Eleanor lies naked on the bed. No thoughts, she is pale and empty and a little chilly from the air-conditioning. Continue reading
fiction
Happy now
Satan asks
— Well?
— I never thought much about it. Certainly, I never believed any of this was likely. But I guess it’s what you don’t know that trips you up. I’ve always thought of myself as…well… moral. Continue reading
The futurefone
We were in bed when the future called. Lara sat straight up. ‘Oh god,’ she said bunching the bedclothes up against her mouth. ‘Answer it,’ she breathed, her eyes wild and staring. ‘Answerit, answerit ANSWER IT.’ Then she forced a fist into her mouth biting down and next she was hitting out at me arms windmilling like a wild thing, ‘Answer it.’
Continue reading
Funnier
‘I like the story, really I do—’
Ed wasn’t looking good. He was greyer, if that’s possible and he’d put on weight, and it wasn’t the pudge of some jolly fellow but the fat that one day soon is going to choke your aorta and leave you face down in your spaghetti marinara. Continue reading
Fuse country…
They sit in the car looking straight ahead. ‘I’d better go,’ she says. They stay. In the parking lot cars come and go. Some drivers reverse carefully between the lines others fang in careless.
‘There’s a pattern. If you watch long enough.’… Continue reading
To the lake again…
March 2005 – Janey was in the car and the car was in the lake again. She looked out at the cathedral columns of weed and the parallels of brown light and thought of nothing – no regrets, no concerns, no consideration. She was adrift beneath the surface of thinking and she had about two minutes of air – plenty of time. Plenty… Continue reading
How to pass the Turing test: a study guide…
First developed in 1950, the Turing test remains the premier means by which computer programs can exhibit intelligent behaviour that is indistinguishable from that of a human. How a program performs in a brief natural conversation is used to distinguish between the real humans and the synthetic… Continue reading
The second father
July 2010 – Here’s me supplanted, replaced, reduced. Reduced to this. Someone’s in my house. Look in the window and see. There’s Julia my wife and Bo and Bea the kids, curled up watching television—a perfect domestic tableau, a twenty-first century Van Eyck, (except Julia’s not deathly pregnant and I’m not some po-faced merchant limply holding her hand and it’s not autumn). Instead, I’m the overweight balding guy standing in the dark in the winter snow like a thief, like a perv, peering through the window at my little family and shivering… Continue reading
Up from the beach…
November 2010
On its final approach the plane turned across the island and Cathy saw the turquoise line of the water and then something dark, a cruising shape out there in the lagoon where the children splashed and then the run of palm trees and the ground coming up with the engines roaring.… Continue reading
In the Emerald Hotel
After nine months, one hundred and twenty-seven flights, one hundred and ten hotel rooms (fawn walls and twenty-four-hour corridors) and two hundred and sixty-five thousand frequent flyer miles, I’ve arrived on this high plateau called exhaustion. Nothing much grows here: a few leathery-leaved plants, xerophytes adapted to low moisture, low fertility and air freshener and there’s us, the travellers… Continue reading
