fallslikesnow

I have visions of a world of ice, two dogs slipping on a frozen lake, chewing on a human corpse. I staggered out of an AA meeting on 76 North, 42 Spinward. I say stagger because I had been drunk going in and was drunk coming out. It's wonderful how the traditions insist that even someone like I be allowed in: stinking; dirty; interrupting everyone with foul mouthed war stories. Truth be told I'd chosen the Sea of Tranquility group for my re-entry to the rooms out of spite. It was a high end group: lawyers, engineers, politicians. Dressed well with the clear wrinkle-less complexions of regular anti-senescence treatments. They deserved a taste of life in North. Once outside I began to hurry to the metro station. I was sure that after my performance in the meeting some perfect alcoholic would call the sheriffs. I didn't need getting picked up for vagrancy so I scuttled down the middle of the cobbled street, saluting the Highlands with a bottle of vodka. I n...

The Cone anthology is now available for free download for the kindle at amazon . It's still available for other formats at smashwords .

"It only gets better from here on," Alex repeats over and over to himself as he crouches in the alley. As his heart slows and he becomes aware of his surroundings once more he realises that he has lost the two men who were chasing him. He wishes he could believe what he's telling himself with such desperation, words tripping over each other in a steady flow, a statement becoming a plea becoming something almost like a prayer. Bitterness rises as he thinks of how easy it must be to be straight, to have access to the results of all those millenia of normalising pressures. He imagines hundreds of generations of lies being told to people like him, the compacted layers of deceit stinking like the trash in the alley -- lies about what is natural, about what is permissible, ultimately about what is possible. As the light from the setting sun fades he finally decides to leave this small town and go to the city. "Desire is the art of the possible," he thinks to himself w...

"Are you listening to me?" said the sheriff. "Are you under their influence still?" "I'm fine," said Jon. "Still woozy from what they hit me with. "And what was that exactly?" Jon had the sense that he was negotiating with a composite entity, the figures riding the sherrif (human and AI) communicating with each other through back-channels and summing themselves in the blank face before him. And he was going to have to negotiate, he now realized. There would be little trust for anyone touched by the Tessellation, let alone someone who had been as unstable as Jon had been. On an impulse he decided to not use his implants to control his easily read physical responses and then lie. He would tell the truth. "They did something to my memory. Made it larger, more inter-connected. Like the memory surgery we do only orders of magnitude more refined." He decided not to mention the fact that the Tessellation had implied that he had...

Jon briefly lost himself in the new labyrinths of his mind - all these pristine empty spaces aching to be filled, this theater of memory with a stage recently expanded to the size of a river plain. How could he ever integrate this shimmering structure with the hovel he had previously inhabited? Then, of a sudden, his aimless search, a seamless flow through a multidimensional phase space of remembrance, came to a halt. In what he visualized as a room of blue tinted glass atop a high tower was an object that must have come at the same time as the structure itself. It was, of course, a torus of off-white plates floating in mid-air. Without thinking he reached out with hands made of pure desire and touched it. The new memory unpacked itself, rolling over his psyche with smells and tastes designed to root it deep within him. It fell upon him in an instant but his nervous system, scrambling to keep up, presented it's contents linearly, as though experienced by the tick of the clo...

It was as though his mind, a familiar, run-down house, stuffed with miscellaneous bric-a-brac, had suddenly revealed itself to have rooms, entire wings, of which he had been unaware. Doors appeared where none had been before, windows that had previously opened on the gentle hills of the body now showed dusty warehouse spaces. What made it awful, unbearable, was the emptiness of the rooms. For a moment he saw himself wandering these places, overcome by an urge to weep as the rush of blood in his ears reverberated, layered upon itself to produce a mighty roar. He felt his consciousness grind to a halt, unable to process such a sudden vastening. *** He woke, minutes later, lying on the ground with blood streaming from his nose. The bush robot, fully expanded into a shimmering cloud a meter and a half across, was beside his head and producing a strange warbling cry. There was no sign of the Tessellation artifact. "Do not attempt to move. You have been subject to an unmediated Tes...

An hour later Jon was up in the hills behind the doctor's office complex. He forced his way through ankle deep bracken closely followed by his minder which bounced lightly across the vegetation. He reached a small gorge, ancient looking despite being no more than a century old. Crumbling strata of reconstituted asteroid rubble were criss-crossed by roots of geneered dwarf oak trees. He pushed towards the back of the ravine, branches and twigs whipping across his face. Against the smooth vertical cliff at the end was a small crude shrine - a low pile of rocks surmounted by a rough wooden crucifix. Orange thread linked the extremities of the geometrical figure. Jon knelt before the altar and bowed his head. There was a moment of quiet broken only by the drip of water from leaves. "What would your fans think, Mr Sorenson? If they saw you worshiping the kite?" Asked the minder in a voice like crashing waves. "Less of me, no doubt. You can't tell them though, ...

Jim Dingilian is one of those rare artists who stretch the limits of creativity with their amazing creations. He uses candle smoke to paint picture-perfect images on the inside of empty bottles. link

"You saw the Kite once, didn't you?" Jon pondered the question while looking out of the window. Reeds swayed in a shallow lake, the cylinder curving up sharply behind. "Yes. I was fourteen. One of the kids in my class got hold of a self-unpacking copy and sent it to me." A small attachment icon unfolding in the desk space to reveal a flat, hi-res image. An orange kite over a small wood on a desolate hillside. A deep sense of completion and a profound, unthinking rage. "It took four people to restrain me. I was in deep therapy for a year afterward." "And the boy? The one who sent the image, I mean?" "He was executed." *** Water features were a ubiquitous element of post-Ruin life. Large, complex ones in public spaces, smaller, more conservative ones in private. The doctor had what seemed at first sight to be a cylinder of flawless glass. Touch it, however, and it would be revealed as a non-turbulent flow of water. She...

So, I did a google search for Shoal + alien to see if any of my Shoal Wars material showed up. I found, to my horror, that there is another, fairly successful, SF series that has an alien race called the Shoal... I just changed the Shoal to the Tessellation everywhere I could think of ...

"The Cone" is now available (for free!) at Smashwords, or you can pay for it at Amazon. It includes the title story (about a US marine who has been transformed into a housefly made of coral and the terrible revenge he takes) and two other stories. Go here . If you like it buy me something from my wishlist.

The long frivolous dream of the Puppetmakers erupted into savage transcendence with shocking rapidity. All their carefully constructed shallowness, the cities of colored glass, the refined arts, the chirruping vacancy of their puppets, counted for nothing once deep hidden urges surfaced in the face of circumstances that their programming considered to be just right. Survival in a Tessellation dominated universe was never something that could be assumed over the long term. The Puppetmakers had achieved it for millennia by consciously making themselves over into something they thought the Tessellation would find harmless. They engineered themselves as thoroughly as they engineered their own puppets, cutting viciously away at anything that could be seen as encroaching on the world of the Tessellation. Curiosity, the tendency to expansion, a desire to rule their own lives - all went under the knife, leaving a species that seemed as easy-going and unambitious as the Tessellation could ask ...

My story "Connect" was published last year in the anthology "Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever," edited by the formidable Phoenix Sullivan. On Tuesday, January 31, you can download the entire anthology Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever free from the Kindle store.  On both Tuesday and Wednesday, you can download each of the 18 single stories for free, including my story, Connect . By any reasonable measure we are dead. Unity -- slow, cold and broken -- is leaving me behind. It’s a slowly boiling mass of speckled gray now. I’m walking away from it, building, understanding, memorizing as I go. And to do these things, to tie them together, I use my memories. Of being alive, of dying, of being dead. Other authors in the anthology are participating in this promotion: Chrystalla Thoma: "The Angel Genome"  Peter Dudley: "Distractions" Shona Snowden: "Blood Fruit"  Scott Thomas Smith: "In Ring" Jo Antareau: "My Own...

Rain forest Mist and mystery Teeming green Green brain facing labotomy Climate control centre for the world Ancient cord of coexistence Hacked by parasitic greedhead scam - From Sarawak to Amazonas Costa Rica to mangy B.C. hills - Cortege rhythm of falling timber. What kind of currency grows in these new deserts, These brand new flood plains? If a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear? If a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear? Anybody hear the forest fall? Cut and move on Cut and move on Take out trees Take out wildlife at a rate of species every single day Take out people who've lived with this for 100,000 years - Inject a billion burgers worth of beef - Grain eaters - methane dispensers. Through thinning ozone, Waves fall on wrinkled earth - Gravity, light, ancient refuse of stars, Speak of a drowning - But this, this is something other. Busy monster eats dark holes in the spirit world Where wild things have to go To disap...

Peah, Chapter Four, Mishnah Ten | Conservative Yeshiva By Dr. Joshua Kulp Gleanings are mentioned in Leviticus 19:9-10, and 23:22. Mishnah Ten. 1) What are gleanings? That which falls down at the time of harvesting. 2) If while he was harvesting, he harvested a handful, or plucked a fistful, and then a thorn pricked ...

In the interests of finding out if anyone is reading this blog, here's an offer. Leave a comment with your name or pseudonym below and I will write a cutstomised blog entry about you filled with fabulous lies.

The agent walked down the loading ramp, his luggage rattling along behind on mesh wheels and his faery, part minder, part secretary, flitting about his head. The mayor rushed up to him, flustered at having to greet someone so senior who's purpose was unknown to him. "Welcome sir, welcome! May I say what a pleasure it is to see a representative of the Commonwealth after so many years. We have made a suite of rooms available to you ..." "Enough of your obsequiousness mayor. My requirements were sent on ahead. I trust they have been fulfilled," said the agent in a voice gruff and stale from lack of use. "We tried sir, but there is no offshore drilling capacity available here. Our industrial base is not yet sufficiently advanced. It will be decades before we have need of such technology." "You have need of that technology now . I will have to stay until you can import the necessary industrial base - the Commonwealth will provide what is needed. I...