characters offered to sell me dubious substances and ladies of ill-repute sat perched, like satin-clad praying mantises, in neon bars with names like Crazy Girls.

After Saigon fell, the sleaze for which it had become notorious was cleansed and scrubbed with communist fervour and the city became a rather staid place in the eighties, with food rationing and five-year-plans the order of the day, but now the Party in HCMC seems to have chosen to turn a blind eye to the open hedonism that would not be tolerated up north.

Things had changed. Even in the six years since my first visit to Saigon, it felt as though everything had changed. I looked out from a Reunification Palace balcony at a skyline I could barely remember, marvelling at a change that could be so rapid.

But one thing that had not changed was the traffic. If anything, it had got worse. There were more cars and there were definitely more motorbikes. It is said that Saigon currently boasts three million motorbikes, and I suspect that's an understatement.

At times it feels like everyone one of them is conspiring to prevent you from crossing the road, turning it into a piranha-infested river that you can never enter. Even when they are not moving, bikes seem to bear a grudge against pedestrians and clog the pavements jealously, meaning that you have no real alternative but to walk on the road, nowhere more so than in the frenetic old towns of Hanoi and Saigon.

Six years ago I had stood on a Saigon road and waited for a break in the traffic; waited for a break that never came. I still remember it clearly: I was standing on the pavement, melting in the midday sun, waiting for that patch of empty road; waiting waiting evermore for nevermore.

Monkey see: monkey do. I watched others cross the road and sought to learn from them. I studied the wily Saigonese, those nimble creatures, nymphs and sylphs all, who know no fear. Some people say that the Mohawk can feel no fear of heights, that they are born that way; and the Saigonese, it seems to me, have no fear of being run over. Atropelladophobiaabsentia Saigonesis.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing. People simply walked in front of oncoming vehicles, slowly and purposefully, like Clint Eastwood in some western showdown. They walked step by step across the road and the motorbikes swerved around them, like water moves around the swimmer; and on and on they went, swimming in only a fraction of a minute what I had already spent ten minutes unsuccessfully trying to traverse.

Either I had to do likewise or else I would spend a week in Saigon walking round and round my block, like the chicken that didn't make it to the proverb. And there wasn't that much to see, around my block, I already knew, having walked around it looking for a traffic light or some other aid to the pedestrian.

And so my wife and I took the plunge and dove into the mechanized abyss, but not without reinforcements, in the form of an impossibly old woman, selected for her assumed lack of mobility. We shadowed her every movement, in the face of the two-wheeled tsunami; and lo and behold, we performed the same miracle. I hadn't parted the Red Sea, but I had crossed my first Saigon street. It was a coming of age, a rite of passage.

It would not be my last street, but even at the end of the week, I was still waiting for natives to shadow and still fighting back the desire to run rather than crawl. And that, by the way, is the key to survival: never run. If you succumb to the panic inside you, the bikers may not have time to serve to avoid you, but if you are relatively stable, a slow-moving obstacle, they can veer right or left; or in extremis, slow down.

There are westerners who ride the snake too, but I confined myself to country roads. A friend of mine actually rode a bike for four years in Saigon. He said it helped to imagine being a part of a living force; the modus operandi for which is never stated, but implicitly understood by those who have mastered the force. I tried to press him into telling me more, in order to avoid becoming one of Vietnam's 13,000 road fatalities a year, but his eyes took on a mystical air and he would not be drawn further.

But now it was six years later, and I was crossing roads in Saigon again — older, greyer, fatter but still scared stiff. Hanoi is no easy city to traverse, and even the smaller towns like Haiphong and Hue are not lightly crossed, but Saigon is a world apart.

And with that sentence I return full circle to the beginning of the essay — Saigon is a world apart. And now that I had learned to cross the road, it was a world I was very keen to explore.

***

Four Videos I made in Vietnam are on my  You Tube channel

In-Flight Commandments

(From India)

It's not flying I object to — it's the people I have to fly with that I find objectionable. Although modern air travel is cramped and uncomfortable there are easy ways to take your mind off it. All that is required is to sit quietly, stick your head in a book, and focus on it and it alone. Indeed, as there is nothing else to do, a plane is an excellent place to read. This simple truth, however, appears to be lost on many members of the general public, who are determined to find other solutions to the problem of what to do on a long-haul flight. There are the pacers, the talkers, the tappers and the screen stabbers.

To bring order and sanity to the anarchy of plane behaviour, I have therefore decided to set down a list of 6 commandments for air travel, as Moses appears to have little concrete advice on the matter of in-flight comportment. While his original commandments still hold true for air travel, in that homicide, adultery, worshipping false Gods etc. are also to be avoided at 20,000 feet, 6 additional commandments are clearly necessary.

The new commandments are as follows:

1: Thou shalt not speak

Flights are for reading, not for yapping. I am constantly distracted from my perusal of fine prose by the inane chatter of others. This is not acceptable.

2: Thou shalt not bring children on planes

Smoking has been banned on flights on the grounds that it disturbs others. However, I have yet to find even the most smoke-filled environment that can come close to being as annoying as a screaming baby, and they always seem to be screaming.

Leave your progeny at home, or in the airport lounge or car park. This will also develop their sense of independence and self-sufficiency because they will have to forage for themselves while you are away, and they will come to thank you in later life for helping them to become more fully rounded individuals.

3: Thou shalt sit quietly

While a very occasional trip to the lavatory may be necessary on the longest of flights, there really is no other reason to leave your chair — it disturbs other readers.

4: Thou shalt stay within thy airspace

As planes must keep within their allotted airspace to avoid crashing into other planes, so passengers must also stay within the bounds of their 'seatspace'. This includes not only the confines of your seat, per se, but also the space above and below your seat. In other words, your elbow must not encroach upon the space of your neighbour, and you must under no circumstances sit with your knees outstretched. Keep your knees firmly closed at all times.

For safety reasons, you must also keep your arm away from the misnamed armrest, which is, in fact, a buffer zone between your space and that of your neighbour.

5 Thou shalt not recline thy seat

Pushing one's seat back reduces by half the amount of reading space available to the passenger behind you, and reducing this space can force other passengers to hold a book too close to their eyes for comfort, thereby exacerbating the already claustrophobic nature of cattle class air travel.

6 Thou shalt stay awake

For some reason, many people consider public sleeping to be acceptable on aeroplanes, but it is grossly inappropriate. This rule holds especially true for those people who snore or drool while sleeping, or horror of horrors, rest their head on complete strangers unfortunate enough to be sitting next to them.

All those who do not repent and break these commandments shall suffer the punishment of in-flight flogging.

Repeated infringement shall result in offenders being summarily ejected from the plane mid-flight.

***

Seven videos I made in India can be seen on my  You Tube channel.

Riding the Dragon

(From China – Me and the Dragon)

Long bus rides are always unpleasant. Twenty-seven-hour bus journeys are hell on Earth! They leave you wishing you'd never left, and promising never to leave anywhere ever again. You would trade your soul in the world's worst Faustian bargain just to be off the bus.

You join me in hour 22. My backside feels like concrete, and I wouldn't be surprised if gangrene has set in. My bottom has never experienced this level of pain before and is probably contemplating a divorce from the rest of my body, which is clearly mistreating it. I'd talk to it to try and explain things but men talking to their bottoms can raise eyebrows, especially on a crowded bus.

In short, I'm tired, I'm hungry and I want nothing more than to be off this damn bus. Let me describe it to you, in case you're ever tempted by a Chinese travel agent's offer of a VIP Bus trip.

Firstly, the bus is very old. In human years, it must be about 15-20 years old, but as with dogs, each bus year is the equivalent of seven human years, so the bus is really well over one hundred. And would you ride a 100-year-old man for 27 hours?

Many of the windows are cracked and held together with copious amounts of sticky tape. The seats were probably never comfortable, and age has not been kind to them. Everything on the bus is grotty and dirty. It's the kind of place where you don't want to touch anything because you'd have to wash your hands afterwards.

I should have taken one look at the bus and never got on to it. As we went to take our seats, we saw a small orange cockroach was on the headrest waiting to welcome us to his ancestral home. My wife deftly crushed him and buried him in a plastic bag, which we kept beside us as a warning to his family and friends. Unperturbed, a few hours later, a roach colleague turned out to bid us welcome, and he was quickly dispatched and buried with his friend. I spent a large part of the night wondering how many were crawling over us in the darkness. My mind always tends to run away with itself at night, and even under normal conditions, I cannot sleep in a room where I even suspect an insect might be lurking.

Since I couldn't see anything, and my wife refused to stay awake all night to protect me from the insect menace, I had to rely on my sense of touch, which is very susceptible to my paranoid imagination, and often imagines things in the dark that aren't there. So, as the bus spluttered and shook its way through the Sichuan night, I spent my time flicking imaginary insects out of my hair and scratching myself, like some junkie going through cold turkey.

I was never so glad to see the dawn.

Even the darkness, however, could not hide the odour from the passenger behind me, who had feet only a dog could love. Usually one becomes accustomed to bad smells very quickly and stops noticing them, but this man had feet that just kept on giving. I comforted myself with the thought that the cockroaches would surely be drawn to that rotting smell rather than to me.

At the front of the bus there was a small portable TV which I tried to distract myself with. It wasn't easy: the screen was tiny, the image flickered and there was no sound.

The DVD, or rather the VCD's, were 24 one-hour episodes of a Chinese period piece; some kind of costume drama thing. Chinese TV is full of them. I've no idea what this particular one was called; probably something like Kung-Fu Monks and the Magic Mirror. Every one of the twenty-four episodes was the same: Kung-Fu fights broke out at ten-minute intervals, everyone kept stealing the magic mirror and each episode ended with a cliff hanger involving the leading lady's imminent bloody demise.

I was occasionally distracted from this televisual feast by sound of a passenger hawking phlegm at a decibel level loud enough to trigger a hearing warning on an MP3 player. If I didn't look away in time, I saw them spitting a surprisingly small globule of phlegm into a bag, or onto the floor if the driver wasn't looking. So much noise for so little mucus.

At Hour 11, we stopped at a roadside café. The shack looked more like a floodlit garage than anything else, and it had a post-Armageddon Mad Max kind of bareness to it. It was as if civilisation had collapsed and this was all that was left; or like the front line in World War 1 was 300 metres in front of us, and this was all that could be done under war-time conditions.

There was one wok, a gas cylinder beneath it, and a large bamboo drum of pre-cooked rice. The Chinese, of course, saw nothing strange in the place, and happily munched away; stopping only occasionally to spit out bones they'd sucked dry; a Chinese custom that never fails to turn the delicate stomach of a vegetarian like myself. The men also engaged in copious amounts of hawking phlegm, which they could now spit on the concrete floor of the restaurant, unperturbed by our kill-joy driver.

I figured there was more than enough body fat on me to see me through the trip. Have you ever noticed that you never get food poisoning from eating your own body fat?

The toilet, or facilities as the Americans put it, was nothing more than a nearby shed with four cubicles, separated by walls of concrete bricks. The wall, however, was only a couple of bricks high, and there were no doors of any kind, so when I entered I was met by the grimacing supine figures of other passengers, crouching to make deposits and straining at stools.

I suddenly wished I was back on the bus, and I would have run out of this place screaming, but I really did have to pee. So, in I went and there I was, the centre of attention in a male toilet; a white face, entertainment for the bored passengers. Remember that staring at someone is not considered impolite in China.

I looked at them: three crouching tigers, all smoking cheap cigarettes to speed up the defecation process, adding to an already overpowering smell of urine and faeces. I wanted to run, but, as I've said, I really had to go.

I approached the centre-right cubicle and the heads of the Chinese men turned toward me. I was standing up and they were squatting, so there were no two ways about it. If I went for a pee, they were going to start staring at a part of my anatomy no other man had ever seen before. I did my best to use both my hands to cover the offending article, but it wasn't easy because I'd never used two hands to pee before.

I stood there for what seemed like an eternity waiting to start peeing. Fear, of course, makes urination difficult, and I had to imagine Niagara Falls to get the waterworks moving. I constricted my bladder to make everything move as fast as possible, and suddenly a torrent of urine gushed forth.

I noticed than that there weren't any holes to swallow my pee, just a drain, so my yellow tidal wave of urine must have washed away all the turds of my neighbours.

This wasn't the meeting of cultures I had hoped from this holiday.

Back on the bus, shaking with post-pee traumatic stress disorder and flicking imaginary insects off my body, I waited for the dawn.

When it came, I tried to rise above the discomfort and concentrate instead on the Sichuan countryside. Western Sichuan is one of the most fertile areas of China -- most of the land in the country being barren and suitable only for light grazing, at best.

To be more precise, the soil in Sichuan is fertile, but farming here is technically very difficult. The hilly landscape makes mechanical farming impossible, and in a European context, the land would probably be left to hardy sheep and goats. The Chinese, however, see semi-mountainous terrain merely as an obstacle to overcome and have farmed it regardless. They have altered the landscape to maximise production and to better suit their needs. The hills have been terraced to allow rice production, using only mud, sweat and an occasional buffalo.

I've haven't seen a single tractor yet, and I think they would probably topple over in this hilly terrain, so farming here is a very labour intensive business. In Europe and even more in America, the countryside has been effectively depopulated, and is now the preserve of agricultural machinery and the monocrops they engender. In China, however, and in Sichuan in particular, the peasants still toil the land, and they toil it with their hands.

There are also innumerable small green rivers and streams, and on the higher hills, where even the Chinese can't farm, trees cling on perilously, wondering what has happened to what was once their sole domain. All of Sichuan was once bamboo forest and the preserve of pandas and other wildlife. If they haven't been sent down the long tunnel of extinction, they are being forced to retreat further and further into shrinking pockets of wilderness, banished by the inexorable advance of man.

Every now and then, we pass market gardens, which produce much of China's fruit. Even here in the agricultural heartland, however, there are signs of China's industrialisation. Dangerously overloaded enormous coal trucks clog up the roads, and convoys of other vehicles impatiently follow them, snaking their way through the narrow curving roads.

We pass through village after village, whose shops look more like garages and always seem to full of old men whose main business seems to be sitting around.

In spite of the scenery, I must say that the trip was the most wretched and uncomfortable of my life, but I suppose I'm still glad I did it. Not in a masochistic way, but because it showed me how most people actually travel in China. The mobile phone wielding businessmen one finds in the new gleaming airports on the coast are a tiny minority. Most people in China still travel by bus and train.

And, of course, there are many people who never travel at all. Even the other passengers on the Haedes Express are not really poor. The average Chinese peasant, on a dollar a day, could only dream of holidaying in a different province, or holidaying at all, for that matter. They might regard the bus journey I've spent so much time vilifying as an interesting experience.

My wife and I, however, did not regard the journey that way, and we spent a large part of the trip in an acrimonious exchange concerning whose fault it was that we were on a 27-hour bus journey, rather than a 1-hour flight.

I remembered the decision to use the bus as being a mutual decision, brought about by our desire to see the countryside, a gross misunderstanding of the term 'Super VIP bus', and an attempt to stop us haemorrhaging cash. My wife, however, had a very different memory of events, and claimed she had wanted to take the plane but I had insisted, Scrooge-like, on the bus. The truth of the matter will never be known.

Reality is subjective.

***

Nine videos I made of China are on  You Tube channel.

Baalbek

(From Lebanon – Where East Meets West)

Baalbek, Baalbek, so good they named it thrice.

First came Baal, the God of rain and general fertility, and then Alexander decided to show just how Great he was by changing the name to Heliopolis, or Sun City, which the Romans kept, but its present name, Baalbek, dates from the final conquest, the Arab one.

One clumsy sentence cannot, of course, summarize the 3,000 years of history that moulded this city, let alone the 5,000 lost years before that, but it is convenient to divide its past into the Hellenic, Roman and Arab periods, and ignore brief Byzantine and Mongol interludes, and much else. With a history as long as Baalbek's there's a lot you have to ignore.

It is the Roman heritage that is paramount, and it is to the Roman ruins that tourists flock; or rather trickle, since there were a mere handful when I visited. Well, three handfuls actually, but nothing when you consider the crowds that swarm over Roman ruins in Italy.

Visitors are deterred, perhaps, by Hezbollah's control of the region, since the very word 'Hezbollah' is so tainted in the west that no westerner dares travel within a hundred miles of the 'Party of God'. It is one of the new bogeymen, a 'here-be-dragons' cartographic warning, a radioactive waste sign.

As to what Hezbollah really is, I cannot claim to know. The answer you receive depends upon whom you ask. The Shiite underclass and the Palestinian under-under class see them as heroes, valiant fighters of Zion's imperialism and meritorious providers of education and health care to the disenfranchised. The Sunnis are more wary and the Christians, especially the Maronites, despise them — albeit silently, not wishing to take up arms against them again any time soon.

Hezbollah in Baalbek, and in much of Lebanon, are "ubiquitous but invisible", as the New York Times puts it, but with the ever-present threat of assassination, it pays to keep a very low personal profile. In Baalbek their posters were everywhere and beside the Roman museum there is even a Hezbollah museum. However, when I tried to film the outside of it, several bearded men with AK47's started shouting at me, so I made a hasty retreat and never went inside.

But everyone I spoke to felt the region to be perfectly safe to visit 'at the moment'. The Israelis hadn't bombed the place in nearly five years and the Syrian Army was almost fifty kilometres away. So off I went, travelling back in time to the ruins of Heliopolis, a city already older than my native Dublin at the birth of Christ.

I was looking forward to visiting a world that did not text, a world that measured history in millennia and not in microseconds. I wanted to see the past because I was growing weary of the present.

And did I find it? Well, let's begin with the journey, which I always confuse with the destination.

Lebanon's public transportation system leaves a lot to be desired. Take, for example, the 'Central Transport Hub', which is not Central, offers little in the way of mass Transport and is a Hub of nothing much.

Charles Helou Bus Station, to use its second name, is three stories high and was built under a bridge. It would be ugly enough if the top two floors were open, but squabbles between the government and private operators keep them closed, so all you are left with is the ground level, a disorganized dank and dismal mess into which buses and minibuses pull in, load up and pull out.

And if you think that's bad then try Cola and Dora 'stations' in the East and West of Beirut, which mushroomed out of nothing in the Civil War, when Christians in the east and Muslims in the west of the city, united in their desire not to get shot trying to catch a bus, started to hunt rides at Cola and Dora intersections. Private operators were quick to offer a bare bones service and the 'stations' were born. I use the inverted commas around the word 'station' because even now they are just pieces of waste ground under bridges where minibuses congregate.

Before the War, Beirut was famed for the quality of its public transport, which has never recovered, and what stands in its place is a warning against the ugliness of unfettered private enterprise.

I got out of the taxi at what the taxi driver assured me was l'autogare de Cola. "Ou est le gare?" I asked, surprised to find a use for that piece of schoolboy French, but the taxi driver was already speeding away.

I squinted at the thirty-five degree sun to show my displeasure at its atomic furnace and searched for the Bus Station.

It was still nowhere to be seen, so instead I looked for signs of its effluent — the junkies, the homeless, and the flotsam of society, who will never inherit the Earth and have claimed bus and train stations in its place, but they too were nowhere to be found. For a moment, I assumed the taxi driver had deposited me in the wrong part of Selim Salam, or that I had mispronounced it entirely and been driven to Salem's Lot instead.

But then an unshaven man with a football trapped inside his stomach approached me and shouted "Baalbek" in my ear. Assuming he had not mistaken me for someone of that name, I replied "Baalbek" and dressed my destination with a smile; and in return, I won his hand, which pointed me to a broken minivan.

"C'est ca?!" I asked, reverting to French, a language I spoke badly and he spoke not at all. To clarify matters, I pointed at the same four-wheeled rusting hulk of imperfections.

"Oui!" he replied, with an accent even stronger than mine, and in we climbed. My wife and I, that is, not me and the fat hairy man.

"A quell heure bus go?" I asked, hedging my bets by employing two languages.

"Oui!" he stated again, and then returned to shouting "Baalbek" at passers-by.

I felt like I was already travelling back in time. The minivan itself belonged to a different era and could well have appeared in early episodes of Scoobie Doo.

Once it had filled up, which is how the time of departure is determined, the driver ignited our chariot and off we sped, hurtling into the smoky highway, accelerating to infinity. Seven seconds later, we screeched to a halt, locked in a traffic jam.

Lurching out of Beirut, we headed upwards and onwards, but mainly upwards. The Lebanon Mountain Range is steep and my ears popped as the air cooled. Soon enough, we were at a thousand metres and climbing, swerving through winding roads in the clogged outskirts of Beirut, only narrowly missing the houses and apartment blocks clinging to the mountainside.

I looked behind me and the whole city lay at my feet. I tried to think of something poetic to say, something profound and insightful. Nothing happened. The muse did not arrive, perhaps left slightly sea-sick by the white-knuckle drops on the left side of the road and the millimetres of space thought sufficient by cars hurtling down the hills to our right. On the one side, a crumpled barrier and a fall into a ravine that would offer us a couple of seconds of free fall followed by an almighty splat; and on the other, the union of metal that is a high-speed car crash. If I were a muse, I'd stay well clear too.

So, I was left waiting, and then, as if in sympathy with my stalled imagination, the van came to a halt. We were off the road and reversing into something. I looked nervously at the other passengers, but they seemed perfectly relaxed, so I decided I should be calm too.

Hairy men with big muscles and deep voices opened the back of the van and started filling it with animal feed of some kind, and above that, fresh vegetables. They said something to me in Arabic and laughed and I laughed too. I'm like a chameleon, you know.

My eyes were then caught by some truly massive watermelons, which rested precariously just behind our heads. Being a worrier by nature, I wondered if they were hard enough to cause concussion or even death, should they fall onto us after a sudden halt. 'Death by watermelon' was not the end I had envisaged for myself.

Fully loaded — and almost certainly overloaded — with people and vegetables, the journey continued. The smell of animal feed started mixing with that of diesel, dancing a chemical cocktail, a nitrous samba, but above it all, the smell of fresh air streamed in through the opened windows. The fumes of Beirut were behind us and the mountains in front of us.

Soon we were so high that we were passing through clouds. My pores closed and ceased to sweat. The hairs on my arm raised themselves to a standing ovation.

I was in Cloudland. As a child, living on the coast, I often wondered what it would be like to be inside clouds, and if you could dissolve into them, should you want to. "What's happened to Phillip?" they would ask, in my imagination, and someone would reply, "Oh, he dissolved into a cloud". The nearest I ever got to travelling through clouds in Dublin was walking home in the smog, and it wasn't the same thing at all. It just made your snot black. But here I was, at last, fulfilling a childhood dream. I was 'The Clouded Man'.

Behind the mist, bleak denuded mountains stood as testament to what happens when man is placed in charge of an environment. In Roman times, the mountains were covered in cedar forests, but cedar is a useful wood for shipbuilding, so over the centuries — or the millennia to be precise, as even the Egyptian pharaohs coveted the cedar forests — the woods were mined to exhaustion, and now only bare rock and a little topsoil bear witness to man's enterprise. Spectral dandruff on a bed of Jurassic stone. Even goats, a scavenger of vegetation if ever there was one, are absent.

I wondered if our entire planet might one day look like this moonscape, as we prove the dictum that one cannot have one's cake and eat it.

A surreal touch was added by the billboards we passed in the midst of all this nothingness. One advertised Elissa lingerie, through the use of an almost denuded female; and another proclaimed Beit Mist (a housing estate) to be "a piece of Heaven on Earth". Heaven can't be up to much, I thought, if it resembles a housing estate.

Everything that goes up, of course, must at some point, come down, and it was up there in Cloudland that I felt the inclines become declines. I was saddened to leave Cloudland, but all mournful thoughts vanished with the vaporous cumulus when I saw the Bekka Valley stretch out beneath me.

Firstly, valley is a misnomer, since it's actually a plateau, lying a thousand metres high, sandwiched between the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon Mountain Ranges. The Bekka Valley is a northerly extension of the Great Rift Valley, which stretches from Africa to Syria, pulling east from west.

In Winter, both ranges are snow-covered, but in summer, the bleakness of the mountain ranges above stand in firm contrast to the fertility of the plateau below. This 150-kilometre long stretch of green and brown is noted today for the quality of its wines and the potency of its hashish, but just about anything that can be grown anywhere in the world can be grown here. The region is so fertile that even in the heydays of the Roman Empire, the Bekka Valley acted as one of the eternal city's breadbaskets.

Our van descended and my ears popped again. And soon we were on the floor of the plateau, slicing its middle and passing through towns that I couldn't pronounce, like Chtaura and Zhele.

Lebanon, as I've mentioned before, is small, but one only really appreciates just how small when one cuts through a plateau and can see both sides of the country through the windows. It is only fifty miles wide, so to my right I had the Anti-Lebanon Range and on the other side, Syria and the desert; and to my left, the Lebanon range, and beyond that, Beirut and the Mediterranean.

A couple of hours later and the Scoobie Doo Express deposited us safe and sound in Baalbek, and behind the rusting hulk of the van, the remains of the Roman world stood and waited for me.

I walked towards them.

The past waited.

And waited.

And.

I paid the gatekeeper and entered the temple complex. Then I climbed up steps that may or may not have been there for thousands of years and entered the city of the dead. The remains of the Roman world lay before me, baking in the early afternoon sun of the cloudless blue sky.

Of the three great temples that once proclaimed the power of Rome and the power of its Gods, and later the power of the Christian God, only the Temple of Bacchus is still extant.

It is approximate the same size as the Parthenon in the Athenian Acropolis, 66 metres long and 35 metres wide, but it is its height, 31 metres, that really impresses you, standing tall and erect after all this time, amongst the fallen ruins of the rest of the complex.

The survival of the Temple of Bacchus was not due to the primacy of pleasure but because the rubble from the other two temple monuments helped to protect it from the elements. Perhaps more importantly, the rubble of its big brother, the Temple of Jupiter, and its little sister, the Temple of Venus, also helped to protect it and from construction scavengers, who would simply cart off building blocks from ruins to fashion new buildings, which was a great deal less trouble that digging up rock themselves and fashioning it into building materials.

Much of the ancient world was destroyed this way. The Coliseum in Rome, for example, owes its dilapidated state not to invaders but to the Romans, who over the millennia have taken bits of it away to build their own houses with.

Sometimes this 'architectural terrorism' was state sponsored. The Temple of Jupiter, the mightiest of the Temples, is today only six Corinthian columns, supporting a single arch. There would have been more, had not the Byzantine Emperor Justinian scavenged the eight biggest pillars for the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. They are still there now, but support a different God.

What happened to the rest of the original 42 columns no-one knows.

What we do know is that the Temple Complex, which at its peak was the largest in the Roman Empire, was never finished, and as Rome began to decline, so Baalbek declined with it.

The Hexagonal Court was the last Roman structure added to the Temple complex and the year 250 AD would mark Baalbek's zenith. After this, there was nothing but decline, plunder and gratuitous state vandalism.

I stood in the eight-sided Courtyard, turning this way and that, waiting for eight seconds at eight compass points, and then eight more and then eight more. I offered a sigh for the past and for the inevitable failure of all its ambitions. I offered another sigh for the present and saw in Baalbek a future, a possible future, for all our great metropolises may one day be nothing more than ruins, rocks and dust. And in two thousand years, some other traveller from some as yet unknown land may stand amongst them, offering a sigh for our failed ambitions. But our ambitions are so great and our appetites so large that there may be no-one left to sigh.

I looked to the past once more. Oddly enough, it was my namesake, the little-known Emperor Phillip the Arab, who added the hexagonal court, and it was under his reign that Baalbek was at its height. This would not save him, however, and Emperor Phillipus Augustus, the 33'rd Roman Emperor and Emperor during Rome's millennium, would be assassinated by his own troops after only five years on the throne. Rome was tail spinning through little known and little loved emperors, and while the empire had not begun to crumble the rot was setting in.

I looked at the ruins and tried to imagine the past. Phillip the Arab was not available to help me create a picture of what the Baalbek would have looked like in its prime and I had no famous film scenes to aid my imagination, Hollywood having ignored Baalbek in favour of Rome, so I had to try to conjure up the image of the past inside my own head, but all around me was just rock, rock, rock. Nothing else remained.

I decided to go back slowly in time, swimming into the past. I began by imagining Kaiser Wilhelm's visit here in 1898, the first big-name tourist.

In the museum, there were photos of him rambling about the ruins with his retinue, in the days before he came to be regarded as a demon with a funny moustache who buried the dreams of a scientific progress to Utopia in the slime of the trenches of World War I.

During his visit, parts of the Byzantine church still dominated the Great Court, but it has since been pulled down. It just wasn't old enough. In fact, all the structures built after the Roman era, and there were many, have been removed to other locations in an effort to keep the ruins Roman. The past here is pure.

We walked around the Hexagonal Court's edge, seeking the shade and admiring the pillars. Some stood high but supported nothing; others had fallen and crashed and their remains lay strewn hither and tither; others were gone entirely. Ruins stand as witnesses to the temporality of all things. How puny are all our struggles in the context of the eternal law of entropy.

"Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes," the Anglican Church tells us, at the end of life, in funereal solemnity. "Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return," Genesis warns us, at the beginning, in the first book of the bible. Matter cares little what uses we set it. We have always known this and it always makes us sad.

I went further back in time and jerked backwards to the earthquake of 1859, which took out three more of the pillars of the Temple of Jupiter; and then to Tamerlane, the Great Mongol ruler of just about everything, who sacked and looted his way through Baalbek in 1400, seven hundred years after the Arabs had ransacked the place. We build and we destroy.

Even Roman Heliopolis was built over the rubble of Phoenician temples, which in turn were constructed over the remains of those who came before them. All Gods are grafted onto their predecessors. Jupiter replaced Baal and Bacchus assumed the mantle of Dionysus. Gods evolve with our collective psyches.

I went further and further back and the Gods grew bloodthirsty. The courtyard became the locus in quo for the human sacrifices of the Phoenician and pre-Phoenician world.

For nine thousand years, humans have worshiped in Baalbek. They have prayed to and preyed for all manner of Gods. Where are these Gods now, and where are those who worshiped them?

If ghosts exist, then how crowded this complex of ruins must be! And if I could feel them, these nine millennia of ghosts, I could surely feel time itself. And if I could hear them, I could know the heart of man.

But if I could speak to them what would I say? How odd I would appear to them — I who worship nothing and no-one; I who pay tribute only to reason. I would tell them of the victory of western empiricism over superstition and ignorance. I would tell them of the rise of science. I would speak to them of equality, fraternity and the pursuit of happiness. I would show them medicine, cities of glass and the new world of the internet.

I would tell them to look on my works and despair. I would tell them that my civilisation is eternal.

And how would they reply? On the lone and level sand of the Hexagonal Court, the ghoulish denizens of the City of the Dead would embrace me, and laugh the laugh of the fallen.

***

I made a short video of Baalbek, which is available on my You Tube channel.
Articles

Stale Heroes Tell the Same Old Story

WHAT'S NEW?

There is nothing new under the sun, at least not in the world of fiction. We are all, it would appear, either listening to or retelling the same old story. Every hero you can think of, from Marvel's comic book superheroes to Luke Skywalker, from the Christ to the Buddha, is nothing more than an archetype on a journey that we have been making since the dawn of consciousness.

Or so Vladimir Propp and Joseph Campbell would have us believe. In this essay, I will briefly discuss their theories and how they affect our view of the world and the shared fictions that make up so much of it.

THE HERO AND THE QUEST

Campbell's Monomyth and Propp's Morphology of Folk Tales are similar in that they have both examined wide corpora of texts and extrapolated common threads and themes. While the soviet scholar Propp restricted himself to fairy stories, Campbell went further and looked for similarities in religious stories. He claimed to have tied religions as disparate as Buddhism and Christianity together into one generic storyline.

In both theories, it is the 'quest' and the role of the hero that dominate. Characters tend toward archetypes, and exist only as the 'hero' or extensions of the hero, such as the 'villain', the 'helper' and the 'false hero'.

Campbell, in 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces', summarized the quest as follows:

"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man"

IS GOD MADE UP?

One has to admit that the above quest forms a large part of the narrative in the New Testament, the Koran and in the life of Buddha. If we analyse 'holy books' objectively and treat them as mere examples of narratives, then the heroes portrayed and their journey they enact are no different from those of more mundane heroes.

TODAY'S HERO

The hero continues to reinvent itself, while always staying the same.

Star Wars and the Matrix, for example, are simple quest stories. Indeed, if one were to spend a weekend in a movieplex and watch every blockbuster on offer, one would be hard pressed to find a single film without the same three-act quest pattern. Most characters have no character and are little more than roles on which to hang the archetypal hero plot.

WHY DO WE NEED HEROS?

But why do we feel the need for this hero figure so greatly that we will build so much of our culture around it? When the narrative is taken as fact, as in religion, we are even prepared to live and die for a story, for a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".

It seems to me that the desire to become omnipotent is crucial in Monomyth' and 'Morphology. With Propp's fairytale analysis, the child's desire to become an adult is more obvious, but even with Campbell, we can see the wish to move from mere mortal to divine God-like figure; the desire to transcend the restrictions placed on us by tedious mortality; the will to become the superman. God may be dead, or at least dying, but the desire to be the hero lives on.

Secondly, I believe that the hero archetype could be a useful panacea to the scourge of consciousness: isolation. Campbell makes much of the theme of 'oneness' and integration, and in Propp's fairytales, this is transmuted into a desire for special powers and universal acknowledgement. We cannot bear to be alone and the hero story helps us believe it is possible to escape isolation.

And if we take the search for cause one step further back, and move from the psychological to the evolutionary, then one must ask, what is the evolutionary advantage of the meme of the hero?

The hero, as they say, always gets the girl. Those attributes possessed by heroes, and the protection afforded by the heroes themselves, will tend to increase the genetic fitness of any offspring of the hero. Heroes beget heroes. So, by aspiring to be like the hero figure in fairy tales and even adult texts, a male will increase his likelihood to attract a mate.

I hope this does not sound like chauvinism, but it strikes me that heroes are almost always male, in fairy tales and in religions. Following emancipation, one would have expected this to have changed, but to a large extent, it has not. This, I suspect, is because the fundamental rules of sexual selection have not changed: males still feel the need to display the peacock feathers of heroism to attract the attention of the female.

GRIM CONCLUSIONS

Personally, I find this all rather depressing. Are we no more than beasts deprived of reason who plough the same fields day after day, doomed to repeat the same old tricks like an old dog which cannot learn a new one, and all in the hope of attracting a mate? In a way, I fear, the answer is yes. We do not expect more than a certain repertoire of behaviours from an animal, and we are just tool-making animals, so why should we be expected to do anything other than tell the same story over and over?

And yet, we are more than animals, my heart cries out. We have landed on the moon, built cities of glass and concrete, tamed nature and bent the planet to our will. So, why can't we come up with an original plot?!

And if I may end where I began, and join the ashes of the last paragraph to the dust of the first, we are all telling the same old story, and all that marks a good writer from a bad one is that the great writer will tell the story well.

Barack Backs Beans

In a surprise move, congress will meet in emergency session next week and be asked to pass a further stimulus package from Iraq O' Barmy, who wants to secure approval for a 100-billion dollar package to invest in magic beans.

In will be a close vote, and many budget hawks have already expressed their reservations on the long-term implications of spending so much money on a handful of magic beans. However, Barnacky Fed Bean insisted that the "M. Beans will create a wave of hope that will carry the nation through the storm of these turbulent economic seas and leave us safely of the beach of economic good times, and the tan of prosperity will soon follow."

When pressed for more details over how the possession of MB's would restore competitiveness to the crumbling American economy, the O' Barmy camp emphasised the 'hope dividend' that would sprout forth and stated that the green shoots of recovery were already evident.

Critics remain, however, and Britain's Premier Gordung Brown and Chancellor Chancer Darling has been publically critical of the Beanstalk Solution, stating that there would be "no BS for Britain", and that the government would instead be spending its borrowed money on buying bankrupt banks in order to restore confidence and trust.

The Vampire — From Ghoul to Teen Idol

Vampires have become the idols of the young, adopting roles formerly played by pop stars and political messiahs. Where once a poster of Che Guevara or Jim Morrison might have graced a bedroom wall, a gloomy vampire now stares moodily down. But why should teenagers idolize creatures who feed on the blood of the living to prolong their own life? Where has this morbid fashion come from?

To answer that question, we first have to establish when it all began. Who was the first vampire?

If we take vampire to mean drinker of blood then the vampire is immortal, as old as our fear of death, but early Roman, Greek and Chinese bloodsuckers are more demons or evil spirits than bone-fide vampires.

Without meaning to offend religious sensibilities, there is even something of the vampire is Christianity. "The blood is the life" is a line shared by Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula and the Book of Genesis. The catholic Eucharist explicitly states that "whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him."

Christianity, however, is much older than vampirism, and it is clear what is feeding on what. Indeed, the word 'vampire' did not even exist until 1734. It moved quickly from the east, via the Slavic languages (upyr) to German (vampir) to French (vampyre) and then to English.

The first true vampires were seen in eastern European folklore, but the original vampire was far nearer to the ghoul or zombie of today, built around man's primordial fear that the dead might not stay dead and might come back to eat you. Their physical appearance in sightings in the vampire hysteria of the Balkans in the 18th century showed vampires to be more cadaver than Count. Their bodies were engorged, their skin was ruddy and waxy, their shrinking flesh left teeth and nails more prominent. Blood covered their faces.

All of this was taken to be the result of drinking the blood of the living, usually relatives and close friends, supplemented with the occasional sheep. But of course what the peasants actually saw was something far more frightening than vampires. What they saw was death. It was the corpse's own bodily fluids, leaking from the nose and rising through the mouth, that covered the ruddy faces and the swollen purple bodies. The description of vampires are really the descriptions of disinterred corpses. Death is not pretty and early vampires were monsters.

Gothic literature changed all of this, grafting grace onto the bloodsucker. Lord Byron's The Burial: A Fragment which his friend Polidori expanded into The Vampyre are still villains but they are charming villains. The peasant ghoul becomes a degenerate aristocratic. However, it was the Victorian Bram Stoker's vampire, Count Dracula, who many take as the archetype.

Film adaptations of Count Dracula, from Hammer Horror productions starring Christopher Lee to Coppola's 1992 masterpiece, paint a far more alluring picture of the Count than the original novel does, and this helps to explain the vampire's transformation from villain to hero. But at this stage, even in celluloid, he was still a lustful and predatory hero, a stud-with-fangs, a cloaked id and a hero for the sexually repressed. There was still something very dark in the vampire — an undercurrent of infection and sexual disease, a shadow of Stoker's syphilis.

Some films painted the vampire darker still. The 1922 Nosferatu Dracula is a sinister monster and Stephen King's vampires in Salem's Lot could hardly be called alluring. These darker vampires still exist, but they have degenerated into shoot-em-up slasher movies, like John Carpenter's Vampires (98), Tarantino's Dawn to Dusk (96), and the graphic novels of Underworld (2003) and Blade (98).

The sea change in our depiction of vampires occurred with Anne Rice's Interview With a Vampire, especially after Tom Cruise played Louis in the film adaptation in 1996. Here we see the first pin-up vampire, and the first maudlin and introspective vampire — the first existentialist vampire. Although Anne Rice has been critical of Meyer's Twilight, and I must admit I am not a Meyer's fan, I think that in many ways Meyer's Edward Cullen, the moody centenarian teen vamp from Forks, is an extension of Anne Rice's Louis. They are both sullen, moody and a little misanthropic. In many ways they are teenagers, or rather they are how teenagers like to see themselves.

The crucial similarity, however, is that both characters choose to fight against their more carnal desires. So, in a sense, sexual desire and the repression of that desire is still at the core of the vampire's appeal. What has turned villain to hero, perhaps, is that the vampire is now an agent of sexual repression rather than a despoiler of virgins. Vampires no longer promote free love — they promote abstinence. Meyer's vampires are ascetic in the extreme: earnest vegetarian celibates. Even their enemies, the werewolves, bond for life.

As I said in the beginning of this essay, it is ironic that teenagers, who have traditionally worshipped rebels, from Dean to Dylan, have now started worshiping the undead, but it is a double irony that they have started to idolise the sexually inactive undead.

How far the vampire has come — from ghoulish fiend, to suave seducer to celibate teen idol!

THE END
Discover other titles by Phillip Donnelly at Smashwords.com

Fiction

Letters from the Ministry

The Inaction Man

The Conscript, the Girl and the Virus

The Screen

Travel Writing

Lebanon – Between East and West

Notes on Nam

China

India

Message from the Author

If you enjoy these stories, please feel free to tell me so at phillipdonnelly@gmail.com. If there's something you didn't like, or something you feel could have been better, I'd like to know that too.

If you can't face the idea of communicating via e-mail, then just answer three questions at Survey Monkey:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/6L5FYV8
