In the silence of the empty kitchen I unwrap bowls and pair chopsticks. The larger soup bowls feel at home on the shelf above the sink, along with the cannisters of rice, dried onions and pickled lemons. I call up some tulips on Windows and start chopping mint. The glass bowl steams with the heat…

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

I stumble through the laneways and backstreets of Aramis, catching the occasional snatch of conversation and dice rumbling. The awnings are still out, despite the dark hour, and just as I realised I’ve taken a wrong turn to the left the rain begins to fall again, unannounced and with great speed. I freeze beneath the…

The mood in this PC Bang is bleak. Most screens switched off and the ones that run blink urgently, error messages forming solitaire cascades. Still this small corner of connectivity on this far deep space of the south continent is pleasant enough for 3am, and about seven tubenerds are here, feeding tubenews into their headsets,…

Under the gloom of moonlights I wander the streets of Aramis, scouring the intersections for PC Bangs, those unofficial shelters for Korea’s refugees, the engine room of the diaspora economy, racks of aloe drinks and snacknuts. Beneath a giant podpark I find an alleyway arcade of fried pork stalls and freeband stations, instant access, newband…

Surrounded by rain. Nowhere to go. Rain sheets all evening. Loose laces in my boots. The sirens stop at about the same time as the feed dies out. I take a shower then, in the dark, and leave the extraction fan off. Great clouds of steam bloom in the recess and the mirror. Raining myself…

By the time I get back to the flat it’s dark. My PCB’s almost powered up. Only old Cherries and Devomail anyway, including that missive, the Arts letter. Flicking through the softcopy as fresh wireless data chugs through the air, I remember again the eerie sensation of slow-motion I felt when I first scanned the…

At about 5pm I take the umbrella out again and walk down to the markets in my rubber boots, sloshing through the sudden laneway cascades, thinking of our new house. I’m trying to remember what it looked like on the day of the inspection. Certainly nothing like this. Then I land on a strip of…

After testing that the thermal pulse has also been connected, I affix our little coffee exploder to the burner, and very soon I’m sipping the speedy brown stuff, looking at the boxes on the door/table in the loungeroom, their wooden surfaces slightly sprayed by spacedust. I’ve forgotten to buy sugar, but I’m enjoying the bitterness…

At 9am the crates arrive, secure and solid packed, eight of them in all, one for each room, with two more for the loungeroom. The delivery scanner nods briefly when I open the screen door to him, and we unpallet the load together without further comment. When he leaves I farm the boxes out to…

A small patio shelters one half of the small garden from the rain and sun, the white posts of its supports ringed by vines of an almost glowing green. I remember the smooth concrete floor and the warm blue walls from my first encounter with the house, on that spacey day when I would have…

‘Aramis is still in the dark’. ‘Aramis is in the planning stages of streetlight-facilitation’, they say in the planning podcasts. It manufactures its own leaves. Beneath the dike, under the glow of the eave-lights, I reach Blvd. 2, Apartment 109/A. We should call it something, you’d said over the crystal clear line. How about, I…

On the platform at Aramis Underground I’m hit by a blast of hot air and steam as an intercity maglev lumbers out, bound for Avalon and the western Metropoles. I notice more platform hawkers here than on my first visit, the day I signed the lease. Airport interconnections, the tourist drill, okay. The raised concourse…

I closed the door on our empty house for the last time, leaving the detritus of rental space – the video cards and home-delivery pizza menus, the old school telephone directories in yellow and white, sensor mood lights and triple flush, raked Japanese mini-garden and opaque pond, twin bins and water-efficient compost – for its…

Rain falls like a scene change and I’m waking up in an empty field, sashaying ever so slightly on my airbed, scaring dust motes with my whoosh. Smelling smoke, controlling the intake of blue dust through my nostrils, knowing that I have to get up and fast, before the rain stops. It’s dawn. My handbag…