ATMOSPHERICS 6 Fall 1995 _______________________________________________________________ Contents (in no particular order): a new poet(h)ics Allegra Sloman (argella@dunciad.dorval.qc.ca) 1. (newspaper headline) 2. Counterpoint 3. How She Saved Her Own Life Arupa Chianari (barupa@atlantic.net) Coding the Flows David Joseph Dowker (djd@io.org) Origami A stay in Acceleration David Hunter Sutherland (3468441@mcimail.com) Fidel's Secret Agent Jay Marvin (102547.1273@compuserve.com) Desert space Skirmishes Scent of flesh s.c.virtes _from_ TRIBALWARE Allegra Sloman and David Dowker all this cumulus Vincent Farnsworth Observations of a Coastal Wanderer J. G. Fabiano (marine@star.net) _________________________________________________________________ Welcome to Atmospherics 6. Some exciting news this issue, Atmospherics will be listed in the new Internet Directory. In this issue there is another excerpt from Tribalware by Allegra Sloman and David Dowker. It was very well received in the last issue. Also included are poems by Allegra and David, s.c.virtues, Arupa Chianari and Vincent Farnsworth. This issue also has a story by Jay Marvin and an essay by J.G. Fabiano. Atmospherics is available through anonymous FTP at: etext.archive. umich.edu; it is available on WWW at: http://www.inforamp.net/~billie/atmos; it is available through Gopher at: etext.archive.umich.edu. Requests for subscriptions and submissions should be sent to Susan Keeping at: keeping@library.utoronto.ca or billie@inforamp.net. _________________________________________________________________ This text may be freely shared amongst individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors and advance notification of the editor. Rights to stories remain with the authors. Copyright 1995, the authors. _________________________________________________________________ a new poet(h)ics she is front of a screen . the penetrated one she is one atom of iron away from being a vegetable, and this is irony only free time can provide . with enough food, one can sit for this discrete movement through space and divert attention from appetite to the raffinated sky . the screen . the gods . * invisible conspirator, I bless you without incense . my deities do not have addresses, I can't click on _send_ and offer up a votive _gif_t of fire . perhaps . you prefer to keep your distance but I must tell you now I know you, I will see your name in these frail reed beds where science lets me nest by your scent I will trace you * were you here, were we to breathe together I would offer you a drink of (filtered) water, the contents of my cupboards so that the simian would be satisfied and the intellect could pull itself free of _those constraints_ those _covert_ suchnesses it is our duty to expose * and turn from the personal to the hobbled hominid of culture, staggering along with pinworms and paresis, peevish with an egotism that is a single organism WRIT LARGE . and turn from the personal to the sick'ning and the ludicrous, the background loopiness that veers from _atavism_ to endlessly repeated logo: _oblate spheroid as viewed from space_ . and turn from the personal to see _assertions_ mirrored and contracted with such tightness you are paralyzed with envy, and are plunged into the personal again . and turn from the personal to find a safe subject to discuss, and every one a grenade which mimics the pineapple of hospitality . my expectations . my non-quantifiable but observable sanity . my desire to dwell among my people . and you are all so far away, even&especially the ones here now, you . the personal is a sixteen year old girl writing clunky words in the back of class with a stolen pen . one can take comfort in knowing that either she will get better at it or she will likely stop . likely stop . the political is a thirty-five year old man seeking a new way to reiterate: the contents of my belief system are more utilitarian than yours . one can take comfort in knowing that eventually all his ravings will be nesting materials for successor species . the observational, _language_:_torsion_:_hebephrenia_ corresponds to something no more or less valuable than two people shifting arthritic hands over a five hundred piece reversible puzzle, alternately laughing and cursing the in-laws who give it to them . or it can be compared to many things, depending on what . you have in your tool kit . or whether you have a tool kit at all . presuppose literacy, and the sham of it rises into your face, the clinging odour of death amid your sufficiency . we are debating what the dance band on the Titanic was playing . we are being ultimately recursive and precious . so switch me off, it's tiresome, but when I am satisfied, when: my hunger for _THIS THING_ is sated; I have PRESSED ENTER; I am DONE for now ; I must fall to the repairs . it hasn't stopped . the entropy machine is still running, and coffee break is over . I have to go back to work . to work . the real work . Allegra Sloman ----------------------------------------------------------- 1. (newspaper headline) WOMAN SHOT BY CLOWN CARRYING FLOWERS DIES 2. Counterpoint FROM HERE I SEErhonda's shadow THAT POOR WOMAN NEXT DOORmousy hair pulled back CHOSE HER HARDSHIPSpushing a shopping cart SHE DIDall over town I SAID TO GUS JUST THE OTHER DAYlooking for a Christmas doll I HOPE THOSE KIDSfor her black child GET SOME CHRISTMAS PRESENTSrhonda's white AND A GOOD DINNERcooks neck bones and rice HE'S A MUSICIANdon't have much money GOOD LOOKING FELLOWhe's a drummer in a THAT'S NOT EVERYTHINGblues band I KNOW YOU DRINK A LITTLEsnorts a little coke BEER BUT YOU GOTTAsmokes a little weed STEADY JOBrhonda scrubs floors AT THE POST OFFICEon hands and knees STAY HOME NIGHTSgoes to work every day WATCH TVmakes the steady pay I COUNT MY BLESSINGSshe's a wispy EVERY DAYshadow in his WHERE'S MYebony dream.. TEETH?of drums in the night... 3. How She Saved Her Own Life Once there was: a vagina dangling from the end of a rope, a purple snake gliding through glass grass, hissing pain, striking at the vagina, which was brown and old. There is a story to this: she cut out her vagina, after it stopped bleeding, and no-one wanted it anymore. It was tired of vibrators, carrots, cucumbers, summer squash. She fastened it to the end of a rope and put it in the garden to scare off crows. When winter came she left it there. The world froze. A purple snake, dying from the cold, pushed his failing body through the sharp edges of the frozen grass. He saw it: a brown rose smelling faintly of love and blood and babies. Moldy with loneliness, he desired this vagina for his own. He struck, and struck, and struck again, until the brown rose fell into his open mouth, whereupon he ate it down to the rind, which he threw away. The purple snake, now strong, went on his way, traveled south, to adorn the jeweled breasts of the king's concubines. She who saved his life went out to the garden one snowy day and finding the rind, ate it with her three good teeth. Arupa Chiarini ----------------------------------------------------------------- ORIGAMI Think like a slave ! Seize these landscapes whose ardor of flashes, stills and pictures, acquiesce too her chastity lucid with critics. Open these arms ! strained with surrender as weighted skin covers.. beauty creams, gels, shattered lip gloss, stain in a memory / forgetting last night.... Curtains between acts, limber on a rickshaw, creased between her paper swans... Japanese tigers... seductions... Think like a slave ! wave-like, naked, idiot-proof. Upstream these feelings ! on rapids' coarse shoals of hair split lovers and papier-mache' then Rise to occassion ! Hard and deliberate as another hour falters to a comfort which begs to stay. David Hunter Sutherland A STAY IN ACCELERATION (Dedicated to my wife) On stilts, Cyrano courts Neptune blind to the time-worn cracks and centuries coarse ephesias, of her moons. Gone this view of her suns, behind half-opened doors Susanna finishes Figaro, Daedalus takes wing, and the price of cloves falter.. Stay ! this beaten path, balm it with a lullaby and Grind it too a halt. (In her absence), shiploads will burn. David Hunter Sutherland ------------------------------------------------------- FIDEL'S SECRET AGENT He calls you to the blackboard and you stand in front of the class. The figures stare at you in white chalk, but you can't make anything out of them; it's like your head is blank, dead, there's no here and no tomorrow. God knows how long you're up there; the whole class laughs; you sit down stunned, wounded. You'd like the whole fucking class to die, and most of all you want your tormentor to die. You escape the moment by thinking of ways to kill your math teacher. You've read stories in the papers about service men in Nam fragging their own commanding officers. You feel the grenade slip and slide in your palm and you roll it under his desk and it goes off with a. . . . At home they sit at the dinner table. You pick at your food watching them your insides coiled like a snake. You watch him eat and drink his water in huge gulps. He talks about the quality of the food. This drives you crazy. This man is your father yet you have nothing in common with him. You don't want to have anything in common with him. You'd like to get out of Marvin--2 your chair and push his god damn head into his plate. Across from you sit his two girls from another marriage. You look at them, you see them every day, but you don't really know them. The family: all of you under one roof bumping into each other living together fucked up as hell. It's like you're on some kind of movie set and you wish you had a saw to cut a hole in which you could climb out . You don't live life you try to survive it. The phone rang and he answered it. He's talking about you. The others at the table are sitting still listening. You get it at school you get it at home. Your mother gets up and fiddles in the kitchen. He continues to talk on the phone you hear your name repeatedly. He hangs up and sits back down at the table. Your math teacher doesn't want you in his class anymore. He says you are flunking and that you won't do your work. The others giggle. You ignore them knowing you'll get them later. Starting tonight, he announces, you'll get no television, and you'll go to your room until you start doing your work and your grades improve. This is the deal he's worked out for you so you can stay in math class. In your room you sit at your desk and turn on your short-wave radio very low so the guards don't catch the prisoner with any special privileges. The radio plays a Marvin--3 Station from a country called Cuba. You hear about this man named Fidel and how he keeps telling the U.S. imperialists to jam it. You like that. Maybe if Fidel was here he'd tell your math teacher, your stepfather and the rest of the household to jam it. You decide to listen every night. Now you're a communist, and while others cheer for your country you'll cheer for Fidel's; and when the Cuban people win in their battle with U.S. imperialism Fidel will come liberate you. There will be trials and those who committed unjust crimes against you will be tried in a revolutionary court of law. It will be a people's tribunal and you'll be the judge and prosecutor. You'll present evidence and take testimony, and in the end they'll plead for forgiveness and mercy, and you'll ask who gave you mercy when they were in control and held you prisoner and subjected you to torments and abuse? There won't be jails big enough to hold everyone you'll try and convict. The radio glows hot with non stop programming from the Caribbean. You rub your eyes and make a pact with God and Fidel you'll be his secret agent here in America; in the belly of the beast. You disconnect your receiver, hide it under your bed, like in the movies, and turn off the light. You get undressed in the dark a smile on your face. You're a guerrilla fighter: a man with a purpose and tomorrow Marvin--4 you'll start to prepare yourself for the coming revolution in which all men will be free from exploration! For the first time in your life you feel like you'll survive. Jay Marvin --------------------------------------------------------------- "Coding the Flows" to continue, as always, the thread that never ends on this grey day drizzling discontinuous as these thoughts which elude recording just kind of dissipate into the text at random intervals, the leaky faucet model of consciousness, the slipstream of being occupied with this and that (the space-time twins) while _pre_-occupied with these manifestations of that other, the impossible possibility the probably improbable happening right now, the room a kind of refuge a space apart from the _flowing_ machine outside, that contrivance of stops and starts and absence and presence, the difficult technic of existence, the absolute immensity of the world, a moth upon a branch of that associative tree we make of our minds, that space where language is the true mirrorsite of emotion, the loose grace of flesh beneath fabric, the feeling translated to motion happens in the head and feeds back into the dream, the sensation of familiar presence, the body without boundary David Joseph Dowker _________________________________________________________________ SKIRMISHES Nobody told the guns to stop: A line wandered back & forth on a small world. The time: forever. s.c. virtes THE SCENT OF FLESH quiet alluring trace of sweat/strength aware perfumes like lace reaching out flowers peace or hope we pass closer, ask where are we going? has this moment passed before? opportunity? a trace, a scent old memories, a future a wave of unknown life interest & dividends like work & play sleeping alone (however close) all islands reaching out air, a chill, an open window, where have we been all this time? reach for a blanket, shiver will she ever be home? s.c. virtes ----------------------------------------------------------------- _from_ TRIBALWARE Nicad awoke in a strange bed, feeling the uneasiness to be somehow familiar, to find Caithin sitting naked in front of a computer, through the open door to the next room, mirrored and sun-drenched, working. The soft percussives of a keyboard punctuated the morning. Nicad's head throbbed once and melted. "Don't worry. You didn't disgrace yourself or anyone else. You _should_ be able to remember once those inhibitors wear off." Caithin displayed a truly wicked smile and continued with the manipulation of writhing shapes on the screen before her. He got up and by instinct, certainly not by any usual functioning of sensory apparatus, found the bathroom. Difficult to avoid the mirror, but, fortunately, the haze had not yet cleared from his vision. The angles slipped, twisty corridors between, at a tangent to the corners. Caithin called out, "So, how does it feel to be a rich, about- to-be-published author?" as Nicad emerged after his brief attempt at becoming human. He stood as close to her as he dared. "You mean that wasn't a dream?" She turned and ran a hand along his thigh. "No, but this is," she said, "and the offer still stands." That succubus smile again. "You'll remember _that_ eventually, too." "So much to remember, so little time to forget." Nicad's fingers found the nape of her (neck) as the screen suddenly _resolved_ into a pointillist beetle or was that a blossom surrounding...? "This is connected to the thing they're after, isn't it?" Caithin asked. "Well...actually it's a trace, an empty carapace. What _they_ were looking for has already escaped...and, I may add, was never really there in the first place." She looked bemused. The image on the screen remained, pulsing amoebically. "Are you sure that you couldn't be a tiny bit more cryptic?" Nicad grinned and entered a short command on the keyboard. The image fell apart and the fragments sprouted a variety of appendages and promptly scattered off the edges of their world. Sporadically, they clambered back onto the screen, forming a series of words which, after much fumbling and groping, arranged themselves into sentences. Caithin read with increasing (as disbelief dissolved into) astonishment the echo of her thoughts across that animate glass. * Pockets awoke in a strange bed, the events of the previous evening rushing back to her, the hurried exit and increasingly intoxicating autocab ride back to this space in _the enclave_, and pushed them away as she arose into the splash of sunlight before her. A shudder of another chemical wave through her nervous system, distant remnant of last night's psychoactive activity. It scurried away and she followed it. Liana was in the kitchen, sipping at a cup of coffee, mulling over _the foldaway_ on the table. "The reading I get is ambiguous to say the least." She was possibly more enchanting in the morning. This was, indeed, dangerous territory. The Daughters were powerful in their fashion, and their wrath, apparently, everlasting. Pockets could not afford to have this woman clouding her perceptions. She _was_ such a delight, though. Her tattoos were actually organic circuitry and allowed her to perform an amazing number of calculations and data-searches while maintaining, for example, an ordinary conversation. Or an elaborate exchange of fluids. Pockets watched, entranced, as the faintly luminous patterns coalesced and disintegrated. Certain radical transformations flashed through her mind, as well as the contrived image of moonlight upon Liana's information-dense breasts. Pockets was amused to think that they had never actually made love. Liana had simply (!) guided her through the most intense massage that she had ever participated in. It was if they had conjugated in their heads (ah! verbs...and re-verb) but translated into touch and muscle, memories flooding over the immediate area of sensation, slipping into and out of dream states, that moment just before falling asleep, slow orgasm flowing across and into that expanse of body-image, not skin exactly but undulant waving flesh-consciousness becoming one continuous perception coincident with the environment. "It would seem to indicate nodes of intense computational activity coordinated through some kind of pattern in time, or agency outside of time, I suppose." Pockets manoeuvred to glimpse the tiny screen. "Why don't I send it to your visor?" Liana asked. The images seemed to exceed Pockets' frame of vision, widening the retinal through some other route, tickling the pineal. (What kind of pharmacological havoc had she wrought?) These animated fractals spoke to her of spels and morphs already actuated. She saw the frenzied rush to consciousness and calculated flight to diffusion. She _saw_ (see the wave of recognition flow over her face as we slow down and enhance the visuals, the quiver of the muscles, the tiny hairs that flutter) but did not know. "It appears to be a signature...or a path, perhaps." "Or both. A map, a formula, a recipe, a spel? Whatever it is, though, it must be monstrous." Pockets removed the visor. She could see the patterns morphing still in her mind and a dim echo reflected in the coffee cup on the table. It took her a while to realize that Liana's foldaway was the source of the image. * Nicad in his eyrie. Memories haltingly surfacing. The most amusing being the realization that they had talked all night and then hugged and retired to separate beds. The darling had not wanted to take advantage of poor, confused, drug-addled Nicad. He _had_ been rather manic. Their conversation was a somewhat different matter. He had said a number of things he probably shouldn't have. Most of it just hints and allusions. Caithin knew him better than anyone, though. How much had she guessed? Yet he had been reduced to stunned disbelief at the slow-motion unfolding of her thoughts across that screen. What in Gaia's name (as Pockets undoubtedly would say) was going on here? His thoughts returned (yet again) to the event rapidly approaching. Pockets had sent the confirmation that morning: "A big hug by the Henry Moore (you'll know the one) or, perhaps, a furtive kiss beside "Erotomania" - we'll flip a coin into that fountain when this is water over the bridge." He had checked out the location earlier today. The Gallery had stubbornly remained over the years and dug itself (literally) into the underground as everything else around it had shifted, as the workers departed from the office towers and cars had disappeared and roads became labyrinthine paths and strings of shanties. Refugees from the various wars had claimed and reclaimed the sub-divided architectures of obsolete industry. Tribes and cults of all races and persuasions occupied the towers and the underground mazes. {Do you suppose - came a quiet voice in his ear - that we should be nourishing our bodies as well as our eyes? I have in mind a restaurant}...real-time image unfurling, subliminals screened he supposed...and there was an address, coiling around a plate of glazed multicoloured objects. He figured that Pockets would be tracking him minute by minute, so he phoned _Tender Buttons_ and confirmed the reservation. It was in his name, which he found disconcerting, after eighteen months of Caithin. The person at the end of the phone took "the opportunity to remind him that the reservation policy was quite strict, and a minimum charge of..." and Nicad hung up, disgusted. A hole in the wall Rwandan restaurant was more his speed. * He became aware of himself at odd moments sorting through the recent past, gradually running the film backwards from her recent graphic revelation to their initial exchange of tribalware. Her naked body with the iconic head of another (imaginary character concealing some message or simply his fixation mimed back at him?), her contortionist morph and, finally, the zoom bloom of genital landscape. What was being said here? He was doing exactly what he said he wouldn't - searching for meaning in a probably random configuration of arbitrary elements. That _was_ his specialty, though. He glanced around the room with a curiously alien eye. The foldaway thrown against a stack of printouts (another ELYTRA compile) and disks, threatening to spill across the table in one last futile download. Nicad considered the lack of reliable data re: Pockets (or Cassandra Alexandra Tessier or Carolyn Alice Tennyson or Catherine Alison Terrebonne or Cheryl Ann Tedlock or Cecilia Amanita Torres or Cynthia Amanda Thorne and many more for all he knew) and his total disregard for the possible consequences. What did he really know about this woman? His eyes caught the image he had saved from that first encounter and taped to the wall. It was meaningless to anyone else, but for Nicad that abstract datamap contained a tantalizing glimpse into the actual emotional landscape which Pockets inhabited. He should have known right from the beginning that she would quite quickly and effortlessly turn his carefully contrived and cocooned existence inside-out. She had suddenly materialized as a butterfly (spring azure, he would discover), delicately, and apparently drunkenly, fluttering about the table, eventually to alight upon his nose. It was one of those rare occasions that he had ventured into the virtual without benefit of shielding. Why _had_ he gone out that night? He seemed to recall some argument with Caithin. A further installment of the ongoing personal reality adjustment to that shared hallucination called _business_. * Inside the visor, his full grid, the series of questions, acronyms and lists, showed itself. He'd captured the opening matrix of D-War 3000 as an armature for his entire life and as she fed him her own data the grid went crimson and gold with explosion after explosion, followed by a trembling bleedthrough of visual purple. He was shaking in his chair, and was so embarrassed that he hit the 'mute' button which, incidentally, cut the feed that gave her his physical status. He swore to himself, then keyed it for the second layer of revelations. This is going to hurt, but better to know now, right?...and damn, it just continued to hit. A series of full-screen implosions and the whole thing collapsed into an apparent singularity from which the rose window of the second level slowly spiralled open, achingly gorgeous spectral blue, indigo to (ultra)violet. Nicad could hear himself moaning, "This is not happening," and ignored her when she sent a single question mark into his silence. "Hang on a minute," she said into his ear. The configuration froze. He hit the mute again. "I'm supposed to feel better? So what are you?" "I am confused, frankly. You should see what it looks like at this end." "Show me." She had arranged her tribalware in two layers - first the bones, faintly phosphorescent, and then the skin, animated to reveal the matching data become a homunculus, the skeleton flickering through a veil of shimmering skin. It looked bizarre: a child's rendition of a cartoon character. The head, eyes, ears and hands were enormous. A fig leaf obscured the genitals. Nicad didn't know whether to be amused or annoyed. "You must have spent ages working on that," he said. "Nah, it's shareware," she responded. "I've never had it go off like this before, usually the poor thing looks like a pinhead with gland problems." The casual tone lay at right angles to the message. "Wanna see mine?" Nicad said, watching her heart rate slowly drift below a certain level. She was either fudging the feed, or genuinely freaked out, no matter how level she could keep her voice. "A pleasure." After a second, she said, "Gracious." * Nicad's lofty abode was another gift from the goddess, namely Caithin. Global Reality Management used the main floor of the antique building for an elaborate display of nondescript subliminal manipulation and most of the remaining space to house the hardware of part of its vast information domain. Caithin had suggested that he renovate and move in to the tower which was connected to the main structure. He would be close to (never away from) his work that way and could make the necessary interventions that were better off not left to outside technicians. This was entirely unofficial, though. Legally, the property was owned by something called _C & C Enterprises_, which he assumed was a holding company. Strangely, he never could discover anything substantial about them. The usual vapour trail. The smell of burning financials and phoenix-like corporate resurrection. * He arrived at _Buttons_ early, pondering his misgivings. It seemed like a really bad idea. He could feel everything sour, becoming increasingly frenetic. As he sat down in a hushed deep leather landslide Pockets appeared in the flicker and he put his visor on. She looked fried. Worse than he'd ever seen her. He wondered for a second if it had anything to do with him, and was happy when she said, "I'm stuck for a while, don't know how long, can't tell you how disgusted I am, want to be with you, not here, and you'd better start ordering or they'll throw you out. Transferring funds," she said, grinning as she got the ping that echoed through Nicad's visor. "Not much of a bribe," Nicad grunted. (She obviously hasn't peeked at my bank account lately, he thought. Or has she?) "This is hospitality," Pockets said smoothly. "Bribes later, switching off," and poof! she disappeared. * His most recent blip recovered from the distant past of the previous evening, mind-crawling through the miasma of the multi-verse, apparently disappearing into a virtual wormhole (redundancy echoed by a similar earthly vanishing act). All the crosschecks came back negative: dates, times, data streaks, parsing, and general dithering about. Moby was nowhere to be found. Then, the message discovered (when Pockets finally woke up and checked her personal mailbox) that he was "on to something" and would get back to her soonest. Who would get them into Wunderland now? She would have to abort their little escapade and find some other way. "Can I have all the faces of my teammates onscreen?" Pockets asked the immediate universe. "Shutdown for now, folks. Unless one of you has developed a sudden expertise in electronic security evasion or taste for suicide." Constance, Daria and Iain uploaded and clicked out. Toni lingered to chatter at Pockets about the e-state of her love life and lack of time for such complications. As she was threatening to move on to much more frighteningly personal topics, Pockets cut her off. "Believe it or not, I have to be physical somewhere right about five minutes ago. So voice me later. Gone." * Pockets arrived amid an internal flurry of invective (hers) and a demure external composure, barely maintained as Nicad arose to embrace her. A twitchy kind of induced calm, obviously alchohol-based, nerves twanging beneath the slurred surface. "Let's get on with it and out of here," she thought, not that loudly. "How about we just, kind of, like, have a drink and get out of here?" Nicad asked, as Pockets experienced a slightly disturbing echo effect and pictured a long cool gin and tonic (with additives, of course). "Juniper, is it? Gin and quinine and all the accoutrements?" ("This is silly," Nicad thought. "Where did these words come from...and where are they going? I'm speaking as if I'm online.") Pockets settled into the loop and smiled curiously. "That would be just so," she replied. Talk became impossible. Nothing about her posture showed anything but relief to have a peaceful moment in a restaurant with a friend. Nicad ran his own personal subroutine, counting down muscle groups and trying to stay calm in the face of an avalanche. He imagined that he could already count on surviving the experience, and quit worrying about it. In his new, expansive state of mind, he slid the fingers of one hand over the hands folded in front of her. Caithin had admired them once in an unguarded moment. ...and he threw his glance over toward the intricately carved stand for the register. "Easy come, easy go," she said aloud, and they pushed their way out. Pockets looked up and frowned at the overcast. The sky leaked ironic intermittent commentary upon their awkward babbling and sudden silences. They walked within a cocoon of apparent immunity. The street dissolved into background luminescence and the sound of shoes slapping concrete. He was following her turnings, slightly light-headed and off-balance, occasionally bumping into her bubble, a shiver of sparks brushed into (being (the feeling of) beside her (finally)) ...winding a way to the tower in the spiral. "Your place." (Definitely not a question.) "Mine," he answered, and searched for his card to open the door. * _The Hive_ was a favourite of the retro-crowd. It did not particularly appeal to Caithin, though. The labyrinthine design of the cells with their radically different internal architectures and means of access made her uneasy, slightly claustrophobic. It would not be difficult to disappear here. Her reserved niche for the evening was definitely not her choice and the early Fifties diner gone wrong motif seemed vaguely threatening. Similarly, her dinner partner did not inspire feelings of security. Mr. Bok had urgently requested her presence at this location at this time and now was almost certainly deliberately making her wait while he adjusted his tie and dusted his eyebrows or inspected his weaponry with paranoid precision of attention to detail. Caithin wondered at the vividness of the imagining. She felt positive that was exactly what he was doing. Assured resonance as he oozed into the room a while later and she scoped his cargo of chemicals and metalloplastic. "Ah, Caithin, you look delicious." "Martin, you flutter me. Consider me buttered for business. Or shall we order first?" "You always did have a poetic tendency, Cait. Speaking of which, you didn't happen to have a hand in composing that manuscript my company so impulsively acquired. Our analysis indicates that your Mr. Addison did not labour lovingly alone, if he laboured at all." Caithin smiled and replied, "But certainly he could have synthesized the language to correspond to his own particular requirements, and, knowing Nicholas, I would say that is highly likely." "We did consider that possibility. There's no way of knowing for sure, of course. Given certain other facts, though, we think _that_ is highly _unlikely_." "And you think that I may know who this mysterious collaborator is. I have no idea. My question is: what does it matter?" "The possibility of future legal action, to mention one thing." He motioned to the young sapling with asymptotic legs holding a foldaway and signalled some kind of vintage obscurity. "One of the unmentionables being the fact that you don't give a damn about the novel and are really after the identity of this hypothetical author. Shall I speculate as to the reasons?" A tiny fault line appeared in Bok's polished marble forehead. He reached for his inhaler and puffed a trace of sentience into his cortex. The restorative effect immediately apparent in the glazed smile and rapidly blinking eyes. He clicked a bit of his physical apparatus and examined the hand-scrawled menu. "I believe it's time we decided what to order," he said. * "So why does everyone want a piece of the action?" Pockets asked, stroking him, slowly, assuredly. "I have the attention span of a housefly," Nicad said, resigned. "You can either stop doing that or get an answer, not both." "Okay," she said, and sat up, allowing her hand to slide over a large portion of his anatomy. He'd never slept with such a muscular woman before, and it was interesting to watch the play of shadows as she shifted position. "About three years ago, I stumbled upon an expert system which appeared to have been abandoned and locked away while still under development." "So you, uh, liberated it," she said. "More or less. I soon realized that it had been damaged, or, perhaps, purposefully disabled. So, when I could cadge the time, I domed out on the programming, rewrote whole chunks of it, fiddled with the source code, fed a translator into it, distributed it across a bunch of different machines, recompiled and nearly died of it. The system seemed innocuous enough at first. Its main purpose appeared to be to search the global electronic network for various programs and information nodes that would address the planetary ecological crisis (within its own defined parameters which I was unable to ascertain, except inferentially) and also, presumably, to correlate this information with its own database (which, I much later discovered, was scattered around the world)." If he kept looking at her, he couldn't talk, so he quit looking at her. The horrid sense that she was using him to get at Cyberslam kept being washed away by the sheer comfort of being with her. "I noticed, though, that the system seemed to be growing in ways not easily predicted and began to behave somewhat autonomously, that is, outside of what I believed to be its prescribed limits. It eventually started to create sub-programs of its own. These continued the search, concentrating on specific areas and often employing different methods. They apparently _absorbed_ and altered the various materials encountered (_Charmer_ being the name of the daemon sub-program which approached and co-opted the security systems involved, usually, with the help of the others, absorbing and altering them for its own use). "I would link up with _Geofile_ to find the strangest things, and began to suspect that something extremely unusual was going on. I always received responses, though (even if often quite bizarre ones) to my inquiries. I mapped its so-called _hypotheticals_ onto current economic trends and asked it to predict where the opportunities to make money would be. Two hours later it was still writing stuff to file, so I went to bed. It was still chugging away when I got up, and it kept going for another six hours." Pockets was quiet. Her heart was pounding and she was having to summon discipline to still her breathing. "Impressive, huh?" "Yes, very," she said drily. "Can it talk to other programs?" "Shit, yeah...the engine is incredibly robust, and it tutors itself in no time flat." "Could you get it to talk to the program _I've_ been working on?" "Sure...what is it?" Nicad said, mentally holding his breath. "Ah. Well. It doesn't have a name, or a specific function. It's just an opportunist with a good sense of humour." "Like you?" Nicad said, before he could stop himself. Amazingly, she laughed. It was the first loud, unfettered bark of laughter he'd ever coaxed from her, and the smile lingered. "Like mistress, like program," Pockets said. "It's a philosophy program, you might say. What it does is hunt up arguments to support certain activities depending on the world view of whoever it is you wish to suborn - I mean influence." Nicad considered this for a while. "Shit," he said. "Exactly," Pockets responded. * Liana meandered through the mall, pausing here and there, fingertips collecting information for her software to process as she chatted up, for example, the hamadryads lingering in the arboretum or the naiads looking bored by the fountain. As if she was a bee gathering pollen and a very busy one at that. She actually did follow an analogue of ultraviolet markings in that her systems scanned for certain electro- magnetic tags and auroral anomalies. Her photos,though, were the ostensible reason for this excursion and so far nothing much had materialized. That blade being chased by security was mundane and mostly ritual. The usual passing fashion parade seemed uninspired, trite. The panhandlers and hookers, vendors and vandals, differently drugged young and old navigating the track - slotted in and flowing through the motion. Liana stopped beneath a sweetly weeping willow to ponder whether or not to continue. The hunch that had sent her here crouched in the shadows (actually the irrigation tubing) of the long leaves, heaved a sigh and nudged her attention toward the base of that incongruous tree. She pointed her camera at the worm-scrawled characters inscribed in the bark and read, "We must talk. Open circuit. E." Click and picture the world as the chunk of spinning rock that it undoubtedly is. Imagine the clinging green moss or fungus and the tiny parasites buried within writing with acid their estimates of particle decay upon the backs of shining beetles. "We are in the land of serious lunacy," she thought. * Nicad tried very hard to pay attention, but it was next to impossible. To cover his fidgeting he started to massage her feet. The ambient images behind her moved through surreal brides, and bachelors, even, to nudes descending ancient newsreels. "Are you non-verbal at the moment?" Pockets asked and bit her lip. Nicad nodded, smiling cheerfully, glad to have such a convenient out. He concentrated upon the pale blue vein on the inside of her ankle, and, forgetting himself, watched it pulse. He traced a finger along that tributary line and felt the molecules vibrate, seemingly accelerating. "Well, do you mind if _I_ keep talking, or would you prefer me to be silent?" was the next question. He gave a swift, nervous shrug, without letting go of her feet. Pockets closed her eyes, leaned back, and fell silent. She wanted to explode. When Nicad got the idea from her body language that she didn't want to explode any more, perhaps ten minutes later, he said, "I'm back from Nonverbia, how can I help you?" "I would like to help you out...which way did you come in?" Pockets said, barely audible. At some point in the future he might have a chance to get bored of her naked form, but at the moment the experience was too novel not to be enjoyed. His hands pursued the argument further, working their way along the long muscles of her thighs to the articulated armour of her shoulders (as his eyes lingered over the softer portions of her intricately sculpted anatomy). The form of his devotion flowed from his fingers, found warmth where shadow had lain and followed the impulse to its source. "I bet you don't remember what you were talking about," Nicad said cheerfully. "Something about being detached, wasn't it?" Pockets stiffened and Nicad's smile got broader. "I have some talents, but sometimes I have to ask for time-outs to think out my response," he said. "Anyway, continue, have the floor." "No thanks, I've got the bed," Pockets said. They hadn't trashed the room, but the bed was a disaster. "You're the first female who's displayed any interest in me in years," Nicad said. "Six months, actually, since Caithin put you back down." Her ambiguous smile was echoed by the pointillist image beside her. There was a tight pause. "I am nothing if not discreet and will speak of her as I wish always to speak of you," Nicad said. Pockets felt her heart twist like maple taffy. It was the politest rebuke she had received in ages. "Point taken. She didn't say anything nasty about you, and I didn't ask her about her sex life. I wanted to know if you were reliable or not." "How I wish I'd been a fly on that particular wall," Nicad said, startled by the sudden appearance of a large compound eye on the wallscreen behind Pockets (not so ambient after all). Then she said, "You weren't. You didn't miss much. And you are apparently quite reliable, as long as nobody expects you to think except in short, strangely timed bursts." "Yup, that sounds like Cait the Great," Nicad said. "She makes me sound like a complete idiot, somehow. I'm sure she didn't mean it," and he moved up the bed to lie next to her. "You don't sound offended," Pockets said. If there was a part of him that didn't smell and feel good, she had yet to locate it. It was ambrosial. It had unparalleled intensity. It was a complex experience...to be so irrational, so obedient to the jerkings of internal chemistry - that was a good part of the kick. No drug could be better than this. And sometimes, she said, hugging the thought of High Romance to herself, it lasts for life, you just have to see. You have to eat the same food and breathe the same air for a while. Everything takes time. There is little instant synchrony. Everything is moving at a different speed and is meant to be meshed. You have to wait sometimes, you have to give ground, you have to see the shape of things and not get too close to your hopes. "You're sniffing me," Nicad said. "Yes. I am taking you forever into my back brain, and you will never get out. I store that, one little molecule, in the back of my head and it will never leave me," Pockets said. "I should feel flattered," Nicad said, and pushed Pockets into Nonverbia, for a long, trying time. Every time she took breath to speak, communication would fail in the barrage of distracting sensations. He was toying with her, and could feel her reaction without much effort. "Say something," he whispered, and when she could make no reply, he slid into that silence with an emphatic answer to at least one of her questions. David Dowker and Allegra Sloman ---------------------------------------------------------------- DESERT SPACE Another burning day faces melt into the sunset with long shadows of relief the cold sweating night arrives. s.c. virtes --------------------------------------------------------------- all this cumulus the tunnel of the road through the trees some words fall off the wall of rock peeled senselessly did curly q's and shangri las susie kept away from me stayed in austria dancing catty beware scratching beware: thoughts are like magnet and skin iron filings away under the heading southeast aphasia nicht sprekken it built up and amounted to people on the street hiding under their coat little shrunken bodies they reveal with the right password or grimace Vincent Farnsworth ----------------------------------------- Observations of a Coastal Wanderer The many beaches along the coasts of New Hampshire and Maine have a beautiful distinction about them. Most of them have the ocean approach adjoining roadways with few small walls or buildings to obstruct the view of anyone who has the opportunity to walk or drive along their edges. These beaches have been protected by town fathers from being over developed by those who see opportunity for the few instead of beauty to be enjoyed by the many. Long Sands Beach in York, Maine, is one of those beaches. In between Route 1A and the beach is a walk. It is elevated which allows the walker to see yet not be seen. Living on the beach for the past nineteen years has taught me that the beauty of the coast does not only come from the physical surroundings. It also emanates from the visitors who walk along the long white sands of the beach. Also having an intense imagination I make up stories about the people I see. Starting from where the beach begins at the point where Nubble Road meets the ocean, there is little beach at any tide. In fact, there is no beach at all. The people simply lean over the large rocks which separates the road from the water. Young and old stare into the pulsating ocean and lose themselves in the heartbeat precision of the never ending waves. This is where the expert observer notices what life's meaning should be. I have watched people find, live through, lose, and then finally search for memories that make and sometimes break their lives. I have observed people meet in large groups. Their conversations filled with laughter, youth, and of course the innocence that we all begin our lives with. These groups eventually break into small separate clusters to be reduced to pairs attracted to each other by the possibility of creating their own memories. During the course of the summer I see these pairs of people on their particular section of beach. They create their territory and do not like to share it. At first they are playing the part of friends not daring to get close or to appear to be interested in their now obvious partner. But as the weeks pass I observe their closeness overtaking the fear of being vulnerable. First their eyes meet and then they finally touch to be seen perpetually as one on their section of beach. I don't care if my observations are seen because I know that if I stood directly in front of them they wouldn't care. In fact, they would not know that I exist. I also see the loners who dare not go on the beach but rather stay up on the black-topped path and dream about their time on the sand. They dream about their lost hours that were either rejected or just disappeared. These people do not have to be young or old, they are just in a stage of their lives. One of the most exciting sights for me is when I first observe young couples and see them appear year after year together in the sun. Then one year passes and I see that they are not alone. They are now accompanied by a mirror of their own lives. They always appear so proud. Year after year I watch them grow older and their babies grow bigger. Sometimes visa-versa. Their memories never end, they just grow longer and newer. I've almost lived here long enough to observe the babies of the summer grow into adults. I have watched them grow to young children, radiating innocence and creating memories for their parents and all around them. Yet, on the other hand, I feel remorse for the people who become singles again because of their life's fate. They are seen in many numbers staring out in the vastness of the ocean, obviously trying to forget while fearing that they will always remember. The old are the people I enjoy watching the most. Especially the older couples who plant themselves on the park benches to stare into the ocean and reminisce about their own pasts. The old couples bring hope to us all. But the old singles display such loneliness and despair that I dread the thought that one day I might live so long as to remember my memories alone. Some old couples lie their beach chairs precariously close if not in the wake of the always approaching waves. They know that with each large entrance of water they will get wet. But they still close their eyes and react surprised as each new wave brushes their feet and then wets their bottoms. Maybe this sharp sensation causes them to remember the first time they exchanged a similar feeling using each other. I remember once I observed a very young lady, perhaps five or six, being instructed by her mother to sit quietly and enjoy the beach. Not so far away I saw another pretty lady, perhaps sixty or seventy, being instructed by an oldest daughter as to how to enjoy the beach. The instructions made the two ladies fidget in their chairs. They were obviously uncomfortable by what was being told to them. But then, as if some magnetic attraction between the two of them developed, they gazed at each other. Their eyes met and it appeared as if they told each other to calm down and enjoy the sea. One day I hope to be fortunate enough to experience what happened between the two of them. But I know that I must first survive time and simply get old. Of course not all men and women dare to get that close to the ocean. Many on the beach are seen straight backed, standing like statues on their rock like pedestals, contemplating nothing more important than themselves. Walking further down the walkway the ocean now allows more beach to appear. This is where most of the young are seen. The children are creating their own form of world in the sand while their parents dream about the world they either left behind or just rediscovered. During a sunny summer day the sounds of laughter and screaming drown out all that nature can muster up. But on fog bound days the inhabitants treat the shore like they would a church with their voices daring not to disturb the sounds of the sea. Continuing my trek down beach I arrive at the place where the young are known to camp themselves for hours in the hopes of attracting each other into summer and maybe longer relationships. But again, during fog bound times, even the young are awed into staring into the ocean praying that sunny days are soon to return. The lovers are always there, arm in arm and body to body, in the hopes that their love is the true one which will last forever. But the fog hints to these young lovers that they are observing a truer reality. Whether or not this scares them or gives them hope is their own mystery. Further down the beach is the territory of the more mature inhabitants. These people have already been through over half their lives and are in the midst of giving up their existence's to mold new futures for their children. Observing these people shows that they always seem lost in their own thoughts or possibly lost dreams. The short summer season is not the only time one has to observe the beauty of the coast of Maine. Another season that marks the end of the excitement of summer and begins the preparation for the holidays and the cold winds of winter is also a prime time to observe what life can be. It is a remarkably quiet time of year. The hustle and the bustle of summer vacations are still very clear in all of our minds. Yet normality is not the only idea that comes back to us this time of year. Serenity also creeps its way into all of our lives. Walking down the beach clearly shows how the screams of playing children are now replaced by the songs of gulls overhead. The acrid smell of aloed bodies is replaced by the pure smell of salt water mixing with the salted air. Even the waves of the ocean, which during the summer seemed to be pounding their way to the beach in the hopes of dislodging all the bodies who would dare to step more than knee-deep, now seem to be enjoying their own sense of serenity by ever so gently touching the newly vacant beaches. The people of this season also have changed. Not that the same people aren't seen on the summer's beaches enjoying the warmth and excitement of that season. But the bicyclist is not hurrying down the beach to be the first to arrive at his destination. He is now sitting by the beach on a bench, enjoying the eternity of the ocean. You can almost see through his eyes and feel that he is not even thinking of the fun of summer's past, but is experiencing his own emotions mixing with the emotions of the ocean. The slow minded boy, whom almost everyone feared and made fun of during the summer months, easily joins the bicyclist in his losing of self. And of course the men and women of the rocks are seen again straight backed throughout the length of the beach, standing like statues on their rock-like pedestals. Different seasons or times mean nothing to them. Even the old, who during the summer were sometimes pushed aside to make room for the energy of youth, now set the pace, staring down into the sands of the beach, contemplating the sands of their lost time. The very young walk with the old more this time of year. They play the part of a sponge soaking all the knowledge that let the old get old. The youth are so young and the old seem so old that is very difficult, especially on the beach, to tell them apart. The other inhabitants of the beach seem to trust us more this time of year. The sand birds inch their way to a closer more fearless view. Even the butterflies and white moths fearlessly circle around our heads. The colors of this season have forever been written about and pictured in pastels, watercolors, oils or photographs. But on the beaches you can't only see the green of the ocean with its frosty white caps. You can feel and smell how perfectly combined the colors are. How the browns of the sands go perfectly with the deep blues and grays of the sky. The morning sky takes a different form this time of year, in that its colors complement the sea's so perfectly that one seem to be a continuation of the other. The clouds appear to form holes at the end of massive tunnels, sneaking a peak at a hopeful heaven in the sky. One particular morning a small sailboat broke this consistency by daring to float between the sea and the sky. I wonder if they knew how close they were in attaining that light at the end of all of our tunnels. The quiet is the most intense feeling this time of year. It is so extreme that the rumbling of chain saws and the banging of hammers can't even hope to overwhelm the quiet of the season. Even the sound of my footsteps, as I walk down the beach, seem to naturally belong to the serenity of the ocean front. The summer months expose people's souls to anyone interested in observing them. The off season demonstrates the natural beauty of the coast. But to me the most exciting observation I can make is becoming part of a coastal storm. They always start with a lull. Not your ordinary quiet, but a time so quiet you can't even hear the gulls or the wind blowing through the trees. It is a time when all those who live on the coast walk to the water's edge to watch the low tide go ever lower, in preparation for the waters destined to explode on the beach. The people are not the only ones who flock to the beach in the lull before the storm. The gulls also come to a collective realization that they must fly to the beach in preparation. They are more courageous than their human counterparts, landing right on the surf, staring into the water en masse, like members of a religious cult awaiting their messiah. The impending storm toys with the emotions of its observers, first by blowing gentle streams of fresh air that stir recollections of the gentler summer breezes. Then the ocean shows its first white frothing heads. Soon, the sea is a bubbling cauldron of milky white foam and spray. The air around the few observers left explodes with the sparks of mist, and the wind forces the viewers to squint into what has always been and will always be, as long as life can exist on this planet. The gulls at this point pray to some gull God in hopes that mercy will keep them from being swept into the depths of the now violent ocean. At the peak of the storm, the skies and the sea become one, torn in half by the foaming waves and violent water. Nothing else exists. Nothing else dares to exist. If there was ever a time when beauty and violence co-exist, the coastal storm is the pinnacle of both. The storm also puts the dreams of the observer into perspective. The day-to-day reality of life seems so desperately insignificant when compared to such violent majesty. Yet the strength of nature, as reflected in the storm, also inspires a sense that anything is possible, even achievable. The beauty of the storm is that no one ever sees it to the end. Most viewers grow to cold or tired and head for shelter. The only thing that remains is the stark, gray tone that hangs in the air and over the ocean. It's a color that has never been successfully reproduced, because like a sunset over the volcanoes of Hawaii, or the blinding white of a snowstorm in the Mount Washington Valley, the gray of a coastal storm registers directly on the mind as a feeling, a sensation of power, rather than a visual stimulus that can be tucked away for later use. Their are many reason why people yearn to be by the ocean. The serenity, the perpetually fresh sea breezes, or the hypnotic sound of the waves striking the beach. I love living here for one simple reason. I am allowed to observe. J.G. Fabiano -----------------------------------------------------------------