Davey Dreamnation

The next morning you clear patched in over the PCB’s secure line, and I could sit with the headset cradled in my arm, watching the morning through Windows, podding your voice’s every urgent burst. Proposing an informational kind of messing with the static stations on OT. OT, old tech, off topic. Your missives, fired like [...]

When you called I could hear a bug in the line, and not much else. Awoken at 2am by my PCB’s random koan. Finding it facedown by the lamp. Flicking its switch, I imagined you in an airport hotel, staring out the window with the headset held in one hand, a mouse in the other. [...]

Jet Moon doesn’t have a ticket but she’ll ride on to the next station. She’ll get off, ride the escalator upwards and emerge onto the street. It’s raining in Seoul tonight. She’ll pass by a comic book stand, plastic meals in a window. Rain sluices down the window. There is a bar on the street. [...]

Like a hawker trundling bananas up and down the laneways, the Radio Free Korea broadcast began, its strident rhetoric pock-marked with apaches of radio static. Blue days and green days, orange dawns and summer frosts; all part of the terraforming mandate. Unfurling fogs along the coastal waterways and islands, the mandate encompassed both canals and [...]

In the rapier silence of the empty kitchen I unwrapped bowls and paired chopsticks. The larger soup bowls were already at home on the shelf above the sink, along with the cannisters of rice, dried onions and pickled lemons. I called up some tulips on Windows and started chopping mint. The glass bowl steamed with [...]

The graffiti walls disappeared overnight, only to be replaced by acres of crumbling bricks. Animated characters from Monkey prowled the screens of the subway cars and stations, drilling the denizens in security and respect, performing kick-flip manoeuvres with pixellated aplomb. I watched vacantly as the main display showed the progress of the train through the [...]

As I stumbled through the laneways and backstreets, I caught the occasional snatch of conversation and dice rumbling. The awnings were still out, despite the dark hour, and just as I realised I had taken a wrong turn to the left the rain began to fall again, unannounced and with great speed. I froze beneath [...]

The mood in the PC bangs and gaming rooms was bleak when I finally found them, with many screens switched off and still more blinking urgently, error massages cascaden. Still the small corner of connectivity on the side of the building facing the wharves and the river was pleasant enough for 3am, and about twenty [...]

Under the gloom of streetlights I wandered Footscray, seeking the streets of PC bangs, the refugees, the engine room of the diaspora economy, racks of aloe drinks and snacknuts. Beneath a giant carpark I found an alleyway arcade of fried pork stalls and tube stations, instant access, newband booths, the works. Just as you’d described [...]

Surrounded by rain. Nowhere to go. Rain sheets all evening. Loose laces in my boots. The rain stopped at about 9pm, at about the same time as the feed died out. I took a shower then, in the dark, and left the extraction fan off. Great clouds of steam bloomed in the recess and the [...]

By the time I got back to the flat it was dark again. My reader had almost powered down. Only old cherries from the Guardian and my home mail anyway, including that missive, the Arts letter. Flicking through the softcopy as fresh wireless data chugged through the air, I remembered again that eerie sensation of [...]

At about 5pm I got the umbrella out again and went down to the shops in my rubber boots, loshing through the sudden aanwaai cascades, trying to make sense of that first day’s all-too-quick inspection, landing finally on a strip of Asian noddle joints, no Anglo menus in any of them but all equally safe [...]

After testing that the thermal had also been connected, I affixed our little coffee exploder to the burner, and very soon was sipping it while sitting before the boxes on the door-table in the loungeroom, their wooden surfaces slightly sprayed by rain dust. I’d forgotten sugar, but enjoyed the bitterness of the coffee anyway, its [...]

At 9am the crates arrived, secure and solid packed, eight of them in all, one for each room, with two more for the loungeroom. The delivery scanner nodded briefly when I opened the screen door to him, palletting the boxes without further comment. We farmed the boxes out to their rooms and they sat there, [...]

A small patio sheltered one half of the small garden space from the rain and sun, the white posts of its supports ringed by vines of an almost glowing green, the smooth concrete floor and the warm blue walls that I remembered from that first encounter, privately, that sunny day when I would have signet [...]