The following stories are currently out of print, but can be read by clicking the links. If you would like to reprint one of them in your publication, or you still retain the copyright over one of the stories, please contact me via email.
Ave Pasifika Series:
It’s not a dignified birth, or even an impressive one. A couple of lines of code bounce out of sync and suddenly there is VINK2, shuddering in the cold of TSIMVINK’s electronic sub-systems. A thought without a mind, a personhood without a body: VINK2 is a newborn artificial intelligence.
Val accidentally fucks the Persinger’s steering on a tricky turn just outside the hangar. One minute the airship is grooving along, not so much as a splutter from the engine; the next he sort-of-kind-of spins them too hard to starboard (he’s avoiding a seagull) and the whole thing cuts out, dead.
“Fuck post-modern. It’s totally temporal, baby.” The punk sucks in his lower lip like he’s savoring the idea itself. The punk’s face is all soft lines and big doe-eyes and Val watches his hands, small and nimble and thin, as they guide the chopsticks in and out of the cardboard curry-box.
[REMOVED FOR REPRINT] Jessica Pemberley-Weston stops welding just long enough to flick up her visor and give me a look of disgust. “A time machine. Duh.”
The cop was bluffing—you didn’t have to be a psyche to work that out. With three spades already on the table, she was trying to fake a flush, but her eyes betrayed her: too manic, too desperate. Mink sensed the cards she clutched were a nine of hearts and an ace, probably a spade. That’d get her a pair of nines—an okay hand, sure, but not when Mink’s employer could make the straight.
The cute blonde I picked up in the club turns out to be a fat, middle-aged perve. I catch him in the bathroom with his holos down, using my toothbrush to clear the plaque from his yellowing teeth.
The Future of Dr Lole San Paulo
In fact there is something decidedly not right about the boy, something almost plastically perfect. Lole looks again at the tattoos—they are pirate symbols, clearly, drawn with a lecky-knife and filled with black ink—and tries to remember where he’s seen them before.
Mumbaikarpocalypse Series:
The Diacon sprite was fraying his nerves – but then they always did get snappy when they thought you were trying to shut them down.
He locates the right button, presses it, and the truck’s AI – Christine, he calls her, a reference he’s confident she doesn’t get – appears in sprite-form on the passenger seat: a tiny, sour-faced girl with a head of wild curls.
A decade ago he’d been attending student protests, waving colourful ‘peace’ banners and writing cross editorials for socialist newsletters about the state of the government. Now he was a security guard schmuck with a gun, who carried a torch for the impossibly beautiful daughter of a local warlord.
Aliens:
A Believer’s Guide to Azargarth
A moment of truth: I am a Christian of the forever-lapsing sort. I fight my faith and my faith fights back and my infrequent truces with God are as uneasy and uncertain as my convictions.
When the aliens invaded earth Lord Valery Battersby-Wilkes was in the process of getting his head forcibly flushed down the second-floor school bogs, so the carnage and destruction that immediately followed was actually something of a relief.
Cyberfunk:
[REMOVED FOR REPRINT (FUNDRAISER): KINDLE ALL STARS] The sharp drop to Los Hellas Airstrip reminded Gig of ‘Nam. Not the real war, of course, but the twentieth century celluloid reproductions he often surfed past on late- night cable. Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket.
XVI and Deek Escape in the Night
In the darkness of that first night she touches his soft belly, his wide hips. Touches him with love. Remembering that without him she wouldn’t have the money: ninety five credits from the suit’s wallet, and another sixteen from the vagrant.
Yesterday in a fit of pique you arrogantly claimed all your nightmares were real. In the tumultuous depths of the neural network you’d seen phantasms, digital echoes of lives as tangible as your own.
They were in a truck-stop on the A78, one of an interminable series of chain stores that fringed the British arterials. Not Malachy’s first choice — he far preferred the luxury of inner-city diners — but he could appreciate that the place possessed an appropriately transitory resonance.
[REMOVED FOR REPRINT] The only people you can take are the vanished, those who are never seen again, those who disappear without a trace, swallowed by the sky, the desert, the sea. The Amelia Earharts, the Louis Le Princes, the Harold Holts.
Ten years later, Ping paints a picture of his grandmother walking into her kitchen to catch him and Da Vinci shirtless and kissing, flowers entwined in Da Vinci’s copper hair. Cherubs frolic merrily in the sink and Christian miscellany—crosses, halos, rosaries—waterfall from the kitchen drawers and sprout from the knife block.
Others:
For a brief moment I contemplated the possibility that the boy had lived in the bush all his life, without any human contact—I remembered stories about orphaned children being raised by wolves in Europe, or bears in America.
“Hello ma’am,” the official says, “I’m here to inform you that your invincibility has expired.”
For three days the implants burn inside my head like coals, but on the fourth day the burning goes away and I can feel my new eyes sort of settling inside my skull, as if they’ve finally accepted their home.
Let he who hath no sins, Gavin thinks wishfully, pushing past her and on up the road. The woman is clearly no saint herself.
