No Bits Per Second

There were seven-hundred and fifty-eight steps to the top of the tower, which Alexander discovered by counting them - once on the way up, then again on the way down. At the bottom was the herbarium, the tropical heat of the glass-house and rank upon rank of leaves. At the top, the rarified air of the observatory, the whistling cold wind that snapped at Alexander's nose and ears and tried to burrow into his clothes. He expected to be able to look down from the balcony to see the greenhouse far below, but the tower seemed to be permanently embedded in a cloud, just the top thirty or forty meters emerging from the dense white fluff to look out over a landscape of jagged islands in a white sea. There were telescopes - three of them, two set high on stalks so that he could not reach them, one set on a low tripod that he thought must have been for Sombra when she was little. He could crouch down and use that one with some effort, pressing the right lens of his glasses up against the rubb...

"You can teach me a new trick," the old dog said to me. "Go on, anything you like. Cards, something on a unicycle. Teach me to conjugate verbs in Spanish, try that." I have chronic fumble-fingers. I have no sense of balance. And I suspected he already knew how to conjugate verbs in Spanish, because I'd once seen him order (as a joke) a bowl of cat's testicles in a tapas bar in Madrid (I didn't say it was a funny joke). He lapped another tongueful of gin and tonic out of the wide-mouthed glass in front of him and twitched his right ear - a sign that he wasn't really paying attention to me. "How about playing the flute," I suggested. I know how to play the flute, although I'm not good at it (see fumble-fingers, above), and my sight-reading is terrible. Listening to me play is like seeing a lego model when it's just come out of the box - all the notes are there, and in some semblance of order, but there needs to be a lot of sticking th...

(For those keeping count, Art Pact 6&7 didn't appear here because they're part of a story I might try publishing. If I fail, they'll be here later!)   Homicide: Titan Squad X The sky was the colour of Caribbean seas, sprinkled with cotton-wall puffs of cloud that were just out of reach. Detective Gargantua and I stood at the corner of the crime scene and waited while the coroner examined the corpse. We weren't supposed to be there - Captain Megazon had warned us off anything that might be gang-crime in the wake of the Mothilla Syndicate fiasco - but we'd been nearby, sitting in Gargantua's favourite watering hole and discussing who we thought might take over from Sergeant Krong when the call came in over the airwaves: dead body in the docks district. "What do you think, boss?" Gargantua asked me. She always called me boss, despite the fact that she was likely to get kicked upstairs sooner than me. Perhaps it was because she was bigger than ...

Almost as soon as the bullet was a bullet, it wasn't one again. The spinner's high-pitched whine was for an instant eclipsed by a raucous yell from the front of the gun, and then a section of crenellation in the battlements above exploded into a cloud of dust and shrapnel, some of which rained harmlessly down onto the infantrymen on their scaling ladders. To Landon's right, the warlord was dancing from one leg to another, beaming with glee. The little man could barely contain himself, yelling in his gibberish language and patting the spinner as if it were some kind of animal. When he saw Landon looking at him he clapped his hands together in the eager gesture that Landon had come to understand as approval. In the waning light, the man's skin looked almost luminescent. "Give it a moment," Landon told him. "It'll make another in a minute." He wondered whether it was worth adjusting the spinner's motor - its dial was reporting plenty o...

Moreover, there were scorpions in the way. A writhing bed of the little black creatures, crawling over each other and forming waves and dunes of bodies in the depression. It was about a foot deep and lined with some enamel substance, slippery enough to prevent them from just crawling out. We stood there, dismayed, imaging all the ways in which we could die on our way out of the temple. "If only it were snakes," Bostick grumbled. "I could deal with snakes." "It's never snakes, though, is it? They know all about you." said Lal. I thought it was more likely that the prohibitive cost and effort required to feed so many snakes was the limiting factor. I nudged Lal, pressing on her shoulder. "Yes yes," she said irritably. I could see from the map that the temple guards were perhaps a minute away from us, gliding smoothly along the marble-floored corridors that led here from the main chamber. Their response had been unusually quick....

She was not sure at what point the change had come over him - unlike the rigid, routine-centred personalities of her own family, his natural tendency to variability masked a slow process of change behind more pronounced but temporary swings in his mood. When he was one day raging furiously about a colleague, the next completely sanguine, she found herself unable to gauge whether or not he was truly happy. But perhaps without realising it consciously she came to dread breakfasts - the time of day when he was arguably most himself, free from the turbulent influences of the real world and reacting only to those unknown dreams which he pretended ignorance of. Then her questions would become nervous and tentative, and his answers cold. The morning of the fourth of September, with a field of grey clouds low in the sky outside, found the kitchen dull and colourless. Two of the three light bulbs on the track had blown, and Clare (too short to reach the sockets even when standing on the is...

The robot was waiting for us inside the chamber - a dull grey thing, squat and menacing. As Georgia had warned us, there was a slender red line circling the floor around it, the pilot-light setting for its incinerator beam. "That's where it will act - if it wants to act," she'd said, circling her finger in the dust around the rock she'd used to represent the behemoth itself. "But don't be fooled into thinking that it can't see you if you don't step into the circle. This"--she drew a larger circle, pivoting her whole arm from her elbow--"is how far it can see you. Depending where they're keeping it, you might not be able to get close enough to see it without it seeing you as well." It looked as though she'd been right on the ball with that guess. There was a gap of about three meters between the circular concrete walls of the chamber and the deadly red circle. At either side of the chamber were columns that the red line...

Despite his suspicions, Loughton agreed at the meeting. There were mutterings amongst those who supported his party that he had not so much been persuaded as railroaded into agreement, but since there was no way to prove that anything improper had occurred the matter was only discussed in private. It was brought up briefly by Daniel Rosten, the owner of the northern-most of the village's two general shops, when he gave a talk at the schoolhouse, but even there it was not a safe topic of conversation, and the children listening to his lecture went on the offensive immediately, making "bwawk-bwawk" chicken noises from whichever side of the room he wasn't looking at at the time. The teacher, Miss Harwick (more alert to the ways of her charges) could easily have stepped in to stop them, but she was anti-Loughton herself, and so more than happy to allow the insinuations of cowardice to continue. She sat back, suppressing a smile, and shrugged helplessly to Rosten each ti...

The three of us sat on the wall, passing the can between us. I hadn't drunk ginger beer since secondary school, and I took too big a swig and coughed as I drank it. "Can't hold your drink, eh" Magnus said archly. "Just hotter than I remembered," I sputtered, then seeing Roger frown I added "picante, not caliente". Roger nodded in understanding. "There's no ambiguity here," Magnus contended. "There's a lot of ambiguity in three men sharing a can," Roger said. "It would be some kind of homosexual menage-a-trois in Japan." I passed the can back to Magnus and checked my mobile. Still nothing. "There's not the same distinction in English between picante hot and caliente hot," I explained, "but in Spanish there's two different words for it. Also, Rog, what?" "Well..." Roger started, but Magnus spoke over him. "There's a word in English," he said. "Spicy, that...

Scrambling over the edge of the skip, Adrian's foot slipped and his lead leg fell onto the metal wall, sending a red burst of pain up his injured thigh. Shocked, his grip opened and he began to topple backwards, catching himself awkwardly with his other hand before he fell completely. Knowing that he mustn't, but unable to stop himself, he glanced over his shoulder and saw to his horror that a few of the monsters had got clear of the rest of the shambling pack and were running towards him at full tilt. That was wrong, surely? Surely they couldn't run fast, they were dead weren't they? He remembered suddenly what Frank had told him - they get slower as they get older, just like us but more so. "Shit! Shit!" He pulled himself up, ignoring the complaints from his shoulder muscles, and managed to get his right leg under him. Jumping from the wall of the skip he got onto the top of the raised area at the side of the car-park and began to sprint. Behind him the skip...

We first noticed the auditors walking the corridors late at night. Caroline Bates was the first to report them - shadowy grey figures strolling through the building, silent and ominous as she viewed them through the frosted glass between the general administration office and the corridor outside. She told Louisa and Chaz that "there was something wrong with the way they moved, like they were walking with crutches", although Caroline's fertile imagination and gullible nature was well known throughout the office, and it was put down to a mere excess of nervousness while having to work late to deal with the anomaly in the 1994-1995 accounts. In addition to that, the film "Auditor" had just finished its run in the local arthouse cinema - and although none of us had seen it, we had all seen clips on Film 95 and heard radio interviews with the director, so it was possible that we were even more susceptible to being given the creeps by it, having no real idea of the co...

The air was hot and thick, and full of the shrill cries of a thousand insects; full, indeed, in every way and therefore somehow more solid, more dense, than the air of home. Water hung there in ambush, waiting to coalesce on Susan's arms, legs, face as she walked through it. She had forgotten what it was like to be fully dry, for every surface of the forest was either dark with damp or bright with drops of liquid. She pushed on through the trees, following the line of saplings that marked the path of the refugees. It seemed hard to believe that Jonathan had once come the opposite way along this track - it was barely anything, how could it possibly have disgorged an entire nation onto the world? His footsteps could lie underneath this covering of the scrubby vines that grew criss-cross over the path, but were they buried beneath the footsteps of tens of thousands of others? There would be no way to tell, of course, since even the last to come had presumably had their trails covered ...

The cardinal stood motionless at the top of the stairs, carefully examining the couple below him in the concourse. Had they but looked up once they would surely have spotted him, but it seemed that God's will was that his misstep should go without remark. He narrowed his eyes, wishing that he had an eyeglass with which he could see their mouths more clearly. Over the last ten years he had quietly practised lip-reading for just such a purpose. Every Tuesday morning he had a selection of different choristers and monks sent to the stairwell onto which his antechamber opened to recite verses from the bible as an act of piety and education for travellers upon those great stairs. The exact verses were picked at random by a process involving lots (he would have preferred dice, but the impious nature of their involvement in gambling stayed his hand - it would probably not be best to put temptation so close at hand for his assistants). The various worshippers stood on the ground floor, from...

We looked in the cage, keeping our distance. The big body of the thing was sure to prevent it from getting between the bars, but the tentacles looked like the could have reached out pretty easily, and in the twilight it was almost impossible to make out where it was. In the full light of day it had been easy to spot once you knew what to look for, but I think if we'd stumbled into someone else's camp and found the cage we'd have walked up to it as confident as anything and no doubt we'd have been grabbed immediately and ended up in bits. Milo had the smart idea of gathering twigs (well, we called them twigs, but of course that wasn't what they really were at all) and using them to make a circumference on the ground around the cage that would show us roughly where we were safe. It was risky guesswork, of course, since we had no idea whether the tentacles could shoot out like a squid's, but it was better than nothing, and I figured a pretty good use of our effort...

I staggered into the bar, hoping against hope that no-one I knew would be in there. It was a crowded Friday evening, though, the place packed with regulars and student pub-crawlers, and much to my annoyance I bumped into Meg almost immediately. Meg works in the same office as my girlfriend - they get on well, despite something of a personality clash. My girlfriend (Hannah) is an old-school protestant work ethic type of girl, turns up early and leaves late, and doesn't stop for breaks. Yes, thanks for asking, she is starting to develop ulcers. I once caught her replying to an email while I was going down on her (she'd surreptitiously swiped her blackberry from the nightstand), which I can assure you is not an entirely ego-boosting commentary on my oral skills. Meg, meanwhile - or rather, "Meg in contrast", since although I say meanwhile in real life, I notice in print it makes it look as though I'm aware of what Meg was doing at that moment that the little click of...

Three days before halloween 1995 was the day that we found out that Billy Sykes was one of them, the day that Lissa let me take off her bra for the first time, and I guess the day that I did what I'd always wanted to do - fuck up the town of Shiphook for good. Although no-body knew that till later, of course. I wanted to do more with Lissa, of course I did, but she was all churched up, so I took what I could get and when she said she had to get back in time for dinner with her folks I just let her go - I wasn't going to go pleading or any crap like that, you get a reputation that way, and fuck if I was going to be with Lissa for the rest of my life, you know? I knew that the little town of Shitpoke was too small for me, too small for anyone really, but some folks like to feel shoehorned into a place, and Lissa's family was like that. She was the hottest girl in school, no doubt, but - you know, a town of three thousand people has got what, a hundred teenagers, fifty of them...