Possible, not actual.
I drive my solar-powered mobile habitat along the beaches of this strange, unpopulated planet, stopping as the sun goes down to watch unfamiliar constellations sparkling above the bioluminescent waves
In the forest clearing you come upon an ancient artificial intelligence, self-contained, self-constrained, sipping on solar power, each day a breath, thinking slow thoughts while the world rushes by
here together at the end of all things
in the trickster world, magick spells are easy to cast: what’s hard is casting them with sufficiently little ambiguity that the magick can’t subvert your intention with disastrous and sometimes hilarious consequences
You’re digging in your ear with a Q-Tip —like you’re not supposed to, but everyone still does— when you feel something detach and fall out, landing on the table: a tiny device, the size of a small ant or even a flea, but instead of a chitinous exoskeleton it appears to be made of metal and glass, faceted like of a virus seen in an electron micrograph, with several short filaments at what you might…
You wake from sleep on an international flight: you are flying over unfamiliar lands. The staff talk to you in a language you have never heard: they hand out forms and give you a pencil, but the alphabet is unknown to you. You take out your passport, and discover that it is written in the same alien script, and the photograph is undeniably yours, but altered, shifted, a portrait of someone with a…
every day we find ourselves suspended between the end of history and the beginning of the future
dream: on the rocky, windy coastline, running down a hill towards the ocean, I meet a woman of indeterminate age and pragmatic demeanour. she is harvesting “jurtice”. the spelling and meaning of the word is clear to me. jurtice is bracken, fronds, grasses, mosses, perhaps even kelp, usable for wattle & daub, for jamming into crevices to keep out the wind, for caulking a coracle, for stuffing a…
Bioengineered trees, their heartwood suffused with xylemic neurons, thinking vast slow thoughts, connected by roots and fungal networks into huge gestalt minds
Neural tissue began appearing outside the skull, developing in interstitial spaces, bodyskeins of decentralised cognition. Most were racked by intrusive visions and runaway thought patterns, but others gained profound, wondrous insights
our search for extraterrestrial life has been conducted at entirely the wrong scale. all we need do is look up into the heavens and see the stars, gargantuan stellar intelligences, gravitic transmutative alchemies, each one a god
Elongated, flexible blimps that swim in the atmospheric currents, whale sharks of the air
The civilisations which came before us left no trace: before they took to the stars they erased all physical evidence of their existence, and are half-remembered as gods
I travel at night, navigating by the stars. As the dawn approaches I gain height, seeking water‘s brightening reflections. I descend, and kneeling at the water’s edge I drink deep. Then sleep as the sun warms, my wings enfolding me, sore from the night’s flight. As the sun reaches its zenith I unfurl my great green wings again and photosynthesise.
In the Great Australian Bight, a thousand-kilometer string of offshore windfarms generates desalination power for floating farmarcologies. In the afternoons, the permaculturists strap on on their wings and soar on thermals, high above the continental cliffs.
Later, we realised that the fungal outcrops were just the visible manifestations of a vast, rhizomatic intelligence whose subsurface tendrils suffused the entire planet
The mass of floating solar panels covered several square kilometres, generating power both directly from the sun and also from ocean swells, harnessed by reversing the energy flow in the artificial muscles holding the array together. Over time, though, the voltage decreased; investigating, we found thousands of electric eels attached to the underside of the panels, sucking on the interconnectors,…
Bioengineered vines snake in and out of buildings, their huge phototropic flowers gathering sunlight outside, sending it via optic fibers to bulbs inside each room, glowing with channeled daytime. Some of the vines store sunshine as sugars, reconverting back into light at night. Hungry inhabitants who would rather eat than see pierce the swollen sacs and feed on liquid light.
Somewhere in Tokyo is an underground workshop where old Aibo robot dogs are recombined with power tools and consumer electronics. Aibos with nightvision and angle grinders stalk alleyways, gleaning parts from dumpsters and parked vehicles. Bluetooth-connected gestalt swarms pool their vision streams, reconstructing 3D spaces and exhibiting emergent behavior. At the heart of the hive, the Aibo…
We fumble towards each other, old friends, past enemies: diminished, awkward, unfortunate. Wrong turns, afflictions and addictions have aged us, crease-cheeked and bent, shuffling uncertainly, clothes worn and ill-fitting, thrift-shop threadbare, baggy knees and thumb-holed sleeves. We seek out those we have ill-treated, look into hollow eyes, grasp their bony shoulders, haltingly ask for and…