No Bits Per Second

Everybody knows that you hang a blue dress in the window to signal your lover. It doesn't have to be a blue dress. Not if you're a man. Then you can use a pair of blue trousers, or a blue shirt (which is probably preferable, a shirt really being a short dress in a way - what, you hadn't thought about that? Wear a shirt that's a little too big for you, or a shirt that fits around your neck if you have a big neck. You'll soon see how dress-like the shirt is when it's dangling around your thighs). You put a blue dress (or a blue whatever) in your window as a signal to them, so that they know that you're missing them, or thinking about them. It's an invitation to get in touch - perhaps literally, perhaps figuratively. You might see a blue dress hanging in the window of your lover's house and decide to give them a call. Then the blue dress could mean: my husband is out, now is a good time to call me. Or it might mean something completely (well, not compl...

Something of a rush, of course. There's never enough time to set such things up in advance, so we're called in at say six in the morning and everything has to be in place by eight, when it wakes up. I work on walls - walls are kind of a boring thing, but they're necessary and it isn't too taxing, so I can be relied upon to do my bit. I like working with brick walls, because they're pleasantly solid. Partition walls - you know, those things that are basically paper and plaster - they're kind of... unsatisfying? I don't know what it is about them that makes them so terrible, but there's clearly something. I think perhaps its the fact that anyone could put them up in a couple of hours, whereas brick is a skill that the average Joe, even the average bricklayer, has to take his time over. You've got to get everything in a line, you have to have the mortar at the right consistency. Don't get me wrong, I know that there are some quick-working and tale...

Empty. Full. Empty. Full. Empty. Full. When I'm drinking - when everything's silent except for the ticking of the pump and the gentle whoosh of others travelling past on the motorway - I consider whether this cycle is healthy for me. I mean, I'm ten years old now, been doing the same thing pretty much since the day I was brought into this world. Is reliable conformity a thing? Or is it just mindless roboticism? I'm hungry, I drink until I'm full, everything's fine again. Until the next time, because slowly, slowly, the energy drains out of me and I'm left in the same situation again, hungering, wondering how I got this way so fast and didn't I just drink myself stuffed a few days ago? It seems so recent. Empty. Then I'm coughing out fumes as the last of the drink drains away, and you can almost taste it in the hunger, a sort of desperation. A sense that something will go wrong, that I won't quite be able to make it to the drinki...

There were rows of houses stretching off into the distance, uniform flat-top domes. Melin had never seen a surface town so large, although it was nothing compared to the hives underneath. The other members of the caravan seemed less overawed. "It's just a burb-town," said Fressa. "Houses and houses and houses and nothing else. No factories, no farms, nothing." "How do they eat, then?" "They're parasites!" Bryve said loudly, leaning over from her horse. "What Bryve means to say is, they don't produce anything. They live there because the governor decrees it. All their food is brought to them from elsewhere, they don't really do any work themselves. A bit of art, perhaps, but nothing concrete. If the deliveries stopped, the town would be gone in an instant." "They can't make anything themselves!" said Bryve. "That's not entirely true. Some of them were farmers, some of them were artisans...

There were old gods in that place, dry old gods who spoke with cracked voices and whispered in the dark so that the green soldiers who were set around the place grew nervous in the night and almost scurried from their posts when they were relieved. The few blue men who were left unharmed by the unholy storm assured their captors that there was nothing to fear, that those who had inhabited the temple before the war had been driven off long since, and without their help the gods could not be roused, but still the green men slept uneasily, tossing and turning in their beds and crying out with horror when they were selected for their detail on the guard roster. Meru-shin had no patience for such histrionics. "Remind them that they are warriors," he told his captains. "And that such displays are unseemly in front of the prisoners. If they see weakness, they will strike. You know how these blue men are." Sul and Pen nodded their assent and swore that they would dri...

The four of us running, helter-skelter pelting down the alleys and up the roads, pouring our hearts into our legs so that we could feel nothing except the pulse pounding of rubber soles on tarmac and concrete, running with all of the desire for freedom and fear of punishment that our friends and enemies respectively had filled us with, we were a team, a herd, a flock of miscreants escaping from the predators of law and custom, the men in their grey coats and blue uniforms that were ever on our heels. We were alive for those moments, perhaps because in the other moments we had let ourselves become dead by our ways, but in those moments such differences, such philosophies were all forgotten, our flight was just nature, the call and response of fists and feet, the old story of animals that must catch other animals to eat, and those that must survive by escaping such capture. We might have whinnied to each other, we might, when the spirit took us and we were so close to our foes that we c...

In the dark of the night I sometimes wake, my heart pounding like an unbalanced engine, my legs tangled in the sheet and twinging to hint at cramp should I move the wrong way or put too much weight on them. Those are the dreams of the old campus, confusing and sometimes terrible dreams that have, I think, begun to feed on themselves. The old campus was big - perhaps two kilometres by four, if you could have rearranged all the various roads and alleys and buildings and scrub areas and so forth into a single regular shape. But you could not - no-one could do that, the way it had grown, both by design and by accident, defied organisation. It was easy to become lost in one's first year, so easy that it was taken into account during scheduling - when a work party was required, it was drawn a quarter as big again as was necessary, assuming that so many of the group would become lost on their way to the muster point that the final gathering would be roughly the right size. It was not u...

"If there's an end to this in sight," said Mantell, "I must be facing in the wrong direction, because I certainly cannot see it." "It's inevitable, though. A fire that burns this fast must burn itself out." Mantell gave me a sympathetic look, shook his head sadly. "I do appreciate your attempt to make sociology one of the more exacting physical sciences," he said, "but I fear that rebellion and conflict do not work entirely the same way that fluid mechanics does. This, my friend, is a potential disaster. You can say what you like about it coming to a natural end, but I fear that the only natural end it is likely to come to is one where we all die, making it impossible to continue conflict." Latto grunted from the other end of the room. He had been sitting on the ottoman by the window, staring down into the chaos below. He still had the bandages on his leg from an injury he had sustained last week, run down by a cavalry ...

Old, old Eric Mutterbaum creaked down the steps from his porch to the front garden and stood in the whirl of leaves that the early winter wind whipped up around his feet. He pulled his cardigan tighter around him but it just made him colder, stretching out the threadbare thing until it was little more than crochet lace, holes loosely tied together with wool from some long-dead sheep. His right slipper was biting at the sore on his heel again, and he kicked his foot at the ground to try to force his toes further in. They were themselves too swollen, though, and the pain was excruciating. He buckled forwards, caught himself on his walker, then tried to right himself against the wind. It was hard work. The wind was bully strong, rushing down the canyon formed by the long straight road and the tall terraced houses on each side of it, and a gust came that almost pushed him off his feet, it was so fierce. He clung to his walker as though it were a railing at the edge of a cliff, and betwe...

Full of the joys of spring, the young couples danced around the fete, infuriating Preston. He had been placed at the far end of the field, the lower end where the drainage was bad and in winter a great sheet of ice covered all living things. The ice was gone now, but its malign presence lingered, the vegetation there different in character to further up the meadow. There it was grass and wildflowers and soft moss. Here there was grass, of course - the local grass was unstoppable - but mixed with it were nettles, burr-grass, and a species of foul-smelling mushroom. Once he had been placed there by the vicar, though, Preston felt no impetus to move away. "You're looking in fine form," said Mrs. Caraller from the next stand over. She reached over her massed ranks of jams to exchange a pot of marmalade with a pot of damson, examined her work, tutted and swapped them back again. "Fine form?" "Yes," she said. "Healthy. In good fettle. Hale and he...

Drowning in paperwork, we took a few minutes to go out on the balcony and smoke, impishly tapping the ash from the end of our fags off the edge so that it tumbled down onto the lower levels. There were five of us, although Bentham didn't smoke, so he stood at one end of the platform and alternately frowned at us and stared at our cigarettes. Sharon, who has a finely-tuned radar for people's weaknesses, nudged me and drew a line in the air between Bentham's eyes and Lola's mouth. I'd assumed he had been staring at her tits, but the truth was more interesting. "You all right?" Sharon asked. "You look a bit discombobulated." "What the fuck does that mean?" "Disconcerted," she told him. "Out of sorts." "No. Perfectly fine." "Oh," she said, nudging my elbow again. "I thought you might have some cravings coming over you. You know, perhaps something you used to love in the past but you...

The precipitous drop in stock prices, though, was hardly a worry for my portfolio - which consisted two shares in Manbourder Industries left to me by my uncle. Manbourder Industries, from what I could tell, was a holding company that held precisely one other company - a fifty-three percent share in a clothes shop in Seven Dials called "Tall and Dark" which catered to overweight and unusually tall goths - generally the former, despite the shop's more optimistic name. The shares, since they were not publicly traded, had no easily calculable public worth, and since whenever I walked past the shop on the way to my day job (filling in forms in the travel agency) it was either closed or open but empty, I imagined that profits were unlikely to be flowing to the parent company fast enough to justify any sort of dividend. Indeed, I assumed that the holding company had originally been set up as some sort of simple shell system so that the shop could be jettisoned when (as seemed i...

When I moved into the house there were several existing tenants - mice, a neighbouring cat that wandered in and out at will, a family of spiders, and most disturbingly, some sort of raccoon. The first thing I did was to duct-tape closed the cat flap, but much to my dismay I soon discovered that there were other ways into the house, ways which the cat and the mystery raccoon knew about but which I could not detect. I kept my bedroom door closed, bolted in fact, because there was a deadbolt on the top of the door left there by the previous owner. That kept the visitors from making uninvited nocturnal trips into my sanctum, but it did nothing to enforce my sense of ownership over the rest of the territory that should by rights have been mine and mine alone. The cat was easy enough to deal with. I briefly considered just trapping the damn thing (I have never liked cats - probably some childhood trauma) but the first time I caught it strolling through my living room I noticed that it had...

Well, when you're sleeping off a drunk under a rhododendron bush, curled up in the foetal position with the stink of alcohol in your nose - partly from you, but partly also from the half-finished can of Carling you have clutched in your paws that's slowly letting its contents evaporate into a miasma cloud of booze - that's not the best time to discover that there are dogs outside, wild dogs in that park, dogs that your drinking partners didn't warn you about when you said that you would walk back that way to your hotel (neglecting to tell them that what you actually meant anyway was sleeping on the floor of the little bit in between the lobby and the front door, the bit you can get to without a key card). That's the worst time, in fact, probably the worst time anyway, to discover this fact. When you stink slightly of piss because during the night your bladder got uncomfortably full of cheap lager and started to wonder what it was going to do with it all, because it...

Every morning I pick up my watch from my nightstand and strap it on. When my husband leaves for work, I raise it to my mouth and begin to report my observations from the previous day. In my capacity as a secret agent, I have often wondered whether the people at home are really quite as on the ball as I remember them. I've been embedded here for close on to thirty years now, have married and raised a family and although I have seen much to be deplored here, it is impossible to spend so much time in a culture and not come to appreciate some elements of it. The people here are friendly to me, of course, because I so resemble their cultural ideal - as an eighteen-year old girl when I first arrived, I was head-turningly beautiful by their standards, and although I have been weathered by age, experience, and (chiefly, I think) children, I still retain something of that natural advantage. In addition, unlike the great majority of the native women, I have my training from the homeland, ...

I punched the bartender, which lead inevitably, as night follows day and day follows night, to me being repeatedly punched myself - first in the face by the other bartender, who at least did me the human decency of putting the bottle she was holding down behind the bar beforehand, and then subsequently in the back by bouncer number one (the big guy, the one with the newspaper type tattoo on his face that made him look like a huge human-shaped piece of silly putty). Finally there was a a resounding one-two in the stomach by bounder number two, who I can only assume had some sort of obsessive-compulsive need for balance, since he gave me one shot with each hand one perfectly opposed ribs. Had I gone to the doctor no doubt I would have been awarded a cup for the most symmetrical injury. At the time, of course, my thoughts were not on that glittering prize and the fame and women that would come with it, but on the four sources of pain which were now present in my otherwise healthy body, a...