Built Environment Fiction Material/Digital Politics/Economics Speculations Technology Writing [key texts]
by Justin
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[key texts] The Caryatids
photo credit: nicolasnova
I’ve spent most of the past month wrestling with the meaning and significance of this book; trying to work out what manner of beast it might be. A challenging task, with cascading revelations. To kick off, three observations:
1. Bruce Sterling is the Chairman – when it comes to his writing, I get all twitchy and excitable, with little possibility of critical distance.
2. Despite that, as a novel, The Caryatids (2009) is a conspicuous failure.
3. And despite this, I rate it as one of the most bold and important books of the last decade.
Caryatids? In classical architecture, a caryatid is a load-bearing pillar carved into a figurative sculpture of a woman. Something like this, from Athens’ Erechtheum:
photo credit: photographerglen
Sterling’s caryatids are a set of clones, born of and raised by the ubicomp-obsessed widow of a Balkan warlord as tech support for a looming environmental apocalypse:
‘They had been the great septet of caryatids: seven young women, superwomen, cherished and entirely special, designed and created for the single mighty purpose of averting the collapse of the world. They were meant to support and bear its every woe.’ (pp. 18-19)
Personally, this conceit read as nothing so much as an inversion of what-I-knew of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957), in which all the smart, productive people abscond, triggering societal collapse. In The Caryatids, collapse precedes the titular superwomen, who are created to hold up the world.
In this, Bruce sets up the conditions for a fascinating thought experiment, a microcosm of the whole structure/agency thing. When the girls’ ubicomp-mediated upbringing is interrupted in an attack by Balkan guerillas, the survivors scatter. Like light through a prism, the novel’s trio of genetically-identical protagonists allow Sterling to deploy a strange twist on the three-act narrative, with each chunk representing a single, stand-alone story, or point of inflection.
In embracing this structure, the novel reads like the bastard offspring of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Shell’s Signals & Signposts (2011) – some cumbersome and wholly unexpected mix of soap opera, satire, technical manual, and manifesto.
- The first clone-sister, Vera, remains in the Balkans, doing some heavy lifting on an environmental remediation project, under the banner of the Acquis: a post-geographic civil society group populated by anarcho-communist, exoskeleton-clad cyborgs.
- Mila, the second sister, marries into the ‘Family-Firm’, a South Californian mafia, taking in ‘real estate, politics, finance, everyware, retail, water interests … and of course entertainment.’ (p. 92)
- The final clone, Sonja, is a soldier-slash-field-medic in China, ‘the largest and most powerful state left on Earth.’ (p. 185)
Three takes on the apocalypse: cyborg environmentalism, Californian dynasticism, and Statism ‘with Chinese characteristics’. In The Spectre of Ideology (1995), Žižek notes how, from the inside, it often seems…
‘easier to imagine the ‘end of the world’ than the end of than a far more modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal capitalism is the ‘real’ that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global ecological catastrophe.’
In this, The Caryatids seems to have taken Žižek’s words as a direct challenge, with Bruce creating convincing, detailed visions of both. End of the world?
The Caryatids poses a scenario where, by 2060, climate change has resulted in a near-total collapse of state authority, leaving, as Doctorow puts it, ‘a slurry of refugees, rising seas, and inconceivable misery.’ The world as we know it is dead and buried.
Change in the means of production?
Well, none of the scenario-environments Bruce presents can realistically be seen as a continuation of the status quo. The Los Angeles chapter could, perhaps, be seen as a perverse iteration on start-up culture, but there seems to have been enough of a substantive change for it to represent something truly novel.
‘Brilliancy, speed, lightness, and glory‘ is a mantra we find repeated throughout the narrative, echoed by actors and agents from each of the political blocs. Within Acquis society, glory has been framed as the ultimate of virtues: ‘Glory was the source of communion. Glory was the spirit of the corps. Glory was a reason to be.’ (p. 47)
Seen against a background of environmental collapse, these Catholic values conjure some of Bruce’s earlier thoughts on something he dubbed ‘Gothic High-Tech‘:
‘In Gothic High-Tech, you’re Steve Jobs. You’ve built an iPhone which is a brilliant technical innovation, but you also had to sneak off to Tennessee to get a liver transplant because you’re dying of something secret and horrible.
And you’re a captain of American industry. You’re not some General Motors kinda guy. On the contrary, you’re a guy who’s got both hands on the steering wheel of a functional car.
But you’re still Gothic High-Tech because death is waiting. And not a kindly death either, but a sinister, creeping, tainted wells of Silicon Valley kind of Superfund thing that steals upon you month by month, and that you have to hide from the public and from the bloggers and from the shareholders.
And you just grit your teeth and pull out the next one. A heroic story, but very Gothic. Something that belongs in an eighteenth century horror novel. Kind of the “man in the castle” figure.’
photo credit: pittpanthersfan
This reassertion of a catholic-gothic sensibility is something I have explored elsewhere in relation to domestic and homeland (in)security. In Caryatids, Bruce links the catholic-gothic thing to science fiction’s origins in the romantic tales of Mary Shelly and her ilk. In the words of Vera’s confidant, aiming for something close to reassurance: “You can’t convince us that you’re the big secret monster from the big secret monster lab. Because we know you, and we know how you feel.” (p. 21)
We can see it in anxieties about the impact of new technologies on what it means to be human, with some kind of public broadcast of brain activity amongst the Acquis fundamentally changing the nature of sociality and group identity: ‘These were people made visible from the inside out, and that visibility was changing them. Vera knew that the sensorweb was melting them inside, just as it was melting the island’s soil, the seas, even the skies …’ (p. 26)
In this world, an individual’s relationship to technology is characterised by ambivalence, suspicion, and a wholly gothic dependence. ‘The Acquis and the Dispension hated China’s state secrecy, for they were obsessed with rogue technologies spinning out of control. Internal combustion: a rogue technology spun out of control. Electric light: a rogue technology spun out of control. Fossil fuel: the flesh of the necromantic dead, risen from its grave, had wrecked the planet.’ (p. 230)
This catholic-gothic tendency also manifests in the protagonists’ total and instinctive loathing for each other, a detail rooted in the uncanny self-annihilatory narratives of shapeshifters, body-snatchers and doppelgängers, and something Sterling leverages to great effect.
But this is, ultimately, a story of redemption; redemption and agency. It plays with some of the worst-case scenarios for the unfolding climate crisis, and then shows some ways in which, despite everything, humanity might be able to claw its way back from the brink. It’s one of several books I could cite that, post-2000, have begun to refresh our vocabulary of the future, with the potential to shift talk away from the simple-minded narratives of collapse and technological salvation – stories we use to absolve ourselves of agency and responsibility.
photo credit: Konrad Hädener
Working with a novum-packed narrative, Sterling focuses on the fallibility and inadequacy of the superstar, the wunderkind, and the auteur. Despite everything, this is a decidedly anti-heroic book. The clone-sisters are twisted fuck-ups. Deployed as ‘agents of redemption’, the weight on their shoulders leaves them febrile, erratic, and riddled with neuroses.
The real solutions are in the systems of participation; superstructures capable of supporting a raft of increasingly radical projects. In the words of Californian wunderkind Lionel, the answer is openness: such radical projects “need widespread distributed oversight, with peer review and loyal opposition to test them. They have to be open and testable.” (p. 252)
Chinese state secrecy isn’t the answer. Despite it’s pretensions, the can-do attitude of the Californian ‘military-entertainment complex’ falters, powerless, in the face of earthquakes and volcanoes. And the European techno-anarchists, however seductive their vision, are an ‘extremist group’ practicing ‘sensory totalitarianism’ to brainwash climate refugees.
Of course.
Whatever the novel’s narrative flaws, the first chapter is worth the price of admission, as a near-perfect combination of worldbuilding, character and cognitive estrangement.
Overall? Compelling and transformative, shot through with veins of disarming sincerity, The Caryatids is part second-hand motorboat, part Viking funerary barge. Departing the harbour, it sputters and flames. Then it sinks.
But by that point, it’s already rewired your brain.
Fiction Material/Digital Pop Culture Publishing Speculations Technology Writing [future shock]
by Justin
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[future shock] Network Realism
Care of (unwitting?) bookfuturist James Bridle, I give you ‘Network Realism‘. This, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly what I was attempting (with mixed success) to get across in the final chapters of my MA dissertation:
‘Network Realism is writing that is of and about the network. It’s realism because it’s so close to our present reality. A realism that posits an increasingly 1:1 relationship between Fiction and the World. A realtime link. And it’s networked because it lives in a place that’s that’s enabled by, and only recently made possible by, our technological connectedness.
(…)
This writing exists on a timeline, but it’s not a simple line back-to-the-past and forward-to-the-future. It’s a gathering-together of many currently possible worldlines, seen from the near-omniscient superposition of the network. The Order Flow of the Universe. Speculative Realism, Networked Fiction: Network Realism.’
– James Bridle, ‘Network Realism: William Gibson and new forms of Fiction‘, 25/10/2010
Here, an admission – networked realism is what I’ll be churning out this autumn. It’s the narrative form of the much-implied secret project; the perfect literary accompaniment for atemporal culture and our shiny new, post-Newtonian network politics.
More details to follow, in glimpses and dribbles.
A publishing house is a fragile organism
‘In his arms he has a pile of galleys; he sets them down gently, as if the slightest jolt could upset the order of the printed letters. “A publishing house is a fragile organism, dear sir,” he says, “If at any point something goes askew, then the disorder spread, chaos opens beneath our feet. Forgive me, won’t you? When I think about it I have an attack of vertigo.” And he covers his eyes, as if pursued by the sight of billions of pages, lines, words, whirling in a dust storm.’
– Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, 1981 [1979], pp. 97-98
In the context of the dissertation, I’ve been thinking a fair bit about textual cyborgs, the speculative field of reader-book interaction, and how this could relate to Tim’s excellent post on cyborg infrastructure. Here, the above quote from Calvino definitely resonates, but I’m still not sure what it all means …
Angels dancing in the static
“Listening to deathly voices in the dark, from Quixote’s moment on the hillside onwards, technologics has suggested, to those who want to listen to its broadcasts, a new, dynamic way of understanding literature – that is, of understanding what it is to write, who (or what) writes, and how to read it. Where the liberal-humanist sensibility has always held the literary work to be a form of self-expression, a meticulous sculpting of the thoughts and feelings of an isolated individual who has mastered his or her poetic craft, a technologically savvy sensibility might see it completely differently: as a set of transmissions, filtered through subjects whom technology and the live word have ruptured, broken open, made receptive. I know which side I’m on: the more books I write, the more convinced I become that what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. The German poet Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static.”
- Tom McCarthy, ‘Technology and the Novel, From Blake to Ballard’, The Guardian
34 nested browser tabs open on their frontal lobes
“What new species of books, then, have proved themselves fit to survive in the attentional ecosystem of the aughts? What kind of novel, if any, can appeal to readers who read with 34 nested browser tabs open simultaneously on their frontal lobes? And, for that matter, what kind of novel gets written by novelists who spend increasing chunks of their own time reading words off screens?”
- Sam Anderson, ‘When Lit Blew into Bits’, New York Magazine
Writing and F3, 1 Year On
It’s been just over a year since the meme finally filtered down to my neck of the tubes with Patterns in Traffic, my first piece of flash fiction. Donning my hypothetical writerly hat in recognition of this milestone, I’ve been trying to root the memetic microfiction in something of a broader context, both in terms of my personal writing experiences and the insights I’ve taken from participating in Friday Flash Fiction.
I can’t really remember my motivation, but I gave NaNoWriMo a shot back in November 2004, producing something I can now recognise as an overwritten dérive of a pseudo-fantastical Venice. The Doge’s Gate – endearingly awkward, with infodumping a’plenty, terrible dialogue, a foul-mouthed Italian waitress, and an ill-judged authorial cameo (37k).
The following spring (April 2005) – despite not studying English or, indeed, anything remotely Englishesque – I managed to blag a place on an undersubscribed 6th form writing course, run by the Arvon Foundation at Totleigh Barton, in the depths of Devon. Viewed through the rose-tinted goggles of nostalgia, this was one of the best weeks of my life. With spring sunshine, good food, and a surfeit of cows, I managed to produce a couple of pretty good poems, a staggeringly vast quantity of really bad poetry, and the first part of a nifty short story in which the MC escaped an abusive mother-daughter relationship … in favour of adventure-with-a-capital-A.
Moving the clock forward to the start of my second year of university (November 2006), I tentatively dipped my toe back into the literary lake of NaNoWriMo. With the additional support of a diverse, vigorous, and broadly likeable bunch of Brightonians (including Kay, Shebit, Alabaster, and Shaun), I made it to the 50k milestone with Illyria - the fantastical offspring of Shakespeare and a thinly-veiled critique of American imperialism. This tale covered theatrical insurrectionism, messenger pigeons, cultural relativism, covertly trebuchet assembly, sheep, swamps, and yet more awkward dialogue.
F3: ‘There Is No Lion’
Another short drip-drip-drip of story, following on from The Landsberger Vats. And, yes, there’s still a fair bit more to come.
THERE IS NO LION
In the depths of the structure, darkness reigns. The air hangs heavy with perfumed solvents and anti-bacterial agents; a wall against the tide of microbial invaders. Stumbling through the door, I drop to my knees, gulping down a lungful of fumes. Extending a hand for support, my palm clings to a floor of moist linoleum. A corridor of halogen pulls my gaze right, towards the lobby proper; the harsh orange standing stark against the gloom. To the left, a bank of terminals and, yes, more biometrics.
Struggling against the polished plastic to stand, I carefully jog over to the terminals. Running an index finger down the main panel, the screens flicker into life – projecting an arc of colourful graphs and schematics onto the dull black wall. Struggling to push aside the noisy and useless with my outstretched hand, I search for the suite. But I’m sweaty and trembling, and the terminal ignores my gestures as sign language through a fish tank.
Realising the futility of my flailing, I give up. My irises are on the system, and – shit – my alibi is watertight, but my body is in revolt. My mouth is a featureless desert, and I’m swallowing dust. Then, echoing down the corridor’s plastic veneers, the thud of approaching footsteps. I’m not getting any feedback from my lower extremities; casualties of hypertension. Now is hardly the time for pre-fight nerves, but something in the mammalian recesses of my consciousness remains convinced that – providing I avoid any sudden movement – the lion won’t see me.
There is no lion. The footsteps are those of a broad-shouldered man in epaulettes and doc martens; a man whose eyes harden as they alight on my frozen form. Now he’s yelling; his red face the conduit for a torrent of angry German. I don’t have time for this. Searching for a solution, my mind flits back to the broken heart of a thwarted victory; back to the ugly plastic mats and vapid smiles of London. Uncorked, a flood of years-old anger pulses through my muscles, springing me from my paralysis. Through a dark fog, I watch distantly, as my right leg traces a gentle arc through the air. Meeting upper chest, my toes buckle within a battered converse sneaker. As the warm sting of pain spreads up through my foot, I wince, tumbling past the guard and down the corridor.
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
Superstructing
Last month, the California-based Institute for the Future annouced Superstruct, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. Here’s the (in game) press release;
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SEPTEMBER 22, 2019
Humans have 23 years to go
Global Extinction Awareness System starts the countdown for Homo sapiens.PALO ALTO, CA — Based on the results of a year-long supercomputer simulation, the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has reset the “survival horizon” for Homo sapiens – the human race – from “indefinite” to 23 years.
“The survival horizon identifies the point in time after which a threatened population is expected to experience a catastrophic collapse,” GEAS president Audrey Chen said. “It is the point from which a species is unlikely to recover. By identifying a survival horizon of 2042, GEAS has given human civilization a definite deadline for making substantive changes to planet and practices.”
According to Chen, the latest GEAS simulation harnessed over 70 petabytes of environmental, economic, and demographic data, and was cross-validated by ten different probabilistic models. The GEAS models revealed a potentially terminal combination of five so-called “super-threats”, which represent a collision of environmental, economic, and social risks. “Each super-threat on its own poses a serious challenge to the world’s adaptive capacity,” said GEAS research director Hernandez Garcia. “Acting together, the five super-threats may irreversibly overwhelm our species’ ability to survive.”Garcia said, “Previous GEAS simulations with significantly less data and cross-validation correctly forecasted the most surprising species collapses of the past decade: Sciurus carolinenis and Sciurus vulgaris, for example, and Anatidae chen. So we have very good reason to believe that these simulation results, while shocking, do accurately represent the rapidly growing threats to the viability of the human species.”
GEAS notified the United Nations prior to making a public announcement. The spokesperson for United Nations Secretary General Vaira Vike-Freiberga released the following statement: “We are grateful for GEAS’ work, and we treat their latest forecast with seriousness and profound gravity.”
GEAS urges concerned citizens, families, corporations, institutions, and governments to talk to each other and begin making plans to deal with the super-threats.
###
Superstruct! Play the game, invent the future.
F3: ‘The Landsberger Vats’
More from Stockholm Syndrome, following immediately from Welcome to the Umweltzone. There’s one more chunk from Red’s perspective to come, one from Simon’s, and then a couple of sections from the perspective of their “quarry”. Unless I get distracted. Either way, I’m really getting into the characters here, despite the fact that my writing pace has been glacial. There’s probably too much swearing, and the cuts between stories are less intentional than a matter of me running out of time. And because it’s supposed to be quite tightly structured, I’ve had to go back and edit some of the previous segments. Still, at least it’s here … and, as ever, crit and comments encouraged;
THE LANDSBERGER VATS
Muttering into my collar, I urge Simon to keep the mark distracted.
In the wake of relay delay, my eyes are slowly pulled skyward. The vats stand in defiance; attempting to dwarf me beneath its towers and buttresses. I’m having none of it.
“I’m trying to kick out the cameras.” I add, turning my attentions to the building.
Cloaked in an ugly green-grey moss and sodden with rainwater, the sodden ziggurat teeters in the wind and rain. A crumbling heap of shipping crate, canvas, and reclaimed aluminium. The original structure is long dead – its skeletal frame buried beneath the tide of impromptu additions.
“It shouldn’t take long.”
Someone saw the need for surveillance: a hundred orange dots in the rapidly fading twilight. My left hand is closed tight on the custom incendiary. Swallowing a shudder, I second guess myself – thieving a glance at the bitch’s simple grey plastic; tasting the latent saline of her binary incantations.
I pull the pin.
A moment of majesty and unfolding exuberance, then I’m struggling for light and oxygen in a torrent of data. For the first time, I panic; swiping desperately at the flickering images that pass before me.
One hundred and five cameras, seventy-two of which are dummies. “Now, that’s interesting,” I think, stumbling backwards. Even so, she could have … scratch that, she should have warned me. But there’d been no hints, just bitter lemon and inexpertly applied mascara. Three hours of stilted conversation beneath a charcoal sky, and this was her repayment.
Synapses firing, my stomach abandons me to the imagined gravity of a chasm of burnt copper. My ears decompress.
“Remind me why we’re doing this, Red.”
The lunchbox bounces Simon’s disembodied words into the depths of my skull.
“A pile of cash?” I ask, managing a grimace as I sweep the overclocked image of a well-dressed woman leftward, out of my line of sight. Then my mind turns to our client; the quarry’s sister. Rising nausea meets the pink blush of guilt in an awkward melange.
“A way of ensuring the long-term mental health of a deeply unstable woman?”
My words sound hollow. Simon gets the text, but the guilt will linger. As the bitch’s trojan overwhelms the ziggurat’s compound eye, I’m distracting myself with the light show; watching the algorithms relinquishing our quarry’s data as they commit my irises to memory.
Grace Diaz. Spanish software developer. Suite 121-B.
For a second time, I swallow.
“You tell me?” Somewhere in the translation from brain to voice, cutting comment becomes half-hearted question. The choices are Simon’s, and his alone. My role in this situation is strictly professional.
Right?
Its task complete, the incendiary is burning itself out – a vortex of flame dissolving back into the velvet cover of dusk. The remaining orange lights flicker and die. Pulling myself up from the damp concrete, I shake the raindrops from my jacket. Composure regained, I begin to trace the boundary of the premises, searching for an entrance.
“Deeply unstable.”
Initially, I take the words for an echo.
“She doesn’t seem unstable.”
Well, shit.
- – - – -
I’m running. In recent years, and in my line of work, this has been something of a recurring motif.
In the background, seeping into my awareness from the edges inward, I’m eavesdropping on the continuing stand-off.
“Unstable? Who’s unstable?” There’s something in Grace’s line of questioning … something in her tone of voice. Something familiar, with a shape I can feel forming in the back of my throat. Something that I realise just before Simon.
“Damn it!”
My yell echoes off the concrete. Pigeons scatter, soaring sideways into the darkness.
I glance behind, but the plaza – if that’s what it is – is abandoned.
“Simon, can you hold her a little longer?” Sod the whispering; my voice is loud, urgent. But, of course, he knows what he’s doing. It’s his fucking vocation, after all, and God only knows how I’m supposed to spur him to new heights of bullshit by asking nicely.
“It’s okay, Perry, I know why you’re here.” Grace seems calm, measured. These are the words of someone who knows a lot more than they’ve been letting on. Which means I have a lot less time than I’d anticipated. So, while “Perry” is doing a double-take, I’m killing the two-way. He’ll probably do better without me on the other side of a teleprompt, meddling inexpertly.
I all but rub my face against the biometric scanners. A pneumatic hiss signals the opening of doors, and – chest thumping – I fling myself into the lobby.
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
F3: ‘Welcome to the Umweltzone’
This is the next layer of The Terminal. Very much unfinished, but – since I need lunch – I’ll post the second half next week. And then there’s at least one more piece to come – I really like the characters, so it could easily end up being more.
WELCOME TO THE UMWELTZONE
Pedal to the floor, I race through the liquid mist of post-industrial Berlin. Even in the twilight, silver and green dominate. A world of infinitely customisable architecture – modular units and wind turbines; turf and steel. This side of the wall, Berlin’s heritage was papered over and trampled underfoot. Preservation and conservation were thrown aside; surplus to the orgy of market-humping and wide-eyed commerce. Thirty years later, and this part of the capital is home to a thousand small business enterprises, buoyed by EU subsidies and staffed with caffeine-fuelled graduates of every stripe. Welcome to the Umweltzone.
The Nissan chatters away, exchanging data with Galileo and the other cars and lorries on the German A-roads. Yesterday, it was a hire vehicle; a bullet point on the expenses of the Brazilian account. Today, it’s utterly convinced of its role as an Interflora delivery van, bearing a cargo of vacuum-packed dwarf orchids.
I call it the lunchbox.
It’s monitoring traffic density, ethanol use, meteorological patterns, and the humidity of the simulated orchids. Apparently, I’m entering a pocket of unusually low pressure, part of a diffuse ribbon of bisecting the continent from Stockholm to Nice.
Luckily, the lunchbox isn’t capable of monitoring the integrity of its own information systems. Thanks to Simon, an adjusted p2p nav system is narrowing in on the physical location of our target. Now, we’re just waiting for her to make an appearance in the terminal.
“Is she there yet?” I ask, flicking my eyes to the dashboard chronometer. “It’s another hundred before the lunchbox is in range. At least.”
Allowing for speech/text conversion and a five second lag, I await his answer. My stomach is a knot of elastic bands.
“Not yet. Wish you could this place, Red; it’s bizarre.” The words belong to Simon, but the voice is provided by the vehicle. Distracted by the peculiarities of my own journey, I marvel at the temple to the railway, a great glass box which passes on my right.
Then, the voice of a woman; “What do you think?” With no obvious point of origin, the question fills me with raw panic.
“Stunning.” It takes a moment for me to realise that this response wasn’t me, but belonged to the diver. Definitely Simon; enthusiastic, with the occasional slip signalling his Mancunian origins. Which means … the woman was Rosanna; our target. Her voice sounds a little older than I’d been expecting, but – hell – at least she’s made an appearance.
Relaxing into the seat, I passively stare as the lunchbox indicates right, turning towards Alexanderplatz.
“And I’m on. You ready?” The artificial voice sounds peculiarly urgent. I have to remind myself that it’s a quirk of programming, nothing more. Outside, the square allows an unhindered glimpse of the city skyline, as punctured by the garish lights of a brutal spire; a lingering monster, born of the twentieth century. But the nav says we’re still out of range. Where is she?
“Think I can see the television tower. Give me a little longer?” I hazard, listening to the fawning and simpering of Simon and our target. She sounds younger than I’d been imagining.
Then the lunchbox is turning. A sharp lurch to the right, and the tower recedes into the ashen haze. Looking at the chronometer, I bite my lip. The elastic bands are back, and they brought friends. I can feel the droplets of sweat glistening on my forehead; should have packed the sweatband.
In the background, I’m forced to listen to Simon’s attempts at flirting. It’s excruciating. Frankly, if it wasn’t what I was paying him for, I’d probably have vomited by now.
But when the p2p nav starts blinking, my misgivings evaporate. A reverse-engineering of the girl’s connection protocol finally yields a physical location – Landsberger Allee; a converted hostel, right on top of the railway station.
“Think I’ve found the vats.”
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
