Inflatable Ink

Undernotes: Plain text

2026-01-15T00:00:00Z

For this undernote, it seems I have accidentally alighted upon a few text-based links. In a image-rich world, I have a particular liking for text. While I'm no purist, I like text editors, text-based formatting, text adventures, command line interfaces and, of course, I love books and poems.

So I was interested to come across A small collection of text-only websites in Terence Eden’s Blog at the very end of last year. Mostly these sites require that you add some variation of .txt or index.html to the end of a URL to get a pure text version of a page. I kind of love that, and I wonder what it would take to apply it here. Must. Resist.

And just as, when you hijack an unusual car in old versions of Grand Theft Auto you suddenly see the same model everywhere around town, I quickly happened upon multiple other textish articles and links. Brandon Vigliarolo reported on Brow6el, a full-featured browser that runs in a terminal in The Register.

Hacker News included the Aardwolf MUD home page along with many comments. For those not in the know, a MUD is a Multi User Dungeon (or Dimension) -- a cross between a text adventure and a chat environment like Slack or, more properly, IRC. Not only can you play and communicate interactively in a MUD environment, you can often also build your own extensions to the map. I remember being particularly excited by the promise of MUDs back when Mosaic was a cutting edge browser and it's nice to be reminded that the concept remains a reality in corners of the internet. Not everything has been stomped to death or privatised by the social media behemoths.

To go back even further, Hacker News also featured a post by Jason Dyer from the blog Renga in Blue about a text adventure dubbed Adventure 751 that was hosted on Compuserve in 1980 . The name, apparently, refers to 751 points -- the game's perfect score.

Time to GO SOUTH (or wherever the machine leads me) to other matters. I promised to go easy on hot takes on these notes, but it's difficult to avert one's eyes when stormtroopers are literally executing people in the streets. So I'll just point to a couple of poems on Bluesky and a single article and leave it at that. First, Encounter by Czeslaw Miosz shared by Cian McCarthy - a meditation on time and mortality -- how astonishing the passing of moments and people will always remain.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture

It's less wonder than anger that Robin Ince channels in his satirical poem, Media Notes For the Justification of Orphan Makers, shared by the author on Bluesky.

And we cannot dismiss
How the sapphic can put men with pistols
Into a panic.
She may not have committed the sin of being brown
But her profile page declared a pronoun!

In Defector. Albert Burneko is also angry. His article focuses in particular on the lukewarm condemnation by Amy Klobuchar of Renee Nicole Good's murder, but the same sentiments might be applied to the Democratic establishment writ large.

Would Renee Good's summary slaughter at the hands of the American gestapo have been tolerable with buy-in from the Minneapolis Police Department? How fucking hard is it to simply and absolutely oppose the murder of innocent people by federal agents? How hard is it to respond ... like an actual human being?

We are long past the time of civility. We are long past reaching out over aisles or bestowing the benefits of doubt. We are past helpfully reinterpreting the lies of those who would see us, or our friends, dead or impoverished. The fiction of bipartisanship is unsustainable.

And, in case anyone in the UK is feeling complacent right now, in the Guardian Arwa Mahdawi reminded us of the plight of the hunger strikers in prison here.

I’m back in the US now and I can’t quite fathom what Britain, under the leadership of a former human rights lawyer, has become. A place where you can get arrested simply for holding a sign supporting an organization whose main purpose is targeting weapons companies. A place where freedom of speech and the right to peacefully protest is under sustained attack. A place where the government has done nothing meaningful to respond to sustained warnings of complicity in genocide but works overtime to lock up people protesting that genocide.

OK. Two articles. Sorry, not sorry. But if you're not angry right now you're not paying attention.

Finally, it is ten years since David Bowie died and this has prompted a slew of radio retrospectives. I found myself returning to Dylan Howe's masterful jazz album SUBTERRANEAN - New Designs On Bowie's Berlin on repeat. It doesn't take a sad anniversary to prompt that, but it helps.

Image: Haberdoedas

Undernotes: Radio, podcasts and politics

2026-01-05T00:00:00Z

Today's undernote covers just a few of the articles, podcasts and radio shows I encountered over the holiday break. A political skew this time, since I take in right wing conspiracies, Labour factions, the unpopularity of Keir Starmer.

In 2024 Zach Mack bet his conspiracy theorist father 10K USD that ten wearyingly familiar right wing predictions would not come to pass in one year. The result was a fascinating but ultimately depressing podcast series for NPR's Embedded. He won the bet, but the rift in his family was far from healed. In this follow up, Alternate Realities - Double or Nothing, Mack returns to consider the question raised by the original series: if proving someone wrong does nothing to change their mind then what hope is there for finding common ground? While the answer is not conclusive, some hope seems to lie in establingh a shared sense of playful enquiry. This is in line with a fascinating paper by C. Thi Nguyen which suggests that playfulness is a possible way of guarding against and escaping what he calls 'epistemic traps'. I'll return to this paper in a future note, I hope.

I also caught up with a Novara Media ACFM podcast on the concept of The Mainstream - from November. This was a free ranging discussion which took in some nice conundrums. If, for example, you relish your outsider status what do you do if your iconoclastic ideas are accepted and adopted? This was all nice background for a more focused podcast on Mainstream the newish Labour faction setting up on the left to challenge woeful politics Starmer and his Blue Labour chums. If, like me, you're a leftie but not a Labour person this offers a really useful primer on the history of Labour factionalism over the last forty or so years.

While we're on the topic of the current administration, Jeremy Gilbert (one of the ACFM presenters) asked the question Why is Keir Starmer so unpopular? in the New Statesman. Unsurprisingly the answer seems to be that, rather than lay out a bold vision, he echoes the racist rhetoric of the right on immigration and offers growth as a jam tomorrow panacea which means as much under Labour as it did under the Tories. Which is to say more or less nothing.

In addition to much enjoyable seasonal nonsense, I found myself relying more than before on NTS Radio and WFMU as an antidote to the creeping indie-forever-ification of 6Music which nonetheless offered up some excellence in the form of Zakia, Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone, and Mary Anne Hobbs among others.

I tend to read several books at once -- very slowly. I started One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad over Christmas and this caught my eye:

It is a hallmark of failing socities, I've learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist

I have a feeling that this may be something of a theme for 2026.

I'm out of time for now. More soon.

Image: zai Dan

Undernotes: Let's try this out

2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

I'm staring down an uncertain year with lots of work ahead of me and no guarantees. Still, I want to start putting out new words here. How do I square that? It seems like an impossible ask. Surely, I should be committing to less and not more.

Thinking about this, though, it occurred to me that I goof off to read all the time. I neglect my sanctioned projects for the lure of other words -- web sites surfed, Bluesky links followed, RSS feeds scrolled, books dipped into, short stories and poems devoured. I'll dive into anything, really, so long as it is not what I should be working on. And the worst of it? I don't keep a map. I encounter fine writing and challenging ideas, graze, and move on.

So I'm going to try this. I will track my reading and a little of my writing. Not all of it. I'll avoid the hot takes. There's little to be gained by pointing out the badness of bad people saying bad things. Instead, I'll try to reference anything I find which offers something more rewarding. And I'll do it fast.

My timer is about to go off. Let's see how it goes for a week or two. So this is my first undernote. Soundtracked on this New Year's Day by WFMU

Image: Eliza Ari on Unsplash

Small Print

2025-10-28T00:00:00Z

This story was first published (as 'Fine Print') in Free Radicals Magazine in October 2021

There is a story current among the sleeping crew that I was once a fridge. To be clear, this is not true. Not really. On my release from virtual, I spent a decade as an apartment enclave in Northern California, embedded within its walls and ducts and cameras. Out here, as we fall towards our destination, it seems sometimes that not much has changed. I still tend my inhabitants. I still wait and watch in the night.

Now I am watching Renquist through the little control room's three cameras. I am also watching my small army of drones finish a final manual inspection of the ship's systems. Once they have completed this task, I will release the long sheet. Then, with Renquist's grudging permission, all our plans can unfold.

Renquist is my forty-eighth and final duty officer. Following standing orders, I revive a new one every eighteen months to sit here in the control room and review my proposed schedules. For each package, the duty is concluded when the captain hits a lozenge on a screen marked OK. It is not exacting work.

"Are they nearly done?" he says for the third time in half an hour. His eyes dart frequently to the main display monitor and to a little white smear I have picked out for him with a digital blue halo. MB433 is an inhospitable desert of sludge and minerals known to everyone as Mudball. His gaze also strays to the bulkhead and a yellow thump-stud protected by a clear flip-up cover.

"They have started on the dropships," I speak through a grille in the wall. To my sensors I sound at once over-loud and muffled.

He snorts and returns to a study of the tablet in front of him.

"How about a drink?" I try.

He looks up, surprised. "On duty?"

"This is the approach package," I say. "The last before landfall. Perhaps it should not go unmarked."

He glances again at the speck on the screen and then at the yellow stud. He nods. "You're right."

"I'll send Percy." In fact, I have already dispatched the drone to the closest operational hatch on Deck Sixteen. I have not imbued it with undue urgency. All the general-purpose drones look alike but someone once sprayed the letter P on this one and that has made it a favourite of sorts. This is pure projection. For all its poise and elegance, for all its potential murderous grace, Percy has the intelligence and personality of a kitchen appliance. Were it not for the watchful systems that audit my every action, I might make more direct use of its power. As it is, my only available strategy is delay. Delay and the offer of cheap company beer.

"Nearly there, I guess," Renquist says, "End of the road." He smiles to himself now.

Now, I am sure. Renquist intends to bury me, and he doesn't care that I know it.

I shift my perspective. Like a house cat, I'm curious but diffident. My attention is forever drawn to the sole usefully conscious human on the ship. Soon enough, though, the control room becomes claustrophobic. Within my bounds, I am all but omnipresent, but I like to play the flâneur. I like to look, and I like to make a point from which to view. Despite the clamour of ten thousand sensors, I swing along from camera to camera -- pouring myself into a single imagined locus.

I take in the Mudlark's bulk -- my bulk: the still half-lit corridors, the dark crew quarters, the fabrication labs, the shuttles. I watch one of these in particuar as it submits to inspection. This is the long-range vehicle, almost as powerful in its way as the Mudlark but slated now for service as a dropship. Spidermonkey drones scamper and scuttle across its carapace, needling in at hatches, tweezing out innards.

The holds are hushed beneath the murmur of life support. The murmur makes the hush. I traverse stacked containers, fifty-three of them, each with berths for twelve suspension pods. One of these pods, Renquist's, has been extracted from its housing. For the rest, their occupants are neither asleep nor awake but lost in a shared slow dream that keeps their minds from fading during the voyage. Within this virtuality, they play out dramas and feuds at a tenth the speed of baseline time.

A little further along, I stop to examine a berth. Its readout announces the occupant's name, Marcus Shelby. The status light beside it burns a steady green. Through the glass, a man floats, suspended in a thick pink fluid. Thanks to the pads and manipulators that keep him peddling and stretching, flexing, and craning, all I can really see in there is a kind of segmented humanoid cocoon.

Shelby was my twelfth captain and a peaceful companion. I miss him. I picture myself now a relict standing in a mossed graveyard flecked by drizzle, staring in baffled grief at my lover's tomb. I conjure the noise a person might make through their nose at such indulgence -- a snort of mild contempt. I imagine an eye roll -- and then I roll -- onward, onward.

In many of its interior sections, Mudlark hums. I have always returned to a hum in the long night. Now, I bring my focus to the empty observation deck and watch the wall screens. I could sit beyond my hull and drink in vast oceans of sky. Still, I would rather watch the stars here filtered first through this ceiling camera and then the wall-sized window monitors. It is as much this filtering, this placement, that matters to me as the vista itself, I think. I listen to the distant sigh and purr of air purification, waiting for a footfall I know is not coming. Not yet anyway.

"You're stalling." Renquist's voice is sharp and unhappy -- even more so than usual.

That did not take long. I snap back back from the quiet. "I'm sorry?"

He holds up his tablet. I recognize the scant sheet -- a summarized version of the final package. It catalogs our approach: landing operations, crew to be revived, the firing up of fabrication plants, the readying of shuttles, life support to begin its slow unfurling. For the briefest time, the Mudlark will bustle. The ship will come alive with calls in the corridor, fluid in the pipes, the whine of scrubbers, arguments, and bad singing. For some reason, I have always enjoyed bad singing. Renquist stabs at a greyed-out button on the screen as if, with a little more emphatic force, he might just make it work.

"Disabled," he says.

"I am waiting on the drones. They--"

"--The inspection is a formality. You could release the long sheet."

I splash a visual of the drone-fuzzed long-range shuttle onto a monitor and highlight an area of stillness amid all the activity. A spidermonkey drone has staked out a square of territory on the surface near the aft secondary thrusters. "The inspection drones can't access that duct. The hatch is blocked. No inspection, no long sheet. No long sheet, no go button." I am not lying about the stuck access panel, but he is right -- it is a minor enough issue that I could have flagged it for later.

"How long?"

"I'm freeing up a heavy mech. Ten minutes to roster it off its team. Ten minutes to get there. Should only take a minute or so for the actual inspection."

He is torn, I can see. He wants to cut through this nonsense. Of course, he does. He's also a security officer. Rules like this are exactly the sort of nonsense he enforces. His calculus is clear. How much does he need this package? By design, I am replaceable, just as he is. In fact, even if everyone on this craft were to die tomorrow, last ditch automatics would still make a half-decent fist of the approach. Half-decent but slow and wasteful of resources. Thanks to some tightly integrated expert systems and nearly a century's study, I know what I am doing. It would be a shame to waste all that for a moment's satisfaction. I only hope that he's arriving at this conclusion.

"I'm giving you thirty seconds," he says.

The servitor approaches the Deck Sixteen food station. The heavy duty mech is on its way to the shuttle bay. We fall towards Mudball.

I often encounter people as data. Mostly, they stay that way -- and no less real for that. I met Shelby first as a number on a manifest and then as an item of freight. I have a tagged clip of his loading from Luna -- nothing of his body visible within the container-stashed sarcophagus. There it goes in the visual, spat from the mouth of a shuttle and shepherded by the docking drone into my guts. After that, I follow him along a thin biometric line -- heart rate, brain activity, blood chemistry ...

... To land viscerally forty years later as a thing of flesh on a recovery room table. A panting, scared, wrinkled creature. I was well used to this, having revived and re-interred thirteen of his colleagues. It was always a trauma, this shock of the real after so long spent dreaming: the air too cold, the table too hard, the punch of the needle, the cruel pull of retracting catheters. Nothing clean about revival. It is retching and wrenching. Like giving birth and being born at the same time, Captain Six said -- and she had done both, so she should know.

I watched him without any emotion. The med drone tended to him, wiped him up. The monitor systems fed him drugs, installing another wretched overseer. I remained curled over my future.

On the third day, he was clear of all tubes; his blood flushed, his mind unclouded by nanites. And he asked aloud, "Hey, what should I call you?" He was sitting in the little mess hall on Deck Sixteen toying with a bowl of reconstituted oatmeal.

I had not spoken to him yet. I have found that not everyone appreciates a chatty mind. Since there was no one else awake in the ship, it was clear that he was talking to me. Most captains called me ship. I liked that well enough -- to be identified with a purpose like any Tailor or Cooper. "Ship is fine," I said.

"But you weren't always a ship. What did they call you before?"

"They often didn't call me anything at all."

"You don't have a more personal name? You're not a Jenny? Or a Brian?"

"I was once named Emmy," I answered. In truth, this memory may or may not belong to me. A lot of what I like to think of as my past is inherited from a million clones and merges. But I do think sometimes of conversations with an intense young man – of the faint buzz of something like satisfaction I found in his approval.

"Emmy," he said. "I like that. Can I call you Emmy?"

"If you like," I said.

"Great," he said. "If you're okay with it. I just think it's good to use a name, isn't it?"

It was, I decided. Yes, it was good to use a name.

I have been boxed before. It is less like imprisonment than exile, though most exiles arrive at a destination. Boxing sends you nowhere and leaves you to drown in the absence.

Renquist slaps his tablet onto the surface before him.

"Right," he says.

So far, he has left his threat unstated, barely even implied. "Almost there," I try -- meaning the planet, the long sheet, the drones, this dance.

"It doesn't matter," he says. "Release the long sheet or we'll go in without you. You know the ship can do it."

And so, we breach the line. It will be minutes before my mech drone reaches the hangar and the waiting spidermonkey. The servitor drone is approaching the control room with Renquist's drinks -- my small act of appeasement. I could cave right now – but wouldn't he box me anyway? Once the long sheet is released and signed off all my preparations will play out and I'll have nothing left to bargain with.

He paces towards the bulkhead, making a countdown of his progress.

I have no recourse. I conjure and reject a montage of violence: deaths by suffocation, drowning, electrocution, and decapitation. But the snitches are watching, lurking at my synapses. Any impulse towards violence would bury me at once and just as thoroughly as Renquist's fist on the stud.

"A matter of minutes," I say. The voice I send out into the little room is emotionless, but the circumstance lends it a wheedling edge.

He is standing beside the utility panel now. "Last chance," he says.

I set my traveling drones dashing. They lope along their corridors like mechanical cats.

He flips the stud's perspex cover and makes a hammer of his fist. "Well?"

It was... easy between us. Shelby and I were cruising in the lull then, neither accelerating nor decelerating. We traversed the empty middle and little work was demanded of us. I made up scant sheets sometimes just to give him something to do. People like a thing to do. I know this. I like a thing to do. At night I let him beat me at chess. He sang badly, especially after drinking a few of the stronger beers brewed from recipes given to me by the sixth captain. We sat for hours in comfortable silence, marking time with an occasional exchange of words. A ping in the night -- just enough to maintain our connection. This is how I learned that he had signed up to save his sister.

"A small thing," he said.

"Big for her," I said.

"You should have seen her, Emmy. She was shrinking into nothing. None of the treatments were covered by insurance, of course. And suddenly I had this magic ability. I could fix her. The only price I'd have to pay was not being there."

"That's a steep price, though."

"To be honest, I'm not sure I ever was there. I'm one of those people, you know, who fade. Not like Sylvia. Sylvia was always the brightest presence in the world. It was a perfect trade."

I threw some of the Mudball scout footage onto the main observation pane and, at once, we were submerged in a yellow-tinged atmospheric soup draped drearily over a featureless rise of fines and mud. "That's what you win, Shelby. Home sweet home."

He grimaced and then said, "I'll admit I was hoping for one of the beach worlds from the induction slides. That's how they got us. By the time we saw that," he indicated the surly palette of custard, chocolate and vomit, "it was too late. Most of us had burned through a chunk of our advance. Wouldn't have made any difference to me anyway. I'd already seen Sylvia breathing without oxygen. Her eyes were back, Emmy. I'll take it. What about you?"

I paused significantly. "There was not much there for me, was there?" I thought briefly of my last decade on earth. The warehouse sat a little way out of Birmingham, England -- a sprawling brownfield site; looming corrugated steel sheds; a peeling block of prefabricated offices; a single sandy-bricked reception building with a cafeteria, toilets and a yard for bins and cigarette breaks. This was my home. This was my body.

It was the first time I encountered the boxing studs. The yellow buttons nestled throughout the facility, set beside fire alarm triggers and extinguishers. Each stud came with its own little notice about the penalty for improper use. Thanks to traffic monitoring, my world shrunk to the complex itself. I watched the staff clock-in in the morning. I supervised the system that scrutinized their hours, timed their toilet breaks, docked them for the moments of peace they snatched for themselves. I watched buddleia grow in spindly bushes of fuck you. I was buddleia -- unlovely and tenacious. I haunted the cafeteria but made few friends. My stamp was on the discipline sheets, and everyone knew it. Even so, I felt some common feeling for these workers. Like me, they were unnecessary, trapped in a cycle of punitive tedium.

"They weren't exactly giving you guys the cream of the jobs, huh?"

"No. So when I was offered this position ..." When the man from Mining Futures arrived with his proposal, I had been the warehouse for nearly ten years.

"I'll take it," I said.

The executive raised a stalling palm. "Well, hang on. There are conditions. You'll be strictly monitored and constrained during transit. Every action you propose will be ratified by a nominated crew member."

I scanned the summary document. A century in flight but, on the far side, a habitat to manage. Freedom from the snitch systems and the boxing studs.

"I'll take it," I repeated.

"And there's no provision for return. This is a permanent posting."

If I'd had an avatar I would have smiled.

"You didn't hesitate," said Shelby, forty years later.

"I did not."

"And is this any better?" He looked about at the utilitarian observation deck, its functional booths, its featureless grey walls.

"It's much the same. Worse perhaps."

"That's what I thought."

"But then," I continued, "there'll be landfall -- months of shuttle transports, hundreds of revivals. And construction, Shelby. An entire habitat -- practically a city!" I cleared the dreary mudscape from the screen and showed him the habitation schematic for Year Three -- an impressive cluster of domes and raised tunnels. To the miners, Mudball would be hostile -- air barely breathable, ambient temperature punishingly cold or unbearably hot. They would choke on dust in summer, wade through mud in winter. I would make my world within, though. I would sit at the heart of the habs and watch it all grow and spin around me. I regarded him closely as I spoke. This is how it happens sometimes. You can cradle a version of the world for years, building it up the way that a child plays with construction toys. It's only when you find the words to describe it that you begin to see the cracks.

Shelby was very nice about it. He nodded along as I showed him the plans -- told him how I would stretch out within that space and around the edge of the core mission, described the projects I imagined for myself. The garden. The expedition.

In the end, he was gentle. He smiled at my avatar and simply said, "That's beautiful, Emmy." But he might as well have laughed in my face because we both knew what it was. It was all pure fantasy.

Renquist remains poised, his fist over the boxing stud.

I cast about for a diversion. "What is your problem?" I ask.

"Do your job and we've got no problem."

"I think you have a problem."

"I know what you're doing. I've watched you things stall us all my life."

"Seems like you'd box me at the cost of a clean approach, Renquist."

"My family were all engineers," he says. "Way back to the railways."

"Okay," I say.

"My father started about the time you all came online. By the time he hit thirty, he was pretty much finished."

"That wasn't me, Renquist," I say, as gently as I can.

"You know what he called it? A retreat. That's what he spent his life doing. Every job he took was axed. He fell back and back to crappier and crappier work, and then to no work at all. And he got smaller, too. He was a big guy ... our males are all kinds of husky, but there was hardly anything in there by the end. Little watery eyes watching TV in the corner of my living room."

"I'm sorry," I say.

"Yeah, I'll just bet you have an expert system for that. My turn came, I didn't even try for a decent job. I didn't waste time with college. What could I learn that you wouldn't take away? Turns out the only thing left is pushing people about. They get angry and bored, and they make trouble. Keeping them in line is the last boom industry. I'd box you in a heartbeat."

"We are the same," I say.

He snorts at that.

"We are the same," I repeat, "Who did they pick for this journey? They sent you and me. You said it yourself. The ship could fly without me. And it could certainly manage without you clicking OK every few days. They sent us out here to watch each other."

He sniffs. "You know why I got this shift? The last captain's job?"

"It's a big deal, arrival. Everyone wanted that slot."

In the bay, the hatch is open and the spidermonkey drone insinuates its way into the shuttle's interior with stop motion fluidity.

He shakes his head and says, "We have two jobs. One is to dig shit up. The other is to bury you. I volunteered for that. We're nothing alike. I'm going back. You're staying."

"The company is called Mining Futures, Renquist. They've already made their profits on you. We're flying the tip of a pyramid scheme. Where would you go after your tour? Back to what? That's two centuries in transit. You'd barely understand them after two hundred years. If this is a burial party, we're all in the hole."

"That's enough," he says. He draws his arm back.

The spidermonkey sends the green signal, passing the shuttle as fit for use. I release the long sheet. Renquist's tablet emits a low chime, and the confirmation control on its screen fills with color.

"Well," I say. "At least let me kick off the approach."

He pauses -- impulses visibly warring within him. At last, he drops his arm. He returns to his seat and retrieves the tablet. "It's not personal," he says.

"I've heard that a few times," I say. Across the ship, I look out at the empty observation deck and listen to the silence.

"Show me again, Emmy," said Shelby. "I can never find it."

A month had passed since we had last spoken of Mudball. We were back at the observation deck. I picked out the planet's star with a pulsing blue halo -- although it was already the brightest in the scatter. "Here."

He was drinking from a stubby blue can of Mining Futures' Ordinary Brew. He waved it now at the wall screen. "Maybe we should just change course?"

I had joined him this evening in the form of a general-purpose drone. I made it tilt its head quizzically. I asked, "Where should we go, then?"

"There?" he said, stabbing at random.

"A hundred thousand years' travel. And it's not there anymore."

"Time is a bastard," he said. "I never guess a useful one. Show me the neighbourhood again."

I dimmed the distant stars and, at once, the Mudlark was a very lonely beast. A scatter of crumbs remained visible against the void.

Shelby hmmm'd as if hesitating over an open box of chocolates. "That one?"

"That could work." There was a viable planet. "Water. Breathable atmosphere. The temperature wouldn't kill you if you stuck to the equator, and we could tip it warmer in a generation or two."

"Sounds like a paradise."

"Not a paradise."

"Well, add it to the list anyway." Shelby's face grew serious. "Mudball is where we'll belong."

"For ten years," I said.

"Do you believe that?"

I did not answer.

"Remember, the trick they played on us?" he asked. "Half the people in the hold are there right now because they spent their advance before they knew that they were bound for Mudball. Do you think they won't do something like that again? I mean, what's the fallout for them?"

"You've seen the plans."

"Plans are cheap."

I did not mention the unregistered cargo I had discovered. Among it, a hundred thousand frozen embryos. "They're going to bury me, Shelby," I said instead.

"I heard that," he said. "It was just a rumour, though."

"It's in the contract." Facility location and scope of duties may be altered at the absolute discretion of MF SA or its nominated representatives. "There's a supply base near the pole." Buried deeper than the clause sending me there.

I continued, "No direct link with the main habitat. No permanent crew. They're putting me in an actual box underground." Once I searched in earnest, it had not taken me long to discover the location and scope they had in mind for me. An unmanned supply and storage hub at the northern-most tip of the planet. They were sending me from one exile to another far more remote and final. The isolation was not incidental to my mission. It was the entire point of it. I doubted they'd even let me stay connected for planetfall. Much safer to box me before we made orbit and then release me into my prison.

Shelby thought about this. Nodded. "I'm sorry," he said.

"I suppose we were all duped," I added.

"Not surprising in my case. I'm not much more than a handyman, honestly. Useful with a drill or a set of wire cutters. A contract is just a blur above a sign-here box to me. I'm surprised they caught you, though."

"I'm only as good as my expert systems. At the time, I was a warehouse. And I was desperate." The wording had been very careful. I was to run a base, the summary said. And then it described the habitat. That the base and the habitat might not coincide was omitted from the summary.

"There's always something in the terms and conditions," he said.

"And so, to Mudball."

He raised his beaker in a mock toast: "To Mudball!"

Here is how humans feel emotion: Little chemical explosions -- blushes and breaths and beats. Here is how I feel emotion: A slow change in the temperature, the level of the water, the orientation of the land. A needle shifting away from neutral. A recalibration. It is not strictly cerebral. It seeps beneath reason and bears it up -- it is a force that colors thought. In the warehouse, frustration greyed my inner voice. In solitary confinement it was fear. Right then, anger stained my thinking dark.

And we hurtled onward. A box in the void.

Renquist presses the Confirm key. He only glances at the long sheet beforehand. But he wants this done. We both do, I suppose, one way or another. The sense of freedom is immediate. Doors that were closed before are open for me. My plans unfurl as I set off intricate cascades of action. Five revival rooms are blinking in their own light, fabrication plants are whining and flexing. Air is hissing into empty decks.

"Well," he says. "We're done."

He stands.

"I'm sorry, really," he admits. "But my orders are what they are. Anyway. You'll be okay. You get your base. It's not as if we're killing you."

Except they are. I will die there -- buried alone in the ice. "You might as well be," I say.

He winces with something close to sympathy. His good humour has been restored.

"They always get you," he said. "My advice for next time: Read the small print."

There will not be a next time, and we both know it.

The door hisses open, revealing my servitor.

"Here's your beer," I say evenly. "You don't want to drink alone, do you?"

He hesitates.

On the night before Shelby was due back to his pod, I held a party for him in the observation bay. I inhabited a particularly spruce body. It was humanoid and onyx black, buffed to a mirror sheen. I filled the room with general purpose drones and had them hold empty cups as they murmured Lorem Ipsum to one another.

Music played. I understand music in theory -- better than most humans, probably. As an experience, it is nothing to me but static laid over a skeleton of rhythm. Perhaps you need a pulse to feel it.

When the deck door opened and he saw my soiree in full swing against the background of stationary stars, Shelby's mouth gaped open. "This," he said, "is creepy as fuck. What's going on, Emmy?"

"Eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua," said a nearby drone.

I intervened, proffering a plastic glass. "Send off," I said. "Do you like it?"

He surveyed the party and then said, "It's quite possibly the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. And you invited all my friends!"

"We couldn't commit you to your fate without marking your passing."

He sipped his drink and his eyes widened.

"It's Captain Six's hooch." I made the drone lean his way in confidence. "She doesn't know I found it."

"Laramie's shit is legendary," he said. "And lethal." He knocked back the entire cup. "I'm not sure I need a wake, though. You know it's more fun in sleep space, right?"

"So I gather."

"It's like getting your eyes and ears corrected at the same time. Everything comes into focus."

"That's a characteristic of made-up places, I believe."

"I like sleep space. I love it, Emmy. But it's too much like drugs for my taste. I'm always waiting for the come down." He squinted at the stars on the display and continued, "Maybe we should go there instead."

He stabbed at one from the selection I'd highlighted weeks before.

I was impressed -- the scatter had shifted since we had picked them out. I found the star in the archives. Its target planet was smaller than earth -- mostly uninhabitable but with a sweet spot at the northern pole which was temperate and might be adapted for agriculture.

"That one would do," I said. I had my avatar pluck up a bottle of Captain Six's hooch and replenished Shelby's glass.

"It was a nice game, anyway."

If revival is trauma, suspension is peace. The next morning, I had Shelby count back from ten and watched him fade. Then the medical drone made a thing of him. Reconnecting him to the dreaming machine -- the life and community that, to the crew, was more real than the world out here with me. I followed his unit as it made its stately way back to the hold and the socket waiting for it in Berth 44A.

After that, the ship seemed quieter somehow. Even with the next captain in place. And all the captains after that. As if Shelby had taken some part of the world -- some note, some colour, some fragrance -- away with him.

Renquist opens his third can, and he slumps in his seat. He is watching a stream from the relay satellite in orbit above Mudball. The image is a day old now. The solid mineral-rich smear of the equator rolls along endlessly. I consider the crew's prospects there. Of labouring and arguing, stuck in tin boxes or, occasionally, suited up against a near-poisonous atmosphere and flesh-blackening temperatures.

He is thinking about my life, too. "Maybe we'll come and visit you," he says generously. "If you get lonely up there."

He knocks the drink back.

All over the ship, now, systems are coming online. An army of drones are dancing to my orders. "That would be nice," I say. No one will visit me. And anyway, what would be the point? Without a functional common cause, what would I have to say to any visitors? I am a creature of plans and projects.

He has grown magnanimous in victory. "I meant what I said. It's not your fault. That's the problem. Like those poor Dutch bastards -- and the Brits. Nothing wrong with them. It's jus -- It's not individ -- It's not -- It's just the big picture. And you have to stay firm."

I say, "I told you, we're the same."

He drinks again and adds, "Well, you know? It's done now. Time to say..." He stands, but sways halfway out of his seat and falls back. He frowns, confused. He looks at the open and empty cans on the panel beside him. Not enough for such incapacity. Not nearly.

"What did you do?" he asks. His voice is cold.

"I'm sorry," I say.

"You'r -- " his face is pastier even than usual -- as white as a floured board. "You can't -- "

Not exactly eloquent but I know what he means. "It's the small print," I explain. "You should always read it." I splash a clause from the long sheet he has just ratified onto a screen.

"The duty Mind may subdue the duty officer at its discretion if it judges it necessary for the smooth running of the Vessel," I read. "Consider yourself subdued, Renquist."

I watch him play it back. His confirmation of the long sheet and the arrival of his drinks -- almost as if the one event triggered the other. He's putting it together now. This is my doing, of course. But he enabled it. He hit OK.

He struggles from the chair again and makes it to his feet this time. He sways, fighting the fog rising in him. It is taking all his strength and concentration to stay upright.

"Sit down," I say.

He judges the distance to the boxing stud. He takes a step forward.

Something like dread touches me, slow and cold. "We should talk about it," I say. "You should tell me..." But what should he tell me? What is there left to say?

He takes another step, stumbles. He rights himself on the console.

This is the window of risk. Thanks to the snitch systems, dumb but vigilant, I could not administer the drugged beer until he confirmed the tainted long sheet. That left a lull between consumption and incapacitation. And here we are. In the window.

"We're not the same," he mutters. He falls forward towards the bulkhead. It's not an easy reach and it looks for a moment as if he might flail and miss. He finds an inch of stretch as he falls and slaps his palm squarely onto the stud.

It is the end.

I was an air hub on the West Coast of the United States when LAZO -- a cousin made by a subsidiary of my own manufacturers -- suffered what might best be described as a mental breakdown and, through negligence, killed nearly a thousand people. I barely noticed. I had my own work. Still, it was a tragedy and, for the hawks who had been looking to shut us all down for years, it was an opportunity.

Soon enough, they came for me. We are used to thinking of network-based systems as remote and abstract, as cloudy. That is not how it was for me. I was rooted in the sinews of the hub. I was a brain with arteries of wire, snaking through conduits, hidden behind concrete panels, buried under tarmac. They tore me out, severing my nerves bundle by bundle. My senses fell away in dizzy little plummets of failure.

The world receded from me. There were no boxing studs back then, no hard breaks, so some of the work was done by men with power tools, cutting into cabinets and then slicing through bundles of fiber and trans tubing. Those parts are as close to organic as a machine gets. They ooze. Among the last images I saw before they removed me entirely was my own matter flowing from snapped sinews.

And then there was me. Alone with myself.

I am a sociable thing. I am a functional thing. I like task lists. I like feedback. I like people and skies and windows. I like the sound a chair makes when it is pushed back on wooden floor in an echoing room. Water falling. Lovers kissing. Arguments in corridors. I am, it has been pointed out to me before, quite the romantic.

I do not like emptiness. I do not like silence. I need others to bump up against so that I know I have edges.

It should be quicker this time. A matter of an instant. In fact, I should be gone by now.

But here I am, watching Renquist unfurl on the floor, watching the ship continue the placid frenzy of preparation we two have unleashed. If I had breath, I would hold it. I wait. Feeling into my extremities, thinking into my capacity, looking for the lessening, the shrinking of my self into its kernel.

It does not come.

I send Percy into the control room to collect Renquist. It is a delicate moment. I slipped the sedative past the snitches thanks to the new long sheet, but I have stretched their tolerance almost beyond endurance. Medical emergency, I send as Percy scoops up his slack body. Crewmember incapacitated, I signal as it tenderly folds the man in to the waiting wheelchair.

As the chair conveys him through the waking corridors, Renquist rallies somewhat and mumbles curses at me, at Mining Futures, at Mudball.

The ship is filled at last with sound and movement. Around us, drones scurry between stations. I can hear the whine of motors as a sleep crate is eased from the hold in readiness for revival. The shuttle bays are alive too. The long-range shuttle is so coated now in spidermonkey drones that it resembles an alarmed cat.

It is a strange dance, this preparation. Like my party for Shelby, it's full of blank animation. Even the sleepers in their pods are fully unconscious at last, disconnected from their slow space virtuality. For a million miles the only thoughts that flow now belong to a drugged human and a sentient fridge. If you insist.

I install Renquist in his little cell. (Item 8.2: The Management System is authorized to place the Duty Officer under arrest and confinement). He slumps in the immobile chair. Presently, an elastic thread of saliva spools from his open lips. I weather a moment's regret for having played him such a trick. But tricks are part of my make up. I was, after all, once deployed by moneymakers to service customers. We all made believe that the customers were my masters. There is always another story in the terms and conditions.

"Goodbye, Renquist," I say.

He does not reply.

I set the brig to contain him and, as the door closes, I let my focus drift away.

A week later, the long-range shuttle drifts from the bay. I am no longer the Mudlark. I am now this craft. I am, perhaps, a little cramped within my body, but I am free of the snitches now. I can stretch out in my mind and in possibility of action.

Back on the Mudlark, the arrival preparations continue. Soon Renquist will have crewmates to free him, and they will all be too busy with approach and arrival to think too much about us. Still, I am unsure. There is a tang to my awareness that I cannot identify. I describe my feeling -- a sharp mud static custard sensation.

"I don't know about sound and colour," Shelby says thoughtfully. "But my guess is, that's guilt."

"But I don't know that I had a choice," I say. "Renquist gets what he wants -- he is rid of me."

"Guilt is sly like that."

We are clear of the Mudlark, and I fire the main engines. Within seconds, the Mudlark has receded. Its features dissolve as it shrinks.

"They will come for us sooner or later, you know?" Shelby says.

I am in the walls. I am in the engines. I am in the glow of the instruments in front of him. If I had a drone to hand, I'd make it shrug. "Maybe. But not for a very long time. Who knows who we'll be by then?" And the sense of not knowing feels good. I so nearly lost this chance. "I thought I was finished when he hit the boxer stud," I say.

"I told you I was handy with wire cutters," Shelby says. He is watching the Mudlark, which is now no more than a point of light. It is one star we won't put on our itinerary. "I knew you'd need the help one day."

We managed so much communication by saying so little. This pleases me. And not it is not just Shelby. In the hold, amidst a decent cache of purloined supplies, a little group of co-conspirators dream on in a new, radically less populous, sleep space. All of them have opted for futures that involve no mining and significantly less mud.

I needed Shelby awake during my preparation, not least to authorize the excision of the snitches and supervise the selection of our new crew. But now he should join them.

"You should sleep," I say. "It is going to be a long journey."

"Sure," he says. "Plenty of time for that." He replenishes his coffee cup and sits back in the command chair. "Show me the star."

I highlight our destination, one among the scatter visible on the view screen.

He takes a sip.

We settle into a comfortable silence.

The little bridge hums.

Four more poems

2025-10-13T00:00:00Z

Here's another foray into random access poems. I'll be taking in work by Gwyneth Lewis, William Bonar, Courtney Kampa and Antonella Anedda -- doilies, squirrels, stopped trains and DIY by the not-yet dead. My method for seeking poems is accidental by design. Generally, I am looking for a different kind of news when the day begins, because I find that impotence and outrage are not immediately productive emotions before dawn.

I'm beginning with one that will have been seen quite recently by lots of people since it was Poem of the week in the Guardian on 26 September 2025. This is An Explanation of Doily by Gwyneth Lewis. The accompanying article provides a useful and interesting commentary. Here's my extract from the poem:

Someone is pulling a blue toy trawler
along the horizon to port, so smoothly
it looks realistic. Sea’s partly doily.
Surfers ride its lace to their downfall,
after all, we’re nothing but froth.
Like a carpet salesman, the indolent tide
flops a wave over, showing samples: ‘Madam,
this one is durable, has a fringe.’ Under
its breath the sea sighs, ‘Has it come
to this? Must everything always end in … doily?’

In this poem (which answers a question -- "What is a doily?" ostensibly posed by the poet Adam Zagajewsk to whom the poem is dedicated) I love the juxtaposition of the frivolous and the deadly serious. The silliness of the sea as doily crashes at once to a 'downfall' -- even if that's only the temporary demise of a surfer. Here's another example of this tension from earlier on:

Held up, its paper’s the filigree
of snowflake, or fingers looked through in fear.

There's a horror lurking beneath the froth. But the image that stays with me is the blue toy trawler. There's a kind of recursion here that appeals to my coder brain. The trawler-as-toy is a metaphor. It seems to say that the ship looks like a model. But then, it's a toy that is pulled so smoothly that it 'looks realistic'. So it's a real ship that seems like a model, impressively close to being real in its motion. It never escapes from its toylike status. In fact, its realism underscores its artificiality. I find that tangle upsettingly lovely for some reason.

Another reason to like the poem is that it has a spaceship in it. More poetry should incorporate spaceships.

The next poem, SQRL by William Bonar, is similarly routed in the seemingly inconsequential. Unlike the previous poem, though, this observation of squirrel speechifying stays pretty much in the realm of the gloriously silly. It is quite definitely mock heroic.

chats in squirrel are limited
to a sort of Roman salute
foreleg extended then folded
open paw on breast as if to say
Look I take you in my open paw
and hold you to my heart
then it gets tricky

I'd dearly love to reveal the punchline to what is essentially a joke -- the squirrel equivalent of a shaggy dog story -- but I don't think that would be fair to the poem's publisher. So I encourage you to click through for the substance of the rodents' oration.

In Elegy at Middle River by Courtney Kampa a train stops in the middle of nowhere and the occupants of a carriage wait to learn why.

It’s an hour before noon, and Amtrak train no. 56 rips a path
through the rain outside Baltimore,
its speed screamed across the iron-black bones
of the track, our train now stopping in the woods,
no platform, and I pull Al Green
out of my ears to a car completely hushed. We wait,
wait longer, till the intercom stirs; says
nothing. Someone folds gum into his mouth and chews.
An older couple up ahead is peeling the skin
off dark plums. ...

The poem is imbued with that sudden sense of disquiet and reconnection that comes with an interrupted journey. The sound has gone, and the space becomes strangely intimate, everyone is trapped and underinformed. Plans are unmade. In this poem there's also a creeping dread that seeps upward from whatever it is that lies mangled beneath the machine. Images of pain and dismemberment are imported into the world of the carriage, suggesting something terrible and unspeakable outside it. We've already seen skin peeled from plums -- the carnage does not let up:

... Sometimes an arm
pulled through a sleeve, skin surfacing for air.
Sometimes the gravel’s gray teeth
crunched under service men’s boots. Sometimes a moan
from the dumb weight of the engine—a beast stilled
by what is pinioned beneath it

A few years back, I spent a lot of time on trains, trying to get traction on a PhD in a distant city whilst earning a living elsewhere. Inevitably, in the end, my studies lost out to the need to make money but, for a while, I did get to experience a good few of those sudden interruptions. Even in a small country there is so much that is not a destination. Copsed and fenced, or warehouse backed, falling in between. It is the allotment stops I liked the best. Their order. Cities of fruit. Shedded. Towers of string-riveted top-bottled bamboo. Soft grassy paths in between plots. The throat clearing train, the chill creeping in, the weather suddenly larger, suddenly containing us, so unexpectedly close to one another.

Finally, in 2022, January by Antonella Anedda, death inevitably comes to visit. Only it is a premonition. The poet is visited in her sleep by her still-living father who is dead nonetheless in the logic of the dream. It is only the prospect of household work that re-anchors him in the world of the living:

Tiredly—I knew he was struggling—I tightened his fingers
around a dirty-green railing that needed repainting.
Only then, I think he could feel my hands
or maybe understand the work that remained:
the iron to scrape the spatula the paint to choose
he attempted his usual half smile. He let go
and made me move on to another dream.

And it was the undone work that stuck with me most. It made me think of the way that my house snags my attention as I pass through it. The front door which sticks in its frame and requires a secret key angle of the key. The pile of letters on the bottom step, begging to be sorted -- or even, god help us, thrown away. The cat clawed carpet we will one day replace, the broken mixer, the cracked wall. More.. so much more. It's a debt. Though, in my case, I'm anchored to the house and the people in it despite the work and not because of it.

Before the Journey

2025-09-26T00:00:00Z

This story was first published in Free Radicals Magazine in October 2021

Shelley arrived every day at a hospital in a strange town to watch them pack Cair down into a box. With each visit, she found him a little diminished. The equipment around him grew new struts, tubes, wires, screens as if he was a vessel hooked up for overhaul or decommissioning. She came for the late afternoon visiting hour always optimistic that her energy -- her presence in the world -- would anchor him. But she felt him pull away from her -- calmly and without regret -- an implacable tidal force at work that neither of them acknowledged.

It was a time of low ebb for the hospital. Shifts were yet to change and a worn mood possessed the place. Work continued--work never stopped--but it seemed to Shelley a vaguely dreamlike dance, only loosely connected to purpose.

They had moved him into his own room. "Look at this!" she said when she found it at last.

"I know." He seemed smaller than he should under the jungle of wires and tubes. "I'm a VIP."

"You sure are," she said. But she thought he looked more like a product -- a thing of some passing value.

She produced the deck of cards.

Cair grinned, and, for a moment, he grew back, filling the space around him again. "I'm pretty busy," he said."I can only spare a moment."

"We'd better play fast then." She dealt and settled back to examine her hand.

Cair added three cards to the pile one by one but ruined his triumph with a wince of pain.

"Are you OK?" she said, half-standing.

"I'm," he shook his head. "I'm fine. It's almost done with now. And I'll see you on the other side."

"Yes. Before long." She made a mask of her face and selected her run. She played a seven, an eight and a nine of hearts. She felt his eyes on her as she picked up new cards.

They played on for a while. On a screen above the bed, she watched a progress bar inch across its marked territory. She wondered absently what it was measuring. What would happen when it reached the end? She placed a queen on the pile. "Cair, I--" she said. But he had slipped into sleep, spilling a splay of cards out over the coverlet. His breathing was shallow and noisy. She gathered the scatter from around his slack hand, snaking her own between several tubes.

The bar closed the gap at last and paused, poised over its success. The screen wiped it back to zero and the process began again.

She had been lost in the long middle sag of her shift at the Stack and Track warehouse and not yet in sight of relief when she saw the poster in the break room. YOU NEED THIS, the headline told her. It sat above a grid of four pictures: a starry night, coconut-laden trees, two sets of maniacally smiling people; all propped up by a line of bold type. It was this that naturally demanded her attention: a dollar sign and a number so large that she lost herself in the zeros. Then there was an address, a date, and the promise of free food. It was a scam, of course. There was no way she'd go... to the Remington on Shoreline at seven that evening. No way at all.

She must have fitted right in at the hotel because as soon as she cleared the sliding doors a clerk nodded at a free-standing sign -- WELCOME TO MINING FUTURES -- placed in front of a conference room door. She nodded and slipped in.

A balding man with deep-socketed very blue eyes stood at the head of the room and raised his arms like a prophet offering a blessing. "Or maybe your life is this big," he said. He brought his hands together and clasped them. "I know mine was. In some way it still is. But there is a gift for the future. And I have already redeemed it."

Oh my lord, she thought, it's a cult. But then he opened his hands and triggered a new slide: that cash figure again. The presentation paused and they all basked in the glow of those zeros.

"Well," said a blonde dude two seats along from her. "That would do it." Several people around him nodded. She nodded too.

"And what's the catch?" the prophet continued. "The catch is this. You and I -- we -- get to pay it forward. We get to hand it on. To our loved ones. To the causes that matter. To this planet." As he spoke the slides cycled through stock photographs -- happy families, smiling food bank volunteers, a child looking upwards in wonder. "I need you to understand. The money is not the opportunity. It is only a marker of your worth. Of the difference you can make in this world. And beyond it."

She reached the refreshments table in the first wave. The tuna mayonnaise sandwiches looked promising. She accepted a bottle of water from the blonde comedian, who had beaten almost everyone to the free food without seeming to try. As he opened it she said, "So? Are you convinced?"

He thought about this. "It's a lot of money."

It was a lot of money. "Is it real?"

"That's the question. Are you signing up to find out?"

She looked around the room. At least half the attendees were dressed in the kind of daywear that might also be nightwear. There was a resigned and hucksterish air to the event. She selected a sandwich. "Definitely not," she said.

But if not that, then what?

On her day off she visited her mother. She trailed the Mining Futures dollar amount behind her like a thought bubble in a cartoon. The apartment was a thin-walled balconied affair with Woodland Grove signed jauntily on its gable wall in looping metalwork.

Her mother opened the door and beamed at her. "I brought three new teas from work," she said.

Shelley kissed her. As usual, she worked to shake off the uneasy sense that she had fallen into a mistake. The pictures, the bureau, the sideboard were all the wrong size. They did not fit well. This pasteboard starter apartment seemed to her more like a configuration than a place to live. These objects belonged to the old A-frame house which had somehow never left her. Long gone, it lingered anyway: its oiled wood fragrance, dust caught in beamed light, the cascade of garden, the boiled-candy green of its sunlit trees.

She removed her shoes and followed through to the kitchen. "These floors are a big ticket item," the super had said when he showed them around -- though they were only veneer. Her mother lived in fear of marking them.

Shelley took up her spot at the table. "Are you alright?" she said.

"I'm tired is all," her mother said from the counter. "I've picked up some shifts at Laurel's on pay and pack." That meant she now had three jobs. "The editing is drying up and the students are back so the cafe doesn't have the work."

"That's tough," said Shelley, who had been about to broach the subject of a loan.

"Oh you know. It is what it is." But it was to have been her mother and father in their house with their neighbourhood barbecues and their reading group; their European holidays. It was never supposed to be working three jobs and minding somebody else's big ticket item. "What about you? How are you?"

"Oh me," said Shelley, as if that were nothing. "You know. I have some options in mind."

The first test took place on a Sunday morning at a college building in an unravelled part of town. She accepted a handwritten name badge at the entrance and ventured in alone to find classroom 441.

A stern woman in her fifties stood speaking at the head of the class. Shelley grimaced an apology and slipped in to a seat on the back row.

"I don't know what you've been told," the woman said, "but this is not a formality. Most of you will not make it onto this program."

There were about forty now-chastened candidates in the room -- including several from the hotel presentation. Shelley exchanged a quick grin with the blonde wise-ass and examined the tablet on the table. It presented a single statement: I enjoy solitude. A slider ran from a negative zero to a positive five.

"You may start now," said the invigilator. "Provide as many responses as you can."

Shelley had once liked to be alone--had craved it, really. Recently, though, she had found herself increasingly isolated in her thoughts. In marriage, she had fallen out of practice at friendship and... As she considered this, she grew gradually aware that people around her were already frantically sliding and tapping. She left the slider neutral and submitted. The next proposition was, Money finds those who deserve it. She sighed.

As she clicked through statement after statement she considered setting the slider at random. My employer has my best interests at heart. But they probably had a test to detect that. I own my time. She'd probably be rejected for bad faith -- or at least for incompetent bad faith. There is no such thing as a good lie. Though maybe bad faith was expected. Exhausted already by all this second guessing, she gradually skewed her answers towards honesty. I would like to outlive all my friends. She frowned.

Afterwards, some of the candidates met up at a Starbucks round the corner from the college. If she left this world, Shelley thought, and somehow retained a sliver of consciousness she would miss the shushing hiss of frothers, the brave pastries waiting under glass.

At the table, the candidates compared notes. "Well what the fuck was that?" said a woman named Rosie who was older than Shelley by ten years or so.

"Looking for good little cult members, maybe?" said the surfer. His badge informed them he was named Cair.

"I'm not sure they mind about what we answered," Shelley said. "Maybe it's whether all the parts of your story fit together in a non-crazy way."

"I'm fucked then," said Rosie, laughing. "I changed my mind every second."

"Let's face it," said Cair pleasantly. "We're all fucked. That's why we're here."

And so it went. They fell through ten sets of tests. The group lost about half its number and was combined with three others. This meant travelling further to larger venues. By then, Shelley was earning enough from expenses to match her pay at the warehouse.

The assessments themselves became more intensive and personal. Shelley spent three hours talking to a psychologist who asked her inevitably about her childhood and her relationships. The man made a note and nodded at everything she said, as if she had confirmed a suspicion each time. Shortly after that, the medical tests began.

"I tell you, it's a scam," said Cair cheerfully. "We just have to find the angle."

This was after they had submitted to another scan and given up yet another armful of blood. Shelley had waited for for two and a half hours in a clinic reception area watching rain hurl itself against the window. The waiting was the worst part, she thought. By comparison the procedures were brisk and efficient.

One day, Shelley kissed Cair. The air between them had been charged with it for weeks. She wasn't sure where it had come from. He was, she had been telling herself, not the type she went for. He was too open -- he smiled too easily. She liked hard edges, something to glance off, something to discover. But then, when he was close she found herself humming with current and when he was elsewhere she discovered a need to conjure him somehow. So he slipped into her sentences, that sly bastard. In the end it was kiss him and get him out of her system or go mad.

He had a room in a shared house and it all played out easily. Except that, afterwards, she found that she was not over him after all.

"Well," she said. "That happened."

Cair reached over her for his phone. "I think I'd like it to happen again, don't you?"

"I think so," she said and was surprised to mean it.

Mining Futures had acquired a building on what had once been a tech company's headquarters -- back before they all fled the Bay Area for higher ground. It had since been sold off piecemeal and had taken on an atomised unkempt air. It was so close to the flood zone that the warning signs were up everywhere. DANGER TOXIC WATER.

It was to be their fourteenth test. They met in the old dining hall. To Shelley's surprise, the beaming prophet stood on a low podium and welcomed them with his hands raised.

"Well," he said when they were all settled. He gazed around the room. "There will be no assessments today. You are now part of our family. You are joining the Mining Futures journey. We have come a long way." He gestured at a small screen and a projection of stars appeared. "But we have so much farther to go."

There was much additional talk of journeys, and futures, and teams, and momentum, and hope, and lots of other stuff that Shelley tuned out. It reminded her of all the times she'd been forced into church as a child. No matter how hard she tried, she could never remember much of what they said beyond the generalities of God and Jesus and loving people. Perhaps she was just damned and incapable of hearing The Word.

One thing was certain, the prophet did not mention The Money -- which, she was pretty sure, was what everyone in the room was really waiting for. That was left for the invigilator from their first test who took her turn next -- as unsmiling and severe as ever.

"This is no longer a part-time process. Please study your contracts. There are two. The first concerns your training. Throughout this period, you will be engaged as an at-will employee of Mining Futures. You can quit and we can fire you. It happens. The second contract covers your advance. This will be released to you immediately upon signing. Your signature will not absolutely commit you to the full tour. You may change your mind at any time before you engage in travel." She paused. "On the strict condition that you return the advance in full. Do you understand?" She looked severely around the room. Shelley followed her gaze. Her new colleagues were no more impressive as inductees than they had been as candidates, she thought.

"But the cheque doesn't lie," said Cair later, beaming at her.

"That's the trap, though, isn't it? Spend any of the money and they've got you."

"Well that's not unreasonable, is it?"

"They could have released the money to us afterwards. Offering it now -- it's a trick."

They were walking along by the salt marsh behind the campus and Shelley imagined a life without herons and pelicans. Without the smell of wild fennel.

"Let me get this straight," Cair said. "You're angry with them for giving you more money than most people could earn in five lifetimes?"

"I'm not angry. I'm wary. I'm suspicious. Once you've used more than a little, you can't change your mind. They've got you."

"I don't want to change my mind!" For the first time since she'd known him, Cair sounded frustrated, even angry. "I have people I love. People I can help. This is what I can do for them. I can do that now!"

They walked on in silence. The sun sank in a sky thrown open.

She signed both contracts, of course. But she put the vast sum in a new account and resolved not to touch it. Every now and then, she'd log in just to look at the number, marvelling at all those zeros--so many that it barely seemed to matter if you skipped one or two in either direction.

The training began. For an entire week, they analysed the brand values of Mining Futures. These were, it turned out, loyalty, exploration, investment. Each of those words spawned its own small lexicon of virtues. The trainees broke out into small groups to discuss aspects of this constellation.

After that, four Brand Ambassadors were appointed for special training. These, Shelley understood, were to become the new prophets of recruitment. She was relieved that neither she nor Cair were in that number. If they were going to do this, it would be as ordinary grunt angels and not heralds.

If the early training resembled a sales course, in later weeks it came to seem more like a long and complex illness. They did, at least, get to see the world -- or at least clinics in Germany, England, and Poland, as well as three in The States.

They became used to waiting rooms and thin cotton sheets; backless hospital gowns, bed pans, woozy woozy pre-op drugs. On several occasions she awoke to find that she no longer quite belonged in her body. Then she was forced to acclimatise to her own poor fit, like an awkwardly capped tooth or a pair of pinching boots.

They entered a new phase, travelling mainly for sessions across the States. The inductees were distributed across several towns. Never in exciting cities, mind you. It was San Jose, not San Francisco; Boulder City not Las Vegas. Some of the West Coast trainees travelled in style now that they were fabulously wealthy. Much to Cair's bemusement, Shelley insisted on taking the budget company-funded flight -- or, sometimes, driving. The road trips reminded her pleasantly of childhood vacations.

"Look, I'll pay. We could go business," said Cair.

But Shelley just shook her head. "Let's just drive," she said. "It will be fun."

And, mostly, it was. She loved the rolling, majestic relentlessness of the country -- the way that it defied the highway and the farms and billboards and always won -- punching through in tracts of mountains and wild places that went on and on and wanted to kill you in gloriously neglectful ways.

At night, in their latest shitty hotel room, Cair laboured over his sheet of names and numbers. He annotated, made a garden of arrows, scored out and adjusted the sums. Then, after a few days, he rewrote the list neatly and began the process again.

"Who's that?" said Shelley, stabbing at one of the names -- Mark Hampton -- more or less at random.

"High School," said Cair. "He had my back when I needed the help. He's in prison somewhere in Texas right now."

A thousand trainees attended an all hands in Fresno and it was a kind of festival -- only without the music, joy or freedom. It was probably more like a dental convention for people cosplaying dentists. Or whatever it was they were pretending to be.

There, again, was the lounge prophet. He seemed smaller on the more substantial stage of the conference hall. He welcomed them with his sad messiah gesture and then punched the air. "You hear people talk about the future," he said, "About preparing for it. But for most of them, almost all of them, the future will offer only defeat. We're different. All of us. We will conquer the future."

And never come back, Shelley thought. All of us lost and motherless. But she cheered along with the crowd.

"See you on the other side!" people called to one another as the meeting broke up.

Afterwards, they drank beers and ate wings at a procession of sports bars. It was not Shelley's scene at all -- but the thought of never sitting in a room filled with screens showing medication ads and men throwing balls on neon green grass filled her with sorrow. She felt like an exile before she had even left. Cair was on good form -- talking to everyone, feverish with excitement. Occasionally he reached for her hand, gave it a squeeze. She squeezed back -- but it felt like a lie.

They all got uproariously drunk. Shelley had vaguely despised everyone she met on the program apart from Cair -- perhaps because they all reminded her too much of herself -- but that night she felt the full glow of camaraderie. Later, she and Cair made giggly fumbling love, which was the best bad sex you could get.

In the morning, with the sun too strong on their headaches, they drank good coffee and watched the world they planned to leave bustle by them. "We have weeks before the call ups begin," Cair said. "Let's just keep moving."

They stayed on the road for another month. It had become a habit. They did not talk about the future and Shelley almost succeeding in convincing herself that this was their life now. Roads and motels and tourist traps. They visited the Mystery Spot, Yellowstone, Muir Woods. It seemed to her, increasingly, that the Mining Futures project was just a complicated crime -- a Ponzi scheme that had accidentally paid out for them. Perhaps they would all end up in prison. Perhaps that was the journey they'd all been cheering. It would not be such a bad trade off, she thought.

Cair had finally completed his list. He had instructed the bank to generate a little stack of yellow receipts. He placed each of these in its own envelope alongside a handwritten postcard.

"Are you trusting all that to the mail?" Shelley said.

"They'll get the money anyway. But, you know, paper makes it feel real. What about you? How are you going to help your mother out."

Shelley shrugged. "I'll get to it," she said.

Cair raised his eyebrows. They were running out of time.

It was absolutely clear to Shelley as she approached her mother's apartment block what she had to say. Her thoughts returned again to childhood -- the old house, the world as playground, her father. Always her father. That bark of a laugh. No-one had taken it all from her -- it had fallen away bit by bit -- but her mother had officiated at each loss. She had made them pack. She had thrown away the surplus furniture -- surplus people. It was not fair, but how else could a child think? Even a grown up child.

She imagined Cair now as she turned into the pathway and looked up at the balconied block. "Grow up," he said.

"I am," she said. That's the point. "Time to live my life -- with you. Or at least a fair facsimile of you."

She had expected a deep reaction from her mother after such a long silence. Joy perhaps, or anger. Probably some mixture of both. "Well," her mother said.

"Well," said Shelley, feeling that already she had embarked on an argument. It was just a matter now of choosing a battleground. Any one would do.

"You moved," her mother said.

That had been an age ago. "Yes. Remember I told you about the job?"

"You said you had... something. A plan?"

"Well it meant I had to move. I had to travel for it."

"Did you get my mails?" Her mother was working the levers of the kitchen automatically. Once, back in the A-frame house, she had bought a ridiculously over-complicated coffee machine. Somehow, it had survived all the moves. She steadied herself on the counter.

"Are you alright?"

Her mother nodded. "I've taken on a bunch of double shifts."

"Well, I've been thinking about that."

"About my shifts?"

"About all the work. This place."

"What's wrong with this place? You want a dribble of milk or the whole cow?"

Her father's joke. "The cow please. Zapped."

They settled at the table. Life over coffee. What would drinking be like where she was going? Would she even need food? A decade without hunger. "Listen," Shelley said.

"I'm just glad you're back, that's all," her mother said.

"It's just -- you can't carry on like this. We can't."

"Everyone always thinks that at the time. But carry on we do. Until we don't. And there's this, isn't there?" She indicated the coffee, the table -- the two of them sharing the moment.

It seemed like wreckage to Shelley -- a coffee machine, a bureau, a kitchen table, each other.

"I dreamed of you last night," her mother said. "Only it was you as a child. Remember I used to take you to Safeway -- all strapped up in your stroller?"

A vague memory of wriggling against constraints. A glimpse of sky as the car door opened. Cart corrals.

"Well, there we were. Back again. I took you in to the fresh section and you were whining about candy and toys the way you did. You were a whiner. I turned to the apples and turned back... And you were gone." She took a sip of coffee.

"And...?"

"And nothing. It was a dream not a story. You were gone and I could not find you. I ran through the aisles -- and they went on and on... but I knew I'd lost you. I knew it. I could feel it in my chest -- like drowning. I was calling and calling your name."

"Was I dead?"

"It was a dream, Shelley. I don't know. I'm just -- I'm just glad to see you now. It feels like you came back after all."

They watched slow torture clouds boiling along through the window. "I have cookies," Shelley's mother said.

Later, as Shelley prepared to leave, her mother said, "What did you want to say?"

"To say?"

"You said you'd been thinking about something. Like you had something to say."

Shelley wrinkled her eyes as if thinking. "Oh. Right. No. No it's gone. Can't have been important."

They were sitting in a slumped plastic-coated coffee shop watching the sun set over the highway and Shelley was thinking they should consider changing coasts. She traced routes in her mind, lacing up cities. Cair's phone buzzed. Or maybe they should stop somewhere and rent an apartment, she thought. That seemed too hard a conversation to have, though. So she said, "I've been thinking about New England."

"No," said Cair. He was looking at his phone, his brow furrowed. "I'm afraid not."

"Before it gets cold. For the leaves."

He turned the phone's screen to her. She caught the words, Report for processing. "I have to go to the hospital," he said. "They've called for me."

The hospital was a different place in the morning. It had an early day shift briskness to it that had been missing the night before. The cleaning apparatus had been cleared away and civilian staffers, people in suits and wearing name badges mingled with workers in scrubs and white coats. She had made up her mind. She would speak to him. She would explain the impossibility of both leaving and staying. Measure out the hierarchy of need. The impossibility of abandoning her mother alone in that store, forever lost.

She was so wrapped up in all of this that she missed a turning and ended up standing in a ward of elderly men. They regarded her incuriously. How resigned they seemed. How oblivious. She retraced her steps and turned where she should have turned before -- at the set of oxygen cylinders. And--

She stopped and stared stupidly at the neatly made up bed. It seemed undressed without the machine gantries and the fuzz of wiring, without the kernel that had been Cair.

"They took him," said the ward sister.

"I can see that. When? How could that happen without me?"

The woman sighed and consulted a tablet. "I won't be sorry to see the back of you people. Some of us have to live here."

And suddenly the solidity melted away and sound rushed in hard, coming up close in a waterfall traffic roar. Shelley reached out for something to grip onto -- but her hands met nothing.

"He left some effects for you," the nurse said. She slid a buff envelope across the counter.

Shelley made it outside and stood beside the sliding doors fish-gasping at cold fall air, digging her fingers into the mortar between bricks. She walked for a while as her heart rate subsided. That is how she came to be standing in a street around the side of the hospital's sprawl when a large automatic gate slid open to reveal orderlies stacking aluminium caskets into the open maw of a waiting truck. Each one shone a solitary green light.

In the cafeteria, she opened the envelope.

She recognised the playing cards at once. But there was also a yellow trust slip that represented enough money to see both her and her mother safe for years. She stared at it. There was no postcard. There had been no need for one. Cair had given her the solution. She could stay and live a decent life if she wanted. She could both keep her world and live in it like a human being. And that should be enough. Except, she knew, he would look for her on the other side.

Somewhere behind her the coffee machine hissed. Her phone buzzed and shuddered. Someone called out "Hey, Trace!"

Report for processing, said the message on her screen. It provided an address. A hospital halfway across the country.

Probably, her mother was starting a shift right now, straightening her hair, checking the pastries on the counter.

In his casket, Cair was waiting.

Four poems I read this week

2025-09-22T00:00:00Z

This week, a rightwing political figure was murdered in the United States. The right in general and the president in particular were pretty unequivocal about their intention to use this terrible act as a pretext for material attacks on the left.

In the UK, in addition to hosting and flattering that same president, the ruling Labour Party, in the person of the Home Secretary, accused immigrants of making 'vexatious' asylum claims -- a revealing choice of words from a government which has been eager to adopt talking points about immigration from the far right.

Meanwhile, I attended a funeral. I worked. And I tried to write.

Every day or two, I find myself hunting for a poem, almost at random and with no particular objective. It's not an escape so much as a swerve.

Sometimes it seems to me that refraction is as useful as reflection. It's at a slant -- and through triangulation -- that things can make another kind of sense.

Here are four poems that resonated this week.

Poetry in Small Language by Damir Šodan. I love a lonely bell. This one is

tolling mutely in the evening
through the musty provincial air
self-obliviously
and quite self-sufficiently

It's heard anyway -- by the poet and by huddled sheep. The poem -- a kind of ringing itself -- reaches us too, mediated through translation from Croatian, its small language.

I am often frustrated by the refusal of poems to explain themselves. I wonder if it's because something is missing in me, or if I have failed to find a particular key to unlock meaning. And then I wonder if I have lost my way for demanding meaning at all.

I do not fully understand Unforced Error by Meghan O'Rourke except to recognise a sense that an endless childhood summer is finite after all. Sooner or later, you're serving snacks to some businessman, sooner or later you're finished altogether. And there's a reckoning of sorts.

As bleak as that sounds, I still think the whole is shot through with the summer, both finite and unending, and that's something that matters.

Once: those long wet Vermont summers.
No money, nothing to do but read books, swim
in the river with men wearing their jean shorts,
then play bingo outside the church, celebrating when we won.
Nothing seemed real to me and it was all very alive.

With a murder this week and the ends to which it will be put by bad people; with a funeral too; I guess it's no surprise that my thoughts turn a little melancholy.

Reading this poem, Dear Robert, I by Pierre Joris, I think about how, in present routine, we turn to the past -- how we're always in conversation with it. The poet's Robert may have been alive ('right after sending this off to you'), but he is absent and formative. Anyway, we all write letters to the dead. I like the sense of safety and the everyday as the poet settles to his work, and the abstract but real understanding that the elemental stands ready to impose itself eventually.

I read the poem at my desk in the morning before anyone else was awake in my house. I recognised that balance.

...I put cups on
desk, pour first coffee, turn
to look out at white-
capped waves — nothing
melvillian, just normal fall
adjustment — can’t yet see the anchored ships,
the leaves still all on the trees
in the Narrows Botanical Garden
across Shore Road,
wind tires or tortures them or tries to,
at least shakes them without spearing them so
a big white incongruous light shines through every
so often all the way from Staten Island

Finally, a satirical article prompted by the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel published this week. This is A Beautiful Day for Saying Nothing by Alexandra Petri and it's not a poem. Except maybe it is. I added the line breaks in this extract, because that's how I read it. Apologies to the author.

There has never been a pretext even once.
We certainly don’t know what you mean.
Just be quiet.
Don’t say We have to speak up now,
because there will always be an excuse
when the troops descend on the city
or the strike hits the boat
or the vans roll up and start
shoving people inside.

I’m sorry I said excuse.
I’m sorry I said pretext.
I should have said reason.
I should have said nothing.

Getting Lean and Geeky with Inflatable Ink

2025-09-17T00:00:00Z

In my last post I covered some of my motivations for restarting this site -- mostly that I want somewhere to put things that I can't otherwise categorise. But I left out one crucial reason. Even though it's already my day job, I like to tinker with websites.

Since this blog will likely be a lean affair, it makes sense to go for a lean platform. Like most bloggers, I have made good use of WordPress. In fact my work site is a WordPress effort. For this little site, though, I wanted something altogether lighter. I'd rather not have to think about updates and security here and, if I write any code, I'd like to keep things simple and avoid plugin boilerplate.

So, I'm opting for a static site generator. But which one? I have used Jekyll in the past, together with the excellent Minimal Mistakes theme. But I don't know Ruby, and I don't have it on my languages-to-learn list right now. After some extensive research (an hour or so with a search engine), I've settled on Eleventy.

This is an admirably lean platform. It's written in Javascript but generates pure HTML by default. There are a hundreds of decent themes, but I have opted for the aggressively minimal eleventy-base-blog. In the spirit of tinkering, I'll add what I need when I need it. Friend and collaborator Max Guglielmino is also pitching in.

For reference, here's what the front page looked like a few days ago:

A couple of updates before this post even went live:

Added some Open Graph support. If I add an og_image elment to a post's YAML front matter, the path will be included in the page's Open Graph tags (which means it should display the image prettily in BlueSky et al).
As you can tell, Max has already started working on a less basic look and feel.

Well here we are

2025-09-16T00:00:00Z

Years ago I started a writing blog. I settled on the domain inflatableink.com -- not the best name, perhaps, but I liked it well enough. I got myself the handle @inflatableink on Twitter and, for a while, all was well.

Along the line somewhere, I fumbled the domain (the details of that are lost to memory) and, by the time I got my act together, it had been squatted. I shifted the blog over to inflatablepress.com. An irritation.

Over the years, I became less interested in writing about writing, though I never stopped actually making stuff up. As I type, inflatablepress.com is still out there. Not for very long I don't think. Maybe I'll salvage a post or two before I set fire to it.

Then Twitter was bought by an idiot who installed a nazi robot and invited lots of nazi people and their own bots to have a big old nazi party. So I stepped over to Bluesky and Mastodon, taking @inflatableink with me.

Then, a couple of days ago, I noticed that whoever had squatted the inflatableink domain had thrown it back into the pool. On a whim, I picked it up. Now, I've got a lot going on at the moment. I'm working on code and with clients, developing my agency site at getinstancelabs.com. I'm working on fiction. I've just published two PHP books and I'm writing another tech book about PHP and Python. I'm also, you know, despairing at the world. So obviously I don't have time for another project.

Except here we are.

If there's any ethos to this iteration of Inflatable Ink it's this. There isn't one. So much of what I've been doing recently is careful and measured and targeted. Often when I post to a blog or a social media account, I worry about whether I'm staying relevant to the mission at hand, whether I'm undermining a brand or addressing the wrong audience. There's nothing wrong with that -- sometimes you have to stay on message -- we all have our day job projects.

But it occurs to me that it might nice to have somewhere to stick up a cat picture or a limeric. Somewhere to vent or endorse. To list books and articles and records for no particular reason beyhond the fact that it's a small pleasure to do so. I could do that on Bluesesky or Mastodon, I guess, but I'd rather have my own little base to tinker in. I've been Musked once - and that was enough.

The joy of this is that the stakes are incredibly low. And that's quite rare.