RHYTHMS, 7

Copyright � Edizioni Theoria srl, Rome-Naples

Graphic project by Susanna Gulinucci

Cover image from "Science Fiction Eye", 1, 1987

First edition September 1994

Electric riders

curated by Daniele Brolli

Theoria

This book

In Darwin, the little girl Kelsey will be nine years old. How will we live, there,
and in all the other places in the world where the almighty Company will move his
mother? And if humanity were divided into two great branches, would you prefer to
be a Mechanist, an expert in artificial prostheses, or a Shaper, a lover of genetic
lines? Another little girl, Cindy, argues that the world is not what it appears:
maybe she doesn't have the wheels in place, but in the meantime, under the sofa of
her house, dark dungeons full of living cables open up, controlling what happens on
the surface. And how about surfing as a method of absolute knowledge, while Chtulhu
himself, the Ancient Monster of Lovecraft, reappears in the age of Artificial
Intelligences and the theories of Chaos, in a wild, hilarious pop comedy? The world
of comics is so real, and that of humans, on the other hand, so fake, that cartoons
invade our space-time continuum ... Computers murmur prayers of plastic and steel,
while ancient dragons, built by skilled craftsmen, perhaps manage to resume the
paths of heaven ... And androids, can they make love?

It's just one example of what the imagination, and the intelligence, of cyberpunk
writers can hold. Just a few ideas in the gallery, or rather in the ride between
the stories of cyberpunk writers that this anthology contains. For each story, a
card on the author, and a thread towards the rest. The rest of cyberpunk, and
beyond.

For many, cyberpunk is something that has to do with a certain type of "consumer"
literature: "science fiction". Cyberpunk would therefore be neither more nor less
than the science fiction of the moment, the most evolved or the most "trendy" one,
whose scenario is dominated by the interaction between the human brain and the
cybernetic universe, made up of machines and programs. For many others, cyberpunk
is instead a practice, a way of life, a banner under which a part, the most
militant and utopian, of the vast, growing international community of cyberspace
surfers, or users of telematic networks ( this is about 15 million people in 1994).
In the meantime, one thing seems certain: cyberpunk, which originally designated a
group of "science fiction" writers, is instead one of the very few moments in which
literature, and writing, have left the "genres" and returned to harmony with the
profound trends of society and technology, managing to intuit and represent their
development, conflicts and contradictions in a series of images and narratives,
capable of striking a very wide audience. To the point of even becoming, in fact, a
"trend", a way of saying and thinking.

Ten years ago Neuromancer came out, the novel in which William Gibson coined the
word cyberspace, to designate an objective space in which one enters and can
"navigate" or "ride" from the keyboard of one's computer. It was then the anthology
Mirrorshades (these are the mythical mirrored glasses favored by cyberpunk),
composed by Bruce Sterling (the Italian edition, edited by Daniele Brolli and
Antonio Caronia, is from a few months ago) that defined cyberpunk as a movement
literary, marking the names and borders. But in our time, ten years or so is a huge
amount: cyberpunk has had plenty of time to defuse (and maybe even resurrect from
time to time) as a literary movement (the creators themselves can't stand the label
anymore). On the other hand, it was said, it has greatly expanded as a "practice"
of groups (sometimes a bit sectarian) and individuals, who identify telematic
networks as the "ground", so to speak, where you play: and where you any future
prospect of personal liberation and general transformation of society can also play
a role. And it also had time to become one of those words which, perhaps in a
confused way, signal to all the works in progress, the mutation taking place.

For all this, in the �Ritmi� series, attentive to the frontier areas of reality and
the imaginary, cyberpunk could not be missing. We asked Daniele Brolli, (Italian
writer, essayist, and curator of "Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine", a
magazine that published the best cyberpunk signatures in the US) to build an
original anthology, which retraces the (literary) path of cyberpunk ideally
alongside Mirrorshades, as his complement, in the library of enthusiasts; but at
the same time capable of illuminating every reader on an area of sensitivity that
is common to all, all young people in particular, whether or not they are
passionate about cyberpunk narratives.

And so Brolli inevitably built the first post-cyberpunk anthology. Partly because
in it, as the curator himself explains, cyberpunk is considered as a "dead
language", which gives new meaning and breath to new languages, those spoken, and
is "underneath" our sensitivity, makes it more our way of perceiving the world is
rich and true, even when we believe we know nothing of that "ancient" language. And
a little also because, finally and without any sense of guilt, the old and new
authors of cyberpunk (the anthology ranges from the years of Neuromancer to today)
are considered for what they are: writers among writers, not inhabitants of a
particular ghetto. , that of science fiction (or cyberpunk itself) but, thank
goodness, common (but also extraordinary) inhabitants of the world of writing and
literature. And ideas. Like so many others, yesterday, today and the day before,
from the writers of the "beat generation" to Baudelaire, from the cursed poets to
the best of the American "postmoderns" or the "magic realists" of Latin America.

Preface

Cyberpunk, a dead language

from our future

What is the fate of a dead language?

If that language has produced works that remain in people's consciousness, it will
become an invisible helper, it will be a magical point of view on the appearance of
things.

A dead language is perhaps the secret language of the spirit, it remains unchanged
over the years and becomes the concrete reference of a discourse not subject to the
superficial mutability of the times. It is the tool of ethics, it is a sacred
dictionary of words that multiply their meanings in the boundless spaces within
man.

It is the language of a non-formalized community, internalized to the point of

transferring itself to the voice and permeating the word itself, but only
implicitly, without ever manifesting itself in the concreteness of exclusive words
(disguising itself with the subtle virtues of accentuation or syntactic choices) .

A dead language can no longer be updated, but it is always able to update the
sensitivity of those who approach it.

It may seem like a paradox: cyberpunk is a dead language, but in reverse.

Unlike of course Latin and ancient Greek, it is able to give our sensitivity the
tools to understand the era of great technological transformations which, in a
pervasive way, attack and transform the entire sphere of our way of perceiving and
being. in the world: our sensoriality.

On the other hand, cyberpunk is not, and never will be, a spoken language. In the
communicating vessels between objects and their codification in words, cyberpunk
immediately escapes a strict referentiality. It prefers to be a language that
glides through meanings, adapting to the personality of its interpreter. Cyberpunk
has to do with the multiplication of identities, in the loss of centrality of the
body, dispersed through the technological prosthesis (in particular the
"immaterial" one of information technology). Above all, it is a language born in
the future destined to tell the present.

Dead languages of the past have had millennia to lose their strict referentiality.
In the social and historical acceleration of the contemporary world, cyberpunk, on
the other hand, sees its utterances historicized at the very moment in which they
are exposed.

Time has lost its vectorial pace. Diachrony, the unfolding of a story in a
succession of different moments, yields to synchrony, the simultaneous coexistence
of moments, of differences. And this happens thanks to the diffusion of means of
communication that have established a network of information on the world that
travels simultaneously, on a thousand different channels.

What remains are the galleries of signs of the post-industrial universe in

competition with each other, which tell of rapid transformations, of unusual
discoveries, of lives lost in the labyrinthine succession of electronic devices and
environments.

Cyberpunk does not pursue changes, in its reflection it precedes them, it advocates
the terms of reference, establishes them before they become commonly used, it
provides tools to understand a reality into which we progressively slip.

The "invented" reality, or rather realistically described, in the stories of this

book.

It is not correct to say that cyberpunk is "science fiction". His literary

reference to the genre imagery of science fiction (for those who want to refer to
the traditional divisions into literary "genres") does not exhaust his path, he
only speaks of an incidental birth, of an event that has privileged a consumer
literature as projected towards the future.

The term cyberpunk was taken as it is from a short story by Bruce Bethke that
appeared in the magazine "Amazing Stories" in 1983. The critic and editor of "Isaac
Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine", Gardner Dozois, adopted it to define the new
movement of writers which soon revolutionized science fiction. The stories that
emerged so far had presented elements still in embryo that would have come to
develop clearly in 1984 in Neuromancer, William Gibson's first novel. Gibson,
almost without realizing it, had sensed some of the technological revolutions that
were taking place in those years in university and military research laboratories.
Its protagonist capable of neurally accessing computer networks, cyberspace similar
to a vast virtual reality, the world order controlled by large multinationals with
their economic interests, the disappearance of traditional communication systems in
favor of a digitized reconversion , the human body no longer understood as absolute
but invaded by mechanical or computer prostheses capable of adapting it to the
daily needs determined by a new social system� Gibson's novel was a unique
compendium of all these themes.

The word cyberpunk effectively merged the cyber of cybernetics, the science
inaugurated by Norbert Wiener in 1947 that deals with the control of artificial
organisms, and punk that referred to the homonymous seventies rock current, which
with English groups such as Sex Pistols , Clash and Joy Division or the Americans
Dead Kennedys, had represented a breaking point, not only in the musical field. It
had been much more: it had embodied the youth insurrection against the
establishment.

As cyberpunk writers began to recognize themselves under the label coined by

Dozois, they gradually became increasingly aware of the disruptive force of what
they were writing. Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker were the theorists, albeit with
different skills. Sterling wanted to understand the communicative potential of
telematic networks, the subjects and the nascent communities, in the new dimension
of a mind that "abandons" the body to travel on the net. Rucker instead tried to
codify a possible relationship with mathematics and physics, sensing with his
"transrealistic manifesto" the passage to a new stream of consciousness governed by
the exchange of mind with technology, which cancels the realism of perception,
creating perceptual possibilities. completely unpublished.

The discussion, the ideas, the theories of the cyberpunk movement gave vigor to the
novels and short stories of its authors. Yet, in the short turn of the 1980s, the
literary movement was rendered obsolete by the same technological and social
transformations it had identified. The horizon was changing, the advent of a larger
computer community was looming, generated by the same massive increase in the
number of people who first used computers, then networks. In parallel, cyberpunk
extended to all arts, to all possible positions.

But, exhausted as a movement, literary cyberpunk remained very vital as a galaxy of

authors who had always been aware of their role and the function of their writing.
Their aspect of postmodern writers, attentive to the loss of centrality of the
single individual, reconverted into a vision of a multiple "subject", endowed with
a strong community identity that also arises from a quick computer reaction with
hundreds of other individuals, it has favorites in always maintaining an almost
prophetic role. In recent years they have perhaps lost part of their enthusiasm for
the new electronic frontiers and have led them back to universal analogues,
engaging in an ever deeper journey into the labyrinth of the psyche, and
discovering themselves in part as proponents of a non-esoteric Gnosticism {I} . In
other words, knowledge is finally available to everyone.

Daniele Brolli

Thanks to Antonio Caronia and Danilo Santoni for the precious advice, Bruce
Sterling for the words, spoken and written. While without the fundamental help of
Alessandra Di Luzio and Gino Scatasta this book would hardly have seen the light.

Electric riders

William Gibson

The connection with the sidereal and telematic spaces of the computer, the life
within them, the overcoming and, perhaps, the transcendence of physical ties, are a
theme that runs through cyberpunk literature and brings it closer to the roots of
the sacred. It is the intangible body of neurons capable of translating our
identity into the etheric one of the computer environment. The "cyberspace cowboys"
invented by Gibson, or more simply the operators able to move rapidly in the
electronic realms, cross a space without dimensions and not subject to the time
continuum. A habit of this new perceptual area leads the identity to travel at the
speed of light, to expand into spaces which, in their infinity relegated to the
real dimensions of a microcircuit, remind the conscience by analogy of the vastness
of the spiritual body compressed in the physical one. . The virtual territories,
non-existent but endowed with an apparent perspective, build prairies inside
computer niches forgotten by the great flows.

The basic themes of cyberpunk literature, evident since the novel Neuromancer
(Neuromancer, North Editions) by William Gibson, published in 1984, were precisely
the oppressive urban space, hyper-marked by signs of economic power (multinationals
as the only social organization, regimentation economy of ideas) and the
suffocating and sprawling context of the city itself, capable of carrying power
everywhere, simply being present everywhere, with its extension. An absolute reign
of the market over identity, in which, beyond all appearances, a substantial
immobility is imposed on individuals, as the only non-dangerous form of life:
whether they really remain stationary in one place, forced by contingencies
stronger than them, whether they move to "different" places which are now, in
reality, all the same as in a fractal gem.

It is precisely to this condemnation to immobility, to this sort of general over-

determination of power over everyone's life, that a group of characters respond
with their private rebellion. Anarchists of a new conception, ride the endless
network of computer connections, originally conceived to make the great centers of
economic power more occult and stable, but subject, in its sometimes unearthly
ethericity, to be freely traveled by those who know how to ride data. Gibson's
cyberspace cowboys have freed themselves from the recognizability of their own
bodies, they have almost lost their identity to become something that cannot be
grasped, that is cosmically free to nestle in the infinitely small as to expand
into a transcendental gigantism. It is not simply a question of a subversive
existence, it is finally a way of existing regardless of the circumstances, an
absolute way of existing.

In the possible Gnostic interpretation of cyberpunk, it is clear that knowledge is

also a rejection of the routines and duties of the regime ("dependent" work in the
first place, as maximum enslavement and degeneration) but in a non-bloody way,
simply leaving aside pseudo-duties (pseudo as duties) and freeing all that in man
is communication.

It is therefore not surprising that Gibson also plays with the paradoxes of
knowledge, and that he alternates the apocalyptic frescoes with ironic stories of
small doubts about the universal conspiracy. The proposed salvation is always
inside, in elusive and irreducible spaces.

It is evident, however, from his own biography, the will of Gibson, born in
Southern Virginia, however, to escape the framing of the regimes of reality, since
in 1972 he took refuge in Canada, where he still resides, to escape the obligations
of the military service that would likely lead him to fight in Vietnam. Canadian
isolation has perhaps produced in him the right distance from which to observe the
unstoppable expansion of a power, that of a rampant global capitalism, now imposed
through an organization of the ways of life and desires of humanity.

Original titles: Darwin (from �Spin�, vol. 6, n. 1, April 1990); Hippie Hat Brain
Parasite (from �SEMIOTEXT [E] SF�, vol. 5, n. 2, 1989).

Translation by Daniele Brolli.

Darwin

The winds of Santa Ana vibrate the Soviet anti-ultraviolet film that Kelsey's
mother keeps stuck to the windows of their hotel room. The wind discovers other
ways to enter the palace; it hums among the pillars and in the corridors, sifting
cascades of faded dust from the ceiling tiles. Through the quivering membrane of
Russian plastic, Kelsey sees the city burn golden in the brown air, the tall frayed
butts of dead palm trees are lost in the boulevard.

Behind her, on the floor, Trev plays the television, muttering faintly as the dull
black tunic strapped to his chest tears him up in a scene of conflict. He does
television all day, slaps his shirt, gloves, black glasses, iterating the same show
over and over, The Gladiator's Skull. Kelsey hates Gladiator's Skull, hates the way
the vibrotactile tunic punches you in the ribs if you let them catch you. And they
always succeed.

You have a show called the Uncontaminated World that you iterate in sometimes; go
horseback riding along a beach. Pristine world doesn't punch you in the ribs.
Unless the sun can hurt you, in pristine world.

In the park at the end of the avenue he sees prone figures wrapped in reflective
silver plastic, people who have nowhere else to go.

Trev mumbles again; his lips move. He talks to himself when he does television, but
she doesn't even try to decipher what he says. He probably doesn't know she can
hear him. He has probably forgotten that within three days they will have moved
into Darwin's free trade zone, the Darwin Free Trade Zone - the DFT, his mother
called it that, while iterating through a travel show. Kelsey wore black glasses
and walked the promenade like any other promenade, interspersed with exterior shots
of orange cargo helicopters lowering white housing modules onto a patch of rough
earth. The young Chinese announcer had a strong Australian accent.

She runs her nails on the anti-ultraviolet film, leaving the lightest possible
mark.

She liked it best when they lived in Moscow, warm smells of soup and subways that
looked like old buildings.

They lived where the Company required their mother. The mother has a job, but
Kelsey doesn't know what it is. Something like making television with numbers. When
her mother talks about the Fellowship, Kelsey imagines a large animal. Her mother
laughs, tells her she is right. He says the Company has offices in all the big
cities, but doesn't live anywhere, either in LA or in Moscow or Singapore; he says
cities and companies now count, not nations.

Kelsey isn't sure what nations are. Lines on a map. Colors. A concept as vague as
the aristocracy. Kelsey has two passports, one issued by the United States of
America, the other by her mother's Company. The men who check passports at airports
only care about the Company. Her mother's other passport is from a country called
Quebec. She keeps it in the suitcase.

Look out at the dead palm trees. Something spread up off the coast of Mexico and
killed them all. He has seen some living in an uncontaminated world.

The black, windowless mass of a police helicopter thunders in the distance in the
gold-brown distance, matching Kelsey's eyes, its bellies studded with sensors and
weapons. At night he can hear the cannonade from the east. Lightnings in the sky.
The roar of the helicopters. The hotel's LCD screen tells her that the police are
confronting the gangs. It's for drugs. "These are drugs," the screen says, showing
the milky beads, bright green powder, something blood-brown foaming in a small
plastic tube. "Don't do the drugs," says the screen. Trev knows their names; ice,
dancer, brown.

The LCD screen is disturbed by time, serum averages for California-Oregon, a fact
of EBV mutation rates, specific translocations at the breaking point near the
oncogenic detector ...

She gets distracted. He clings to the sound of the wind blowing east from the
desert.

Closing his eyes, he sees Shibuya at night, the crowd under the lights, his father
there, his biological father, the expressions he knows from the photos, bending
over to touch her hand, explaining that his mother is her genetic mother, not
biological, which Trev's biological one is still another, another surrogate; that
he and his mother are now separated but that the contracts remain in effect.

Eyes still closed, bolted, she can't wait for her mother to return from the mirror
towers, the blind walls of the street level, guarded by the guards and the patient
crunching of the eyeless armored cars - from the city flaming with gold.

Her brother swears softly, mechanically, losing his game, and she wishes she was
already in Darwin, walking new miles of walk similar in all respects to any other
walk, like doing television.

It's almost Kelsey's birthday.

In Darwin he will have nine.

The mental parasite

in the shape of a hippie hat

"Bill," says Kihn, his voice all too clear, that unreal clarity of primitive
satellite AM communication with voices speaking from outer space or even Cleveland,
"I've seen one." And something in the intensity imprinted on the words pronounced
in italics makes that I have seen triggers a hologram-mnemonic, Mervin Kihn in his
signature Hawaiian shirt Charles Fort, a raucous sailcloth of horrifying shiny
Taiwan nylon with storms of frogs, with spontaneous human combustion, Lubbock
lights, New Jersey moth men, and the predestined wing of a US Navy torpedo bomber
about to disappear forever in the Bermuda Triangle.

�Wait a moment, Merv. Where were you calling from, did you say? ' It is a phone
call paid by the recipient, as we wanted to prove.

A break. "Night falls," he intones.

"What?". I understood night falls, night falls.

"Knight Falls," he specifies. "In Ohio."

"Okay ... And what did you say you were going to see?"

�Ah� Listen� You have seen some yourself. A lot. With a wide and rigid brim, with a
high peak, cut out of a piece of dairy cowhide and held together as a project for
the protection of the child. Do you know the painting? �.

"Those hats? Like a John Holmes boner put together with Los Angeles whorehouse
hats? Well, I can't say I've seen any recently, man. '

"Right! And it's too cold for dickheads up there, that's why! Add it to the
evidence! '

'What evidence, Merv? What fucking heads? "

�Parasites�, he whispers, �you fucking alien parasites��.

Mervyn Kihn, Armored Genialoid, author of nine paperbacks miscellany of Things

cursed so unspeakably absurd that it doesn't even guarantee him the attention of
the most depraved collectors of modern cultural junk. Lone Butte's menstruating
Barbie. German dachshunds in the form of luminous ghosts, spotted flying in
squadron over Berlin in August 1958. A Monopoli found in excavations in Crete and
made to disappear by the Greek authorities. The bizarre case of Ruth Edith
Fishleigh, the medium from Birmingham, found drowned in a Toyota full of soda ...

�The Haight, that was the place. That must be where they landed. Maybe just one.
Maybe just a spore. But in the end I tracked them down in Frisco, around '68.
Leather shops everywhere �.

"Umm, wait a moment, Merv, I�".

�Listen. This is crucial, man. You think those things are just, let's say, a stupid
kind of hat, right? Maybe the silly hat by definition, and this is fucking
ingenious. The last thing in the world you would ever think of wearing, right? And
it is people like you who pose the greatest threat to them, broad-minded people,
people who read my books. But I finally saw one, man, and I know. '

"What do you mean by visa?"

"Out. I saw one outside. I was in Taos last week. A wave of mutilation cases. No
one in relation to the others �.

"Livestock?".

"Rosicrucian".

"Christ�".

�Not people, man, magazines. There was someone who cut all the coupons from the
magazines, all those advertisements for AMORC, the association of the Rosicrucians.
Like the ones on the back cover of Popular Mechanics ... But I was there, you see,
and I went to that coffee shop, and there was one of those guys wearing one of
those hats. So I sit there, trying to come up with a new point of view on the
Rosicrucian peculiarity, and I notice this guy, a kind of human being, like he's
nodding his head, understand? He doesn't drink his coffee, and he doesn't even look
like he's going to fall asleep, it's more like he's taking a damn thing, but
slowly. That is, he was shaking all over and blinking, but in slow motion. We are
there alone in the club, except the waitress, and I say, "Hey brother, are you
alright?". He doesn't answer. They must have spread from Haight-Ashbury, in my
opinion, and are now in those sixties hippy culture persistence pockets. You bring
one of those out-of-the-ordinary leftovers, brother, and they'll still look zombie.
Perfect. Perfect coverage. Like mimetic insects. Have you ever seen a horseshoe-
shaped crab? '

"Some kind of helmet-shaped thing with a long harpoon instead of a tail?"

"Centered. Well, you imagine one of those, but without a tail. In its place there
is this kind of rigid skirt, this membrane, which surrounds it all, and the helmet
part is just the right size �.

"Right for what?"

�I mean, I'm looking at this guy, are you there ?, and he's really crazed, and I'm
starting to get a little worried. "Hey," I say to the waitress, "do you think that
guy is all right?". She just pops her gum and shrugs. It's one of those shit
places. Then he takes up his coffee, brings it to his mouth, and pours some into
his lap, in the meantime makes these lip movements and sips. Well, just in that
moment, I felt the vibration, brother� �. Fall into silence. I listen to ten
exorbitant seconds of static.

"What vibration, Merv?"

�The Unknown. Once again, I found myself confronted with the Unknown. It just
happens to me. I'm tuned in �.

"Understood. Right. So, you are there, you are tuned in, and�? �.

�Very slowly, or at least it seems to me, he lowers the cup. And then it begins to
fall forward. Was it one of the old ones, are you there? Or maybe he was sick. But
it's so slow, it doesn't feel like it's really dropping. As if very gradually it is
leaning towards the counter� I can't quite believe they still sell them in stores,
right? You see one in a shop and it's nothing more than a hat. Just like those
camouflage insects they're said to make toothpicks with, sort of. A weird variation
on this mimicry story, but we're talking aliens, right? Probably what they do, they
probably crawl around on their goddamn paws. Up from the sewers. For the windows.
There is a man sprawled on a sofa who seems to have been designed by Robert Crumb,
with the TV on, cane in hand, and he only feels the hat� �.

"Legs. Did you say paws? �.

�Maybe a dozen or more. Transparent brown stuff. Have you ever seen an oversized
scorpion? They become pale and waxy. Like this. Anyway, there I am, face to face
with the Unknown in that coffee shop in Taos, and that guy is about to touch the
edge of the counter. As if she was about to flip over, but she had never heard of
gravity. I hold my breath".

And I mine.

�Touch the counter with your chest. Contact. And then it happened �.

"Well, what? What happened?".

�His hat falls off. It spills onto the counter. I got a good look at his legs, the
organs of his mouth. Without eyes. So I jumped up from the stool as if a bull's
horn had been stuck up my ass. Because it had fallen out of its support, brother.
Died. Or something like that. No brains. Nothing on top of the head. Just fleshed
out properly up to the ... hat sign. Almost healed inside, healed, a grayish pink.
I saw where the hat had slipped its pliers, the concept was that of the puppet ...
�.

"Merv. And what did the maid do, Merv? '

"He said, 'Have a nice day.' You can imagine, it was just mawkish. It seemed he
hadn't noticed anything. '

I close my eyes, tight. "Merv, why did you call? I mean, why me? '

"You write about things like this."

"Right. And what about the Rosicrucians' coupons' nibbles? '

�The Watchtower� an attempt to climb. All of the Jehovah's Witnesses in the United
States joined the Rosicrucians last month. But you know a lot about the suspicion
of CIA infiltration among the Dianetics, right? The same thing. Even if at that
juncture the burning thing was that the Disney people had caught Hubbard in Akron
in '71. What they have there now is an advanced-made animatronic copy. Because, of
course, they wanted Ron Hubbard's cryogenic laboratories for what was left of Walt
Disney� �.

"Thanks, Merv."

"Hey, imagine. We are friends. I warned you, boy. And, for God's sake, stay away
from those hat shops, understand? '

"Good night, Merv."

"Good morning. Here it is already day �.

Click.
Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling is rightly considered the ideologue of cyberpunk. But his reflection
does not end in the essays in which he establishes connections between the social
organism and the future of computer discoveries. Nor did Sterling limit himself to
giving overall perspectives to cyberpunk fiction with a collective anthology such
as Mirrorshades, from 1986, in which he developed the potential of the
relationship, still embryonic at the time, between "gender" imagery (Science
fiction ), new sciences and collective consciousness through the contiguity and
succession of stories by a group of authors ranging from Gibson to Bear, from
Shirley to Rucker to Shiner to Pat Cadigan.

Sterling's widespread presence in non-professional publications, his interventions

at public events, his often improvised opinions on aspects of new information
technologies, up to the publication of the essay on the relationship between
institutional powers and free access to telematic communication networks (The
Hacker Crackdown, 1992) have made him a point of reference for the relationship of
new computer research with ethics. Sterling mentions indifferently the new French
sociologists (from Baudrillard to Virilio) together with the American "garage"
culture, and is genuinely fascinated by the relationship between Japanese society
and technology.

His 1989 anthology Crystal Express brings together tales from the Mechanists and
Shapers series, of which the present 20 evocations is an example. These are stories
about the post-human in which humanity has split into two factions: the Shapers,
who turn to bioengineering, and the Mechanists, who prefer prosthetics. Schismatrix
(1985, in Italy The broken matrix, North) belongs to the same thematic universe. It
is singular how, together with a very committed research in relations with the
social, Sterling has always paid attention to the stylistic features of genre
literature. If his early works such as Involution Ocean (1977) and Artificial Kid
(1980) were closely related to Samuel Delany's avant-garde science-fiction, between
picaresque and literary research, between linguistics and baroqueism, later
Sterling has more and more preferred to intentionally adhere to the classic themes
of science fiction, seen in terms of political reflection on the present.

Sterling presents itself today as a new Herbert George Wells. Time will tell if it
has succeeded in its intent.

Original title: Life in the Mechanist / Shaper Era. 20 Evocations (from �Interzone�
n.7, spring 1984).

Translation by Daniele Brolli.

Life in the era

of the Mechanists / Shapers.

20 summons
1. EXPERT SYSTEMS. When Nikolai Leng was little, his teacher was a cybernetic
system with a holographic interface. The holo took the form of a young Shaper
woman. His "personality" was a complex interactive expert system created by the
Shaper psychotechnics. Nikolai loved her.

2. NEVER BORN. "You mean we are all from Earth?" Nikolai said incredulously.

"Yes," said the holo softly. �The first true space colonists were born on Earth,
sexually produced. Since then, of course, hundreds of years have passed. You are a
Shaper. Shapers are never born �.

"Who lives on Earth now?"

"Human beings".

"Ooooh," Nikolai said, his tone waning betraying a rapid loss of interest.

3. A MALFUNCTIONING LEG. The day came when Nikolai saw his first Mechanist. The man
was a diplomat and a commercial agent, placed by his faction in the Nikolai
habitat. Nikolai and other children from his nursery were playing in the corridor
when the diplomat passed him. One of the Mechanist's legs was malfunctioning,
clicking-whrrr, click-whrr. Alex, a friend of Nikolai's, imitated the man's limp.
The man suddenly turned to them, his plastic eyes wide open. "Genetic lines,"
growled the Mechanist. �I can buy you, make you grow, sell you, cut you into small
pieces. Your cries: my music �.

4. WOOL PATINA. Sweat ran down the galloped collar of Nikolai's military jacket.
The air in the abandoned station was still breathable, but unbearably hot. Nikolai
helped his sergeant remove valuables from a dead miner. The slain Shaper's
antiseptic body was dried out, but perfect. They moved on to another section. The
body of a Mechanist pirate lay sprawled in weak gravity. Killed in the attack, his
body had been rotting for weeks inside the suit. A sheen of grayish fluff a few
inches high had devoured his face.

5. LITTLE INTERESTING. Nikolai was on leave from the Council of the Ring with two
men from his unit. They were drinking in a free-fall bar called the Epileptic
Eclectic. The first of the two was Simon Afriel, a charming, ambitious young Shaper
of the old school. The other had a Mechanist eye implant. His loyalty was
questionable. The three were discussing semantics. "The map is not the territory,"
Afriel had said. Suddenly the other had pulled an almost invisible listening device
from under the table. "And what I hear is uninteresting," he had ruled. They never
saw him again.

� A malfunctioning Mechanist pirate who betrayed genetic lines. Invisible listening

devices bought you, raised you and sold you. The ambitious young Shaper of the
abandoned station, killed in the attack. Falling psychotechnics sexually produced
the desiccated body of a commercial agent. The loyalty of the holographic interface
was suspect. The cybernetic system helped her snatch what was of value out of her
plastic eyes ...

6. SPECULATIVE COMPASSION. The Mechanist woman looked at him with an air of

speculative compassion. �I have an established trading position here,� he told
Nikolai, �but my cash flow is temporarily limited. You, on the other hand, have
just deserted the Council taking a small fortune with you. I need money; you need
stability. I propose marriage �.

Nikolai considered it. He was new to the Mec society. "Does this imply a sexual
relationship?" He asked. The woman looked at him puzzled: "You mean between the two
of us?"

7. FLOW SCHEMES. "Something is bothering you," his wife told him. Nikolai shook his
head. "Yes, it is," she insisted. �You're upset about that deal I made with the
smugglers. You are unhappy because our corporation profits from attacks against
your own people. '

Nikolai smiled sadly. �I guess you are right. I've never known anyone who
understood my innermost feelings as well as you do. " He looked at her fondly. "How
do you do?".

"I have infrared scanners," she said. "I read the blood flow patterns on your
face."

8. OPTICAL TELEVISION. When one stopped to consider it, the space in the hollow of
one eye was surprising. The actual visual mechanism had been radically miniaturized
by the mechanical prosthetic experts. Nikolai had installed a few other devices: a
clock, a biofeedback monitor, and a television screen, all wired directly to his
optic nerve. They were convenient, but at first they were difficult to maneuver.
His wife had to help him out of the hospital and on the way to his apartment,
because the thin visual switches kept flashing business news on public channels.
From behind his plastic eyes, Nikolai smiled at his wife. "Spend the night with
me," he told her. The wife shrugged. "All right," he said. He put his hand on the
door of Nikolai's apartment and died almost instantly. A killer had smeared the
doorknob with poison on contact.

9. MOLDING TARGETS. "Listen," said the killer, his face sluggishly chiseled with
weariness. "Don't bother me with ideologies ... Just transfer the money and tell me
who it is you want dead."

"It's the work of the Council of the Ring," Nikolai said. He had just come out of a
regimen of emotional drugs he had taken to combat anguish, and had to counter
recurring waves of strangely spoiled happiness. �Lieutenant-Doctor Martin Leng of
Security of the Council of the Ring. It is one of my own genetic line. My desertion
cast some shadow over his loyalty. He killed my wife. '

"Shapers are good targets," said the killer. Her armless, legless body floated in a
transparent nourishing tank, where colored plasmas caressed the purple ends of
bundles of encapsulated nerves. A servos trudged into the tub and began to link the
killer's arms.

10. INVESTMENT IN CHILDREN. "We understand your investment in this child,

shareholder Leng," said the psychotechnician. �You may have created it, or you may
have hired the technicians who created it, but it is not your property. According
to our regulations, she should be treated like any other child. It is the property
of our corporated people's republic. "

Nikolai looked at the woman, exasperated. �I didn't create it. He is the posthumous
clone of my dead wife. And it is the property of my wife's stock companies or,
rather, her trust, which I control as an executor ... No, what I mean is that she
owns, or at least controls through a credit right, the corporate property. of my
dead wife, who becomes his with the age of majority ... Are you following me? �.

"No. I am an educator, not a financier. What's the gist of all this, shareholder?
Are you trying to recreate your dead wife? '

Nikolai stared at her, with a carefully neutral face. "I did it for tax
deductions."
� Leave the posthumous clone to take advantage of the attacks. The semi-autonomous
property has a pre-established commercial position. Recurring waves of pirate
contraband. His indolent face annoys you with ideology. The innermost sensations
died almost instantly. Smear the door with poison on contact ...

11. ANNOYING LOYALTY. "I like it out here on the edges," Nikolai said to the
killer. "Have you ever thought about a split?"

The killer laughed. �I was a pirate. It took me forty years to join this cartel.
When you are alone, you are flesh, Leng. You should know that".

�But these loyalties must bother you. They are inexpensive. Wouldn't you rather
have your own Kluster and make your own rules? �.

"You are speaking like an ideologue," said the killer. Feedback displays flickered
faintly on his synthetic forearms. �My loyalty goes to Zaibatsu Kyotid. They own my
entire suburb. They even own my arms and legs. '

"The Zaibatsu Kyotid is mine," Nikolai said.

"Ah," said the killer. "Well, that puts the matter in a different light."

12. MASS DEFECTION. "We want to join your Kluster," said the Super Bright. �We need
to join your Kluster. No one else will have us �.

Nikolai made a few distracted scribbles with his light pen on a comfortable video
screen. "How many are there?"

�There were fifty of them in our genetic line. We were working on quantum physics
before our mass defection. We have had some small successes. I think they may have
some commercial application �.

"Gorgeous," Nikolai said. He assumed an air of speculative compassion. �I think I

understand that the Council of the Ring has persecuted you in the usual way. That
he declared you mentally unstable, ideologically ill, and so on. "

"Yup. Their agents killed thirty-eight of us. ' The Superbrillante, uneasy, wiped
the sweat that beaded his swollen forehead. �We are not mentally damaged, President
of Kluster. We will not cause you any disturbance. We just want a quiet place to
finish our work while God eats our brains. "

13. DATA IN HOSTAGE. A high priority call came from the Council of the Ring.
Nikolai, surprised and intrigued, took the call in person. A young man's face
appeared on the screen. "I have your teacher hostage," he said.

Nikolai frowned. "How?".

�Your teacher, when you were little in the nursery. You love it. You told him. I
have it on tape. '

"It must be a joke," Nikolai said. �My teacher was just a cyber interface. You
can't have a data system hostage. '

"Yes I can," said the young man in a gory tone. �The old expert system has been
thrown in the trash in favor of a new one with a more effective ideology. Look". A
second face appeared on the screen; it was the superhumanly perfect and faintly
luminous image of her cybernetic teacher. "Please save me Nikolai," said the image
woody. "He is cruel."
The young man's face reappeared. Nikolai laughed incredulously. "So you saved the
old recordings?" Nikolai said. �I don't know what your game is, but I suppose the
data has some value. I am willing to be generous �. He said a figure. The young man
shook his head. Nikolai grew impatient. "Listen to me," he said. "What makes you
think that a simple expert system has any objective value?"

"I know he has it," the young man said. "I'm an expert system too."

14. CENTRAL QUESTION. Nikolai was aboard the alien ship. He felt uncomfortable in
his ambassador's brocade jacket. He adjusted the heavy dark glasses over his
plastic eyes. "We appreciate your visit to our Kluster," he said to the reptile
ensign. "It's a great honor."

The Investors ensign cocked the multicolored fringe behind his massive head. "We
are ready to do business," he said.

"I'm interested in alien philosophies," Nikolai said. "The answers of other species
to the great questions of existence."

"But there is only one central question," the alien said. �We searched for your
answer from star to star. We hoped that you could help us to answer �.

Nikolai was cautious. "What's the question?"

"What do you have that we can use?".

15. INHERITED GIFTS. Nikolai looked at the girl with old-fashioned eyes. "My Chief
of Security gave me a record of your criminal acts," he said. �Copyright
infringement, organized extortion, conspiracy to restrict trade. How old are you?".

"Forty-four," the girl said. "How many do you have?".

"More or less one hundred and ten. I should look at my files. ' Something about the
girl's appearance bothered him. "Where did you find those old-fashioned eyes?"

�They were my mother's. I inherited them. But you are a Shaper, of course. You
don't know what a mother is. '

"On the contrary," Nikolai said. �I think I met yours. We were married. After his
death, I had you clone. I suppose that makes me yours� I have forgotten the term �.

"Father".

�Sounds almost right. You clearly inherited his talent for finance. " He reviewed
the girl's files. "Would you be interested in adding bigamy to your list of
crimes?"

� The mentally unstable have a certain value. A trade restriction puts a different
face on the video screen. Some small successes in the questions of existence. Your
filing cabinet haunted him. His swollen forehead cannot contain a data system ...

16. ROAR OF PLEASURE. "You must avoid getting stuck in your habits," said his wife.
"It's the only way to stay young." He pulled a gold inhaler from the pouch attached
to the garter. "Try some of this."

"I don't need drugs," Nikolai said, smiling. "I have my fantasies of power." He
began to take off his clothes.

His wife looked at him impatiently. "Don't be silly, Nikolai." He inserted the
inhaler into one nostril and inhaled. Sweat began to cover her face, and a slow
sexual flush spread to her ears and neck.

Nikolai looked, then shrugged and sucked lightly on the golden tube. Immediately an
explosive sense of ecstasy paralyzed his nervous system. His body arched back,
shuddering uncontrollably.

Awkwardly, the wife began to caress him. The roar of chemical pleasure made sex
irrelevant. "Why ... Why bother?" He gasped.

The wife made a surprised face. "It's tradition."

17. SHINING WALL. Nikolai turned to the gleaming wall of television screens. "I'm
getting old," he said. �My health is good - I have been very lucky in choosing
longevity programs - I just don't have the resourcefulness I used to be. I have
lost my flexibility, my claws. And the Kluster has grown beyond my ability to
handle it. I have no choice. I have to leave�".

He looked carefully at the faces on the screens, looking for any thrill of
reaction. Two hundred years had taught him the art of reading faces. His skills
were still true to him. Only the will that supported them had lost its strength.
The faces of the Government Office, with their confidentiality broken by shock,
seemed to flash with ambition and greed.

18. LEGAL TARGETS. The Mechanists had unleashed their drones in the suburb. Armed
with subpoenas, faceless drones darted through the hallway crowds, looking for
legal targets.

Suddenly Nikolai's former Chief of Security broke away from the crowd and started
running for cover. In free fall, he plodded from handle to handle like an armored
gibbon. Suddenly, one of his prostheses gave way and the drones jumped at him,
almost on Nikolai's door. The plastic cracked with clattering noises as
electromagnetic forceps paralyzed his limbs.

"Operetta trials," he gasped. The deeply wrinkled lines in his ancient face glowed
with rivulets of sweat. �They will tear me to pieces! Help me, Leng! �.

Nikolai shook his head sadly. The old man screamed: 'It was you who dragged me into
this business! You were the ideologue! I am just a poor murderer! �.

Nikolai said nothing. The machines blocked the old man's arms and legs and took
them back.

19. OLD FRAGMENTS. �You really had them all stuffed in, right? This huge old stuff!
' The young men spoke a slang-encrusted jargon that Nikolai could barely
understand. When they looked at him, their faces showed a mixture of aggression,
compassion and fear. It seemed to Nikolai that they were always screaming. "I feel
overwhelmed," he murmured.

�You are overwhelmed, old Nikolai! This bar is your museum, isn't it? Your
mausoleum! Give our ears your old frontiers, we're listening to you! These idiotic
video ideologies, these antiquated fragments of spirit! Mechanists and Shapers,
right? The war between the two sides of the same coin! �.

"I feel tired," Nikolai said. "I've drunk too much. One of you take me home. '

They exchanged worried looks. �This is your house! No?".

20. EYES CLOSED. "You were very kind," Nikolai said to the two boys. They were
archaeologists from Kosmosity, dressed in elegant academic robes, award-studded
robes, and Kluster Terraformer medals. Nikolai suddenly realized he couldn't
remember their names.

"It's all right, sir," they said soothingly. "Now it's up to us to remember her,
not the other way around."

Nikolai felt embarrassed. He didn't realize he had spoken aloud.

"I took poison," he explained apologetically.

"We know," they nodded. "You don't feel pain, do you?" We hope not �.

"Absolutely no. I did the right thing, I know. I am very old. Older than I can
bear. ' Suddenly he felt an alarming collapse within him. Pieces of his
consciousness began to go away as the void engulfed him. It suddenly occurred to
him that he had forgotten his own epitaph. With an enormous effort, he remembered
it and shouted it vehemently.

"Futility is freedom!" He died, triumphant, and they closed his eyes.

John Shirley

Without being fully aware of it, until it was made evident by Sterling's inclusion
in the Mirrorshades group, John Shirley was the real initiator of the cyberpunk
wave. His 1979 novel Transmaniacon contained, in a plot worthy of the sociological
science fiction of Pohl and Sheckley's �Galaxy�, elements of anarchic punk excess
inserted in a future that becomes a pretext to talk about our times. A look without
mincing words on the contemporary, on the arrogance of power, which is attacked
with the decision of a sort of aesthetic terrorism cloaked in science fiction.
There are no other authors who have been as explicit, especially when you think of
the Eclipse trilogy. In it, Shirley's point of view is very clear: the classes that
hold economic power are marching towards a new authoritarian system and Christian
fundamentalism supports right-wing ideologies.

Born in 1954, Shirley has collected typical cyberpunk experiences: he has been a
singer in various rock bands for years, with a career culminating in his
participation in the Sado Nation. It's quite unbelievable (but it has something of
Dick in the unfortunate plot) the story surrounding his first novel, Change World.
Sent to Terry Carr to propose it to the Berkley publishing house, the novel was
lost due to the post office. Shirley didn't even have a copy. He was so broke that
he hadn't been able to photocopy it.

A fluvial and instinctive writer, he has always jumped from one genre to another,
ending up mixing them all in a personal magma. It belongs simultaneously to the
crowd of "genre" writers and to the small circle of those who are concerned with
breaking down the restrictive boundaries of codifications. The resulting stories
are disharmonious but full of lines of flight towards territories of the
imagination still to be explored. This consideration of the characteristics of
Shirley's writing is not negligible, it means that many of the authors who started
after him owe a lot to the themes that Shirley so spontaneously brought to the fore
in the science fiction imaginary.

There is something about this that makes Shirley resemble Dick, in which the
poverty of the treatment is often overcome by an intuition that makes it obsolete.
As if popular literature, free to be incoherent, digressive, even haggard, could at
times reach thematic heights denied to mainstream literature (the "main" narrative
path of the typical American "average novel").

In addition to being a small tribute to Philip K. Dick (master of narrative methods

for discovering the apparently banal "reality" illusory and very disturbing), the
story we have chosen seems to exemplify this concept more than any artificial
attempt at demonstration.

Original title: What Cindy Saw (from �Interzone�, n. 5, autumn 1983).

Translation by Daniele Brolli.

Visions of Cindy

The people at the clinic were very nice. Of course they lived above the shell, and
the people above the shell often behaved kindly, and with uniformity of purpose,
like little magnetically moving electronic players in a soccer video game. They
looked very sincere, and they had a lot of quirky details that made them much more
realistic too. For example, the way Dr. Gainsborough took things out of the corner
of his eye. And the way the dada Rebeck was always rubbing her crusty red nose and
complaining about allergies.

Dr. Gainsborough admitted, and seemed genuinely sincere, that, yes, life was
mysterious and that ultimately Cindy might as well be right about the way things
lay under what she called "the shell." Dr. Gainsborough couldn't be sure she was
wrong ... but, Cindy, they said, we have doubts, serious doubts, and we'd like you
to consider our doubts, and our way of thinking, and to take into account. of our
point of view. Dr. Gainsborough was well aware that Cindy would respond to his
display of courtesy by reflecting on what he had told her. Cindy, after all, was a
good girl.

And she just refused to answer when people told her she was crazy and saw things.

Yes, Cindy, Dr. Gainsborough said, you might be right. But on the other hand, we
have serious doubts, so we better get on with the treatments. That is fine?

All right, Dr. Gainsborough.

So they gave her the stelazina and taught her how to make jewels. And, after a
while, she stopped talking about the shell. He became the mascot of the clinic. It
was Dr. Gainsborough himself who brought her home, after "only three months this
time, and not even a shock treatment." He left her in front of his parents' house
and she leaned in the car window to shake his hand. He smiled too. He smiled back
at her and winked with his blue eyes, and she stiffened, pulled her hand back, and
stepped onto the curb. He was pushed away down the street; he was pushed away on
the car he was driving. She stayed with the house. He knew he was turning towards
the house. He knew he was walking towards it. He knew he was walking up the steps.
But all the while he felt the attraction. The attraction of the shell was so
insinuating that you could think: I know I'm turning and walking and climbing, even
if you haven't moved in the meantime. You were drawn to all those moves, but you
really weren't doing them.
But it's best if you think you're the one making them.

She had practiced, orienting herself through the obstacle course of free memory
associations. He did so even then, managing to suppress his sense of attraction.

He felt good. He felt good because he felt nothing. Nothing more. Just ... just
normal. The house looked like a house, the trees looked like trees. A postcard
house, postcard trees. The house, however, seemed unusually quiet. Is anybody
there? And where was Dubi? The dog was not tied in the front this time. He had
always been afraid of the Doberman. She was relieved that he was gone. He had
probably left with his family.

Open the door. Funny, they weren't home and had left the door open. It wasn't
Papi's stuff. Papi was paranoid. He also admitted it. "I smoke the weed of the
paranoid," he said. He and Mom smoked weed and listened to old Jimi Hendrix
recordings and listlessly fucked on the sofa when they thought Cindy was asleep.

"Are you there? Papi? Mom? �Cindy was calling them now. No reply.

Good. She wanted to find herself home alone. Listen to a record, watch TV. There
was no one to stand up to. No random factors, or barely anyone. And nothing that
wasn't harmless. Watching TV was like watching in a kaleidoscope: it was constantly
changing, pretending its own convoluted style, but there was never anything truly
unexpected. Or almost never. Once Cindy had turned it on and watched a Japanese
monster movie. And the Japanese monster movie had been all too much like a shell
caricature. As if they were making fun of her by showing her what they knew. What
they knew, she knew too.

Now, he told himself. Think about now. He turned from the entrance hall towards the
archway that led to the hall.

In the hall was what had all the appearance of a sofa. If he'd been in the clinic's
recording room, she'd be pretty sure it was a sofa. Here, however, he stood in the
twilight of the room, burly and dusty blue-gray, with the armrests rolled up a
little too tight; lying menacingly right in the center of the room. There was
something unnatural about the pattern of the fabric texture. It had a grain she had
never noticed before. Like one of those irregular, misshapen scraps of jellyfish on
the beach, a membranous thing that the stickiness had given a coating of sand.

Even more disorienting was the ostentatiously familiar shape of the sofa-shaped
thing. Yes, the shape was that of a sofa. But it had something swollen, something
tumescent. It was just a little more voluminous than it should have been. As if he
had gained weight by dint of eating.

So that was their secret, she thought. It's the sofa. I don't usually notice
anything special about him. Of course. I usually don't bite him as soon as he's
eaten.

He wondered who had eaten. One of his sisters? The house was silent. Maybe the
whole family ate. On the other hand, the mother had said that they would not be
home when she arrived: she remembered it now. One of the dades had reported it to
Dr. Gainsborough. Sometimes the stelazine made Cindy forget things.

They were out for dinner. They had wanted to go out to dinner, probably, one last
time before Cindy got home. It was embarrassing to go out to dinner with Cindy.
Cindy had such a way of reporting things. "You're always reporting things, Cindy,"
Papi said. �You should mellow. You're a big pain in the ass when you start with
that bullshit. ' Cindy would report the waitress, and then maybe the tables, the
tablecloths, the folds in the tablecloth. "It is the symmetry of the grid of the
table that reveals the deception," she would have said very seriously, like a
television commentator talking about communist terrorism. "This constant imposition
of symmetrical models is an attempt to deceive us by attributing to our environment
a sense of harmony that does not exist at all."

"I know you're precocious, Cindy," her Papi would have said, brushing crumbs of
French bread from his beard or maybe pulling one of his earrings, "but you're still
a plague."

�Maybe,� Cindy said aloud to the sofa, �you ate one of my sisters. I don't care
anyway. But I can assure you outright that you won't eat me too �.

He still wanted to find out more about the sofa thing. With caution.

He went into the kitchen, got a can opener and a flashlight, and went back into the
living room.

He directed the torchlight on the thing placed on the gleaming parquet floor.

The legs of the sofa thing, he saw now, were clearly fused with the floor: they
seemed to grow from there. Cindy nodded to herself. What he was looking at was some
kind of bud. It must have had its roots underground.

He shivered, awkward in the beam of his flashlight.

With the flashlight in her left hand (she could have turned on the light above, but
she knew she would need the flashlight for the caves beneath the shell) she walked
over to the lying gray-blue thing, careful not to get too close to it. In his right
he held the can opener.

Meanwhile, she thought she heard a secret prompter saying: Not part of the program.
You should go upstairs and watch TV and move from time to time thinking correctly,
dodging obstacles, turning the wheel to get away from harmful association
processes, pretending that you don't know what you know.

But it was too late, the stelazina was nearly exhausted and the sofa had spurred
her in the wrong direction, and now she was on a side street in a foreign suburb
and didn't know her way back to the highway. There were no cops he could ask, no
mental cops like Dr. Gainsborough.

So Cindy crawled towards the couch thing. She decided the sofa couldn't hurt her if
she didn't sit on it. If one had sat on it, it would have curled up, wrapping it
up. Flytrap.

She got down on her knees. Sensing his intentions, it livened up a little, kicking
dust off the pillows. It twitched, hunching the pillows. It made a terrible sound.

She began to work it on the legs, where they joined with the floor. For thirty-
eight minutes he worked briskly with the can opener.

The couch thing made a series of long, painful sounds. Her arms ached, but the can
opener was surprisingly sharp. In short, he partially brought to light the cavity
under the sofa; it could be seen under the shell lining. Cindy took a deep breath,
lifted a flap and widened the opening. It was dark in there. Musky smell; musky and
weakly metallic, like engine lubricant. And a faint aftertaste of rottenness.

Gradually, working hard, he wrapped the leather of the floor around the sofa.
Nature was ingenious; the skin had hitherto been camouflaged by wooden parquet. It
had grown hard and thick and veined in just the right amount. A wonderful disguise.
The skin was hard, but not as hard as it looked. You could peel it off like the
bark of a tree, as long as you were patient and didn't mind your aching fingers.
Cindy didn't notice.

The moan of the couch thing rose to a crescendo, so loud and shrill that Cindy was
forced to retreat and put her hands over her ears.

After that the sofa folded back on itself. His scream also folded back, muffled
like a scream trying to escape from under a hand pressed against a child's mouth.

The sofa was like a dying sea anemone; it deflated, shrunk, vanished, sucked into
the dark wound in the center of the hall floor. The house was silent again.

Cindy directed the flashlight into the wound. It was wet, dripping, flecked with
red and yellow. The blood of the house did not gush, it dripped as if he were
sweating. The thick, glassy flesh quivered and flinched as Cindy prodded it with
the can opener.

He slipped the can opener into his boot and knelt over the wound to get a better
look. He directed the beam of the flashlight deeply, towards the most secret part
of the shell ...

The house in theory had no foundation. Despite this, there was a chamber under the
floor of the hall. It was about the same size as the hall. The walls were slightly
concave and shiny with moisture - but they weren't organic. The damp was a kind of
machine grease. In the center of the cable was a column, the stem of the creature
that had passed through her house. The column, she reflected, was more than a stem;
a thick stem made of cables. Each cord was as thick as its Papi's forearm. They
were twisted together like wires on a power line. The sofa must have been sucked
into its natural hiding place, compressed inside the stem.

She wondered why the house hadn't come out until today� Why hadn't she taken them
all while they were asleep? But probably the people in her shell, the programmers,
hadn't bred her to be ravenous, an indiscriminate carnivore. He was there for the
elimination of selected people ... he realized that this must be the reason for the
disappearance of the guests. Mom had brought four guests home for the past two
years, all of them sleeping on the sofa, and none of them had ever stayed for
breakfast. Strange coincidence, Cindy had thought, that each guest had decided to
leave home before breakfast. Now Cindy knew they hadn't left the house at all. They
had become part of it. That was probably what happened to Dubi. Mom usually didn't
let him sleep in the house, and she never let him get on the sofa. But his sister
Belinda had sometimes let Dubi in after Mom had gone to bed; the dog must have
curled up on the sofa for a nap, the time had come for the sofa to be genetically
programmed to eat, and had done to Dubi what a sea anemone does to a minnow.
Enveloped, paralyzed and digested.

Cindy didn't care. He had always hated Dubi.

He leaned his face down, moving closer to look into the breach in the skin of the
house. The dungeon opened about five meters below her. He pondered whether to
immerse himself in the world below, to explore it. Cindy shook her head. Better go
get help. And show what he found.

A curious sensation in her stomach made her raise her head ...

The arcade of the hall had disappeared. It had resealed. The windows were gone. A
kind of healing film had grown over them. She had alarmed the creature, tearing it
apart. So he had trapped her.
Cindy made an indistinct sound, a "Uh!" sharp, inside the throat. The walls were
curved inward. He got up, and went to the nearest wall, pressed his hands flat
palms to the surface. They should have felt the stiffness of the plaster, which
instead deformed under his fingers, leaving an imprint like clay. Compliant. The
house would pour over her, implode like a hill in a landslide in Los Angeles, and
he would crush her and squeeze the juice out of her to drink it.

He turned to the gash he had opened in the floor. The edges had curled like paper
turning to ash. But that too was closing. She gripped the flashlight tightly,
knelt, and launched herself into the opening, falling to the floor below. The
impact hit her shins.

Cindy straightened up, took a deep breath, and looked around.

Galleries opened on either side of the room, extending as deep as he could see,
both left and right. He took a few steps into the gallery to the right. The ceiling
was just fifty centimeters from the head; it was curved and smooth. He walked
slowly, groping the street, directing the flashlight beam to the floor. The
darkness was full of implications, and Cindy felt her nerves waver. He had a
feeling of some kind of pressure in his temples and some kind of electric shock on
his tongue. He tried to imagine the flashlight beam as a laser-beam gun, a fury of
bright lines, blazing through the darkness. But the light was dim, illuminating
only a small part of the darkness. Her eyes gradually got used to it, however, and
the darkness seemed less dense, less oppressively pregnant, the beam of the
flashlight no longer essential. At intervals the ellipse of light revealed what
appeared to be transparent fishing lines running from floor to ceiling. The plastic
cables appeared in bundles of eight or nine placed at irregular distances.
Sometimes there was barely room to squeeze in between. Then he went around it,
turning from side to side. When it rubbed against a cable, it sounded like a guitar
string, but with an overtone in its hum, like the call of a desert bug. She somehow
sensed that the cables had something to do with the happenings of the surface
world. They certainly weren't installed by a utility company, he told himself.

He came to a place where the wall was transparent, in an area the size of his two
hands put together. He was a little confused, but Cindy could see through the wall,
into another room where two men were sitting at a metal card table. They were
playing cards, the little white rectangles in their hands had mazes and mandalas
instead of the usual kings and queens, jacks and spades. Both were hunched over
their hands, in deep concentration. One sat with his back to her. He was the
smallest man; he had gray hair. The other had a round face; stocky, slightly
overweight, with a brown beard streaked with white. The bigger man wore a creased
jacket and modern-cut trousers; the other, a worn-out suit that must have been
about ten years earlier. The room looked like a prison cell. There were two bunks,
a toilet, trays of nibbled food, empty beer cans abandoned under the table. "It's
your turn, Mr. Fort," said the bearded man, with ironic ceremoniousness. "You are
right, Mr. Dick," said the other lightly. He threw a card face up on the table and
said, "MC Escher against the Aztec Labyrinth." The other sighed. �Ah, you're done
yet. You won. It's not fair: you have decades of practice playing against Bierce�
Damn, if only they let us smoke� �.

Cindy tapped on the glass, and screamed, but couldn't make herself heard by them.
Or maybe they pretended not to hear it. He shrugged, and went on.

Another ten paces forward, and something glinted to the left, reflecting the beam
of his flashlight. It was a long, rectangular, vertical mirror built into the wall.
The mirror distorted Cindy's reflection, made her ridiculously elongated. She
reached out to touch it, and unwittingly touched one of the cables. The transparent
cable moved, the image in the mirror shimmered, vibrating alternating visibility
and invisibility in a frequency tuned to the quivering of the cable. She hit the
cable again, harder, to see what would happen to the image in the mirror. Its
reflection fluttered and vanished, and a flickering image of the surface world
appeared in its place. A street scene as seen every day: children returning home
from school, cars honking impatiently behind a slow-motion Volkswagen Golf, driven
by an elderly lady ...

With a suspicion, which quickly became an impulse, Cindy began to pinch the tunnel
cables several times, as hard as she could.

The mirror - actually a kind of television monitor - showed traffic skidding out of
control, the Golf backing off at high speed, bumping into other cars, children
losing control of their limbs and banging them at random. .

Cindy giggled.

He took the can opener from his boot and cut the cables, always keeping an eye on
"the mirror" in the meantime. The ropes parted with a ueng of protest. And in the
surface world: children exploded, cars twisted into each other, suddenly becoming
soft and flexible, curled up around telephone boxes ... a great invisible current
swept the street, rinsing the buildings away ...

Cindy smiled and continued down the tunnel, randomly cutting the cables.

Every few hundred meters he ran into the intersection of some tunnels; three
opening to the right, three to the left, his continuing straight. Sometimes Cindy
changed direction at the crossroads of that underworld, following her intuition,
vaguely knowing she had a specific goal.

Finally the gallery opened into a circular room, in the center of which was another
thick yellow-red stem; a stem twisted into a rope, thick like a man, grew and
merged with the ceiling. But there, the walls swarmed with what looked like giant
aphids. Mechanical aphids, each the size of one of its hands, the color of a blue
metal razor blade. They rang metallic against the walls in groups of twenty or
thirty, only a span between one group and another; the aphids swarmed methodically
on the metal legs as thin and numerous as the bristles of a hairbrush; on the wall
to the right they tingled among heaps of TV monitors. She turned off the
flashlight, there was enough light on the TV screens. Standing in front of the
monitors, spaced more or less at random, were about twenty so dusty blue, vaguely
human, that they wore rompers made of daily newspapers. Looking closer, Cindy could
see that the newspapers were printed in an inscrutable, almost illegible cipher.
And the photos only featured half-unrecognizable silhouettes.

For the first time, a real sense of unease ran through her like a shiver, and
spikes and morsels of fear, like jagged hailstones, rolled down the frozen core of
her sensations.

Fear because: the men on the monitors had no mouth, no nose, no ears. Each of them
had a single blinking gray eye. And fear why: with Cindy's arrival in the room, the
aphids, if they really were, began to move feverishly (but somehow intentionally)
in mandala patterns on the wall, rustling in the thick cover of a shaggy carpet. of
eyelashes; eyelashes, he realized now, covered the walls everywhere. The room was
the color of a gorge with a bad cold.

The mouthless men used their three-fingered hands to turn the dials on the monitor
dials. From time to time one of them would lie down and brush against an aphid;
something in the touch galvanized the creature as it scurried furiously up the
wall, dividing its lashes and altering the symmetrical patterns created by the
collective movement of the other aphids.
The television images were in black and white. The floor was alabaster, modeled
with interspersed silver cables; the cables were configured in an arcane way, and
occasionally sparkled at the touch of the shoddy metal feet of the quasi-people.

Cindy had decided to call them quasi-people.

His eyes adjusted to the dim light, and he saw that there was a navel in the lower
back of each quasi-person. The long, tenuous black navel descended and then went up
and attached itself to the base of the yellow-red stem in the center of the room,
like a Spring Festival ribbon is attached to the calendar pole. Cindy deduced that
navels made mouths and noses useless for quasi-people.

Cindy was scared, which always pushed her to the offensive. Stay in control, she
told herself.

So, just to see what would happen, he wandered around the room and, with the can
opener, methodically severed the navels, separating the quasi-persons from the
stem.

Almost people stopped doing what they were doing; they turned and looked at her.

Cindy wondered how they felt. Were they alarmed, surprised, outraged or hurt? He
couldn't tell.

They fell one after another, fingers gripping their tapered throats. They writhed
and shivered as the intertwining of cables on the floor spat blue sparks, and Cindy
thought they were choking and would soon die.

This time she felt a little sorry. He also said so. "Oh sorry".

After a few minutes, they stopped moving. Their big eyes closed. Breathing heavily,
Cindy stepped over the corpses and walked to one of the television screens. She was
very careful not to step on one of the silver cables on the floor; she was sure
that if he did he would get shocked.

Television screens monitored life in the surface world. Lattices of sketchy video
images of houses, motels, traffic and dogs. Scrap. Traffic lights changing. Farms.
Seaside holiday centers. Canadian hikers. Rock singers. A teenager with long, thin
blond hair and a narrow chest staggering to fill a syringe from a rusty teaspoon.
Jazz players. Children masturbating. Women who masturbated. Monkeys masturbating.
He stared for a moment at a TV that showed two people making love in a hotel room.
They were both middle-aged and nearly unhealthy. The man's hair was sparse, and his
belly jerked with every stroke of his hip; the woman's hair was stiff and with a
stable shape, like a hat. A hat in the shape of a bell.

Impulsively, Cindy reached out and fiddled with the symbolless black plastic knobs
of the monitors. The image flashed, changed; the woman's head deformed,
disintegrated completely, reconverting ... it had become the head of a chimpanzee.
The man screamed and wriggled back. The woman scratched herself.

Cindy made a face with her lips, and tilted her head.

He reached out and prodded some metal aphids with the can opener. They squirmed,
frightened by the unfamiliar touch, and prompted the others to hurry more
frantically, until the thousands of aphids clinging to the rounded ceiling ended up
reshaping their symmetry of destroyed modules in a hysterical swarming.

Cindy looked at the television monitors. Now they only showed crowd scenes. People
at the game, who looked confused and in pain, as if they had all gone blind and
deaf; they bumped into each other, waved their arms in the air, or stumbled,
rolling off the stands, alerting other people� but, as Cindy saw, people began to
descend smoothly towards the playing field. They swarmed onto the field, crowding
it, and began to settle down according to the dictates of a spontaneously
reconsidered psychic pattern: people wearing white or yellow shirts moved together,
people in dark shirts aggregated, until the view from the top of the stadium did
not show the crowd formulating words in their rearranged color schemes.

They said:

ZEITGEIST

then:

MULTIPLIED LOVE DEATH EQUAL ACTION

then:

LACE REBELLION

� Cindy walked away. He walked over to the stem in the center of the room. He began
to climb with the can opener between his teeth. The path was slippery, but she was
determined, and she reached the ceiling in no time. With aching arms and legs, he
clung tightly and, with one hand, began to dig an opening.

The skin opened much easier from underneath. Ten minutes of painful exertion and
the breach was wide enough to hoist through. Cindy dropped the can opener and
crawled up the passage through the wound in the ceiling.

He passed through a second layer, which he tore apart with his teeth, emerging
through the skin of another fake-floor.

He found himself under what looked like an ordinary four-legged wooden table.
Around her were four empty chairs, and a floor-length white tablecloth.

He dragged himself out of the wet, quivering breach and onto the floor. Breathing
heavily, she pushed aside the tablecloth, which had kept her away from what was
outside, and crept into the surface world, once again over the shell.

It was in a restaurant. Mom and Dad and Belinda and Barbara were sitting at the
next table.

They stared at her, mouth open. "What the hell are you wearing, Cindy?" Her father
asked. The girls looked a little disgusted.

Cindy was covered in the humors, the goo, the half-blooded death essence of the
things below.

Still breathing heavily, her temples throbbing, Cindy reached down and pulled the
tablecloth aside, revealing the gnawed, humor-covered wound from which she had
crawled out. This time her family saw her too.

His father jumped up from the table, almost toppling him, and his glass of wine
splashed on his mother's dress. He turned away and, looking for his little bag of
weed, staggered towards the exit. The sisters had covered their eyes. They sobbed.
Her Mother was staring at her. Mama's face was changing; the eyes grew larger, the
lips dissolved, the skin turned a dusty blue. It was his mother then that they had
planted in the family. "They're not under all the houses," Cindy tried to explain
to her sisters. �They aren't always over there. You can dig under our house and not
find them - you have to know how to look. Not where to look. They keep us blind
with false symmetries �.

The sisters joined their father outside.

Cindy turned around. "So let them all go fuck themselves," he said. He felt the
eyes of his Mother's underworld behind him and dropped to his knees crawling under
the table again. He slipped into the wound with his feet forward, and plunged into
the room below. He searched the monitors and found a screen showing Dad and the
little sisters getting into the car. He turned the knobs, and laughed, seeing the
car go up into the sky like a balloon with the string cut, spinning endlessly on
itself, Belinda thrown out and fell down, her father screamed as the car began to
melt, becoming a giant drop of mercury, which first hovered in the air and then
exploded into a thousand shiny droplets that fell to spray the parking area with
silver toxicity.

Rudy Rucker & Marc Laidlaw

Rudy Rucker is perhaps the most extroverted character in cyberpunk. Born in 1946,
his real name is Rudolf von Bitter Rucker, a graduate in mathematics from Rutgers
University, teaches Information Science at the University of San Jos�. He was a
software designer in Silicon Valley and wrote some scientific books on the fourth
dimension, on the philosophy of infinity, on quantum mechanics. His Rudy Rucker's
Cellular Automata Laboratory software for self-generating computerized images is a
sort of hypnotic window on a digitized unconscious moved by fractal logic.

Rucker was the leader and lead singer of a punk music group, The Dead Pigs, and
wrote a manifesto for new science fiction-based writing he called transrealism. The
basic concept of transrealism is the perception of reality in a fantastic way. The
assumption is that the underlying themes of science fiction (time travel,
alternative worlds, telepathy�) are archetypal symbols of perception. Based on this
assumption, time travel is memory, alternative worlds symbolize the great variety
of worldviews of individuals, telepathy refers to the ability to communicate
integrally. This is the aspect that Rucker calls trans, while, as far as realism is
concerned, he argues that, quite simply, the artistic work must have to do with the
world as it is. Therefore transrealism grows following the sensitivity of the
people and proposes an escape from a conception of reality based on consensus.

Consistent with this theory, Rucker, since his first novel, White Light of 1980,
has written wild vaudeville that cross the world of physics and the real one as in
an immense quantum amusement park. The result is remarkably close to that of Philip
K. Dick, but unlike the absolute nightmare prophet, Rucker's sliding from one
reality to another is playful. For the universal conspiracy that revealed itself in
Dick's plots, Rucker replaces a network in which it is possible to slip from one
state of reality to another, escaping the idea of the end, the sense of death of a
closed universe. In a 1989 interview with Forced Exposure magazine, Rucker quoted
the mystic Meister Eckhart, according to whom we should not think that one day God
created the universe and then abandoned it; he is continuing to create it even now,
working somewhere outside of our concept of space-time. Other Rucker novels are
Software (1982) and Wetware (1987).

Marc Laidlaw, born in 1960, is a Californian who specializes in cyberpunk with

strong satirical implications and in stories with religious and new ritual aspects.
Dad's Nuke, his first novel, in which the idea of Christian fundamentalism is in
grotesque contrast with the disintegration of the United States of the near future,
was followed by Neon Lotus: a Tibetan Buddhist sage reincarnates in a girl. The
scene is always the United States of the future, highly technological.

Chaos Surfari is the second story written in collaboration between Rucker and
Laidlaw starring Del and Zep (Del is an ironic version of Laidlaw, Zep by Rucker):
the first was titled Probability Pipeline and appeared in �Synergy�, n. 2. The text
follows some reflections on the logic of surfing, seen as a possible escape and
existential mystique in the computer age. Nothing to do with the drama of Big
Wednesday and Point Break. Here the typical irony of the "nerd" culture prevails,
related to the Devo or films like Hollywood Party, but above all with that culture
that sees the concept of surfing as a scientific concept, applicable to navigation
in the great streams of knowledge of scientific knowledge or of computer networks.

A warning for the reader of this story. If he already knows the infinity symbol,
the reading "key" will not be a secret for him: just follow the curve ... If he
doesn't know it, don't worry: he'll just have to surf the page on his own. , with
its mental table. When you reach the end, following the wave, you bend over, that
is, you turn the sheet over and read, and so you go back following the text in the
smaller body, upside down or not, going up to the beginning� and you will find a
surprise. After, you can start all over again.

Original title: Chaos Surfari (from �Interzone�, n. 28, March / April 1989).

Translation by Antonio Caronia.

Chaos Surfari

Great trip.

Delbert stood, shoeless, in a shoal of sharp, slippery rocks, a terry towel wrapped
around his pimply chest. Behind it a sandstone cliff strewn with cottages, at its
feet dead fish, seaweed, discolored water and crabs wallowing in the foam. A crab
was clutching a sticky condom: the animal absentmindedly continued to stretch and
crumple the object with its claws, occasionally lowering its jaws to taste the
human taste that dripped out of it.

The sea, Del thought, has become the worst place on earth.

Even though the waves were high, Del was still ashore today due to the red tide.
More and more dinoflagellated protozoa got caught up in the frenzy of reproduction,
and the ocean around Surf City was getting ugly and smelly for weeks on end.
Someone among the old surfers said it was as if the sea was all in tatters, but it
made Del think more of the time he'd been throwing up after eating fried squid and
drinking mucho red wine. Surfing that shit? But not even for a dream!

Zep, on the other hand, didn't care. Zep� Zep enjoyed getting into the most
disgusting situations imaginable. He had a fight with the policemen; he called
motorcyclists by names that not even their companions would have dared to use; he
took drugs made by crazy people. And now, yes, sir, Zep was standing off the coast
sculpting the waves, accepting with his eyes closed whatever crap he might need.

Well, almost with your eyes closed. What changed everything was Zep's imipolex
surfboard, a unique piece of high-tech: the Chaotic Attractor. The Chaotic
Attractor had a particular effect on the waves: it was connected to a parallel
neuronal port located in Zep's ankle. This intelligent board was able to read the
ripples of the water hitting it, to spin a CAM8 cellular automaton that simulated
the future behavior of the ocean in the surrounding area, to autonomously manage
the simulation even against the will of Zep, and finally to eliminate differences
by referring the most appropriate counter ripples to the sensible chaos of the
ocean.

This Zep contraption had built it all by himself, using stolen pieces: the
manufacturer of CAM8, a Silicon Valley company called System Complex, had bought
whole pages of advertisements in the "Computer Shopper" offering a disproportionate
reward. to anyone who had brought the device back, or at least had given useful
information for the arrest of the culprit. Thankfully, aside from Zep, the only
person who knew the truth was Delbert.

Offshore, red-stained waves foamed in the pincers of the jagged rocks of Blowhole
Cove; standing on the water, Zep let out a chilling scream every time he managed to
create a particularly nasty wave. Watching the big return wave, Del realized that
Zep just wanted to do something crazy, something he didn't even know exactly: and
no wonder, since it was made like a tire. That morning he had made a joint as big
as a house. Dennis Dementex, the cook of Pup Tent, the place where Jen, Del's
girlfriend, had got it.

Del had taken a few shots, too, and now he was beginning to imagine that the
stinking, reddish ocean was full of real blood, the blood of dead, stoned surfers;
yes, the ocean, with all that was in it, was very angry, and the waves struck in
revenge on the ungrateful beings who still breathed. Is that how you treat your
mother? The ocean seemed to say. By building parking lots and high-rises on its
sandy shores? Filling your crib with toxic waste and pesticides, as if you were his
only child? But how can you brag about your explorations into space when you know
so little of what I hide inside of me?

Del leaned out of the slippery rock to look at the sand a couple of meters below.
Retreating, the tide had combed the ribbon-like leaves of the sea zost�ra, which
now looked like hair loaded with grease. Sea anemones stirred on the rough wall,
throbbing like sphincters, soiled with shards of shells and bits of glass. He
realized he had to piss. There was no one in sight: he did.

Delbert directed the steaming jet on the zost�ra, trying to free it from the algae,
as an archaeologist would do when cleaning a shard. Something sparkled: he tried to
piss harder, but he had hardly any pressure now. There was something peeking out of
the seaweed, all encrusted with pink plankton yet shining like a diamond.

A jewel! He thought. It is a kind of jewel thrown ashore by the sea!

Zep's scream managed to overcome the roar of the
saw his friend splash towards him at the foot of
him. But there was no time to see Zep's slide: a
treasure, just found, would disappear in a tidal
the sand and started digging in the seaweed.
sea. Delbert raised his head and
a wave that was about to swallow
few moments, and Delbert's
wave of foam. He jumped down onto

Delbert's fingers closed around the prey at the same instant the wave broke on his
back and enveloped him, pushing him to the bottom. There was no way to figure out
how to get back to the surface, and Delbert was already short of breath. He clung
as tightly as he could to the glittering sphere he had conquered ... confusion, a
sudden leap ...

(Reverse text in the original. [Nds])

Now Zep, Delbert, Gidget, Logomarsino, Kid Beast, the truck and the car, were all
in the air, a hundred meters high, and pushed by the force of gravity they were
falling into the great surf basin called Bitchen Kitchen. The water was deep, but,
as was well known, it hid very sharp rocks. Zep turned the nose of his table
forward, trying to get there before the others; when it submerged it raised a
spiral of smooth matter, a kind of invisible gravitational track. Looking up, he
saw that the others had been sucked into this spiral; they circled above his head,
gliding as if their fall had been slowed by some force: It seemed to him that they
were somehow marking the lines of his strange halo.

The water was rushing, and he had hit it hard enough to create a vortex. The dark
water freaked him out; the vortex was trying to take the table away from him. He
heard a watery murmur, still the same surf music, then he ran out of oxygen.

Delbert was staring at the water through the windshield of the sinking pickup
truck. The ocean looked like the toilet bowl the night he'd thrown up all those
baby squid and red wine. They hit the water with a thud. A strange silence filled
the cabin of the vehicle. There was a face pressed against the windshield: Zep!
Delbert slid open the side window, the pickup swung and belched a large bubble of
air. Del grabbed Zep and pulled him upwards until they emerged to the surface.

Everyone else was already there, Beast, Logomarsino and Gidget. And there, on the
beach, were Penny and Jen waving and cheering.

"Penny," Zep yelled as he came to. "Hey, Penny!"

"Zep! Love! Let's go fuck! �.

"Are you all right, boy?"

Del sat up, his head thundering, and stared at the waves. Where had he been?

"You got my board in the middle of the head," Zed said. �Fuck, I'm glad you woke
up. I had to drag you along. You got yourself a really bad wound. '

"I� look what I found," Delbert said. He opened his hand and the crystal appeared.
Inside was a world, reproduced in miniature but very deformed. He brought it closer
to his eyes, trying to focus on it better, but his head hurt a lot. There was
something moving in there, perhaps a shrimp, or a crab.

He thought he heard a voice in his head, an insinuating murmur that said come
closer, look.

Now he saw clearer. Inside that crystal supersphere was a small gallery of
miniature faces. Non-human faces, like those in a grotesque cartoon. Instead of the
beard they had vibrating tentacles; where the mouth should have been there were
beaks and claws. Cold gray eyes, dark secrets. The insinuating voice began to
whisper words he couldn't understand, promising to reveal unsuspected mysteries if
only he had ... if only he had ...

"Of the?".

"Sss! I am watching!".

He had been dumbfounded trying to discover the origin of those faces, because they
were arranged in a kaleidoscopic structure, according to some geometry that he
could not quite visualize. They seemed to sprout from the corners of a three-
dimensional web of glittering silvery lines; a network that formed pyramids and
equilateral triangles, too many, however, to be embraced all together with the
gaze. The whole thing could very well have been an illusion, a hologram of some new
kind constructed in the spare time by a ship's captain. Yet he couldn't take his
eyes off those depths. The faces twisted, getting closer and closer to each other.
They were like gothic monsters crouched at the vertices of those intertwined lines,
who stood guard at the center of those triangles. But the guard to what, he
wondered?

Very well; now, the voice whispered, a vision.

"Let me see, Del."

"I told you wait!"

The doors of the net began to open, allowing him to understand something of what
was hiding behind those faces. What he saw made his mind falter. There was an eye
in a green pyramid, in a plain similar to the one he had just dreamed of. But it
wasn't a real place, it was rather a miniature landscape, reproduced on the back of
a dollar bill. Suddenly the point of view changed, and where the banknote was
before he saw a delightful blonde surfer all naked: while with one hand she
supported her breast and with the other she was playing in the curls of her pubis,
she winked at Delbert and approached him. But now his tanned flesh became all white
and scaly; the girl began to swell as her hair turned to shriveled lettuce.

A burrito, Del thought. God, it's the most delicious burrito I've ever seen. And
the perfume ... heavenly!

He tried to reach for her, but something rattled in his hand. He looked, and where
the crystal had been before, he saw a car key; he looked up and at the edge of an
alien parking lot he saw a mint green '48 Woodie in perfect condition that seemed
to be waiting for him alone. It was just like the machine he had seen in Surf Serf
magazine last week, the Country Squire that belonged to the local silicon
billionaire. It was the most beautiful car in the world!

From the back of the car protruded, perfect and sparkling faces, three beautiful
surfboards: one red, one white, one blue. He knew they would give him the ride of
his life: like the Woodie, like that blonde girl.

As he approached the car, he noticed that the back seat was filled with crates of
beer: all imported, Australian brands that he could never afford. And on the front
seat was a resinous trunk full of leaves, and between the still nearly closed buds,
as big as his foot, a glint of gold flashed.

And standing on the dashboard, as bright at noon as it would have been at midnight,
was Jesus Christ himself, spreading his protective and saving aura on all surfers,
even the most played!

Then, suddenly, the strange walls closed, and the net reappeared. The guardians
glared at him, as if daring him to seize their treasures.

"Come on, Delbert, get out of there!"

Del blinked. �Zep, I think� I think it's magical. Ah, I think I have found my luck
�.

Zep snatched the ball from his hands and held it up, looking at it with one eye.
"I don't know anything about it," he said after a few moments. �In my opinion it's
just a plastic ecosphere, a normal toy. But look at what it says �.

He handed it back to Delbert, and showed him that, if you put yourself in the right
light, you could see angular letters etched on the flat base of the sphere.

WRITE NOW!

PO BOX 8128, SURF CITY, CA

RICH AWARDS!

"Let's write right away," Del said, cuddling the wonder sphere. �Before someone
steals all the prizes from us. Say, Zep, have you seen the Woodie? With the beer,
the key, and Jesus Christ on the dashboard? '

"I didn't see anything in there, just lines of light and a shrimp," Zep said. �Must
be one of those cheap plastic kits they advertise in comics, for raising seahorses,
which are actually like shrimp. Some fool will have engraved that message like
this, just to make a joke. Anyway we go, let's go to the post office. There must be
Penny. ' Penny was a busty woman with black hair and a contagious laugh. Zep always
thought of her.

They shoved the chaotic Attractor into the trunk of the old Chevy that Zep had just
bought and drove off to the post office. The place was cool and empty. Like a jewel
box, Zep thought, a box that held that plump pearl Penny, so pretty in her Bermuda
shorts. Zep, with a broad grin and bleached hair clipped with the machine, was
leaning over the counter desperately trying to come up with something nice to say.

"I wish I was your underwear, Penny."

"You're a peasant, Zep."

"Whose PO Box 8128 is?" Delbert asked. "I found this magic ball on the beach, and
it says to write to PO Box 8128." His shrill voice annoyed Zep a lot.

"PO Box 8128?" Penny replied. "I can't give the service information to the first
comer." He laughed in that nice way of his and went to look at the post office
boxes from the back. "But look! It's Kid Beast! '

"What a name!" Del said. "Is he a white man?"

"Is there anyone who isn't white in Surf City?" Pen said, resting her arms on the
counter and her breasts on her arms. �Kid Beast is a skinny boy with a nice gab.
You've seen him before, Zep, he was playing drums in Auntie Christs. ' He glanced
around the empty room. �I happen to know his home address, because I saw him there
once. It's 496 Cliff Drive. '

"496 is a perfect number," Zep said.

"And what is a perfect number?"

For example, six is equal to three plus two plus one; and three, two, one are
divisors of six. Now 496 is� wait. Thirty-one ... thirty-one by sixteen. Yes. In
fact 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 31 + 62 + 124 + 248 is 496 �.

"How do you know?" Penny asked.

�I went to college, babe. Santa Cruz, University of California �.

"Show me this magic ball," Penny said.

"We found it on the beach," Zep said, taking it from Del's hand and handing it to
the girl. �We saw things inside. You can keep her, Penny, if you get screwed tied
to the bed. '

"Ah well". The girl gave him a puzzled look.

"Oh, Zep, don't give it to him!" Delbert said. "That ball has some kind of
power ... it's magical."

Zep snorted, pissed at Delbert for interrupting a promising conversation.

"Why don't you go by car in the meantime, Del?" Zep said. "I'll put a note in Kid's
inbox, then we'll drop by his house, so we're sure he pays."

�You want to dump me, huh? And you want to steal my magic ball! �.

"Yup. But no. Come on, hold your ball. Go, friend. ' Del walked out.

Five minutes later Zep also came out whistling, with a postmark stamped on his
cheek, like a kiss given with an administration lipstick. He had made an agreement
with Penny: they would meet later at the Bitchen Kitchen to watch the sunset. He
would have Dennis give the Pup Tent some smoke, unless Dennis was sick again; then
he would get a bottle of wine and chill out with Penny, cheerfully. Too bad it was
just past noon. In the summer the days were so damn long!

What am I doing out here? Zep thought. I don't even know what I feel like doing. It
is this music that agitates me. I'm a goddamn hero. A legend.

The Chaotic Attractor soared in his thoughts and sent waves of ambiguity along the
twisting curves of the Moebius highway. The music always kept playing, never
managing to develop into a real song.

Of course the highway was an endless skein out of the tentacles of the being that
had been a sulituan, that had been a girl, that had wrapped itself around the twin
probabilistic distortion devices that Mr Gidget called the CAM10s. Although Zep's
board only fitted a simple CAM8, his expanded consciousness was so enhanced that it
was up to him to sculpt the highway.

And he sculpted. Cutting tighter and tighter, it wrapped the creature of the road
on itself, caused chaos to coagulate in an oscillating periodic line, wrapped the
line around the two point attractors of the CAM10s, merged the two attractors into
a single point, and then, with a last avenging flicker of the table, it broke the
symmetry and renormalized the deadly sulituan and the CAM10, making them disappear
into thin air.

Zep found Delbert sitting in the front seat of the pickup truck, staring at the
sphere as if he was really seeing all that weird stuff he said he saw. For a
moment, depressed Zep worried.

"Do you still see things, Del?"

Delbert shook his head. �They don't show me anything, Zep. I have to be good�. I
have to do something special for them, I think. '

�I just hope you didn't get some kind of space-time concussion, Delbert. After all,
what hit you on the head wasn't just any surfboard: it was the Chaotic Attractor.
It may have knocked your brain into another dimension. Have you ever seen that
movie with the brain-like beings that come out of monsters? Do you remember the
spines that look like tails and move like snakes? '

Delbert watched as a trickle of saliva ran down his chin. From the sidewalk a thin
stranger leaned over to look at them for a moment, then disappeared. Something
funny was going on, something even stranger than in the B-series monster movies.

All the houses on Cliff Drive around 496 had flower gardens and ivy-covered "For
Rent" signs on the mailbox. Only 496 looked like a pigsty, reduced to shit. A
three-legged mastiff was lying in the dust of the courtyard in front of the house
and barking like a madman. His missing leg ended in a stump that looked� well,
chewed. When the dog got to his feet after a while, Zep kicked him and knocked him
over onto his back, causing him to whine. Then, using the magic ball as a knocker,
he knocked on the door of the cottage.

At that moment something began to happen on the surface of the door. It was as if
someone were projecting a slide onto it, a pattern made up of many bouncing dots
that, taken together, formed a boy's face. Zep noticed that these bright dots were
coming from very thin laser beams coming out from the base of the sphere in his
hand. But as soon as he grasped the meaning of the image, the lasers went out.

The door of the house opened and framed a guy: the very same face the lasers had
just drawn. He wore ankle-high trainers, jeans, and a black jacket, old but trendy
enough, with no shirt underneath. His straight black hair fell over his eyes. There
was a trace of black lipstick on her lips, or maybe she just sucked on a stamp pad.

�I'm Kid Beast. Are you here for the audition of the new band? �.

Kid Beast held the door open and stepped back. The room gave off a pestilential
stench of the sea, as if a bunch of starfish had been locked up in a pickup truck
for an entire August day. Half a dozen aquariums gurgled along the walls and
corners of the room; just as many were still, dark, and stagnant, and only
occasionally farted a sulphurous bubble with a muddy bottom. There was also a
battery and amps.

"Come in," Kid said, taking a box of Friskees and pouring its contents into a black
aquarium. The surface of the water boiled: opalescent mouths were frantically
eating.

"My friend found this ball on the beach," Zep said, holding up the ball. "I suppose
you give a reward to whoever finds it, right?" I am Zep �.

Kid looked him in the face from under his disheveled hair. 'On the beach, huh? I
would have bet on it. Gidget sent you, is it true? '

"Gidget who?" Delbert said, grabbing the ball and shoving Zep into the house.
�Wasn't that the one driving the Auntie Christs? We like their music, don't we,
Zep? ' And he began to sing: �I am Auntie Christ! I look like Vincent Price! Dress
in black latex! A surfer is chasing me! �.

Kid glared at them with a nervous smile. His front teeth were broken, blackened and
in need of treatment. Suddenly Zep was sure he'd seen this guy plenty of times
before ... on the street, loitering in front of the Seven-Eleven at two in the
morning, bothering the strangers who passed by asking him for a cigarette, or
change for one. beer. He suppressed the insane desire to give Kid a friendly pat on
the back and reassure him that all was well. Kid Beast was like a rear-end
collision of five cars waiting for the sixth to come.
�No, man, I'm talking about Tuttle Gidget, the chip billionaire. He had taken
Auntie Christs to play at one of his high society dinners. They considered us
freaks, an out of the ordinary sight. I was biting into a live cuttlefish� it was
part of the new surf music we were trying to promote. You know, don't you ?, it
bites into it and moves its head with the swaying tentacles� �.

�Did you get to see Gidget's '48 Country Squire?� Del asked. "I bet this ball is
coming right up to him, and that he wants to give me that car!"

�Ah, yes, I think I've seen her. I don't remember much of that evening. Someone
gave me a fix just before the second performance, and by the time I came to my
senses the party was over, and those band assholes, good friends !, were gone
without me. I was overcooked, lying on the lawn, and Gidget didn't even spin me.
That's when I heard the sounds. Waits".

Kid Beast paced around the room attaching suction cups to the aquarium walls, then
connecting them with cables to an older model mixer, held together with tapes and
rubber bands. Strange noises began pouring out of the speakers, all low. Meanwhile
he was talking.

�More or less it went like this. The sound was coming from his swimming pool, and I
was seeing colors. Things like three dimensional color video images� one looked
just like you, Zep, now that I think about it, and another your friend here. What's
your name?".

�My name is Del. And I want what is due to me �.

"Of course. Now, why should I have seen something like Delbert? ' Kid Beast shook
his head in wonder, and his dirty hair flapped over his eyes. �Anyway I see these
evanescent images and I hear this strange gurgling music coming from the swimming
pool. Listen well. It could be a good sound for a new band �.

Kid Beast fiddled with the controls on his deck and liquid gurgling and burps
spread around the room. He mixed the sounds of the aquariums, drawing obscene
configurations that made one think of a crazed punk vomiting into the immensities
of space.

(Reverse text in the original. [Nds])

The music was going on, a long descending scale of bass that continually tended to
the archetypal core of the surf sound. The shellless nautilus, floating freely,
sang in a high pitch. Its tentacles fluttered around the ether, forming a great
figure of eight, the ring of infinity. The world below had vanished into the mist,
Zep began the long descent balancing on his legs. The nautilus saw him coming and
opened his beak.

Logomarsino was firing again. The bullets passed close to the nautilus and Zep,
curved in the direction of the ring and returned back to where they started. Mr
Gidget screamed, the car door opened and Logomarsino, pushed by Gidget, whirled
around in space. It was grabbed by a mass of tentacles and pushed down to the
intersection of the figure-eight. Zep thought the nautilus was about to devour him,
and in fact at that moment the clam-girl swallowed the gorilla whole. Zep sped
away, curving in the direction of the rounded end of the ring.
Kid seemed proud of his product. "I like it, it's much more disgusting than
anything the other bands have done."

"What happened after you woke up from Gidget?" Zep asked. "Did you take any other
drugs?"

'No,' said Kid, 'just imagine. The point is an other. Gidget had a chick tied to
the trampoline, with her head sticking out and her hair hanging down. She was all
naked, legs and arms tanned, while her ass and tits glistened in the dark. Gidget
was standing on top of her, on the diving board, in a diving suit, holding a
glowing ball. Like the one you have, "he said," and that brings us back to our
problem. Was it Gidget who sent you to me? '

"I see it," Del said, looking into the sphere with a smile. �She's the girl you're
talking about. And it turns into a burrito �.

Kid Beast chuckled. "Exactly so. In short, then the whole pool begins to gurgle and
shake, and a striped, orange shell emerges from the water. A terrible stench. This
shell attaches under the diving board. It had orange, slimy tentacles, there must
have been hundreds of them. And start shaking them on that poor girl. When I saw
that crap, I ran away. "

As he recounted, Kid Beast had sent a truly frightening soundtrack as a

counterpoint, which resembled the rumination of a fish-devoured sailor playing a
juke-box on the bottom of the sea. The tale had chilled Zep, but it seemed to have
left Delbert completely indifferent, now completely immersed in another world.

"Fuck," Del said, looking up and lazily fiddling with the sphere, "do you think we
might be able to meet Gidget?"

"What's the matter, Del?"

"I bet he'd give me that Woodie."

"Did you really find him on the beach?" Kid asked.

"See for yourself," Zep said. "There's a PO box number on it."

Kid Beast shook his head, and refused to touch the sphere. �This looks like one of
Gidget's pranks. He wants me to pick up this ball, so maybe he'll mark me, stick a
smell on me or whatever, so that thing with the tentacles will be able to find me.
Ah no, I'm sorry, I don't touch it. '

�That thing you saw with the girl,� Zep said as he looked down at his hands, �was
just a hallucination, wasn't it, Beast? Delbert, put the ball down. '

"And� what about the Woodie? And the girl? And the money and all the rest? '

�It's a trap, Del. Throw it down the toilet ... you'd better get rid of it. "

Delbert held the object tightly to his heart. �You don't understand anything, Zep.
You're just envious because you can't see what I see. I want what is due to me! �.

Kid looked at Zep amused. "Has your friend never seen a movie?" Nobody would ever
say such a thing. " He took a sideways step and put an arm around Delbert's waist,
with an androgynous smile. "So you want what you deserve?"

"Leave my ball alone!"

"I think you should give that ball to Gidget, Zep," Kid Beast said, letting go of
Delbert. "Anyway, it's his. Revise the mark to him �.

"Shit," Zep said. The whole thing was becoming a bit of a nuisance. At this point
he just hoped it wouldn't interfere with his plans for the evening. �But you mean,
for example, take her back to Gidget's house? They would never let us in. '

Kid thought about it for a few moments. "Well, maybe not. But I know a way in. And
then I'd like to hear that sound of the swimming pool again. In fact, I'll bring a
deck and sample it. Yes, yes. Glad you are here. I would have been a little afraid
to go back there alone. "

"See, Zep," said Delbert; it seemed that he did not hear what the others were
saying at all, that he heard completely different words. �Let's go to Gidget. He
has the Woodie and all. And he will give me the reward! That's what shrimp things
want in here. Here, they're telling me now, can't you hear them? They say Gidget
wants to meet us. Especially you, Zep. "

There was no doubt: Delbert had never been this bad. And Zep, somehow, felt
responsible: after all, it was his surfboard that had knocked him out.

"All right, Del," he said. �I'll take you to him. But let's go inside, give the
ball to Gidget, ask for the reward, and leave. Inside and outside".

Delbert was pleased. He got out and headed for the pickup truck, not looking where
he put his feet. The dog saw him, leapt towards him, missed him and fell flat.

"Why don't you join my new band?" Kid Beast yelled, cranking up the volume in one
last paroxysm of his watery hell before turning it all off.

"I can't play any instruments," Zep said.

"Me neither," Kid said. "That's why I left the Auntie."

They made their way up the hairpin curves of Surf City's hillside, hacienda after
hacienda, tiny pastel buildings, each with its own dwarf palm and its little wood
and glass sculpture. Zep didn't trust Delbert to lead, and Del was only interested
in the promises of his magical sphere. Kid Beast sat between the two, occasionally
giving some indication of where to go. But Zep already knew the way. And who didn't
know? Gidget's mansion occupied a hundred-acre property on top of a hill north of
town.

"Hit these fucking tentacles!" Kid said. "I can't get out."

"Stay calm, Kid," Zep said. Surf music flowed down his spine to his arms and legs.
He knew what to do.

As he fought, Kid Beast produced muffled grunts: an intertwining of wormy

tentacles, like a sparse but living Persian carpet, tried to suffocate him. Zep
pulled his surfboard, the Chaotic Attractor, holding it firmly by the fin. The
tentacles contracted. Pulling the table behind him, Zep crawled on all fours to the
back of the truck and kicked open the hatch.

"Where the fuck are you going?" Kid shouted. "Help me, friend!"

Zep crouched on the Chaotic Attractor. "I am". He gave himself a little push and
threw himself out.

Zep kept thinking he saw pedestrians out of the corner of his eye. They popped out
of nowhere and staggered toward the car. He swerved, and they suddenly disappeared.
It happened so often that Zep began to understand what the pattern appeared to be.
He saw ghost pedestrians only at certain kinds of intersections, where the road up
the hill curved at an angle, so he decided it must be some kind of optical
illusion. This also explained why the mysterious wayfarers all looked like Kid
Beast. It was the eye that played a trick on him: an instant image of his passenger
remained etched in the retina, and then the eye mingled it with the crazy lines of
the hill road. Anyway, Zep was pleased when they finally came under the pink wall
that surrounded Gidget's property: it meant the streets were now over.

In the distance, you could see the roof of the villa with its turrets. The wall was
closed by a wrought iron gate decorated with dinosaurs. Long ago, when silicon was
a material that people happily left on the beach, the Gidget family had made a
fortune out of California oil. And these were not people who easily forgot their
origins. Zep had read somewhere that they had even had a Tyrannosaurus Rex put on
the family crest.

"Very well," Kid Beast said. �Now, to get you to open the gate, sound four quick
beeps, and then three longer ones. Don't worry, there are few servants, and they
are all in the house �. But Zep's horn was broken, so all three had to shout "Honk-
honk-honk-honk!" and "Hooonk-hooonk-hooonk", like a band of belching dinosaurs . In
the wrought iron a ferocious pteranodon and a delicate diplodocus melted from a
primal embrace, and the gate creaked open.

Automatic sprinklers were running throughout the property, and the grounds were
lush with flowers and plants of all kinds. It looked more like a jungle than a tidy
garden, like in one of those lost worlds movies. Kid Beast sat upright, looking
around carefully. They passed several back streets, then, at one point, Kid Beast
pointed his finger. �See that fork in the boulevard over there? On the right, as
soon as you turn, there is the main entrance. To the left, in the back, are the
swimming pool and the garage. There is a real maze of narrow streets around here.
So go left. We throw this fucking ball that brings bad luck into the pool, we
record some sounds, and we beat it. "

Zep tried to turn left, but Delbert grabbed the steering wheel and yanked to the
right. For a moment Zep felt pulled in opposite directions, and the next moment
they were on the great drive that led towards the house. "It's the wrong way!" Kid
Beast yelled. Zep braked and started backing off, looking in the rearview mirror.

Just before they reached the fork, a shiny '48 Country Squire Woodie emerged from
the road to the left, the one they hadn't taken. There were four people inside, one
behind and three in front. At first Zep saw only the blonde chick, the beautiful
surfer who sat between two guys in the front. Then he looked at the driver's face.

"But for Christ's sake," he whispered. "It's me!".

Before he could see who the others were in the car, Delbert gave him a shove,
risking to drive the car off the road. "It's her!" Del cried. �My car, just like
the shrimp promised! Look, Zep, there's beer in the trunk, and that light on the
dashboard is Jesus, there's three boards in the back and all! Don't let them
escape! �.

But they were already far away� they had disappeared behind a clump of
bougainvillea, while their voices were lost like the blast of a radio in the murmur
of the sprinklers, the chunka-chunka-pfft of those field birds. Zep didn't even
have time to decide what to do next, when a chubby guy in dark glasses and a white
suit appeared in a golf wheelchair. This dress was soaking wet, and covered with
what might have looked like a mixture of bits of seaweed and grease. None of these
details, however, impressed Zep as much as the fact that the man brandished a
machine gun.

"It's Logomarsino, Gidget's bodyguard," Kid said, hiding under the dashboard.
"Don't let him see me."

"What are you worried about?" Zep asked. �He only has an Uzi submachine gun. Cheap
scrap metal �.

Del jumped out of the car and waved his ball under the bodyguard's nose. "Hey! And
my reward? �.

The man in the golf wheelchair, surprised by what appeared to be a hostile gesture,
fired off a volley. The bullets hissed over their heads, then, as expected, the Uzi
froze. The man got out of the car and stared at the three intruders, tremendously
shaking. "You're not real," he said hoarsely.

"Of course I am!" Delbert said indignantly. "And don't be smart to avoid giving me
my due!"

�Y-you're not real, and I'm not afraid of you. I'm not afraid at all. You are just
duplicates, echoes, you are bogus. I'm not afraid�".

There was a noise in the distance: four short and three long beeps. The bodyguard
pulled a remote from his pocket and pressed a button. "Ah, this is real!" He said,
and sent the golf wheelchair down the slope.

"I want the reward!" Delbert whimpered, and set off for Gidget's house. As a
precaution, Zep turned the car, then followed him, along with Kid Beast. As they
made their way up the hill, Zep saw two more false images in the bush: this time
Del treasury and the blonde girl. They seemed frozen, like flakes or blobs of color
in the air that slid over each other in an obscenely hyperdimensional way, forming
a grainy image, which gave the impression of being able to dissolve at any moment
into many dots. This scene Zep saw repeated several times, more and more often as
they approached the villa.

Eventually he decided to ask. "Hey, Kid, do you see what I see too?"

"No," said Kid. "I don't see any of this damned devilry, man." He pulled a small
crucifix out of his pocket and gave it a furtive kiss.

Delbert, on the other hand, of course, saw the images, and also tried to talk to
them, asking, "Do you know when I can get what I am entitled to?"

"Stop asking these questions," Kid Beast told him, but meanwhile the large wooden
door of the mansion opened and revealed the figure of a distinguished man, all
swathed in shimmering black. He held a glowing crystal ball in his hand, and all
around him was like a crown of false images.

"Murderer!" Kid Beast yelled at him. "Dickhead!"

"What the hell, Beast, friend's got a scuba suit," Zep said. "How can he be bad if
he's surfing?"

Seeing all this fair of oddities, Zep was convinced that Gidget was hiding a
monstrous stash of drugs somewhere. A pile of coke like in Scarface, a real mound
in which to bury your stoned face. Quite a fucking bunch, man. Zep could almost see
her, coke (or maybe it was acid methamphetamine), on a nice silver tray set on a
small table right next to Gidget. Zep shoved Del, snatched the magic ball from him,
and in no time at all he jumped onto the marble steps of the mansion.
Zep's ball and Gidget's ball recognized each other, and tiny laser beams shot out
of the two balls, causing the two men and the images around them to vibrate. The
billionaire diver opened his free hand, using it as a focal point for the leaping
rays: in a few moments the lines of light coming out of Zep's sphere all
intertwined into five brilliant ribbons, which ended up on each of Gidget's
fingertips.

At that point Gidget clenched her fist and the ball began to move towards her hand,
dragging Zep with it.

Before Zep could speak, he found himself surrounded by all those duplicate images
that clung to Gidget like her body odor. Now she was shaking his hand, and she was
putting a thin arm around his shoulder, inviting him to enter the house.

"Come away from there, friend!" He heard Kid calling him. And Del: "Zep, asshole,
give me my ball!"

But they were now muffled sounds, voices that drifted further and further away as
he exposed himself to that bath of incredible richness. Yes, that man emanated
wealth from every pore. "Well, well," Gidget was saying, "did you come to see me?"

Zep nodded. The heavy wooden door slammed shut, leaving his friends out. He began
to look around, looking for the famous reserve of stuff: it had to be around there,
he was sure of it. Unfortunately, the more he looked, the more the ghostly heap
seemed to elude him. He had to behave and not betray himself, that was the most
important thing.

(Reverse text in the original. [Nds])

"He wanted me, Zep," Delbert panted. "He really wanted me."

�Of course he wanted you. He wanted you to make his babies. "

"You do not understand". Delbert began to stammer.

"She ... me ... she loved me."

�But I know, man. And now he loves Kid �.

She was holding Beast by the ankle, and he, moaning, tried to free himself from
that incredibly thin tentacle with the click of the car.

"Help him, Zep," Delbert yelled.

Zep nudged the rear window of the vehicle; the rubber seal gave out and the window
landed on the floor of the car, all over the Chaotic Attractor and Kid Beast.

Wonderful surf music filled the air.

Gidget dribbled the balls from hand to hand like a juggler. �Yes, I lost my spare
ball a few days ago. I sent her on an errand, and I was afraid she would never come
back. But I shouldn't have been so pessimistic. These affairs are capable of
intertwining dimensions so elegantly, of using the force of situations so well.
There can be no accidents, can't you? We certainly met for some very good reason �.
"There's no question," Zep admitted.

�You look so sure of yourself. I like it in a young man. Besides, such a robust
young man. Surfer, is that true? I said it. But I have a doubt. The sun and the
waves aren't the only thing that interests you. If not, what could a simple surfer
do with a piece of computer technology as sophisticated as a half-million dollar
Systems Complex CAM8 card? '

"Tell-of-what are you talking about, man?"

�I think you know very well. Someone unhinged the Systems Complex warehouse to
steal something� six months ago, right? E Systems Complex is a subsidiary of
Gidgetdyne. '

An image of the Chaotic Attractor floated out of the ball and began to dance around
Gidget's head. On the table was the small figure of someone, the miniature image of
Zep.

And Zep, on the ropes, gave up. 'Look, Mr Gidget, do you want your CAM8 back? No
problem, I just kept it to experience it, for her and for the Sistems Complex. I
have it out here in the pickup truck. It's mounted on the surfboard. '

"Oh, no no. CAM8 is now obsolete. Six months ago I still could have sold it, but
now� now all of our major customers want the CAM10. The CAM8 card used to simulate
a space that was a little less than two dimensions, but the CAM10 can handle four
dimensions, and this means that it can also encompass time. This is why it was so
easy for her to find you. "

Zep couldn't help but ask, "What ... what does a CAM10 card look like?"

"At this," Gidget said, rummaging in the base of Del's sphere: there was a hidden
compartment, which contained a bright red jewel. He closed the base, and the
compartment disappeared. "What makes the CAM10 truly unique is that it runs a
laser, holographic display."

"I noticed," Zep said. "But how did he find me?" As long as they kept talking, it
meant everything was fine.

�Interesting question. Do you know anything about chaos theories? Sure you know. If
not why would you put the CAM8 in a surfboard? Very well". Gidget was obviously
excited about the subject. "Let's put it this way: these machines are so rich, from
the point of view of information theory, that they function as strange attractors
in the fact-space of our reality."

"I agree, man," Zep said. �Look, I have called my table with the CAM8 Chaotic
Attractor!�.

"You know, Zep," Gidget was beaming. �Maybe our research department ends up using a
mind like yours. Honestly my idea was to let Chtulhu sneak his latest baby into the
CAM8 thief. But maybe ... �.

Up until that moment Beast and Delbert had been banging on the door, but now there
was a gunshot and the shots stopped. There was the sound of running away. The door
opened and the same bodyguard Zep had seen before, the one with the Uzi, entered.
But this time his appearance was completely different: the dress was no longer so
filthy and crumpled, on the contrary it seemed to have come out of the laundry at
that moment.
�Ah, Logomarsino. Did you take care of our guests? �.

'I did my best, Mr Gidget. And what do we do with this chicken? Do I tie it up like
a salami and throw it in the pool? '

"Keep it short, mate," Zep pissed off. �Consider me one of the study center. A
computer scientist, a scientist. Who is this Chtulhu we were talking about? That
stinker of Lovecraft's books? '

"Yes, you got it right," Gidget said. "Well done. Yes, more or less like
Lovecraft's Chtulhu. Maybe it's just the same, who knows. In my opinion that poor
man's brain was, in a sense, a chaotic attractor at least as strange as CAM10. '

Zep was attached to the wheel as if it were a life preserver. The vehicle that had
been a Woodie was deforming, almost melting, in terrible turbulence, like chaotic
surf foam. There was a pop that drowned out Delbert's scream as the clam-girl
leaned out the window, writhing and flapping in the wind. The girl fell out of the
car, but somehow managed to escape the gravity, getting sucked into the lines of
force that had continued to intertwine out of time.

"Hey, Del," Zep gasped. "Take the wheel."

Del grabbed the wheel.

A trumpet sound deafened him. The girl was opening, as if expanding, her body
turning dark gray, her hair turning into long, thin tentacles. She seemed to be
caught in a current that dragged her quickly, without remission, to a point halfway
between the two machines. When he reached this point, his whole mollusk body
shivered. The tentacles reached out in both directions: one half tangled around the
bumper of Gidget's car, the other half clung to the back of Zep's pickup truck,
sneaking through the empty cans and clam shells, trying to make contact with Kid
Beast.

"Are you saying that CAM10 has opened some kind of dimensional door?"

�The creature we call Ctulhu made me realize that it was actually CAM8 that got it
here. One day she appeared in my swimming pool. It is a kind of mollusk, a giant
nautilus. It has happened that our supercomputational network has become so
sensitive that by now different levels of reality manage to tune into it and can
materialize. But we have a problem, Zep. This Ctulhu has been impregnated several
times, and every 49 days she has to give birth to a newborn. Babies enter the flesh
of a human being and develop there. Now I don't want to sacrifice you, but� �.

A muffled sound came from the rear entrance of the villa. Delbert was yelling and
kicking the door. "FUCK EVERYONE, I WANT WHAT I HAVE!" Gidget and Logomarsino
exchanged a wicked smile. With all this dimensional mess, Zep had to suppress the
urge to smile too.

A few minutes later they were all at the edge of the pool: Del had his hands tied
behind his back with surgical thread. He screamed for help, so they gagged him,
then yanked him, naked, to the diving board. The water was black and fetid, as if
the pool were fed directly from the sewers.

Zep, from a billionaire, would have expected something better.

(Reverse text in the original. [Nds])

Out, high in the air, sixty meters above the golden waves from the sun. And then
there's this kind of click, and Woodie becomes Zep's pickup truck. It's just like
before, Zep Del and Beast in the car and the chaotic Attractor in the back, only�
the� girl is as if she opens in two, her arms and legs blossom and become
tentacles, the skin on her back opens�

�It's the nautilus! She's the antigravity nautilus! �Kid Beast yells. And the
sphere shoots rays towards Mr Gidget's sphere and the girl opens her cloak and now
Logomarsino and Gidget also fly over the cliff and ...

The water of the pool stirred, bits of garbage and algae appeared on the surface,
like a reddish plankton flower: at the center of this flower appeared first strips
of yellow-green hair, and then a face, the face of a girl Californian so beautiful
it takes your breath away, a nice straight nose and lips so thin that you can peel
an orange even without teeth ...

"Hey," Zep yelled. "A girl!".

She emerged from the murky water all naked, holding a knife, a large black anodized
diving knife; in an instant he was close to the diving board, knife raised over
Delbert's genitals, faintly begging for mercy. Zep covered his eyes. The poor boy
was about to get his due.

There were noises of something rubbing, then a thud. Zep couldn't help but look.
The girl had cut Del's ties, had thrown the knife away, and was now kissing Del on
the cheek! Before anyone could react, Zep pushed Logomarsino into the pool. The Uzi
had jammed again.

"Let's beat it, Beast!"

"Stop them," Gidget roared, but it was too late.

In four and four, the chick and the three caballeros were on the avenue in front of
the villa. In place of Zep's pickup truck was the green '48 Woodie Del had been
raving about all day. Zep would have preferred his trusty vehicle, but there was no
time to look for it. So they jumped in and skidded off, down Gidget Hill, then the
back streets of Surf City, to the Pacific Coast Highway.

Hot air hit the windows. The ocean was to their left, and the highway was clear. It
was a calm evening: the sun was setting over the smooth waves and everyone had gone
home.

"Roll a joint a bit, Del."

"Ah okay".

The girl watched with her mouth closed, stroking Del's arm. When he had made the
joint, she took it from his hands and lit it with the Woodie lighter. He smoked
strangely, opening his lips so much that he almost swallowed the filter, and then
exhaling the blue smoke hard from his nose. He took three hits, then offered the
joint to Kid Beast in the back seat.

"Later," he said. "Now I want to hear this." He was holding a homemade CD in his
hand. "It's the best of the Auntie Christs."

Zep slipped the disc into the CD player. Del took a shot and passed the joint to
Zep. Everything was perfect. The water was beautiful: the red tide was gone. The
waves rolled over each other and crashed on the shore in long, sloping trains.
Their energetic sound merged with the deafening music that came out of the powerful
speakers of the Woodie system.

Hearing the car carrying them so fast and quiet, Zep smiled. The shape of the
Woodie reminded him of a car that he thought he saw in an advertisement when he was
little. This car had wings folded under the fenders, so that, if you wanted to, the
car would float in the air from the top of a hill if you wanted to; heavy as
before, he would have flown, however, with the roaring engine, responding as always
to the steering wheel. What a buzz, guys. Gidget wouldn't have dared follow them.
They would soon be in Bitchen Kitchen. In less than two kilometers they would cut
to the left, to the point, and then they would really start sculpting.

There was something for all four of them, Zep thought: the chaotic Attractor safely
behind it, along with the beer, and the three new boards that came with the Woodie.
What a car! Del was right, it was magical, but no black magic, as you could tell
from the glowing plastic Jesus on the dashboard.

"Hello, Jesus," Zep said. "Thank you".

They had just passed the crater area, with the San Diablo lift, and were making the
long descent, the last one before the road ended in a recess on the right. The long
descent to the sea was clear.

Zep could already see the Bitchen Kitchen parking lot over there, behind the
recess, a beige patch between the road and the sharp cliff, and in the background
the ocean, which seemed so distant. Bitchen Kitchen, where the strangest nudists,
perverts and surfers loitered, Bitchen Kitchen with its beautiful and ugly paths
that led to the beach.

Zep liked going down that hill with the engine off. It was fun. The legend said
that if you could get enough speed and go straight instead of turning left or
right, you could get over the edge of the cliff and land safely in the basin below.
A tourist named Tuck Playfair, in '68, had succeeded.

The blonde was now lying on top of Del, unbuttoning his shirt and even putting her
hands inside his pants. Del had never been happier in his life. Pure Kid Beast, in
the back, was happy, even though he kept looking nervously at the road behind the
car. All the boys there felt that it could be the beginning of a beautiful and
fruitful collaboration.

"I said so," Del said in a broken voice, so great was his joy. �He ... I told Zep
that I would get what I was due. Hades�". Del tried to contain the emotion by
raising the volume and pitch of his voice. "Now! Now I have everything I deserve!
Understand, guys! Wooooo! �.

Silently, the girl finished taking off Del's shorts, waved them in the wind, and
slowly bent over him, opening her mouth. Kid Beast was still turned around, Zep was
looking down the street, so only Del could see the terrible things inside the
girl's mouth. Something was absolutely wrong� instead of teeth he had two ridges of
rigid cartilage covered with skin. Delbert dismissed her in fear as she leaned
towards him, opening her mouth wider and wider and making a noise like Patty Duke
playing Helen Keller imitating a madman eating shit.

"What is your name?" Kid Beast asked. "And how did you get rid of that giant clam
stoned in Gidget's pool?"

�Wuuuh! Uuuuuuuuunnnh! Nnnnnnnggghhh! "

"Wait a minute!" Delbert was saying. He looked worried, but Zep was too polite to
watch. "Wait a moment. EHI, ZEP� �.

There was a distant snap behind them. A cobweb suddenly appeared on the windshield.
"IT'S GIDGET AND LOGOMARSINO!" Kid Beast yelled. "THEY ARE RUNNING HERE!" Another
shot, another hole in the window.

Out of the corner of his eye, Zep could see the girl's open mouth and something
coming out of it, like a pipe or ... a beak ...

And Del was all a "AAAUUUGGGHHH!" WHO ARE YOU�".

And she: �YEEK! WURRaa! WURRaa! WURRaa! YEEK! �.

And Kid Beast is yelling "THROW IT DOWN", only the cliff edge approaches and now,
before Zep can take his foot off the accelerator, the girl sneaks a surprisingly
long leg over his foot and sends them all ...

Paul Di Filippo

When William Gibson included Thomas Pynchon and American postmodern fiction in
general among his inspirers, he was only recognizing some authentic precursors of
cyberpunk. If together with Pynchon we mention John Barth, Donald Barthelme,
Richard Brautigan, Don De Lillo and Gilbert Sorrentino, we have the complete
picture of a current of American literature capable of historicizing, through
narration, "pop" or "mass" culture . Television soap opera and any other form of
small-screen programming, idioms, public figures, cinema, all departments of mass-
media production, high-profile gossip, commercial music, comics, and a thousand
others expressions of popular culture have been analyzed and reorganized by
postmodern writers in a set of works that manage to account for the period of
contemporary history "taken into consideration", that is, their historical time.
With a look at times digressive, at others critical, strongly alienating and for
this reason even more capable of highlighting the bizarre way of life, almost as if
it were an ethnographic document or, more generally, anthropological for the use of
posterity.

In this sense, cyberpunk writing can be considered the direct heir of the American
postmodern, precisely because of its ability to tell, as an entomologist studies
and tells the behavior of his insects, the syndromes and passions of an era without
being fully involved, working on land that is already halfway with the future.

Paul Di Filippo has chosen to stay on the fringes of the great cyberpunk wave.
Bruce Sterling, who is one of his greatest admirers and also hosted him with a
story in the manifesto-anthology Mirrorshades, complained some time ago that Di
Filippo had never written a novel, because surely it would have been a good novel.

Jones's continuum is one more proof of the insight of this not very prolific author
who, even with a few short stories to his credit, is rightly considered one of the
most representative authors of the new wave.

Original title: The Jones Continuum (from �Science Fiction Eye�, n. 3, March 1988).

Translation by Daniele Brolli.

The Jones continuum

Carr tunes the oscillometer with delicate precision. It almost feels like an
integrated component of his creation. His nimble fingers give quick flicks on the
control sliders, up and down the main console with mottled finishes, like the
delicate manipulations of a record producer trying to get the proper sonic blend
for some upbeat commercial melody. Vermilion displays flicker through an infinity
of interdimensional coordinates, before finally being channeled into the
appropriate group. Seemingly relieved, Carr stands up from the large control desk.

Carr and his console find themselves in the middle of a converted recording studio
somewhere in California. This requisitioned equipment, chosen for strategic and
security reasons, is gigantic and desolate, housing the ghosts of the actors,
directors and operators, and their fictional realities. Carr is suddenly struck by
how this is just the right scenario for their attempt to breach an alternate
reality. The huge space siphons and distortions resonate strangely. Carr and his
busy team crowd only a small portion of the high-ceilinged building. Cables meander
through the concrete floor from the console to the portal to the main switchboards.
Large halogens on telescopic rods with tripod feet light up the scene crudely.
Shadows lurk behind the perimeter thus outlined.

Men and women, dressed like Carr in sexless antiseptic outfits, fitted with skin-
tight hoods, control various instruments and convey silent instructions from one
station to another through headphones and pin microphones. Confused in the shadows
are some officers wearing the various uniforms of the United States Armed Forces.
However, they do not disgust even half as much as can be done by plain clothes
observers who, as Carr knows, represent the most secretive and powerful sectors of
the government.

Carr wipes cold sweat from his forehead. A lot depends on this mission. His
reputation, years of hard work, additional grants� He would have preferred to walk
through the portal himself, but it's impossible. As the inventor of distortion, it
is too important to take the risk. No, the success of all his efforts depends on
the functioning of the selected team standing nervously near the portal. These five
individuals, four men and one woman, were selected and licensed by ranks of
government experts. The only ones capable of dealing with the unknown territories
that extend beyond the portal and establish a bridgehead for democracy are these
five interdimensional explorers.

Leaving his console, Carr heads for the group.

Jones is their leader. The solid, responsible Jones, has a Full American look like
his name. Carr finds it bizarre that there are guys like that, always ready to pop
up whenever the country needs them. Glenn, Armstrong, and now Jones, all of the
same stuff. He is a great man, made to appear even taller and more imposing with
his equipment on. Like the rest of his group, Jones wears, over the desert
camouflage suit, segmented plates of Kevlar armor, fastened to a loose metal mesh
bottom that provides ventilation in the hot environmental conditions they expect to
encounter. Combat boots add an inch to Jones' height. Weapons and supplies are
secured on his back and chest, hung from his hips and belt. Anti-personnel
grenades, food concentrates, water bottle, medical first aid, the latest model of
rapid-fire rifle with laser aiming ...

Carr places his hand on Jones' armored shoulder. �Well, Charles, I think that's
all. There isn't much I can say now other than 'Good luck'. '

Jones's voice is firm. �We couldn't have asked for a better support team� that is,
coordination, Phil. Just worry about keeping the portal open at the right time, we
will do the rest �.

Carr knows he wanted to say a hundred things by now, but the excitement makes him
forget them. All that comes to mind is a final warning.

�Remember, we are pretty sure that the physical laws of this universe are different
from ours. All theoretical work indicates that there will be a deviation from our
continuum. Nothing that exceeds the quantum level� Plank's Constant and the rest of
the stuff should be identical to ours, at most within a few dozen decimal places.
On the other hand, all those small discrepancies put together can give rise to
macroscopic differences that we are unable to predict. You will have to move
carefully. All we know is that life is possible there. You know, our guinea pigs
returned without any damage� �.

Emaciated Kent interrupts him, his voice nervous. "And what can you tell us about
the frightening results achieved with higher level life forms?"

�Right, Tom, right. That monkey and cat came back with behavioral abnormalities at
first, but they disappeared soon after. We now suspect that most of their atypical
behaviors stemmed from sharing the same cage, despite the glass partition. However,
just to be on the safe side, you have been equipped with various psychotropic
stabilizers. Take them following Dr. Benson's prescriptions. '

Carr points to the only female member of the mission. Dr. Benson smiles faintly,
her hands fiddling with the plastic buckle that fastens her grenade belt. He
presses on the pair of hooks to release the buckle, releases the closure, opens it,
releases the closure, opens it ...

Then, suddenly realizing that the sound is an imitation of the stronger one of the
distortion that will signal their departure, he forces his hands to hang relaxed on
his hips.

Everyone's worried, including Carr, and Jones, with his fresh manners, takes
control of the situation.

"Well, let's make up our minds then."

Carr greets everyone with a handshake. �Charles, Tom, Mike, Heather, George. Our
hearts are with you. Oh yes. The President also sends you his best wishes. Well�
see you here at� mmm� nine o'clock �.

Carr heads back to his post. When he turns to look at the portal, he sees that the
explorers have climbed the step inside the ring. The portal resembles a severed
cornucopia: a series of massive rings in succession, smaller and smaller. The first
and largest rests directly on the floor, while the others are supported by forks of
varying length. The expedition team is standing in single file inside the metal
horn.

Carr takes a key out of his pocket, opens a button. The finger hesitates briefly on
it, then drops down, initiates the launch sequence.

Driven by an advanced program that runs on the Cray-2 cpu, the whole process is now
automatic. The whine of the distortion generator increases in frequency and
strength. It's more than Carr can handle ... In the end, thank God, the noise ends
in the distortion itself ...
The annular stage is empty.

Carr looks at his watch.

Two hours to recovery.

The team materializes, still in single file, on a strip of dusty desert strewn with
pebbles. The three members inside, Benson, Kent and Blount, immediately crouch
down. Each points the weapon in a different direction all around, covering the
expected 120 degrees of fire. Meanwhile, Montreaux, who closes the row, and Jones
in the front pull out vanadium and steel micro-alloy stakes and hammers from their
belts and start banging them on the ground. The explosive charges prove superfluous
in breaking through this brittle earth, and the poles - which contain searching
transmitters and radio-activated alarms - are placed in place. They mark the area
where the group will have to wait for the reopening of the transdimensional portal.

Only when this crucial maneuver is completed can the team relax a little. The men
crouched in cover get up. At a signal from Jones's hand, the bandolier guns are put
back over their shoulders. Always on the subject, men and women try to absorb the
surrounding landscape, in this dimension completely distant from the entire
universe that saw them born.

At first glance they appear to be on top of a vast plateau. Beyond the flat surface
extends a panorama of canyons and chasms, wind-sculpted towers and pinnacles,
titanic spiers and platforms, precarious arches and natural pyramids, red, yellow,
sand-colored, brown and gray. The silent view, from one horizon to another, is not
altered by any trace of civilization. The air is dry, the sun is vibrant. No signs
of animal life.

"We could have come out in a more comfortable place, too," says Jones. �We
certainly won't be able to get off this plateau and back up it in two hours. It
seems that our exploratory mission will be limited to these few acres �.

"That's true," says Montreaux. "On the other hand we will be safe up here."

"It looks like some kind of Arizona," Kent says.

"Yes," says Blount, "around Coconino County."

"How is it that that name reminds me of anything?" Asks Benson.

Blount laughs. �Attention, you are revealing your age, child. It is where the mouse
Ignaz� �.

"Look!" Suddenly shouts Montreaux.

The others follow his finger pointing towards the sky with their eyes.

A daytime moon hangs low from the sky. It looks like a cheese with an irregular
slice cut off the back. It is yellow like melted butter.

They are all speechless with surprise until Jones speaks.

�It must be an illusion, a joke of the atmosphere. Maybe it's the refractive index
of the air. No natural astronomical body could have that shape. Remember, Carr
warned us to be careful of small differences in the physical characteristics of
this place. "
'Whatever the explanation,' Kent says irritably, 'I don't like it. Either we can't
even trust our senses or the natural laws here are completely screwed up. Or it
means we're about to get into trouble. '

"Make sure you control yourself, Tom," Jones warns. �Nothing will happen to us as
long as we move carefully and stick together. So, let's check the edge of this
plateau. Maybe there is a comfortable way to get off �.

In patrol formation, the five go off. Jones in the lead, Blount and Benson in the
second row, Kent and Montreaux cover their backs.

As they head for the edge, Jones quickly wonders if they shouldn't rethink the
pairs. Kent, a down-to-earth guy, has had a few quarrels with Montreaux in the
past, and his nervousness could explode today. The team now cannot afford the
luxury of arguments or disagreements. However, Blount and Benson are an efficient
couple. The plump Blount seems to have a crush on the reserved but tolerant Benson,
which makes him extremely considerate of her safety. It would be a shame to
separate them. No, scrambling could be worse, it could spread anxiety and make you
nervous, Jones decides. Better leave the deliveries as they are - for now.

Reaching the eastern edge of the plateau, the five stop and peer down cautiously.

The bottom is a few hundred meters below. A thin thread of blue marks the path of a
winding river. The rock walls are absolutely vertical. There, at least, no chance
of a safe descent.

"Good," says Jones. �We will coast south and inspect the entire perimeter. We may
have better luck elsewhere. '

They don't have it. A half-hour walk around the circumference reveals that they are
well bottled on this desolate plateau, with the only company of a few large cacti.

Jones brings them all together at the original point of arrival. During the
meeting, the two pairs of team members began to converse softly with each other,
without Jones being able to understand anything. Now they all shut up. Up there,
the moon has impossibly crossed a good fifty degrees of the sky in the short time
they spent there.

"Well," Jones begins, "it looks like we're going to have to write a boring report,
but sometimes it comes for the best ...".

"Fuck it!" Kent yells.

Jones rolls his eyes in Kent's direction but then notices that Kent has addressed
the epithet to his partner, in Montreaux, and not to Jones.

�Tom, check yourself. What's wrong?".

�It's this mongrel bastard. He's bothering me, he says nonsense, he provokes me to
piss me off. "

"George, is it true?"

"Not even for an idea. It is Tom who provokes. He's started freaking out about how
we're all going to die here. I tried to calm him down. '

Jones tries to figure out which of the two is telling the truth, and gives up. He
seeks help from Dr. Benson, his deputy commander. Jones is grateful when Benson has
his say.
�Everything is under control, now listen to me. It must be an attack of the psychic
anomalies that guinea pig animals have also shown. Everyone has recourse to his
humoral stabilizer �.

Following Benson's lead, the four men immediately hold their personalized
neurotropic pills in one hand and uncorked flasks in the other. At a nod from
Benson, all five swallow their doses, Kent reluctantly.

�Here,� says Jones gratefully, �so we should be there. Now, let's break up into
pairs. I will stay here by the ravine. And get some sensors and samples. Check if
you can find any trace of animal life, however simple. '

His subordinates obey. John watches them disperse, then sets to work on his soil
sample around the stakes.

A cry distracts Jones from his concentration.

Montreaux is lying on his back. Kent jumps on him and is about to strangle him. The
truly bizarre thing about this scene, the vision that Jones initially fails to
accept, is that Montreaux's tongue extends more than a foot outside his mouth and
vibrates like a windsock as his eyes are shot. out attached to the peduncles. On
top of that, the victim's face is turning an unnatural cobalt blue.

Jones rushes towards the two, senses that Blount and Benson are following him.

Forcibly dividing Kent from Montreaux, Jones drags the crazed assailant to his feet
and begins to shake him. When Kent seems a little more in possession of himself,
Jones frees him.

'What the hell of an explanation can you give me for this, Tom? Why did you want to
slaughter George? '

Kent rubs his forehead with one hand. �I ... I don't know. It's as if I can't bear
the sight of her. '

Blount and Benson help Montreaux to get up. Inexplicably, just as it had deformed,
her face returns to normal, and it looks fine. Jones approaches to examine it.

Until he pulls the safety off, no one notices that Kent is holding a grenade.

Jones only has time to scream, "Down, down!" before it swoops into their midst and
explodes with a roar.

The smoke dissipates to reveal four figures standing in the center of a charred ray
of shattered ground. Their white Kevlar shells are streaked with long soot-black
vines. They have straight hair. Despite everything they are unharmed.

"I can't believe it," Jones says completely bewildered. �We should all be in
pieces��. And suddenly, in the certainty now that he has survived, he is overcome
with an intolerable anger at the sight of the unrepentant Kent.

Without realizing, Jones clenches his right hand into a fist. Grab your fist with
your left hand and start screwing your arm into a coil of rubber, armor and all,
until it's completely flat at shoulder level. He advances towards Kent, who
trembles but does not run away. As soon as he gets close, Jones lets go of his
fist.

The legendary fan takes Kent in the jaw. Small multicolored five-pointed stars
shoot out of the point of impact. Kent's head rockets backwards, stretching the
elastic neck by at least a meter. There is a noise of BOI-OI-OI-NG. Kent's body
eventually pops up behind his head. His feet start off the ground and he whizzes
through the air for twenty meters. Land on the lap of a large cactus. The arms
close on him, the thorns pierce his armor. Kent yells, "Iiieee-oooouu!" It is fired
directly into the air, flips to the zenith, with its head pointed down, then falls
plumb. When it comes to impact, it sinks into the plateau planting itself up to its
waist.

Jones turns in amazement to the other three. He barely notices that all the effects
of the explosion have disappeared from them as well as from himself. �I didn't
intend to� I didn't know I could��.

Nobody pays the slightest attention to the commander. Blount promptly investigates
Benson's condition after the grenade. Montreaux, meanwhile, is laughing at Kent's
fate, bent over in dues hysterically beating his knees. He throws himself on the
ground, waves his legs in the air. He rolls on his stomach, slapping the dust,
wetting it with tears, until a large puddle forms around him. He doesn't care about
Kent's return.

Kent is dirty and full of cactus thorns, but still unharmed. He takes the rifle off
his shoulder. Montreaux seems to sense his presence. He stops laughing, looks up,
jumps to his feet in a moment and starts running. Kent lets him walk away, patting
the single-load rifle. He takes careful aim and fires a shot in the ass in the wind
of Montreaux. The bullet arrives at its destination with the same ringing of a bell
rang in the marquee of a shooting gallery. Montreaux jumps straight ahead. "Ouch!",
Then he starts running again. Kent begins to chase him across the plateau, stopping
every now and then to shoot him at random.

Jones doesn't even try to stop them. He's scared of what he might do to them.
Instead he turns to Benson and Blount. At least they remained in themselves ...

Blount is holding Benson's hand. Somehow it has made progress; dealing with the
effects of the grenade on the woman's health, he moved on to fervent requests for
love, in an atrocious Maurice Chevalier accent.

"Oh my pittolo pizzion-zino, don't you fenti my cosse battered d'amov?" Sbaciuch-
sbaciuch-sbaciuch-sbaciuch-sbaciuch-ciuch ".

This latter noise accompanies the kisses that Benson passionately disseminates up
and down Benson's arm.

"Stopped! Stop ... disgusting! Stop that!".

Blount pays no attention to Benson's wishes. He grabs her at the waist, folds her
back so that she balances on one foot, with the other leg reaching out into the
air, and begins to kiss her neck.

Benson slips out of Blount's grasp as if greased with oil. His arms remain tied to
nothingness, as he continues to kiss the air for a few seconds after she has
escaped him. When he notices the absence, he straightens up.

Benson has the shotgun pointed halfway up at Blount. Jones desperately notices that
he is in the burst position.

"Don't take another step closer ..." warns Benson.

"It's certainly not what you think, cherie," Blount says, and takes the fatal step.
Benson releases at least two hundred large-caliber bullets. Jones closes his eyes.

He opens them again to see Blount pierced with holes. It is a chiseled solid, a
Swiss cheese.

"You've drained my phtomach, my little little little boy," says Blount. He drinks
from the bottle. The water gushes like a fountain from the bullet holes.

"Now that I'm refreshed, let's get back to our love skirmish."

Benson throws the rifle away scared and runs away. Blount curls up like a spring
and nonchalantly hops behind her on all fours, leaping into the air impossibly with
every step, even finding time to stop in the middle of the chase to smell a cactus
flower.

They left Jones standing alone. Noises of gunfire and explosions, shrill giggles
and shouts of triumph echo across the plateau interspersed with bizarre sound
effects of crashes, echoes, reverberations, sobs ...

Stunned and disheartened, Jones shuffles away.

It finds itself on the edge of the plateau. He sits down, with his legs dangling
over the abyss. As he thinks, he checks the stopwatch. Less than an hour to return.
He realizes he should return to the rendezvous point, but he doesn't have the
strength. The mission is a complete failure, a total disgrace. How can he introduce
himself to Carr and the others and report what he allowed to happen? Jones grabs
his head in despair and shakes it. There is a ringing like balls in a jar inside
his skull.

�BEEP BEEP�.

Jones is suspended in thin air, having made an instant transition from the edge of
the cliff to flight over the abyss. He only has time to see an absurd being
standing on the plateau behind him, shamelessly showing his tongue, before
realizing that there is nothing under him. It flounders in the air in vain. Well,
that's good old air, perfect� Try to run through the air, legs whirling and arms
outstretched, but get nothing. Then it falls.

The fall is long.

Jones has plenty of time to get an idea of the impact.

When it happens, the blow leaves him unconscious for a while. Coming to his senses,
he realizes that he is still alive, lying in a hole that has the shape of his body.
So, here there is no possible escape from humiliation and failure, not even in
death ...

Jones climbs out wearily. The inviting river stretches out just a few meters away.
He heads for the river to quench his thirst. Bending over, he cupped his hands and
draws in some water.

A grinning shark opens its jaws and gulps down Jones's head and neck. Jones stands
up, carrying the shark on top of him like a hat, tail flapping. He gropes until his
hand stumbles upon a petrified stick. With the stick, he begins to rage on the
shark with strong blows, until it releases it and plunges indignantly back into the
river.

"Hey hey hey hey!"

This incident convinces Jones that he must go back to his universe. Away with
despair, replaced by renewed ambition. But the dimensional portal is still far
away. Stretch your neck back, examining the wall from dizziness. There is nothing
else to do but climb.

Jones begins the climb, helping himself with jolts and cracks.

Climbing like this should be impossible. But is not so. After all, it takes about
half an hour.

As soon as he puts his hand on the edge, he feels something give way and fall
apart. A ridge of rock breaks off, bringing Jones down with it as well.

Jones crashes first. It is not known why, but this time it does not make the hole.
A shadow grows around him. Jones removes his Emergency Umbrella from his belt and
opens it over his head. The gigantic boulder falls on him.

It emerges from below, flattened like a pancake, hairy on top, with its feet
sticking out from underneath.

With a SPROING it opens like an accordion, resumes its normal shape.

Wearily, he starts climbing again.

This time he manages to reach the surface of the plateau.

It is almost time to return.

Jones rushes to the beacons.

He only has one minute left. He would like to be able to somehow recover the
others, but there is no trace of them anywhere, and there is no more time to look
for them. A better equipped force can return for them later. Jones stands
motionless between the stakes, full of hope.

Distractedly, impulsively, Jones traces two parallel lines in the fine dust with
the toe of a boot, then joins them with bars.

The scribble immediately transforms into two shiny iron rails resting on tarred
sleepers. A huge express train materializes a few meters away, traveling directly
to Jones at more than a hundred kilometers an hour. The impossible creature is
leading him. Before Jones can move, he finds himself riding the stonecutter across
the plateau. When the train reaches the edge it continues further, on a bridge that
did not exist before.

Jones's moans echo from afar.

At the control mission, the nerves are tense, to the breaking point. A large clock
on the wall counts the remaining seconds with a thin red hand. Carr would like
there to be some switch, even symbolic, that he can operate, so as to make a
personal contribution in bringing the team back. But the entire re-entry process,
as well as sending, is under the control of the machines.

Carr checks his wristwatch, then the other one on the wall, then his own again. The
other members of Mission Control stand at their gas stations watching the
electronic records, alert to any significant fluctuations in the size structure.
The assembled members of the scientific community exchange glances that only they
know how to interpret.
The whine of the generator is growing ...

The zero hour arrives.

Nobody breathes anymore.

The generators unleash the distortion, like the crack of a hunter god's whip.

No explorers reappear. The platform is empty.

At first, they are all stunned by the non-return of the scouts. For a while, there
is absolute silence. Then two things happen together.

Carr notes that although the generator has closed automatically, the gap between
the two dimensions remains open. At the far end of the cornucopia there is a narrow
circle, shining with sun and sand and a small moon that looks like something out of
a Krazy Kat comic.

At the same moment, the technicians begin to nervously shout their reports.

"Planck's Constant is failing!"

�Boltzmann's constant is growing by one point three eight zero four two��.

�Avogadro's Constant is failing. Below zero zero zero zero zero zero three! �.

A telephone rings; a woman replies. She listens, then drops the receiver, white in
the face.

�It was the Cerro Tololo Observatory. The Hubble Constant is changing �.

A hot wind blows from the ring, beating Carr. His dizziness grows, he puts a hand
to his head. It seems he can see the distant light of an approaching train coming
from the thin circle, it seems he can hear its insane whistle. A tangle of railway
rails suddenly appears from the dimensional distortion, making its way through the
concentric scrolls of the portal. The rails continue on the floor, where they cut
cables and pipes, and cross the wall of the recording room, opening a hole in the
shape of a train.

Carr feels he has to talk eventually, all the huge responsibility falls on him. The
disbelieving faces of the others plead with him. But what to say? What words are
able to sum up the effects of their disastrous exploration?

Eventually he gets it, the sentence runs off his riotous tongue:

"To ... to .... see you next episode, guys. That's all, folks! �.

Richard Kadrey

As a literary avant-garde, cyberpunk has always placed itself in relation to the

history of the literary avant-gardes more generally. Despite the lack of knowledge
of European movements, which leads serious magazines such as "Wired" to argue that
surrealism is an evolution of Dadaism (sic!), Cyberpunk authors have shown a
sensitivity on this point that goes beyond their own knowledge. The movement has
developed a repertoire of poetry, graphics, illustration, artistic events that go
beyond writing, especially in its expressions of "alternative" circulation
(magazines and books from small publishing). The cyberpunk collages closely
resemble the surrealist ones, their poems are related to Dadaism and Futurism; yet
in these productions there is no air of epigones, of simple followers of one or the
other movement of the "historical avant-garde", in particular of Europe. Instead,
there is a capacity for intuition that goes beyond the repurposing of old modules.
It is perhaps, in particular, the imprint of situationism that today renews the
proactive force of cyberpunk, starting from a careful observation of the daily
microcosm, seen with lenses that often lead it back to a perverse hallucination.

Computer programmer, editorial director of the cyber-sex magazine "Future Sex", a

multifaceted artist capable of producing both phenomenal collages and stories that
test the senseless aspect of American society, Richard Kadrey (born 1957) is
perhaps the personality more multifaceted than cyberpunk culture. His stories
always push the limits of writing by projecting themselves towards the action,
towards the scene, desired by Kadrey, of an anarchist revolution mocking the
compromises and hypocrisies of the international establishment. Fortunately (as
happens to many exponents of cyberpunk), however, the violence of Kadrey's thesis
corresponds to an energy and robustness of invention that should make him
appreciate well beyond the circle of those who fully share his ideas. And the
ultra-individualistic and ultra-cynical rebellious character of the sulphurous tale
we present is a compelling, even moving, example of Kadrey's talent as a
storyteller.

Original title: Goodbye Houston Street, Goodbye (from �Interzone�, no. 19, spring
1987).

Translation by Daniele Brolli.

Goodbye Houston Street, goodbye

Granted, it would be the art event of the year, Dix was saying. The phone call had
woken Parnell from his nap; he listened quietly, twisting a piece of copper pipe
recovered in the morning from an abandoned refrigerator. An exhibition of the new
Surrealism, Dix continued, in his Soho gallery. In the 1930s, the Levy gallery
exhibitions had to do with the perception of the world as it was in the early
twentieth century, according to the artists of that time. How would the heirs of
that current see life now, Dix asked, at the end of the century that had seen it
born? �I will call the exhibition� Fun-de-si�cle �. Sympathetic, n'est-ce pas? �.
Then, as if in response to his question, Dix added, "Are you interested?"

Parnell blinked a couple of times, set the small copper tube next to a collection
of transistors, some animal bones, and a lawnmower motor. "Yes, it sounds like a
great idea," he said.

"Well, are you going to join in with something then?" Dix asked.

Parnell threw a bundle of hoses onto the pipe. �To tell you the truth, I've been
working on a large piece for several weeks now. Ever since Jessie left� �.

"Perfect!" Dix said. �Jessie said that for two guys like you, living together meant
stifling your artistic growth and her need for individuation. Now I'm not saying
that leaving was easy for her and I'm not saying that it did her a world of good,
but I'm saying that she has settled down really well and that she says' Hi 'to
you.'

"Oh," Parnell replied flatly. "Say 'Hi' to her from me too." Through the phone,
Parnell could hear Dix sigh.

�I have to tell you Parnell� I was certain at the time that this going into
business between Jessie and me would cause a communication gap between you and me.
Well� I just mean I'm damn glad we've both been mature enough not to let that
happen. Damn happy �.

Parnell smiled. "People should be happy," he said, adding a stuffed owl to the
rickety pile of debris.

�How right you are, mon ami. And right now Jessie is happier than she has ever seen
her and I think that's what we all want. Right? However, the exhibition opens on
February 18th, the day of Andr� Breton's birth, will you be ready by then? �.

"The eighteen? I think that�".

"Wonderful," Dix said. �I can't tell you how much I enjoyed talking to you,
Parnell. Now I feel really close to you, brother. Can I call you "brother"? See you
on the eighteen. Hello".

"See you," Parnell said, putting down the phone. He removed the stuffed owl from
the pile, tossed it into a distant corner of the room, and replaced it with a box
of false teeth and celestial maps. From another box he pulled out a 1908 Luger
American Eagle, put the barrel to his temple and pulled the trigger. The rusty
mechanism made iron oxide trickle down the sleeve of his shirt and the trigger
locked. Parnell sighed and replaced the gun in the box.

Parnell hadn't thought much about Jessie since she left. Whenever he thought of
her, he ended up feeling dizzy and dazed. He would begin to formulate thoughts,
opinions on his sudden abandonment but, inevitably, they would get stuck in some
neuronal stagnation where he would no longer reach them. Constipation of the brain,
he thought. Jessie, you were the Guttalax of my soul. The mineral oil of my heart.
The plumbing aid of my ... fuck you ...

Rather than languishing in dull self-pity, he had become obsessed with his own
work, with the result that his largest, most elaborate and, arguably, most
successful piece was almost complete. Focusing on this, he resolved not to think
about Jessie now. There was really no time if he was going to finish the piece by
eighteen.

With his part-time job with the garbage truck (a revealing choice, one critic had
sarcastically commented), Parnell had scrambled to collect almost everything he
needed to complete the new piece, which still didn't have a title. . Truck
suspensions, punctured basketballs, a collection of broken sunglasses, lacquered
frogs, stuffed and mounted as if they were playing small musical instruments,
artificial legs. However, the piece still lacked the most important element.
Parnell fished out a two-day old copy of The New York Post from under the bed.
"PAGAN MOTHER GIVES HER LITTLE ONES ON FIRE," he read in the opening credits.
Scrolling through the ads, Parnell wondered what to look under for plutonium.

Eventually he had to adapt to uranium. And he didn't get it until sixteen�

Meanwhile Parnell had become very nervous.

He had almost skipped the ad for "Unskilled Workers" in the Recruiting section. He
found it in a small box at the bottom of the page tucked between much more
conspicuous ads for a military microbiology expert and a bouncer for a BDSM gay
haunt on Canal Street. The Yonkers Nuclear Power Facility was looking for people to
work in the "hottest" parts of the plant. Within thirty minutes, Parnell and
roughly a dozen illegal Mexican apple pickers would be exposed to the same amount
of radiation that ordinary office workers suffered in a month. It was still a way
to enter. And, Parnell noted, the controls in the hot parts of the plant were
rather sketchy. The beefy private cops spent most of their time firing sure shots
at the pigeons that they lured in the parking lot with piles of crumbled bread.

So no one noticed Parnell happily dragging the cart with the new uranium rod behind
a wall of cracked waste bins. Nobody paid any attention to him as he unscrewed the
lid of the lead container, pulled out the frame that housed the rod, and removed
what appeared to him as a huge vial of sky-blue amyl nitrite.

From the pocket of his radiation suit, Parnell pulled out the thermos and the
multi-purpose knife which he used vigorously to scrape off some scales from the
slightly fluorescent surface of the bar. When he thought he had enough of it,
Parnell put the lid back on the thermos, put the knife in his pocket, and freed the
bar by carefully putting the uranium back in its place.

At lunch that day Parnell ate alone, leisurely, slipping the thermos from his
protective suit into his Spider-Man breakfast basket. At five he took the company
bus to go home with the rest of his team. The guards made a mocking face and
shouted at them "Immigracion!"

Upon awakening Parnell found more hair on the pillow than usual. His gums were
bleeding and his joints ached as he brushed his teeth. He was happy that the
exhibition was opening the following day.

Three men covered in sweat were lowering a pink and green stuffed polar bear from
the back of a truck with discolored panels. Nearby, a well-placed woman wearing a
necklace made from an intrauterine coil stood with her arms crossed, the fingers of
her right hand barely resting on her lips. "Be careful please," he repeated, his
fingers muffling the words.

Parnell wedged himself behind the woman to enter the gallery. Inside he discovered
that the high ceiling of the room had been divided into a complex labyrinth of
sheets of plastic material about three meters high. The walls of the labyrinth were
decorated with complicated rhymes and puns whose aim was to guide the reader
towards the center of the room. Parnell had never been keen on puns, he placed
things like crosswords in the same category as the My Lai massacre and brain
cancer. It was lost almost immediately. For a moment he was seized by panic: a
sudden attack of claustrophobia that pushed the air out of his lungs. He thought of
Minotaurs and virgin sacrifices, of rats trained to perform sophisticated tricks
and then sold off to some government laboratory for dissection.

Eventually he found himself in an open area in the center of the labyrinth. Parnell
saw a small man in milky mirrored glasses in Saigon who angrily oversaw the
arrangement of a silver-tipped black leather rocking chair. Two women Parnell had
met at some inauguration or somewhere else were planting razor-blade roses in a
coppice of broken glass. A car hummed in a corner, disassembling and reassembling
itself endlessly into ever-changing shapes: now a seamless tetrahedron, now an
apple, now a part of a double ellipse, now a Louis XIV boudoir, and so on. Parnell
wandered among the exhibits in search of his space.

"You don't look very good," Dix told him, emerging from the corner of a Cadillac-
sized condom adorned with flashing Christmas tree lights. He held out a small vial
of white powder: �Take a sniff. It would do you a world of good �.
Parnell shook his head. "No thanks. I stayed up late, putting the finishing touches
on the piece �. He was about to ask where he could settle when his eyes fell on
her. "Hi, Jessie," he said.

From Dix's side, Jessie smiled at him. "Hi Parnell, how are you doing?"

He shrugged. "I would say well." Half of the face readily agreed to his
instructions to smile, while the other half stubbornly refused to get involved.
Rather than standing there looking like a completely deranged Parnell asked, "What
have you done to your eyes?"

Jessie brightened. "You like? Colored contact lenses. It was Dix's idea. '

"Brown is a color without charisma," Dix explained. He took Jessie's hand in his.
�I think we,� Dix said (he meant: Jessie), �will become real celebrities after this
show. Strong artistic valuation and big bucks beaucoup. One followed by zeros;
many, many zeros ".

Parnell smiled at them. He was starting to feel a little warm. "I'm happy for you.
Where can I settle down? �.

Dix pointed to a spot near something that looked like a washing machine about to
give birth to a very large and disgusting insect. Parnell nodded; Dix gave him a
"straight thumbs up" salute and left to confer with the refreshment staff who had
just arrived loaded with crates of wine and crab legs under ice. Jessie gave
Parnell a small wave of her hand and, before joining Dix, she hissed at him
something she couldn't understand.

Parnell had borrowed a forklift from Mister Lenti of Saigon and drove into the back
of a rented pickup truck equipped with a lift. He pulled the tarp off the large
mound on the floor and gently placed his device on the forklift; as he set it down,
the piece panted like a tuberculous buffalo. The artificial legs kicked the air
with small metallic clicks as she carried him into his space inside the gallery.
Parnell handed the forklift back to Mister Lenti of Saigon and was busy arranging
the piece so it got the right light when he heard Jessie's voice behind him. "I
like. What's your name?".

Parnell looked up. �It is still untitled. I thought I'd give it a name tonight. '

Jessie nodded, holding her hands together in front of her hips. �I brought some new
stuff up front. Have you seen the Dalai Lama's trousseau? It's mine. One hundred
and twenty objects found by chance. You choose any forty and you declare yourself
Dalai Lama. Instant lighting �.

"You spelled 'desperate' wrong," Parnell said calmly.

"What?".

�You were wrong to write 'desperate' in that note you left me�.

"Oh," Jessie said. He looked away. "I am sorry. Grammar has never been my forte �.

�It's not a question of grammar, it's spelling. Which is quite another thing. I
thought you could at least take the time to write me a correct letter of welcome. '

�A little louder, Parnell, I don't think they hear you in Jersey,� Jessie said. He
gestured to Dix who was watching them in the midst of a heap of emptied shells. �I
thought we were going to behave civilly. I thought we could be friends. '
�I'm behaving like a civilized person. I have not thrust any blunt and sharp
objects into anyone, it seems to me, �Parnell said in a sigh that could be heard
for a block. "Jessie, why are you with this fool?"

Jessie shook her head sadly. �I like Dix. He's a little over-anxious at times, but
he's very nice. And if you insist on talking like this, I don't see how we can
continue to be friends. "

Parnell's eyes widened innocently. "Talk how? I'm just trying to engage in some
frank and blatant prank about my recent rip-off, �he said.

Jessie gave him a blow, but Parnell jumped back and she struck a glass eye that
dangled from its construction by means of a coaxial wire. �Fuck you,� he heard
Jessie say as he turned to walk back toward Dix's office. He slammed the door hard
enough to remove a group of papier-m�ch� genitals from the ceiling. "I'm sorry,"
Parnell shouted. Dix came towards him, frowning.

�Problems, kemo sabe? Everything OK here? �.

"No problem," Parnell replied, draping his arm around Dix's shoulders. "Do you like
the piece? I had you in mind while I was working on it. '

Dix smiled as if Parnell had just offered him one of his own kidneys. "Well, I'm
damn flattered, old sport," he said.

Parnell took Dix's hand and squeezed it. He said, "Good! I must run. I have to go
pick up a dress I rented for the grand opening. However your suit is very
impressive, Dix, old-fashioned elegance. They are the twins. Always wear twins, I
say. You can't go wrong. Well, au revoir �.

Before Dix could say a word, Parnell was off to the back exit, into the alley,
throwing up everything he had eaten in his life. A foot patrol policeman walked up
the alley as Parnell shuddered to his feet. �I was just trying to impress a woman,
Officer. Instead, I think I got some pretty good radiation poisoning. Excuse me for
the disgust �. The policeman advised Parnell to go home and sleep on it. Parnell
thanked him and headed for his furnished room.

When he got home, however, he found the street closed to traffic and full of men
wearing what looked like long white pajamas with breakfast baskets over their
faces� a protective device similar to the overalls Parnell had worn at the station.
For a moment he thought that some new gang of kinky fetishists had moved nearby,
until he saw the Nuclear Regulatory Agency van. The men dressed in white were
combing the entire block with geyger counters.

Parnell turned the rental truck and fired it down an alley that opened onto First
Avenue. He picked up his tuxedo and, before heading to Long Island, bought some
pieces of welder's glass at a hardware store. From the presence of the men in the
white jumpsuits, it was evident that they had discovered his Yonkers scam. He knew
it wouldn't be long before most of the state police were on his heels. Parnell was
glad he had thought of keeping the radio transmitter hidden in the pickup truck.

In the northernmost part of Long Island there was a decaying but expensive area
facing the beach called "Saint Thomas." It consisted of a single, poorly
constructed wooden walkway, a 'Boucherie' rotisserie, a pharmacy, a Shell station
always open, a video game room and sixty restored harbor houses, freshly repainted
to mask more rotten wood per square meter than in the entire Amazon delta.

The owner of the area had lured the residents into that out-of-the-way stretch of
sand with the promise of a new suspension bridge that would directly connect their
community with the heart of Manhattan. When the city council rejected the bridge
project, the designer began building an airship landing field. Then he dropped that
too. Parnell's parents had often taken him to Saint Thomas as a child to visit his
father's alcoholic brother. The islanders, he recalled, had never forgiven the
designer or Manhattan for their isolation.

Parnell bought ten gallons of petrol at the Shell station and changed into a tuxedo
in the toilet. Then he left the pickup truck in front of the video game room and
hurried to the beach, carrying a small nylon suitcase with him.

Evening fell quickly, veiling the colors and contours of the beach until they
resembled a Yves Tanguy biomorphic landscape. Parnell set the suitcase on the sand,
opened it, and took out the cheap plastic alligator that activated the radio
transmitter. A police car passed slowly over the promenade. Parnell wondered idly
if it wasn't one of the patrol cars that had been following him since he left
Brooklyn. Parnell did not believe that policemen were protectors of the arts and
became nervous. Public officials, he mused, should have wide ranging skills,
especially when dealing with art. He made a mental note to write it to someone.

Parnell pulled the "on" switch (actually the opening ring of a ten-year-old
Budweiser can) with his fingers now dark and swollen. He thought of Jacques Rigaut,
a young surrealist who he said would commit suicide in ten years, and he went
around cutting off the buttons from the cops' jackets. Parnell thought of Andre
Breton exhorting the authorities to throw open the doors of asylums, of Dal�
declaring: "The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad."

Parnell's clock said 8.30, the reception must be in full swing now. He pushed a
button on the transmitter and a toy train rattled on ten centimeters of plastic
track. His nose hit the main switch. Parnell held his breath.

Nothing happened.

He kicked the transmitter, Something rattled inside, Manhattan continued madly

blazing with lights.

He had done so much to get the cover of Art in America, he thought.

"Parnell?"

He turned at the sound of the voice. "Jessie?" He came running clumsily on the
sand, waving at him. As soon as he reached him he felt her arms encircling him;
kissed his neck.

"I'm sorry about earlier," Parnell said.

She nodded. "Me too. You looked so sad there in the gallery. I really had to talk
to you. I followed you for miles. "

"Really?".

"Sure," Jessie said. Her smile turned to a confused expression. "Parnell, what the
hell are you doing here?"

"I give the name to the piece."

"Out here?"

Parnell raised his hand to Manhattan. "Remember, Breton once said that because it
is based on the irrational and the spontaneous, the real surrealist act can be
firing a rifle at the crowd, at random."

"My God, Parnell, you don't want to shoot anyone, do you?"

"No, of course not. What do you think, that he is crazy? '

Behind them a dozen NYPD cars, sirens and raging lights, were nailing. Figures in
dark uniforms pounced on them with their weapons drawn.

"Parnell, what the hell does that mean?" Jessie asked.

Parnell sighed. "The critics are here," he said. He kicked the transmitter again
and remembered that he had forgotten to lower the "safety". He smacked her with the
toe of his shoe.

Police surrounded the performers as, a few miles to the north, coupled explosive
warheads detonated, forming fission material at enough speed to cause a chain
reaction. Manhattan disappeared silently like a burned out two-ton light bulb.

From the shores of Long Island it seemed that a second sun had suddenly appeared in
the east. Some policemen lowered their rifles, others cursed and shielded their
eyes from the gradually widening mushroom cloud. Parnell happily watched it all
through a piece of soldering glass; he handed another to Jessie.

"It's great," she said.

�Thanks, I ...�.

The sound of the explosion reached them, dragging his words away.

After about a second, a gust of wind swept over them like a stonecutter on a train,
sending artists, police, coastal birds and curious locals upside down along the
clean golden sand.

Parnell stood there, half buried in the sand. Jessie was the first to get up; the
policemen stunned by the explosion followed one after the other. Down along the
promenade, the well-dressed inhabitants of Saint Thomas were gathering to point and
stare in disbelief at the scene. Many, Parnell noted, were pointing to him. In the
fading light he couldn't see their faces, so he couldn't be sure they were
preparing to hang him.

As soon as she got up from the sand, Jessie started clapping. Someone at the back
of the crowd joined in, and so did a dazed policeman. Then another. Immediately the
whole beach reverberated with the sound of tumultuous applause. It rang in
Parnell's ears, the sound wave pushing him forward, cutting down all other noises.
He smiled at Jessie.

As the police drove him to a steering wheel car, he pretended and danced in the
crowd like a boxer who had just won the world title. The men shook his hand, the
women leaned over to kiss him.

Someone shouted: "Speech!" Parnell turned and raised his hands above his head.
Silence fell on the crowd. "I'll call him," Parnell announced, pointing to the
smoldering remains to the north, "Goodbye Houston Street."

The crowd went mad.

No wonder Parnell's trial was held out of state in Youngstown, Ohio. By that time
most of his hair and teeth had fallen out. With the help of Jessie's testimony and
her pathetic appearance, Parnell did not receive the death penalty. However, he was
sentenced to 900,000 consecutive life sentences, a number that roughly corresponded
to the population of Manhattan at the time of the explosion.

A month after he entered a special lead-shielded cell in Sing Sing, upstate New
York, a package arrived for Parnell. His fingers were so bloody swollen it was hard
for him to open it. Inside was a note from Jessie. He was about to leave to
inaugurate his first exhibition in a very important gallery in London. He attached
a copy of "Art in America" with his photo on the cover. She had become a true
celebrity.

At the bottom of the package, Parnell found a New York State Art Commission plate
plate. It said: �HOUSTON STREET GOODBYE Award - Collective Fun-de-Si�cle 1987 -
Second place�.

He never managed to find out who took the top prize.

Michael Blumlein

James G. Ballard's 1970 anthology, The Atrocity Exhibition, mixes various types of
provocation in a single work. Against the all-American beatification of John
Kennedy, the Dallas attack becomes the chronicle of a car race; Reagan, the angora
governor of California, is seen as a collection of pieces, human and otherwise.
Then there are the names of American myths and tragedies, Marilyn Monroe, the
assassins of America and Vietnam, all gathered and confused in a single narrative
flow, as if they were icons of a fragmentary and magmatic communication that
confuses everything in itself, in appearance as in a television schedule, but with
such editing and writing that, suddenly, they enlighten us on the general absurdity
of the scene that the author has constructed with the individual "materials".

One of the characteristics of cyberpunk writing is precisely to "overload" the

lexicon, to build the page with a linguistic mixture of different materials, as if
the word had to become transparent to let us see the facts and bodies that the
writer tries to tell. And with due merit, therefore, the English Ballard can be
considered among the inspirers of cyberpunk, capable as he is of surprising us
readers by confronting us with a development of the situation that is always
different from what we would expect, making us discover not "the" reality like
this. how it presents itself, but always different levels of reality, even through
images and situations, invented or the result of narrative montage, which may
appear at first sight to be of an overwhelming hardness, bordering on cruelty.

Michael Blumlein, doctor, born in 1948 in the United States, made his debut in 1984
in the British magazine �Interzone� with a story of clear Ballardian ancestry:
Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: a Case Report. Once again poor Reagan is
involved, whose body a group of doctors empty organs, without anesthesia, for both
revenge and ... humanitarian purposes. But what do you want: more than feelings,
Blumlein's narrative merits are intensity and coldness (surgical ...), as
demonstrated by the personal anthology The Brain of Rats of 1989. Since then
Blumlein has written only two novels, one of a science fiction environment, The
Movement of Mountains, 1987, and the very recent horror X, Y, from 1993.

Despite the small production and the confidentiality of the character, Blumlein is
unanimously recognized by the cyberpunks of the first hour (Sterling and Rucker in
the lead) as a ruthless and radical interpreter of the themes of the body in the
electronic age, in his obsessive and controlled prose. .

Original title: Drown Yourself (from �Mississippi Review� no. 47 / 48.1988).

Translation by Daniele Brolli.

Foggy lives

Johnny Jukes knew the woman was an android. She was standing on the edge of the
dance floor, outside the pit, cold and detached. He had sandy hair, almost blond
but not quite, of a severe cut.

On one side they came down smoothly, leveled at the point where her neck melted
into her shoulders, half covering her eye. On the other, it had the high shade,
almost up to the skull. There was visible the scalp, the wrinkles of the skin, the
delicate blue of the veins. He had highlighted the veins with a tattoo. It looked
like a stream running down a thousand kilometers upstream. Liquid music. The band
improvised a ride and threw themselves headlong into it.

Johnny Jukes' clinical eye saw that she was not human.

She was leaning against the wall, pinned to the corner. His eyes were dull, fixed
without trembling on the thronged crowd. The long fingers of one hand clinging to a
dark bottle, which he held at his side. When he brought it to his lips to pour the
liquid into his mouth, it was as if he were putting oil in a car. His eyes didn't
move, he didn't swallow. Once he was done, he wiped his mouth with the back of his
hand. Her lips were blue, the same color as the veins on her scalp.

Cuddling a bottle on the balcony, Johnny Jukes looked at it and knew. It was all
rough edges. She stood upright against the wall, like a sword sheath. It was not
flawless. Her clothes fit her like everything else. They were dark, except for the
boots, which were red. A dart of love. A shrill solo blew a dozen dancing people
out of their minds.

Johnny Jukes watched and knew. He knew it had to be his. She was the most beautiful
woman he had ever seen.

The scene was something like this. Johnny Jukes, a fair-skinned, beardless young
man sitting alone at a table in the Deaf Club. He drank a bottle just to show. He
smoked, if he had to, just to show. He had never made love. He had never cared,
until that night.

The blood had gone to his head. Like music, suddenly, like a hand that squeezes
your heart. No past, no choice, just the hand that squeezes you until you give in.
You run out of breath, you run out of peace until you give in. As if you saw Noah
and the Ark, and below them the clouded, angry, bottomless sea, and you gave in and
chose the sea. And in the sea you drown us. That is love.

Johnny Jukes pushed back his chair and stood up. He drank the last few fingers of
torticollis, in the imitation of a beefy motorcyclist. He adjusted his jacket,
pulled up the zipper. Then he changed his mind and left it half open. He took the
black glasses from a shoulder pocket and put them on. He saw what was enough. If he
got out of there in the right way, people would step aside.
Behind him was the bar on the second level. There was another one upstairs and
another one downstairs. The three of them were crowded, sucking people in like
black holes. The sweet smell of metabolized alcohol gushed from his mouths, mixed
in the air with the thick smoke. Below was the swollen hope of drugs, the smell of
them calmly wafting from sweaty pores. People screamed at close range as bodies
rubbed on all sides. Some kissed with their mouths wide open, their tongues thick
and fleshy, without touching their lips. The music cut through the steel, and those
who entered smothered in stiff smiles. Nobody noticed Johnny Jukes the Hard one.

He pushed and apologized, on his way through the crowd. When a space opened up,
even one as tight as a knife blade, because maybe there were two people blowing
their breath out at the same time, he would jump in between. He made his way, using
his shoulders, and then waited until the crowd pulled back and the next crack
appeared. In this way he reached the stairs.

He couldn't see them. They were submerged in a dense cluster of human organs.
Bodies were thrown to the top, some being pushed up, some thrown away. A man in a
drenched scarlet suit landed near Johnny Jukes' feet, rolled around clinging
tightly to him, grimaced in fright and relief. Johnny adjusted his leather trousers
and stepped over him. He was young and confident. The human insect complained; her
fingers pushed him down as they made room. The other landed on the floor on his
back, getting up quickly before anyone came upon him. He scanned the room, looking
for the woman. She hadn't moved. He toyed with the zip, now close enough to feel
excited. Tough Johnny, aka the Bluffer, Snake Tongue, the Great Liar, joked with
himself about the limits of his own sincerity. It was tough: the boy had never done
it before, never. Not two or three or four times: in no way and in no form. It was
as clean as deep space.

The bassist worked on the subsounds, freeing the sphincters and distorting circuits
at the Deaf Club.

Johnny Jukes rearranged himself and went out, a wave of desire pulling him by the
chest like a magnet. He bumped into simpletons, pimple-pocked boys and girls, masks
concealing official lunches, and biscuit-covered tables for breakfast. He pushed
his way through the crowd, disinterested, but the battle had shaken him. His way of
doing things was known at the Club, starting with the single table. He enjoyed that
scene of boys and girls with his eyes and ears. Violence was a first-class
stimulus.

He walked over to the woman at the wall, exhibited his body two inches from her
face.

"One plus one equals one," he said.

She pulled the draped cover away from her snake eyes. "Get out of my way, friend."

"My name is Johnny Jukes," he said. �I am here in front of you. Give me a little
listening �.

�Look close, man. The terminal is disconnected �.

"My name is Johnny Jukes," he repeated stupidly, annihilated by her harshness.

�It's a plea. No kidding".

Her chest throbbed (could you feel pain in the Deaf Club?). The blue lips turned
up. �No foreclosure whatsoever, man. If you are able to raise the dead ... �.

Jukes smiled. He felt as fragile as a crystal vase, nothing more. Since she didn't
want to turn her head, he backed straight back, squeezing the crowd behind him. He
pulled down the zipper of his jacket, and when she gave him a smile, he pulled it
down completely. The flaps moved aside, revealing an ice-smooth chest and belly.
Above the stage the band went to the head. The fire raged, and beasts flew from the
amplifiers. Johnny Jukes began to dance.

He was swift but not agile, precise but lacking in grace. He kept the angles sharp
and the rhythm carefully eccentric. The girl watched, impressed and amused. He felt
something for this boy, but his senses were weakened by the bottle and the sensory
dermis on his skin. He couldn't get used to that feeling. He relaxed and let things
go on on their own. The Deaf Club that made her life easy.

Johnny Jukes continued to move, spasms and crude geometries. His head lurched, and
his glasses flew off. He broke them under his heels, making the woman laugh. She
emptied the bottle and threw it to the ground, kicking it at him with the
reinforced toe of a boot. He easily blocked the bottle by planting it on the shoe
and smashed the glass to the ground. He looked up hopefully, she was laughing. He
continued to dance.

Here's what was going through his head. Bright birds flapping their wings, fish
fins hitting the keels of boats. The arc resistance of a welder while melting
metal. He was enveloped in his own throbbing warmth. In the deaf and unconscious
lie of passion. He would expose himself for virginal love and a handful of meat. He
would tear down the temple pillars to taste this woman. For its meat. And the
crimson sea, the noisy drunken sea, asked: what meat are you talking about? After
all, she was an android.

Then Johnny Jukes really calmed down. He became curious. How would they do it?
Would it turn him on? Was he able to do it? He knew nothing about sex, and he was
afraid he was being clumsy. Would it have meant anything? What did it take to
satisfy an android?

He walked over to her, attentive to her expression, immersing himself in her

perfume. Inside her were drugs, along with fast little molecules of sexual arousal.
His nostrils flared when he breathed.

"Did you look at me?" Johnny asked formally.

"Yes," she said, moving her empty hand, touching his chest with her finger. "I did
it inch by inch."

Johnny grinned like an idiot, causing sensations to explode that gave him momentary
paralysis. He wanted to grab it but couldn't make the right connection. He opened
his mouth and stuck his tongue out as he had seen others do. She narrowed her eyes
and withdrew her hand. It was crossed by a memory.

"Pull it in, man," he said coldly.

He closed it obediently and scanned her face nervously. "Johnny Jukes, my name is
Johnny Jukes," he said, drawing back.

"Yes," she said, a little softened. "I don't get people in the face, Jukes."

"Excuse me," he said, wishing he had to say it. But she didn't seem to notice. With
one finger he stroked the blue lines on the bare side of his head.

"I know this scene," she said thoughtfully.

"It's the first time," Johnny protested.

"What is it?" She replied. He got into it, took the game into consideration. It had
happened the same way again, she was sure of it. Some guy had done it on the floor,
and they had gone into the bin for the rest. But she couldn't remember the rest and
had a feeling that maybe it wasn't there either. A taste of danger entangled her.
It was decided.

"Operational," she said, turning away. "Go ahead and count down."

She forced her way through the crowd to the bar on that floor, passed onto some
guy's back, and threw coins at the bartender. She reached out and grabbed a couple
of open bottles, then slipped away, using her hips to slip out.

Johnny followed her to an empty back table.

"Do you take a bath, Jukes?" She asked, having emptied half of the bottle down her
throat. He shook his head.

"Me neighter. I came up with this theory, that one day we will all end up drowning.
When the fire has already destroyed us. We started in the water and that's where we
will end up. It is a wise thing �.

In the other room the band beat seven ninths, and the bottles clattered on the
table. I'm drowning already, Johnny thought.

"You are the most beautiful person I've ever seen," he told her.

She laughed and threw herself back in her chair. "You insist, eh Jukes?"

"I can not stop thinking about you. From the first moment I saw you �.

"Birthmark isn't that rare."

He shook his head. "It's love".

She raised her eyebrows. "Let's get it inside, then."

From one boot, she slipped out a plastic flap with some colored plates glued to it.
He pulled one off and stuffed it into his mouth against a gum. He took another and
offered it to Johnny on the tip of his finger. He took it and did the same.

"I have my own theory about love," she said, as her body began to float away from
her like a river. She grabbed her breasts to keep her nipples from squirting. �It's
part of the package. Same as for candy. Except there are no labels, so when you go
to a store you don't really know what you're getting. They do everything in a
department store under the sea. They pack it in the dark. It must be dark because
the light destroys it. Light is like the death ray, for love. Do you follow me,
Jukes? '

"I must have you," he said. "I've never felt like this before."

�Last night, Johnny dear. Only then you were wearing glasses. I couldn't see your
eyes. '

"No," he said, shocked and confused. "I'm not one of those."

"All of them are one of those," she said, finishing the bottle.

"Only if provoked." She looked at him.

�What would you do if I told you I don't, Jukes? I'm not worrying about dude or
caio. "

"I understand," he said quietly. Then it became urgent again. "It does not matter.
Really. I don't care what you are. '

She glanced at him, then laughed. �You studied me well, huh, Jukes? You analyzed me
thoroughly, studied with your hand on the trigger. You build your own fantasies and
think that's all there is. ' She leaned over the table, grabbed him wildly by the
jacket. �I told you, man, there's no way. There are entire fortunes in the ocean
and it is deep. Do you know how deep the ocean can be? '

Johnny nodded to his face with frightened eyes. He felt innocent and floated above
his head. She saw him and released her grip. He pulled back.

"Forgive me," she said. "It's all such a rupture." Then she smiled and touched his
face with a finger. "You're sweet. Have another drink with me, and we'll take a
ride. '

He nodded numbly and offered her his bottle still intact. Maybe he could return to
the charge. She drained her gut, then got off the stool and strode into the dark
hall at the back of the room. His bearing was surprisingly steady. Johnny Jukes
followed her like a duckling as her schedule began to swell with hints of manhood.

The small entrance was interrupted by three doors, none of which were marked. Along
the opposite wall, those who needed a quick sweep of their private parts were
agitated. They were a group of heartbroken, bug-eyed, sweaty faces. All flickering.
All those who had forgotten to take the pills, the antidiuretic pills that the
organization dispensed at the door to prevent customers from pissing, were covered
in sweat. A bloated tranny who couldn't wait lowered her skirt and emptied into a
corner.

Johnny Jukes' dream machine appeared on the scene like a shark in shallow water. He
knocked once on a door, waited five seconds, then slammed it hard with the flat of
his forearm. The inconsistent bolt latch snapped off and the door swung open.
Another five seconds and she was hauling out a skinhead with a red face and
underpants at the knees.

"And stop jerking off!" She said in disgust, pulling the astonished Johnny in by
the collar. He slammed the door shut and blocked it using the bumper as a wedge. As
an added precaution he wedged the waste bin between the edge of the sink and the
door handle. Then he turned to his man.

"Good," he said, his body starting to fill the space. "Good good good".

Johnny stared at her hungrily. He wasn't sure what to do. He had thought of tearing
off her clothes but was afraid of making her angry. He had never gone this far
before. The phrases overheard by the boys at the Club didn't help. He was dazed,
and his body was turning to stone.

The woman, on the other hand, is not. The sudden action had stimulated her, and she
wanted something more. His head was miles away, and his body felt like the hood of
a young planet. He absently approached the object of his desires and tore off his
jacket. With her quivering fingertips she traced his skin from neck to navel. He
was naked to the bone.

When her hand touched his belly, Jukes grabbed her wrist, nearly breaking her
joint. Through the pain the woman smiled confident in her power. He broke free from
his grip, not easily, and searched for the lacing on the front of his trousers. He
slammed her to the ground once, twice, three times. He felt alive.

He lifted her by the elbows and set her on the sink. On the back wall was a
shattered mirror with a speaker on it with a cable connected to the Club's PA
system. Indifferent to the pieces of himself on the wall, Jukes tiptoed to the
speaker. He turned the regulator to maximum, and suddenly the room spoke up. The
band had come to the gates of the plague. Harmony flowed through the capillaries of
the Deaf bassist, bursting into dots of blood on the skin. Higher up, a solo line
had entered into sync with the nerve tissues, causing the muscles to contract
uncontrollably. Johnny Jukes felt a vibration like metal fusion. He faced the
woman, and with trembling fingers began to tear off her clothes.

She looked at him, and the intensity of that boyish face excited her mind. As he
took her heavy breasts in his hands, one in each hand, his voice dropping to a
whisper, she began to remember. When he whispered fearfully to her, "They seem so
real, so full of life," everything returned. Through the dermal sensors, the
partitions, the bottles, she remembered the previous night. It struck her at first,
looking funny, then a little sad. She worried that she had forgotten such a thing.

She pushed his hands away and got out of the sink. She took a deep breath to speak,
but Jukes was already on her knees taking off her panties. With a sudden sag, they
leapt off her hips and fell to her ankles. He was panting, and she stood naked in
front of him. Drops of sweat moistened her pubic hair, and an unmistakable human
smell filled the air. Jukes was staring into space; in the grip of illusion.

The woman smiled at him, as kindly as she could. She touched him and gently raised
him. Quickly, before he could stop her, she undid his trousers and pulled them
down. The front leg joint was smooth and free of lint. It looked like the hollow of
an elbow. Or, she thought, the sexless tissue between her fingers.

Johnny Jukes didn't look down. Shaken now, he turned away from the body of the most
beautiful woman he had ever seen. His eyes met the mirror, reflecting a hundred
bits of android, a hundred clouded truths. His mind had it all clear. At that
moment the band switched to a simple, light and simple piece. A single line of
merciless penetration. He was first grade, he smelled of radio disturbances, dead
stations and garish dreams. Jukes was annihilated. Stripped by the music. Or from
bursts of twisted truth. Cause and effect were hard to imagine at the Deaf Club.

The woman sighed and masturbated absently, trying to relive the situation. It was
hopeless. The painting was worn, and she couldn't imagine another one. Jukes, the
boy, was still. Someone was punching the door.

She pulled up her pants and pulled on her shirt. When he was done, he picked up his
jacket from the floor and busied himself with tucking his arms up his sleeves. The
whole time he remained motionless, his face jammed like a parachute stuck in
midair. She fastened her trousers and zipped up her jacket, then went back one last
time to get the boy back on his feet. He was pathetic in his paralysis, almost
lovable. She felt confused, angry, scared of what she wanted. It was scary to think
what he could do for a car.

"Light is the death ray for love," she said, listening to the dying words. �Keep it
in mind, Jukes. Print it on fire �.

He threw the garbage can on the floor and kicked the door, then pushed Johnny out.
A pale boy rushed in and slammed the door. In the hall the band had remade
underneath. The party was on fire and overheated. Johnny Jukes began to revive.

She quickly found a small table and led him to sit down. She wanted a bottle to put
in his hand for appearances, but when his eyes began to wander in unison, she left.
He stopped at the edge of the floor, near the door, and looked back. He was
exploring the room with determination, which made her shiver. She took a bottle
from someone's hands and threw down the gut twist. Then he threw himself into the
anthill and went out.

Johnny Jukes sat at the table, lost in his weakness, but he was finding his way
quickly. The band was compact in his head. The circuits were settling back into
place, and from deep within the torment of love began to rekindle.

He looked around. The boy felt that this would be his night.

Misha

In July 1989, writing in "SF Eye", John Shirley hypothesized new scenarios for what
until then had been called cyberpunk. His article Beyond Cyberpunk. The New SF
Underground (Beyond cyberpunk. The new underground science fiction) opens with an
image as evocative as it is atrocious, the scene of the massacre of Jonestown,
while the followers of Jim Jones are drinking Kool-Aid mixed with poison. Jones has
ordered the children to be given it too, and dying children can be heard crying on
the tape. At that moment Jones's voice scolds the parents and urges them to keep
the children calm. Shirley in her article instead wants to urge cyberpunk writers
to do the opposite: because, she suggests, being quiet and quiet means becoming
extinct.

Having given space to the identity of those who, in contact with the potential of
telematics, recognize themselves in free access to communication and knowledge
crammed into networks and databases, has quickly made cyberpunk pass from frontier
literature to language in able to mark an important date in the history of
communication. From another point of view, the dominant culture quickly absorbed
the terminology, places and modalities of cyberpunk thinking, even as it became a
movement emancipated from fiction. In the United States, the existence of hackers,
the so-called computer pirates, who oppose the possession of information as power,
appears to be programmatically necessary for the large communication companies and
military organizations. With cyber traps, companies lure hackers and test their
abilities. Then, they either use them as a test for their cyber defense
countermeasures or pursue them legally, until they convince them, to avoid
detention, to get hired in their companies, turning them into the best IT
specialist on the market.

It is therefore entirely secondary that what was considered cyberpunk literature in

the 1980s has now become, for most of its production, pulp: mass consumer genre
literature. If the label "Cyberpunk" is also dominating today on the covers of
books of all kinds, this happens because we know very well that this word has
become a stable reminder of a reality well known by readers. The reality of the
advent of the informatic civilization which is revolutionizing the methods and
times of work, and which is becoming more and more widespread in our lives.

And once again, the detachment from the advanced tools of commercialization and
reproduction of the hierarchies of power takes place through literature, or rather
through the emergence of a "post-avant-garde", an avant-garde once again capable of
entering the scene after all the historical avant-gardes have exhausted their
cycle. The Science Fiction Underground that Shirley talks about is a movement of
historical components of cyberpunk (Gibson, Sterling, Rucker, Laidlaw, Kadrey, Di
Filippo ...) together with American neosituationists (the Hakim Bey, alias Peter
Lamborn Wilson, of Temporary Autonomous Zone ; the Pynchonian Robert Anton Wilson
of the Illuminati saga; the Ivan Stang of the SubGenius idiot religion ...) and of
new writers who have faith in the possibilities of writing.

Small independent publishers and limited circulation magazines are the bridgeheads
of Science Fiction Underground. Among the most representative characters of this
wave is Misha. Married to avant-garde composer Michael Chocholak, she is a software
specialist. It is improper to define Misha's works as tales: in an apparently
narrative fabric, free lexical associations, specialized words, digressions, words
that mend only phonetically the broken sentence in the sense, Japaneseisms are
grafted ... "Deconstruction of meaning" to the stories of William Burroughs, but
only in appearance. Misha's work, read in the original, has a musical sound, a
fluidity that reconstructs in the background, at a non-immediate level, the
indecipherable path of a story.

Original title: Prayers of Steel (from Prayers of Steel, personal anthology, 1988).

Translation by Daniele Brolli.

Steel prayers

for Michael Chocholak

"There was a small area in Tommy where he could still feel close to God."

Ferret

It is a world of living metal. Silicon and cobalt fibers stretch a web of shiny
threads across her face and hands. He stands on the suspension bridge next to Gaia.
The winds between the cables admonish in the form of a steel cathedral sonata.

He has no one near. A river of chemicals, scents and fish with strange metallic
coatings flows beneath him. Ripples of molten metal trap the setting sun in oily
copper peaks.

He hides his hands in the kimono. A large metallic insect snaps at him, spreads its
tinfoil wings and flies into the yellow. His latest orders fill his pocket.

As he walks among the shards of the city, metallic clangs assail him. Dry hits of
wiring harnesses collapse against the balustrades. The brass wind piles up the
night in mounds around him. Sodium light cones carve black. Hordes of plastic and
paper swirl around. Kneels. He puts his forehead covered by a cataract on the
asphalt. Kiss the intersection of the streets. The sound of the papal iron on the
waste bin brings him back to himself.

He hears a beetle strolling along the rusty edge. His hearing is enhanced. His eyes
find the hair on his paw. His vision is enhanced. His strength is his eyes are his
ears are his voice and his mind is his empowered world.

Pull down the protection chain. The press to make them icons. The bent stakes ring
like bells against the cable. The ancient drawings hung over the concrete; flashes
of broken glass reflect his frayed eyes.

A rusty hook tries to reach the latch. He stops sleepwalking. Inside the empty
chemical tank, flakes of rust fall on his face and hands. He sits next to a
phosphor lamp. Light up your pink sternum, pour the molten metal into a jar and
dump it into your own torn lips.

Collects a rosary of batteries. Black cats leap through red cylinders. Pet the
kittens. He connects them to their leash-cables and ties the leashes to his belt of
chains. Its furious sparks slam against the walls of the tank.

Sing cries laugh curses. The body is empowered. His scary mask is wired. Its
monitors rotate. Gray static settles on his skin. The hollow howls the holy waters.
Raise the psalms. The thorns rain. The broken knife tolls, the castanets of the gun
barrel respond to its hammered wall. Tommy strengthens himself. Raise the song. Its
x-ray, infrared.

Tears fall between rust dunes. He kneels in the red. He torments the medals.
Insects cocooned in staple-legged bullets flit across the surface. He frees them in
the bronze of the city. They are teeming with curiosity. LED eyes tick beyond. The
batteries drag him behind their leashes.

The sulphurous wind and acid rain envelop him. It is indebted to the city's
scheduling system. The father's city designed it. Its supports fall plumb; collects
cobalt rods. The stone smashes the scissors, the bureaucracy covers the stone. It
has been rebuilt.

Its metal mesh looks like an oilcloth shroud, playing it keeps away from the
radiant skies. Relapse of cloud halos. He stands near the Cathedral of San Matteo
waiting for his mask. His priestly robes flutter. The stains on the glass rattle.
The bell rings three times.

Puppets of worship rise in the red arches. He passes the plate of offerings. The
altar boy swings his neck in the sacristy. Bells ring. The hosts bow. The wax runs.
The priest at the baptismal font absolves his stainless soul. The confessional
amplifies its blessing. The congregation groans. The glass shatters. The chalice
makes Christ's blood drip on the altar.

Oil falling on the smoothed aisle. Kneeling puppets dancing. The reeds sigh.
Tommy's organ pumps blood from the crucifix into his burning heart. Silver coins
leap violently across the floor. A whipping thread snaps, the red curtain is torn.
Fury turns dust into fire.

The puppets raise prayers of steel.

James P. Blaylock

In the essay Terminal Identity (The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction),
critic Scott Bukatman argues that the advent of any new revolutionary technology
generates a moment of cultural crisis, and at the same time arouses terror and
euphoria in equal measure. The steam engine in 1848; electric power and the
internal combustion engine at the end of the nineteenth century; and from 1940
onwards the development of nuclear and electronic technologies� Each of these
revolutions brought with them enormous cultural changes, new ways of seeing the
world.

As far as the world we live in is concerned, the so-called "postmodern" culture

would then be nothing more than the specific culture of the crisis era that
followed the discovery of electronic technologies. In this sense, therefore, we all
belong to the postmodern era, and cyberpunk is also inserted, in its own way, with
a further click or turn of the screw, into this "tradition", of which it can be
considered the heir, or at least one of the heirs.

After all, each is destined to be a child of his time. With the four-handed novel
The Difference Engine, 1990 (in Italian, The Reality Machine), Gibson & Sterling
analyzed how, even by changing the factors, the state of crisis of a culture
remains an inalienable consequence of the underlying technological trends. proper
of that era (the hypothesis of the novel was the invention of the computer in
Victorian England, in the period that saw the dominance of the technology of the
steam engine).

The narrative envelope of that novel was indebted to a current, parallel to

cyberpunk (distant, as much as specular), which, in a sort of fantastic
revisionism, has specialized in rewriting the past (that of the Victorian era but
also the more recent one). , as in the story that follows), backdating it: the so-
called steampunk (where steam stands for steam). The backdating or time lag of a
technological discovery in the past; the future in a d�co key; the manipulation of
past events seen through the eyes of historical protagonists (Lord Byron is the
character who fascinates steampunk writers the most); the esoteric fusion of magic
and technology; the discreet emergence in the present of elements that according to
our knowledge do not belong to our era and that in their appearance make it
fantastic yet real� All these modalities, individually or combined in a single
narrative fabric, are steampunk.

Although in some ways Philip Jos� Farmer can be considered a precursor of this
literary current, James P. Blaylock, born in 1950 and living in Orange, California,
is, together with Tim Powers, one of the leading exponents of this non-formalized
movement. In The Digging Leviathan faced the myth of the hollow earth sinking
beneath Los Angeles, in Homunculus he revisited Dickensian London, populating it
with mad scientists with dangerous theories about life. The recent Lord Kelvin's
Machine also takes off in the Victorian setting. But Blaylock has now published a
dozen novels, variously fantastic and esoteric, some of which are more fantasy than
steampunk, all tempered by a concentric and unsettling writing, which subtly
pervades the reader to the point of taking him out of his daily certainties.

The friendship that united Blaylock with Philip K. Dick (who had a cenacle attended
by three very young Californian writers destined for a great future) is revealing:
Blaylock and Powers, in fact, and that KW Jeter who is perhaps the closest to the
footsteps of maestro), from which everything always seems to descend in
contemporary science fiction "emancipated" from the cages of the literary genre. In
steampunk, gnosis, that is the desire for general and limitless knowledge, is
perceived as veiled by a curtain of metaphysical fog; in cyberpunk, on the other
hand, gnosis can be traced to the theme of access to the network of electronic
knowledge. The difference between the two movements is that the first chooses a
metaphorical terrain, the second a hyperreal one. However, the desire for unlimited
knowledge is the same.

Original title: Paper Dragons (from the collective anthology Imaginary Lands,
edited by R. McKinley, 1985).

Translation by Daniele Brolli and Danilo Santoni.

Paper dragons

It is said that extraordinary things have happened in this world, and that some
still happen. Although, in my opinion, half are lies. But sometimes it fails to
prove it. The sky on the north coast has been flat gray for weeks. Thick clouds
suspended like carded wool no more than fifteen meters above the ground, impaled on
the treetops: on the sequoias, alders and firs. The air is heavy with the mist that
settles in the harbor and in the open sea, drifting from one end of the jetty to
the breakwater, with both of them fading into the gray, and there is no longer an
iota of difference. between the sky and the ocean. And when the tide goes out, and
the cliffs rushing away to the tip come out of the mist, covered with brown water
bladders and rotted seaweed leaves, pink seaweed lace, and slimy ribbons of sea
lettuce and of eel grass, it is easy to imagine that the dark mass of fish lying in
the deep-water gardens pushes towards the pale green of the shallow water, to feed
at dawn.

There is, of course, the likelihood that winged things, or, if you prefer, the
counterparts of that marine fauna, dwell in dens in the clouds; that in the valleys
and caves of the low and heavy skies live unexpected beasts. Sometimes I think that
if a man could unannounced the veil of cloud that darkens the skies, pulling it
away in an instant, he would surprise a world of oddities up there: balloon-shaped
things with little wings suspended like the fins of puffers. , and thorny, leathery
creatures, nothing but bones and teeth, and with beaks half the length of their
ribbed bodies.

Some nights I was sure I heard them, when clouds hung from the treetops and sirens
wailed over the headland, and water dripped from the needles of the fir trees
beyond the window on the tin roof of Filby's garage. I heard muffled screeching
sounds and the airy flapping of distant wings. On one of those nights, as I was
walking on the cliff, the clouds parted for a moment and a sprinkle of stars, like
a swirling carnival, shone in the depths until, like a slowly drawn curtain, the
clouds gathered together. one on top of the other and they are no longer divided.
I'm sure I caught a glimpse of something (a shadow, the promise of a shadow)
obscuring the stars. The next morning the crab business began.

I woke up in the morning, to the sound of Filby hammering something in the garage.
I think it was claws, copper claws. Not that it made much difference. I wake up. I
can't fall asleep until about an hour before sunrise. There is a certain bird, God
only knows what breed, that sings until the end of the night and hushes just as the
sun rises. Don't ask me why. Anyway there was Filby making a noise just before
noon. I opened my left eye and there, on the pillow, I saw a blood-red hermit crab,
with its eyes on top of its antennae, watching me as if proud of itself, waving its
claws. I jumped up. There was another one crawling into my shoe and two others
intent on stealing my pocket watch, dragging it away in the scabbard towards the
bedroom door.

The window was open and the screen was torn open. The beasts clambered over the
pile of wood, then hoisted themselves over the window and rummaged through my
belongings while I slept. I threw them out, but in the evening there were even
more, dozens of them, bent under the weight of the shells, crawling home in search
of my pocket watch.

It was a migration. Once every hundred years, Dr. Jensen tells me, every hermit
crab in creation comes the yearning for a pilgrimage and struggles for the shore.
Jensen had camped on the beach in the cove to study those creatures. They all
headed south like migratory birds. At the weekend there was an exhausting mass of
them marching, millions, according to Jensen. But they left my house alone. They
decreased with the waning of the following week. They seemed to be advancing in
dribs and drabs from deeper waters and were getting bigger and bigger: the size of
a man's fist, at first, then of the head, finally a giant hermit crab, as big as a
pig, chased Jensen to the lower branches of an oak. . On Friday there were only two
crabs left, both bigger than a car. Jensen went home mumbling and drank until he
was drunk. He was there again on Saturday anyway, and he has to be credited for
that. But nothing appeared. He suspects that somewhere along the coast, in the deep
water of a chasm, two hundred meters or more beyond the last faded colors, there is
a monumental beast, blind and shriveled by unbelievable pressures, wearing a coat
of shell, which sooner or later he will find his way to shore.

At night, I sometimes hear occasional echoes of distant cackles, just a hazy, muted
impression. I stare at the open pages of a book, while the light from the hearth is
reflected in the cut crystal of my glass. There are various noises outside in the
misty night, including the occasional clack-clack-clack of what might be Jensen's
impossible crab crawling up and casting a shadow on the lighted porch to ask for my
pocket watch. It was the night after the appearance of the pig-sized crab that he
walked one into Filby's garage (apparently by cracking the door) and made a big
mess with his dragon. I know what you are thinking. I also thought it was a lie.
But things have since set in a way that makes me change my mind. Without a doubt he
knew Augustus Silver. Indeed, Filby was an acolyte; Silver his teacher. But the
dragon business, they tell me, is not so much a matter of mechanics. It is a
problem of perspective. For Filby it was the downfall.

There was a gypsy who drove by last year. He couldn't speak. For a dollar he could
do the most amazing things. As soon as he arrived, he tore his tongue out and threw
it into the street. Then he danced on it and stuffed it in his mouth, like new. He
took out the entrails (meters and meters, like sausages from the mincer) and
stuffed them all inside. With a pinch he closed the gash in his abdomen. It made
half the town nauseous, mind you, but they had paid to see it. Which is very close
to my attitude towards dragons. I don't even believe half the stuff about them, but
I would give quite a bit to see one fly, even if it were nothing more than a well-
rounded illusion.

But Filby's dragon, the one who looked after for Silver, was a disaster. The crab
(I think it was a crab) had tattered it, pulling out the cotton wool. It reminded
me of one of those big dried crocodiles you find in some junk dealer, all bitten by
insects, looking sad and tired, with its tail folded to one side and a piece of
padding sticking out of a hole in the back.

Filby was beside himself. It is not good for a grown person to behave like this. He
had picked up the tattered remnant of a dried wing and was flogging himself. He
whipped and insulted himself. I didn't know him very well then and so I witnessed
that incredible scene from the kitchen window. The garage door rattled in the wind,
Filby cried and moaned through the open door, pacing furiously back and forth,
dashing and stopping theatrically, then the door slammed shut cutting off the
awkward situation for thirty seconds or so and then swung open completely to betray
a plaintive Filby who searched here and there among the debris on the garage floor
for the remains of what had once been, so to speak, a dragon in flesh and blood,
built by the ubiquitous Augustus Silver years ago. Of course I didn't know anything
about it at the time. After all, it was Augustus Silver. And he alone was reason
enough to push Filby to get by on his own. And I've been a little busy since then
too, even though, as I said, most of what sparked the whole thing started to look
suspicious like lies or whispers in the misty night; and the clamor and the hum and
the movement of wings began to sound like a barely disguised laughter, which became
more and more confused with the months, looking out of nowhere: from the clouds,
the wind and the fog. Even the sporadic letters from Silver himself had become
suspicious.

Filby is an eccentric. I can say this without fear of denial. How you finance your
own projects is beyond my knowledge. Weird chores. I'm sure of it: repairs and the
like. He has the hands of an archetypal mechanic: spatula fingers, black nails,
nicks and cuts and scratches that he would not be able to identify. All he needs to
do is touch a bunch of components and shake his hands over them, and the faint
rhythmic excitations of order and design begin to quiver amidst the crisscrossed
pieces on his workbench. It was there that a huge hermit crab had slipped in and in
a single night he had torn apart a masterpiece, a marvel, a thing that could not be
fixed. Even Silver would have thrown it away. The cat wouldn't want it either.

Filby was sulky for many days, but I knew it would come out. He would loaf around
the house apathetically, waving yesterday's papers, and a flash of light from a
copper wire would catch his eye. The thread would have suggested something. This is
how it works. Not only does he have the irritating ability to coexist with
mechanical waste, but he also talks to us, letting himself be hinted at
possibilities.

Soon, a few mornings, he would start hammering at great speed (damned hermit crabs)
putting together the ten thousand silver scales of a wing, assembling the scattered
gems of a multifaceted eye, peering through a lens at a spray of thin spun metal
inside. a braid that would run along the spine of a creature that, once released on
a foggy night, would disappear in an instant among the clouds, going away forever.
At least that was Filby's dream. And I must admit: I had total faith in him, in the
dragon he dreamed of building.

In early spring, however, a few weeks after the hermit crab affair, I was hoeing
the garden. Another frost was unlikely. The tomatoes had been planted for a week
and a huge green caterpillar full of thorns had eaten the leaves of the plants.
There were only the stems left, and they were smeared with a kind of slimy mush.
Once, as a kid, I was digging through the trash a few days after it rained and I
pulled out a finger-sized worm with the face of a human. I buried him. But this
tomato worm didn't have that kind of face. In fact it was pleasant, with little
porcine eyes and a lump for a nose, just as caterpillars' noses must be. So I threw
it over the hedge into Filby's garden. He would come back here, there was no doubt.
He would crawl back from anywhere, even from the moon. And since that was the
situation (and since it was inevitable), agree with me, there was no reason to
mislead him that much. But the plants were a mess. I uprooted them and threw them
into Filby's garden, which is full of weeds anyway. But Filby himself was leaning
out of the hedge like a grinning gutter, and a bundle of half a dozen chewed-up
vines flew into his face like a squid. This is not, however, the kind of thing that
bothers Filby. He didn't care. He had a letter from Silver sent a month ago
somewhere south.

I hardly knew the man's reputation then. I had heard of him, but who hadn't heard
of him? And I could barely remember seeing the pictures of a big, bearded man with
disheveled hair and a flicker of passion in his eyes, taken when Silver was dealing
with the Mechano-dissectionist league in the days when they began to know the truth
about mutability of matter. He and three others at the university were responsible
for the brief invasion of unicorns, some of whom are said to roam the hills around
there, mutants worthy of attention, sure, but not the kind of wonders to satisfy
Augustus Silver. From the photos he looks like the guy who would have dived upside
down into a frozen puddle at dawn; and that maybe he was used to eating Bulgarian
wheat and honey by the spoonfuls.

And here is Filby, intent on getting rid of the remains of the damaged tomato
plants while, very excited, he holds a letter in the other hand. A letter from the
master! Silver had been in the Tropics for years and had seen two or three things
they deserved. In the hills of the eastern jungle he had sighted a dragon with what
was almost certainly a bamboo rib cage. It flew with the furious pounding of a
ringing xylophone. It had the head of a huge lizard, the trident tail of a manta
ray, and mechanical wings made of silver, string and carp skin. That creature had
made him come up with ideas. The best dragons, he was sure, would come from the
sea. He was about to sail to San Francisco. Certain things could be bought in
Chinatown, the ones you "just couldn't do without," as he wrote in his letter to
Filby. There was a hint of perpetual motion, the construction of an immortal
creature, welded with the parts of a dozen wild animals.

I was still waiting for the last crab to appear, and so was Jensen. He had written
a monograph, a report of great scientific precision, in which the correlation
between the decreasing number of creatures and their immeasurable size was
postulated. He had camped on the cliff with his son, Bumby, peering through the
mist, his eyes fixed on the lenses of a special telescope (one that saw things, as
he said, especially clearly), waiting for the beast's first quivering claw. huge
would rise out of the gray surf, flowing water, draped with weeds, and that the
crab's snout would follow, drawn south, towards the sky only knows what, by a kind
of migratory magnet. Either the crab disappeared along the coast hidden by the fog,
or Jensen was wrong: in fact there was no last crab.

Augustus Silver's letter, as they say, put wings on Filby's feet, and he flew to
build his dragon, sending a letter to the East in which he included forty dollars,
his outstanding share of the Dragon Society. The tomato caterpillar, which was
itself a wingless dragon, crawled back into the garden four days later and busied
himself with half a dozen fresh seedlings, nibbling lace-up arabesques on the
leaves. Throwing it back onto Filby's ground wouldn't solve anything. He was a worm
with monumental determination. I put it in a jar (a large three-and-a-half-pound
jar of pickles; empty of course) and screwed a lid with the punch holes into it. He
lived happily in a small garden of leaves and dirt and polished sticks and stones,
occasionally nibbling tomato leaves.

I spent more and more time with Filby observing, in those days after the first
letter arrived, the dragon's mechanical bones and joints and organs beginning to
wedge into each other. Unlike his mentor, Filby had almost no knowledge of
vivisection. He hated it, I think, and as a result his creations were almost
completely mechanical� and almost completely unlikely. But he had such an aura of
certainty around him, such an absolute and irreducible conviction that even the
most unlikely project seemed, inexplicably, credible.

I remember a Saturday afternoon with particular clarity. It had been sunny for the
first time in weeks. The grass had not been tingling with slugs and slugs the night
before, a sign, I think, that the weather was turning towards dryness. But that
wasn't entirely true. Saturday dawned cloudless. The sky was imperceptibly blue,
dotted with dark specks of what might have been sparrows or crows flying right over
the treetops, or something else, something bigger: dragons, shall we say, or
inhabitants of some very cloud world. distant. Sunlight poured from the beveled
panes of my bedroom window, and I swear I could hear the noise of the tomato and
onion and pea plants opening into bloom, hurrying into the sun. But around noon
large dark clouds grew numb over the Coast Range. Their shadows crept across the
fields and redwoods, fences and hedges. A spray of rain drifted over the refreshing
land breeze, and the sweet smell of ozone rose from the cobblestones of Filby's
driveway, bringing with it, along with an initial thin specter, an indefinable kind
of promise and regret: the promise of unsolved wonders, the regret for the lost
moments and fragments of time that drifted away entangled like hermit crabs
migrating, inexorably, irreparably, towards the mists.

It was therefore a Saturday afternoon of rainbows and umbrellas and Filby, still
animated by the thought of Silver's approach, showed me some of his things. Filby's
house was a marvel, devoted entirely to its collections. Carved heads made from
soapstone and ivory and ferrous wood populated the rooms, like strange memories of
a distant journey. Aquariums bubbled, filled with aquatic plants and bizarre
spotted creatures: eels and leaffish, gobies submerged in sand up to their noses,
sole with both eyes on the same side of their heads, and darting anablebi with the
marvelous ability to see above simultaneously. and below the surface of the water
so that, unlike the worldly fish that swam submerged, they were inclined to
philosophy. I suggested that Filby do the same, but I'm not sure he understood me.
Books and flutes and curios filled half a dozen crates and celestial maps hung on
the walls. There were the construction patterns of some of Silver's earliest works,
intricate and swirling sketches completely covered in what had previously been
utterly meaningless calculations and comments to me.

On Monday another letter arrived from Silver. He had continued eastward, chasing
the hope of finding something very unusual in the evolutionary scale of snakes. A
proboscis snake, he said, with lungs running the length of its body. But he would
come to the west coast, that was certain, to San Francisco. It would come within a
week, or a month, he couldn't be absolutely accurate. A message would precede it.
But who could say when? We agreed that I would drive the five hours south along the
coast road to pick him up in town: I owned a car.

Filby was drenched in sweat trying to build the creature before Silver's arrival.
He longed to have the master's approval, to see the fleeting electricity of
surprise and excitement in Silver's eyes. And I wouldn't have doubted for a moment
that there was an element of envy involved. Filby, after all, had languished for
years in college in Silver's shadow and was now on the verge of becoming a teacher
himself.

So there, in Filby's garage, leaning against a wall of rough-hewn spruce uprights

and redwood planks, lay the beast's shoulders, neck, and right wing in silent
repose; the head, a mass of faceted pastel crystals, piano strings and bones, all
pressed into the soft rubber grip of a clamp. It was on Friday, the morning of the
third letter, that Filby touched the bare tips of two microscopically thin copper
wires and the dragon's eyes rotated around their axes, very slowly, winking a
couple of times, scanning the narrow garage and dimly lit with an ancient and
expert gaze, before the threads parted and life flickered away.

Filby was triumphant. He danced around the garage, screaming with joy, doing little
somersaults. But my proposal to take the afternoon off, drive off to Fort Bragg to
eat and have a beer, met with impassive refusal. Silver, it seemed, was on the
horizon. I had to leave in the morning. I should almost certainly have spent a
couple of nights waiting. You couldn't rush Augustus Silver, of course. Filby, for
his part, would work on the dragon. It would take a day and a night to be quiet. I
decided to take the tomato caterpillar with me, somehow for company, but the beast
had crawled under the rubbish for a nap.

This business of being a Filby emissary left me somewhat perplexed when I woke up
on Saturday morning. I was a neighbor who had been trapped in a peculiar web of
enthusiasm. Here I am, pulling on heavy socks and stumbling around the kitchen,
flakes of mist crawling from the windowsill, spruce trees like ghosts beyond
dripping glass, with Augustus Silver just tossing about the dark Pacific waves from
somewhere beyond the Golden Gate, with a fist full of dragon bones. Who was I to
push past a "Filby sent me"? Or something more concise: "Greetings from Filby."
Perhaps in these environments one simply winked or made a sign or wore a special
hat, with a foot-long peak and one eye set in a pyramid sewn into the front. I felt
like a fool, but I promised Filby that. At dawn his garage was lit and I had been
awakened once during the night by a piercing scream, cut short and followed by
Filby's roaring laughter and a brief hint of a song.

I was supposed to speak to an elderly Chinese named Wun Lo in a restaurant outside

Washington. Filby referred to him as 'contact'. I should have introduced myself as
a friend of Captain Augustus Silver and awaited orders. Orders: what the hell was
that jargon? In the dim light of the lamp, past midnight, such a dark speech seemed
reasonable, even satisfying, in the freezing dawn it was ridiculous.

It took almost six hours to get to the city, winding through winding roads, with
some stretches that occasionally ended up in the sea due to the winter rains. Mist
rose from the rocky coves and clung to the rock faces, casting a gray veil over the
dew-fed flowers and grass of the shoreline. The silver poles of the fences poked
out of the darkness with, scattered here and there, impaled skulls of cows or goats
on top, and then the rushing by of a dozen mailboxes, rusty and blunt, towards the
cliff together with cypresses all twisted that seemed about to jump into the sea.

At times, without warning, the fog disappeared in the blink of an eye and a
kilometer and a half of uncluttered freeway appeared, strangely clear and
crystalline, in contrast to its previous state of opacity. Or there would suddenly
appear an avenue in the sky, the far end of which sank into the opalescent blue and
appeared as distant and unattainable as the end of the rainbow. Across one of these
avenues, making themselves visible for perhaps three seconds, the clumsy mass of
what might have been a huge bird squawked, frolicking just above the low fog as if
battling a violent, tumultuous wind. It could easily have been something else,
something much higher. A dragon? One of Silver's creations that nestled in the
dense, misty emerald forests of the Coast Range? It was impossible to tell.
However, as I have already said, he seemed in the throes of a struggle ... and a
piece of something, a fragment of a wing, evidently came off him, perhaps due to
the wear and tear of old age, and went straight into the sea. Maybe it was just a
stick that was being brought back to the nest by an ambitious heron. In an instant
the fog closed, or rather the car shot out of the momentary clearing, and every
opportunity to identify the beast, to study it, vanished. For a moment I thought
about turning around and going back, but it was unlikely that I could find the same
patch of lightning or that if I did, the creature was still visible. So I went on,
weaving curves through the redwood-covered hills that might have looked like crafty
paintings hanging along the ghostly edges of the freeway, with the hooks holding
them hidden from view overhead in the mist. Then, almost without warning, the wet
asphalt turned into a large causeway and, soon after, into the humming expanse of
the Golden Gate.

Below, some silent boats struggled against the tide. Perhaps one of them was
Augustus Silver's boat that was turning towards the landing stage.

Probably not. In appearance they were fishing boats, full of shrimp and squid and
insect-eyed scorpionfish. I drove to the outskirts of Chinatown and parked; leaving
the car I immersed myself in the crowd that swarmed from Grant and Jackson and into
Portsmouth Square.

It was the Chinese New Year. The streets were heavy with the smell of almond cakes
and fog, of lacquered duck and gunpowder, of garlic and seaweed. Above, rockets
exploded in a hail of barely visible sparks. One of these, swaying above the street
as it burned the fuse, headed straight for Washington, whistling and glittering and
foaming against the wall of an antique shop, eventually falling to the ground
inanimate, almost ashamed of its own extravagances. The smoke and bang of
firecrackers, the throng of people whirling and the irritating absurdity of my
mission led me down to Washington, until I stumbled upon the open, smoky door of a
cramped three-story restaurant. His name was Sam Won.

A parade of chefs dressed in white was breaking up the vegetables. The large
Chinese pans hissed. Crazy bowls of white rice smoked on the counter. The head of a
fish the size of a melon peeked out of a pan. And there, at a small steel and
plastic-coated ant table, sat my contact. It had to be him. Filby had been
wonderfully accurate in his description. The man had a gray beard that ended above
the table and a suit of the same color, some size too large, and he took spoonfuls
of clear broth so mechanically and decisively that his eating was almost
ceremonial. I approached him. There was nothing to do but keep it short. "I'm a
friend of Captain Silver," I said, smiling and holding out my hand. He leaned over,
touched my hand with a weak finger, and stood up. I followed him to the back of the
restaurant.

It only took me a few seconds to see clearly enough that my trip had been
completely useless. Who could tell where Augustus Silver was? Singapore? Ceylon?
Bombay? He had sent some herbs from the East just two days ago. I was instantly
struck by the stupidity of my position. What the hell was I doing in San Francisco?
I had the unpleasant feeling that the five chefs, just outside the door, were
having a laugh at my expense and that old Wun Lo, staring at the street, was about
to ask me for money: a five dollar bill, only up to per pay day. Was I not the
friend of Augustus Silver?

My worries were momentarily interrupted by an old photograph hanging over a tiled

fireplace. It depicted some kind of strange city of huts somewhere along the north
coast. There was a fine mist, enough to veil the surrounding countryside, and the
photo, of course, had been taken at sunset, as the long, deep shadows cast by the
strange hovels stretched inward, among the trees. The tip of a lighthouse was
barely visible on the edge of the dark Pacific, and a modest number of small boats
were anchored below. It was disconcerting, of course� it was doubly so: the
lighthouse, the tongue of land that swerved towards it, the green bay of cypresses
and eucalyptus trees� I couldn't be wrong, it was Point Reyes. But the city of
huts, I was equally certain, did not exist, could not exist.

The cluster of hovels stretched tumbling towards the edge of the bay, a long arch
that descended the hills like a strange Gothic staircase. And all, I swear, were
made in part with the remains of dragons, of enormous winged reptiles: tin and
copper, skin and bone. Some were piled up, leaning against each other like houses
of cards. Some were perched atop oil cans or stood on wooden beds. This was nothing
but a broken wing casting a sliver of shadow, over there was what appeared to be a
fairly complete creature but lacked, I suppose, the essential parts that once
served to animate it. . And next to a cauldron, along with a man who might have
been Wun Lo himself, was Augustus Silver.

His beard was immense: the beard of a wanderer in the hills, of a prospector
finally back after years of unknown mines, and that beard and a wide-brimmed felt
hat, his oriental jacket and the glow of arcane knowledge that shone in the his
eyes, the same harpoon he held in his tight right, the width of his shoulders ...
all these details almost seemed to deify him, as if he were an incarnation of a
Neptune just out of the bay, or of a wandering Odin who stopped to drink of flower
petal tea among the strange shacks of the coast. His very appearance annihilated
all my indecision. I left Wun Lo nodding, reclining in a chair. He had evidently
forgotten my presence.

The smoke hung in the air of the streets. Thousands of sounds (a cacophony of
voices, explosions, whistling pinwheels, oriental music) mingled in a strange kind
of harmonious silence. Somewhere to the northeast was a village built from dragon
skins. If nothing else, if I hadn't learned anything about Augustus Silver's
arrival, I would have at least taken a look at the group of barracks in the
photograph. I pushed through the throng in the direction of Washington, heedless of
the sparks and explosions. Then, almost magically, like the Red Sea, the crowd
parted and a wide asphalt lane opened in front of me. On either side of a road, all
of a sudden clear, there were grinning faces, frozen in anticipation. There was a
great ovation, a confusion, the beating of Chinese cymbals and the playing of small
reed horns. Round the corner and running at the mad speed of an express train, the
cunning head of a paper dragon swung back and forth, its unkempt, rainbow-colored
mane floating behind it. The body of the thing was half a block long and seemed to
be constructed of thousands of slips of the finest pastel-colored rice paper,
sheets and sheets that threatened to fly away and disperse in the mist. A dozen
people huddled inside the dragon ran along the pavement. All together screaming and
chanting as the crowd closed behind them and, in a wave, pressed east towards
Kearny, the turmoil and color changing once more to silence.

So the rest of the afternoon had an air of unreality which, strangely enough,
deepened my faith in Augustus Silver and his creations, even if all rational
evidence seemed to point decidedly in the opposite direction. I drove north out of
town and at San Rafael taking the shortcut to the coast, to Point Reyes and
Inverness. I meandered along the green side of the hills as the sun dipped in the
afternoon sky towards the sea. It was just before dark that I stopped to refuel.

The curve of the shoreline ahead of me was a close cousin to the one in the photo,
and if you squinted enough to blur the image through a tangle of lashes, the
bungalows clustered on the hillside might have looked like ghosts from dragon
shacks. Perhaps they were a projection of my memories: I can no longer say with
certainty which of the two worlds had substance and which was the ghost.

A bank of fog had slipped towards the shore. If it hadn't been for this, perhaps, I
could have added the top of the lighthouse and completed the picture. As it was, I
could only see the gray veil of mist rolling up in a faint landward breeze. I asked
the distributor for a map. Surely, I thought, somewhere nearby, maybe in sight if
it weren't for the fog, was my village. The gas station attendant, a pile of engine
oil and blue paper towels chewing on tobacco, hadn't heard of it� I mean the dragon
village. He looked at me sideways. A map hung on the window. It cost nothing to
watch us. So I headed for a steel and glass cubicle, frozen with rust and sea air,
and studied the map. He said little to me. It had been hung up recently, the duct
tape that held it at the corners hadn't turned yellow or started to peel off.
Through an open door to my right you could see the dark garage where a Chinese
mechanic tinkered with a hoist with a car frame.

I turned to leave just as the hanging mist engulfed the sun, casting the gas
station into shadow. Above the dark Pacific swelled the mists carried by the sea
wind, a dangling tuft that curved skyward in a wave, like the grass of a pool
washed by the billows or the waving tail of a huge mist dragon, and for within a
split second the last dying rays of the evening sun shone through the ragged fog,
illuminating the old pump pump, the discolored interior of the office, the dark,
tool-strewn garage.

The map on the window seemed to curl at the corners, the tape instantly dry and
dark. The white background was tinged with shades of old ivory and pale ocher, and
what had been creases in the paper appeared, for a moment, like hitherto unknown
roads leading from the redwoods to the sea.

It was the strange combination, I'm sure, of the evening, the dying sun and the
rising fog, that confused me for a moment. I did not understand if the mechanic was
crouched in his overalls under some huge, finned automobile, the result of the
peculiar architecture of the early 1960s, or if he was working under the chrome and
iron shell of a leaning dragon, frozen in flight above the grease-greased concrete
floor carpeted with coils of pipes and dusty old tires.

Then the sun went away. The darkness fell in an instant and everything was back to
the way it was. I drove slowly north through the village. There was, of course, no
hut village made from dragons' scraps. There was nothing but warehouses and vacant
lots full of weeds and the worn concrete and tin of a temporary industrial
building. A tangle of narrow streets surrounded by bizarre and crumbling shacks,
some of them on stilts as if waiting for a tide of apocalyptic proportions. But the
huts were made of shingles and bituminous gravel, there were no traces of dragons
anywhere, not even the tip of a rusted wing in the midst of the weeds and mustard.

I decided not to spend the night in a motel, although I was tempted to do so, on
the off chance that the fog would dissipate and the watery moonbeams along the
coast washed all of that off the coast (was it a trick of the sunlight or a trick
of the fog) that briefly had me confused at the gas station. But the day had been,
for the most part, fruitless, and the thought of shelling out twenty dollars for a
motel room was intolerable.

It was late, almost midnight, when I arrived home, exhausted. The tomato
caterpillar slept in its lair. The light was still burning in Filby's garage, so I
went out to peek through the door. Filby sat on a stool, his chin on his hands,
staring at the dismantled head of his beast. I instantly regretted having looked
out; he would ask about Silver and I would have nothing to tell him. The news, or
rather the lack of news, seemed to drain his energy completely. He hadn't slept for
two days. Jensen had shown up a few hours earlier muttering about an incredibly
high tide and his suspicion that the last of the hermit crabs might still appear.
Didn't Filby want to take a look at the beach that night? No, Filby wouldn't have
wanted to. Filby just wanted to mount his dragon. But there was something not quite
right: one of the wires making contact, or a gem that had been badly cut� and the
creature was not responding. It was just a pile of wreckage.

I regretted it along with him. Bar the door to Jensen's hermit crab, I said, and
wait for the dawn. It sounded like a lot of nonsense but Filby, I think, was ready
to accept any reasoning, regardless of how empty it was, just to abandon his
bungled attempt.

We both sat down until the sun came up, drifting with tearful reminiscences and
debating the merits of a ride down the cliff to see how Jensen was doing. The high
tide was accompanied by a monumental surf, as in the spaces of meditative silence I
could only hear the fury and the roar of the waves collapsing on the beach. It
seemed unlikely to me that there was some giant hermit crab marching.

The days that followed saw no change over time. It continued to drizzle and be
gloomy. No letter arrived from Augustus Silver.

Filby's dragon appeared to be in a state of progressive decline. The problem that

plagued him receded in depth as the days went by as if he made fun of Filby groping
for him while awake, floundering towards it, sure, in the morning, to hold the
problem firmly by the tail, sulky, in the afternoon, because he had escaped once
more. The creature was a perfect marvel of separate parts. I had no idea of its
complexity. By the end of the week, hundreds of those parts were resting neatly on
the garage floor, one after another in the order they had been taken apart.
Concentric circles of bone expanded like ripples in a pond, and by Tuesday of the
following week large quantities had been collected in coffee cans that stood here
and there on the workbench and on the floor. Filby was giving in, I could see it.
He spent less time in the garage that week than he had spent there in a single day
the previous weeks, and instead slept long hours in the afternoons.

I was still hoping for a letter from Silver. It was, after all, out there
somewhere. But I was haunted by the suspicion that such a letter might help
reinforce Filby's illusions (or mine), thereby prolonging what as the days passed
promised to be the final deflation of those same illusions. Better no hope, I
thought, than impossible hopes, or frustrated expectations.

But towards the end of the afternoon, as I watched Jensen carefully make his way
through the cliffs from the attic window carrying a wooden and brass telescope, as
the orange glow of a diffuse sun radiated through the thin mist above the sea, I
wondered where Silver was that night, what strange seas he crossed, what whispered
wonders swept him along the jungle paths.

One day it would come, I was sure of that. There would be a patched mist
illuminated by the ivory light of the moon. The sound of oriental music, Chinese
banjos, and copper gongs would echo above the darkness of the open ocean. The mist
would swirl and open, revealing a universe of stars and planets and the dancing
Northern Lights in transparent colors like the soft rainbow light of paper lanterns
hanging from the windswept sky. Then the mist would close and out of the ghostly
mists, rising in the surf, his ship would slowly make its way to the mouth of the
harbor, slicing through the water like a ghost, with strange sea creatures visible
in the phosphorescent trail, while one after the the other let themselves go,
returning to the sea as if they had escorted the hull across ten thousand miles of
mysterious ocean. We would have a beer, all three of us, in Filby's garage. We
would have distracted Jensen from his wakefulness.

But, as I said, no letter arrived. Any waiting was in vain. Filby's beast was in
pieces: a platter of spoiled meat, to put it as it was. It reminded me more than
anything else of the sad bone remnants of the Thanksgiving turkey. Nothing could be
done about it. Filby would not have rested. But the fog had finally lifted. The oak
in the garden was opening its leaves and the tomato plants were knee-high and lush.
My caterpillar was still asleep, but I had some hope that the spring air would
resurrect it. However, it had nothing to do with Filby. He stared at the jumble of
debris for long hours, and when I had the unfortunate idea of jokingly suggesting
that he send someone to Detroit for a carburetor, he gave me such a savage look
that I slipped away again leaving him alone.

The following Sunday afternoon, the wind blew, slamming Filby's garage door until
the noise became disturbing. I looked inside stealthily, horrified. There was
nothing in the stacked pieces of debris that made one think of a dragon, except a
dismantled wing, with the silk and silver covered in grease prints. Two cats were
prowling around there. I looked around for some sign of Jensen's hermit crab
hoping, in fact, that some rational and concrete explanation could be brought to
explain the disaster. But Filby, alas, had simply fallen apart along with his
dragon. He had lost any strange inspiration that gave him the charge. His creation
lay scattered, there were not even two pieces connected together. Cables and fuses
were piled up amidst unidentifiable crystals and the twisted piece of elaborate
machinery had, quite clearly, been trampled and now lay cold and dead, half hidden
under the worktable. Delicate components of all kinds were mired in a puddle of oil
that foamed over half the floor.

Filby drifted around, his hair worn out. He had received one last letter. There
were hints of a longer, possibly dangerous journey. Silver's visit to the west
coast had been postponed again. Filby ran his hand back through his hair, oblivious
to the excruciating result this action was causing. He looked like a nineteenth-
century mentally ill. He muttered something about having a sister in McKinleyville
and seemed quite enlightened when he added, for no reason, that in his sister's
town, deep in the heart of the north coast, was the tallest totem pole in the
world. Two days later he left. I closed his garage door and promised to collect his
mail with a particular eye for a revealing exotic stamp. But nothing has appeared
yet. I got into the habit of spending the evening on the beach with Jensen and his
son, Bumby, both still hoping for the last hermit crab. Spring sunsets are
unimaginable. Bumby is in love with it as much as I am and can recognize similar
coils of color and shape both in the concentric curves of a shell and in the
peculiar green depths of a pool created by the tide.

So when my tomato caterpillar staggered out of its burrow and spread a huge pair of
diaphanous dark-flecked wings, I took it to the beach so that Bumby could see it,
so to speak, unfurl its sails. The afternoon was cloudless and the ocean sighed on
the beach. Perhaps calm, Jensen insisted, would call the hermit crab. But Bumby was
now indifferent to the fabled hermit crab. He stared into the brine jar at the
half-dozen bright orange circles that dotted the abdomen of the giant sphinx
butterfly that had once crawled through my tomato plants in a cunning disguise. She
was gorgeous and awful at the same time and had a strange fascination for Bumby,
who tapped the jar making up names and discarding them.

As I unscrewed the lid, the butterfly fluttered skyward for a few feet and circled
in a maddened oval, with Bumby clinging to its wake and running in pursuit as the
monster hurried south.

The picture is as clear to me now as spring water: Bumby running and jumping,
kicking upward splashes of sand, standing against the mossy cliff that rises to the
peak, and the magnificent butterfly above, out of reach, enticing Bumby along the
beach in the afternoon. In the end it was impossible to tell what that patch was in
the deep blue sky that was getting smaller and smaller: a tiny winged creature for
a moment against the light in the false horizon of our little bay, or some huge
flying reptile that rushed over the distant ocean to then disappear into the void,
beyond the edge of the flat earth.

Note

Read cyberpunk

Although cyberpunk as such no longer exists, there are many publications that
present the findings. In the United States he had his laboratory in the "Isaac
Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine" (of which there is also an Italian version)
under the guidance of Gardner Dozois. Some such stories, along with a column by
Bruce Sterling, have appeared and continue to appear in "The Magazine of Fantasy &
Science Fiction". "Analog. Science Fiction / Fact �instead presents more popular
authors, who use the stylistic features of cyberpunk at the service of a new
adventurous science fiction.

The most important critical magazine is �Science Fiction Eye� (PO Box 18539,
Asheville NC 28814, USA), a limited circulation magazine that has allowed movement
authors for years to discuss the issues they care about. The American university
magazine on postmodern fiction "Critique" dedicated an entire issue to cyberpunk
(vol. XXXIII, No. 3, Spring 1992, Heldref Publications, 1319 Eighteenth Street, NW,
Washington, DC 20036-1802, USA). While Scott Bukatman established, with his essay
Terminal Identity (Duke University Press, Durham and London 1993), a critical axis
between postmodernism and science fiction fiction.

The social expansion of the movement is well evidenced by some widely circulated
magazines that collect in a single container the usual themes of the great
magazines, giving them a cyberpunk interpretation. The first is �Mondo 2000� (PO
Box 10171, Berkeley CA 94709, USA) which counts among its collaborators old
exponents of the hippie culture who see in cyberpunk a new libertarian possibility
and in virtual realities a new form of enlargement of consciousness. Timoty Leary
is one of them, smart drugs (i.e. medicinal cocktails through which it is possible
to chemically improve the functions of the human body) have been their workhorse.
International conspiracy theories have appeared on the pages of �Mondo 2000�,
eccentric musicians like Glenn Branca or Diamanda Galas, writers like Mark Leyner,
directors like David Cronenberg, old and new situationists and obsessed with the
new age.
Completely different is �Wired� (PO Box 191826, San Francisco CA 94119-9866, USA),
which stands as a magazine of culture applied to information technology. You can
only collaborate if you have a modem to send the pieces (or only by sending
electronically). Its advertising pages host all the major IT producers. Bruce
Sterling was sent for a report in Moscow, Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow
Crash, in Singapore. The variety of topics covered testifies to a highly developed
computer civilization, of which in Italy for now we know at length only the tip of
the iceberg. On the other hand, the confusion made by the Americans with European
culture plays in our favor. Situationism has upset the cyberpunks, who have only
been discovering the existence of Baudrillard, Bataille, Virilio, not to mention
Leiris, Klossowski, Deleuze and Guattari for two years or so: thinkers and writers
who are confused in a single cauldron.

�2600� (PO Box 752, Middle Island, NY 11953-0752, USA) is the information organ of
hackers, the so-called computer pirates (but they are, rather, libertarians of the
world of computer communications).

Computer sex, on the other hand, is well theorized by Richard Kadrey with his
�Future Sex� (PO Box 31129 San Francisco CA 94131, USA).

Index

This book

Preface. Cyberpunk, a dead language of our future (Daniele Brolli)

Electric riders

WILLIAM GIBSON

Darwin

The mental parasite in the shape of a hippie hat

BRUCE STERLING

Life in the age of the Mechanists / Shapers.

20 summons

JOHN SHIRLEY

Visions of Cindy
RUDY RUCKER & MARC LAIDLAW

Chaos Surfari

PAUL DI FILIPPO

The Jones continuum

RICHARD KADREY

Goodbye, Houston Street, goodbye

MICHAEL BLUMLEIN

Foggy lives

MISHA

Steel prayers

JAMES P. BLAYLOCK

Paper dragons

Note. Read cyberpunk

Request the catalog by writing

to the Theoria publishing house,

via Severano, 33 - 00161 Rome

or by calling the number:

06/44245700

Finished printing in July 1994

at GRAFICA SIPIEL - Milan

on behalf of Theoria publishing house

on PALATINA paper from the Miliani di Fabriano paper mills

{I} The terms gnosis, gnosticism, gnostic are used hereinafter by the editor of
this anthology to indicate, starting from the trust in the single limited datum or
fact, a possibility of general knowledge. Just like in gnosis in a religious sense,
where it is believed that, precisely starting from its finitude, it is possible for
man to arrive at an intimate knowledge of the universe, and of God, and share its
mystery. We then speak of a non-esoteric gnosis, that is, of a knowledge that does
not want to be reserved for a limited number of adepts [ed].