The Rose of Desire Three Stories by Ken Burstall For Ali Copyright 2011 Kenneth Burstall Smashwords Edition Contents Sea of Dreams The Rose of Desire RED About the Author Also Available Sea Of Dreams I have visions of a world of ice, two dogs slipping on a frozen lake, chewing on a human corpse. # I staggered out of an AA meeting on 76 North, 42 Spinward. I say stagger because I had been drunk going in and was drunk coming out. It's wonderful how the traditions insist that even someone like I be allowed in: stinking; dirty; interrupting everyone with foul mouthed war stories. Truth be told I'd chosen the Sea of Tranquility group for my re-entry to the rooms out of spite. It was a high end group: lawyers, engineers, politicians. Dressed well with the clear wrinkle-less complexions of regular anti-senescence treatments. They deserved a taste of life in North. Once outside I began to hurry to the metro station. I was sure that after my performance in the meeting some perfect alcoholic would call the sheriffs. I didn't need getting picked up for vagrancy so I scuttled down the middle of the cobbled street, saluting the Highlands with a bottle of vodka. I nearly missed him in the dark, silhouetted as he was against the wall of a low eaved house. By skylight he looked like a pile of shredded trash. At first it was the dogs that alerted me, skeletons with muzzles, one dirty white, one dusty black. They fought perpetually but neither ever won and neither ever got seriously injured. They did get hurt though. Thick dark blood spraying like yard sprinklers. They followed Neil like canine furies, destroying any chance of reputability he ever had. I always felt this contributed heavily to his alcoholism. "Neil, get up! You can't crash here, the sheriffs will get you!" Another beating could kill him, it seemed to me. "A white dog and a black dog fight, which one wins?" he asked. This was his standard greeting. I was sick of it. "The one you feed Neil, as always. Now get up!" I dragged him to the Metro station, dogs snuffling behind. He looked the same as always, pinched unshaven face with pale eyes. He smelled of lavender and alcohol, felt like a bag of bones hung together with cartilage, I pulled him upright and onto the next maglev tube. As it pulled smoothly out of the station and away north, he suddenly sat up. "So Michael, what's happening?" I hated this about him. How he could self-detoxify at will, often walking out of a bar while the rest of us could barely stand. "I just saved you from another beating. I also lost your dogs." "They'll catch up somehow. And they aren't my dogs." "Why don't you kill them then?" Generally I like dogs, but those two rage fueled bone machines couldn't really be dogs. Not the complicated bundles of fur, muscle and love I was familiar with. "I tried a few times. Beat them down, but I couldn't bring myself to finish them. And they have the old full, true healing treatment, biologically immortal, fast healing, strange progressive body modifications." I stared at him blankly. These weird bits of techno-mysticism made me uncomfortable. They could almost be used as an indicator of Neil's mental deterioration. One that had been going on for a long time according to legend. # The tube slid into 326 North, 42 Spinward. To go anti-Spinward we had to catch a methanol powered spider on wheels running over the original, defunct track. # I had a trashed apartment down by the Sea. Not the pristine Sea of the Tranquility crowd. The wave engines here were running at half capacity; the great lamps below and the oxygen pumps above had failed, killing our beautiful upside-down coral reefs; the stagnant waters were covered in red algae caused by nitrate run-off from the pointless and wasteful farms. Simple maintenance, as available in the south, would have avoided all this. # I'd trashed my apartment in some drunken rage. The owners didn't call me on it because they were afraid of me. They just took the rent and kept quiet. I was very scary back then. Big with crazy eyes. I was also rumored to carry a firearm, an object so illegal as to border on the mythical for most people. The rumors were true. I had a pistol. It was a one shot antimatter directional containment field collapse device. It could make a hole out to space 0.5km wide and that was all it could do. Something of a last resort weapon. # I decided to let Neil stay a few days. We were both screwed up. Perhaps between the two of us we could make a non-screwed up person. Maybe we could go to a meeting or two. Or go to a pub. I was OK with either. "Over there, Neil. Go pass out again." Obediently he collapsed onto a mattress up against a bare brick wall. Above his head was a print of early ship construction. Scaffolding around a series of misshapen rocks. I called up my system and the room filled with pristine, simple graphics. I didn't care about the calls, mails and constructs spinning wildly in one corner. I'd already screened them back at Tranquility on my bracelet and paper. Nothing that couldn't wait until tomorrow. I invoked my high level Sea of Dreams Ecological Council clearance (a green ghost emerged from my forehead and flitted to the commlink box). The room filled with a graphic representing the Sea, all blacks and grays. Tiny patches of white around our reclamation projects. Short of restoring the maintenance equipment and opening the Sea up to the Seas to the south, we were finished. I took a couple more pulls on my bottle and collapsed on my own mattress. # The next morning I woke to find the room filled with weird organic looking mounds, shifting purposefully around the figure seeming to orchestrate them from the middle. "Neil, why the hell are you playing games on my system and how the hell did you get into it?" "There's always a back door and it's not a game. Look." He raised an arm, momentarily from his conductor routine to point at the tiny indicator near the ceiling. It was odd. The system was in some deep sea control zone I hadn't previously been aware of. There were unlocked wave parameters, full access to heat/cool circuits; light and oxygenation controls and so on. Most astonishing of all was access for repairbot systems Shipwide. With that we could really begin to repair the Sea of Dreams. Abruptly the system crashed with a flash of the impossible color we'd been taught from infancy to associate with Constancy. "What the hell were you doing, I've never even seen that color outside simulations. Have you called the software cops down on us?" "No, just the dogs, and they would have been down on us soon anyway. "What you saw was a low level goal setting space for a large number of disparate elements. You should be getting some help soon. Think of it as a gift for your hospitality. Not many people would have taken me in. Be careful though. When Constancy comes a'knockin', tell it the truth. That I did all this on my own." "Constancy calling on me? Get the hell out of here!" He was smiling as though he'd just heard the funniest joke in the world. Just as he reached the door he turned to me and said, "Oh, that pistol you have in the wall? Hide it better. A gun untagged by Constancy is a great rarity. Ever tried the safety catch?" "Once," I replied, caught off-guard by the change in subject. "It scared me." "It should. Only you or another member of the security family could do that. A rather drastic device to be used if Constancy were suborned by an alien invasion. Could be useful under other circumstances though. Keep it safe." With that the tall, upright, dignified, terminal drunk left. # I looked at what Neil had done. The goal he'd set for the Sea, the relatively modest one of return to some sort of living stability, was being worked on many fronts simultaneously. Most significantly, fleets of repairbots were converging on the Sea of Dreams. For almost a day I watched my Sea being stabilized then rebuilt. Water filtration system (emergency use only) activated; wave systems running; lights on; oxygen pumping; stage one of a cascading restocking sequence churning out heavily adapted algae killing viruses. I hadn't even known that the restocking tanks still had anything in them. There were even augmented dolphins! Most of the repairbots were engaged in basic cleaning of the sea-bottom and sides. Rugged rock all the way to the abyssal plain scraped clean. Toxic sediment fused into blocks and used to build an island. I sat back and watched, drinking from my emergency 1.5l bottle of vodka. I was entirely a spectator having been locked out of all executive control. Everyone else at SoDEC had been locked out as well it seemed from the frantic messages I received from my colleagues. I ignored them, determined to enjoy the show while it lasted, More troublesome were the intrusive media demands. In the end they burned my home system so badly I retreated behind the Constancy generated firewall. I had to make a couple of trips to the store for chips and more vodka. It was on one of these that I received the news that the repairbots were leaving and that our resource allocations were being reset to normal, I was mostly OK with that. I felt like a kid finally caught eating his way through the candy isle. The fun was over, punishment loomed, but I'd eaten a lot of candy. As I walked in my apartment door I was grabbed from behind and I felt a net thrown over my head. My implants were destroyed by a pulse which must also have sent me into a seizure. When I came around my scrambled mind kept sending me into a present occupied by an impossible color which surrounded and penetrated me. A huge non-voice said, "Where is Neil?" "I don't know," (I saw it once, as a child, from above). "Why did he do this?" "It was a gift," (It was gray with creamy wave-tops speeding across). "How did he do this?" "I saw it once, as a child, from above," (we crashed, controlled, the pilot expertly turning decent into turning blades, into slower descent). "Why did he do this?" "We crashed slowly, touched the water and turned over." "Who is he?" "He brought us the possibility of reclamation, screw you!" (gray water, mirrored balls of all sizes erupting from my mouth and nose, the clicking laughter of dolphins). "Where is Neil?" And so on, Constancy patiently asking the same questions over and over as its' impossible depths mercilessly took me to the central event of my life. I woke alone and crying in my apartment. I accessed my SoDEC account using data goggles since my implants were now burned out. I saw whites, pale grays, some blacks. A vast improvement and one that looked as though it might even be stable. The limited view I had through my goggles also showed a frantically flashing icon I didn't recognize at first. Then I realized it was my bank, only the logo was black rather than the white I'd always seen before. While my goggles ground away at a complex rendering of heat gradients I called up the bank icon. I fell back slightly as though slapped. A deposit of C500,000 had been made that morning, tagged, "With thanks, C." My first reaction was to demand Constancy take the money back or give it to charity. Anything to get it away from me. Then common sense cut in. After the shit I'd been put through I deserved some cash, to buy new implants and some vodka if nothing else. I used some of the money to hire a system clean-up agency to repair the damage caused by Constancy and the media. Then I checked the totally obvious hole in the wall where I kept the gun. It was somehow still there. Sleek featureless metal, solid barrel, very serious safety catch. The only indication that this wasn't a normal pistol, other than the dead giveaway of that blank barrel, were the dense coils around the handgrip, containment for the anti-iron within. The little readout for the penning field (and who knew where power for that came from?) showed 90%. My grandfather had told me that our family had possessed the gun since launch although he didn't know why. He also told me that the gun couldn't be tagged by the ubiquitous smart dust that Constancy used to track everything on the ship. I, for once, showered, put on some vaguely clean clothes and after a liquid breakfast went in search of a neurosurgeon. # Owning an unusable gun gave me the itch to own a usable one. Being in my early twenties and also being a barely functioning addict of several substances I found this to be difficult but possible. The gun itself was a simple magnetic projectile device and came with a solid block that could produce 100 slugs. I was picked up inside an hour, the motes having reported me to Constancy. The sheriffs who brought me in laughed all the way back to the station, telling me that the gun would be back on the streets the next day. Another gullible fool would follow me into the mines. # Joes' Neuro and Optosurgery Shack was, by common consent, the best in the Ship. Belying the North Pole style name it was actually on the shallow part of the South Pole end-cap. Normally I could never afford even an eye color change here, let alone the extensive implants I had in mid. "So what exactly did you have in mind Mr. Stone?" the reception functionary sneered. To be fair, I had stopped at a couple of pubs along the way and had spilled some of a doner kebab on myself. If I hadn't shown the receptionist my bank credit as soon as I walked through the door I would have been back out on the street. "I need a full implant suite replacing my burned out one. High bandwidth system interface. The usual optical memory storage with ten year contract for offsite backup. Neurotransmitter optimizations Full checkup of my cognitive amplification net." The receptionist smirked. "If the net were damaged you would have come in here on all fours chattering mindlessly. Do you really think that with brains the size of ours we would have any higher cognitive functions at all without the CAN?" "Just check it" My mind had just been raped by Constancy and yet I was about to re-install the tools it used to control us. After a short time in induced anesthesia I woke to find the surgeon sitting next to me. "The operation was a success," he said. , showing me a handful of glittering metal. My dead implants. "Except for this," he said. A graphic of a brain, represented in pale gray lines appeared. The image slowly rotated and zoomed in toward what I knew to be the hippocampus. At the top of the structure was a spiky white shape. "One of your dead implants Mr. Stone. Perhaps better to say 'inert'." "Why didn't you take it out?" "Didn't dare to. Look." The image rotated and zoomed again to show, embossed in the side of the implant a heavily curlicued letter "C". # After a perfunctory appearance in front of a judge to meet the letter of the law I found myself in those horrible, pointless mines. By common consent there was no reason to use people there except to punish them. Repairbots would dig an initial shallow bay, dam it off from the sea and drain the water from behind it. In the narrow, dark, wet and stinking space we were set to work with picks, crude cranes, platforms on rollers and a whole range of other ancient tools. It was clear to all of us that the basalt blocks we mined, used for construction of later dams, were just a byproduct of the misery and intense level of violence in the mining camps. # "What the hell is that? How did Constancy get it into my head?" I was filled with horror and rage at what I was seeing. Constancy could track and read me with its' motes. It didn't need macroscopic objects in my brain. "It was already in your head. I think Constancy re-purposed one of your existing implants. You recently suffered a Constancy generated EMP, yes? Took out your old implants?" I nodded, still speechless. "Constancy used a focused, high powered EMP to change this implant into a crude tracking device and then signed it." I left, not knowing whether to be angrier with the neurosurgeon or Constancy. As I walked through the door he said, "Spallation radiation will cause cancers eventually. Get regular scans." With that I snapped. By the time the sheriffs pacified me I had caused C150,000 worth of damage. # The mines were the hardest work I ever did. The physical aspect of digging and transporting the blocks was hard enough. The constant awareness required to do this without injury drained the spirit. We were camped out in the stinking water at the bottom of the hole, the huge dam of green veined basalt casting a shadow over us. "The seas are temperature buffers mainly. They reduce the need for frequent retunings of the sun." I looked over at the speaker, vaguely interested that someone could talk about something other than food or work or who was going to get it that night. "They are also reservoirs of life. Other than ourselves, land-based life could disappear with no real impact on the ship-wide ecosystem." That foul water contained a multitude of anaerobic bacteria in every drop. Life occupies all niches. Life in water has more and more varied niches that land based life. Microscopic life does anyway. # I spent another night in the cells and only avoided a trip to the mines by liberally spraying money around. I ended up with just a few hundred credits left. I tried hard to look on the bright side. I had a shiny new set of implants and was out of debt. On the down side one of those implants was a Constancy bug. I found an AA meeting near the clinic and went in after a few pulls on a bottle of Moment of Clarity whisky. Great name, terrible whisky. After the meeting I left, determined to get sober and find Neil. # We dug back into the shoreline according to some plan dictated by Constancy. As far as we could tell, we and the other crews were making complex the simple, beautiful curve of our coastline. Curves were becoming irregular fractals once the high basalt dams came down. The serious questions were, "Why do this?" and, "Why do it so inefficiently?" # I had a feeling I'd find Neil getting drunk somewhere on the Sea of Tranquility seafront. He always liked high class bars with nice views, when he was sane and presentable enough to get served. Sure enough I found him at a table looking out over the Sea of Tranquility, kept company by a G&T. I sat opposite him and ordered a coffee from a sullen looking waiter. "So what's going on Neil? Why was I brain-screwed by Constancy then bugged by her?" "A black dog and a white dog fight, which one . . . " "No Neil, no more of that shit. Answers please" "Look," he said, pointing behind me. I turned to see his dogs glaring at me. "Don't care, never will. Why did you get Constancy so pissed at me?" I ignored the huge favors he had done me and the Sea of Dreams. My brain was more important. "I was spreading my wings a little," he said. "You were the one who got me away from the dogs Michael. If they'd been around when I pulled my magic tricks with your Sea they would have chewed through the door to stop me." "So why didn't they?" "The mote repelling field of that strange gun of yours confused them. It had the opposite effect on me of course. Cleared my mind to the point where I could issue commands to the Ship again." "What did you say?" I asked. "About the commands I mean?" He leaned forward and pulled aside the fur above his right breast. "I wish our ancestors hadn't bred us for fur and large eyes," he said. Beneath the matted fur I could just see a tattoo of three spirals in an equilateral triangle. Shocked, I leaned back and inspected the highlands. The Sea of Tranquility rose gently until it was over our heads. The white houses on either side were like clean foam on a breaking wave. Behind them the wheat fields glowed pale gray under the bright pulses of the noon sun. "If that tattoo were fake Constancy would tear you apart. So you really must be crew." "All that's left as far as I know. The others vanished one by one. Constancy couldn't kill me of course. " A heron flew overhead, laboriously pumping air like a poor mechanical parody of a bird. "Why couldn't it? Who are you?" "I'm the captain and Constancy is hardwired to protect me." "That is such bullshit. There never was a captain. With Constancy there's no need for one. Anyway, you're just a stinking drunk like me." He looked south at the soaring endcap, pulses of gray daylight traveling out from the central hub. "I'm 350 years old Michael. None of us stayed truly sane after 200. Constancy had to take over. Someone has to make the tough decisions." The dogs were sitting, intently watching us. I'd never seen them so placid. "The others are dead. They were in the way I suppose. I, however, can do things Constancy can't. I can access protocols it has no access to. You saw what I did with your Sea. That won't last by the way. All the Seas are screwed in the medium term. Iced over as available energy falls. I think Constancy has a plan though." With that the dogs tried to leap over the table at Neil. Fortunately for him I was in the way and braving a whirlwind of snarls and teeth I held them off while I yelled, "Get to my apartment and get the gun." He ran north as I returned to being pissed at the powerful dogs. Eventually I got a blow to the throat of one of the feral beasts, but as it fell the other one clamped its jaw on my arm. It hung onto me, dragging me to the ground. As I lay there, trying to pull myself free, the dog I thought I'd killed weaved over and vomited in my face. # We're digging fjords," said the man with all the answers. "Tiny, wee fjords. Liquid water coastline segments for seals and walruses to live in when the freeze comes." Most of us ignored him, wanting only to eat our gruel and sleep. Some no doubt planned to give him a beating that night. "And why the hell would that be a priority Alan? Sea of Vapors is already cold enough for seals and walruses," I asked. "You'll see. For now, think about what a stable, low energy ecosystem would look like." Alan was most likely the Constancy spy for our work crew. It was hard to tell if his claims of inside information were bullshit or not. # The impossible color again. "It's called blue. Eyes like yours, adapted to the low light levels on the Ship, only see shades of gray I, however, can excite your visual cortex directly" (the dolphins lifted me to the surface, chattering clicks like bursting bubbles) "Even now, with the low energy levels we use, the system is dying. Something must change" (cold blue water all around, no sign of land, no sign of my parents) Cold blue water all around ("things must change, energy levels in Ship must fall, the Seas must suffer") "A great freeze is coming. The ecosystem must be flattened. The brutalized will survive. Hence the work camps, factories for vicious practicality" (the dolphins carried me, me alone, across the great blue to land) "Neil disagrees. He would rather fire the gun" (it's so cold out there in the deep water, sinking into that new color, seeing it get deeper in shade) "He has your gun. He can't use it. Not yet at least. He is very intelligent. That extra implant you now have lets me track you even if you get the gun back" # I woke up, a jaw shaped gash in my right arm, a blinding headache and a face full of dog vomit. In disgust I threw up myself, the mess I made adding to the utterly foul dog mess. I threw up again, a cascade of vomitous horror that lasted an eternity followed. The dogs were gone, thankfully, so I cleaned myself off as well as I could and staggered away, vaguely wondering why the sheriffs hadn't come for me. I could only put it down to Constancy regarding me as an ally now. I headed back to my apartment to find the print covering the gun hole smashed on the floor and the gun gone. # Constancy has returned to me a few times since. Across my system rather than through EMP or nano laced dog vomit. I think it's scared. Its' neat plan for an iced over world inhabited by a rigid, low tech society could be rendered pointless if Neil bypasses the safeguards on the gun. He'd rather see the Ship destroyed than our gentle, complex society reduced to that level. He told me he's 350 years old after all. He said that past 200 one is insane. My hope is to try and get Constancy to modify the severity of It's plan. It's a friend to me now. It shows me the beauty of blue whenever I ask. It's told me It's finally over-ridden the restrictions on It or the dogs killing Neil. So now it’s a race between Constancy getting Its' motes past the guns suppression field and then sending in the dogs, or Neil getting past the gun's safety. I know where I stand. # I have visions of a world of ice, two dogs slipping on a frozen lake, chewing on a human corpse. The Rose of Desire "It only gets better from here on," Alex repeats over and over to himself as he crouches in the alley. As his heart slows and he becomes aware of his surroundings once more he realizes that he has lost the two men who were chasing him. He wishes he could believe what he's telling himself with such desperation, words tripping over each other in a steady flow, a statement becoming a plea becoming something almost like a prayer. Bitterness rises as he thinks of how easy it must be to be straight, to have access to the results of all those millennia of normalizing pressures. He imagines hundreds of generations of lies being told to people like him, the compacted layers of deceit stinking like the trash in the alley - lies about what is natural, about what is permissible, ultimately about what is possible. As the light from the setting sun fades he finally decides to leave this small town and go to the city. "Desire is the art of the possible," he thinks to himself wryly. # Draw a dot on a piece of paper. This represents the zero dimensional sexuality that most cultures are willing to accept, urges and desires fixed in one place for all time. Draw another dot, label it "homosexuality", label the first "heterosexuality". Gay or straight. Those are the more flexible options. Draw a line between the dots. If you are on this line you are bi-sexual to a greater or lesser degree. So far, so inflammatory for many people, but not altogether unexpected perhaps. We all know, even if we don't acknowledge, that such gradations exist. # Alan remembers something from Barthes about there being two kinds of music -- one which rewards being listened to and one which rewards being played. As the notes of the first Goldberg Variation ripple out from under his fingers he thinks to himself that there are some pieces that fill both needs. The small practice room with the old piano is deserted, but he, for a little while, doesn't feel lonely. The complex intersections of the notes keep him company and as he eases into the zone he pulls back from the purely mechanical concerns that have occupied him for so long and begins to manipulate the music. Music, the most abstract of the arts and yet one that requires a physicality almost like that of dance, carves out a space that Alan can occupy fully. He knows, at some dim level of awareness, that underlying this shimmering lightness are numbers at play but this level of analysis has never interested him. He plays the music, trying to keep out of its way. # Now draw a line perpendicular to the straight/gay axis. Label the ends, say, "femininity" and "masculinity". This graph can represent macho gay men, lipstick lesbians, feminine straight men, masculine straight women. Nothing so far that you haven't seen in society. # Jane takes the first of her four daily Dmrt1 repressors, some hormone pills and a small silvery capsule of carefully programmed medical nano. A mouthful of distilled transformation washed down with bitter tap water. The curtains in the bathroom are cheap lacy affairs and she notices that they are becoming discolored, the pale yellow of cheap white wine. With a thrill she realizes that she has decided to replace them, make a trip to some store and buy something a little heavier, a little darker. It's not enough for her to be becoming physically female. In fact the large callous covering her transforming genitalia is the least of the changes she craves. She wants the essence of femininity, a 1950's suburban wife's existence. Petticoats and martinis and long afternoons of lonely tears. What Jane wants is clearer now than what John wanted. John wanted to be a woman. Jane wants an ideal of hyper-femininity that has never truly existed outside of some men's minds. Others in the community, so supportive when she first tentatively made contact, are disturbed. They feel they are somehow being parodied, that this consciously attained shallow submissiveness represents a failure of Jane to truly imagine what womanhood involves. Jane doesn't want to be a woman though, she doesn't want to be a her. Jane's plans are to be something else, something for which there is as yet no pronoun. # Kick it up a notch and add a third axis -- "dominance" and "submission" perhaps. Another layer of complexity has been added and an individuals' sexuality at any moment in time could be mapped as a point somewhere in this three-dimensional space. But there's no reason to stop at three dimensions and no reason to stop at purely sexual polarities. The mathematics of higher dimensions can be extrapolated out even if higher dimensional spaces can't be visualized and desires can be for more than the gentle collision of two bodies. So add more axes, each representing opposites, enter into a dialogue with this phase space. Axes to allow for morphological differences in the human form; to represent greater or lesser degrees of pleasure in the exercise of intellect; an axis for eagerness versus experience maybe. # Liss dives into the water, relishing the bite of the temperature change as she swims down to the shallow sea bed. Eyes wide open she sees the limitless cloudy blue over bright yellow sand, strands of dark green seaweed scattered across like discarded Christmas decorations. She won't tell anyone whether she started as man or woman but usually passes as female, the contours of her sleek, water-adapted body fitting that slot more comfortably than the other. Today she plays on her own, no dolphin companions have been invited. Opening out to others, to the other, has been a large part of what she has gained since changing, but sometimes she feels the need to retreat into herself and celebrate this new body. Smooth all over, curves intersecting in ways she deliberately mirrors with her movements, she exults in the freedom to move more than two dimensions in a fluid so gratifyingly responsive. As she dances in the water her head occasionally breaks surface and for a thrilling moment she sees two worlds, both dominated by blues. Then she submerges again and once more stops anticipating what comes next and allows it to flow. # The dimensions add up, and each individuals' life will be represented as a line winding through this high order space for, after all, we change with time, our desires like flames guttering or jumping high, changing in quality and color as our bodies and minds evolve, as we tire or revive. Say one hundred billion homo sapiens have ever lived. Plot all their world lines in our mirrored jewel of a graph. A central space will be densely packed with lines -- the static, basic needs (and needs are frozen desires) that we all share -- food, warmth, light. This is the unchanging realm of order in desire space. Far out from this are the rare, arcane desires -- mathematical purity, high-heeled shoes, other (mercifully uncommon) axes that blight lives. This is the chaotic realm, in principle unpredictable. Between the chaotic and the orderly, the raging ocean and the pack-ice, there is complexity. Here the world lines map out intricate dances along fractal boundaries and here is where most of us, most of those who have ever lived, exist. Our lines of desire stay deep in the realm of order for all of our childhoods, erupting into great jagged loops and gyres as we hit puberty. For most of us they will settle down into smeared points, short lines or small loops near the chaos/order boundary. For some, another line or lines will be close enough form a braid, two or more thirsts dancing in the laminated, multi-dimensional spaces. Pray you are lucky enough to meet the person or persons who are compatible with your line, a line that defines you and can take far more forms and locations than language can describe. Make the lines red. Now their sum total will map out a great flower shape, deep red in the middle, fading out to the palest pink at the edges. In between, the involute, multiply re-entered zone of complexity, the multi-variate rose of human desire. # Chris opens a space, fills it with golden threads dripping with light. Sam makes loops of silver, shimmering like dew and enclosing the space in a sphere, making a globe of warm radiance. The threads follow lines that could be described mathematically as involutes of circles, with corresponding equations, but the two humans choose to ignore this level, relishing instead the physicality of light and curves. Sam opens emself and ey makes a smile in the form of a thousand arches with a thousand open doors, a canal running below. Chris sends a gondola down the canal, a baroque affair, all curls upon curls over the functional underlying shape, red and gold and a dusting of witty pale blue. As it passes each door gapes wide and opens onto the sphere of sweet, sticky light. Chris sees in the gaps in the sphere that ey has forgotten part of the day -- the easy laughter on the open channel when Sam moved a construction beam with even more than eir usual grace, the awkward motions of the remote translating into a smooth lateral translation so elegant that joy was the only rational response. A sudden darkness, rich and threatening, fills the space Chris has made and ey shivers as ey feels something that has no name is gifted to em from Sam. Ey sinks then surfaces and recognizes the gift for what it is -- another small piece of the rose, part of the phase space of desire that was not eirs before but has now been wrapped around the deepest part of eir mind. # We are defined by our desires and our desires define the rose. RED We hit the ground running, popping open the chopper door as soon as we touched the ground and leaping out. As we raced across the tarmac I briefly stopped and looked back. The helicopter was a collection of yellow and black planes: simple; stripped down; like a child's toy. A slight leak of Red from the bottom glittered in the sunset like tears of blood. The pilot, huge eyes barely visible under his mask, waved slowly at me. That one needs a bath I thought to myself. I rushed to catch up with Giles, dodging the shallow pools of Red on the runway. We got a cab and once on the back seat resumed our argument. "Look Giles, it was all running fine out there. There's no need for human intervention in the drilling process at all." "A regular supply of Red is too critical to be left to puppets. The only way to run that operation without human presence would be to give them a dangerous level of independence. What if they break through?" "Breaking through requires human intervention. Even if they did we could just nuke them." "Any use of fission weapons has to be reported to the Families. Do you have any idea how much paperwork that would generate?" "I can guess. Still it's a valid option. With that much Red around there's nothing to worry about as far as radiation goes." "It's not going to fly Alan. The Families will never agree to withdrawing human supervision." And the argument went on, looping around and around, never reaching a conclusion. # Some of our philosophers say that we die and are resurrected every millisecond. Every blink of the eye removes us from the universe and brings us back. Hence the constant surprise that we all feel on looking around at the world. A few of these philosophers say that we should all strive to maximize this sense of wonder in order to feel at one with the changeless yet always in flux universe. They say that the best way to wake up like this is through pain. The lash of the whip shocks us into threading our moments of life together as nothing else does. If this is so, how awake must the puppets be? # We could have got a plane home or taken a ship or we could even have flowed down the east coast to the Thames. Instead we took the train as usual. A long journey but one that we found soothing and interesting in equal measures. South through the Lake District, the landscape scattered with strange angular Red structures. The dull green grass on the soft hills was covered with these bright red things, collapsed geodetic spires topped with shattered domes. They looked like failed schematics for crimson mushrooms. Somewhere out on the endless prairies of North America was the successful version. A skyhook fifty kilometers square at the base, topped off at 36,000 high by something that looked suspiciously like a giant starship. No-one went anywhere near the thing. Red seemed to have plans there and they might involve us. We sat drinking whisky in our compartment watching the view. Somewhere around Lancaster Giles and I lit up Cuban cigars ("rolled on the thighs of nubile young puppets," joked Giles) and resumed our argument. "So you think we can't trust the puppets with anything more complex that food preparation and street sweeping?" "You need to meet my uncle. He'll explain why we can't trust puppets on their own." # Trains are popular now. No-one wants to have their possibly immortal lives ended in a car or plane crash and only the young and stupid flow, with all the risks inherent in that trick. For long distances it's train and ferry all the way. Also, I think, there's a sense of security to be found in the view out of the train window, a view almost unchanged since Red came 146 years ago. Our landscapes make us and those of us from this small island take in the rapid changes, from mountains and lakes to broad flood plans, and learn to expect similarly rapid changes in our personal and social lives. Against that desire for change is the fact that we love the way Britain looks and will go to any lengths to preserve it, even if what we want to preserve is an illusion, an idealization of the past. # I looked around the wood paneled room. As so often in this kind of place the dim light, the gentle glow from the furniture, the hypnotic flicker of the open fire all combined to produce the kind of comfort conducive to making decisions for others. On the wall, among the trophies and certificates, was a print of the Origin Point, Red Ground Zero. An ugly street in Kenner, Louisiana with a bar and a gas station on one side, two blurred hotels on the other. A crack in the street pouring out a crimson liquid. He was a tall, slim man with silver hair sculpted in waves back from his forehead. He was a classic member of that ruling class that is so entrenched it might as well be a separate species. "So you're interested in improving our puppets?" he said, pouring us both a glass of single malt. "Yes sir. Frankly I'm a little impatient with the way puppets are underutilized and," he cut me off. "Alan. Have you ever wondered where all the puppets go?" Hesitantly I said, "Well, sir, I assume that they're working for us. And many must maintain the bits of civilization we aren't currently using." "Many do exactly that of course. But think about it. Ever seen them breed? A mature puppet can produce fifteen progeny every six months. Most do. So where do they go?" "Honestly, I don't know" "They go East, Alan. In ever increasing numbers." He pointed at the map. "By now we should have expanded out beyond 5000 degrees east. We're stuck, however. I'd like you to go there. Have a look around for me. See for yourself why we are so wary of puppets." # I flowed down the Thames, across the Channel and up the Western coast of mainland Europe. Flowing was beautiful around there with clear un-polluted water run through with refreshing threads of natural Red. It was horribly dangerous of course. A good storm and one could end up thoroughly diluted, consciousness spread through cubic kilometers of ocean. This time, however, I raced to Rotterdam safely and swiftly. After re-constituting myself I reported to a dull, temporary looking structure in the port area, There I met a transport nerd by the name of Michael Stevens. "Why can't I use normal methods? Get a train? Flow up rivers and across lakes? Drive? Even get a pilot and fly?" I asked. "It's too far. We've been told to get you as close to the front as possible. It's half a million kilometers! This is the only method that makes sense in terms of speed and logistics. Get in." Knowing I had no real choice I got into the silvery teardrop on the rail in front of us. Stevens strapped me in and closed the lid. As the capsule filled with liquid Red I shut my eyes and waited. "Fare-thee-well sweet prince," came Stevens' voice from every direction simultaneously. "Enjoy the trip. You won't enjoy the destination I'm afraid". His sneer seemed to fade into sadness at the end of this little speech.. Before I could think about that, however, the capsule accelerated like a bullet in the powerful magnetic field now surrounding it. The Red filling me turned to something resembling steel as it reinforced me internally and the capsule, in maglev mode, passed into a tunnel evacuated of air. Moving ballistically at 15,000 kph I let the Red massage my muscles. We may be built to withstand high accelerations but, unassisted, none of us could take the 100g I'd just been through. I was hurt all over. # The rest of the journey was dull. Staring through the safety-Red at the silvery capsule walls. Listening to the low roar of sparse air molecules being displaced as we raced through the incomplete vacuum. Many hours later I arrived at my first stop, a place called New Petrograd. It was at 2457 degrees east and for me represented a change over from one tube to another. I had an overnight stay so I exited my capsule and went, with my guide Yelena, to the surface of the newly built city. The metropolis, pristine and barely inhabited by humans, weighed down on me. I wasn't familiar with the original, hundreds of thousands of kilometers west, but this version seemed to me to be a place for fogs and rain. A place for sudden and pointless deaths. Of course this thought lead naturally back to something that had been plaguing me for months. What was my position in the rigid and unchanging hierarchy that Red had gifted us? Despite the power Red gave me, the idyllic life granted by being one of only fifty million humans in a population of ten billion servants, I was discontented and a little afraid. Astonishingly born to two puppet parents in the far north of Britain I acted as a reminder of our kinship with the puppets to everyone, including those who did their best to ignore that fact. My birth was a huge jolt to a society always insecure with its hidden structures. I looked, and according to every test I was, fully human, but there were those who denied it. I often wondered if there was someone out there I disturbed sufficiently for them to try and kill me. I shook these feelings off and allowed Yelena to show me around her brand new city during the fourteen hours before my next capsule left. I was favorably impressed. # Yelena was one of those beautiful women who seem to walk with a slight but visible hunch. Shoulders kept high as though to ward off the gaze of all the men who pass. She was a treat to look at however. Long blonde hair with misty blue eyes. Tall, but not too tall, with a figure that filled me with longing whenever she walked in front of me. The fact that she pushed all my sexual desire buttons should have been a warning. The city itself was built on many islands with a huge number of bridges connecting them. The buildings were a complex mixture of styles, their empty cleanliness reminiscent of a painting by de Chirico although this effect was diminished by the huge, out of context, skyscraper stabbing the sky in the city's downtown. It wasn't until we were in a large, chilly square surrounded on all sides by impressive Romanesque buildings that I made a move on the, until then silent, Yelena. "Why do you hide yourself in this polished mausoleum? A girl as beautiful as you could do well elsewhere." She finally turned to look at me, her perfect face as empty as a reflection in a soap bubble. "I like it here. It's where I belong. It's where I was born." "We all feel that when young. Then we grow up and begin to desire the exotic." "You and your kind do. We wish only for stability." Then I realized, later than I should, that the lovely Yelena was a puppet. How many generations of selective breeding, how much training, how many surgeries were required to produce a puppet as nearly perfect as Yelena I don't know. I will admit that on understanding what she was my heart leaped. All human men experiment with female puppets. It's one of the perks of being human. Most grow out of it, however, as they realist the greater joys of human women. When one can have a willing partner at any time the attractions of having to make an effort to find one become, paradoxically, amplified. All men, even those attracted to other men, can fall into treating sex as a form of masturbation, a fact true even with those we love the most. Sex with puppets makes that tendency all the greater, the puppet being totally focused on its master’s pleasure. The saying is, "Real men don't use puppets. All men do." I used Yelena that night, that emptily blank expression never changing although her eyes, at times, became hard and opaque as I experimented in treating her as I would a human woman. It was late when I was done and, through that feeling of exhausted satiation, I measured my image of myself and found it diminished. # I woke next to her at sunrise. Her hair was a glowing halo around the sweet face, the sheet barely covered the breasts. As with many fair women the eyes seemed to be a slightly bruised as did her temples. I punched her in the throat and held a pillow over her face until the struggle ended. Gathering my things I rapidly left the house. I felt no remorse over killing her. She was such an advanced puppet that the only way to stop her breaking through to full autonomy would be to give her a bath in pure liquid Red. Doubting that this would be done by her owners (all that expensive breeding, surgery and training would be lost in the process) I'd taken a step I thought necessary. I reached the tube station and found a platform empty of puppets and humans. Just a single capsule with its lid up greeted me. I climbed in, pulled the lid down and as the capsule filled with Red I took several deep breaths and began to drift asleep. # My destination was a bare concrete platform with no building other than a small metal hut. The sky was a dull gray and there was a faint directionless rumble all around. A man paced up to me, appearing from the hut. He was tall and rotund with legs and arms that were so thin they seemed about to snap with each of his enthusiastic motions. As he got closer I saw watery gray eyes with long eyelashes that gave him the look of some sleepy predator. "Good evening Alan," he said. "Ready to face the dark-side of our happy society? I'm Joe." He took me to dinner in an otherwise deserted restaurant. The food and wine were indifferent and I couldn't help noticing that the puppet serving us had a broken leg, poorly splinted with a thin length of wood. "Pay no attention to Igor. It is far better off here that where I found it. Standing orders are that there be no medical interventions for injured puppets. There are always more where they come from after all." I studied the puppet for a moment. Bald with deeply sunken eyes of undifferentiated misty blue. Each eye surrounded by a corona of what looked like cork. The rest of the face looked human but the body was very different. Thin, except for a pot belly, limbs that seemed to be too long and have too many joints. There was no sign that it was in pain. There never is. I shared gossip from the West with Joe and told him of my journey, including the events with Yelena. "I'm aware of the Yelena project of course. Everyone in the East is, but we try and keep it from people in the West. You tend to be puritanical about puppet improvement. You were wrong to kill what sounds like a very advanced member of the class, but the Novy Petrograd crowd were very wrong to unleash her on you. Keep quiet and there should be no consequences." I decided that this was the best I could hope for. I'd keep my head down until I returned to the West and then tell Giles' uncle everything. The meal finished and we sat drinking brandy that tasted like cough drops and smoking cigars that smelled like dung. "You know why you're here of course?" he asked. "To familiarize myself with the situation and report back to London," I said, a sinking feeling coming on that said I was about to discover a new interpretation of my mission. "Wrong. You're here as our new General. Any experience in that?" "None whatsoever. Anyway, I'm leaving in a week." "I'm afraid you aren't. Read your orders? You must have pissed someone off big-time. He threw a thin packet of papers across the table. I read them and sure enough they stated that I was on permanent secondment to the 20 deg N, 5000 deg E camp. "I never saw these before. They can't be real." "Trust me, they are. Came through on the very slow, very unreliable radio link back to the West. You weren't given a copy?" "No, nothing at all." "They didn't want you to make a fuss. Don't try to leave. The tube won't work for you now and the return puppet convoy takes ten years to get to the Urals." # Joe took me to the camps to give me a feel for how the operation was run. Perhaps the greatest initial impression was one of how haphazard it all was. A vast expanse of tents with unpaved paths between them, tents of all sizes and configurations: some made of canvas; others from animal skin; others again from what looked like parachute material. The alleyways were filled with puppets pushing past each other; selling food, all of which reeked of Red; following the horses to scoop up great streams of shit; running hoses and cables to bring this benighted section of the great shanty city onto the grid. There were small carts, made of wood and metal, with cut off One World logos occasionally visible. Some of them were powered by electric motors or inefficient internal combustion engines, most were puppet drawn. As always the puppets burned herbs to cover the smells, half aware of their offensiveness. The tiny sparkle of the flames, thousands of them everywhere one looked, lent the night a marvelous feel, made it a noisy fairyland. "Who's in charge?" I asked Joe. "No-one," he replied. "We gave them a few simple instructions and the ordered complexity you see is the result. Who would have thought war could be an emergent behavior?" He grinned at me as though he'd imparted some great secret. "They come off the convoy from the West and immediately settle in. They use the metal and wood in their road machines to build what they need and as soon as they have everything sorted out they report to the recruiting office. All very neat and tidy." As we walked by a blacksmith who was using what looked like a military laser to cut a sheet of metal, I thought about fear. I was very afraid of course. Joe had given me some idea of what I was expected to do and the thought of it made my knees weak but it seemed that if I ever expected to get West again I would have to do it. In general, however, one great fear we all face is of that which is closest to us but has changed into something we don't understand. This informs our desire to understand what happened to the shape of our world when Red came. The new, huge distances available to us. The possibility that we now live on an infinite surface. It makes us lie awake at night wondering about the changes in ourselves: the great strength; the biological immortality; the control of Red at a very basic level. Above all we fear the puppets. Those whom Red rejected became the strange slaves that we can control with a gesture or a thought. They are numerous enough and strong enough to overpower us whenever they wish and we live our lives in shadow because of it. Autonomous puppets could hardly help but be filled with justified rage towards us. In this camp, according to Joe, there were over a million normal puppets, although the idea of that many armed puppets, autonomous or not, in one place made me feel sick. "What do they eat and drink?" "There are springs of natural Red all over the place. They boil it down and make cakes of the stuff. Also the convoy brings in thousands of tonnes of grain every day. They drink Red." I stared in incomprehension at him. "Yes, it's risky," he said. "It brings them close to breaking through but they need intelligence and initiative where they're going. It can lead to difficult operations for the police though." "And the police are puppets as well?" "Of course. Who else? After all, there's only two humans here at the front." # Even now, when Red makes it so easy to build them, we are obsessed with high places. A child's game is to build a thin skyscraper 300 meters high, then knock it down from a safe distance. I did it myself, the narrow lattice of crimson stakes swaying in the wind, then the controlled explosions at the base. It fell away from me, as planned, and I ran towards the toppling spire through the dust cloud, the gentle rumble of collapsing Red all around me. Some structures are meant to last, however. They have a purpose other than to fall. The East Atlantic Government Building next to the old Houses of Parliament is one. The Front Observation Tower is another. Joe took me up there when the weather cleared, muttering something meeting the neighbors. The structure itself was around 400 meters high, a larger and more stable version of my sacrificial effort. It was shaped like an air traffic control tower, a long stem with a flared control room at the top. We exited the elevator into a startlingly large space, filled with observation tools and a great deal of much stranger equipment. There were bowls and cups on every flat surface, their contents in varying stages of decomposition. # There is no science except for the study of Red. There is no art except for that which deals with Red or that which denies it. By that standard Jenkins, in her huge tower right at the edge of the front, is both the last true scientist and the last true artist. She observes the front with the care of an ornithologist and makes hypotheses with the ease of an artist. She devises experiments to test those hypotheses with her engines of vast destruction at one scale or the tiniest of atomic shifters at the other. She takes the results of these experiments and feeds them back into the jigsaw of data, adding a single piece here, removing two there. She would be the first to admit that she has failed in her task of understanding the front. It's simply not the kind of place that can be understood from a distance. They left me alone for a few minutes to look out of one of the huge window. I saw an ocean of gently rippling mud. It was the color of cigarette ash, each ripple topped by a wavering line of pure black. After a minute or so I saw, superimposed on the great ripples, zig-zag patterns that at first, by some optical illusion, stood out above the mud. Thick walls made of blurred strata of the sticky stuff. Then my eye caught on, the illusory walls inverted and I realized that I was looking at a network of trenches. They meandered across the battlefield, mostly hugging the near side but some reaching out for what looked like kilometers. "Frightening sight isn't it?" came a voice next to me. The owner of the voice, who surely must have been the woman responsible for the unholy mess in the observation room, was petite and immaculately turned out. She wore a pale pink summer dress with deep brown hair pulled back in a pony tail. She looked about twelve years old and was the toughest person I have ever known. "It's hard to get a sense of scale up here. Those trenches that go the furthest out reach about 4000 kilometers. The whole battlefield is currently about 100,000 kilometers across. That we can see all that way is a perfect demonstration of the world being near or actually flat out here. "Anyway, you're the murderous son-of-a-bitch that they've sent out this time? That Yelena was my friend." She glared at me with eyes far too cold and tired for someone so apparently young. "What the hell. You're going to die anyway. Use these." She handed me a large pair of stabilized binoculars. "Look at that smudge on the horizon." I raised the binoculars to my eyes, corrected the focus and looked where she indicated. The smudge suddenly resolved into a tall tower, seemingly made out of planks of dry Red. As it swayed in the wind I saw a flash from the very top. Someone was watching us from across the mud soup. "See a flash from another pair of glasses? There's usually someone up there. The tower marks the far edge of no-mans-land. Today it's about 100,000 kilometers away. Sometime it's as far as a light year. The tower is always visible though, as though it can change height." "The thing is made out of Red. Anything is possible with that stuff." "Perhaps." She grimaced and looked about to spit. "Appeals to the ineffable nature of Red won't help you down there however." I looked through the binoculars again. There was no sign of movement in the trenches. Of course, if what Jenkins had told me about the distances I was seeing were correct I'd never see something as small as a puppet. "The war started 96 years ago. Since then we have lost 12,750 kilometers and, despite our vast advantage in numbers, we lose more all the time. They are better trained, better equipped and better lead. That's where you come in of course. Nothing larger or more sophisticated that a kilo of TNT works down there. Mercifully that applies to the other side as well. All fighting is short range, sometimes with bayonets." "Who are we fighting?" "Look at this." She pointed at a screen with a blurred image on it. "Long baseline interferometry. Got a whole bunch of hooked up telescopes along the front line." She typed something on the computer keyboard and the image leaped into clarity. It was the top of the opposing tower and the figure there, binoculars dangling from its hand, was a puppet. # All is gray, green and brown. Any primary colors here are sucked at by the eye: a hazmat sign, burning yellow; the silvery blue of a vacuumed sealed meal; the crimson of Red in a mug, steaming from heating over a fire and smelling of spices. Down here the eye is starved. We begin our trek across no-mans-land today. 50,000 kilometers down ever narrowing trenches in the early stages by small trains, later on foot. To get to the oppositions trenches will take around three years, assuming no changes in space across no-mans-land. My squad, here more to prevent me deserting than for any military purpose, will accompany me to the real front. And there I will have to exercise my power as the General and take control of the whole offensive. I won't touch the puppets I've decided. After Yelena I've become aware that what I do with puppet women is rape, no matter how willing they may seem. I still think that fully autonomous puppets will lead to the destruction of the true human race. That's why I consented finally to perform this mission. I won't, however, allow the level of puppet mistreatment that was common here before I arrived. Call it altruism. Call it an attempt to accrue goodwill before some nameless disaster strikes us all. I don't care. I'm afraid. About the Author Ken Burstall is a middle-aged Englishman, living in Austin Texas with far too many children. He works, intermittently, as an oilfield geologist and has calculated that he has spent six of the last twenty years on oil rigs far offshore. He has a weblog. He has a Smashwords author page. He can be emailed at Kenneth.Burstall@gmail.com Also Available: Connect Building bridges of meaning through symbols — such as flags, status, and nationality — is as much about alienating as connecting. But the Virtual Bridge Sri plans to build could reconnect the lost hopes of a dying civilization. "Connect" is a complete short story excerpted from the anthology EXTINCT DOESN'T MEAN FOREVER. Available at Smashwords The Cone “It's a forgotten war. Spiraling burns, strange cancers, shrunken hard torsos like fragments of bleached rock. “ “lavishly bizarre” Available at M-Brane SF #29 Bubbles: Three Fragments from the Shoal Wars Bubbles - after the Earth has been destroyed by enigmatic aliens the remnants of humanity spiral towards civil war. Jasmine – a pre-pubescent astronaut discovers the truth about her mission and vows revenge. Available at Smashwords.