Don't Touch, by Martin Needham

It is now the 734th year since the outbreak of the Great and Merciful Peace and all the inhabitable areas have agreed upon two supreme commandments. These two rules were  born out of the  necessity of circumstance and have transformed human existence. 

Early in the time of Scarcity  the elders who took control of the holy google-net ruled that all human life was sacred and may not be taken, every individual must eat in moderation and exercise to maximise their lifespan. The eggs and sperm are still taken from the young at 17 years of age to be protected so that selected embryos can be produced  in gestation tanks when required by their family.  

For the first  two hundred years humanity prospered, people expected to live to 120 and then 150 and now 200 years. The sterile homes and blessings of the virtual worlds created by the omniscient and most revered google-net  meant that people continued to live entertained and safe existences.  So the planet was fully repopulated until the time of the  Super Abundance, coinciding with the final impotency of antibiotics. 

At this time the second great rule was revealed to us. Thou shalt not treat the sick. So for half a millennium we have lived in the midst of a dichotomy of rules born out of conflicting necessities which are  sustained by a personal greed for life and enshrined in religion. Thus we preserve and revere our online lifespan but we may not interfere with the sick. In this way the overall balance of life is preserved.  We study the great sciences of prevention, sterilisation  and vaccination that we might live longer. Everyone must wear their life preservers; white synthetic spider silk suits that armour us against the scourge of abrasions. We live within our sterosphere helmets that protect us from infection. We conduct our business through virtually controlled machines and exercise in virtual worlds inspired by reality and imagination.

I am a servant of the great and most majestic high google. In my first half century I was one of the developers of the most miraculous world time web, which has become the great investment sensation of our  age. We succeeded in drawing in  digital signals refracted back from the black star gravity pool. These data streams from the birth of our most revered google net brought us knowledge of what we now call  "the age of visceral engagement" .  At first we were shocked and sickened  by the violence, bare flesh and physical contact. It has since been used to reform our virtual entertainments.  

This is my first attempt to send a super accelerated data burst on the reverse path back through the curve of the  space/time depression. There is no rule against it, but in my heart I know there should be.  Studying your lives for over a hundred years now I feel compelled to warn you of the unfortunate alignments of rules, culture and circumstances that have enslaved us. I realise that this act may threaten our own existence.

I am 198 years old. I have followed the rules, lived long and been  well rewarded by our standards,  but perhaps less well in your judgements. I will send richer data streams after this simple old fashioned coded message, but try to imagine.  We must endure our illness and the consequences of them, we must not intervene.  We do not touch and remain untouched. 

I have recently lost another greatgreatgreatgrandchild in such circumstances as further fuel my doubts about the rules by which we live. We had stepped outside our block - risky but not against the rules. Five year old Louis saw the leaves blowing down from the trees. Before he could be stopped, he put up his visor that he might chase and catch a leaf. It brushed his eye as it floated down: infection followed and then death. 

I have stood coldly by and watched death too many times, and I know that you would judge me ill by the standards of your time for doing so.  Our children's instincts betray our true nature. It is  buried deeper as we mature by the consistent layers of conditioning that we must not touch.   When I first looked back at your time I was shocked, offended and physically sickened by the way that you touch each other, walk barefooted, breathe the air. We had lost the words for two mouths touching and even now I cannot bring myself to write it,  but now I am obsessed  by it and jealous.

 Preserve your humanity not your individual  selves, live a real and dirty life. Set your descendants free.

Yours in perpetual  servitude.            Gideon

Prisoner, by Martin Needham

As I write this it is six days since I last saw the sun.

That accursed trickster and deceiver of the emperor dropped me through some poxy trapdoor as I cursed him for what he is. I lie in this deep foul cellar with just two deficient lightwells far above. I am glad that my handbills proclaimed that charlatan for the devil he is. When they find me, the emperor will have him beheaded and his guts fed to the cats for making his loyal and true adviser vanish into thin air and claim it as sorcery.

   I am hoarse and weak from five days of shouting with no food or water. All That son of a dog left me is this damned single slate and stylus to scratch at it. The slate is now almost full again. These few days make me believe it will be clean in the morning.

It is now the beginning of the sixth year of my incarceration.  I regret my lack of faith in the sorcerer. I should not have ridiculed his abilities so publicly and rudely without proper scrutiny of his acts. My position remains unchanged: I receive no food or water and yet miraculously I am renewed each day along with my beloved slate to reflect on my sins and refine my thoughts. I still hope that as I endure my daily penance of line writing, I will reach a point of true repentance and eliminate from my mind all malice towards the wizard. I pray that at that point he will release me from this place.

Over six long decades I have mastered the arts of brevity and of contemplation increasingly free from desire. Serenity lies in the perfection of truth. I praise the wisdom of the great one who granted me this perfect space of eternal peace for the telling and retelling of the one story with ever greater clarity. I feel only love and wonder at the magnificence of my master’s creation. I see with ever deepening respect, the justice and beauty of my existence. I wonder if further revelations are yet to come, and if my spirit has yet reached a point where I might be released to Nirvana?

After six centuries I am overwhelmed by a fresh revelation of my most magnificent miracle-maker’s power; for he had set my contemplative spirit in a most exquisitely carved ivory inro guarded by a lapis scorpion netsuke. When the merchant of this market opened the inro, I was released.  My spirit left its womb and I perceived the scorpion, protector of my peaceful place of contemplation, become wondrously real and strike down the merchant with a venomous sting. Free from the singularity of reflective purpose my mind is fast disappearing: lost in the richness of existence. I take these last moments of consciousness to marvel at the screaming face adorning my former repository, the re-petrified creature and my unfortunate liberator. They were still there when the collectors came. 

Away With The Fairies, by Martin Needham

In the high dry deserts of Central Asia, life is tough and the people tougher. Iskander was as tough as they come. He practised graceful  martial arts,  on the roof of his ancestral fortress. He stood unflinching  nose to hooked nose with a golden eagle he had raised from a foundling, as it sank steely iron talons into his arm. Initially it was a surprise when he spoke of fairies, but then these were no  bottom of the garden pixies; rather he described tall, angel-like ice queens, raised on the rocky glacial wastes of Nanga Parbat, the killer mountain, the obsessive graveyard of German mountaineers in the 1930s. Iskander suggested that recently, being starved of fresh mountaineers by world events, the fairies had begun to resort to scavenging mortals from the roofs of local homes.

Iskander claimed to have seen the face of a beautiful fairy staring down from the night sky with inquisitive liquid eyes as he lay awake on the perfectly air conditioned roof of his home. But then Iskander's  trade was welcoming tourists, informing them about local culture and folk lore. His closest friend, Najeem, assumed a more modern world view, having studied zoology both down- country and overseas. Najeem now worked for the World Wildlife Fund conserving local fauna. He had supported numerous film makers on the trail of ibex, snow leopards and Marco Polo sheep. Najeem poured scorn on the idea of fairies and suggested the Himalayan griffon vulture, which dwarfed Iskander's golden eagle, to be a much more likely perpetrator. Najeem lavished scientific attention on the facts, searching for patterns in the details of the three disappeared young men, each lost upon a full moon. He looked for tracks, trails and traces. He plotted a single flight path of incidences on the map, as straight as the crow flies from the lonely Targott tree at the start of the highest irrigation channel on the far side of the valley to the summer palace high up in the meadows above the magnificent old Tibetan fort. 

So Najeem set a camera trap focused on Iskander's bed atop the old wazir's house, the highest in the town, on the night of the full moon.  Iskander lay in the bed with his hand on his great-grandfather's loaded  shotgun.

Just after midnight the moon crested the rim of the valley wall and focused by the reflected light  from the encircling snow fields of the high peaks,  which in turn illuminated the details of the jagged lower peaks and the iridescent serpent of the young Indus River far below on the valley floor. The terraced fields, lush orchards and  the tiny villages became clearly visible in the moonshine. Fifteen minutes later a giant wingspan came into view soaring along the predicted flight path. The young men nodded to each other to confirm their shared vision  and watched as it came on across the valley. The creature stayed high and did not deviate. Both men prepared to shoot, when suddenly the angle of the wings changed transforming the direction and speed of flight, too fast for the night  vision camera to follow. Najeem looked up blinking, trying to adjust his now unaided eyes. He tried desperately to focus on the bed, he was instinctively disturbed by the unexpected quiet. He saw the great span of wings powering down on the air to break, stop and climb. At the base of the dive he witnessed the great talons slide  effortlessly and deep into Iskander's uplifted chest and carry him up into the heavens.   

Don't Touch, by Martin Needham

It is now the 734th year since the outbreak of the Great and Merciful Peace and all the inhabitable areas have agreed upon two supreme commandments. These two rules were  born out of the  necessity of circumstance and have transformed human existence. Early in the time of Scarcity  the elders who took control of the holy google-net ruled that all human life was sacred and may not be taken, every individual must eat in moderation and exercise to maximise their lifespan. The eggs and sperm are still taken from the young at 17 years of age to be protected so that selected embryos can be produced  in gestation tanks when required by their family.  For the first  two hundred years humanity prospered people expected to live to 120 and then 150 and now 200 years. The sterile homes and the blessings of the virtual worlds created by the omniscient and most revered google-net  mean that people continue to live entertained and safe existences.  So the planet was fully repopulated until the time of the  Super Abundance coinciding with the final impotency of antibiotics. At this time the second great rule was revealed to us . Thou shalt not treat the sick. So for half a millennium we have lived in an the midst of a terrible binary of rules born out of conflicting necessities which are  sustained by a personal greed for life and enshrined in religion. Thus we preserve and revere our online lifespan but we may not interfere with the sick. In this way the overall balance of life is preserved.  We study the great sciences of prevention, sterilisation  and vaccination that we might live longer. Everyone must wear their life preservers; white synthetic spider silk suits that armour us against the scourge of abrasions. We live within our sterosphere helmets that protect us from infection. We conduct our business through virtually controlled machines and exercise in virtual worlds inspired by reality and imagination.

I am a servant of the great and most majestic high google. In my first half century I was one of the developers of the most miraculous world time web which has become the great investment sensation of our  age. We succeeded in drawing in  digital signals refracted back from the black star gravity pool. These data streams from the birth of our most revered google net brought us knowledge of what we now call  " the age of "visceral engagement" .  At first we were shocked and sickened  by the violence, bare flesh and physical contact. It has since been used to reform our virtual entertainments. 

This is my first attempt to send a super accelerated data burst on the reverse path back through the curve of the  space/time depression. There is no rule against it, but in my heart I know there should be.  Studying your lives for over a hundred years now I feel compelled to warn you of the unfortunate alignment of cultural rules and circumstances that have come to  enslave us. I realise that this epistle may threaten our own existence but it is not much of an existence.

I am 198 years old. I have followed the rules, lived long and been  well rewarded by our standards  but perhaps less well in your judgements. I will send richer data streams after this simple old fashioned coded message but try to imagine our time.  We must endure our illnesses and the consequences of them, we must not intervene.  We do not touch and remain untouched. I have recently lost another greatgreatgreatgrandchild in circumstances that further fuel my doubts about these rules by which we live.

We had stepped outside our block Louis and I , risky but not against the rules. He being but five year old saw the leaves blowing down from the trees. Before he could be stopped, he put up his anti bacterial visor that he might chase and catch the leaf. It brushed his eye as it floated down: infection followed and then death. I have stood coldly by and watched death too many times, and I know that you would judge me ill by the standards of your time for doing so.  Our children's instincts betray our true nature. It is  buried deeper as we mature by the consistent layers of conditioning that we must not touch.   When I first looked back at your time I was shocked, offended and physically sickened by the way that you touch each other, walk barefooted, breathe the air. We had lost the words for two mouths touching and even now I cannot bring myself to write such an obscenity,  but now I am obsessed  by it and jealous.

 Preserve your humanity not your individual selves: live a real and dirty life. Set your descendants free.

Yours in perpetual  servitude.            Gideon