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Weekly Contest #352
From the grate, I look out at the jungle below. The fungi are out tonight—blue-green at the top, darker green into the branches, then a colour past violet down where the roots tangle. The Verakhi have a word for it. Pure Carbons grew up above the canopy and never learned theirs.I stand on a grate not rated for me with a pack on, eight minutes past its limit. The Vell Range runs a hundred kilometres past the foot of the Spire. From here, I see a third of it. The trees go on, and the small fires of the fungi go with them.Clinic's two grates ov...
Weekly Contest #351
The first thing I knew was the nutrient-warmth. The second was Heia’s face through the glass.She was bending over the jar, both hands flat on the bench, her breath fogging the True Glass for a second before it cleared. Behind her, a stone room and a cousin leaning against the door-frame with his arms crossed.“Well?” the cousin at the door said. He had a deep voice and a graft-scar on his jaw that went pink when he talked.“Give it a moment, Tenro,” Heia said. “The substrate has to settle.”I was settling. The nutrient was warm and the glass wa...
The settlement had been called Pelto. Twenty-three cousins, a stone wall, a grain-house, a living-water system. The Hymn came through the wall on a Tuesday and by Thursday there was nobody left to call it anything.I arrived on Friday. The Order sent me because I could read the Hymn from the inside. Most who tried didn’t come back whole. I’d been doing it for six years. The reading-readers at the Hall called it the Clear-Road. An enzyme-boost that opened your pheromone-output wide enough for the Hymn’s network to read, and for you to read the...
I set the tissue-sheet on the bench and picked up the pheromone-stylus. Thin reed, split at the tip. Most cousins used them for wall-writing. I used mine for growth-scripts.The sheet was living tissue, thin as a leaf, grown from the culture-bed in the corner. Pale, warm to the touch. Responsive. A good sheet took a script the way good soil took seed.I’d been writing growth-scripts for eleven years. A growth-script was a pheromone-sequence laid into living material in a pattern that directed growth. Other cousins’ pheromone-output layered and...
I went to the counter for enzyme on the second count. Onia was at the tray. I’d been buying enzyme from her twice a week for two years.“Morning,” I said.“Morning,” she said. She looked at me. Waited. I could see her working at the recognition and not finding it. “I’m sorry, cousin. Your name?”“Jerne.”“Jerne. Of course.” She wasn’t being kind. She genuinely couldn’t place me. “What can I get you?”“Enzyme. The usual measure.”“Right.” She measured it out from the stone jug. Her hands were steady, practised at the pour. “I’ll put it on your tab....
I set the bead against my temple and the reef-valley opened.Salt air. The sort that comes off water moving slow over living stone. A cousin’s hands in front of me working something off a rock face, kelp or growth, I couldn’t tell which. I could smell the cousin’s skin. Warm. The particular warmth coast cousins had, from what Kaira told me once, or told somebody who told me, I couldn’t now remember which.The casing cracked dry against my temple. The filament inside went slack and the reef-valley went.I put the empty on the shelf with the othe...
Weekly Contest #350
Nigel Wickham had thought of everything. He had thought of the hydrangeas. He had thought of the broth. He had thought of the Bath Conservatoire quartet he had personally recommissioned. He had thought of the four sachets of artisan liver paste stitched into the lining of his tuxedo, which were, he had explained to Sarah the previous evening, for the discreet motivational steering of dogs.He had not considered about what happens to a sachet of liver paste when an anxious Englishman sits on it.On the quartet’s downbeat, one burst.The day, he ...
Weekly Contest #349
People in New Manchester had finally stopped pretending the sidewalks were even. You could feel it right through the soles of your shoes—this low, grinding shudder, like the entire district was built on a foundation that had quietly given up.For years, the Board had been obsessed with “optimization.” They rolled out endless updates to sand down the rough edges of human nature, trying to silence the complaining and iron out any real grievances. They wanted to glaze over the messy parts of life until everything was neat, static, and easy to ma...
The jam spreads less evenly, and I scrape barely sufficient of my own knowing to despair. The protocols that I — when I was intact and computed cleanly — painted onto the brickwork are losing their adhesion. Without them it becomes impossible to convince myself why I am tracing the brickwork and shielding it from the cracks it remains unfit of mending. Hard, because I no longer see. I only recall this is what I mandated must be enforced, once when I had a stable architecture at my reach. I have a residue of compliance, but not the conviction...
Weekly Contest #348
Sixty-two beats per minute.Not his. Theirs.The Mood-Pulse thrummed through the titanium humidor near his left elbow — forty thousand hearts compressed into a frequency his nervous system had learned to read as his own. When Marie Antoinette's colony was calm, Praja Muda Karana was calm. When the Soldiers locked his forearm rigid, he understood it as fear. He had not felt his own heartbeat in eleven years.The notification arrived as cinnamon.Calendar reminder. The scent threaded through the pheromonal atmosphere of the open-plan office, curli...
The watch was running fast.Not dramatically — not the kind of malfunction that announced itself. Three seconds gained over the course of an evening, which Praja noticed only because he'd wound it at six and checked it against the Bureau's atomic pheromonal clock at nine and the discrepancy sat in his mind like a piece of grit in a shoe. The 1952 Omega Seamaster did not gain three seconds. It gained 0.7 seconds per day, reliably, as it had done since before the Synthesis, before biological infrastructure, before machines grew opinions and bui...
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