BOOK 4: Into the Nowever
Chapter 1: Closed Camera
AT AN EARLY GONGSTROKE BRETT WEIR (AKA THE LYRICAL PRANKSTER) WAS FINALLY BROUGHT for judgment in the Supreme People's Court in the fiefdom of MENAGERIE. In accordance with the venomous scheme of the arthropod Jackie Tung, the Maker of the Menagerie, the trial was being held closed-camera, all justice-loving persons excluded from the court (save the properly elected representatives of the People's Court, who embodied all the justice you could ever need.) This is kind of how it happened. The Prankster was led in by a single guard into the cavernous bowels of the Menagerie space station, close to the very heart of the hub. Brett Weir had proposed that the time was not a one-dimensional line, but curved like a conch. Such a heresy had not been heard by the Reptiles since the days of the Ancient Greeks! Add to that, Weir had been convicted of tampering with the underwear of some Hooters personnel (but it was only in self defiance!) "Under your benumbing eye, my Excellence," the Prankster riposted, "I have just one thing to say: time does not exist. It is an illusion. They used to say that time travel was not possible, they proved it by a paradox: imagine you invented a time machine and went back into the past and you murdered your earlier self. You would therefore cease to exist -- but if you ceased to exist, how could you have invented the time machine at a later time, and then how could you have survived to murder yourself? Therefore, you would suddenly come back into existence -- a vicous cycle, an impossible loop. But I say the past is not set in stone. It rearranges itself to fit the present and the future. Life itself is a paradox, and impossible loop nobody can solve. In fact, there is no such thing as time. Or rather, time is three-dimensional, the same way as space. Welcome to the sixth dimension. That's all I can say at this point.vChapter 2: Air G-Strings
A concept for a movie made in the style of Stanley Kubrick: imagine a frisbee spinning over a beach to the music of Air on the G String by Johann Sebastian Bach elegantly morph into the rotation of a space station in Earth orbit. From chicks in G-Strings, to a heavenly string ensemble playing in the key of G. SKYBRIDGE NEUBASHI CONNECTED THE CENTRAL HUB OF THE MENAGERIE SPACE STATION WITH its outer torus. Babel Thorgarten and her flock lived in a coniferous belt of the torus with a commanding view of the skybridge and, rotating out of view on the inverted horizon, an anarchic reconstruction of Weimar Berlin. Babel lived on the outer torus of the Menagerie and she liked nothing better than watching the glass elevators lifting residents, tourists and support crew the 800 or so meters of glass tubes that extended all the way to the hub, far above them. in terror. Of course, the skybridge was as safe as any in orbit around the Earth, and its name represented a perfect marriage of German and Japanese infallibility. A prototype, however, the design was never replicated across the space station because most humans feel nervous riding in a glass elevator 400 meters above the simulated ground, regardless of whether the gravity was real or now. It was that animal instinct in them, that instinctively feared high places. Unlike them, she had never been scared of heights. Hence why, the Menagerie was the perfect place to hang. She could ride up and down the elevator all day long, and still not get bored. It was the coolest spoke ever!AT "NIGHT" BREEZES WOULD through the conifer forests and stir the tender curtains of Babel's nest. She had lessons with the court astronomer, an offworlder named Aradshir. She trained her jewel-crusted telescope on the Southern Cross while he discussed its meaning. The lower orbit colonies were for trailer trash... those stations were under continual drag from the atmosphere, and eventually plunged back to Earth. The Menagerie was in a geostationary orbit, well beyond the exosphere, and thus immortal. On a Supernatural tangent, perhaps the Menagerie is actually Heaven, held afloat by Enochian Magic.
Chapter 3: Poon Maru
<<YO POON, BETTER GET YOUR ASS DOWN HERE PRONTO," Gunther Gross shouted. Gunther Gross, as a rule, didn't talk, he shouted. You could typically hear the guy from three blocks away. Paradoxically, when he really wanted to get your attention, he whispered. That's when you knew he was really pissed -- that or getting emotional. A conundrum of conflicting stereotypes and personality types was our boy Gross. It was impossible to categorize him.Chapter 4: The Punch
AS SOON AS JULIAN PUNCHED OUT DEAN AT FLORA'S ACCOMMODATION NODULE IN ANTARCTICA, KARAFILPA KNEW THAT TIME WAS UP. It was actually a multi-armed punch from her perspective, with at least three "aspects", and its impact literally shook the world. The punch not only floored Dean, who honestly deserved it, but at the same "time" knocked Tyson to the ring a few hundred kilometers to the west. In the symbolic sphere, the movement manifested in the attack by Paval Poznyak and his miscreants on the Creswell Corporation stadium. This was the moment that Karafilpa had been patiently awaiting, for countless eons. This was the end of history. Carriad tossed the final piece of bread to the sparrows and (careful not to look at the Zeppelin) ambled back in his house. From outside and even within (to the untrained observer at least, to all the pizza delivery men and visiting sales reps) his home was a Georgian terrace, a little modest but not too unappealing, nothing out of the ord. Wallpaper and carpets and toasters and stuff. Looks can deceive: the house was just a holographic ruse! If only the teenager delivering a biryani or mutton curry dish could see, with eyes beyond space, that the address was actually home to a Martian BraneStormer interplanetary cruiseship, a vehicle from another world. In through the backdoor lay a vast control room vaguely akin to that one on The Enterprise, computer consoles and podiums and pulsing gassy orbs, a handful of strange Martian animals (like jewelled reptiles, but warmblooded and smart), a couple of Martian underlings. They saluted Carriad as he entered (in the Martian style of course -- a quick flex of their facial muscles.) They had been sitting here in the heart of Hamstead for more than an English century now, just keeping a watch on the natives. Put it this way: HG Wells' invasion did actually happen, but not in the way he told it. The story and the mythology it generated was just another hologram, designed to mislead, and the Martians had never left. That was the truth behind the illusion, but the illusion was punctured, the illusion was starting to deflate.For billions of solar years, She had inhabited the body known as the Earth, coming into being Herself as it coalesced out of the nebula cloud. She matured as the planet did, as it evolved from a molten mass, silently watching as it cooled and developed a solid crust, surmounted by an atmosphere of a lighter elements. The crust cracked into chunks, each with own sub-deity, and purpose. Iceland and Japan were demonstrations of elemental power, while America the land of the free, and Australia was the land which time forgot. Africa was the great labatory. She waited in the shadows, always passive, but stupendous enough from the human perspective to earn Herself a multitude of names. To Hindus she was Prithvi, while the Andeans called her Pachamama, the Goddess of the Earth. In Celtic mythology she was Danu. The Greeks knew her as Gaia.
In Antarctica, they called her Karafilpa. The name had Austronesian roots although nobody knew for sure... <<Commence Mayan Intervention Protocol>> she ordered said, and for the first time in more than a century the BranestormeR was on the move. Not flying up, like a jet plane, but digging down, to the South Pole. You see, the human belief that Mars is actually somewhere "up there" is another fallacy, a symptom of the hologram. From Son Carriad's perspective, the surface of Mars lay just under the surface of the Earth, like a deeper layer of the onion. The BranetormeR extended shovels and spinning drills, and began chewing itself down, past the bombshelters and subways, through the fiery core of the third planet. Except this view was multidimensional, Branic, and the normal constraints of human vision was removed. The inside of the Zeppelin became its outside, and the future was written all over the past. . Up until now, however, the humanoids had proved rather clueless in the arts of deep perception, the occasional Buddha or Christ figure excepted, and Karafilpa had been reasonably free to let it all hang out. As the Hindus and Romans understood, every planet in the Solar System had its own resident deity. On top of that, every continent had its purpose: . While India the land of religion, and Antarctica the most precious of all, for it was reserved for the postindustrial era. It was the true "Promised Land", reserved for humanity until its moment of arrival had come. Preserved for millions of years at the far end of the world, more recently snapfrozen by snow and ice. "Inform Lord Carriad of My arrival," she said. <<Estimated arrival time>> the Underling said "three point five minutes.>> And by the time the CIA and their European colleagues had scrambled to Hamstead, all they would find would be just a hole in the ground, a gap in the row. Another mystery for the sensationalist press.However, as a Surveyor, he was stunned to find himself suddenly the surveyed. What a reversal! The Zeppelin was ostensibly a tourist ride, of the type that could be seen all over the capital these days, but Karafilpa knew this one was different. The sistah had been merely feeding the raps of bread, enjoying the light of the sun on her face, and ready to take a ramble in the nearby park. But in that instant, as the wind rustled petals and feathers in the quiet yard, Karafilpa knew the game was up. It was time to get out.
Karafilpa welcomes all these innovations, for humans are the mind of the Earth. Murdoch is my friend! Jacky Tung is my friend! Let 10infinity flowers bloom!50 Million Hues of Rainbow
IN THE EONS before melanin mutated, humanity was shaded in a spectrum which ranged from milky white to buttery brown, and on to jet black, or if pheomelanin was sprinkled into the mix, yellow or red. They were one-dimensional spectrums, 50 shades of grey, but even that limited range of variation often proved too much for the bigots of the Earth. It caused no end of division. Unfortunately for them Gaia (Karafilpa) waits for no man, and once 2012AD had arrived, the moment of alchemy was due. Willem Boonzajer prophesized: "Ordinarily, black plus white equals grey. However, through alchemy, black plus white equals rainbow." 50 million hues of rainbow, to dazzle the eye and reduce the old world to cartoonish simplicity... Glam Skincare made it possible.
Murdoch Consciousness
A TESSERACT OR HYPERCUBE IS A GEOMETRIC OBJECT THAT EXISTS IN FOUR DIMENSIONS, WHICH IS ONE DIMENSION MORE THAN OU USUAL THREE-DIMENSIONAL WORLD. It can be thought of as a cube that has been "extruded" into the fourth dimension. Just as a cube has six faces, a tesseract has eight cubical cells, 24 square faces, 32 edges, and 16 vertices. Whereas the volume of a cube is given by the length of each side(s) cubed, the volume of a hypercube is s4. Like most humanoids, Meen E was oblivious to the higher dimensions and was not aware that he himself with his six faces was just one cube of a tesseract, otherwise known as a soul group. He also could not see fully the BranestormeR when it emerged from the rock and ice beneath the foundations of the stadium. It felt like an earthquake to him, and it is indeed true that Karafilpa's arrival triggered a seismic rupture recorded around the world. Since he was a Californian, earthquakes didn't scare him. He was crouched over Tyson's chest, blood dripping from his knuckles, and ready to slam him one right in the kidney. Tyson was doubled up, looking at E with the closest thing to sheer terror in his eyes the rapper had ever seen - even when he was pointing guns at people. And try as he might to stop his razored fists, try as he did to stand up and flee this dastardly scene, Meen E whacked Tyson in the gut and then in the side of the head. Blood spurt all over him, and Tyson hollered in pain. Dimly aware of the confusion around him, his body like it was acting under remote control, Meen E punched Tyson all over and said, Feel this, pussy! Then the ring collapsed, and Son Carriad came striding through the wall to meet his Mum. A huge blast tore through the stadium, a frigid gust of wind following the predicable noise and dust. Then the crowd screamed, cameras flashed, and the lights went out. Taking advantage of the confusion, Tyson elbowed the rapper aside, jabbed him in the head for good measure and scurried to the protection of his personal ambulance crew. In a heroic effort to quell the bloodshed, the referee tried to tackle Meen but Meen just palmed him aside like a ragged doll. Meanwhile, the crowd was going berserk. As he paused to clean skin and flesh from his razors Meen became aware of a phalanx of security types gathering ringside. That could be a problem. But before they mounted an assault a huge blast tore through one end of the stadium, an extremely cold gust of wind following the predictable noise and dust. Meen E was looking around for a coat or something to shield him from that polar wind when several smoke cannisters landed on the stage beside him. He kicked one into the baying Colesseum, was lining up the second when something else came flying towards the ring - a man on a [flying fox]. He was dressed in paramilitary attire with a balaclava and Es first presumption was that it was one of Murdoch's security detail. He positioned himself in front of his trajectory so he could give him a face full of sharp steel on his arrival, but the assailant quickly pulled out a small pistol and popped a dart into his chest before they even connected. The dart punctured the armor and artificial muscles and managed to penetrate his actual skin. Meen slumped to the canvas, trying to remove the dart, but then his senses blurred, and his thinking slowed, and began consciousness. Murdoch! he thought. The last thing he remembered was the man in the balaclava scooping him up in his arms, smoke and dust and the frenzied click of the paparazzi cameramen. [Two Towers sample, to be meshed in. Croon flying on a rocket backpack.]IT WAS A GOOD E, and they gave him another one several hours later, and then he conned his way into getting the blunt ends of some joints (for strictly medicinal uses). In other words, by tea-time Meen E felt mellow enough to join the rest of the settlement for dinner. As they marched down a dim tunnel Mustafa said, We are a community of about 1200 people who live in a series of interconnected caves about 18 kilometres from the Australian Tuggerah research station. Our economy is based on hydroponic agriculture, light industry, computer telecommuting; theres some hunting. Actually our chief purpose is to subvert the influx of mining and other corporate activity into Antarctica, the only continent left on this planet which could be truly called pristine... The nurse coughed, Mustafa apologised in a foreign language, and he changed his tack. The settlement is called (جبل قاف" or Jabal Qaf in Persian. Though inhabitants are drawn from all corners of the globe, Jabal Qaf has its own language, culture and religion. Mustafa stopped at a small Buddhist style shrine cut into the tunnel wall, put his hands together, said softly, Kala kula Karafilpa. They walked on to the dining chamber, at least 100m2 and hung with fat lamps, tobacco and marijuana smoke, smoldering incense and stalactites. There was a fresco covering almost all of the roof, though coated with soot and grease; penguins, puffins and auks crowded the perimeter, along with vistas of icebergs and glaciers and the aurora australis, but in the center there was a woman so beautiful it nearly stayed the black heart of Meen E. Stars blazed in her eyes, rainbows danced in her hair, while angels and cherubs dressed in 00s street fashions hovered in the outer reaches of her halo. Dont get so excited, kid, Pozynak chided him, she aint no fucking woman. Or at least, no woman that you can fuck. There were several hundred people in the chamber, gathered at rock tables or else sprawled on furs on the floor; laughter and talk and spices from 16 ethnic dishes filled the air. Mustafa explained the tribe were developing an indigenous cuisine, although the concept of penguin kebabs and roast seal still repelled many inhabitants. The herbivore/omnivore split is shaping up as one of the bigger political issues in this place, Pozynak said, finding them a plastic table in the middle of the cavern. Herbivores claim the only way humanity can complete its ascendancy over animal consciousness is to become fully vegetarian. There are others who say eating meat brings about divine communion with animal spirits and actually bridges the sub and superhuman kingdoms. Each to their own, I say. But if only cuisine was our main problem. He clapped his hand, and a young man wearing a pink dyed fur appeared to take his order: the specialty of the house gruel and reconstituted milk. We dont have any cows here, the Ukrainian conceded. Unless you count the seals, Meen E said. His memory revived by amphetamine and THC, looking around the place and especially at the ceiling, Meen remembered his assignment at Tuggera and his dreams of the native Utopia. Suddenly everything made sense. I knocked out Dean Coombes, he blurted, and his accent was educated Australian. He accused me of being a poofter, but he was the real poof." "That's Jules," Pozynak explained. "Actually, he is the only one of us that's real."
JET STREAMS CRYSTALLIZED in a crystal sky, naked children tobogganing in the virgin snow... Well, this had to be the strangest tangent of a tangential career. Halfway through the media event of the century, hes the star and suddenly the lights go out, smoke grenades are exploding all around him and hes being kidnapped by a green man who claims to his genetic clone. As if his professional alter-egos had grown bodies, come to life... all while Croon was out for a packet of fags. Lying in his granite cot one night, steadfastly refusing more drugs so he could regain some clarity, the hilarity of the situation dawned on him. As if it could be true! Shit, he thought, Tyson must have hit me harder than I thought. Hed been duped. Mustafa Hasan was a fraud, a scam; how could they have convinced him otherwise? This cave, the whole operation was thus suspect as well. But why? There were schemes within schemes within schemes, and Croon felt sure the CIA was implicated in most of them. His occupational instinct was to hang around for a while, check the place out, get a feel for the case and the mythology of this unusual world. Maybe this was just another subversive tribe the CIA wanted to infiltrate and understand. But where did the man with the Mustafa Hasan mask fit in? Was he a secret ally? Lying in his cot one granite night, Croon plucked a speed pill from a bedside tray and rammed up his clarity. But somewhere else in the still concussed corners of his mind, very unclear emotions were threatening to erupt. That night he has another dream lifted from Wuthering Heights. Early the next day he cant control his anger, and resolves to escape. In the process he knocks out a couple of Antarctican pussies. This worried him, as he knows he is not normally this violent. He leaves one of the cave exits, decides to run, but an internal mental struggle keeps him still. While he is outside, he sees what looks like his real body go down another cave entrance, and gives pursuit.
Nathan Maguire surveyed the scene through a pair of infrared binoculars -- he surveyed the scene of the devastation. <<The general's warnings should have gotten through in time>> he growled. Maquire was the polar bear of the south. <<Why didn't they just shut the fucking thing down?>>
SUNLIGHT SPLAYED IN a field of daffodils, ramparts topped with royal standards, spice smells and girls in mordant market-places: Quilff was as pretty a Queendom as you'd find in all Creation, but its tranquility was beginning to impose an inverse feeling of fret upon Bjork's sweet heart. All she seemed to do these days was fight. Even her halcyonic friendship with Croon was starting to disintegrate, and she was worried that not even mushrooms could bridge the growing rift.
Chapter 20: Into the NoweveR
ELEPHANT & CASTLE TUBE STATION, LONDON: SPORES PUFFED out over the city from the floating Zeppelin balloons, endlessly, like it was some kind of coral mating season in the sky. Reproductive space spores everywhere, miniature HG Wells' Martian death squads, as omnipotent as smog. Hurling himself to the pavement, Cassius Croon (aka: Marc Spoon, Frank Sloon, Pet Store Napolean) literally had to stop breathing to avoid them. Shalom intuitively sealed itself to his face contours, confiscated his wind organs, commenced filtering and recycling his internal air supply. He was sealed, airtight, but pissed off. What the fuck was going on? Somewhere from across town, Croon's clubbing partner Strife was calling him on the keitai. A window opened on Casio's face, between the atmospheric plume results and the latest news from CNN. DEATH BLIMPS HIT LONDON...POP STARS CAUGHT IN PANIC Croon flipped open the receiver, spoke urgently through the speakers in his elegant Israeli mask: "Stife, this ain't no time for jokes, but I'm afraid we're in strife..." Pulling his cloak around his head, Croon ducked down behind a pile of newspapers, fired Abraham II high into the everdeadening gloom. Make that bloom. The flare flowered a kilometer or so up, a brief lightning sheet behind the fungal clouds, Armaggedonic. Abraham II faded as if it had never existed. Down on the ground, you couldn't see more than 10 metres in front of you now, the smoke was that thick. Croon realized there was a family sheltering behind a nearby newspaper stand, near the subway mouth. They were hyperventilating. "It kind of makes you wonder whether the Government wants to kill a couple of people, just to reap the electoral dividends," Strife pondered. It was a typical thing for him to say, but not on camera, and Croon became concerned. What was going on here? Had he swallowed too many mushroom spores? But magic mushrooms took more than five minutes to take effect -- even if they were modified, Croon himself was still sober now (but how he was looking forward to the onrush!) "I didn't get that, can you repeat?" he asked. A flicker passed across Strife's face, and the walls which had hitherto been concrete behind him seemed to glow green for a second, as if they had been impregnated with chlorophyll. Some creatures wandered on to set, like demented aliens on Dr Who: green humanoids with eyes on protruding stalks, humming cicada wings. They seemed to be sticking bits of trash (clothing, plastic bottles, foodstuffs, newspapers and so on) all over the walls. "What are they doing?" Croon asked, wondering if he was stoned himself.
The Man Who Freed Fridays
The holiest day of the week according to Islam. Surah Al-Jumu'ahNew Newfoundland
IF THERE WAS ANYTHING TO BE SAID FOR THE BENEFITS OF GLOBAL WARMING, THIS WAS ONE OF THEM - IT HAD SURE OPENED UP SOME SWELL OPPORTUNITIES FOR FLY FISHING. Take Greenland as a case in point. When Professor Ichiro Sato, the world's foremost expert on the search for extraterrestrial life (ET), was growing up in a concrete rabbit hutch in Tokyo, the best fishing to be found was hunting zarigani (crayfish) in the local concreted stream, which the kids scooped in little nets during the long humid summers. At that time Greenland was naught but rugged mountains and glinting snow, nothing but Inuit and ice, and as remote and forbidding as Hell itself. Sato back then probably didn't know the exact figures, but up to 85 percent of the island's surface used to be covered by ice - a permanent ice cap up to five kilometers thick, comprising 10 per cent of the world's freshwater. Only a relatively narrow coastal strip and scattered nunataks (isolated mountain peaks) were free of the ice, and life was hard and cold. Needless to say, this didn't present optimum conditions for fly fishing. Coaxing and hauling seals out of ice holes, that was one possibility, to be sure. Spearing whales another. But Sato preferred the more gentlemanly, cerebral aesthetics of fly-fishing, and didn't go in for Hemmingway-style big game hunting. Maybe it went with his kind of work - fishing out details of alien communications from the background noise of the universe, the ultimate test of patience. At least fly fishing gave him a realistic chance of success, the occasional victory, and release. Whereas fishing for alien life in the cosmos - that could take for centuries, it could take forever, and Sato knew it. So, whenever he had the time, he loved to get away somewhere remote and forget about the universe, and get all connected to the innerverse. And by the time of his 95th birthday, Greenland had become one of the hottest places in the whole world to get away from it all. It was the ultimate New World. He'd picked a spot outside the old capital Nuuk, the place they called Quassussuaq in Inuit, or Lille Malene in Danish. It was easy to find: just pass the peat house at the road going to the airport just before the large curve on the road, near the new West African shantytown, Sermitsiaq rising triumphant from the flyblown haze beyond. The best fishing place in the whole of the North Atlantic, that was what Dr Sato used to say! Hydro-electric and outdated fiber-optic cables crossed the horizon, mangled it as ferociously as all those flies. In the foreground, Lake Qallussuaq was simply overflowing with liberated water. Greenland becomes a new Utopia, just like Antarctica! A happy ending for the novel!With No Warning
Let me put it this way: in the days of the British Empire Sudanese Governor Charles Gordon held out against the siege in Khartoum for ten months under the most appalling conditions before he was killed by Muslim warriors on 26 January 1886. On July 25, 2051, it took the Israeli army just three point seven seconds to topple the Sudanese state --- all by remote control. Sadiq wandered off to talk to the other prisoners, rally support for his plans of underground resistance. But how could you resist when the enemy was everywhere --- even inside the food you ate, even inside the clothes you wore. With no warning at all, our world caved in.
The Water of Life
THEY HAD A HOUSE OF WHALE BONES AND birch logs on the Antarctic shore by the edge of a storming sea, and every morning you could see Julian Offer gutting the penguins and rabbits that had been harvested on the nightly hunt, or playing with the pygmy pandas that wrestled in tbe bamboo groves. Afternoon, as the glaciers calved into the Antarctic Ocean, and mermaids and seals frolicked amidst the misty waves, Julian would sit seiza style in his room, taking moksha lessons from his Tamil guru on the InnerNet. They lived in a rustic house on the edge of a thawing land, and the Tamil was reading scripture. The text was Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, a classic piece on the path to immortality.: "In the book, Babaji is described as a divine being who has the power to assume any form, to appear and disappear at will, and to communicate with his disciples telepathically," the Tamil explained. "He is said to live in the Himalayas, in a secret location known only to a few advanced yogis, and to guide the spiritual evolution of humanity from behind the scenes." "No willstream is truly immortal - even Gods one day expire," the Tamil said. "The issue is one of metabolism. Smaller animals live shorter lives than larger ones. Parrakeets fly through the jungle at a hyperactive pace and die after a decade or so. They live at a faster pace, and they die young. Trees, on the other hand, can live for millennia. The Basal Metabolic Rate is your benchmark. Animals depend on movement, so their metabolism is faster." "Slow your metabolism, and your lifespan will increase," the good Tamil instructed. The Tamil vanished in a cloud of incense. Later Julian Offer glimpses Son Carriad larking around in the bamboo thickets, and then meets him, which signifies his ascension to a continental level of consciousness. When the soul merges in the veli the veils of concept are removed. There is no feeling of pain; a state of bliss starts. In this state the soul realises itself; God resides in this state. The soul unites with God in this state.
The Calling
<<Did I? I was almost asleep and I had a dream.>> Note self: ask Chat GPT to write a story based on "The Love Boat", set in the height of 1970s kitsch...Sightseeing in Selrin
UP! FROM THE GROUND AND on to the open plains, a vivid flash of Nipponese red on the rolling polar plains. Morten watched the passing world with a brooding interest, despite its empty desolation, finding interest in every passing mile. At length the rock and ice-strewn lands gave way to a vast field of stunted greygreen, 12,000 hectares of genetically modified lichen trying to eke out a novelty crop for the health shops of San Francisco and Guangzhou. Morten Offer watched a troop of workers plodding with electronic, scythe-like probes, silver hermetically sealed suits glinting in the morning sun. A sight only from Antarctica Morten thought, and wondered. Now only 30 kilometres from the centre of Selrin, the levitrain again dipped into the ground and passed the remainder of its journey on a subterranean track. The first of the linear, thready-like suburbs of Selrin that had spread along the track appeared out of the darkness, dazzling the occupants of the train with their brightly clad platforms and mini-rainforests. The train slowed and made ever more frequent stops. Morten could not see it, buried so far in the ground as he was, the outer wall of gleaming glass apartment blocks passing overhead which marked the entrance into Selrin. Eleven minutes later the levi-train drew into a large chamber of synthetic marble which was the central rail terminus of Greater Selrin, and the three travellers were forced to disembark.SELRIN WAS THE LARGEST and oldest city in Antarctica, and served as the cultural and political capital of the Lemurian Collective. This is where it all began. With a population steadily approaching 2 million, Selrin was also the fifth largest sealed city in the human kingdom. It was an exciting and dynamic centre, especially to a group of young men from the sheen -- reasonably inexperienced in the ways of the metropolis, the crush and tarry of the fluorescent halls and vaster-than-vast indoor fish markets. But to Morten Selrin had a significance far greater than a convenient host for his exhibition (or for that matter, the Love Hotel capital of the world): Selrin was the birthplace of the Antarctican nation, forever a symbol of solidarity of the Global South. Although the celebrated Antarctican revolution began in the Helium 3 mines on the surface of Luna, it was here where Son Carriad, on May 22 92AE, arrived with his trumpet-tooting Revolutionary Army and proclaimed an uprising against the TSA imperialists. Two days and 60 deaths later, it was in Selrin that Carriad proclaimed the declaration of the establishment of the Partial Utopia of Antarctica with a capital in the city, and launched the so-called 30 Day War to seize control of the continent, expel the TSA and teach the northlings a lesson. Morton could almost feel the adrenalin and raw, untampered emotion of the turbulent but triumphant period, as Carriad stood upon a dais in the cavernous TSA administrative headquarters and delivered a rousing speech on the need for southern unity, autarky and the end of political domination by the TSA (make that America.) He could picture the sight of the stolen TSA gunships as they took off from the Selrin spaceport to liberate the cities of Shintokyo, Grunberg and Samloon (all up on there on the Moon or at least in orbit around her), and to destroy the TSA military base at Eastpeak (this one was just off the coast of Antarctica.) He could sense the jubilation of the morning of June 23 2104 when loudspeakers throughout the city resounded with Carriad's announcement that he was officially ending the 30 Day War following the destruction of a TSA cruiser near Mars, forever altering the course of human affairs. But he could also feel the impact, 18 months later, of the TSA-organised economic blockade, as Carriad continually tried to preserve morale by claiming the Antarcticans could live quite comfortably as international outcasts ("we don't need anybody anyhow"), while secretly playing off China and United States as the immanent conflagration edged ever closer. He experienced the shortlived optimism of of July 2107, when Carriad finally breached the blockade with a decision to join the Chinese bloc ("we're all Utopians anyway"). Meanwhile, winged tanks were swooping on Korea and Kazakhstan, and partial utopias were springing up everywhere -- San Diego, Kathmandu, The Perpetual Love Republics of Berlin. In Antarctica, the Partial Utopia became Complete.
After milling out of the arrival zone the three decided on a quick sightseeing tour of Selrin. The unanimous decision for the first port of call was the so-called Dome suburbs. They therefore piled into a shuttle escalator and were throttled up the kilometre to the surface in just more than a minute. Morten, having spent all his life not only in Antarctica but in the sterile and air-conditioned cubicles of the sheen was buzzing as he raced towards his first confrontation with nature en masse. Stax was the only one of them to have ever seen a real forest.
Chapter 33: By the Steam of the Opal Ray
THE YEAR -0.5TR WAS SIGNIFIED BY A remarkable incident, a mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten. Not to mention the rumors which agitated the general population and excited the public mind even in the developing world, astrocentric people were particularly excited. Astronomers, astrologers, conspiracy theorists, New Age practitioners, both of east and west, the north and south, collectivists and libertarians, and scientists on all continents, were deeply interested in the matter. For some time past, residents and skygazers had been met by "an unfathomable blob", an iridescent globe, phosphorescent, and infinitely larger and more rapid in its movements than any even the fastest plane or drone which currently existed. It didn't so much seem to move, to be honest, but materialize and dematerialize at will, appearing all over the solar system. Was it an alien vessel, or some kind of natural phenomena? Nobody really knew. (reported by numerous captains) agreed in most respects as to the shape of the craft in question, the untiring rapidity of its movements, its surprising locomotion, and the peculiar life with which it seemed endowed. Perhaps the UFO which is buzzing the eastern seaboard of the USA is in fact the Mnemosyne, piloted by Commander Larkin! In the center of the chamber stood a cylindrical device, heaving and falling like the control panel of the TARDIS. It was, in fact, a quantum computer..."PROFESSOR," SAID COMMANDER Larkin, gesturing the instruments hanging on the walls of the chamber, "here are the contrivances required for the functioning of the Nemesis. Here, as in the drawing-room, I have them always under my eyes, and they indicate my position and exact direction in the Solar System. Some of them are known to you, such as the spectrometers, which measure the wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation from celestial bodies; the x, which measures radiation levels inside and outside; the x, whose readings announce sunspot activity and the chance of solar flares; and the planetary chart, which I use for navigation." "These are the usual space-faring instruments," Dr Sato replied, "and I can surmise the use of them. But these others, the use of which I cannot guess? This disc, for example..."
