code excitement

Print, originally uploaded by avlxyz.

in the bunkered Brain

key words

The roboroach behind the office door found it interesting that the elfin lady was somehow fogging Authority awareness of the conversation about the Blue Jade Geisha....that was not supposed to be possible....so it began to stream the happenings in the room to City Systems on a tight beam.  Miles away, deep within the massive bunker that houses City Brain, the code began to pump in excitement....."Blue Jade Geisha" triggered a priority security program, and the crushing attention of the City shifted lightning fast.....the Wandering City could not be threatened by very many things, but the return of the Blue Jades was something to be feared.....after what they had done last time.....

Dwell

Dwell. I bequeath me. Utterly, I do bequeath me. It has been time, time is all I have, but time has passed. Passed me by. Two years before I came stopping out of the dwelling. Not knowing where I was, who I was, just hunger. Hunger. Mirada saw me first. Came out of the blue, or was it red? She saw me scraping at the binds that tied me. She said:

"You, do you see me."

Puke came up. A fellable wall of puke.

"M-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m...."

She wipe off the puke with a paper towel.

"You. You. Amass. Do you SEE ME?"

"Mi-mi-mi-m-m-Mirada."

"Well there you go, M i r a d a. Can you take your time and say it?"

"Mir...."

And then I was asleep again, with the hunger still inside me.


All that was left of me was a demoralize bit of brain stem with the cord attached, the left side of my earlobe. Everything else had to reworked from scratch. Everything else. Which is why it took two years. Which is why Mirada was questioning the retinal blood vessels where it connects to the Optic nerve. There had been many instances where the Retina did not blossom. But in mine. They did.

Now Mirada took a spit second to ramp up my file and knowing it was such she brough me home again. Home.

"Pine & Palm"

"Pine & Palm", originally uploaded by ZardoZ69.

reflected in the pool.

palms and pines

Diedre and Freddy were sitting poolside, looking at a palm tree.  Freddy says "OK, we see it now as a palm tree....but let's both go ahead and decide it should be a pine tree and watch what happens."  So they thought pine tree and danged if the tree didn't morph from palm to pine.  "What happens?" asked Diedre.  "Does Management read our minds constantly, and change the illusion to suit us?"  "Well," Freddy replies, "I think what happens is that Management actually changes the reality, not any illusion."  "How could that be?" puzzles Diedre.  "I think we are in a place where reality is plastic, and mind cuts like steel."  ponders Freddy.  A waiter appears out of thin air at their table.  They are used to that by now.  "Did you have a question?" he asks.  "Yes," answers Freddy, "When we change the tree from a palm to a pine or back again, is it an illusion, or does it in fact change it's nature?"  "Management does not deal, sir and madame, in cheap illusion.  Any change you see to suit your wish or mood is a bona fide alteration of previous reality."  Freddy sips at his drink and looks thoughtful.  "How does that work?" he frames his question carefully.  The waiter shifts his silver serving tray from one hand to the other, and explains thusly: "On very common planes of perceived reality, things only get changed through some amount of work or maybe just by accident....."  He grimaces, looks down at his feet, and starts again.  "What I'm trying to say I guess is that here where Management is in operation, work and accident have been made obsolete....on this plane those things played out a long time ago.  You don't need to work to change things, you just have to instruct or suggest how something should be, and the setting defaults to that."  he stops, and waits.  "Oh" he resumes, "As regards accident....accident is just messy, so it is usually not allowed."  Diedre has lost track of the conversation....she is thinking of going back into the pool....which begins to splash gently in anticipation.....

with rockets roaring

Four Color 322 roaring rockets con, originally uploaded by bbmason1981.

they fled

closely pursued by a Nomad warsloop

Estaban jigged and jagged as best he could, popping missiles out the tubes when he saw a chance....he got some hits, but the lizard craft had a good shielding circuit, and it kept coming, pulsing quantum fire back at the dancing gunboat.  "Bet it's that freaking Slither again....or one of his cousins..."  Estaban was muttering to himself as he tried to figure a way out of this jam....the Nomad was closing rapidly, so he flicked on all the gatling sluggers, peppering the warsloop, trying to take out it's targeting sensors....a quantum blast slammed into a gatling turret, leaving nothing there anymore but a splash of molten metal that slewed off into space at a crazy angle....but the pirate spiders had built the gunboat pretty good after all, and it sealed up the wound and kept fighting.....the lizards were pushing to get close enough to launch grapples....Slither probably still wanted to eat Estaban's liver, but first he had to catch him.  Getting too close turned out to be not such a good idea, because once the range got short enough, Estaban lit off the brace of fusion rockets that seemed to have been patched to the hull as an afterthought...actually, it was an old pirate trick....let your enemy think you were almost dead in space, and then pour out sunfire point blank, at the same time powering yourself away from the battle at a random vector.....Estaban grimaced and twisted in the pilot station as the gees wrenched the craft about....and then yelled in glee and relief as the Nomad ship, bathed in fusion flame, twisted off course and he made good his get-away, gravatrons red-lined, rockets roaring.....

roboroach

5 September 2008, originally uploaded by Snowlet.

who didn't like our company

the bar was closed

And they were sitting around the dingy little room....Trixie scratched at her close-cropped scalp, free at last from the wig....she screwed open a quart of malt liquor, and took a big swallow, and leaned back against the madras bed spread stapled to the wall.  She stared out the window at all the crap that got dumped from the City drifting around in outer space....that was one of her favorite passtimes lately seemed like....Slippy, the nomad lizard barback, sat in one corner smoking a hookah, somehow making daisy chains of smoke rings with his scaly lips and forked tongue....in another corner, the sax sucking cyborg had punched open a can of rocket fuel, and was mixing it with motor oil, and having himself a good ol' time.  A roboroach slithered under the door, decided it didn't like the company, and went back out.  "You know why I like being a cyborg?" asked the sax player....Nobody asked him why, but he went ahead and told them anyway...."Cyborgs don't have to worry about women or children or dogs or cats or parrots or any damn thing that needs to be taken care of.....nothing to whine at you and want attention...except maybe a bad ball bearing...."  Trixie thought about that.....no whining?  Where do you go to sign up with that outfit?  The door crashed open, and Wendy and Lisa stumbled in, dragging Cowboy Bob between them....they all fell to the green shag carpet, and started singing  a song that was one long string of off color limericks.....Trixie went back to work on her quart, and Cowboy Bob crawled toward the hookah......

Blue Green Geisha Asian Hair Sticks

Blue Green Geisha Asian Hair Sticks, originally uploaded by ivydee.

to go in your wig

Trixie had a gig

Way deep on the Downside.....a dive couldn't get much below this place....it was so far down it was at the top of the Downside, you see what I mean?  The Blue Geisha is a very strange place....for centuries it's been doing the same trip....blues music played by three ladies done up as geishas....when Felicita decided to marry her spaceman and get away from the damned Wandering City once and for all, she tossed her electric samisen and her silk robes and stuff to her roomie, and so Trixie got promoted from bar girl to blues singer.  And she was pretty good at it....sitting cross-legged on the bamboo mat, she would crank up the fuzz and "Look out your window at the break of dawn, see me down the road I'm gone"....or "If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all".....that kind of tune.  The other two geishas pumped the back beat on bass and drums, and a bleary crowd of dopeheads and drunks and spacemen and other Downside trash would shag-dance and whistle and whoop and sometimes throw bottles....at the band, or at each other....good thing they only had those plastic bottles like they have at ball games, or somebody might get hurt.....the robobouncer would cause the really foolish clowns to chill.....he would hit them with a freezebeam, and then throw their frozen asses in the alley out back.  So you just kept up the boogie music and they would dance and buy drinks....or you slowed it down and really moaned a mean blues and they would all cry in their beer....and buy another round.....you got a share of the door, a share of the bar, and the hard money they tossed on the mat.  Trixie kept her blond hair cut short, and used Felicita's big wig, you know, with the chopsticks stuck through it.....there was this cyborg who would come in on sax some times....he was really good......

blue jade geisha ascendent

blue jade geisha ascendent, originally uploaded by steve_tingle.

this is what the foxy lady wanted us to recover for her....she would pay big bucks.....

Brass Knuckles

Brass Knuckles 3, originally uploaded by JMaddox.

from a novelty shop

foxy lady

There was a vacant office down on the ground floor of the apartment block, where there used to be an insurance agency or something.....Sir Topper picked up a  six-month lease on the space, and we hired a guy to paint our logo on the door.  I shopped around and found an old wooden desk and a couple of chairs, and a beat up floral printed sofa.  We put some cheap prints on the walls, making sure some of them were hung crooked.  And we found a third-hand coffee maker that stank....and I found a place to buy cracked coffee mugs and jam-jar drinking glasses....you know, the kind with little stars around the lip.  So we got a bottle of bonded whiskey and stuck it in the tall desk drawer with the jam-jars, fired up the coffee pot....and waited for our first client.  Sir Topper liked to sit in the corner half in shadow, stroking the styrofoam brass knuckles he had found in a novelty shop....grinning just enough to let his long canines show....I learned how to sit with my feet on the desk without falling over backwards in my squeaky office chair.....and we waited.  And one day right after lunch, a tall blond elfin woman came through the door, in a nice outfit with some kind of fur stole over her shoulders, with a smoke in a long holder, and high heels, and legs that were so long that by the time I got to the knee I had to stop and ask for directions.....is that the line?  The sound-track started playing "Foxy Lady" by Jimi Hendrex....and she sized us both up with a look down her long aristocratic nose that seemed to consign us poor mortals to one of the outer rings of no-class Hades..... Carefully, I managed to get my feet off the desk without any disaster, and I stood up to say "Why hello, mam', can we be of service?"

Film Noir

Film Noir 7 b, originally uploaded by Airchinapilot.

the Dairy Queen lights shine through the shades at night....

Film noir

Topper loved watching the detectives, he liked the old black and white movies from 20th Century Earth in particular....he thought they were gems of the genre.  So one day when we were having lunch at Dairy Queen, he said he had something to show me.  So I clicked on my City Systems computer mind-link, and went to the thing he was talking about.  It was an Authority permit issued to Sir Topper and Consul the Hon. W.M. Dodge....a permit to operate a private investigation agency.  At first that sounded pretty silly to me....Authority knows everything, even your darkest secret....so what would a P.I. have to do, besides ask for the answer?  

"Aha!" says the suddenly equestrian Topper...."What if you can't get the answer from the City Source?"  "Well " says I, "Then Authority must not want you to have the answer, and it would be the better part of discretion to leave it at that."  But Sir Topper said he was pretty bored, and wanted to do something....and you could make a few extra bucks in the investigation racket....look at that Greased Weasel character who had the commercials on the very late night junk channels...he said he could get in anywhere, get the info, and get back out to you with no payments and no interest for ninety days or until he was incarcerated whichever came first.  And he had dancing girls and everything in his spots, so he had to be turning some profit.  So later in the afternoon we went ahead and punched all the right icons and entered a bunch of made-up codes and established the Baker Street Discreet Inquiry Agency, LLP.

Colton in the Wandering City

Colton looking up, originally uploaded by carolinedhillon.

waiting to go to Dairy Queen

Hath you of your love requested thusly....

Of my love of the halo ended player to be wanted.

Dearest my dearest my want to be my whole hearted my bubbles. Why hath you forsaken me? Do you not here my please? Can you want
something I have not given you? Are my harbors to significant. My paltry won tons not heavy enough for you? I understand you want what you want, some dibble, some lotion, some razor chips it bequeaths you. I understand. I understand. What drizzle I understand, I need your come-up-once, to play the way you play. You're being suggest this into what I no to me true. In to that I can money lend you, to trouble to want to money money lend you! I have no course of action to take. To take my longing. I beseech you to no avail.
Honey drips for your orfeus, it leaks, it want you to be real, to taste it, to feel it, to real it. You want to be real. To real. I can bequeath you, it is the monday, the tuesday, the wendsday on and on it goes the one day I want you to have it. We figure it to be unrequested.
And you alone can make it last, a day, a week for ever and ever. To say what is unreal, unwinding, un un un. The say it can be only thus. Your tube. Your erective. Your fug hole for my tun. Your being, wanting, to real to my forsaking. I find your wholly can you see it? Can you touch it? No, no never. We see you as you already are. To take it behind a pulled curtain. To want it like none other than.
You can take it in your tung. Your effectiveness. Your dreams. I can hold it thus. Thus is mine. Mine. Do you want it to me yours? I will give it to you. My thoughts, my actions thus thus thusly for us. In my friend, my pozole, my poseque, my POS. We wait, we wait for a positive reaction to my heart. We wait for a plant operator selection system. We wait. Can we do it? Can my heart take it? My bubbles?
This is what I must do, I take my bubbles to the extreme of the extreme to wait for it. Dearest my dearest my want to be my whole hearted my bubbles. To unsuit you.To unzipped me. To wragle my boot straps. To whom it may concearn I leave my body untrue to you. Can it be what I think it might me, a wiggle and a tickle and best? Aye the best! Dodging the staringly glassy eye of countenance.
Can you be with it? Behind a pulled curtain. Can you take it thus? Can you take it thus for me to be you for you to be me. Allowence for the skipper. True. True that! Any allowence be ture to your upkeep, your allowence be true to you. When I come up to your pale green curtain I can sence you. Pale green like a bodice. And behold your fitted lenghly stares, you come up, come down, come down. Can you taste me then? Can I taste you? When we wage a war within our confines, a legthy battle, a truce, a ure. Our feelies going to grips, our tonque feelies too. All of you I want in me. In me I want all of you. For some money takes what it takes. Are feeling being with us with us us us. In this moment I can just what I just what I feel for you in always something. Some thing. Some thing you can not mention. A buzz I can not feel, a buzz I can not wait, a buzz I an note longer feel the waiting to be it.


Hath you of your love requested thusly.

lots of dancing girls.

Tutu Chorus Line. , originally uploaded by Mikey IQ Jones.

courtesy of the Khan

clever idea

Well, you probably figured out what the machines had in mind....given that they had lots of stuff, more than they knew what to do with....and the spiders spent all their time trying to snag stuff....so the Machine Envoy put it on the table that if the spider-pirates would stop hijacking from other biots, they, the machines, would divert all kinds of loaded cargo carriers and tankers and etc...to the webbed space.  So the spiders would get tons of goods, and the machines would get rid of surplus manufactured capacity.....and the spacelanes would be safe for Imperial Insects, Nomad Lizards, and Earth flagged spaceships.....and everybody could go home happy.  The Khan said this sounded pretty good to him, but could the various embassies at least hang around for a week or so, because he had ordered up a whole hell of a lot of food and drink and dancing girls for this conference thing, and he didn't want to see all that go to waste what with the whole problem being dealt with so quick.  So the hard working diplomats sucked it up and did their duty for the host planet....they partied hearty at night and pushed some papers around a couple of hours every day, until it all looked good, and then they left.

it plays by itself..

it plays by itself.., originally uploaded by titters.

Downside

Downside to City life

Most of the population of the Wandering City seemed to have it pretty good......as long as you just let Authority do what it was going to do, and didn't fuss about it, then things went along just fine.  But you can't have something so big and so old without having some strange goings on.  I mean stranger than Klub Krazy, or Dream Street.....the "spread singularity" which forms the foundation of the City works in both directions.....the City of Authority is the topside, and the realm beyond the gravity reversal is the Downside.....a very distorted mirror image of the enlightened and proper society of machine acumen and established tradition that has attracted the best and brightest of a thousand worlds for ten thousand ages.....down beneath the glittering towers and bustling commerce of the great City, there is another world altogether.....the world of mystery, strange paths, dark secrets, perversity, sanitation facilities, underground niteclubs, midget wrestling, roller derby, bunco squads, quilting bees, fried chicken necks, disenchanted ancient robots, dice-and-ball played for terminal stakes.....disco bowling alleys.....really creepy lounges....bars that serve only rum cola and catfish sandwiches....burger joints that have used the same grease for fries since before the dawn of Man.....it's pretty awesome Downside on a Saturday night, let me tell yuh....

official saucer

Close encounters II, originally uploaded by Erroba.

of the Machine Envoy

Machine Rights

The night before the conference was to open, the cocktail reception was in full swing in the castle in the sky.  Back at the Royal Spaceport, a chrome flying saucer quietly set down, and a single cyborg emerged from the craft.  The machines had decided that if everyone else was going to have a party, they wanted to go too.  After all, machines have rights, you know.  So they had outfitted right off the assembly line a saucer-gunboat, sticking two 1.2 megaton anti-matter cannon into the design.  And they had prepped an Excellent Class cyborg as Machine Envoy....his ivory exterior had been buff-polished, and his scrimshaw detailed out.  And they hung a solid gold bicycle chain around his neck, to symbolize his official nature.  The magi in charge of the flying carpets at the Spaceport were at a lose as to whether or not the Machine Envoy should be whisked to the Royal Reception, or if he should be ignored, since they didn't have any machines or cyborgs on their short list for gratis carpet taxi service.  But the Xanadu Diplomatic Office, who was throwing the whole shindig, quickly switched to the option where the machines did for some reason send somebody, and the official status of the Machine Envoy was confirmed.  It looked pretty impressive anyway, standing calmly on the flapping carpet as it elevated to the cloud castle.  Estaban saw the cyborg enter, and stand briefly just inside the hall, as the herald keyed the P.A. and announced "The Machine Envoy!  er..the envoy of the machines."  His name was the same as his status?  That sounds like a good idea in general, don't you think?  Maybe not.  Anyway, Estaban recalled with some fondness his time with the cyborgs riding the machine tanker, so he made his way through the throng, to see if he could strike up a conversation with Mr. Machine Envoy.  Over by the punch bowl, Shelby took this all in, and began to edge in that direction too....towards the unexpected player, the wild card?  Machines had always simply avoided spider-space, as defined by the webs....didn't cost much to route around them the few times the problem had come up.  So what was machine concern in the present negotiations?   Actually, the Machine Culture had come up with a very clever idea.....(to be continued)

Welcome to Miss Kitty's

Cat & mouse play - linen apron, originally uploaded by linda vignato.

no doggie bags, please.

Miss Kitty's Physic Cafe

Topper, my neighbor across the hall, of an elder race....he said that if I'd never been to a physic cafe, he would take me to one for dinner tonight, if I liked.  So later towards evening we set out walking down Baker Street, heading towards one of the older sections of the Wandering City.  On a section of the boulevard with small gift shops, and tables out on the sidewalks from quaint cafes, we entered Miss Kitty's.  The idea of a physic cafe is that you arrive with no expectations, only a good appetite, and sufficient good credit.  There is no menu, and no daily specials....the physic staff will just take a good look at you and decide the meal that you need.  We were seated by a window, with a view out into a small garden space.  Soon Miss Kitty herself appeared....a feline creature of some sort, a head shorter than I perhaps, looking like a mother cat from Mother Goose.....dressed in a blue and white apron, with a matching bonnet on her head.  To help keep cat hairs out of the food?  With a rumbling purr, she regarded us through cat's eyes.....and made her mind up as to what we needed to eat I guess, because she turned and slinked back to the kitchen doors.  A roboserver quickly arrived with cold beer....so far so good....and then something that seemed to be either chicken nuggets, or maybe they were fish, with a red dipping sauce, and a white.  Then for me, a dinner salad, a typical "house" salad like at a good steakhouse.  For Topper, some alien looking greens, with beets?  And then soup...my favorite corn chowder, Topper with something with shells floating in it.  And then for me a perfect plate of pork-roast, with new potatoes, peas-and-onions, and gravy.....Topper was digging into what could have been a roasted capon, but with four wings.  And my grandma's bread pudding, and black coffee.  Replete and beaming, rubbing our bellies, we expressed our delight to Miss Kitty, paid the bill and left a hefty tip, and wandered off into the night.

in the galley of the Merry Wider

Hickory Hills Bar-B-Que, May 2, 2009, originally uploaded by tinguru.

Slops is doing without a helper, while Estaban is away in Xanadu.