fallslikesnow

I woke next to her at sunrise.  Her hair was a glowing halo around her sweet face, the sheet barely covered her breasts. As with many fair women her eyes seemed to be a slightly bruised as did her temples. I punched her in the throat and held a pillow over her face until the struggle ended. Gathering my things I rapidly left the house. I felt no remorse over killing her. She was such an advanced puppet that the only way to stop her breaking through to full autonomy would be to give her a bath in pure liquid Red. Doubting that this would be done by her owners, all that expensive surgery and training would be lost, I'd taken the step I thought necessary. I reached the tube station and found a platform empty of puppets and humans. Just a single capsule with it's lid up greeted me. I climbed in and pulled the lid down. As the capsule filled with Red I took several deep breaths and began to drift asleep.

Yelena was one of those beautiful women who seem to walk with a slight but visible hunch. Shoulders kept high as though to ward off the gaze of all the men who pass. She was a treat to look at however. Long blonde hair with misty blue eyes. Tall, but not too tall, with a figure that filled me with longing whenever she walked in front of me. The fact that she pushed all my sexual desire buttons should have been a warning. The city itself was built on many islands with a huge number of bridges connecting them. The buildings were a complex mixture of baroque and neoclassical, their empty cleanliness reminiscent of a painting by de Chirico. The effect was diminished by the huge, out of context, skyscraper stabbing the sky in the city's downtown. It wasn't until we were in some large, chilly square surrounded on all sides by impressive Romanesque buildings that I made a move on the, until then silent, Yelena. "Why do you hide yourself in this polished ma...

The Standing Stones But all we see behind are the twin rows       Of standing stones, broken like rotten teeth An avenue to no-where, only crows       Over the dying grass, the blasted heath

{Placed here because I somehow deleted the original version} I flowed up the Thames, across the Channel and up the Western coast of mainland Europe. Flowing was beautiful around there with clear un-polluted water run through with refreshing threads of natural Red. It was horribly dangerous of course. A good storm and one could end up thoroughly diluted, consciousness spread out over cubic kilometers of ocean. This time, however, I raced to Rotterdam safely and swiftly. After re-constituting myself I reported to a dull, temporary looking structure in the port area, There I met a transport nerd by the name of Michael Stevens. "Why can't I use normal methods? Flow up rivers and across lakes? Drive? Even get a pilot and fly?," I asked. "It's too far. We've been told to get you as close to the front as possible. It's a quarter of a million kilometers. This is the only method that makes sense in terms of speed and logistics. Get in." ...

The rest of the journey was dull. Staring through the safety-Red at the silvery capsule walls. Listening to the low roar of sparse air molecules being displaced as we raced through the incomplete vacuum. Many hours later I arrived at my interim destination, a place called New Petrograd. It was at 2457 degrees east and for me represented a change over point from one tube to another. I had an overnight stop so I exited my capsule and went, with my guide Yelena, to the surface. The huge city, pristine and barely inhabited by humans, weighed down on me. I wasn't familiar with the original, thousands of km west, but this version seemed to me to be a place for fogs and rain. A place for sudden and pointless deaths. Of course this thought lead naturally back to something that had been plaguing me for months. What was my position in the rigid and unchanging hierarchy that Red had gifted us? Despite the power Red gave me, the idyllic life granted by being one of onl...

Raeburn, Sir Henry (1756-1823), Date: 1792

  "Lingua Cosmica." A language for extraterrestrial communication developed by Hans Freudenthal, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Utrecht. Details of it are presented in Freudenthal's book 1 published in the Netherlands in 1960. LINCOS represents an extension of the logistic language of mathematics developed by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. It is intended to be conveyed by unmodulated radio signals of varying duration and wavelength which represent phonemes. The signals would be combined to make up concepts or words. Lancelot Hogben, who himself described a code for communication with alien intelligence, called Astraglossa , discussed Freudenthal's work. The Internet Encyclopedia of Sciemce Chapter III: Behaviour 3 00 1. For the time being it would be premature to try to describe  human behaviour by a system of general rules like the mathematical  and chronometric rule...