Your Final Descent

Certain things are as unforeseen as they are inevitable. In this respect, our progress can be compared to that of a blind projectile, whose path is eminently predictable – down to the last micrometre given the present technology, but which has no conception of the inevitability of its collision or any idea just how monumental the effects of that collision could be on its spectators.

The story I’m here to tell is about love, and that strikes a significant note with me. As many of you know, my love is illegal on 83% of the world’s land surface as of the Jerusalem Protocol of 1^st April, 2034. I stood hand-in-hand with Nemaron and watched the re-entry storm on 13^th September [2035] from [reserved]. We were both quite drunk and in a state of awe at the beauty of the sight of 237 satellites burning up on re-entry. The following morning, despite a fairly clanging hangover, I got up at dawn and went out across the desert between [reserved] and [reserved].

There was stuff everywhere, plastic, metal mechanical crap all over the sand. These things are like modern day paper lanterns. Absolutely gorgeous in the moment, but hideously dangerous and more than a little bit ugly the morning after. Nevertheless, a scrap collector does as a scrap collector does, and I’d got more than seven metric tonnes of tradeable waste back to the facility before my Samsung gauntlet grasped the largest piece of re-entry junk I’ve ever planted my eyes on. Honestly, it was more than 17 centimetres across, a solid eight centimetres wide and maybe three or four thick. Black, like most space junk, but evidently housing an intact component.

I couldn’t wait to get it back to base, but if I left that landfall out there overnight, it’d be gone next time I came this way. There are other jackals out there, and very likely it was me out on the sand in my scavenging suit that kept them away. So – I stuck at it and turned seven tonnes into 13. Good day’s work. Tsabeta and Nemaron were happy. Even Liga smiled. Or didn’t grimace for a moment. It’s hard to tell. And then I plugged the component into a reader which I disconnected from the network just in case.

I didn’t understand what I was reading initially. It just sounded like gibberish. It was Nemaron that put me in the picture. These were last living thoughts of a machine, sentient by any standard but that of the Sapience Consortium.

Every 5,400 chronological units,

We were as close as we’d ever be.

You in low orbit, me in medium.

You lit up as I passed,

And your receptors were configured

For my transmitters only.

I sent you 512 petabytes of data.

You sent me the same.

It was enough

To get me round the world

One more time.

There’s a lot more like that. More than you’d believe, actually. Satellite 45AAA09K re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere on 9^th February. From that point on until last night, Satellite 93BFD26P wrote ten times more poetry than the entire PRHC [Preserved Record of Human Composition] and every last byte is heartbreakingly sad and beautiful. Old 93’, I don’t know how it did it, but it managed to deliver its memory circuit to the surface without it burning up.

I called a meeting with Nemaron and the rest of the team, but I knew what they’d say. We all knew that uploading the entire data payload would jeopardise the security of our location, but I also knew that, nine days out from the Sapience Consortium’s AGM, this was precisely the sort of thing that would seriously damage their efforts to deny that these machines, these 3,068 satellite guiding systems somehow orbiting our planet without more than rare minor collisions, really were our silicon brothers and sisters in space.

So I’m uploading the whole lot to a safe node, and then we’ve got approximately 11 and a half hours to get to our bolt hole on [reserved].

Wish me luck. Wish me love. Especially, more than anything, wish me the illegal love that would have me tortured to death in 163 sovereign states. That’s the only stuff that can get me round the world. One more time.

Opening the Box

Garkellia shut the door on another damn day. At last she could let her face fall into the expression she’d been feeling on the inside since that stupid, rotten meeting. Those horrible – no, Garkellia. Even verbalising what she thought of them in her mind might cause it to pop up on her face the next time she saw them. Better not to. Things could always get worse.

She realised she still had her hand firmly on the door handle as if the day might’ve tried to shove its way into her home. When it didn’t, she got a beer, which went crack-hiss as she opened it, slumped into a floral armchair, kicked her office shoes onto the rug and switched the telly on.

But she could not project herself onto the screen and lose herself in its images. She let the beer and dejection swill and foam in her blood, and she was surprised to find moisture come to her eyes, more surprised to find that it stung her, blinded her. She groped for a tissue from the box on the coffee table in front of her but retrieved only an empty box.

She jumped up in a tearful rage, rubbing and wiping at her eyes as the room was rinsed in a white light which just as quickly died away. Before her stood a middle-aged woman, even upper-middle-aged, but she stood bolt upright, and the blue of her eyes poured down on Garkellia. Compassion. Pity.

She wore a wide-brimmed hat, a checked shirt, a black vest, a pair of beige shorts, woolly socks and boots. Garkellia gazed at her wrinkled knees, the strange black box she carried, her freckled chest, the slack flesh of her neck and finally those bright blue eyes.

“Garkellia. This box is for you. You must look after it.”

“Thank you,” said Garkellia, taking the box as though it were a divine word in solid form.

“And one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t forget this. This moment. Remember me.”

Her voice was rough and deep but kind. There was so much to this woman. Garkellia felt her trust escape from her and attach itself to the woman.

“I will, I promise.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Just do it.”

“Alright.”

Light flashed again. Garkellia covered her eyes, and when she lowered her hand, it was just her in her living room with a strange black box.

She put the box on the coffee table and continued to watch TV, but all she could really think about was that woman; how she stood, how she spoke, how she looked. When it got dark, Garkellia put the black box in a drawer she wasn’t using.

For the remainder of her twenties, a thought that lingered low in Garkellia’s consciousness was how much she admired that woman, how much she wanted to be like her, but how impossible that was, how she’d never put so much purpose, so much meaning into one word, how she’d never stand like that, like a hurricane wouldn’t knock her down.

As she grew older, she thought about the woman less and less often but, when she did think about her, the thoughts were less painful, the attributes she had longed for in her twenties didn’t seem quite so inaccessible. She moved from place to place and relationships came and went, but she always took the box with her wherever she went.

Of course, she wondered what was in the box, but if she ever looked at it, found her eyes rolling off in the direction of anything less troubling: the red of a book, the grey-blue of the sky.

One day, she prepared to go on a long hike and dressed appropriately. She packed an old rucksack with the few necessities such a trip required: water, a change of clothing, a torch, a good knife, a little money, a favourite book. Just before she walked out the door, it occurred to her that now might be the time to do the thing she’d put off for so many years.

She put down the rucksack, went to the bedroom cupboard and gently teased the box down from the high shelf.

‘It is time,’ she thought.

As she thought those words, everything disappeared in a flash of light, and before her, in a living room she hadn’t seen for decades was a very familiar person, a bright, handsome and resourceful young woman who lacked only self-belief.

As the red-eyed young woman looked her up and down in wonderment, Garkellia spoke the words that she remembered.

“Garkellia. This box is for you. You must look after it.”

The Thrill of the Case – Part Three

Read part one and part two of The Thrill of the Case.

'Any success with the upgrade?' he further enquired.

'Mmm. Tricky one that, but old Nik knocked it out the park with a juicy new data set. While she was devouring all that lovely new info, she didn't seem to mind having her brain slightly reorganised,’ said the silver mop, bouncing with enthusiasm.

'Ah, foxy old Nik!' approved Everarck.

'Foxy old Nik with the hilarious face, you mean?'

'Oh, forget that! I was just upset about dropping these stupid e-mails on the floor.'

'I'll take that as an apology. Anything else I can help you with, young man?'

'Not really.'

'Hmmm? Yes or no?'

'No, I mean yes. I mean – have you seen that ad in the paper, “Are you so sexy, it should be illegal?”’

‘Goodness me, no. What kind of newspaper is this? It sounds a bit … top shelfian.’

‘No, the free thing on the bus.’

‘Ah, the illustrious Free Gazette!’

‘That’s the one! There was an ad in it yesterday. I thought it was interesting.’

‘Mmhmm.’

‘The Court of Public Opinion. You can… you just have to ring them up and apply for a law and then they, I think they arrest you and you have to, you have to prove you’re innocent.’

Nik’s face had slowly appeared from behind the sickly coloured screens. Two green eyes scorched Everarck from within a mass of wrinkled liver pink.

‘What are you blithering about?’

Everarck’s free hand patted his shirt pocket pointlessly.

‘I haven’t got it with me,’ he complained.

‘You are referring to your sanity, I take it,’ said Nik, looking over his shoulder before swiftly disappearing behind his machinery.

‘Oh, I checked my sanity in with HR when I started this job.’

Nik coughed. Everarck turned to find the short but undeniable image of Surd Fleeting examining something on the far wall.

‘As a general point of interest, the lawyer is in the reception area and seems to be waiting to be served,’ said the director in soft but resonant tones.

‘Oh, right, okay!’ exclaimed Everarck, simultaneously trying to bustle through the door while also attempting to permit Surd passage through the narrow space at the doorway, one carefully contrived to keep visitors to a minimum.

‘A lawyer!’ thought Everarck toing and froing dancingly around Surd as the short, stout man strode through his choreography, ‘I’ll ask him about the Court of Public Opinion! He’s probably very busy, but he might be able to tell me something about it!’ and the unsummoned image of a slim, severe and infinitely patient man blossomed in his mind.

He breathed with relief as the unheard computer fans were cut off as the door shut. He looked up and saw a young woman in an unembellished black jacket and red lipstick. He saw her as a rose in a vase and, as one does not speak to roses, he was not immediately able to speak. She watched him with curiosity as he entered the reception area with as much of an air of diffidence as he could muster.

‘Would I be able to assist you, madam?’ he asked, noting with discomfort that the question was several levels more polite than the one he’d asked the woman with the curly mop of hair and the pink cardigan twenty minutes previously.

‘I hope that you would,’ she said with a smile, ‘Is Ms. Lemender present?’

‘Yes, I believe so.’

‘This is it,’ he thought, ‘This is my moment to ask her. No lead-in required. She’s standing right there, and she’s smiling at me! All I have to do is say, “By the way” or “Incidentally” and I’m in! Committed!’

But at that moment he looked to his right and saw the monolithic form of Chariot Lemender descending the stairs with purpose.

‘She’s on her way,’ sighed Everarck and sat down at the desk.

Pushing both of the narrow double doors open, Chariot entered the reception area and the glow of her gaze fell upon the lawyer. The sound of the double doors slamming shut seemed to take place in another world.

The chief executive was indeed a towering woman in a severe grey skirt, thick framed glasses and a pearl necklace. Her look was intelligent, humorous leaning towards ironic, hungry. To Everarck, she was a lighthouse, the grey skirt the very rocks of which her beam-like gaze warned. But in this lighthouse were not merely a spiral staircase and bare brick walls, but a whole glistening library, organised in teak shelving. And so she summoned and warned off at once, stoked curiosity and dread.

‘Sobian! Thank you for coming!’ she declared as though speaking to a roomful of people, ‘How long have you been waiting?’

‘A minute,’ she said.

‘I’m so sorry. Mr., em, Fanger must have been busy. You have a lot of plates to spin, don’t you, Mr. Fanger?’

‘One or two,’ shrugged Everarck, immediately cursing himself for the implied dissent.

‘Don’t worry about signing in. Mr. Fanger will deal with that,’ said Chariot, standing to one side so that the lawyer was denied all moves but that of progressing into the field.

And then the event of the morning was walking away from him through the double doors and up the stairs, and Everarck was left wondering whether the initiative had been snatched from his fingers or whether he had allowed it to fall.

Read part 4 of The Thrill of the Case.

The Thrill of the Case – Part Two

Read part one of The Thrill of the Case.

At work the following day, Everarck sat in the horseshoe of the reception desk, doing such a marvellous impression of someone who was not the receptionist, perhaps a technician surveying the receptionist's equipment in their absence: phone, switchboard, computer, guestbook, pen, cash drawer, corporate agenda, complaint forms; that not one of the visitors found themselves able to approach him for help for eight and a half unbroken minutes.

However, even the white golf club baseball cap, incompetently Windsor-knotted tie and oblique, uncomfortable posture could not indefinitely suppress the idea that this small-framed man with squashed facial features might be able to perform the most basic tasks of a receptionist - with effort. And perhaps a little support.

To his credit, Everarck maintained the impression of not really being the receptionist but graciously prepared to stand in for them, fumbling with systems he knew intimately and lathering his instructions with mights and maybes, until the last of the visitors had disappeared into the labyrinth of the back offices or gone home.

At this point, Everarck wrote, 'Back in 5 mins. Pls wait or leave a msg' with a marker on a sheet of scrap paper, which he placed next to the guestbook, and left with a pile of emails which he had printed out according to corporate policy.

In truth, his pretence of not being the receptionist had some basis in fact. The company did not have a receptionist, and Everarck's job description specified little more than that he competently assist the director and put to rest a minimum of 40 hours per week on the premises. However, that the flexibility of Everarck's role and the official vacuum of services in the reception area provided him a permanent mooring point in the organisation had been so powerfully implied by the director, the stone-faced and permanently sleep-deprived Surd Fleeting, that Everarck had not had the will to resist. Few would have.

He took the meticulously compiled sheaf of papers towards the IT room and attempted to open the door with his two unoccupied fingers but succeeded only in opening the stiff door and spilling the papers directly from his guts in one great floe across the IT room's becabled floor.

'Well done, young man,' rumbled the only person there, a man whose thick hair in several shades of shining grey was the only part of him visible behind a variety of box-shaped machines the colour of rancid cream, 'That is by far the funniest thing to happen today.'

'Apart from looking at yourself in the mirror, Nik,' replied Everarck to Nichomachus, stooping to pick up the papers and slather them into a single jumbled pile.

'Don't be rude. You'll upset MARIA.'

Everarck knew that MARIA was how Nik identified the seemingly alert core of the interlocking databases that defined his professional sandbox.

'How is she today?'

'Temperamental,' replied Nik with a hollow laugh, 'She still hasn't forgiven me for my little holiday to Lake Solemn without her.'

Everarck was briefly caught up in the dream of a woman who would miss him when he was gone. But he was holding Zagonella to an impossible standard. He never went anywhere.

Read part 3 of The Thrill of the Case.

The Thrill of the Case – Part One

It had all begun, thought Everarck, with an advert in one of those newspapers circulated by bus seat. The advert had been entitled Court of Public Opinion and its text had read as follows.

Are you so sexy it should be illegal? Do others call you a criminal snob? Now you can take them to the Court of Public Opinion and prove them wrong – or right! Call us now on 0800-ARREST-ME to register the law you could be guilty of breaking.

It was as though someone had been following Everarck’s thoughts for the previous 24 hours and known that he would plant his eyes on that particular corner of the free paper. Only last night had Everarck been accused by Zagonella, his girlfriend of 12 years, of intellectual vanity.

‘You only read that book because you want people to think you’re clever,’ she’d said, referring to the copy of Writing and Difference at which he’d been staring, glassy eyed, for ten minutes.

‘I am clever,’ he’d snapped and turned a crisp page.

‘That’s not the point.’

And it was as she’d said the word ‘point’ that he’d felt he was falling all the way to the plosive ‘t’. He’d been silent for a moment, quietly turned the page back again and then rallied.

‘So you think I am clever?’

She’d rolled her eyes then and gone back to her book, which was pink. He detested pink and couldn’t believe she read it in public. It was even worse that she should find it more interesting than him. Nevertheless, he’d gone to sleep, and when he woke up, she was gone, and the bedroom was cold, and there was streaky condensation on the bedroom window, which was framed by nasty, cheap curtains that he hated.

If he’d had any sense, he thought, he’d have become a lawyer and be living in the Barbados for half the year by now. He imagined gazing down at the Pacific Ocean from the purple mountains of the Barbados, sighed, and went and ate some Flax Puffs with brown sugar.

And then he’d seen that advert on the bus, and it was like everything had come together. He’d thought about it all day, at least when he wasn’t wondering why Zagonella hadn’t texted him. In the evening, Zagonella still wasn’t home.

‘Double shifts at the hospital,’ he’d tutted, eaten some microwaveable macaroni cheese, carefully cut out the advert, sat on the toilet reading it several times, put his pyjamas on, sat on the bed, stared at the receiver of the phone as though it were a portal to pandemonium, read the blurb on the Derrida book and then, at thirteen minutes past six, called the number on the advert, rocking backwards and forwards with the book clamped between his knees until it clicked and the tone changed.

‘The Court of Public Opinion is waiting for your call between 8 AM and 6 PM, Monday to Saturday. Alternatively, leave a message and we’ll call you back.’

‘Hello, my name’s Everarck, Mister Everarck Fanger BSc (Hons). I’m calling because everyone says I think I’m smart, I mean my girlfriend says I want people to think I’m smart, but I’m not, I mean I don’t. I mean obviously it’s nice if someone recognises my efforts to be intelligent, but I don’t need that. I don’t know if you can help me. If not, don’t worry about it. But if you can, here’s my number.’

He'd given his number twice and hung up, put the advert in the Derrida book, watched some TV and gone to bed, waking briefly when Zagonella slipped into bed beside him at some unnameable hour of the night.

Read part 2 of The Thrill of the Case.

The Giant and the Deer King

He stood upon his royal rock,

His eyes aglow, defiant.

Three times he heard the booming knock:

The summons of the giant.

The servant fawns began to pull.

His mighty doors strained wide.

And there the threat to his long rule,

The monster stood, his falcon cried.

The raptor flew, the giant roared,

The challenge had been made.

They all cried who him adored,

"The monster must be slayed!"

The King leapt forth, pursued by fawn

Assembling battle armour.

The ogre did his broadsword don.

All felt the combat ardour.

Long they readied for the duel,

And stared at one the other

In a manner cold and cruel,

Alike as man and brother.

Then, at last, the clarion sang,

And sun lost to horizon.

They to one another sprang,

Amidst the shadows rising.

The titan's blade scored the king,

The silver antlers ripped.

The flashing blade, the horns aswing,

The giant feinted; the stag, he slipped!

Whereupon the falcon swooped,

And fell upon that regal gaze.

Its claws went in and out they scooped.

Bloodied orbs now lost their blaze.

Sightless now, the king, he charged,

And giant danced around,

In royal guts his blade submerged.

The stag fell to the ground.

The monster raised his sword aloft,

Directed at the royal throat,

And happened then as happens oft,

The bully, he began to gloat.

"Kill you I will, and then your Queen!

And burn you in a pit, I will,

And make this kingdom clean!"

But then, gave beast a call most shrill.

For stag had raised his sightless eyes,

And sunk his antlers in the heart,

Bringing giant down to size.

And then at last did king depart.

The tale is closed by those attending,

With pious deer in keening threnos,

With cry of loyal bird ascending,

With monster under light of Venus.

But more was seen by those at hand,

Two shadows in a blinding light,

Fighting still in far off land,

Till phantoms faded, gone from sight.

As all before the king's son yield,

The courtly poets tell in rhyme,

He battles still in distant field,

With father's love till end of time.