A path less straight (pt. 2)

The Wikipedia kid rides again

We had taken Egg’s five year old niece for a walk in the park. She lived mostly with his parents, although care was shared between various relations when they were available. Everyone seemed to travel quite a lot. I asked him why his sister could not look after the child.

“Aphelia? She swings around when she can, but she and Kuiper have important careers and it would not be fair on Vesta to have her live with them” he explained. “She’d probably grow up all weird.”

Vesta ran on ahead, a pair of dress-up feathered wings on her back and a plastic sword in her hand. She had explained to me that angels carried flaming swords to smite down their enemies. I had asked her if she wanted to be an angel when she grew up.

“No,” she had replied. “I want to be a corporate accountant.”

With the ducks fed, the swings swung, the slide slid and some imaginary, but fairly insidious, evil smote into small, charred pieces we headed back to Egg’s house.

Egg shared a fifties semi with his older brother, which he had explained meant that he mainly had the place to himself except for a couple of weeks every year when Bracken breezed into town, rearranged the furniture, enraged the neighbours and then disappeared again to wherever the family firm required him to be. The gardens were neat, the pebble-dash well-painted and while the car on the drive was a couple of decades out, it looked much as it might have done when it was first built. Inside it had been modernised, was decorated conservatively and only a few touches showed any of Egg’s usual disregard for convention.

He set out glasses of iced mint tea and a plate of beetroot and dark chocolate brownies and then paused as though he had heard a strange noise in an adjoining, but empty room.

“Sorry, I’ll have to take this in private,” he said. Then his phone rang.

Vesta and I had brushed away the crumbs and adjourned to the back garden to keep the dinosaurs away as we rounded up cattle on the ranch before he rejoined us. I had thought he looked a little under the weather all day, but something in the phone call had turned his face ashen and sucked all life from his usually under-animated features. He sat heavily on the low wall that guarded the central flower bed from the lawn.

“That was my uncle Fez,” he explained. “My dad’s in hospital, its his heart.”

“Is it serious?” I asked, not knowing what to say. I had met Egg’s dad, Rob, a small, bald, quiet sort of man, he and Egg conversed in partial sentences and long pauses, but seemed to understand each other perfectly. Fez was quite the opposite, overtly expressive about everything, spouting forth endlessly without actually saying anything.

“Yes,” he replied. “The doctor says he has myocarditis of some sort.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Myocarditis or inflammatory cardiomypathy is inflammation of the heart muscle (myocardium). Myocarditis is most often due to infection by common viruses, such as...” stated Vesta.

“Cheers, Vesta.” He took stock of my expression. “That’s just Wikipedia. I usually remember to turn my wi-fi off before she comes round here. It doesn’t look good, I’m going to have to get in contact with Mother.”

“Is that difficult?” I made a mental note to stop asking little questions.

“She was working with Bracken in Vladivostok last month, but left him to finish off. We don’t know where she went after that, usually she’ll get back in contact within a couple of months, but...” He swallowed.

“I understand, and does Bracken know where she might have gone?” I asked.

“He’s split up with Huggy again, which means he’ll be sulking with his phone off,” he said. “He could be anywhere, probably a cabin in the woods somewhere.” He paused. “But I know someone who might be able to point us in the right direction.”

We followed him back into the kitchen. He turned on the radio and played with the tuner until he found what he wanted. I vaguely recognised the intro, but when the voice joined the beat it was the voice of an old gent from the home counties and not some American rap star.

“You’ve got some dilemma, running through your life,

Causing you troubles, giving you strife.

You need to go searching, looking for your bro.

Sucker’s hiding where? You just don’t know.

Need to find that sucker, don't know where to go?

He's hiding in the forest, eating kalakukko.

That girl beside you, if I were you

I’d tap that ass

Touch it, stroke it, slow grind all night

Play it...”

Egg quickly snapped the radio off. The colour had returned to his cheeks in a rush.

“That was...” I began.

“...awful,” he finished. “He should have stuck to yodelling.”

“And that was supposed to help?” I raised an eyebrow. “What's that Kali-something?”

“Kalakukko is a traditional dish from the Finnish region of Savonia made from fish baked inside a loaf of bread.” Vesta answered.

“Cheers, Vesta,” Egg said. He turned to me. “Do you fancy a trip abroad? I can't promise there'll be much time for sightseeing, but the firm's credit card will be paying.”

“Well...” I considered my options. I was between temporary contracts and my passport had been gathering dust, but I could never remember when on the relationship calendar you were supposed to vanish off into the wilderness with a guy.

“Separate rooms, if that's what you want,” he added. “I could just do with some company and an independent, sober viewpoint when it comes to family stuff. Steve's useless at that sort of thing.”

“Okay,” I replied. “I'll get my mum to water the plants.”

“C'mon, Vesta,” Egg said. “Let's go visit your granddad in hospital, and then Cass and I have to go to Finland to find your Uncle Bracken.”

“Uncle Egg, is Granddad going to be alright?” she asked.

“Of course,” he answered in that way adults say things to children when they are trying to convince themselves. “We'll find Granny and she'll know exactly how to make him better.”

“Citation needed,” Vesta stated.

A path less straight (pt. 1)

Egg and Chips

I met Egg through friends. We were gooseberries to the romance of the century. While they entwined on a bench on the seafront, we leaned against a railing and scowled at the seagulls. He had a kind of distant look, as though he was listening for very faint sounds from very far away.

He suggested that we find somewhere out of the wind, rather than rely on the radiated glow of other people’s love for warmth, so we sat in a café and ate greasy chips and drank over-stewed tea. Trying not to keep up both sides of the conversation or mention my recent ex-, Jason, I had asked him to tell me about his family.

“They’re odd.” He said.

“Everyone thinks their family are odd,” I told him. “No-one wants to be normal.”

“When I was twelve, I was listening to the radio with my Granddad,” he replied, adding more ketchup to the remaining chips. “ Suddenly, he stood up straight and saluted. He stayed rigid like that until the end of the song and then keeled over dead, still stiff as a board.”

“You must have been devastated.” I took another gulp of lukewarm tea.

“Not really, we had a sweepstake on who would be closest when he passed away, I won big-time.” He patted me on the back as I tried not to choke on my tea. “It was his idea, he hadn’t been well since he left the army and it was his way of preparing everyone for the inevitable.”

“What was playing? Was it the national anthem?” I asked.

“It was ‘Baby Got Back’, he hated all that patriotic stuff.” He replied. “Ever since then, if I ever want any advice, all I have to do is tune the radio into some hip-hop station and I hear his voice, rapping the answers to my problems.”

“That’s kind of nifty.” I gave a laugh, but he was not smiling, not in his distant blue eyes.

“It is handy,” he said. “But it makes MTV thoroughly embarrassing.”

Two weeks later Egg arrived unexpected at my door. The romance of the century was on the rocks, Janet had been on the phone wailing and cursing about what Steve had done. I was looking for an excuse not to go around to her place with a bottle of wine and try to hold back the flood of tears with a dam of platitudes.

“Have you heard about Janet and Steve?” I asked, somewhat taken aback because I had never told him where I lived or discussed the possibility of meeting again.

“I surmised something was up, but the battery ran out on my phone,” he replied. “Fancy a drive out in the country?”

Just then the opening bars of some cringe-inducing pop song trilled out from my phone. I noted Janet’s name on the screen, but the battery indicator was flashing and the device went black before I could hit accept.

“Oh.” I said. “Looks like its catching.”

“If it becomes an epidemic, how will people cope?” He gestured towards where an old Ford sat at the kerbside. “Perhaps we should escape before civilisation collapses.”

The car, he explained as we passed fields at a leisurely pace, had been his granddad's. It had never suffered any kind of mechanical breakdown, unless you counted the radio, which had ceased working properly six months after the car was bought and so would not play anything other than eighties tunes.

“That must be annoying.” I said.

“Granddad said it was novel in the seventies, but got old real soon after then,” he deadpanned.

He parked the car on the verge of a seldom travelled road, lifted a rucksack from the boot and led me through an over-grown stile into a field. I followed him along a meandering path, snaking around bushes and then taking a route through a small copse as though it had been laid by a drunk with nowhere in particular to go.

“They could have made this straighter,” I remarked.

“Its easier to follow where the path wants to go,” he replied. “That’s the problem with modern roads, they build them straight and it takes so much effort to follow them.”

I spent the next few minutes trying to digest this as the path zigzagged through a grassy meadow, but I guess he could have been right because we found ourselves at the top of a ridge, the car visible far below us, there had been no sense of climbing. He pulled a blanket out of his bag and set up a picnic as I surveyed the kind of view that people call idyllic but rarely actually go out of their way to find.

We ate a spread of off-beat food, brie and beetroot sandwiches, quail eggs wrapped in bacon, parsnip and sweet potato crisps, cheese scones spread with quince jelly and a cake that he said was made with pineapple and courgette. He told me that it was mostly what he had found in the fridge.

We spent a couple of hours sat, chatting about nothing, drinking gooseberry cordial and enjoying the one nearly perfect day of Spring, until a chill wind rose up and he suggested heading back. He left the rest of the cake, telling me it was a present for the pixies, so that they might let us use this spot again some other day.

As we drove back, Wham and Duran Duran playing on the radio, I realised that I had just broken all of my rules and spent the day with a bloke I hardly knew, leaving my phone at home. But there had been none of the pressing for a drunken Friday night tumble that marked my usual relations with the opposite sex. It was more like a date from the fifties as I imagined them, all jolly good fun and none of that hanky panky, but with less smoking and fewer quiffs. It was certainly better than spending the day agreeing with Janet on what pigs men are.

A fortnight after that I managed to get Egg’s number from Steve, who had sealed the rift with Janet by single handedly keeping the local florist solvent. He apologised for not getting in touch, work had managed to get on top of him. I suggested that we go out to see a film and then I would cook us a meal, he agreed and arrived five minutes early with a bunch of pelargoniums and a bottle of rioja.

I had not heard of the film, but it turned out to be a quirky and intelligent thriller. We laughed at several inappropriate moments and he did not hog the popcorn. The cinema was virtually empty, it was not until a couple of weeks later that I saw it advertised on television so I assumed it was some sort of advanced preview screening.

Back at my house we dined in style on my vegetable lasagne served with over-done oven chips. He told me a story about the layers of lasagne representing the social strata of medieval Italy, proving that to survive at the top you have to tolerate slightly burnt cheese. I drank most of the wine as he had to drive home and had to work in the morning.

“I work for the family consultancy firm,” he explained. “Mostly communication and forecasting.”

“Sounds complicated,” I said.

“Not really,” he replied. “Its mainly answering the phone and making guesses.”

He kissed me sweetly as he left. Not a huge romantic snog, but a gentle peck on the cheek. Some of the distance had gone from his eyes and there was something in his wave as the old Ford pulled away from the kerb. My lasagne never fails.

I was a teen-aged cyborg

“Its completely experimental, quite on the bleeding edge,” Nina had told me, beaming the words and associated data straight to my mind. “Although, of course, its a very long time since either of us had any real blood.”

The image she sent of a girl laughing was an old one, a reminder of our long friendship. I had captured it myself with my first set of artificial eyes just after we had both recovered from the surgery. It had been the first step on both of our journeys into becoming post-human.

“I don't know,” I replied. “Its such a big step and you know how I like to take things slower.”

I sent her my memories of recovering from that plane crash and the painful choice of deciding which parts of my body to replace with machinery, which to regrow as before. Part of me still wonders how my life would have turned out if I had kept as much flesh as possible.

“But don't you think things have become a trifle staid and boring?” She asked me.

I received and perused her delight at her first transformation into something truly non-human. The winged, four-armed form was designed for working in a reduced gravity environment, Nina had turned it into a beautiful artistic gesture.

“You have always moved faster than I have.” I responded.

I dredged up a memory of us in our old bio-mechanical glory and transmitted it to her. Racing through clouds on jets of fire, I had been unable to keep up, only tracking her through my radar sense.

“Have you lost that sense of adventure, of discovery?” She demanded.

She sent me a recording of two vessels leaving the docks and heading for the open vastness of deep space. We had travelled between the stars for centuries as living ships, revelling in far-flung stellar oddities.

“There is no shame relaxing and taking pleasure in a myriad of little joys.” I told her.

I connected her to my live feeds, monitoring the lives, loves and losses of my million inhabitants, each as individual and different as we had been. As a space-borne mining and processing station I was their home, their employer and their carer, they were my obsession and my entertainment.

“Think of it, inserted into the informational fabric of the Universe at the most basic quantum level, you'd be a god, the creator of your own reality.” She insisted.

“Then you go first, create a reality for both of us and I'll follow when I'm ready.”

I watched her go through the procedure, watched the energies build and flow and watched her disappear from my life. I considered taking the same procedure for many years, but eventually turned my back and joined the rehumanist movement. I was tired of following Nina from pillar to post-human.