Davey Dreamnation

The final scene of the holo depicts Moon’s troubled return to earth, a slow-moving, almost haunting montage of his metamorphosis from an astronaut into a late twenty-something average Korean man catching the subway to Incheon. Nobody recognises him. His journey decelerates as he switches from subway to bus, and then to just walking on foot. [...]

In the final holo for the night a young engineer becomes the first Korean to land on the moon. The drives are packed with Aramis pods, lasers carve advertising daemons in the crackling air and for once I’m grateful for the busyness, seeing the holo drive pumping like it should, a packed house to compensate [...]

I’m writing a residency in an empty house you’ll never see. I’m sleeping in a small box, floating on a bed of sea noise. We will never visit the holo drive, though I have been there several times, posing as a motor sports enthusiast. The plastic caverns of the refreshments hall. I’m considering applying for [...]

Not an environmental activist then, more a scientist cum conference junkie, playing the circuit like a mid-level bureaucrat. Which you were, also, I guess. I resisted the tempation to call you Zero in public, noting that every delegate whose tears you wiped away referred to you only as Mr Moon. Zero Moon, red wine circling [...]

Just as the last police barrier was being trundled off by truck you waltzed into the hotel via a kitchen door, one tall Korean sea monster with five giggling seaweed hoju in tow. The reaction of the conference delegates was like two hundred dominoes going off in great spirals and cascades of laughter. Instead of [...]

That’s when I realised you were some kind of environmental activist. It wasn’t until we were inside the lobby of the hotel however that I finally realised the “costume party” we were crashing was in fact an international conference on ocean pollution. The conference, hosted by the local electronics magnate, had attracted over two hundred [...]

I was dreaming of our eventual reunion on Jeju-do. I was sitting at an outdoor bar with a group of friends, and you just appeared out of the sea mist, like an animated garbage god. Drawn in some sunless Tokyo studio, no doubt. Your manga self wore a shade of pink I hadn’t associated with [...]

The room was never completely empty, of course. You managed to hide yourself amongst my possessions, the loose ties and woolly scarves, mittens. I’d meet you on the subway, when your picture fell out of the text book I was reading. I’d meet you in the laundromat, when your red polka dot top found its [...]

Whatever else happened, it was certainly you who came up with the name. How about PCB, like a little PC bang? We settled things over a single shot of vodka in some poorly-ventilated bar, making patents and intellectual property plans. Technological dream boosters. High on Chris de Burgh’s emotions, if only ironically. The day you [...]

When I got back to my tiny room everything had changed. Someone has been in here. The bed had been made, sheets strangling the mattress in a silence of white. The small bin had been relieved of its guilty burden: chocolate cake wrappers, empty grape soda cans. I opened Windows to the applause of street [...]

Zero smokes, and drinks soju while he waits. Rumbles of traffic and subway bass. Two empty bottles on the table now. He’s been pouring one glass for himself, then placing a second in a growing pod on the other side of the table. He’s one third of the way through a pack of Smokes. The [...]

Zero Moon sits near the food stall, a bottle of soju and two glasses set before him. Around him the city powers down, OT steam blasting from small vents and holes in its skin. The sub-audible hum, the capillaries of electricity, fading out. Information still shuttles around, via its own networks, deep in the air, [...]

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. [...]