It’s the taste of lemon balm lingering,
languid and laughing,
through the sun-soaked hours of late morning.
I think it’s even in that dark threshold
between our eyes. There, I uttered your name
as the boundaries blurred.
That scent like honey bees and the first quarter
covers me with strawberry kisses and yawns lupine
in my lap. She hunts skillfully, and I am, I fear,
possessed—the perfect game.
This converts hindu-arabic numerals into elvish ones. By “elvish numerals” I mean Tengwar duodecimal in order from least magnitude to most. I just think they are neat. Enjoy!
Tengwar made possible with the FairfaxHD font.
See the “numbers” section here for more details.
]]>As she flew past, she grabbed a chair with velcro straps before a computer showing a calendar. She stopped—held by the fixed object—and swung herself into its seat. She pulled a pair of glasses up to her eyes from their cord around her neck. She peered at the screen. The year was 2109; the month was July. She tapped the seventh day. The screen filled with colorful chevrons. Next to each there was a task.
Audit CoR system logs / Trial 7 of dextrotetraacenaphthylene / Re-calibrate NIR imaging equipment / Transmit status…
She chorded the keyboard a couple times and black filled the screen.
A blinking cursor awaited her command.
Julia tapped in cor-audit -l.
The screen produced a long table of dated log entries.
Each date was paired with a short message.
Julia paged through these briefly before entering cor-audit -l -d0.
This time, only one entry appeared.
It was dated for July 7th, 2109, at 00:00.
Its description read, burn_, and nothing else.
What is this? A prank? Julia thought. Maybe that solar storm, but we were eclipsed… She investigated a few more commands, and said to herself, It’s not a prank. This is from CoR itself. She knew Symbol wouldn’t care. Just keep working, they would say. Julia undid the straps and kicked off the adjacent fuselage.
Across the room there were three inset cylindical racks. On two of them were bulky, air-tight suits, white and utilitarian, with the Symbol logo on the right breast: a square with the letter sigma in the center. Symbol values coordination, she recalled the orientation, because we are more than the sum of our parts. Sigma means summation, and the presenter put thick emphasis on the word sum. Julia remembered cringing at this.
The third rack was empty. To the left of the racks, beside the airlock, there was a gray box unseemingly bolted to the wall with a dial and a speaker. She floated up to it. She turned the knob, and the speaker began to whine. A voice protested over the noise. Julia dialed the knob back slightly and the whine ceased.
Julia began, “Are you alright, Thom? Over.”
The voice responded, “Yeah. What’d’ya need? Over.”
This is how Thomas normally started a conversation: “What’d’ya need?” He wasn’t supposed to be conducting a spacewalk unsupervised technically. But, there’s the safety protocol, then there’s the demands of the job, Thomas would say.
Julia proceeded, “There’s a weird log entry. I thought you might want to see it before I got rid of it. Over.”
Thomas called back, “Yeah, I saw that. I figure it’s the IT guys testing some new system. Probably nothing. We can just file it a 02-25. Over.”
That’s the code for a mistaken entry, Julia recalled. But that implies an actor posting a log manually in error. This was an automatic log from the CoR sensor network, it couldn’t have been a test or manual entry. “I was thinking the same thing.” She says, “Are you aligning the NIR camera out there? Over.”
The sensors on the Anadyomene-01 were in various stages of disrepair. Julia had to conduct repairs on the NIR camera nearly daily.
“10-4,” a pause. “Well, I was but—Christ, this station is falling apart—the cable needs to be replaced first. There’s no continuity on one of the data pins. Over,” Thom grumbled.
“I’ll send out a new cable.” She told him, then, “Thanks for looking at it this time. Over and out.”
She turned the dial back. For a moment she thought about Persephone, her green idol cactus back home. She had many cacti, but Persephone was special; Persephone was first. As she woke in the morning back home, drinking a warm glass of water, she would often sit and trace the cactus’s folds with her eyes. The warm water was a substitute for tea; the tea, a substitute for coffee; and, the coffee, a substitute for amphetamine.
The spare cables were kept fast to the wall above the hatch that held other spare parts including the carbon-dioxide removing air filters. These had to be replaced every three days before it became uncomfortable to breathe. When her mother called her an addict, she remembered saying, “We all have things we need to live comfortably.” The aluminum panels showed through all the spare cables they had burned through, but she held her gaze on the hatch.
The amphetamine wasn’t always bad for her, she would recall. But, she discovered in time that she lived better without it. The same went for the coffee and the tea. So, she would sit with her water and her cactus. As long as she had it, she knew she had been watering it every couple weeks and feeding it in the spring. This thought was a token she carried with her. A token she could present to herself when life got hard; as it often did.
She took a thick grey cable from the wall, and started toward the airlock. As she did, she thought about the chemical trials she would conduct later. An organometallic reaction that could only happen in microgravity produced Getalis, a medication that slowed aging. She was researching similar reactions. Symbol hoped one of these resultant compounds could do what Getalis did more cheaply and with fewer side-effects.
Julia and Thomas just hoped life support could support them until August.
She pulled the latch that retracted the doors into the airlock’s vestibule. There was a gust as air filled the lock. Inside were dangling various hoses and cables. The light flickered for a moment then shut off. Julia chucked in the NIR camera cable then pushed the latch. The doors shut again. The change in pressure as the air rushed back in caused Julia’s ears to pop. She turned to the speaker box and twisted the dial; no whine this time.
“It’s in the lock,” she said. “I’ll clear that log now. Over.”
“10-4. Over ‘n’ out.” Thomas affirmed.
She went back to the console.
It was an error in the system, she thought, so I should file it as a 16-23. But…
She looked out the port hole beside the desk. This side always faced Venus. Her ruddy, roiling atmosphere looked to her like the fur of some protean animal as it charged and ate and fucked. …it feels like a threat. She remembered her mother telling her she should go into the trades. She thought she may have been right. If she was fixing plumbing on Earth, she could see her cactus. She could breathe all the air she wanted without a CDR filter. She could live past this month.
Nothing could save them now. She knew even if no one else did. She looked back to the patient, blinking console.
She typed, cor-audit -d0 --report '16-23'. And, the strange log entry went away.
But, you are queen of rodents.
You are the roughshod fane.
The bruises are your laurels; \
The body, your demesne.
Thrash against thy bindings
when the reaper thee arraigns.
but, the seeming went—
as easily as it came—
into base gray matter,
dissolved, and washed away.
class Muscle
attr_accessor :tensed, :relaxed
def initialize ()
@tensed = false
@relaxed = true
end
def push_pull ()
@tensed = !@tensed
@relaxed = !@relaxed
end
end
class Heart < Muscle
attr_accessor :emotions, :age
@@gamut = [
:bliss, :joy, :excitement,
:calm, :boredom, :fear,
:anger, :disgust, :sadness
]
def initialize ()
super
@emotions = [:bliss]
@life = Array.new(rand * 122, :moment)
@age = 0
end
def push_pull ()
super
@emotions << @@gamut.sample
@age += 1
if @age > @life.length
throw :death, 'that is all'
end
end
end
a_beating_heart = Heart.new
# stumbling
loop do
puts a_beating_heart.emotions
sleep 1
a_beating_heart.push_pull
end
# falling
First things first: You need to change. (A small change will do. You could start wearing the part in your hair on the other side, get into competitive international chess, or divorce your husband of several years. Anything really.) Have you changed? Are you different yet? Have you emerged/become/evolved/bloomed/withered/contracted/enervated/etc.? Very good. The next step is to do it again. Keep changing indefinitely. BASICally:
10 CHANGE
20 GOTO 10
Simple. But, also difficult. I have kept my end of the bargain. That accounts for the steps in the set of natural numbers.
The next steps are in between the other ones. Don’t ask me to explain how. These kinds of mysteries will be revealed to you in time.
Remember that you are a living thing. What does it mean to be a living thing? You are the ongoing product and reagent of an ancient chemical reaction called Life. This is a beautiful and monstrous thing. This grand grotesque is a thing of monumental violence; all living things on some level struggle to survive. Even trees sometimes have to attack their neighbors with chemical warfare to ensure their saplings can grow. But, what does it mean to struggle? It doesn’t always involve bloodshed. At the root, a struggle is a contradiction; it is the engine of change. (See Step 1.) Elements of the body that cannot coexist must change each other. (See Step π.) They change each other through struggle. In this garden of earthly delights, you must struggle; you must fight. And, if you cannot fight, you must change. That is what it means to be a living thing.
Remember that your body bleeds. You can feel pain. And, you will die. You are your desires and fears. You do not live in your body; you are your body. And, your grasping, vulnerable, teetering body really only knows two things: hunger and satisfaction. It’s all body. But, I hear you quibble. “What about the mind?” Even, “what about the spirit?” Let’s not split hairs, little lamb. The “mind” is just an abstraction of the brain, i.e., the part of the body that lives in the head. The “spirit” (or “soul”) is just an abstraction of the heart which is the part of the body that lives in the chest. I keep trying to explain this to guys the running the train ride I’m stuck on, but they just won’t accept it. Something about an engine without an engineer. I think they just don’t want to be out of a job.
I will now list the things that are not part of the body:
This is all that needs to be said. You are an animal. You will die. Continue to change. Continue to want. Continue to struggle. Praise be to the primordial and protean CHAOS. Hail Eris
]]>Her words, many-faced,
pierce spur-wise the wheel of the sun
rolling over moss-kissed lips.
There are penetrating
alphabet truths
in every direction.
Would you listen?
Not just listen, but deeply!
She brings rain and shine
to your twiching little ear
as your wiskers wet with strawberry seeds.
The true hearing empties the mind.
The skull, a cavern running strange water
through cracks,
deposits minerals that grow
clear,
bright,
and fractured.
The air is still,
and nothing has ever been said.