Yesterday, I was in Louisville, Kentucky, and spent some time in the Hurstbourne Barnes & Noble bookstore, signing copies of Darwin’s Paradox. Get ‘em while they’re hot and newly autographed, folks!

When I first got into Louisville, I wasn’t sure how to pronounce the name. The standard English pronunciation is “looeeville” (referring to King Louis XVI, for whom the city is named), which is often utilized by political leaders and the media. But most native residents pronounce the city’s name “looavul”— often this degrades further to “luvul”. The name is often pronounced far back in the mouth, in the top of the throat.

Located in north-central Kentucky close to the Indiana border, Louisville is Kentucky’s largest city. It is ranked as either the 17th or 27th largest city in the United States depending on how the population is calculated. Louisville is famous as the home of “The Most Exciting Two Minutes in Sports”: the Kentucky Derby, the widely watched first race of the Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing.

Although Louisville is situated in a Southern state, it is influenced by both Midwestern and Southern culture, and is commonly referred to as either the northernmost Southern city or the southernmost Northern city in the United States.

Louisville was the site of many important innovations through history. Notable residents include inventor Thomas Edison, the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, boxing legend Muhammad Ali, newscaster Diane Sawyer, and writers Hunter S. Thompson and Sue Grafton. Notable events include the first public viewing place of Edison’s light bulb, the first library open to African Americans in the South, and medical advances including the first human hand transplant, the first self-contained artificial heart transplant, and the development site of the first cervical cancer vaccine.

Louisville had one of the largest slave trades in the United States before the Civil War and much of the city’s initial growth is attributed to that trade. During the Civil War Louisville became a major stronghold of Union forces, which kept Kentucky firmly in the Union. It was the center of planning, supplies, recruiting and transportation for numerous campaigns. Despite being surrounded by skirmishes and battles, Louisville itself was never attacked. After 1865, returning Confederate veterans took control of the city, leading to the jibe that Louisville joined the Confederacy after the war was over.

The first Kentucky Derby was held on May 17, 1875, at the Louisville Jockey Club track and 10,000 spectators came to watch Aristides win the race.

On March 27, 1890 the city was devastated and downtown nearly destroyed when an F4 tornado tore through the city at 8:30 pm as part of the Mid-Mississippi Valley Tornado Outbreak of March 1890. An estimated 74 to 120 people were killed. The city quickly recovered and signs of the tornado were nearly totally absent within a year.

In late January and February of 1937, a month of heavy rain in which 19″ fell prompted what became remembered as the “Great Flood of ‘37″. The flood submerged about 70% of the city, power was lost, and it forced the evacuation of 175,000 residents, and also led to fundamental changes in where residents bought houses. Today, the city is protected by numerous flood walls.

Louisville is one cool town! You folks rock! Oh, and: “Louisville, keep it weird!” More in a future post (I met some VERY interesting people, especially at my favorite place, Starbucks!). If you missed my previous post on my “great American journey”, part one of a series entitled “America, You’re Beautiful!” go here. Well, next is Columbus, Ohio…

One of the most important devices to spice up narrative and increase pace is the use of dialogue. There’s a reason for this: we read dialogue more quickly; it’s written in more fluid, conversational English; it tends to create more white space on a page with less dense text, more pleasing to the reader’s eye. Dialogue is action. It gets readers involved.

Good dialogue neither exactly mimics actual speech (e.g., it’s not usually mundane, repetitive or broken with words like “uh”) nor on the other extreme does it proselytize or educate the reader through long discourse (unless the character is that kind of person). Good dialogue in a story should be somewhere in the middle. While it should read as fluid conversation, dialogue remains a device to propel the plot or enlighten us to the character of the speaker). No conversation follows a perfect linear progression. People interrupt one another, talk over one another, often don’t answer questions posed to them or avoid them by not answering them directly. These can all be used by the writer to establish character, tension, and relationship.

Below, I provide a few tips when using dialogue in your story.

As promised while I’m away, here is my short story… about the casualties of war and violence…

A Butterfly in Peking

My brother and I cower behind my older cousin as she strides with long steps toward the foreman at the Techno Corporation Farm. The foreman slouches, legs spread apart, atop an ATV with a radio strapped to his head. He oversees several huge vehicles that worm their way across the vast field, tilling and seeding. I fix on his sun burnt belly, distended under a shirt stained with grease and old food. Indolent eyes flicker like a scorching flame. “What have we here?” he bellows. “Urchins for dinner?”

I shrink back. Greasy black hair coils like knotted rope to his shoulders. He looks like the Techno my cousin just killed and in sudden panic I wonder if he knows. She raises her chest and tilts her head back proudly. Her face is smeared with dirt and her hair is matted and tangled with leaves from spending the night in the forest. Backlit, her chaotic hair seems to give off its own light as though it’s been dipped in heaven. She says in a clear voice, “Techno vigilantes raided our farm and killed our parents.”

The foreman snorts. “Then you must be little Greenies to barbecue on a skewer—”

“We’re just children,” she counters. “We have nowhere else to go. If you turn us away you’ll be sentencing us to sure death. They don’t care who they kill. Please, you must help us.” Her hands reach out in supplication. “We work hard and we don’t eat much.”

The foreman’s gaze softens and his gaze sweeps her body, eyes devouring her. She’s charmed the beast with her precocious tongue and he takes us into his lair.

~~~~

I gaze at the flat horizon that trembles in the blistering heat. The sun beats down on me and the rain-saturated field. The workmen and women have left the shiny beetles slumber in a neat row as they retire inside. My cousin and I weed the hardpan and my younger brother sweeps the kitchen floor, while they drink in the cool interior of the corporation farm workhouse and complain loudly about the poor conditions. I can hear them from here. Too little food, too much work, they shout. They argue about the revolution. The breeze flings their words in my direction.

“You’re a God-damned Greeny, Birch. They’re destroying our society!”

“They’re saving the fucking planet!”

“Oh, yeah? Not until they fuck all of us first!”

“Look around you. We’re already fucked. Technos are raping this planet—”

Chairs scrape. I brace myself for the inevitable brawl. Other raised voices join in. Soon they will spill out of the barracks, fists flying.

Shielding my eyes from the sun, I watch my cousin dance lightly over the clods of dirt to the cistern outside the kitchen for a drink of water. The flush of heat glows on her face. Ignoring the commotion inside, she waves to me and her smile draws one out from me. A gust of wind blows up from behind, dulling the voices inside. I smell rain. The distant role of thunder murmurs of a coming storm.

It’s her thirteenth birthday today. No one will know and I wipe the surging pleasure from my mind. There will be no birthday cake. No presents. At least we are alive and safe. That is her present. The revolution, which sweeps the country like a violent storm, carves cities into rubble. It casts families across the landscape like pebbles in a rough sea. It left our parents dead in its wake, made my cousin a killer and us three orphaned itinerants, fleeing here with the hope of shelter.

She raises a cup of water from the cistern to her mouth, then lets it drop and runs into the kitchen. I’m annoyed that she has abandoned me to tend the field alone. The workhouse has grown quiet. Perhaps the workers have all fallen into a drunken stupor. The gusts rise to an open-mouthed roar and sting my eyes with dust. Coal-black clouds chase each other like predators. After a while I walk slowly to the kitchen, shielding my eyes from the flying grit.
Hearing malicious laughter within, I hesitate at the open door then force myself to creep forward. I peer around the threshold then freeze, stiff with fear.

My brother huddles, naked, on the floor. His dark clothes lie strewn like dried blood at a slaughter.

My cousin writhes against the strong hold of several men. Her face is pale with alarm and her eyes dark with terror. They laugh and rip off her clothes. A large man, naked from the waist down, lurches toward her and growls in a drunken slur, “Here’s the witch who convinced our piss-pot foreman to give away our food! Well, here’s some dessert for you!” He drives into her, rough and insistent, his grunts to her cries a discordant duet of lust and pain.

Someone points to me. “Look! The other kid!” They all turn. For a brief moment — an eternity — my eyes lock with hers. They plead for my help.

I bolt. Her screams chase me stumbling across the uneven soil, tripping on the ruts, refusing to glance back. My face hits the ground. I scramble up, taste dirt in my mouth, and fight into a gallop. Gulping in air. Ears ringing. Eyes blurred with tears. Nose bleeding.

Run. Stinking son of a bitch. Run. Run.

I’ve left her there, screaming. And, because I didn’t stay to hear the screams end, they never will. I hide, shivering in the forest, as the earth grows black and rain pelts me. The onslaught is over in minutes. It leaves me limp like rotting vegetation as I watch the shafts of sunlight pierce the dark mantel and touch the landscape with an unearthly glow. I inhale the skunky smell of marsh plants and imagine her ravaged body discarded on the rubbish pile like old meat. As the shadows of the afternoon enfold me in their skeletal embrace, I stumble out of my garden of moss and ferns and scuttle over the vast field, hoping no one will see me. I slide into hardpan pools and the wet clay clings to my boots and weighs me down.

When I creep into the kitchen, I find her curled like a wounded deer on the floor where they’ve left her. My brother lies pressed against her, asleep, and she strokes his whimpering face. I want to embrace her, let her cry in my arms. Instead I turn my head away and stand fixed like a stone, cold and heavy. I cannot gaze into her sunken eyes. They sting my soul.

When she finally raises herself off the floor without my help, she scoops my little brother in her thin arms, takes up her tattered clothes and limps back to the sleeping barracks. She does not look back to see if I’m following.

The days bleed into months and she appears unharmed, looking like she always did, face quietly sanguine and eyes glowing like a warm campfire. But I sense her distance. My little brother clings to her. I avoid them both. When our eyes meet one day, I imagine reproach in hers but know their gaze only reflects my own emptiness. I perceive in that ethereal look that they’ve molested her and probably my brother several times since.

When I’m not working I crawl and hide under the porch floorboards where the dirt smells acrid and I spy on the workers from inside my dark enclave. I feel cursed in my fortune. Am I successfully evading them or do the bastards leave me alone because they sense my worthlessness? I crouch there and recite poetry like she used to at bedtime to us. She is silent now. After kissing my brother on the forehead and wishing me a good night, she slips quietly into her bed. I lie stiff under the moldy covers and listen to her hitched breathing in the bed beside me. I know she’s crying herself to sleep.

Now I crouch under the porch with aching knees and recite her favorite poem like a mantra:

When the Greens liberate the Techno Corporation Farm, I return to the new city, which enjoys a peace, disrupted only by the occasional sniper — disgruntled Techno reactionaries who lurk and take pot shots at anyone. My brother returns to his schooling and my cousin and I find a livelihood under the new regime.

I embrace the Green science and soon find myself a leading scientist, giving papers at conferences and overseeing an elite cadre of researchers. Feeling secure in my growing prominence, I become daring in my work. I invoke the long abandoned chaos theory and apply it to my models of ecosystem behavior. The signature of chaos appeals to me, how the subtle effect of a single event has the potential to spiral into overwhelming and irrevocable change.

Chaoticists call it the Butterfly Effect: sensitive dependence on initial conditions, based on the strange notion that a butterfly stirring the air in Peking today could set off a tornado in Texas next month. I recognize its hand in everything I see, including the behavior of my cousin. I observe how the imperceptible mark of that initial disturbance has with time cascaded into a turbulent squall. As though a wounded bird thrashes, trapped within her, its wings smashing her insides more violently with every breath she draws in.

Seeking obscurity, she finds a position far beneath her capacity as a plant biologist in the Department of Industrial Ecology –DIE– and sinks into oblivion. I see little of her, but there is seldom a moment when I do not think of her. While I rarely have time to entertain my many casual friends in my penthouse suite because of my busy lecture tour, she languishes in the poor section of town with the bus driver she married and two wild-haired children. Is she happy?

~~~~

The day I find the courage to visit her, I feel excited and nervous like a child. I stride toward the DIE building entrance, bubbling with things to share with her. Once inside I see her waiting patiently for me in the main hall. She turns and smiles. It draws one out from me.
A loud report jolts me. She jerks back with an expression of surprise then falls, sprawling unnaturally on the floor as a red flower spreads over her breast. A woman screams and flings her hands to her mouth.

As others chase the sniper, I stand fixed like a cold stone and watch her gasp her last breaths then shiver. Her eyes flicker like a dying flame, then the light in them takes flight and her blank gaze upward is still like a dark pool. My heart beats like a mallet and I ache with a million unfinished sentences.

~~~~

I scour the chaos for those fragments of memory, taped together by longing, and see her as she once was, as she always was. She was just my cousin, but when we were still children, she killed for us. Using the hunting bow her father gave her, she slew a man who charged at us with a knife, the same one he’d used to kill our parents. When my brother was attacked, she flew to his aid and threw herself into a den of assault. Then, when she pleaded for my help, I ran away.
I was just a boy, only ten years old. Now I know better. The revolution defined what I am. She faced fear head on, bravely pushed it aside and rose to the call. I let fear chase me away.
Now, I wander dark shores, stranded in that moment of agony, still hearing her screams.

Aching to fly.

SQT, over at Fantasy & Sci-fi Lovin’ Book Reviews is giving away a copy of my SF thriller, “Darwin’s Paradox”. So, if you’re interested in getting a free copy, check out her very cool site, here, and all you have to do is post a comment saying you’re interested. Good luck!

It’s Friday and my Friday Feature is dedicated to Chapters-Indigo-Coles Bookstore, a wonderful Canadian book chain that has wisely–and to my ecstatic pleasure–decided to carry “Darwin’s Paradox” in every store across the country.

I just got back from my book tour in Toronto, Canada, and had a blast! Upon arrival at the Pearson International Airport, my brother and sister in law picked me up and graciously hosted me in their home north of Toronto. I didn’t realize just how gracious they were until I got there and discovered that they were in the midst of redecorating their home. But they were cool with me staying there and my sister in law even offered to act as my guide through Toronto’s maze of highways and suburban sprawl—so long as I didn’t mind visiting a hundred bathroom and tile shops between bookstores. I congenially agreed and settled into the groove. I even picked up a few tips along the way. Did you know, for instance that 1/2” thick cementitious ceramic tile backerboards are recommended over greenboard sheetrock for tub and shower enclosures, because the latter aren’t sufficiently water-proof in areas subject to heavy amounts of moisture? Well, there, you learned something just as I did.

As for Toronto…I saw it all…and I can tell you where every single Chapters-Indigo-Coles bookstore is, too! Toronto is really a network of many smaller historical “villages” with unique character, ethnic culture and history, glued together by a “connective tissue” of highways, urban sprawl and shopping malls. Toronto (t?’r?nto?/, local pronunciation [tr?no?]) is the largest city in Canada and the provincial capital of Ontario. Located on scenic Lake Ontario, the city is the fifth-most populous municipality in North America, with over 2.5 million residents. Considered one of the world’s most diverse cities, Toronto is also a global city and one of the top financial cities in the world. It’s come a long way from “the place where trees stand in the water” (Iroquois meaning for “Toronto”).

It’s Canada’s oldest science fiction bookstore. Located in Toronto’s funky Queen Street West, this shop has hosted many a big name science fiction writer signing, including Robert J. Sawyer, who used to work there during his salad days. Those of you passing through Toronto, Canada, or who live there, you can now find my book, “Darwin’s Paradox” on the shelves of this genre bookstore. And if you can’t find my book, it’s only because it’s temporarily sold out! (so I was told the other day). More were on order and may have arrived by now.

My book tour is in full swing! What a hoot! My second book signing took place in my own home town at Black Bond Books. And we sold out! I was ecstatic…so was the bookseller! … … I was heartened to see some old friends from my community, who’d responded to the article in the local paper, the Delta Optimist. People showed up from … well … all over (as far away as Coquitlam!) to buy my book. WOO! HEE! Again, as with the previous signing, friends and family coaxed me to leave with rhe promise of drinks and appetizers… Do you see a pattern emerging here? … (Nina grinning from ear to ear). Next is Toronto, to several Chapters-Indigo-Coles bookstores.

Prior to going in I had entertained foolish notions of sitting behind a stack of books, bored, as strangers milled past without a glance in my direction. Well, the word bored isn’t in my vocabulary and, besides, that isn’t my style (as those of you who know me would certainly testify; though I’ve been also known to have my shy moments…no really! Especially when it comes to THAT….well, you know…I’m too embarrassed to say…) So, when I arrived, energized with a Starbucks cinnamon latte in hand, I donned my sales robes and made a point of greeting my stranger friends. We all had something in common, after all: we all liked books. Determined to sign off all the books Chapters had been kind enough to get for this event, I hailed the merits of my book (“Look at this beautiful cover!) to one and all like a French market vendor…and soon–to my surprise–my off-key singing voice actually brought people flocking forward and I made friends with some wonderful people (who probably don’t sing). There was Mark, for instance, a young Vancouver student who studied evolution; there was Karyn, an avid science fiction fan and another Karin, also an avid reader; there was Jacek, an aspiring writer who is writing a very interesting YA novel, who came with his son; there was Craig Bowlsby, a local TV show producer (who I wangled an interview with…you’ll see my interview of him here live on this blog later!); there was Kuldip, who wanted to talk philosophy during the whole three hours I was there; and Brenda Carr, another wonderful writer who is currently marketing her mythic fantasy novel (look for it soon!); and so many other wonderful people. My sole journey had become a soul journey. And I did manage to reduce that huge pile of books into a small rubble. It would have dwindled to nothing except that my husband and son wanted to celebrate and successfully lured me away with promises of wine and rich food.

Speaking of souls, Mel over at Monday Morning Power (see my last post), who bestowed upon me the badge for a “winning attitude”, would be proud of me. He recently gave me another gift: the gift of friendship (see below). This is how Mel explains it:

“I didn’t start blogging until May of this year. As you may know, the reason I started blogging was to have a vehicle to put out my “Empowerment Process,” which I have been posting in installments. However, what I got was a home for friendships that I feel are as real as the ones in my “real” life. For this I am more thankful than words can express.”

“There is something very special and unique about blogging friendships. In “real” life we all have to first get by the physical and superficial aspects of each other before we can get into who we are, really. In “real” life there is so much bull shit that we have to put up with, that sometimes developing true friends becomes very difficult. I feel that with blogging friendships there are no superficial aspects to it; the barriers do not exist. We open up in our writings as to who we really are. We bare ourselves and say “this is me.” For many of us this is the only way that we can truly express ourselves, our opinions, our strengths and our fears. I have also discovered a level of INTEGRITY amongst bloggers that I have not found in “real” life.”

Thank you, Mel! You are a wonderful friend. I, in turn bestow this gift to all my blogging friends on MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog, my blogging communities. You folks ALL rock! I’d like to specifically mention the following bloggers who have added so much to make this place a home for me:

Jean-Luc (The Federation)…for your loyalty…(and being so SEXY)

Karen (Nameless Grace)…for your impeccable grace (and for always correcting my spelling! But mostly for your love and faith in me)

Tricia (Modern Matriarch)…for your justice and diligence (and clever mind…you make me think)

WalksFarWoman (Kissing the Dogwood)…for your compassion (and wonderful sense of humor…you make me smile)

Bob (Somerset Bob’s Place)…for your honor and integrity (and all those drinks you sent me on Facebook!)

Deborah (Climate of our Future)…for your indomitable spirit (and ALL those MEMEs…geez! You know I love ‘em! …

Adria (In Cing)…for your joy and clarity (and endless enthusiasm)

Erik (AuthorsDen)…for your incredible sincerity (and stubbornness! I love our discussions! You keep me honest and I hope you keep doing so…)

Theresa Lucas (Fantasy and Sci-Fi Lovin’ Blog)…for your impeccable mind (and warped sense of humor!)

Mel (Monday Morning Power)…for your positive attitude (and rather twisted sense of humor!)

Jennifer (Random Synaptic Transfers)…for your kind friendship (and warped sense of humor…wait…there’s a wierd trend happening here…WARP NINE, MR. SPOCK!)

Virginia (Sumptuosity)…for your generosity (and all those beers we slugged back…and will slug back in the future! You slugger, you!)

Lynda (Reality Skimming)…for your sincere and down-to-earth goodness (and your crazy wonderful laugh)

Princess Haiku (Princess Haiku)…for your poetic wisdom (and astute calmness)

Melanie (A Quiet Symphony)…for your beautiful words (and REALLY twisted sense of humor!)

Jon (Chimeric Day Dreams)…for your gentle wisdom and beautiful mind (and beautiful everything.)

Heather (Heather Dugan)…for your kind spirit (and your incredible voice!…Hey, maybe we should do an audio book…oh, we ARE? GREAT!)

Margaret…(who doesn’t even have a blog!) for your incredible and steadfast loyalty and friendship for aeons (God knows how you could stand me that long!)

more to come…there are so many of you!…

And here they are! Bloggers who welcomed me so long ago, when I first began blogging. Bloggers who welcomed me with kind advice as my blog clunked along on its new wobbly legs. Bloggers who provided comments and words of encouragement, challenges and amazing humor on my posts. People like:

I’m so looking forward to meeting more bloggers out there and making friends with you.

My book, Darwin’s Paradox is out today!

Besides Amazon (e.g., in the U.S.: http://www.amazon.com/; in Canada: http://www.amazon.ca/; in the U.K.: http://www.amazon.co.uk/; in Germany: http://www.amazon.de/; in France: www.amazon.fr/; in Japan: http://www.amazon.jp/), the book can be found throughout North America (both at stores and through their online webstores) at:
Barnes & Noble
Borders.com
Chapters-Indigo (Canada)
White Dwarf Books (Vancouver)
The Sentry Box (Calgary)

Bakka-Phoenix Science Fiction Books (Toronto)
Blackwell Books (UK)
various online bookstores (as an ebook)

You can also buy or order the book at Target (http://www.target.com/), one of the major department stores in the U.S. as well as India and Malaysia, Wal-Mart, or purchase it online at Buy.com, another major retail store. And those are only the ones I know about (the writer tends to know paltry little when it comes to publishery stuff).

It’s been only half-a-day and I noticed that it’s ALREADY temporarily out of stock/sold out at some stores. YOU did that! Thank you so much! Those of you who haven’t ordered it yet, not to worry…go ahead and order…more are coming!

Here’s the ad for the book:

I’m heading off this weekend to Vcon, Vancouver’s SF & F convention…You know the deal…drinking, talking, laughing, sharing, drinking some more, slurring, theorizing, imagining, arguing, drinking yet some more, slurring some more…Well, then there are all those aliens “coming in peace” or whatever it is they’re saying (I’m usually too happily inebriated to understand their squeeky little voices…or to care for that matter…).

For reasons I’m not at liberty to discuss, I shant be participating in any panels this time (shame, really, because now I’ll just have to keep that neat little phaser I was going to give away as a door prize…). Suffice to say that the best of promises, motivated by the very noblest of intentions, may “break” when pressed with insufficient resources or time.

At any rate, I fully intend to enjoy myself and learn a thing or two. So, in the meantime, I’ve left you a short story that is aptly in keeping with misunderstanding, apparent abandonment and hopeful resolution. It’s all about promises: to others and ultimately to oneself. The story was originally published in Dreams & Visions (Skysong Press). It’s a love story set in a time when AI and humans have settled on an uneasy truce of cooperation.

Angel’s Promises

Rebecca stared through the window where the sun trembled on the horizon and inflamed the sky. She contrasted what she saw with the dark inner-city, dank with despair, from which they’d retrieved him. Pacing her outer-city office like a trapped panther, she fidgeted with her dress and raked her dark hair back with her fingers. She strained to hear footsteps approaching and felt her heart race with — what? What did she feel? Exhilaration? Terror? A terse rap at the door was her only warning before it swung open and the face she had not seen in four years stared boldly at her. The fire in his coal-black eyes stirred up memories of when she’d met him, kissed him and deserted him.

~ 1 ~

Belly aching with hunger, Rebecca glanced down at Isabelle huddled next to her in the gutted apartment that was once home. It was four days since they’d lost their mother in the crowded mall. Rebecca listened to the murmurs of the city in her head: a low hush mingled with the stirrings of cryptic metallic sounds, chopped up words, bleeps and sighs. Like a million voices in the distance, they came and went like the ebbing and swelling surf of the sea. She no longer mentioned the sounds to Isabelle, who could not hear them, because it frightened her too much. Rebecca had heard a rumor that the outer-city was searching for people who could interface with AIs. They called them veemelds. Could she be one? As much as she wished to return, she refused to leave her little sister behind. Nothing would ever separate them, she thought, glancing down at Isabelle’s urchin face. She’d promised.

Rebecca’s gaze swept the place. Some vagrant had vandalized and torched it. Nothing of theirs remained, not that there was much to begin with. She rose and wandered into what used to be their bedroom, Isabelle scrambling behind. Black and sodden, it reeked of kerosene and urine. Her gaze rested on her old bed, torn and stained, where her mother used to awaken her every night, smelling of whiskey, then crawl in beside her, clutch Rebecca to her breast and sob. Rebecca turned abruptly from the gutted bedroom and said, “We have to go now.” She was fifteen and could take care of herself and her twelve-year old sister if she had to.

Isabelle scrambled behind. “Can’t we go back to the outer-city and visit Uncle Carl till mummy comes back?”

She isn’t coming back, Rebecca thought. She rolled her eyes and shook her head at her sister. “And how’d we get there, you silly? On wings?” As if they could simply climb out of the dark depths of the inner-city. Besides, Uncle Carl was mean. He’d said that anyone who ended up techno-slaving for the inner-city AIs deserved their fate. There’d been no choice for her mother who’d lost her wits after their father was taken away. Rebecca pushed out her lower lip and narrowed her eyes at the thought of Uncle Carl’s stern face. Seeing the tears stream down Isabelle’s cheeks, Rebecca took her hand. “Never mind, Izzy. I’ll take care of you.”

They headed to the mall, hoping to find some scraps of food. They staked out a Food Stop and patience finally paid off when a woman got up with a half-eaten oatcake. The girls followed her to a waste bin and watched her drop the cake into the bin. After a quick glance around, Rebecca dove in after it but a dirty hand snatched the cake first. Rebecca jerked up and gazed into a filthy face.
“Th-th-this is my bin,” stammered the boy about her age, who stared at her with intense slag-black eyes. Blinking through dark strands of hair, he stroked his long face, smeared with dirt and grease. Then he flicked back his shoulder-length hair and studied the two girls with a smirk that unsettled Rebecca. “You t-t-techno-slummers?”

She’d heard of them. They were orphans of the inner-city, waste products of desperate and over-indulgent techno-slaves. And troublemakers for the AIs. Vermin, who choked up the cyber-system, disturbed their complacent humming, stole into their metal bellies and snuck off with their secrets. “We’re looking for my mother,” Rebecca replied, curbing a frown.

“That’s what they all s-s-say, after their parents ab-b-bandon them,” he said as though he was discussing a school event. He smacked his lips as he chewed. “She’s b-been gone awhile,” he said with a full mouth. “I can tell.”

Isabelle puckered her face, ready to cry.

“Here.” He broke off a piece of the oatcake and handed it to Isabelle. “You can share my bin until you get one of your own,” he stuttered, offering Rebecca another piece. “We’re family. We look after each other, especially from the cypols. I’m Neo.” He puffed up his chest and tilted his head back proudly. “You probably heard about the mess I caused in the Food-Center. I got us twenty kilos of nano-soup.”

Rebecca refused the piece of oat cake, even though Isabelle had already accepted hers and was gratefully eating. “I told you, we’re not techno-slummers,” she said in a huff. “We’re just waiting for our mother to come back.”

“Yeah, like when chaos turns to order.”

~ 2 ~

“What d’ya mean they talk?” Neo squatted next to Rebecca in the cramped makeshift shack, as they repaired a computer they’d built with scrap parts they’d found. He dug his dirty nails into his tangled hair and squinted at her.

“Can’t you hear them too, Neo?” Rebecca said in a faltering voice. She shifted her weight from one knee to the other, suddenly giddy under his penetrating stare. She caught his scent, sharp with old sweat, felt her face heat and fought down the confusing storm that surged through her abdomen. Lately she’d caught him studying her with such intensity that it made her blush. His opinion meant more to her than anything.

Neo tilted his head to one side. “You making this up?” His name wasn’t really Neo. It was Colin Baker, but he’d abandoned it like the parents who’d given him the name had abandoned him. All the techno-slummers had given themselves new names. She’d chosen Angel, the nickname her father gave her. “Machines don’t talk to people, Angel,” Neo said, shaking his head at her. He stood up. “I gotta get some quantum couplers.” He studied her for a moment. “Get a grip, Angel. You’re still looking for your mother a year after she abandoned you! A cypol probably caught her and she’s been recycled into something by now, maybe the nano-soup you ate today.”

She thought him cruel to have said that. Mocking the promise she’d made to her father the day he was arrested. He’d turned at the threshold, flanked by two policemen as her mother and sister wailed uncontrollably and Rebecca stood brave like a soldier: Take care of your mother and sister for me, till I return, Angel . . . I will, father, I promise. . . .He never did return, of course. They’d accused him of being a luddite — she didn’t know what that was — and she never saw him again.

Several of the younger orphans had gathered around in the small bivouac built from scrap parts cemented with the detritus of urban fast living. Rebecca clenched her fists and worked her jaw as she watched Neo brush past the giggling children. Letting her anger subside in silence, she decided that from then on she would avoid confiding in him. It was too painful.

But that night, when the little children lay asleep in their nests of garbage and she listened with her eyes closed to the droning throb of the machines in her head, Neo startled her by touching her shoulder. Her eyes darted open to his reckless smile and her face smoldered with the thought that he meant to kiss her. But he was only excited about her strange talent and what it meant for them all. She inhaled his smoky metal scent and controlled her breathing as he shared his plan, totally unaware of the effect he was having on her.
That was when they began to invade the cyber world of the inner-city to feed and clothe themselves. Although she disagreed with stealing, Rebecca sensed that her ability to tap into the AI world not only fed her undernourished companions, but also bolstered their morale. What else could she do? They were starving, cold and sick. And they had no one they could go to. Turning themselves in to the Care-Center facility was not an option. They’d heard horror stories of what went on there. No one ever emerged once they went there. Nano-soup.

~ 3 ~

“Cypols!” Neo shouted. His voice rang in the mall, empty now in the deep of the night. Rebecca looked up from the public computer she’d hacked into and her gaze followed Neo’s to where a shrill whine grew louder. Several great metal birds of prey swooped down, their burnished wings glinting as they selected their targets and honed in. The children scattered and ran for cover among the garbage and rubble. Isabelle stood stiff with fear.
Rebecca spotted one heading straight for them and leapt to her feet. “Izzy, come on!” She seized Isabelle’s hand and ran. Isabelle stumbled behind her, panting. Rebecca tugged her hard, galloping toward a makeshift lean-to. Isabelle gasped and tripped in the rubble. Their hands flew apart. Rebecca dove under cover, expecting Isabelle to be right behind her.
“Becky!” Isabelle shrieked. Rebecca turned and saw the metal bird seize Isabelle with its claws. Her arms flailed out to Rebecca. “Help!” Within a moment Isabelle sailed up, clutched firmly in the great bird’s talons as Rebecca, crouched under the corrugated metal, stared in frozen silence. Her sister’s wails subsided and she disappeared into the darkness above.

~ 4 ~

Neo’s face grew red and blotchy. Rebecca had just told him that she intended to let herself get caught by a cypol.

They were fashioning a table out of an old building support and he reeled away, letting the piece he held fall to the floor. She flinched as the table crashed. “Damn you, Angel!” He spun around to face her, raking his fingers through his long greasy hair. “What about your mother? You going to abandon your search for her? Just like that?”

Rebecca set down the makeshift hammer then straightened up, wiping her hands on her rags. “You’re the one who keeps telling me it’s useless to keep looking for her. It’s been close to two years now.” She tilted her head at him and said tartly, “Nano-soup, remember?”

His eyes flashed. “What about your promise?”

Her face heated with defensive anger. “Which one? I promised I’d look after my sister too.” He pouted and his voice dropped to a whisper. “What about our dream. . . .”

It was a wild dream they shared: escape to the outer-city, where the sun shone and the air was fresh from a breeze rich with the wild scent of flowers. Where people walked with unrestrained laughter and AIs only served a limited function as tools, not lords of techno-slaves. She’d corrupted him with her tales of the outer-city and regretted it now. Sold him on a dream that she couldn’t deliver.

He waved his gangly arms. “Damn you!” he lashed out. “We’re family and you’re going to leave us to rot and starve.” His stammer was worse than usual. It got that way when he was upset. She stiffened. “You were around long before I arrived. Besides, Neo, you can do most of what I can do. It’s not like you need me—”

“I can’t talk to the machines —”

Rebecca stomped her foot in frustration and stalked forward until they stood facing one another less than a meter apart. “Neither can I, Neo. I told you, I can’t talk to them, only hear them.” “It’s the same thing!”

“No it isn’t!”

They were both panting, eyes blazing in stalemate. His breath reeked of nano-soup. She let her shoulders slump and looked away with a sigh. She knew he was only hiding his pain under this tirade. She would miss him too, more than she cared to admit.

Neo hunched over and sobbed, “D-d-don’t leave me, Angel.” The hand that never asked for help thrashed out, like the broken wing of a bird, flopping on the ground.

Overcome by his clumsy supplication, she took his hand. Then she leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the lips. Stunned, his eyes widened. She savored his delicious vulnerability like the nectar of a flower unfolding as he opened to her kiss, his mouth wrapping itself around it. When she withdrew from him, he leaned with her, reluctant to separate. He fumbled for her, clutched her tightly and laid his cheek upon her breast. She stroked his head, smelling his unwashed hair, and felt him shake with silent sobs. Her eyes heated with tears. She fought the confusion between the craving to stay and the need to help her sister. She’d promised, after all. “I’ll come back for you,” she said in a trembling voice. “I won’t leave you behind. I promise.”

~ 5 ~

As the rest of the techno-slummers dashed for cover, Rebecca stood fixed. Her heart pounded as she listened to the familiar squeal of the approaching cypol. Neo lunged for her, tugging hard. Determined, she fought him off and thought down the panic surging inside: I’m going to do it this time. I’m going to let it catch me.

“Damn you, Angel!” Neo screamed. “And damn your promises!” He dashed to safety.

She swallowed down her fear and curbed the instinct to hunker and flee. She could see the cypol’s gleaming eyes. Saw it veer toward her. Lock on her. There was no escape now. She’d be joining her sister soon. It had been a week since the cypol took Isabelle. What if she was dead? What if the cypols just took you up to their lair in the darkness of the ceilings and devoured you, like Neo said? What if her sacrifice was for nothing, wouldn’t reunite her with Isabelle but would simply put an end to her life?

Rebecca ran. But the cypol was almost upon her. You will not be hurt, it seemed to say. Did she imagine it? Stunned, Rebecca broke from her run, let her body go limp as the cypol scooped her up. The air rushed across her face as she soared up and felt exhilaration. I’m coming, Isabelle, she thought. I’m coming to save you. She glimpsed Neo staring up from the shadows, his face twisted in anguish, as she approached the rafters. Trembling with the memory of their first kiss, she whispered in a hoarse voice, “I’ll come back, Neo. I promise.”

A doorway opened into a yawning darkness. The bird sailed through and she was enveloped by pitch black. Her heart raced and she caught an overly sweet, almost cloying smell as she grew weary and fell into a deep slumber.

Rebecca awoke groggily to loud voices in her head. It was still dark. She lay bound with her back on a smooth, hard surface.

She recognized the metal voices as their AI rulers. She’s definitely a veemeld, said one. Go fetch Christian from the outer-city. We can sell this one.

Another said, Look at this, Alpha. Her V29 prostaglandins appear abnormally high. Even for a veemeld. What can it mean?

Perhaps we should charge a higher price. It is a sweet deal, Omega. We rid ourselves of these pests and the outer-city humans pay us for them. Beats recycling. Reuse, when you can, I always say. This one will fetch us a good price. They use these veemelds to help them run their disorganized outer-city. Able to interface with their primitive AIs, veemelds also serve as the best interpreters between their city and ours. . . .

She strained to hear more but the voices faded and she lost herself in the dark void. When she regained consciousness, she heard more voices, this time not in her head. They were exchanged in mild argument and one of them was definitely human.

“—You know we want her, damn it!” the human, an older male, said in frustration.

“Only if you pay double the price, Christian,” a shrill metal voice insisted.

“All right, all right,” the human conceded wearily. “Are there more like her?”

“Doesn’t she have a sister?” rejoined a tin voice. “I think we picked her up earlier.”

Another metal voice cut in, “She tested negative. Not a veemeld. We disposed of her. She’s been recycled.”

No! Not Isabelle! She pulled frantically on the bindings and squeezed her eyes tight to the tears that filled them. Oh, God, no! Not my baby sister.

The voices continued, oblivious to her pain. “ The girl has an uncle in the outer city. Carl Douglas,” Christian said.

No! Not there! Let me stay here with Neo.

“. . . I’ll contact the uncle and arrange for her departure within the hour.”

No! Rebecca screamed out but no sound emerged. The weariness overcame her. Oh, Neo. I’ve left you for nothing. Our dream. So many promises to keep. So many promises. . . .

~6~

He’d cut his dark hair short and his face had matured. A few stubborn locks fell over his temple. Full lips, held tightly, were poised on a rugged and unshaven jaw. She appraised his torso, visible beneath his tattered rags. At 21 years, he’d filled out from his awkward adolescence into a man’s shape, tall and strongly muscled. She hardly recognized him, except for those intense coal-black eyes.

Rebecca pointed to a chair facing her desk. “Please,” and slid into the chair behind her desk. She placed her hands flat, caressing the smooth wood.

Refusing to approach, he planted his legs apart and crossed his arms over his chest. His eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Why’d you bring me here?” he said without a trace of a stammer. He’d learned control, she thought. Become a warrior poet. “Why didn’t the AIs kill me?” he challenged. “I’m not a veemeld. I’m no use to you people.”

Could it be that he didn’t recognize her? Trying to control the emotion in her voice she said, “Neo, it’s me. . . Angel.”

His face paled. A tide of astonishment swept the dark hostility aside and his arms dropped to his side like lead. “A-a-ngel?” he stammered. Then anger boiled up. It fired his eyes with rage and he charged toward her. She recoiled in alarm. But he stopped at her expression and a miserable smile crossed his lips. She watched him take in a deep breath before speaking with more control, “I was right. When the human slaves are no longer useful like your drunk mother, the AIs recycle them.” His mouth curled into a self-mocking smirk. “Nano-soup.” He appraised her wearily and pursed his lips. The expression in his eyes opened to his pain and she heard the agony break over his voice. “I thought you were dead, Rebecca.”

She flinched at his use of her proper name and swallowed.

“Couldn’t eat nano-soup after that.” Then he veiled his anguish with disgust. “But eventually news filtered down that the outer-city had a new veemeld with special powers, she could hear the machines in her head.” He sneered. “And I knew you were alive.” He flicked his hand to dismiss all his previous pain as if it were unimportant. “You probably knew you’d be safe and fetch a good price too. Not brave like I’d thought, more like self-serving.”

“It wasn’t like that, Neo,” she said in a trembling voice.

His eyes gleamed with open hatred. “I really believed you. I believed all the things you said about escaping and living here together, but you never really meant it, did you?”

“Neo—”

“Once you got here, you forgot all about us.”

By ‘us’ he meant him. Did that tremulous first kiss taste bitter to him now?

“And I can see why.” His accusing gaze slid from her face and roamed her plush office. His eyes rested on the blazing sky. She heard a tremor in his voice, “You got what you wanted.” He glared at the plaques of distinction and achievement that hung on her wall. Then his head snapped at her with a scowl. “Chaos knows why I’m here now. Was it a glitch? Some embarrassing mistake you have to fix? You certainly didn’t earn your excellent reputation by thinking of us or our welfare.”

Shivering with anger, she found her voice, “Do you think that was my choice?” Propelled to her feet, she gripped the desk and locked her eyes on his. “They — my uncle — kept me from going back to look for you. I was trapped here in a paradise without a heart. It was our dream and my thoughts of you. . .” and that sweet kiss “. . . that kept me from drowning in despair. Kept me afloat these past four years with the hope that you hadn’t been caught and recycled like my sister. I realized that the only way I was going to find you and bring you out was if I played along and became the best veemeld the outer-city had. My prize was that I eventually had a chance to talk to the AIs in the inner-city and convinced them to sell you to me.” She swallowed the emotion rising in her throat and tried to gauge his intense look. Was he still angry with her? She couldn’t blame him. Feeling utter defeat, she forced the last words past a tide of anguish, “I thought I would never find you.” Her eyes heated with tears and his face blurred in pools of dismay. “And now that I have, it’s to find I destroyed our dream. I lost you anyway.” Unable to meet his fierce eyes her gaze dropped to the floor and her voice fell like petals from a wilted flower. “I’ve broken all my promises.”

“No you haven’t,” he said in a gentle voice that drew her gaze. With a few strides he’d closed the distance between them and stood so close to her, she could feel his breath upon her. His smoky metal scent coiled around her in a heady embrace as he placed his hands on her shoulders and leaned forward. His icy glare had melted to dark pools of warmth. “You didn’t break the one you made to me, Angel, when you first kissed me with your tender promise of love.”

She trembled as he took her face in his hands. Then his lips were on hers and she felt like they’d never been apart, tasting the mature fruit of his love. He took her in his arms as though he never meant to let her go and she finally felt like she was home.

She thought of her mother and sister, recycled in the inner-city, feeding into that eternal cycle of altering form. . . nano-soup. . . the cell of a beating heart. . . the suspended dust upon which bloomed the blushing sky. As she gazed into Neo’s midnight eyes, now reflecting the glow of sunset, Rebecca realized that he’d just given her the key to her legacy of promises. Every promise she’d made was a declaration to nurture a tender seed.

The rest was up to God.

O Muses, O high genius, aid me now!
O memory that engraved the things I saw,
Here shall your worth be manifest to all!
—Dante Alighieri, Canto II of the Inferno

As a published author of over a dozen short stories and three novels (with more coming!) I often get asked how and where I draw my inspiration from. How do I find my muse? And how do I keep it? (i.e.,, how do I defeat “writer’s block”?). Let’s first define muse:

The Muses, in Greek mythology, are a sisterhood of goddesses or spirits who embody the arts and inspire the creation process with their graces through remembered and improvised song and stage, writing, traditional music and dance. The Muses are water nymphs associated with the springs of Helicon and with Pieris (from which they are sometimes called the Pierides). According to Hesiod’s Theogony (7th century BC), they are the daughters of Zeus (king of the gods) and Mnemosyne (goddess of memory).

Many of us have experienced some kind of bullying, whether in school or the playground or later even in the work place. I remember being pushed, unprovoked, into the bushes by a gang of ruffians back in elementary school. It’s always the one who is different, stands out in some way, and usually alone who winds up being targeted. Those memories, often painful or just embarrassing and enfuriating as in my case, can shape how we deal with difficult situations and potential bullying in our current lives. Sometimes we respond with angry tirade; but sadly we usually respond with silence.

I offer a story I wrote that touches on this subject.

The Mark of a Genius

“I’m Jorge,” he extended his hand.

Mitch accepted his firm handshake as excitement surged up her face. She’d noticed his dignified face earlier in the crowded room of strangers and his gaze had briefly met hers then strayed away, somehow disappointing her. She was used to men looking at her. Since she was seventeen boys had undressed her with their eyes. But this man’s glancing stare betrayed a kind of recognition that sent her heart pumping in her throat with a fearful thrill: could he be one too?

[SAM], she’d sent her thought wave to her AI-partner. [Find out everything you can on the person I’m watching].

[OKAY, MITCH], SAM had replied in her head.

Mitch had caught furtive glimpses of the stranger as he wandered among the other guests then lost sight of him. She’d boldly searched the room, unconsciously straightening her dress only to flinch when she found him standing in front of her with an enigmatic smile.

“You’re Mitch, aren’t you?” he said in a pleasant tenor’s voice, his handsome lean face radiating a disquieting calm.

“Michelin,” she corrected rather tartly, fighting down her rising defensiveness; no one called her Mitch except her best friend.

“Your boss pointed you out to me earlier,” he explained, drawing her to a more secluded corner of the room. “First time to one of these, Michelin?” He waved his hand to the room.

“Yes,” she said, irked at herself for blushing. Was it so obvious? Kraken had insisted that she accompany him to this fancy outer-city party. She’d come just to please her new boss and worn the only good dress she owned.

Jorge tipped his head sideways and a network of lines radiated from his sudden blue eyes. “Kraken calls you a genius, but I know you’re just a veemeld.”

Her heart slammed and she bristled, eyes involuntarily darting around to make sure no one overheard his accusation. Now she knew why she’d been repelled and attracted to him at the same time. She’d guessed right earlier: he was a veemeld too. A rude one.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly, offering a conciliatory smile. “I didn’t mean to insult you. I’m also a veemeld. You hide it well. I didn’t sense you.”

And why should he? she thought peevishly. She’d taught SAM, her AI-partner, to keep her isolated from the AI-core, effectively blocking her thoughts from other veemelds. And Jorge was polite, not intrusive like that scruffy vagrant boy, Dexter, she’d run into earlier today near her shack in the inner-city. The little creep had followed her home again and when she’d turned to glare at him his thoughts burst into hers like the groping hands of an inexperienced lover. He’d plowed right into her mind, blundered into the front door of her brain with the excitement of sensing another veemeld’s energy field. Jorge had only flirted in a back alley of her mind, gently probing via their respective AI-partners. He’d guessed the rest.

“Your avatar is? . . .” Jorge trailed, obviously hoping she’d provide the answer.

Mitch gave him a crooked smile and obliged, “SAM. My AI-entity’s called SAM.”

Jorge’s eyes sparkled. “Ah.” He looked impressed. “Short for Samantha?”

“Smart Analog Machine.”

“Ah.” He nodded. “SAM has quite a reputation in the core. I should have known it was ‘you’.”
There followed a moment of silence, which neither offered to break. Jorge lost his smile, his mind elsewhere, as Mitch brushed chestnut hair from her face. Then Jorge leaned closer, his eyes penetrating, and confided, “It’s lonely being a veemeld, isn’t it.”

Her face flared. Unable to meet his probing eyes, Michelin dropped her gaze. She found herself staring down her cleavage past her black silk dress to her long bare legs and thinking that her dress was too tight and too short. Was he coming on to her?

“They treat us more like tools than people,” Jorge went on in her silence. Michelin looked up into his sad eyes. “When I announced that I was a veemeld in school, the other students harassed me. My bosses use me like a commodity to be traded or disposed of.” He exhaled slowly and ran his long fingers through his gray hair. “When researchers developed the AI-core and the technology to use it, they had no idea that only point five percent of the population could veemeld with it.”

“Actually, it’s 0.2%”

“Ah.” He smiled wryly. “But it is rather sad, isn’t it, how it all turned out,” he continued with a thoughtful expression. “Scientists have now proven that just through the act of veemelding, we improve our cognition, memory and learning, particularly our ability to respond to changing environmental information. We do it through activation–”

“Of theta rhythm in the hippocampus. Yes, I know. We use the high-frequency tetanic pulses generated by the AI-core to activate a particular phase of theta rhythm during veemeld.”
Jorge nodded enthusiastically. “Every part of the brain that’s enhanced in veemelds is involved in theta rhythm: the brain stem that transmits signals to the septum, which then activates TR in the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex. While normal people rely on REM sleep to activate theta rhythm, veemelds have it on all the time. Remarkable, isn’t it?” He slipped his elegant hands into his pockets. “Your whole body is a symphony of rhythms, a vehicle of spontaneous, persistent synchrony. Fireflies talk with light; planets speak through the force of gravity; heart cells share electric currents. We . . . .” His eyes fired with emotion. “Imagine what humanity could be if we all connected like a single autopoietic system in a kind of synchronal dance.”

Mitch shrugged. She didn’t usually have time for dreamers . . . and Jorge was obviously a dreamer. She indulged him anyway: “autopoietic?”

Jorge smiled like he’d won a prize: her attentive ear, she supposed. “I’m talking about the whole of our society behaving and evolving in a self-organized, adaptive way. We already do this ? veemelds, that is. Have been long before the AI-technology came along.”

She gave him a skeptical half-smile. “People ‘veemelding’ without the AI-core?”

“Proof is all around us, Michelin, in the independent formulation of calculus by Newton and Leibniz or the theory of the evolution of species by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Then there’s McFadden and Pocket independently but simultaneously theorizing that electromagnetic fields are the seat of our consciousness. Multiple independent discoveries have increased in society a thousand-fold since the nineteenth century. Did you know that? The reason is obvious: the fabric of our society is evolving into a neural network, learning, interacting and sharing toward the achievement of a common zeitgeist.”

Mitch folded her arms across her chest. “That doesn’t prove the existence of veemelds.”

Jorge’s eyes lit to her challenge. “Well, there are two schools of thought on multiple independent discoveries: that it’s a function of either social context or the qualities of the individuals making the discovery such as inventive genius. I think it’s both. I think most of our geniuses were frustrated veemelds waiting for a better vehicle to tap into ? the quantum electromagnetic waves of the AI-core ? but they made due with humanity’s subtle autopoietic system instead.”

Mitch caught herself smirking. Jorge hadn’t struck her as arrogant; yet he was suggesting that every genius from Newton to Einstein was a veemeld! But she couldn’t help thinking his premise elegant. Scientists had figured out that the unique genetic makeup of veemelds provided them with, among other things, a slightly different electromagnetic field arrangement, one better suited to sending and receiving non-local fields outside their bodies. Which explained why veemelds, alone, could . . . well, veemeld.

As though he were reading her thoughts, Jorge went on, “When McFadden and Pocket simultaneously but independently proposed the theory of a localized electromagnetic field as the seat of consciousness a hundred years ago, they had no idea what Pandora’s Box they’d opened. We now know that there are so many different kinds of energy fields with differing frequency and waveform surrounding our brains and our entire bodies and connecting us to the rest of the planet and universe, like?”

“Static and pulsed EM, quantum-vacuum fields, gravitational fields and cosmic and particle-mediated fields to name a few,” Mitch leapt in, not to be outdone. She was Kraken’s “genius” after all.

Jorgen nodded with a thoughtful smile. “I thought that perhaps all humans ? veemelds and non-veemelds ?could eventually communicate as we are meant to ? as a single autopoietic system, through the subtle force fields that embrace all life and non-living entities of our planet and universe. Imagine a world where there’s no war because we all communicate and understand one another.”

How naïve he was! “You’re suggesting that geniuses ? veemelds?” She fought down a sneer. “?are simply more in tune with cosmic forces so they can tap into? . . .” she trailed with a shrug.

“?The web of our greater consciousness,” he finished for her, quite serious. “The autopoietic network of our humanity . . . waves of consciousness.”

“Waves of consciousness,” she repeated, finding it hard to hide the jeering tone that crept into her voice. “A new kind of energy field? Surfing the consciousness wave? . . .” She felt a sarcastic smile tugging at her lips.

“Far-fetched, you think?” His eyes gripped hers. “It’s not so different from what we already know is true. EM-mediated consciousness, for instance, and non-localized wave propagation. Researchers have long known about the phenomenon of ‘collective effect,’ Michelin. The synchronicity of multicellular organisms and societies of insects are good examples of ‘collective consciousness’, and ‘social facilitation.’ Either way, we’re the key. Veemelds. We’re the nodes of the human network. I’m convinced that all humans are capable of it. They just need to be taught. By us.” He smiled wistfully. Then he exhaled and the fire in his eyes died. “Just a dream, I suppose.” Jorge stroked his jaw pensively. “If anything we’re growing more isolated and distrustful.”

His words resonated in her gut and she dropped her gaze to the floor again. It was a wonderful dream nevertheless.

Jorge pursed his lips, letting his gaze stray for a moment to a distant place. When he refocused on her, his eyes glinted and his voice took on an edge. “They fear us, Michelin, what we can do: talk to machines in our heads. Run the city. The luddites have turned that fear to hatred. They’re terrified by our unique connection with the AI-community. We’re dangerous freaks to them. Genetic monsters. Cyborgs . . . .”

Machine-sluts . . . .

“We have no mark to show what we are,” Jorge went on, “so we can choose to hide in our anonymity. The luddites would like to change that. Brand us with some visible mark. That’s one of the reasons I formed the Veemeld Alliance. Do you know about us?”

“Yes,” she said guardedly.

“But you haven’t joined us.” Jorge looked puzzled. He pulled out a durable card and pressed it warmly in her hand. “We’re having a meeting tonight, in fact. At my place.” Then his eyes glowed like a warm camp fire. “I’d like to be a friend.” His sincere expression drew her in. “A real friend.”

Longing swelled up her throat and made her swallow convulsively. She knew what he meant: a friend who knew what she was.

He tilted his head and gazed at her with intense curiosity. “You don’t have any friends, Michelin. Yet you’ve lived here for a year, the longest time you’ve stayed in one place.”

Mitch jerked her hand out of his and clenched her jaw. That wasn’t true, she fumed. She had Nancy, after all. Her best friend . . . She thought again . . . Nancy didn’t know she was a veemeld. If Nancy did, would she still be Mitch’s friend? Mitch had long ago learned to move rather than face the consequences of intimacy. Her gaze darted around the room, looking for Kraken.

Jorge continued in a soft voice, “Veemelds can be fiercely independent and secretive. Whenever we conceal something of ourselves we choose to become slaves to our secret.”

She knew he meant her.

“It’s only together in open solidarity that we can overcome the prejudice — the fear and hatred — against us. Perhaps we can teach them that they don’t need to fear us.” His eyes grew intense and she fought the urge to back away. “Michelin, we need you.” He drew closer to her and she recoiled. “Our community needs you. You’re intelligent and . . . very attractive. You’d make an excellent spokesperson for us. With your help we could take charge of our destiny and move the human race forward to embrace a harmony of diversity. Everyone needs a friend, Michelin. Including you.”

Mitch felt anger heat her face. She didn’t need his solidarity or his friendship. She’d done just fine on her own up to now. She gave Jorge back his card. “I’m sorry but I’m not interested in joining your alliance. I’m happy just being an Icarian.”

He blinked several times then stuttered, his voice rising a pitch, “But, how can you say that? You can never be just an Icarian—”

“Because I’m a . . . genius?” she scoffed and brushed past him. “Good day.”

She glimpsed his crestfallen face as she walked briskly to the other side of the room where Kraken stood, talking to another man. Kraken leered down at her and enveloped her in his arm like a possession. She felt a hollow in the pit of her stomach.

Mitch excused herself early from the party and took the tube-jet home. She watched the amber emergency lights strobe past her as the tube-jet dove into the darkness of the tunnel. She saw Jorge’s kind face in her mind and found herself thinking about that miserable day when the girls at school discovered what she was . . . .

~~~~
Eager to make a good impression on her new school friend, Mitch was helping Abbie who struggled with her Ecology 101 lesson. They shared a holo-module at the Ed-Center and Abbie turned from the holo-com to Mitch, seated beside her. “Here’s my answer to his question on the principals of Icarian ecology,” she confided. “ ‘Ecosystems develop through natural selection from generally chaotic, pioneer stages toward stable ordered stages which maintain a dynamic equilibrium through internal forces’.”

“No, Abbie, that thinking’s a hundred years out of date. Ecosystems function and change under stable chaos, naturally cycling through destructive and building phases through changing variables—”

“Nonsense!” a gruff voice scolded. Michelin flinched and looked up at the teacher who towered over her. She fought from cowering under his glare. “You’re quoting heretical theories, young woman!”

She looked into his nostrils and focused on the dark hairs inside as she said in a shaky voice, “But I read—”

“Read!” he cut her off. Several other students peered round their cubicles. “More like cheated by slutting with your AI friends for information.” The teacher leaned over her and his small eyes narrowed. “I won’t have you disrupting my class. We don’t cater to veemeld brats.” He sneered to her look of horror. He’d just given her away. “Yes, I know what you are,” he ended menacingly. He stalked away as gawking faces ducked behind the cubicles.

During break Mitch was looking for Abbie in the school mall when a classmate collided into her.

“Out of my way, veemeld!” The girl snarled.

Mitch backed away. “I’m not a veemeld,” she lied.

“Yes you are.” The girl sneered. “I heard the teacher.” Several other girls closed in on her, forming a ring.

“Veemeld! Veemeld!” they chanted, shoving her until she fell to the ground. “AI slut—”
Mitch scrambled up in angry defense. “I’m not a vee—”

A fist struck her on the mouth, splitting her lip. “Veemeld slut!”

Her lip pounded and she tasted blood. The girls pressed against her, their faces distorted with hatred. They pummeled her as the chant resumed. “Veemeld! Veemeld!” Voices built, echoing like a mantra, to the increasing rhythm of their blows. Mitch tucked her head down and raised both arms to protect her face and chest, taking the blows with her shoulders and back.

“Hey!” A teacher approached. The girls scattered like flies disturbed from a carcass. Mitch fled in the opposite direction, glancing back. “Yes, you! Stop!” The teacher shouted at her. She rushed into the closest bathroom and, finding an empty cubicle, slid in and slammed the door shut. She slumped on the toilet, elbows on her knees, and cradled her head in her hands, rocking and sobbing, and hearing the hum of those cursed AI machines in her head. She was getting tired of moving . . . .

~~~~
Mitch was the only one who got out at the inner-city station. She inhaled the familiar stink of urine, stale liquor and rotting garbage as she picked her way past shiny pools of spit and pies of dried vomit to the stairway that led outside. Mitch bolted the stairs two by two to the exit and flung open the door. She took in a deep inhale of fresh air and shivered in the bracing cool air. Wrapping her bare arms around her waist for warmth, she headed home at a brisk pace and watched the long jerking shadow of herself that the pale moon threw ahead of her. She found herself stealing glances at the dozens of bivouacs that littered the street: eclectic shacks, built out of scrap from discarded droids, abandoned furniture, even parts of an old tube-jet, and cemented with the detritus of urban fast-living. Her shack wasn’t much better but it was home . . . for now. This was the roughest part of town. Hell, she’d lived in worse places. One just had to be smart and careful—

She’d just turned a corner to the shortcut she normally took when her stomach clenched at the sound of grunts, shouting and malicious laughter that drifted up the dark alley. Heart pulsing up her throat, Mitch stole forward. When she emerged from the alley into a courtyard, she saw five teenage boys beating a younger boy—Oh, no . . . unmistakable, the chaotic hair and the rags he wore: it was Dexter, the young veemeld who kept following her home.

He must have caught her emotional surge because his head jerked round and he looked right at her even though she was still hidden in the shadows of the alley. [Please! Help me!] came his outburst.

Mitch threw her gaze around in search of another bystander. No luck. The place was empty save the boy’s attackers and her. Mitch gripped her lower lip in her teeth, feeling a surge of adrenalin. Dexter was too young and feral to command respect from the AI-community, but she was another matter. She squared her shoulders then stepped out into the light and shouted in a commanding voice, “Stop that now!”

The boys halted and stared at her. She caught several lecherous grins and pulled down on her short dress. Dexter whimpered on the ground and the leader, a square-faced boy with spiked hair pointed down at him. “He’s a freaking veemeld!” he said as though it fully explained their actions. “Stay out of it, lady.”

“I meant it,” she said and marched toward them, hands balled at her sides. “Stop right now! You’re hurting him!”

“What’s it to you?” The leader spat out. It suddenly dawned on him: “You’re one too, aren’t you? A fucking freak.”

“No way, Russ,” one of the other boys interjected, licking his lips. “She’s too luscious to be a veemeld.” Several of the other boys agreed.

She could slink out of there, Mitch thought. Like all the times before, they didn’t want to believe she was a veemeld; she could take advantage of her beauty and retreat back into the shadows. They probably wouldn’t kill Dexter. She could let him fend for himself, like she’d fended for herself all these years . . . .

Then her eyes flickered over Dexter’s cowering form, head tucked in and both arms raised to protect his face and chest. She fired back, “Yes!” she practically gasped the word and felt the terrifying exhilaration of unburdening herself. “I am.” The words surged up her throat like an electric charge, burning all the way up: “I’m a veemeld too!”

A few boys moaned in disappointment, scanning her covetously. “What a waste of good babe meat,” one of them sighed.

The leader sneered as she resumed her advance. “Once we’re finished here, you’ll have your turn,” he said. The other boys followed with enthusiastic noises. “Grab the AI-slut!” he commanded, pointing to her. Two boys dashed for her with churlish grins.

Mitch fought from recoiling but halted. “I’m sorry, but you won’t be doing that either,” she said.

The two boys sniggered.

Mitch clenched her teeth but stood her ground.

[SAM], she sent her thought wave to her AI-companion. [Instruct the security system of Liv-Building E-29 to dispose of the five boys causing crimes, beta 050 and 051. Visual through my retina].

[OKAY, MITCH], SAM responded inside her head. Instantly, several ports on the building swiveled and discharged a concussion laser beam at the five boys, instantly stunning them. They crumpled to the ground in unison like a strangely choreographed macabre ballet. The two who’d rushed her tumbled a meter from her. Mitch side-stepped them and rushed to Dexter, who lay curled up in a fetal position, entwined with limp arms and legs. As she bent over him, Mitch continued her thought to SAM: [instruct security druids of Region E to collect these five hoodlums and put them into the cooler. They can use my visual for the crime record].

[OKAY, MITCH. THEY’RE ON THEIR WAY].

[Thanks, SAM]. Mitch touched Dexter and he flinched. “It’s okay,” she said in a gentle voice. “You’re safe now.”

He looked up, wide-eyed through a bloody and dirt-smeared face. Suddenly realizing what had happened, Dexter cracked a big grin, revealing a bloody mouth, which didn’t seem to concern him anymore. “You did it, didn’t you? You got the AIs to blast ‘em, didn’t you? I knew you were a veemeld. That was awesome …”

She realized that she didn’t need to answer his steady stream of questions and exclamations. “Come on.” She helped him to his feet. “Can you get up? I’ll take you to my place and clean you up. Looks like you’ve got a few nasty cuts.”

They left the courtyard for her shack as the city’s security droids arrived. When they entered her place, Mitch pulled out her first aid kit, sat Dexter down by the sink in the bathroom and gently washed his mouth before applying some antiseptic healing gel.

“Looks like they were trying to shut you up,” she observed with a wry smile, thinking of how he’d poked his mind where he had no business being.

“Yeah,” Dexter said. “I keep telling everyone I’m a veemeld.”

Mitch snorted. “Why on Earth would you do that?” She snapped the first aid kit shut and leaned against the sink to give him a long hard look. “You don’t look dumb. So, why do you tell everyone? You’re just looking for trouble, Dexter.”

“No. Just a real friend. Someone who’ll like me for what I am.”

“And you’re willing to get beat up time and time again to find that person?”

He nodded and gave her a goofy smile despite his puffy split lip. “I found you.”

Mitch felt a strange mixture of emotions swell into her throat. “Come on,” she finally said. “I know someone who wants to meet you, then. A whole community.”

~~~~
When Jorge opened the door he gasped. “What a surprise!” He beamed with undisguised pleasure, glancing from Mitch to Dexter. “Come in, come in!” He swung the door open for them to enter. A dozen or so people pursuing desultory conversation were already seated in comfortable chairs in Jorge’s livingroom. The meeting must have started already, Mitch observed.

She waved her hand at the boy. “This is Dexter. He’s a veemeld too. Like us,” she ended with a half-smile. “I told him he’d find a few genuine friends here.”

Jorge nodded with enthusiastic approval. “I’m sure he will. Hello, Dexter.”

Jorge was about to introduce both of them to the other veemelds in the room, when Mitch touched his arm. “And,” she added in a lowered voice, “I’ve reconsidered what you asked. I’d like to try being a spokesperson for veemelds. . . .”

She noticed that the room was suddenly quiet and everyone was looking at her.

“Thank you, Michelin,” Jorge said, taking her hand and pressing it between his two.

She pressed back. “You can all me Mitch,” she said, her smile opening to a broad grin.

The Mark of a Genius first appeared in ScifiDimensions.

I’m heading off to Calgary to that wonderful SF & F convention. I’ll be gone for a week and may not get to my blog (you know, between giving panels and workshops, I’ll be doing important things like sitting in the bar with Captain Jean-Luc Picard–he owes me some chocolates– or Boba Fett…). So, in the meantime, I’ve left you a short story that is in keeping with the theme of AI, that I have started (and will resume when I return). It’s a love story that blurs the realms of virtual and real. This variant of “Beauty and the Beast” strays into the area of disturbing intrusiveness…one plausible scenario of a brain implant. “Virtually Yours” was first published in Hadrosaur Tales and later reprinted in Neo-Opsis Science Fiction Magazine and then translated into Polish and published in the Polish SF magazine, Nowa Fantastika.

Vincent yanked the V-set off his head and found himself back in his apartment, lying alone and spent on his king-size bed. The cozy cabin with the fireplace had vanished. Katherine was gone.
He stared at the V-set. His vehicle to paradise. To Katherine.

Her scent of lilac lingered in his mind as he summoned her beautiful face, smiling just for him. No, he reminded himself. Not for me. For Jake, my carrier. It was Jake she smiled at. Jake she had just made love to. Jake, who smelled her desire, felt the tender stroke of her slender legs. Vincent was just along for the ride.

His eyes swept down his deformed and gnarled body. Angry boils and scars encrusted his livid hairless skin. He remembered colliding two days ago with her in a Samson Corporation hallway and her hand had unintentionally brushed his thigh. She’d jerked back, blushing with the shame of not knowing how to avoid staring at him in revulsion. Then she’d rushed off before he had a chance to speak. Probably to wash her hand. I’m just another anonymous Corporation Overseer, he thought. A nameless ugly gnome. She doesn’t know that I’m Vincent, her Overseer, with whom she shares beautiful thoughts of life and poetry over the V-screen.
Two weeks ago she’d boldly begun to offer a few friendly comments at the end of her progress memo. He’d responded with his own and found himself looking forward to her messages more than anything else during the workday. When he opened them, he clicked straight to her post-script, leaving her formal report for later. He recalled the message she’d sent him last week that had started everything:

“Do you like poetry, Overseer? It is one of my passions. I’ve read a lot of Milton lately. Granted his writing is over 400 years old; yet he evokes in my soul a yearning for Eden. Do you think Eden can exist on Earth? Perhaps it is our destiny to long for it.”

Up to then she’d used her worker code-name as salutation: “Cheers, V-screen USER 134872”. This time she’d signed, “Virtually yours, Katherine.”

It was as he reread her signature over and over, that he’d come up with his ingenious scheme to track her down among the hundred roaming workers in the Samson Corporation research lab by assigning a carrier to work with her. It had started out innocently enough. He’d only wanted to know what she looked like. It was Sen Tech’s fault.

His SenTech holo program and the V-set’s link to a sensor embedded in Jake’s forehead gave Vincent the next best thing to having Katherine. Thanks to Jake, who didn’t even know he was providing Vincent this service, SenTech permitted Vincent to see, hear, feel and taste Katherine using Jake’s senses. Jake had no idea of Vincent’s access to the implant or that Overseers typically used them to spy on their carriers. Jake only knew that the implant provided him with enhanced cognitive abilities. Being connected directly to the central computer database was a great advantage to him in his work as Vincent’s data manager.

Hoping to make the meeting pleasant for her, as well as for himself, he’d selected Jake as his carrier based on what he’d ascertained of Katherine’s physical tastes in men. But once he saw her blush with desire at Jake’s perfect physique, smelled her hunger and felt Jake’s heart throb, he knew that he’d wanted more all along. This would be a good ride, he’d thought, and immediately prepared his AIs for full surveillance. Jake moved fast. Following their initial inflamed encounter at Samson Corp, Jake enticed her to his secluded cabin, where he seduced her. Vincent was unprepared for the sweetness of it and how it inflamed his own forgotten desires. Through Jake, Vincent felt like a consumate lover, drawing her out patiently, using gentle, tender strokes at first then matching her escalating rhythm. She was shy though not coy and wonderfully responsive. When the lovemaking had ended, Vincent felt strange, as though he’d betrayed himself. Moved by the experience, he’d wrenched off his V-set and wrote her an E-note as her anonymous Overseer. He’d heavily quoted Milton.
“She’d never look at me the way she looks at Jake,” Vincent said, glancing down at his mishapen body. Mildred, his model 20 AI droid, glided to the bed and touched his shoulder. It said in a tinny voice, “She does not know you are her Overseer, Vincent? Perhaps you should tell her, she might like you—”

“No, Mildred,” he snapped. He imagined compassion in Mildred’s round green eyes and let his voice soften, “She might like communicating with me as her anonymous Overseer, but I’m afraid this is the only way she’ll ever look at me that way.” He placed the V-set on the nightstand. “She could never love me.” Vincent let out a long breath and stroked the V-set. “But I’m content with what I have.” A wry smile crossed his lips as he wrestled with a pleasure edged in guilt. His creative use of SenTech’s surveillance capabilities definitely stretched its intended use. “Does that make me some sort of pimp?” He eyed the folds in the sheets then stroked the sheet. Resting his gaze on the leopard-skin of his hand, he murmered, “So be it. At least I’m a harmless one.”

“The library inquires as to whether you wish to save this SenTech scenario as Katherine 1 for later use?” Mildred rasped.

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently. He brought the sheet to his face, wanting to savor her scent, knowing he would smell nothing, and clenched the fabric into a ball. With a cursory glance down at his gnarled body, he jerked to his feet. “Save it.”

~~~~

“He’s so damn ugly. Like some monster from a bad movie,” Fanny whispered to Katherine as they looked for free workstations two weeks later. Fanny stared through the transparent panel to a hunched figure in the office perched above them. He was one of twenty Overseers in the Research Department of Samson Corporation, but Katherine knew which one Fanny meant. There was only one ugly Overseer.

She stole a glance up to where he paced like a feral cat, eyes flashing at them. She felt her face heat. Embarrassed for him, she quickly looked away. Of course he hadn’t heard Fanny. But surely he knew what they all said about him. Could read it in their churlish glances and smirks. The glabrous skin of his face and head looked like melted wax. Its smooth surface was blemished with islands of angry bubbles and crevasses that resembled burning lava. She couldn’t help thinking of the rumor that he’d actually caused the fire, which had nearly taken his life and killed several people. They’d been experimenting with a new product at the lab. The explosion took his three colleagues, including his fiancée.

“You wonder why he doesn’t get some major surgery done,” Fanny continued as they claimed two unoccupied workstations. “In this day and age, when nano-reconstruction’s so attainable, it’s as if he wants to look that way, to scare us all.”

Punishing himself, Katherine thought, and felt her eyes sting. If Fanny could only look beyond his ugly shell into those eyes of gentle sadness and vulnerability. She remembered when they’d bumped into one another three weeks ago in the hallway and her hand had accidentally touched his thigh. He smelled of smoke and metal. Their eyes met and she blushed like a teenager. He had the eyes of a poet. She’d turned away without a word and fled. He’d probably thought her rude.

“Fanny, he’s probably a G-type,” Katherine said, glaring into space. She yanked at her chair and let herself drop into it. “G-types can’t handle the side effects of nano-construction.” Her fingers slid furiously along the alpha console, activating her virtual support and accessing the network with her code. Instantly, her station housed itself with a set of files, a virtual bookshelf filled with books, and a vase with flowers.

“Okay,” Fanny said, settling into the chair next to her. She activated her virtual support: stacks of files with documents and papers and a poster of a naked man. “You don’t have to get snippy about it. You’d think you liked him or something.” She gazed into the distance. “I’m glad we don’t know who our Overseers are — or they us. I’d die if he turned out to be mine. Imagine if he was your Overseer, Katherine! How awful! What irony: beauty and the beast. It’s like he knows it too, knows how absurd that would be — never looks at you.”

Katherine felt her face crimson. Or was it that he detested physical beauty? Found her reprehensible.

“Fanny leaned into her and cocked her head. “He might as well be an AI20, alone up there in his ivory tower, anonymously giving orders to some of us peons. Ugly as sin and cold as metal.”
Katherine recoiled. “Fanny!” She focused on her computer screen, surprised at the yearning that stirred inside her. He wasn’t a machine. More like a wounded animal. No one knew the name much less the identity of his or her Overseer. But when she’d defied protocol two weeks ago and signed with her name, Katherine, he’d followed suit with his: Vincent. She knew Vincent was the beast. Felt it in her heart. Vincent’s “voice” and the beast’s eyes spoke the same truth. But where the ignoble beast howled baleful regrets to the moon, this beast quoted poetry to her.
No, not to her, she corrected herself. She was just another rude employee who bumped into him once. He didn’t know she was V-screen USER 134872 — now Katherine — who sent him progress memos, and lately shared her personal thoughts with him. She clicked on her saved messages and found the one she was looking for, Vincent’s response three weeks ago to her silly remark about poetry and Milton.

She’d reread it several times and every time her heart flipped when he used her name:
“I admire your passion for poetry, Katherine. Does it not strip prose to the very essence of what drives our soul? If you believe in destiny, then each of us is already a story waiting to be written; mine would be a tragedy. Alas, my burning desire for knowledge destroyed the thing I most loved. I do not expect to find Eden in my lifetime here on this Earth, or elsewhere, for that matter.

“You have made me curious to read Milton. His poetry remains relevant to this day. Perhaps you are right about our longing for Eden: ‘These lull’d by Nightingale embracing slept, and on their naked limbs the flow’ry roof show’r’d roses, which the morn repair’d’.”
Following her lead, he’d signed “Virtually yours, Vincent”.

Three weeks later they were still sharing personal philosophies and always found an opportunity to quote Milton.

“Now, that’s more like it!” Fanny’s strident voice cut into her silent rapture. Katherine jumped in her seat, swept the screen clear and looked up, face burning in anticipation of finding Fanny looking over her shoulder. But Fanny was gazing at a man striding toward them. Katherine sighed and felt a surge of pleasure. Jake. She’d met him just over two weeks ago, when Vincent had assigned them a joint task.

“Now there’s a specimen.” Fanny said. “What a perfect body and face. Bet he’s a great lay.”
Katherine blushed. She appraised Jake’s showman’s eyes, firm jaw that easily supported the loose smile he always wore, and a seamless brow partially hidden beneath thick curls of chestnut hair. Yes, he was a knock out. And exciting.

“You’re a lucky girl.” Fanny sighed.

“Yeah,” Katherine said, sensing her own hesitation. “Lucky.” Although they’d been physically intimate many times already, she still didn’t know Jake. His charm and humor masked a reserve of quiet depth — or nothing? Could he sustain a loving relationship with her or was Jake just lustfully infatuated with her?

“He’s a carrier, isn’t he?”

Katherine nodded. “Carries a piece of the V-net inside him.”

“That’s why he’s so swift and enlightened.”

Katherine nodded. She didn’t consider Jake exactly enlightened. Swift, perhaps. He’d managed to get her in a prone position the first day they met and every day after that.

“You’re so lucky, Katherine. You’ve got it all.”

Katherine swallowed. She’d been considering breaking off. Jake seemed more interested in using his mouth for kissing than for talking. After two weeks of wonderful sex, she began to long for the serenity that came with sharing an ordinary life with another person. She and Jake didn’t seem to have much in common. They’d never conversed like she and Vincent had on the V-screen. Jake was a bored realist. And he took no interest in poetry. She resolved to break off, before he dumped her for another lustful jaunt.

“Hi, girls.” Jake tussled Fanny’s mop then glided to Katherine like a panther. Gathering her long hair back with both hands, he bent to kiss her on the neck. Her decision blurred at his seductive touch. Jake seized her hands and coaxed her up from her seat. “Come.” He grinned like a boy hiding a lizard in his pocket. “I have something to tell you.” He led her away from the workstations toward the lounge.

“What is it, Jake?” Her eyes darted around her and she looked annoyed at him. “People are watching.”

“I can’t tell you here. Tonight. Meet me at Samson Square, Level 2 at 23:00. That’s when my evening shift ends. Promise?”

“Okay.” She looked down, wondering how she was going to break the news to him.

~~~~

“I love you,” he said, pulling her toward him. “Marry me.”
Her throat swelled. Was that his news? She had come to tell him she didn’t love him, she was in love with another man. A poet.

“I need to tell you something, Jake.”

“Later, later,” he whispered in her hair, pulling her into an alcove of an abandoned shop. “First my conversation.” He caressed her ear with his lips and played them over her neck and face. It sent a shiver through her. She closed her eyes and thought of Vincent: ‘with thee conversing I forget all time’. She let him maneuver her to a dark corner. He kissed her eyelids, her cheeks, her hair. Perhaps she’d been too harsh. He wanted to marry her, after all, to share an ordinary life together.

She helped him shrug out of his clothes and smelled his longing. Let him undress her, pull her down on top of him, taste the hollow of her shoulder, her breasts, her nipples. She imagined Vincent’s trembling hands, his tender glance. His fingers exploring, diving into her dark longing for him. She shuddered, surrendering to her passion. ‘Flesh of flesh, bone of my bone thy art’. Later, she thought. Then thought no longer.

~~~~

Something nudged Vincent awake. “Katherine is with her lover,” said Mildred, peering down at him.

Vincent roused himself, wiped the sleep from his eyes and croaked, “Library, connect with SenTech sensor, subject carrier Jake. On screen.” Katherine’s face appeared on the huge screen on the far wall. She looked straight at him with longing. Her lips parted as she drew closer. Vincent flung off the covers and sat up, naked, ignoring his misshapen leopard-body. He snatched the V-set from the nightstand and pulled it over his head, letting the translucent screen cover his face. “Library, activate SenTech virtual program. Save this scenario as Katherine 17. Remember to voice-over ‘Jake’ with ‘Vincent’.”

The room disappeared, replaced by a dark corridor. He lay on the cold surface of the grimy floor. Her warm body slid over him and he smelled the sweet spice of her desire. Perhaps he could find Eden on Earth after all! He felt himself firm and whispered, “‘Part of my soul I seek thee, Katherine, and claim my other half’.”

She drew back and peered at him with wide eyes. Then she tilted her head, gave him a searching look, and leaned forward. He felt her breath on him. “Vincent?”

His heart soared. “‘How can I live without thee, how forgo thy sweet converse and love so dearly join’d, to live again in these wild woods forlorn’?”

She stared at him in astonishment, then broke into a wonderful smile and kissed him. She whispered into his hair, “‘With that thy gentle hand seiz’d mine, Vincent, I yielded, and from that time see how beauty is excell’d by manly grace and wisdom, which alone is truly fair’.”
Frantic for her, he clasped her and thrust into her moist haven. She gasped. “Oh, Vincent! Vincent!”

His spirit soared like a falcon to her tender loving. When it was over she leaned her cheek against his and murmured, “I love you, Vincent.” He closed his eyes. If this were only true, he thought. It felt so real. When he opened his eyes she was staring at him with intense wonder. “You’re crying. . .”

Vincent wrenched off the V-set and blinked the tears from his eyes. The room returned. He was back on his bed. The screen was dark and she was gone. Vincent glanced down at himself, covered in his own semen. He let his eyes flutter shut and clung to her sweet words of love, ignoring what he knew — that her uttering his name was the computer’s doing — and imagined the sweet perfume of her love mingled in his own.

Then he bowed his head and stared at his shriveled hands. They looked like withered twigs, infested with parasites. His body a hideous monstrosity. It was obvious that she loved Jake. How could he ever think she loved him.

He swallowed down his emotion and stumbled to his feet. Clearing his throat, he said, “Please clean up the bed, Mildred. I’ll be in the shower.”

“Do you wish to save this scenario?” he heard its tinny voice behind him.

“Yes, yes,” he growled. This was the only way he could have her. “Tell the library to flag this one with four stars.”

Vincent caught his own reflection in the hall mirror and stopped. The stretched skin of his face glistened like plastic that had been meddled with, its integrity destroyed. He pulled at the single tuft of hair on his mottled head and, feeling the pain, stared into his own narrowed eyes in challenge.

The crying, the poetry, were surely his feelings and thoughts, not Jake’s? Yet Jake had expressed them to Katherine. Up to now Vincent had been convinced that SenTech provided strictly a one-way conduit from carrier to Overseer. SenTech was designed to help Vincent sense everything that occurred to his carrier, but only as an active spectator. What just happened with Katherine implied that Jake had acted on a subliminal message from Vincent. That he, Vincent, had initiated action. He blinked at the realization and saw his eyes widen with excitement, then guilt and dread.

What have I started?

~~~~

Katherine lay upon Jake, her cheek pressed against his furry chest. She gently stroked his hair. “You were so sweet to quote Milton,” she said. “I had no idea you’d taken an interest.”

Jake brushed his eyes with his hand and looked baffled. “I’m not sure why — how. It just came out of my mouth. I’ve never read Milton. You’re the one who reads that stuff.”

Her lips curled in sudden amusement. She liked seeing him vulnerable. “Perhaps a poetic muse has invaded your mind,” she teased and ran her fingers through his curls. He’d shown that beneath his reserve there lay a depth she’d never suspected.

He thought for a moment. “Perhaps I should start reading it.”

She buried her nose in his hair, inhaling his musky smell. “And, the crying—”

He drew back, embarrassed, and shot her a dark look. “Why did you call me Vincent? Who’s Vincent?”

“Did I?” Katherine swallowed. When they’d made love, she’d lost herself in his eyes, imagined for a brief moment that he really was Vincent. Spirit and flesh mingled into one whole. She bowed her head. “He’s only a character in a virtual game I was playing,” she said casually. Vincent could never be really hers. Uncomfortable with her outer beauty, he’d irrevocably isolated his physical self from her. Didn’t want her. She’d been sharing “love-notes” with a phantom. But Jake was physically here with her. She could touch him. Could feel his warm breath upon her face.

And he loved her. She knew that now: no one had ever wept for her before. He’d even quoted poetry to her. She decided against breaking off. Maybe there was a little of Vincent even in Jake.

In the meantime, I’ve left you a short story of mine. Arc of Time was first published in The Armchair Aesthete (Pickle Gas Press) in 2002. It has since appeared in the Romanian avant-garde speculative ezine, Imagikon. Then it was picked up by Ultra! and more lately SFera Online. Now it’s here, an ancient Earth tale retold by an alien…

The Arc of Time

I-net correspondence from: F. Y. Benoit, Ph.D.,Paris, France
to: Dr. F. Wolke, Bonn, Germany
September 6, 2096

Dearest Friedrich,
I missed you at the World Sustainable Environment Congress in London last week. Where were you? I thought you were going to come? You should have heard Dante Sarpé. He captivated the congress right from the start with an introductory quote from the 20th Century social ecologist, Aldo Leopold: “Ecosystems are not only more complex than we think, they are more complex than we can think.” Describing the grave environmental calamity facing us as a symptom, Dante challenged our present paradigms and values to achieve peace and harmony. He submitted that our insatiable thirst for knowledge reflected unease with ourselves and a lack of partnership with our world.

He moved me with his parting words, Friedrich: “The branch of the tree cannot bear fruit of itself. Without compassion to fill it, knowledge is an empty house, casting its shadow on our courage to embrace the paradoxes in our lives: to feel love in the face of adversity; grace when confronted with betrayal.”

The conference was very well attended. Over 3,000 scientists and socio-economists came from all over the world. I wished you’d come, Friedrich. I drank my coffee alone, longing for your stimulating company.

Love,
Françoise Yvette

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A breeze braced the boy as he scrambled up the mountain. When he reached the old woman’s hut at the summit, he shielded his eyes against the sun and saw her, stepping with fluid movements in some meditative exercise. He crept closer and watched from a distance as Da’at performed her graceful dance, limbs coiling and slithering to an inner rhythm.

After completing a full turn, she pulled her rags about her and faced the boy with a nod.

He stepped forward. “What were you doing, Mama?” he asked. Da’at was not his mother, but she had looked after him since before he could remember. She always called him her blue-eyed chosen one.

“They will call it Tai Chi Chuan,” she said in a deep voice, easing herself to the ground and crossing her legs. “It is an exercise of the will, mind, and body toward the Way of Nature. Something you must learn, boy.”

“It was beautiful.” The boy squatted beside her and looked into her green eyes. Her motions had reminded him of the elegance of the cormorant and the spring of the furry Purgatorius.

“The purpose of the movements is to transfer the Chi, or the intrinsic energy, to the Shen, or spirit, by using inner rather than outer force.” She trained her gaze to the bright sun and her eyes sparkled like emeralds. “It brings me closer to my eternal love who dwells now only on the shafts of light and the whisper of the wind.”

The boy tilted his head and squinted, trying to grasp the meaning of her strange words. She often spoke cryptically, expecting him to understand.

Da’at turned to the boy. “If you practice Tai Chi long enough and execute it properly, you will become reconnected with the unity of everything, including the fourth dimension.”

“What is the fourth dimension?”

Da’at smiled wearily. “Time, my chosen one.”

The worn lines of her masculine face resembled weathered rock. She had always looked old yet she never seemed to age. “Is that why you can see into the future?” the boy asked, rocking on the balls of his feet.

She folded her arms on her knees and her thick brows knit together. “Future? What is that?”

Before he could respond, she added, “You have much to learn about time and space, boy. Do you think we inhabit one place and one time? Our universe is not only more complex than you think; it is more complex than you can think.” A dove flew overhead. Da’at gazed up at the bird and raised her hands in supplication. “My Shekhinah, I sense your presence here. How will my chosen one acquire wisdom when you elude us like the shifting wind?”

Reminded of why he’d come, the boy moved onto his knees and leaned forward. He focused on the dark hairs on Da’at’s chin and, taking a deep breath, he said, “While I was napping in the forest, I had a strange dream. About a faraway place unlike any I’ve seen. Full of huts taller than the Gingko trees and so many people like me, crowded inside them like ants.”

Da’at nodded to herself. “The dove has spoken to you.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear Françoise Yvette,

I regret not seeing you at the WSE Congress. I have a favor to beg of you, mein Schatz. You must conduct some discreet research for me on Sarpé. His seminar at the WSE Congress proves my suspicions of some self-serving motive to his messianic leadership of our foundation. I know what you will say: that he’s considered a genius and a visionary by his peers and members of the traditional scientific community. He’s a hypocrite! No one’s that altruistic! That Teufel snake is up to something. He’s using the foundation for some personal mission that he isn’t sharing with the rest of us. Why indulge the simpletons of the world with the philosophy of our new prototype society? God forbid he intends to include them! I don’t trust him, Françoise. There’s something strange about that effeminate man. I know too little about him and his history. See what you can find and forward it to me with haste.

Alles Liebe,
Friedrich

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“I dreamt of a huge hut that rose into the sky and glinted in the sun,” said the boy. “Inside, it was crowded with people like me and you — none of those hairy ones who cannot speak. There were smooth tables and chairs made of strange material. And strange colored objects. I was there. I was one of the people! What does it mean, Mama?”

“You have dreamt about your destiny and your past.”

“My destiny?” The boy looked down and picked at the purple Calluna bush beside him. “But I want to stay here with you, in the forest and on this mountain. Safe from—”

“And renounce your destiny?” Her voice slit the wind. “You have a gift for seeing, boy. You must develop it. That is how others like you will learn.” Da’at pressed his shoulder with a firm hand. “Come, my angel, soon it will be time to become a man. I cannot complete your training by myself. That is why you must heed the dreams sent to you. Look for their messages in the wind that stirs the trees and in the shafts of light that filter through the forest.”

The boy leaned forward, “The dreams, then, are real?

“They will be,” she said, smiling wistfully. “What else do you remember?”

He squinted his eyes and gazed over the blue mist of the Ginkgo forest, focusing on his dream. “An old man with a sad face who was kind to me. I called him Father.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I-net correspondence from: F. Y. Benoit, Ph.D., Paris, France
to: Dr. F. Wolke, Bonn, Germany
October 2, 2096

Dearest Friedrich,
As requested, here is the information I was able to obtain on the subject of our mutual interest. I now find Dante even more fascinating than before and am convinced of his genius and visionary abilities. So, rather than focusing on negatives, I suggest we consider how my gift in empathy and yours in telekinesis can be used to further Dante’s International Research Foundation in Parapsychology. Having said this, I agree with you that much about him remains a mystery. Here are the facts I managed to find:

He has no birth record and no medical records. He first “appears” in 2049, when he registered at l’Université de Lyons. Dante Sarpé was a brilliant student. He received an honors degree with distinction and pursued his masters in ecology there, then he obtained his Ph.D. in physics and genetics at the University of California Berkeley. He became a post-doctoral fellow at the University of London and continued studies in ecology, psychology and animal physiology. Then the Institute of Vision offered Sarpé a position as researcher and associate professor in energy mastery and vision psychology. That’s where he met his significant other, Apollonia Buto. She taught paleo-ecology there at the time and together they wrote several papers on the medicinal properties of the prehistoric passion flower, Passiflora. In 2074 they co-founded the IRFP and the rest I think you know.

I tried to find out more about his earlier years but came up with nothing, as if he had suddenly appeared from nowhere. I also found a curious bit of nothing, Friedrich. In my attempts to discover more about him, I scanned his picture into my database. It was then that I made the odd discovery of his “doubles”. Two of them, a woman and a man. Their resemblance is striking! The woman, Datinella Snok, lived in the late 20th Century in the United States and the man, Dato Slangéka, in 19th century Russia.

Out of female curiosity, I suppose, I checked up on Apollonia Buto. Would you believe that she, too, appears from nowhere? Here is the most curious bit — she also has identical counterparts: a man, Anthony Orm, who lived in the late 20th Century in England and a woman, Antonia Kigyo, in 19th century Hungary. This piqued my curiosity as a geneticist. Do you know the odds of this sort of thing? They are astronomical and worth investigation. I include all six images at the end of this file.

When do you come for a visit? I long for your company. Do you remember the International Vision Conference last year? The IVC this November is held in Oslo. I’m presenting a paper on the genetics of dreams. Meet me!

Love,
Françoise

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~

Da’at sighed. “That old man in your dream created a ship that crossed time and space. The one you flew in when you were too young to remember.”

The boy followed Da’at’s gaze to the volcanic mountains that rose like fisted warriors in the distance.

“The foolish old man thought that he could instill pure light in mortals and begin again,” she said. “His eternal mate warned him against it. Mortals are not meant to travel as we do.”

She gave him too many riddles; he decided to start with the old man. “What happened to the old man, Da’at? And those who flew with him, like me?”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I-net correspondence from: F. Y. Benoit, Ph.D., Paris, France
to: Dr. F. Wolke, Bonn, Germany
January 7, 2097

Dearest Friedrich,
I enjoyed your company at the IVC in Oslo and savor our delicious speculations about Sarpé and Buto during our extended coffee breaks.

I have incredible news! Anxious for some answers, I took your suggestion, Friedrich, and sought Dr. Buto while I was in London to teach my workshop on Evolutionary Genetics at the Institute of Vision. She was there to speak with Prime Minister Smythe about the cadmium deficiency syndrome that is reaching pandemic proportions throughout the world. I managed to surreptitiously obtain a tissue sample by rubbing against her with a micro-sampler. I gave it to Gordon for analysis and he soon called me to his lab, eager to know where the sample was from.
Friedrich, she’s not human! Her unique DNA more closely resembles a reptile. Genetically, she is also neither female or male, but both! I immediately thought of her doubles and my imagination reeled at the possibilities. With some alarm I feel these events playing out for me like a déja vu. I fear Dante is like her. But what exactly is that? Friedrich, what does this mean? What have we uncovered? I fear we have bitten off more than we can chew.

Love,
Françoise.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Da’at’s lips curled into a bitter half-smile. “Only you and another survived.”

“Who?”

“I was the old man.”

The boy stared at Da’at. “You!”

“I once had an eternal mate, one like me. Bound through soul, spirit and flesh, we sailed the waves of time and space. We came here long ago to help the chosen ones. But, because you only look forward, we were soon forgotten, except in myth and legend, and the chosen ones grew irreverent. When she was destroyed, I became trapped in this space, able only to move in time. Shortly after arriving here with you I became as I am now.”

The boy wrinkled his nose. Why did she always speak in riddles? “But you’re not a man!”

“Neither am I a woman,” she said and blurred for a moment. He blinked and she became solid again.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I-net correspondence from: F. Y. Benoit, Ph.D., Paris, France
to: Dr. F. Wolke, Bonn, Germany
March 9, 2097

Dearest Friedrich,
I have incredible news. We were right, Friedrich. After much hesitation I finally processed the tissue sample I secretly got from Dante. Here is why: I was so clumsy about it I was sure he knew what I’d done, Friedrich. Can you imagine my humiliation? In the collision, he scratched me and I stumbled to the ground and almost dropped the micro-sampler. But after studying my face — I blushed with shame — it was he who apologized. He said, as he helped me to my feet, “I’m so sorry. I did not mean to make you fall.” Then he smiled in a fatherly way and went his way. Anyway, I found that his DNA complemented Apollonia’s.

I imagine these hermaphrodites are shape-shifters who live for very long periods of time (those doubles comprise at least 300 years!), switching sexes with one another in some kind of biological renewal every century or so. Since there is no photographic technology prior to the 18th Century, we can only speculate on the true age of these creatures. What do you make of it, Friedrich? You have been so silent since we last saw one another.

Why don’t you respond to my messages? You don’t return my calls. Are you annoyed with me for hesitating on processing Dante’s tissue sample? Perhaps now that I have, you will answer. Or are you just too busy making arrangements with those chosen for the journey in Dante’s ship? I’m still disappointed that I did not make the “cut” (I’d hoped you would have vouched for my talents as an empath, yourself being one of Dante’s favored ones). Anyway, I will patiently await your return. I hope you find a safe haven for us to begin again.

By the way, did you hear about Apollonia’s freakish accident? A tube-car slipped off its track and collided into her. She was killed instantly. They suspect the car was tampered with but can not determine how. Weren’t you and Dante in London that day to discuss logistics for your travel plans? You must have just missed her. I’m sure Dante is devastated by the news.

Love,
Françoise

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Da’at gazed into the distance with sad eyes. Smoke the color of carbon coiled up from a distant volcano. “I made a grave mistake. I replaced the substance of my eternal mate with a mockery. Mistook artificial for genuine light. Then a rage overcame me for it. It is for this reason that you are here in this new world, come from the clouds. Why you grew up with only wild animals and a foolish old crone to keep you company.”

She folded her arm around the boy and drew his head near hers. The boy leant against her rough body and felt her shake with silent sobs.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I-net correspondence from: F. Y. Benoit, Ph.D., Paris, France
to: Dr. F. Wolke, Bonn, Germany
February 10, 2098

Dear Friedrich,
Your cold silence has sealed my conviction of your deceit and self-serving motives. You’ve used my friendship. And once you got what you wanted, you discarded me.

Trifle with me if you like. Since my discovery of Apollonia’s and Dante’s interesting other-worldly heritage, I investigated you as well. I discovered that during Dante’s time of grieving over his mate’s untimely death, you’d gathered many supporters among the journeying IRFP who share your elitist vision, including a young woman whom you’ve made pregnant.

I submit that you killed Dante’s Apollonia with your telekinetic powers — probably to unbalance him and subvert his power. I further submit that you intend to seize his leadership in the IRFP by exposing his alien origin once you arrive at the new world he spoke of.

You don’t intend to return for the rest of us like Dante promised, do you, Friedrich? You plan to remain there to lead your own elite cadre while we rot here in the pestilence of humankind’s deathrows. Leave us here, then, to face apocalypse. I stand ready, and an inexplicable peace fills me. Heaven help you find peace where you flee. For all your superior gifts, you are still, like me, only human et enfin je te pardon.

Salut, mon ami,
Françoise Yvette Benoit

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Da’at placed her large hand on the boy’s head and unfurled her slender body. She stood up and stretched her sinewy body toward the sky. “You have worked hard, tending this beautiful garden, gathering my knowledge. It’s time I revealed myself to you.” Her head drooped and her shape hunkered into a ball.

Da’at’s hoary form vibrated, then blurred. The boy scrambled to his feet. Parched skin transformed into overlapping scales. The boy stared with pounding heart as the old woman’s hunched form uncoiled and rose into a monstrous shape. He shrank back and drew in his breath. The giant serpent reared its head high above him and hissed.

“Don’t be afraid, child,” said the serpent. “I am still your dear Mama.”

The boy studied the creature and his fear slipped away. The creature sounded like Da’at and the boy recognized the kind old woman’s eyes peering directly into his.

“This is my true form,” said the snake-creature, bowing its head. “Can you still love something as hideous as this?”

“But you are still my Da’at who’s been so kind to me, so good.”

“Yes, I am good,” the serpent said. “But without my guiding light I have become dangerous. When I discovered that my favored disciple betrayed me, I destroyed him in anger and all those who followed him.” The snake-creature coiled and uncoiled its form. “Only you survived, my chosen one, plucked like an angel from the darkest cloud. Wolke’s gifted son. Then, with blood-stained hands I fashioned from your genetic material and another’s a woman so that you may complete your journey. Alas, I shall eternally long for that which completes me.”

The creature wept. The boy swallowed down his own sadness and sensed the creature’s pain and loneliness. Like the old man in his dream, Da’at had always looked sad. “Don’t be sad, Mama.” Instinctively, the boy reached out and touched the scaly form. He longed to quell her sorrow. “You’ve taken care of me all these years and taught me so much. I’ll stay with you.”

The snake’s head bowed close to his. “Your destiny lies elsewhere, boy. Deep in the forest lives a girl of your kind with whom you will create a new race. For she is also bone from your bones, flesh from your flesh. Her “mother” was a compassionate and beautiful, though somewhat overly curious, woman who should have joined us on the arc. Alas, my traitor told me she did not wish to make the journey and I believed him. But, by happenstance I had earlier obtained her genetic material from a sample of her skin I got when she, out of scientific curiosity, purposely collided into me with a micro-sampler. So, I mingled her essence with yours. It is no surprise that the girl is intelligent, beautiful and full of light.” Da’at leaned back in silence to look him over. “Now, boy, it’s time for you to live a man’s life and take a man’s name.”

The boy blinked, unsure of himself and a little afraid. “What’s the girl’s name?”

“Like you she has no name yet. Her “mother’s” name was Françoise Yvette Benoit. I imagine the girl may fashion hers from that.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Peggy Kolm features a wonderful interview with me here on her blog, “Biology in Science Fiction“, a site that merits a visit (even if I wasn’t on the feature post!). I’ve been interviewed a few times (here’s one with Denise Fleischer at Gotta Write Network). Peggy asked insightful, intelligent and challenging questions that had me thinking (lucky I’m now a thinking blogger, having had that little thinking alien award bestowed upon me by Somerset Bob!). Peggy also devoted some quality time to researching my biography, my books and general items of relevance. And it showed; it made a difference in her questions.

This reminded me that it isn’t a piece of cake to do a good interview. Having done a few in my day, here are a few things I would suggest to any prospective interviewers (things that Peggy got all right, by the way!). When you do an interview you should:

There ya go…

In keeping with thoughts on endosymbiosis, autopoiesis and other wonderful biological words, here’s a story of mine that speaks to them…Hope you enjoy it…

Julia’s Gift

I inhale deeply to savor the freshness of the air and raise my face to the bright sun bathing in an azure sky. I begin to climb the stairs, avoiding the thousands of people watching me. I falter and nearly stumble as my thoughts sink like a stone in water to Julia and what she did: to that cursed day twenty-nine years ago when her actions determined who lived and who died and to the day much later when she ended the curse she’d placed on herself as a result.

Why did she do any of it? Maybe it was because she was the middle child in our family. Psychologists like to say that the middle child acts like an immobile bridge between roles of leadership and childish irresponsibility. Best able to see both sides of an argument, they usually make good diplomats but falter when faced with spontaneous decisions. Like a fish out of water forced to breathe air, Julia gulped in leadership and action against her nature . . . and destroyed herself.

How different the course of events might have been if she hadn’t acted so boldly that spring day twenty-nine years ago. Would I be here, walking up these steps now? Would Simon have survived? Would Julia still have jumped in front of the tube-jet seventeen years ago? Or would we all have died along with our parents that spring day?

~~~~
The blood-red dawn promised a warm spring day. By mid-morning the smell of Montreal had dissipated and the sun felt like a heat lamp on my face as I stepped outside the farmhouse, scrambling after my older brother and sister. They were both tall and long of stride, wearing functional bows and arrows slung over their warrior-like shoulders, while I trotted behind like their pet dog. I didn’t mind. I was only ten years old and Simon and Julia were my heroes. They took me on forbidden adventures in the forest. Our parents didn’t allow us outside the farm property because of the threat of stray revolutionaries, but Simon and Julia flagrantly disobeyed them. It probably started on a dare that escalated out of hand. It was as much that dare as anything else that ended up saving one life, sacrificing another and damning the third.

We often spent the better part of the day in the forest and fields beyond the farm property. And it was only Simon, who usually made the decision in the first place to stay all day, who had the presence of mind to bring along food, which he seldom shared. During our journey Simon would usually throw a glance back once or twice to make sure I was still keeping up and rebuke my snail’s pace: “Hey dreamer, hurry up or we’ll leave you behind!” Julia would snap at him in my defense: “Claire’s only ten, you idiot! So slow down for the runt!” They would always argue. “Well, you slow down too, then!” he’d shout back. “I slowed down for you already, slug!” she’d rejoin. On it would go as they shoved each other until I caught up to them. They were less than a year apart and I think Julia resented Simon being the eldest and the one who made all the decisions. She wanted to make them but she never did, so she always disagreed with his.

The day started pretty much like any other day. Simon and Julia were arguing as usual by the time we reached the forest. They’d overheard a discussion between Mom and Tante Lise about the revolution. We moved to the country last summer to get away from the fighting in Montreal. Mom and Dad lost their jobs because of the Gaian revolution. The company they worked for, BioGen Technologies, went up in smoke along with the latest flame bombings and Mom got scared that the Gaians would come after the survivors, mainly Dad, who was one of the head honchos there. So we packed up and came here to my Oncle Pierre’s and Tante Lise’s small dairy farm in the Eastern Townships, where the air smelled clean — well, cleaner than the cities, anyway.

Mom and Dad met at BioGen in Montreal. She was a junior microbiologist in “functional genomics” with unorthodox ideas and he was one of their chief scientists in nano-technology and transgenic research. BioGen was supposed to save the world but then one of Dad’s “creations” got away from them and crashed the world’s wheat crop.

“Tante Lise shouldn’t call Dad Frankenstein,” Julia grumbled. “He isn’t a monster.”

“It’s ‘cause he made monsters, stupid,” Simon snorted. “Frankenstein’s the name of the mad scientist, not the clone monsters he made.”

“He’s not a mad scientist,” she defended. “And they’re not monsters!”

“The Gaians say they are,” Simon remarked, picking his teeth. “They say that BioGen’s just another multi-national company that’s making too much money. They say BioGen’s technology is irresponsible and that stuff Dad did is wrecking our ecosystems like diversity, evolution and stuff.”

“What do the Gaians know, they’re luddites,” Julia snorted with disgust, parroting what our father always said. I knew she didn’t know what a luddite was. “Dad just made a little mistake once. Some DNA escaped and went rogue on them. Part of the risk we have to take in GE crops.”

“Yeah, like widespread famine,” Simon muttered, shaking his head.

Julia frowned with worry. “Tante Lise isn’t a Gaian . . . is she?”

“Dunno.” Simon shrugged and absently raked back his mat of straw-coloured hair with his hands. “She doesn’t like what Dad was doing. Lots of people think it’s wrong. Even Mom.”

“Mom’s just scared they’ll find us,” Julia grumbled. “She’s scared of everything,” Julia murmured more to herself than to Simon, as if trying to convince herself.

As we stepped out of the cool dappled forest into the warm sunshine of a small clearing, Simon announced that we should eat some lunch. I was happy to comply.

“It’s only ten-thirty,” Julia objected.

“Well, I’m hungry. So it’s time to eat.”

“You can’t tell me when to eat,” Julia said tartly. “Pig!”

“That’s because you only brought along some crackers while I made three sandwiches for me! You’re never prepared,” he said smugly. “And now you’re jealous!”

“I’m not jealous,” Julia said haughtily. “I’m just not hungry.”

“You are.”

“Am not!” Her face went pink.

“Are too, dork!” He laughed then promptly sat down on a patch of matted long grass and swung out his backpack. Without waiting for either of us to agree or even join him, Simon fished out a peanut butter and raspberry jam sandwich and bolted it down with gluttonous pleasure as I longed in silence. He wasn’t a particularly tidy eater and left a smear of red jam on his chin. I noticed that his cheeks were flushed already from the heat and sweat glistened on his nose and forehead.

Julia stomped around then finally dropped down and threw her arms against her upraised knees, glowering at her older brother. Even if she was hungry she wasn’t going to admit to it now. I was ready to confess my hunger in hopes of receiving a morsel, but Julie glared at me as if she’d read my mind. My shoulders drooped in defeat.

Once Simon finished his first course of lunch, we plunged back into the forest out of the burning sun. The deer flies buzzed furiously around our heads amid wild arm waving and frustrated outcries. Simon led us up a hill toward a large hemlock grove. He scrambled a steep incline to a narrow long ledge that may have once been a path. The forest floor was carpeted with dead needles and tiny fallen cones and dotted with young maple saplings. Like a man who had found gold, Simon bent down and gathered a handful of cones then darted behind a tree. Julia waited for me catch up before she scrambled up then shrieked at the deluge of cones Simon flung at her face. He sniggered as she practically fell backwards on top of me then swore furiously at him, her face red with embarrassment.

“Come on!” Simon said enthusiastically. “Let’s play war!”

Eager to play, Julia ran for cover and gathered her own arsenal of weapons.

“You can’t use your hands!” Simon warned just as Julia was about to throw some cones at him. “You have to make a slingshot using a tree like this.” He squatted over a young sapling and bent its branches into a mutilated mess, fit a cone into his makeshift catapult, pulled the sapling back than let it spring naturally towards Julia. The cone flew past her head, barely missing her. Both participants shrieked with pleasure.

As Julia and Simon collected their cones, I, left out of the game as usual, sat back like a dutiful and appreciative audience to watch their creative entertainment. The warriors shot in earnest, sometimes hitting their opponent with a victorious cry, other times — most of the time — missing widely. In the process the poor saplings they used were swiftly demolished and they had to forage for a new catapult. During one of her forages Julia tripped on an exposed root and fell headlong to the ground with a hollow thud. When she didn’t get up right away, Simon jeered, “Hey, clone monster! Get up!”

She jerked to her feet, wiping her head and pushing back her thick mane of chestnut hair and tucking it behind her ears. I noticed a cut on her dirt-smeared forehead. “Don’t call me that, you moron!” she spat out, temper flaring.

“You’re the moron! You never do anything on your own,” he bit out. “That’s ‘cause Dad made you out of spare parts back at the lab!” That line was usually reserved for me and I was used to it. But Julia couldn’t bear the insult.

“You shut up!” she screamed. “I’m tired of your snotty remarks about Dad. You can keep them to yourself–”

“Until he gets us all killed when they come looking for ‘Doctor Frankenstein’!” Simon mocked.

Julia bolted at him, hands lashing out like raptor’s talons. He jerked out of her clawing hands and tackled her. They rolled among the dead leaves, hands swiping and legs kicking. I couldn’t tell who was winning but both were crying.

“Stop it! Stop it!” I pleaded and tried to pry them apart. I finally succeeded but only after receiving a kick in the stomach.

Simon stood up first, nose bleeding and an eye already swollen. “You bitch!” he screamed down at her as she pushed herself off the ground and wiped her dirty tear-stained face. “You crazy bitch! You don’t care about Mom. You’re just like Dad: he should have thought about us before he went and made all those monsters!”

“Go to hell!” she shrieked. “You haven’t a clue what he was doing. He was feeding the hungry of the world!”

“Yeah? Meantime we’re polluting it so much we’re killing everyone we’re feeding!”

“Can’t we do both with the same tool?” I piped up. “Like the plants?”

“What?” They both turned haltingly to me like I was an alien who’d just uttered gibberish.

“Feed the hungry and clean up the pollution,” I said. One day while my brother and sister were in school, my father had pulled me out of school to take me on a tour of the BioGen facility and show me their artificial photosynthesis lab: “How marvelous,” he’d exulted, “if we could copy what chloroplasts do and plug directly into the sun without burning a drop of oil. No more hungry people. No more fossil fuel and no more pollution.”

He’d dropped me off at my mother’s lab and she’d shown me holo-images generated through electron tomography of mitochondria and chloroplasts. While my father had dedicated himself to feeding the starving masses, my mother dreamed of a world where people no longer needed to eat. The mitochondria and chloroplasts shared a common ancestry, she explained to me. They both descended from earlier prokaryotic cells that established themselves as internal symbionts — endosymbionts, we now call them — of a larger anaerobic cell. The similarities between these two organelles were uncanny, my mother went on: for instance, they both contained their own DNA and ribosomes; they divided by themselves and used the same enzyme to produce energy in the form of ATP. The only major difference was how they produced ATP. While chloroplasts used chlorophyll to capture the sun’s energy, mitochondria broke down glucose in the food we eat. Inspired by my father’s tools and my mother’s vision, I soared on a dream of people capable of photosynthesis in a Ciamician world.

“Dad told me,” my words rushed out in a torrent, knowing I had seconds before they ignored me again, “about a scientist named Giacomo Ciamician who a hundred years ago dreamed of a world where photosynthesis did everything for us–”

Julia took in a sharp breath and turned back to rail at Simon: “You’re so narrow-minded, just like a Gaian, just like Mom!” She retrieved her bow, scattered arrows and quiver. “Come on, Claire.” Julia took my hand with a last glare at Simon who was brushing off the mess from his shirt and pants. “We’re going home.” Without waiting for me to decide, she led me at a brisk pace back to the farm.

“Do that!” Simon yelled after us and sat down on a rock to sulk. I turned my head for a last glimpse at him as Julia tugged me hard down the hill.

“Shouldn’t we wait for him?” I asked innocently when I lost sight of him.

“He can find his own way home,” she muttered, tugging me harder. “He led us here, didn’t he?”

I staggered over the rough terrain to keep up, secretly praying that Julia knew the way. It wasn’t Simon I was worried about. The sun disappeared behind carbon-coloured clouds. They scudded overhead like prey, chased by a biting wind. It howled and sent the Trembling Aspens thrashing above us. Their lanky poles clanked like bones to the moaning wind as the leaves hissed a mad chorus.

“What if we meet a bear?” I asked, starting to feel unsafe.

“There aren’t any bears in the forest, Claire,” Julia said shaking her head sarcastically at me. “Besides, I have my bow and arrows.” She tapped her quiver and bow smugly. She was right, I thought, pacified by her confidence. She was good with that thing and I was a little surprised that she didn’t remind me of the four rabbits and two coyotes she’d killed while all Simon had managed to do was wound a rabbit with his.

We broke through the perimeter of the dense forest to the farm as rain pelted us like missals, instantly drenching us. As if the stinging rain warned her, Julia gripped my arm to stay me and I saw her eyes harden as she threw swift glances to the open garden gate, the greenhouse whose door was ajar–

I squeaked in surprise as she clamped a hand over my mouth. “Shhh! Hold still!” she hissed, glaring at me under streams of wet hair. Then she let go and I couldn’t stop trembling while she snatched her bow and loaded it with an arrow. As if in response to her move, the front door of the farmhouse creaked open and a large unshaven man with unwashed hair and eyes glinting of malice lumbered out. He carried a loaded sack in one dirty hand and a blood-covered knife in the other. The man spotted us and I hitched my breath, stiff with terror, not daring to blink the rain off my eyelashes. He grinned, baring yellow teeth, and stomped toward us. I scrambled behind Julia and clutched her shorts leg.

Julia glanced from the man’s churlish grin to his knife and raised her bow. He laughed at her. She didn’t know that our parents and relatives lay dead inside. Yet without hesitation she drew the bow back and let the arrow fly. It sunk into his chest and he inhaled sharply, eyes bulging in disbelief. Then he charged us. I cringed and wet my pants. Julia stood like a statue, her arm a blur of reloading, and struck him with two or more arrows before he staggered and fell dead on his face metres from us.

Gruff laughter from the side of the house warned us that there were more men. Julia seized my arm and dove for cover in a small thicket by the cherry tree just as Simon broke through the forest into the clearing. I shivered, cowering in our wet hiding place as several men marched past us toward the dead man. Toward Simon. Simon stood not far from their dead colleague, hair hanging in his eyes and bow in his hand. They made the logical conclusion.

He must have made his own rightful conclusion and his eyes fleetingly strayed, searching hard, beyond the thugs to where we huddled behind them. Did he see us there? I imagined that he did. But before I could see more, Julia shoved my face down into the dirt. What I didn’t see I could only imagine as my heart slammed up my throat: Simon’s and Julia’s eyes locking, their anguished message of agreement. The rest I heard through the hissing rain: a slashing sound, a clipped gasp and a thud. I was choking but didn’t dare struggle. Hot tears stung my eyes. Julia’s firm hand, now shaking, kept me down for an eternity of smelling dirt and rotting vegetation. Of feeling the wet prickle of soil and leaves against my face. Of listening to men’s grunts and shuffling steps wither to a constant sizzle and plopping of rain.

I was young but I knew perfectly well what had just happened: Simon took the hit for us and Julia let him. The first — and last — decision they’d made together was one made in complicity.
~~~~

Julia and I made it out of there, after she confirmed that Simon was dead and found our parents and relatives murdered inside the house. We had a difficult journey but were eventually taken in by a kind family where we rode out the remaining years of war until the Gaians established a new government and peace was reinstated.

I found a calling in micro-biomimicry — the Gaian’s answer to mindless technology — at Concordia University in Montreal. Julia never returned to school. She got a job as a waitress and helped me through university. I met André, a med student, and eventually married while Julia wandered like a nomad from one relationship to another. We saw less of one another and I started to think she was avoiding me. When she committed suicide I was shocked. But not surprised.

Had she been running the same thought loop I had? How it might have played if she hadn’t instinctively killed that Gaian.

Had she needlessly killed a man — albeit a murderer — and needlessly caused Simon’s death? If we’d run instead would they have chased us or let us go? They were paid assassins, after all, on a mission to ‘take out’ our father. Not child murderers. Maybe Simon would still be with us and Julia wouldn’t have destroyed herself out of irreconcilable loneliness. . . .

Or had she tapped into some divine providence when she let the arrow fly and saved my life the only way it could have been saved . . . at Simon’s expense . . . and consequently her own? . . .

~~~~

I turn to the audience and spot André and our two children. They blur through my tears. As a scientist I understand that one cannot know the future or one’s destiny; but my heart tells me differently. Like most things for him, my brother’s choice was clearly laid before him. For Julia, as always, it was not so simple. And yet, that spring day she became more than she was and with fluid motions enacted her part in the cruel miracle that brought me here today.

The heaviness in my legs lifts as I make the last steps to the podium in the open-air auditorium that celebrates our clean air. I am finally ready to accept my Nobel Prize. And I know at last what I am going to say:

I’m here today accepting this award for the creation of photosynthetic symbionts in human mitochondria because of my brother and sister. I share this honor with them. If not for their heroism of that day long ago, I would not have survived with the burning motivation and tenacity to pursue a lifelong dream: to serve the human race and the planet with the gift of an alternate and clean source of fuel and food — a way for humanity to directly harness energy from the sun . . . Julia’s gift.

~ The End ~

Well, it’s about time I told you a little more about me…I’m a limnologist. No, that isn’t someone who studies limbs. It comes from a Greek word limnos, which means fresh water. I study fresh water (e.g., lakes, rivers, ponds), and everything that’s in it and around it. Heck, I even received a masters of science degree in it. I worked for a while in several universities and colleges, teaching biology courses, then decided to get out into the “real world” and became an environmental consultant. It means that I get to zoom around in speed boats, take water and sediment samples then analyse them and write reports for clients that teach them how to be good environmental citizens (see my posts on environmental citizenship–May 14-17, 2007, posts).

One of the things I do in my work is study water quality, what affects it and how to fix it. Limnologists define water quality in terms of its chemical, physical and biological properties. There’s no magic bullet to measure water quality; we use several measurements in a kind of weight-of-evidence approach. Water quality is somewhat subjective, based on perspective. For instance water used for drinking can be used for irrigation but not all water used for irrigation is potable or will meet drinking water standards. A common phenomenon that limnologists study is something called “eutrophication”. Eutrophication describes the natural process of aging for a lake or pond, with the gradual input of nutrients and sediment from erosion and precipitation. When the process is sped up through the release of nutrients and industrial and municipal effluent and poor land use practices, then we have a problem. Enhanced eutrophication is characterized by algal blooms (that scummy layer on the surface), excessive weeds, increased pests and fish kills.

Here are a few facts about water that might interest you:

• Some very simple organisms can survive without air, but none can grow without water.
• About 83% of our blood is water. It helps digest our food, take in oxygen, transport body wastes, and control body temperature.
• Freshwater lakes, rivers and underground aquifers hold only 3.5% or the world’s water. Saltwater oceans and seas hold most of the rest.
• 30% of the earth’s fresh water exists as ice in the form of glaciers and ice caps.
• Canada has more lake area than any other coutnry in the world.
• 10 litres of water is needed to manufacture 1 litre of gasoline.
• 1000 kilograms of water is required to grow 1 kilogram of potatoes.
• One litre of oil can contaminate up to two million litres of water.
• Many homes lose more water from leaky taps than they need for cooking and drinking.

Next post, I’ll talk a little bit about urban waterways and their unique properties and challenges.

The cover of my new book, “Darwin’s Paradox” is out and it’s BEAUTIFUL! Don’t you agree? A large part of the story takes place within the self-contained megalopolis, Icaria (formerly Toronto), where people live contentedly inside and connect via underground trains and giant malls (sound familiar?) Note that most of the buildings are in a state of ruin, overrun with vegetation; only some of the larger buildings remain in good shape. They are Icaria, thrusting up through the decrepit chaos of the past like a rising phoenix that soars into a blushing sky. The cover art was done by the accomplished Croatian illustrator, Tomislav Tikulin (www.tomtikulin-art.com/), whose art work I find transporting, evokative, eerie and thoughtful. I am honored that “Darwin’s Paradox” is graced with his vision.

“Darwin’s Paradox” is now available for pre-order at Amazon.ca or Amazon.com.

My SF sensual romantic thriller, “The Cypol” published by eXtasy Books in October 2006, was nominated for the 2006 Ecata Reviewer’s Choice Award. Here’s part of the review: “…The Cypol is a different type of romance…The ending is poignant yet appropriate. Ready for something different yet rewarding? The Cypol by Nina Munteanu is well worth your time.”