“Aren’t you a little short for the Born Breathing?”
“What?” blinks the man wearing the death’s head. “Oh! The armor.” He pulls it off and offers a naif’s grin. “I’m See Me! I’m here to rescue you!”
“Is that really your name?” says the Princess Leaves.
“I’ve got your cogwork slave. I’m here with Ratio Tile.”
“Ratio Tile is here?” she says sharply.
“And the Wish Power is with him,” says a man in a darker death’s head, far above.
“Then he must not be allowed to escape,” says Government Cat.
“Escape is not his plan,” says Reaching the West Reaches.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Eventually this guy from the original team gets Death to let him bring Deep Blue to a chess match. He wins. People rage about the technocracy and preferential treatment, etcetera, but it turns out you can beat him with a MacBook running Rybka.
In fact, most of the the time all you need is one of those hand-cranked laptops, and soon deathless child armies rule the third world. They march the old warlords off to candy factories; the diamond business collapses. It’s a strange kind of paradise.
Death buys his own laptop but he can’t get the touchpad to work.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Madigan basically expected, throughout her career in tech theatre, to end up in the CIA.
There is this about a safe house: it must feel safe. It needs dressing like any set; even the new ones need to have their corners knocked and book spines broken. It’s not just to blend away from enemy eyes. It’s to give agents and those in protective custody the feeling that people have been here; people have lived here; people have lived.
Madigan stayed in one in Madrid, quietly and against regulations, for a vacation week. The art on the walls was all children’s collage.
Friday, November 16, 2007
This is school: Latin and Greek, deportment and dressage, the lineage of the House of Wettin. They learn to waltz with each other and how to address a Duchess. They learn which fork to use.
Proserpina and Radiane sneak out in boys’ clothes to watch the fights, and Proserpina vomits the first time she sees a man’s blood drooling through his mustaches. Radiane doesn’t. They go again and again, and on the nighttime walk back they talk out every step. Did you see his feet, they say. Did you see how he fell apart as soon as he touched the ropes?
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Muddy, exhausted, scared, hungry and alone: the Justin was perhaps feeling an appropriate amount of self-pity. He didn’t even have his boat anymore. Also, he was technically dead.
He sat on a sandbar a little ways from the shore, and tears ran salty in his mouth.
The Nile rose to lap at his sandals, then the seat of his jeans, his waist. The sandbar submerged itself. The Justin heard a soft sound: the current rippling, dividing around the ankles of a man behind him.
“Well,” said the man wryly, “cry me a river.”
“Ptah!”
They embraced like water and sand.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Eventually, thanks to stubborn tradition and globalization, everybody’s family name is either Li or Smith. There are some people in San Francisco named Smith-Li but nobody likes them.
Smith men only want to marry Li women and so goes the reverse, which means that while percentages fluctuate, they stay at about fifty-fifty for the next twelve thousand years.
Then one day, Smith Nakhit pings the downtown courthouse construct and demands to change her name–not to Li, not even to the apocryphal Smith-Li, but to Jones.
And it totally catches on! Everybody’s named Jones now! So that’s good.