Smoke

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 Korean man catching the subway to Incheon. Nobody recognises him. His journey decelerates…

In the feature holo a young engineer becomes the first Korean to land on the moon. The Aramis Drive is packed with pods, lasers carve advertising daemons in the crackling air and for once I’m grateful for the busyness, seeing…

I’m the writer in residence 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…

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 two giggling seaweed-clad hoju in tow. The reaction of the conference delegates was…

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…

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 studio,…

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…

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.…

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:…