day thirty

it was not only that I’d had a huge crush on him in the past. it was much more than a crush. I just couldn’t keep my mind off him. I’d just try to focus on my work or what was happening around me, but it was as if he lived on the edges of my mind and when I tried to push him away he got more intrusive not less and when I relaxed at all images of him just occupied my mind. I saw him in a room, on the ground outside, sitting by ferawsie fires, tracking and hunting down ferawsies with different teams and in town in his houses with friends, travelling, fucking, and on and on. so I knew now what I couldn’t believe before because I saw it with my own eyes – that cally was a bounty hunter at that time, and he wasn’t reluctant. so he can put on and take off ‘robot’ whenever he feels like it like installing software, and maybe his ferawsie is only another act, I don’t know. I knew I should forget him but he wouldn’t release me. I didn’t know if he knew I was remote viewing him or not.

I suspected mayenna knew all about it but I felt such a heavy weight upon me when I tried to talk to her about it, even telepathically that I just let it pass and so she never commented. in the village they said if you remote view some animals when tracking they surround you with their psychic sensoria, and you see them staring at you when you’re getting close and nearly got them. when you see the face of the wallaby staring at you, and feel him with you like in your life field, he’s your prey.

I used to so fantasise getting him for my man. and yeah, they all said he’s a wallaby dreaming man. so he’s this ‘prey’ of mine, preying on my mind.

at those camps when we were kids I was too young to fall in love, and I had crushes just as bad on any number of other boys before and after and even at the same time, like most kids around puberty. it was only that time I first saw him coming into camp with the work gang from ariat wearing furs and talking only in that weird ferawsy that I connected with him so strong. even though he was completely neutral with me and didn’t remember me while I never ever forgot him even after nine years, he was still in my sexual fantasies and in my dreams and on my mind and when I saw him again it just made it worse.

I was lovesick.

 

*   *   *

Ignatius Feld

back in the cave with the people coming and going and the same raucous room service we were used to, teddy and I spent our days just trying to make time pass. we were under surveillance – everyone watched everyone and us most of all.

 

but we had a certain amount of freedom to walk about and stretch our legs and find our way to the toilet, which was a largish cave with a thick plank floor which had series of holes in it through which you could see shit piled up on a floor below.

monops was again my friend as I recalled the correct response to totally disgusting things.  I didn’t vomit. I admit to a dry retch which I smothered in a shuddering yawn. I learnt to not go in till the urge was maximal, then take a deep breath and quickly duck in discharge and retreat, lungs bursting but unpolluted – relatively. I think I actually managed to never actually smell it.

everywhere we went we could feel wildborn eyes upon us, they guarded the corridors systematically like a well-trained force. gotta hand it to them. once or twice we were refused passage through corridors that were forbidden to us. but there were three large caves that we had freedom to visit, including our own. the other two were pretty much like the rest – factories, they seemed like, with every working at something, mostly leather, wood or textiles. or preserving food. not everyone who worked here lived here and there were sleeping times which I suppose corresponded to night and day outside, which I couldn’t verify because i couldn’t find any windows. there were other small caves but some of those had people in them who shooed us away sometimes, or they’d all just gawk at us till we went away and then go back to their talking or whatever.

oh well, that’s detention, HUG or ferawsi.

 

threadgold was showing the strain more than either cally or me. there were lice in our hair and beards and somehow they like threadgold best out of us three and they nearly drove him nuts. he used to lie on side, gripping his ribs which he’d rubbed sore with scratching after them and going, ‘cunts! cunts!, fuck it! cunts!’ then he’d stare straight ahead with wide, tense eyes until he dozed. he was pretty crook. once he said ‘this is purgatory, mate. we’re dead.’ well I couldn’t prove him wrong.

 

cally seemed to like wandering about talking to people. he was restless prowling sort of person and he had good social instincts. if one group of ferawsies rejected him, another would stand and at least insult him in a sociable sort of way and some were only suspicious stand-offish and resentful. they told him he sucked sowf. with teddy away with the pixies, I was virtually on my own until a little girl from the trolley team brought me a book. she told me in laboured, obviously tutored beginners’ linguish (which of course I’d learnt at school and used in my work as an ecologist before HUG became respectable from being a conglomerate of multilingual text abbrs and webslangs because linguish was becoming scarce on the ground) that it was from mr chatten, who hoped I would allow the bringer to visit me daily and read it, both to inform me in preparation for the process and to provide reading practice for the child. she was about ten or eleven.

I consented to that, mostly because I was so bored and so lonely in the midst of all this hostility that I was in danger of following poor threadgold right round the twist. as for preparation for processing, it was not something I was particularly  curious about. I am fearless because I know how to deal with fear. how these debased creatures might treat me and what they call processing had not yet been fatal to me. teddy had always been unstable, as I said, I’d always been on the point of mentioning him to monops, just quietly. the girl was thin, pale and radiant with a confusing aura, with lousy platinum blond hair puffed out in strange fluffy curls over her ears. her face was small and pleasant enough. at least it was fairly clean. and she was fragrant with a strong scent of wood smoke and hay.

to my surprise, I found myself looking forward to the morning visit, when this child would come and stand like a wooden doll dressed in a thick skirt and knitted stuff and her skinny legs and bare feet and opening the book so that it covered her face began to read to me what chatten called the history of the world in slow, clear, conscientious linguish.

I even praised her progress, helped her with her diphthongs and explained the passive mood which she said she had not seen before, which occurred on p.15., though my own monopsian head-load on that was getting flaky.

she was scared stiff of me of course, but beginning to like the praise.

I was non-plussed, if you want to know the truth. where did a kid like this come from? obviously she was to do with chatten, all those forbidden corridors away, but who was he? who?

wildly I even wondered if he was an example of someone they’d ‘processed’. and this child? they were not feralwsies. this kid was being taught linguish. why? I asked her. she said she couldn’t explain because I was HUG. ‘they’re going to process you then you’ll know everything.’

chatten himself had compiled the book from what he claimed were predee sources, which he had incorporated into a taut, angry narrative account of the fall of the predee culture and the rise of HUG to global political power and authority through monops and it was virtually an exposition of a series of major crimes against humanity that chatten wanted me to believe was a legal document and represented legal charges against HUG. and before I dissolved into giggles at the thought, I might think of luck and all his power and all his kith and kin as yet unknown and ‘understand, o robot,’ said he in no uncertain terms, ‘we will win this war.’  and then, with a strange little undulation that may have been a kind of curtsey, she would snap shut the book and go running back to the archway she’d entered by, where a stiff, draconic aunt-like person in a sort of tartan pinafore would take her arm and walk her out of the cave.

day twenty nine

I thought I was a crab… becoming a crab…because I could feel my face pulling down and becoming the underside of my chest and the mouth parts opening and shutting and I started to ululate strangely and I heard mayenna say, ‘I think luck’s coming now,’ and I noticed she was crying and I realised it was for me because I wasn’t staying focussed and I remembered where I was and fought my way back to her.

I was scared of luck too, but he was so nice and everything went back to sane and simple around him. I can’t remember everything he said or did because it’s difficult to take the memory back down till you’re fully initiated. he helped my vision and my understanding of what was happening to me and showed me things about *H*U*G* and monops and the ferawsies and he talked about genetics too, and all the magic you could do with your own genetic inheritance when you learn to play your own genetics like krsna’s transcendental flute. there’s no ferawsie genes or approved hug genes, just genetic predispositions, and they can be manipulated into desirable dispositions only up to a point, because when it gets too stressful to maintained an approved disposition you try to mutate instead of relaxing into a phenotype nearer your own natural one. the norm  are set and everything set up to support the normal people and if you’re not one, they’ll help you or if they can’t it embarrasses them and they do cruel harmful dangerous magic trying to hide it from themselves. and trying to hide from themselves that they know screechingly painfully that they’re wrong about normal, there ain’t no norm.

*H*U*G* people can bear the pain of the normality corset because they think it is normal, and to do with all the naughty things they do that *H*U*G* encourages them to ‘get away with’. so they’ll feel they’ve got a will of their own, and they let *H*U*G* anaesthetise them so they won’t mind that *H*U*G* keeps everyone half-sick for eight or nine decades and say that’s better when they all used to die at age forty, which was considered decrepit in predee days. most of the pain leaves people’s lives when they don’t have to conform to types constrained to the small range of phenotypes approved as normal by a minority dominant culture composed of people whose genotypes are strained to the maximum to produce phenotypes the true genotypes for which are no longer known.

I understood what he meant. you can literally kill yourself trying to be hug enough to pass muster.

a lot of the ferawsies talk about gaia.

luck said, look at the world, hug, monops, the ferawsies. see it as a globe, just the material planet, in its moist airy atmosphere, that’s gaia’s material body. it has humans, and all sorts of fairies all with their fairy animals and things, and they can’t all see each other, because humans use their magic to avoid it, but they all see and inhabit the same material sphere. and she’s got these inner spheres, fairy lands, hades and tartarus, and the outer spheres of the astral, aerial and etheric and so on, like the full array of the so called subtle-bodies of a human.

I was looking at it like a science student, not that I was good at science but I did a bit of biochemistry in my career path when I was at school, but suddenly I saw he meant she was a big creature, round, but passionate, and hurting in great pain for cosmic reasons beyond human understanding, and that’s the cause of the wars within and between the worlds that are her body parts and the parts of her brain and she’s crying and that’s coming out of our babies moiuths and our mouths and the mouths of howling wolves and sobbing seals and horses too. when she internalises her celestial strife, she reproduces the patterns and dynamic of it in her animal behaviour and that includes human warfare human creativity and even in domestic situations, and also in our bodies as the metabolic wars of disease. she screams and howls in fear and terror. she calls he sister planets, and those who can come. and he began to try to tell me about the space people, too, but I wouldn’t let him, I screamed and screamed. we all saw the disclosure of the late predee period on edU, where they had genuine footage of space people with all these hideously deformed pieces of people, hacking up babies and implanting weird machinery where their heads used to be… I screamed and screamed and he touched my forehead and put me into a quiet peaceful mood and said, okay you are too conditioned. believe me, HUG is lying to you. and that was okay because yeah everyone was being sarky about it, because it’s so kool to think you can see through HUG, but I didn’t dare, didn’t they know monops was monitoring every time they click like and might want to get you for something and there they’ve got you for treason. for noticing that fake stuff looks so fake. so yeah, no, I didn’t believe what monops said. and yeah, I’m conditioned to fear them by the lies.

because he said I was going to meet them. they come from a sister planet of ours which orbits a distant star, and they regard us with great affection.

then he showed me her archetypes and how sick and some of them are, while others are vigorous and strong, waging war against some of the others, just as our worlds do, just as our nations do, just as people do out there in the concrete jungle. I remember him saying that the poets were like flies drowning in milk. poetry crowds in smelly corners of the web homeless and disreputable. MONOPS writes all the popular poetry that anyone ever recalls any of. kuppa mc cola, stars in a cup. well it rhymes in HUG. one thing I know, you’ve got to be free, that’s why it’s kipsi for me. that scans in *H*U*G*. well that’s poetry isn’t it?

I cried when he showed me her body like a bruised sick beast, full of cancer and disease. I was frightened. looked like she might die. he showed me images of how she was before the decimation, nowhere near but with serious problems. the material is the only sphere where wars are raging. sickness has always plagued young planets like this.  they thought the wars would end in our death but wars do end. they despaired too soon. planets die. planets do die. this one might die, how scary is that?

he showed me people waiting to reincarnate who just could not get birth. and people so bent and twisted they could only incarnate deformed – people we could help = we have to take control of the magic.

he showed us her paralysis, her extremisms and gave me such an overview that I was totally overwhelmed to think that she might have communed with me lovingly while I was part of the healing of her ducts and axes. official H*U*G* religions condemns the aesir as irresponsible meddlers in human affairs and *H*U*G* pagans put on proper hug grins and say things like paganism just isn’t about grovelling and kowtowing to the aesir, and other petty pantheons, we know its all rally just whatever slush you prefer to the truth, since its all just fantasy anyway. they still police you if you show an interest in the aesir on-line.

I said though that I could not just handle the fear, it was too much. he said, yeah, but they were trying to kill me or they’d have put me through the gradual ascent that doesn’t scare you as much, though you have to be brave.

he told me all sorts of things, too many things about the space people, the other spheres of this world of concentric spheres we call earth, and the paranoid confusion afflicting gaia, and he said to be patient with HUG because the  chances of earth being hit by some large enough object to kill it in the next few centuries are scarily high. miracles have spared us. gaia has developed the technology to protect the earth from these objects but HUG is not aware that that’s what it’s for, and is lying to the people about how much technology they’ve got and how they’re using it because they still believe their real role is to bring the people to a preparedness for the death of this planet from disease.

they’re trying to find us quick painless deaths, gentle skids. and they’re under a deep intractable vicious money enchantment that is crueller than any demon or devil, and it’s so easy to tame it. they fear being awkened just to feel the horror when the planet starts to shriek and scream and roar and rip and break and tear apart, and we will all die, if not immediately, then slowly and horribly in the unsurvivable post-apocalyptic conditions. that’s why they try to kill the magic.

and it is investigating the cosmic environment, and it too is scared. we’re a scared planet. most of the fear comes from ignorance, and understanding will dispel it. we can defend ourselves and its worth doing – the planet has not got terminal cancer but manageable diseases that are responding to the magical response of the human population.

HUG is not not magical as it claims – that is ridiculous. they  recognise psychosomatic disease and use fantasy to heal it but still deny the intrinsically magical nature of life and health and happiness. so their magic is all over the place, uncontrolled and higgledy piggledy so that the good it can do is mostly sabotaged by random shit and they all take their meds like good little robots and take their bodies to be hacked up by surgeons instead of healing them before surgery is needed.

so all right, I said, I would try to overcome my resentment and let go of the hatred because healing gaia matters so much more than me getting what I want every time.  HUG doesn’t know what to do with nonconformists, it tries to get them all matched with other nonconformists so that it can organise and manage them as a group. that’s fine for conformists, and people who naturally fit the norms but its nuts and they’re embarrassed when monops so obviously cripples us socially to restrain us to its own limitations. they know there should be no slaves. and they know they are selling some of us off the planet to who knows where.

they can’t be honest. they’re even thwarting themselves in that letting us get away and bungling their own attempts to round up the freeborn ones. but they’re not even trying. they’re only pretending to. and all the things they do to us force us to become telepathic just with wondering wtf.

they’re forcing us to find the                                                                                                                        rest of the planet and make peace with it. beacause if we don’t they will kill our planet.

they’re shallow, he said. they numb their fear then act as if there is no danger. we have to deal with the fear for them because they can’t feel it and do not believe it exists even while manufacturing megatons of tranquilisers to subdue it. they’re scared shitless of us because they know they can’t defeat us, that we must win because we take control of our magic, and wield it to do good.

yes, quite simplistically to do good.

he told me I was a feeler and could be trained to help gaia to expend and deal with the pain she was in without sharing it so much that I would become debilitated.

mayenna showed me how to let the pain pass through me, to acknowledge it and its source and let it go and get the medicine to the source of the pain. and it doesn’t hurt much when you realise that the pain isn’t your own and just let it tell you all about it and be released like a sigh.

the rest of what we talked about the whole long night long, with me hysterical on and off and mayenna and luck giving each other rests I only remember bits, but they couldn’t let me sleep because I’d just start sinking instead of reattuning to the material sphere.

junas was ready to apologise when luck finally returned  me to the village. they were even really nice to me to make up for the trauma I’d been put through. but it’s like the ferawsies to be like that. their tempers flare easily but they don’t usually do much harm and they get over it completely so quick it’s strange at first. the one thing we all hate is hate.

but mayenna says even hate has its place in the scheme of things.

mayenna shapeshifts, and she sympathised with me changing shape all out of control under the influence of what she called predatory forms. she said I needed to learn to drive my own shape-shifting, and that she herself and most of us wanted more than anything to be able to claim our own true spiritually attuned self as a home bas to explose our shape-shifting potential.

there’s a lot of deformity where shape-shifting tendencies in humans related to gene management by the organism within the organisation of its culture are not even recognised as causes of malformation so never corrected as it so easily can be by the right yoga and physio for fucks sake therapy.

so when I went back down permanently I joined a group that practices seership and another one that teaches body-forming yoga. no magic powers till you’re healthy enough not to divert the power through your own system in such a way as to force feed a tendency to create psychosomatic disease with the energy surplus to my own needs.

but I didn’t feel good still even with the ferawsies accepting me at last, because in my heart, try as I might, I still had more than just a crush on cally and besides, I thought about him all the time, involuntarily and couldn’t believe he was HUG because he is soooo ferawsie in furs. new escapees always look as if they’re dressed up for the school play but cally looked so natural. he even had the wise, connected expression that the wild-born have. I don’t believe it’s just that he’s a good actor.

and wasn’t one thing they said to me and the ferawsies all talk about it that there’s such a thing as a destiny and it’s a living mindful thing, like gaia’s train of thought for each person and it sings and glows with bliss for us when we do things that advance us towards it and we cry as we get dragged away from it.

so it wasn;t surprising that the first thing I saw when I was learning remote viewing was cally and this other guy walking though the scrub but he was sick. and they were going north but they wanted to go east, and I said to mayenna ‘cally’s escaped’. and then I saw him with luck, when luck had him prisoner, and then by the stream where they caught crane and had her in tight restraint down there. so I realised that I had the subject in my sights but it wasn’t one I chose, but one i was a bit scared of, but mayenna was sympathetic. we were achieving a telepathic rapport and she calmed me a lot. she said ultimately gaia must be wanting it, right or wrong. and I couldn’t place it in time either, so we’d have to work on both those things.

one thing’s for sure – I’m not so scared of dying anymore. I’m drawn to the astral plane and mayenna’s got a nice comfortable room there. that’s where I’d manifest and she’d help me adjust real quick.

HUGs heaven is there with all its feathery winged angels but it’s on one of the other spheres and not every one’s going there. only a tiny percentage has the right attributes. the rest of course are not just burned eternally in hell or left insane and alienated in limbo, they are recruited by all the other feenwelts as gaia requires for her optimal health. and she wants them all healthy and happy and none superior to another for the least of them is just as much as the biggest and avatar of the whole living breathing people breeding planet crafting universe.

they had this guy up there. he was one of the captives, the bounty hunters. not cally, but the guy who was with cally, cally calls him teddy. he just kept saying, I’m not a robot, I’m not a robot. in a totally robot voice, right off mac-throat. and burbling his finger over his lips to drown out what anyone might say to him. he was totally disfunctional. but he kept saying he wanted us all rounded up and put through the system because they sap the system if you don’t. if you do they build it. they have no right to try to wriggle out of it.

and he called us sheep and said you wanted a couple of good dogs to put round them to find them and bail them up and he kept wagging his head and saying, monops is a stupid machine if it had any nous we’d have the lot. he was really in a bad way, between crying and fits of trembling, and swaggering bravado and weird laughing, like he he he he he.  he just kept asking luck to take him up higher, higher and higher, real high, to where you could see the whole thing, and explain it all, and just let him stay there, take him to heaven… but then he’d chicken out and just go robot robot, no I’m not a robot…

but he was because the robot mentality doesn’t register the pain his soul is in.

because they made him understand that he wanted a few thousand sheep and enough land to run them on. there are a lot of feral sheep out here and we shear some of them and no they don’t do well without shearing, though they’ll breed and yeah, they suffer a lot some of them, poor things. teddy cared about them. good shepherd, looking for his heaven as if it was his destiny and perhaps it was. and he was terrified of it.

anyway. when I got my seeing straight, mayenna started to teach me to shift from the material plane to the astral plane, oh how lovely it is, how I love it, for all its wars with HUG. and yeah, crime and mega slave trade. but the parts I’ve seen are beautiful, like village scenes in wales or somewhere strange and beautiful, so pretty and full of sweetness and love.

I did it for myself once, from the astral after she’d taken me up. it was fairly easy after the training I’d had. I fixed my mind on the memory of the place by the lake where the goats are kept in summer, and I chose the friendliest goat who always smiles at me and I give her flowers to eat, so she’d be clairvoyantly aware of me coming and she’d welcome me and that would help me. then I stood in perfect yoga balamce and let myself be moved. I dropped a bit, lack of practice and still a bit nervy and got back to floating and then glide and then I dropped again, which makes you feel swimmy, but I did it. I eased down in about three steps and it was like walking across mayennas carpet but downward through the duct you open and into the material scene. suddenly everything clears like the clouds parting on a sunny day and there I was next to the goat. I felt good. people praised me. mayenna cheered and applauded.

getting up was harder, but I was focusing on mayenna so she could give me more help with that.she caught me up half way and took mme up on her power the rest of the way. yeah I didn’t have enough power. and it’s dangerous, you know. you can’t get lost, but you can get damaged, like really damaged, if you get disturbed or lose your focus getting across. and there so many robotised HUG people that have diseased caused by tendencies even robots have to escape horrific situations by gravitating towards their favourite other sphere unconsciously especially while they sleep and there’s no one but monops whom nobody believes anyway to delude you into believing yourself happy like that…

still, the big thing looming in my vista was cally.

day twenty eight

and that’s why we win. it’s the flat earthers  against the whole fucking universe.

we’ve got all the magic because they don’t believe in it.

we can destroy their technology. we’ve got people with the power.

I was scared of being murdered when I got back down there but they said they would fix things up for me and they did. not many stayed angry when they knew that the aesir had denied the accusation and taken my part. I had not been arrested and condemned as a traitor to the Processing.

the floral, winey elixir made me very calm. I smiled while they told me I was more ready than most beginner for the initiations and I was anyway going that way so I might as well meet my newly appointed astral planet spirit guide on the way home.

like I said, it’s scary going up and without the sedative I’d have been too scared to go back down. even with it I was anxious, nearly whimpering. they whispered and there was sweet music as they whispered of love, to reassure me, like you’d calm a frightened animal. there’s no gradual adaptation to the new energy level. in the yellow dome in the middle chamber of the mountain you cannot get there except through perfect volitional self-attunement so it’s painless and happy but it takes anything from months to years to learn to do it. that way translocate fade-out/fade-in and you’re there, fade-back-out/fade-back-in and you’re home. and the best adepts have that in them.

the way I went was like being suctioned up through a tube and I kept hitting the sides and getting wedged edgeways in the kinks, until the tube convulsed and jolted me through and kept me going till I was certain that I was yes inside the duct of a vastly-bigger-than-me organic beings and her organs are all made of all these different substances and we can only see the material part of the spectrum and get a sense of the far edges of some of the others. like you’ve got a glass sphere like they showed me, on a sceptre it was but only very short handled where you can see the five things it’s made of, glass, wood, metal, cloth and plastic, and you can imagine what it would look like if you could only see the wood. or like we see an xray image, only the bones and shadowy outlines. flesh, ducts, organs of my mother planet. I felt her soooooooo. I soooo felt her living breathing body full of emothion and love. I understood like a gift, a trust, an inspiration that our species must find and clear and reopen these ducts and it is our instinct to do it. ad the rewards and incentives – I had such visions, I saw such wonders, strange nations  whole worlds, layered within the sphere s of this world, any number of them, all unimagined in *H*U*G*

day twenty seven

I had never met the ferawsies and when I first did I was so scared I wanted to die. they were hairy, dirty, and dressed in animal skins and their eyes looked like wild beasts’ eyes. they stank like animals. their voices speaking ferawsian sounded like chattering devils. I was so conditioned I just wanted to scream and scream and scream. I’m used to it now and don’t even notice it, and yeah, I’m just the same now. but then it scared me, it scared us all.

luck was really soothing. he dressed nicely and spoke *H*U*G*. he took us into the mountain for debriefing and to prepare us for freedom. it took months. and he taught us the basics of ferawsie. and he took us up and made us believe in the aesir, because we so conditioned not to believe.

anyway, all that was years ago, I don’t know how many, four or five, I haven’t been counting, but I guess I’m as scary as any of them now. I picked up ferawsie real quick when I got put in a group and haven’t spoken a word of *H*U*G* for years. I wear leather and knitted wool, just leather or nothing at all in summer. i haven’t worn shoes or cut my hair in all those years. I wear a tangled plait down to my waist and I’m used to the head-lice.

I didn’t pay much attention to the two bounty hunters they had down at the old house. they often used to keep prisoners there during the summer, before they took them away for whatever they did to them, when cally came into the camp and I recognised him I didn’t connect him with them. I just assumed he’d been through what I’d been through, but a bit earlier.

I went up to him and asked when he escaped, and he seemed really shocked and acted strangely. he said he had amnesia. maybe he just defected without being put through the treatment. amnesia’s fairly common. I reminded him of the camps and asked him if he remembered me at all. I even told him I used to have a crush on him. I was working getting hay and he was doing the wood so we saw each other fairly often, coming and going, because the wood yards are close to the hay barns and we all hang around there before and after work and in between. he said ‘don’t tell anyone where you know me from.’ it would have been all right anyway, because who would ever ask me?  but then someone recognised him as a bounty-hunter and the aesir had to come and take him away so they wouldn’t kill him.

There was a lot of talk about shadow, which some of them call ‘the engrafted word’. that’s a joke among the old farawsies who’ve never been robots and weren’t born in *H*U*G*.  it’s a joke from predee religion.

they used to have five religions, or may be more, but five main ones and after the dataloss and the decimation they put them all together because they’d caused most of the wars and biological warfare and nono wars that killed most of the people.

they gave the job to monops because they were strictly reasonable, to revise the religions and manage them and they preserved the sacred texts and on-line teaching packages and you can install them and practice them, but you’re regulated so you can’t get up a militia off a religious fanaticism anymore. of course *H*U*G* uses it pretty cynically to mind control the religion-addicted masses.

the ferawsies aren’t religious. they don’t have to be because they can see, they kn know where the dead souls go, they visit the afterlife worlds and they see the fairies and ghosts, and they ‘ve got such shamans, and people who can talk to the stars and planets and celestial beings, so they don’t have to stylise it as religion. they do magic instead to make the connections and channel the power. they’ve got all sorts of systems, and all sorts of little covens and communities doing all sorts of magic for the earth.

crane was in on that escape and she told us all about it. she’d been waiting with moon and michael for the escapees four kids that had been a couple of days getting through. and she saw the cunts get em. she was watching from above. she wasn’t where they could see her, but they use resonance technology to locate targets and suddenly there this robot was behind her and she saw him discharge the dirigible detention dart an d she’d taken off and damn near, yeah, flown over the scree, where the kids play in summer, fucking dangerous. they caught one of them when they stole the truck and two of them went after it, but the other one got away and that’s the one they reckon was cally. the caught the leader when michael came down to rescue                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       crane and only one got away. michael said they had already prepared false reports for monops for when they were out of the mad zone that they’d escaped died of exposure and had her up for auction on uGet under the false front of a major preedee artwork that doesn’t really exist. they were gonna get millions for her. she’s got the power.

michael was always really distant, like she kept herself apart and usually went up a tree or found somewhere to stand that was higher than everyone else. and only talked to others who had the power, but crane was friendlier.

then one day I started to get sick and I went and told hellsdream and he said that what was wrong with me wasn’t much, I just needed a head-purge and to fast and take his herbs. but he said I was doing self-harmful things with some loaded energies and he said I had to wait and see michael. he didn’t say why. he’s a good doctor but he doesn’t talk much. michael came in and shit, you know I used to admire her so much and she just started INTO me with all these deep probing questions, what do I love how do I love when I love what do you do to people who insult you, attack you, frighten you or bore you, etc, etc, etc,until I felt lit up and totally transparent, all my pychic processes under the lens of the seers’ mind, secret places and the disgrace places all full of shit. no I mean just deposits of sludge that she said were soul-grunge and she started asking all these questions and before I could answer, she totally took over my head and said out of my mouth, ‘you got nearly a critical mass of unrelieved agony to precipitate as disease instead of psychic abilty, and we want you activated and healthy. I was shedding the old burdens with their pollutive ways. and she made me see scabs over my psychic eyes and said that they would soon fall away and I would see again. again? when did I ever have the sight? she explained that our species did once thousands of years ago and it’s dying of its own vice because because they killed the magic and therefore they lost the earth.

. and now the ferals had begun to thrive, gaia has found us and nurtures us and we are  becoming earth-connected again. she gave me meditation exercises to do and then left me then, totally shell-shocked to think it over. she even said, ‘you’ve got the potential, you could have the power.

the aesir aren’t the only walkers between the worlds. some of the ferawsies were just as free and easy about switching dimensions. and the etherics are always trying to get home after wandering onto our reality by mistake usually. I was excited at the thought of going there myself. the hollow mountain has a nexus, a world axis, inside it it’s got twelve chambers one on top of the other to interact with the other worlds through, and they’re building gateways between earth and all the other planets. *H*U*G* is a totally flat-earth mentality because robots are too binary to think in an organic quadratic way, like gaia did when she first started designing our genes, like we’re all sposed to. because they’re born with their mobile clipped to their earlobe and from then on they start to behave like yet another external device of MONOPS and monops doesn’t register the attempts of small fairies to hack in so they don’t exist for the robots until nothing exists but the robots nothing exits but robots nothing exists but robots…

anyway they start you in the yellow chamber and there’s all this yoga and stuff to perfect our presence in the world we’re in, which is the yellow one, the one in the middle the fifth one.

then they teach you to prepare to attune to the green, which is the astral and there you find out who your spirit guides will be, and then it depends on your own predisposition whether you’re going to be taken down to the red end or up to the greens and blues and that end.

I’ve been taken up without it too. it was about cally, just after they arrested him. this *H*U*G* girl who used to give the prisoners their dinner every day saw me with him talking to him that time, and she said, ‘hey, how come you knoe him, and he had just told me not to tell anyone and already here’s this older woman asking point blank in better ferawsi than mine. so I said ‘he told me not to tell anyone.’ and she said, ‘secretive cunt isn’t he. he told the gang he came in with where he was from but no one could understand his ferawsie. it’s real ferawsie, but it takes some listening to to catch the meaning, until you’re used to it. it’s a different dialect, but there are all sorts up north and without telecommunications they’re diverging fairly fast.

anyway, after everyone found out he was *H*U*G*, she started in on me, and started asking all these questions in front of everyone and she started hitting and kicking me and spitting on me and I thought she was going to kill me or stir up the others to it, and she screamed TRAITOR TRAITOR at me till I thought she was shredding me with the edge of her screaming. then she stormed off leaving everyone staring at me and demanding to know what it was all about and I was surrounded by these angry ferawsies all with knives in their belts or in their hands and they sort of let me say I only thought I knew him from when I was a kid at school and I lied and said I didn’t even know if it was the same . bloke or not. so one or two kept on abusing e and the rest tried to keep peace and fighting broke out and the meanest ones were winning and nearly close enough to me to stab me and I was hysterical and suddenly one of the aesir just materialised without even using the axis, the way luck does, but it wasn’t luck it was hara, and she took me up. and it’s weird that way, like a death, she told me, but reversible. it’s like being extruded through a tiny tube. when I’ve got the power I’ll be able to do that. the axis in the mountain must be a kind of beginners rink.

so I got to meet all these aesir people in a watch tower up in ashreal on the aerial planet. they only kept me quiet in a small chamber with beautiful pictures and lovely things to hold, that they said were made just for their beauty and for no other reason. glass spheres with beautiful forms suggesting sweet magic. pictures painted with colours so lustrous and magical it made me almost swoon. they gave me a sweet wafer for energy, and a drink of something light and empowering out of a goblet. they said they were glad I was willing to take on te shamanism. they gave me a Upod with a sort of travelogue. that was soothing sort of, but weird, in that airy beautiful place. these were wathcers. they’ve got all sorts of jobs in that busy wolrd, and these few were watches, concerned with this axis and connecting with our planet here and elsewhere as the nexus gives them the power  and courage to do. they got watchers up there. they nurture certain cultures for their purposes, they proactively have a developed foreign policy, even with *H*U*G* that’s subliminal of course, and no one knows better than I they watch over their own.

day twenty six

then one day I was fourteen or something and I was starting biochemistry as part of a horticulture career entry path because I wanted to do food production in one of those many-bubble fast farm food factories off shore. the biochemistry was piddling and you knew it was fumbly stuff and they were faking about what they  did know and were dumbing you down as they were teaching it. I didn’t have any friends by then. they have subtle ways of infiltrating your friends lives, on-line, or through special attention they give you or them in school so no one was clicking like anywhere for me. when I saw them out and about they just gave me a blank stare and walked past me. I stopped trying. some of the boys started bullying me so I just kept to myself. then they said I was anti-social, and so I was given a course of intensive one on one and then five on one counselling, with lots of vids, brain-training and behaviour patterning games on-line, selected for me by my team of helpers. like, it was psychoanalytical. I was supposed to do this self-portrait to reveal underlying patterns of mental disease, and they said mine showed paranoia and dangerously criminal attitudes. they said nothing about genes, but they insisted there was a type and I was it. recalcitrant, and I was rated probably irretrievable. as well as that I wasn’t visiting any of my groups or clubs, and I only had one leisure subject which was drawing which is a solitary pursuit and not a social activity. but why the fuck do you want someone to be sociable when all you’re going to let them do forever is monitor hydroponic equipment where they’ll never see anyone, except to check social networks now and then – under sufferance, but indulgently tolerated as long as you don’t abuse the privilege.

and test, and more tests, and behaviour-modifying drugs, and constant interrogation, and they put my family through it too. I mean they’ve gt so much information about you from before you were born so that if they wanted to, they could clone you just from monops peoplemaps. it’s true. we used to joke about it. big larfs. and all that sci fi dealing with it, and all the time they’re lying, telling us we haven’t got the technology to do that and drowning us out and dumbing us down with all this fibby fiction about why we can’t. like the lies they tell us about why some parts of the web are so glitch you can’t use them while all the monops mainstream sites work like fucking charms. they’re using the same technology. and they lie when they say they can’t fix it. they create very visible problems and act innocently totaaly mystified all around it while not being able to fix it, its so obvious. they’re so fake. and they got everyone so brain-washed, mind-controlled, programmed robotised from fucking kindy up, and they all just sooooo believe everything onops says. because, isn’t monops the main *H*U*GU media, and managed by the government for the good of us all.? the fuck for the good of us all. what’s good about what they did to me?

I wasn’t calling myself feral or wanting to go with the ferawsies, but after a while I started to really wanna cut loose and I started to listen when I heard or saw anything about them without letting monps know, but the ones who listened to the transmissions from my brain were aware and I started getting voices threatening and calling me a fucking ferawsie bitch just in my head, not evn tryng to hide, because what could I say? I believe the voices in my head are a part of an evil conspiracy that picks on scared teenagers? that’s when you get put away. and I didn’t even know then that they even sell them sort as slaves.

I don’t know what my num and dad thought about it. they probably didin’t know any more about the ferawsies than I did – just what you got off tv. they were sort of hyped up like a corny fable, like abominable snowmen. and I suppose they also even believed in the psychiatric description of my rebelliousnous. and the need for the drugs. they smiled and grinned such lots for the counsellors and made me talk to them about it all. they presented a united front with the counsellors against me. they lectured me about running off and fucking farmers sons and even more about telling lies when i said I never did. monops has phased out lie detection tets, because they say they are not reliable.. but that’s a lie, r you can get lie detector kits off the web, or tweak your vr, and conduct your own experiments to prove it. but monops scoffs in times new roman and the world aligns –   kicks its own arse for still believing it and loads monops.

and anyway once they had a psychiatric report on me that said I was intractable and filled with unreasoning hatred who would listen to me. the implants could make me scream and rage any time they wanted and could bring on staggering, feebleness and bursts of emotion out of nowhere. like hormones but controlled via the web, by monops. okay, everyone knows they put stuff in your suckies and then mind control only and all the kids that monops has down as delinquents to buy the sort that’s got the implants, with a self destruct programme if the dog or your  snooping aunty gets it by mistake.my mum and dad cried, just like the ones on tv so her face didn’t look ugly but her shoulders shook and dad hid his face in his hands. he had a chair there he could collapse into for extra dramatic effect. robots. ROBOTS. GAIA, do you hear my scream???????

oh I had no idea about gaia back then. didn’t even know I’d ever be ferawsie. I was just orienting to the dawning awareness that they had me on the skids self-deteriorating rapidly or into the loony bin to be forcibly deteriorated there. they don’t much try to hide that they are doing it, but good robots don’t look. and only good robots’ve got rights, right? if you do look you see. and if you do see you scream, ad if you scream, you are obviously insane, because nobdy else is screaming, are they

and this is the part you’re not going to believe. I have had my memory of all that happened after that edited so cynically that it looks like a problem I’ve got that I can’t recall hw I got from counselled at home to a sheltered psychiatrically managed workshop. so now you mall think I’m a case and so I tell you this knowing that you are sold out as all fuck to hug. first I was drugged out of my brain in this green room, and there was this woman and a man and they asked me all these questions and whatever I answered the mind was syy never said anything but acted as if I was all dysfunctional and it was tragic. after a week my mind was systematically wiped out. I was really believing I was mentally ill and there was something wrong with me and I couldn’t reason.

I was put into a building I did not know the location of. perhaps I remember being taken there in a van. I was put in a nice room with everyone smiling sad little brave little reassuring smiles and I was given a job clicking yes or no appropriately for two hours a day, one hour in the morning the next hour at night on a website whose purpose I was never sure of, according to criteria I had to know but not understand. easy work to pay for my keep now that I was an unemployable burden to society.

the implants soon brought me to where we all agreed tht I didn’t need my parents any more and they didn’t need their exemplary faces rubbed in in the mess they and monops had made of me. there was afinal meeting, not very sad, angry I suppose and I’m finished with them. how I would have loved to have loved, but monops wasn’t allowing love. it only wanted the appearance of love according to someone’s sense of what love is that I could never achieve in a million lifetimes of trying.

then I was told my mother was dying of XUd, i wasn’t able I could feel the implants though back then how could I suspect anything, it was all such slushy rumour. but I felt nothing at all. she’s a bit of animated meat like me, soon to cease. that’s what monops thinks of us. what else could a cyberbeast think. ah but monops can kill you for accessing cyberbeast. for them, the machine is t be perceived as dead except by the loonies and them with the hallucination that occur when you’re on the ha ha ha ha ha skidzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

then my father went into intensive care and died – I’m nt sure what of, and I’m just fourteen…

yeah well, no doubt they are still alive and have been officially informed that I have committed suicide. wouldn’t put it past ‘em.

and then all the pretence stopped. I was practically unknown. the isolative practices of the last four years had killed my social life. none of my old friends knew or cared where I was, and anyway, why would they stalk someone they haven’t seen in years?

now the nurses became cold and impersonal as if dealing with a bedpan.

I was dressed by them in a uniform like a toga. the food was monops approved mush. slave food. I clicked like or I didn’t for two hours, and the rest of the time was regulated for me via the implants. I got up when told and sat down when told and once or twice a week a psychiatrist would chat via monops with me, and not to help me either. he just took all sorts of measurements and gathered all sorts of physiological data with his instruments and treated me pretty much as a specimen, an example of the genus.

the food is drugged and you are given drugs and you are kept docile, apathetic and hypnotised, highly suggestible, with no defences.

I got relocated a few times without being told where or why which was very disorienting.

I ended up working in this sheltered workshop factory thing in my own room with a bed and a toilet in it and monops instead of a window. that was from age 11 till I was about 14. there was supervised leisure time and controlled socialising, with robots so depersonalised we scarcely could think of things to say.

and then I started having serious dizzy spells (caused by the meds of course but they’ve got it down as a symptom.)  and they started these treatments. and how stupid did they think I was or didn’t they care how transparently clear it was that what they had in mind was human guinea pigs. and who could I tell. believing such things is a well-known ‘symptom’.

and as well as that there was this bursitis I got in my shoulder where there’d suddenly be this searing pain just in one spot but they said there was nothing wrong and proved with their infallible tests that I was not in pain because it wasn’t registering on their screen. fuck knows what they were monitoring!

some days between work hours I just used to sit in my cell and howl like an animal.

and I’d get migraines with flashing crystalline lights and blazing clarity, and the medicine they gave me for that made me hear voices. soft ones, I wasn’t afraid of these ones. I couldn’t make out much of what they said, but they filled me with love. I wanted to die, to go to them through dying and that’s what I tried to do by willing myself to die.

I was alone one day after a treatment and I was hearing those soft voices and then suddenly the sound changed and I saw the speaker, this guy just standing there. I didn’t know it was luck but that’s who it was. I thought he was an angel but he had no wings. he talked to me about escape, about magic and about power and told me what I had to do with my power, how to make it more and manage it and he would help. he gave me detailed instructions how to effect a powerful magical shamanistical shift in the holographic arrayary to make a getaway.

he said I had to trust and not fear, but be quick. when I heard the shout ‘freedom!’ I should run to the assembly room and out into the quad.

‘freedom.’ he said it in ferawsie. it was the first ferawsie word I’d ever heard. I didn’t find out the meaning of it until later. then he disappeared like a fading image right before my eyes. so I thought oh well, it’s just a hallucination, because I fantasise involuntarily, like they keep telling me it all is, and I  really was in agony, in real mental torture for two days and then suddenly early one morning I hear this scream, rending the air, shredding the silence, a woman’s voice. ‘FREEDOM!’ and I did the routine the little rite the ritual ad there was this cracking bang and my door door flew open so I ran to the assembly room and the double doors are sliding open, and I go out into the quad and all the power doors are open. two more patients followed me out and there were already four there. the staff were just standing staring as if they were blind and not trying to stop us. we ran to the centre of the quad and stood there in a huddle like scared geese. suddenly there was this official *H*U*G* skimmer that descended above us and we’re all inside it and there’s this sensation of rising fast. we all fell on the floor and rolled up small while the gravity of that ascent flattened us. that alone should have alerted monops’. I thought luck must have stolen that skimmer but I didn’t know about shadow then and the way they clone stuff, the aesir..

there was no one on board except us escapees. the skimmer took us as far as it could, to the edge of the radiation zone in which electronic devices do not function and  left us there, pointing us towards hollow mountain which luck had told me about.

day twenty five

Part two

my name is Charmaine. it’s an ancient name that goes a long way back. it’s preedee.  it’s not *H*U*G* name. I took it on a short time after I went feral.

I knew Cally from youth camps back when I was ten. he was older than me. I used to have the most terrible crush on him.

I recognised him when he first came into camp.  I thought ‘wow, is he ferawsie?’ we’d captured some bounty hunters and the aisir wouldn’t let us kill them. I went and talked to cally but he didn’t remember me. he was pretending not to know any *H*U*G* and was talking way weird ferawsie, so some were getting a bit suspicious of him right from back then.

crane, who the  bounty hunters’d captured trying to rescue the escapees finally identified him as one of the team and they locked him in the mountain with the other two. she’s got the power. she remembered him straight away but wasn’t sure whether he was a team member or an escapee – she was badly concussed at the time, and stupefied by the dart.

I wasn’t there when they went in and rescued crane and the escapees. I heard about it later. moon, he’s a giant, he rolled the truck away and michael, who also has got the power, kept the robots sleeping. they said there were two of them went looking for the truck and they only caught one of them, the straw-haired young one. cally must have been the other one but I couldn’t know that then. they caught another one with crane and we tied the two of them to the verandah posts at the old predee house down by the lake and they’d been there a while before cally came in. he didn’t look like a robot or act like they do. he had a lot of tattoo, which *H*U*G* would never permit. *H*U*G* would never admit it but they’re scared of freedom. tattoos there are regulation standard issue and everyone’s got the same dragon, eagle, wolf, mermaid or sex god or goddess. approved patterns only only your too dumbed down and too past caring to notice or care.

the aesir let him be so we did.

crane doesn’t speak *H*U*G*. she’s free-born, from over in the west, where they speak a different form of the ferawsian we speak here, so she speaks both forms. Cally’s was neither form, ad not the one you learn from monops. before I went feral, I used to download ferawsie lessons from monops and learn phrases and such to be ready for when I took off. I used to get so scared, knowing that monops’d be aware that I was doing it, and without sufficient cause, and I’d end up in detention and maybe in jail or a treatment centre. that’s not what cally was speaking. his was just weird.

then this guy junas recognised him. and said he was a completely sold out *H*U*G* robot too cowardly to admit it and he tried to kill him, because his team are well-known. he’s with iggy feld and that’s who we’ve got in that mountain, lucky to be alive. moon stopped him and we let the aesir settle it.

the aesir treated him as a joke and taunted him, and then they put him under the mountain with the others. and then he stopped pretending and talked pure sweet *H*U*G* like the mind-controlled zombie robot thug they all are.

so junas was right, he was one of them.

anyway, when they disappeared from the house, we thought the aesir had taken them up. they’d had the skinny one with straw-coloured hair up when he escaped once and only got halfway up the mountain.

fuck that was funny. they had him upside down screaming for mercy just by holding him down and giving him to the aesir. well they didn’t just do it to hurt him, he had to be taken up, but it was funny, and he was only scared, I mean, he didn’t get hurt. he was already sick.

I speak good *H*U*G*, though I’m out of practice. I was fourteen before I got told I was delinquent and got put in the  reformatory. well, I was a bit wild, shirking school, mucking around with marginal cults on-line, always looking for the rads and ratbags. it doesn’t take much to get caught. I think their problems with me centred around things I said on-line to my friend faola abut the school social camp. I hadn’t wanted to go anyway. monops had registered that my social life was ‘insufficient’ so the counsellors had investigated and said I had bad attitudes. so they heavily advised me to go to this camp and my parents had to make me go. it wasn’t ‘advice’ it was an order and when I went I just got sick of the fun and I said so on-line.

I knew there was something wrong even when I was only ten. talking of cally, it was at that youth camp that i was at that I used to have such a crush on him at. it was for kids 10-14. his hair was so black and wavy, and he had a sort of swagger, and he was a way cool dancer. I wasn’t in his age-group, so I never even got a chance to speak to him and any way, I was only a silly kid.

the last day of camp was pranks. we were supposed to do it. it’s traditional. you always do. on the last day, you all play tricks on the staff.

they had all these showers outside the hostel where we were all supposed to wash the salt off after we’d been swimming in the sea before we went and got changed. there was this supervisor there who always got there first and she always used the one nearest to the door.

then everyone would line up for that and the other showers. while it was all happening she’d really ostentatiously set the example for us all, practically worshipping the shower rose, radiating the sensual pleasure of a clean body with enough clout to kill.

and we were all supposed to do the same.

she used to tell us how crystal pure the water was, and how much the technology cost to get it there and all about the ways of testing and how their camps water came through all tests with sparkling acclaim. she’d turn on the big tap to luke warm to spare the power resources, and wash her hair, standing there in her bikini and smile a nice big shiny robot smile at us all.  and we’d all go in that line under the shower, oldest first and we’d all wash our hair and wear that same happy face, even me. and I was really cross because cally did too, and I didn’t want him to have that plastered on plastic smile.

but I was just as bad. I just used to do it like everyone else. I couldn’t stop myself. the grin would just spread and I hated it. anyway, on the last day some of the kids unscrewed the pipes to the first shower nearest the door and screwed in a small tank of luke warm purple dye. and the teacher didn’t notice it, she was so busy giving us all a big smile to copy, until she was covered with it. then she laughed herself sick. and we all laughed ourselves sick, cally, did, laughed himself sick, and I did too, just like a programmed robot.

that woman does camps all year round and on the last day theys always do pranks and they always do that trick with the dye. and the best bit is, while she’s laughing herself sick she’s showing us all how to laugh ourselves sick just like her.

that was the day I really knew I hated it.

after the showers I was going back to the dorm to change and I was on my own a bit behind the others. the holiday director, this big bald guy with a big robot grin came out of his office as I went past and said, ‘charmaine, come with me, I want you to give me a hand with something,’ so ifollowed him to the boat shed down by the beach and he made me lay down on a bunk and he raped me, the bastard. it hurt like hell and when I tried to scream he nearly suffocated me clamping his horrible mouth over my mouth so I couldn’t. he nearly crushed me with his weight he was such a heavy build so I couldn’t breathe even when he let my mouth go. then he dragged me back to the hall by the wrist and I was crying hysterically and blood was pouring down my legs. and he went and told everyone that he’d caught me sneaking off down to that shed and followed me down and caught me having it off in a tryst with one of the local farm boys, whom he had seen running off when he saw him coming.

they all believed him. monops had all sorts of black marks against my name that I couldn’t ever have known about. anyway, they pretended to be being kind to me by hushing it up. but they had me under close surveillance after that which is the last place before they put you in detention. and from there on, I don’t care what anyone tells you, you are a slave. plus I had to have regular counselling and restricted outings, with supervision only. then they ran me through a whole lot of tests, and physical examinations – they didn’t say anything about the genes, which they pretend not to know about, but it’s obviously what they were after. they were so fake and so fucked up and so cruel when you said, you’re dumbed down so you can’t see what stupefied robots you all are.

every time I started thinking about all the lies this society runs on, I tought I’d go crazy and then I started hearing voices when I dozed off at night, or was coming out of sleep in the early morning, saying over and over again robotically in this plastic robot voice that soo I would be permitted to socialise again in a limited way, and I would be allowed to drink and when I could I was to drink myself to death with all possible speed. I was to see this as a relatively painless escape from a painful and pointless existence.

this was at a time when the suicide rate was soaring among teenagers. no fucking wonder with mind control like that, the bloody hypocrites.

okay an angry mind always distorts the perception. I started talking back to this fucking voice and it suddenly went random, and said really whacky things, and I knew it was to try t make me not believe what I know I was perceiving. then I got a lot of ridicule in tiny voices for believing that I was the only person in ten million who didn’t love *H*U*G* and then scary insanity in high pitched gabbles with menace I almost succumbed to. but I kept scoffing. ‘you are hyocrites, liars,’ I kep telling them.’ tiny tinny little voices for a year with painful sensations of stress and tickling of nerves and they tell me I am all alone making it all up going insane voices in my head, psychotic, to be locked up.

but I knew they were doing that to me. I wasn’t nuts. they are evil.

I stopped doing well at school and my marks went down. I think my faith collapsed completely then, I just kept seeing through everything. and that’s what saved my life but it’s also why they needed to look for other ways to control me.

they get the voices into you, the tinny plasticky ones through nano technology, imbedding tiny radio receptors in your neurology smart enough to build themselves into all the right circuits so as to speak into the subliminal levels of your mind while it is relaxed. and your not supposed to hear it, and if you don’t you just mindlessly do what you’re told and if you do you get rapidly diagnosed as psychotic, which means intensive treatment under restraint. benign detention.

day twenty four

that’s for sure. he was gross.

‘well,’ I told him, ‘it will be a tragic disaster for our planet if the ferawsies win this war they say they are planning against H*U*G* Predee ways no longer work for our species. remember the plagues that raged before the data-loss event. and war after war leaving whole continents almost uninhabitable, even before the vibrational agony since the solar explosions of the first century ad. *H*U*G* formed to stop the death of our species from its own barbarity. maybe the one historical fact most of us remember from school is that the population of the planet went from ten billion people to about three point three billion, with more than 70% of land surfaces uninhabitable because of pollution and radioactivity. since then we’ve put two hundred years of damned  hard yacka into building our world anew with a civilisation that doesn’t self-destruct, based on sound principles and the highest ideals of democracy and human rights.’

‘unless you don’t fit in. your prisons and loony bins are full of shriekingly unhappy people.’

‘the ferawsies are law-breakers.  *H*U*G* values and promotes diversity. if they can’t fit in they’re just not trying hard enough. well, criminal, you know we mostly catch runaway delinquent kids who’ve got into bad company and gone feral to return them to the circle of family and friends with supportive counselling and kindly rehabilitation programmes.’

chatten laughed for quite a long time, rolling about in his chair like a beleaguered walrus. ‘I know you deal with the slavers, iggy. that’s why you are here with us, being processed.’

‘you also know those are hard-cases not worthy of a place in any civilisation because they seek to destroy what belongs to us all.’

‘you include here the last one you caught? the one that made herself bait in the trap that caught you, for the sake of the captured kids she was rescuing?’

‘she was unspeakably filthy degenerate and depraved, like all the ferawsies and you can include yourself, dr chatten.’

‘we shall talk again, iggy. we have so much more to tell each other.’

‘why bother?’ I said in a rough ragged voice. ‘I’ve seen enough. you are crazy.’

but I was the one that felt crazy and I was so tired I was almost falling off the seat. meanwhile, I’ll continue work on my translation into *H*U*G* of some very interesting linguish and predee documents which luck wants me to acquaint you with.’

with that he got up and left and the lab assistant gave me something to drink. I didn’t feel fit to protest. I just dramk it. it was only their ferawsie soup.

*     *     *

day twenty three

‘well, I’m tired,’ I said. ‘what do you want?’

‘iggy, my qualifications are in psychiatry. that’s what got me my job as a chief regulator, my understanding of how the human psyche works. I use my knowledge to work around the cultural neuroses that tend to distort all politics, civil and social practices and so on.’ he shrugged. ‘well, once I did, long ago.’

humbled, I said, ‘you must have been a brilliant scholar.’ my head began to ache.

‘well, yes, it’s a specialised field and requires special abilities. like anything else.’ he blinked wetly. ‘but since my defection – you might have heard about my “early retirement to pursue other interests and write books”, (which *H*U*G* is having done for me since I’m not there to do it for myself) I’m finding my psychiatric talents more useful to my fellow humans in this much humbler way, as a psychiatrist for people caught between two worlds who have gone insane and need analysis, counselling and perhaps, calculated restraint.’

‘well, you might look at teddy.’

‘teddy?’ he looked at me, riveted, pen poised.

‘one of my team members.’

‘has a teddy?’

‘no, is teddy.’

‘you have a teddy who is a team member?’

‘no. I mean threadgold. we call him teddy. it’s a nickname.’

‘oh I see.’ he blushed a bit and wrinkled his bald head, scratching his ear with his pen.’

‘no, threadgold is ill.’

‘well, it’s been traumatic.’

‘for you as well’

‘of course.’

‘and so, because you are exhibiting symptoms consistent with intense anxiety, you’ve been referred to me for counselling, but there’s more to it than that. I rarely speak to *H*U*G* people. naturally I avoid the corrupt officials who get in. only people we arrest are brought here.’

‘what for?’

‘for questioning, to be informed, and for psychiatric treatment for traumatic stress.’

‘you mean “processing”?’

‘why don’t you just kill us?’

‘luck wants you. you’ve met luck?’

‘yes’

‘you’re nearly over the initial reaction to immersion in the radiance of this high radiation zone. are you noticing any psychic effects?’

‘I am still hallucinating.’

‘do you think you can read minds?’

‘I said I am hallucinating.’

‘you have the impression that you were reading someone’s mind?’

‘yes. I am sometimes temporarily delusional.’

I felt very focussed. I could see he was a dangerous enemy. I did not know why I was saying the things I was saying or why so meekly and even with a pleasant expression. I felt belligerent and offended. underneath that I was terrified, traumatised and had been in a state of shock for half a year, yet here I was chatting as if to a trusted friend. and when he asked if I ever felt controlled by another mind or other minds, I was not tricked. I knew that this man was controlling me.

not even the embedded manops manual of mental health  symptoms associated with  traumatic isolation, such as loss of contact with monops, came to my rescue until later. at the time I just felt myself coming up with things to say.

I simply produced the text-book symptoms .on cue and reiterated that I was still sane because I knew that I was hallucinating.

chatten seemed pleased enough with that. he doodled a round circle and put a point dead in the centre, and he spun the pen tip round back n forth for emphasis.

after about an hour of talking he spoke again about genetics, ‘the genetic component of the syndrome of feralism is being denied by *H*U*G* because they use genetically manipulative techniques to manage human behaviour. starting in prenatal care, all the way to graduation from school, right through career, retirement and senility. so they are secretly developing a useful knowledge of how to do this while teaching at universities that genetics is a rock hard unchangeable cause of traits, which at the same time is far too complex and subtle for any but the most highly trained specialists to understand. we’re thinking in terms of dumbing down, mystification.’

‘yes, it’s terrible,’ I said putting on the right *H*U*G* frown. ‘they get away with murder.’ my hand clicked lol on thin air again. so I laughed, out loud. then I sat back and smiled comfortably the way you do, a bit sadly, looking for a *H*U*G* context for this oh so typical conversation in good enough *H*U*G* and there was only this cave under a mountain.

he smiled the same smile and nodded deeply into his double chin. ‘damn scallywags.’

I laughed lightly again, while he nodded, arms folded, and then he and I both began at once: ‘yet for all its’ faults…’ ‘yes, we’ve both learned that one.’ I heard him say, but his lips weren’t moving. an hallucination, or a hoax he was playing. it was a soundless utterance, the impression of each word not the less clear for being unbreathed.

‘so you will hold in your memory what I showed you, that it is possible to extrapolate from the sociological interrelationships between HUG officials mathematics that supports with awesome ease the genetically determined traits of HUG’s most troublesome criminal element. the ferals. ferawsies, as they call themselves. ‘

the ferawsie genetic array has been disproved. we haven’t got sensitive enough instruments to observe much at that order of magnitude. applying the theory isn’t producing predictable results.’

‘that’s the official story. in fact they have advanced genetics, developed from preedee genetics, and they’re using it to manipulate the people unethically. dumbing down, mystification.’ he adjusted the pair of preedee glasses he was wearing on his nose and sort of snuffled huffily. MONOPS hadn’t been helping him with his personality grooming exercises

day twenty two

no data survived the catastrophic pan-global data-loss event. the first *H*U*G* (*holistic*unity*group*)  convention named that year 0-0-0 before that is pre-d, after is a-d. all history written after that is unverifiable..

*H*U*G* established monops to restore global networks.

monops unified and began to regulate the independent networks that had sprung up, and eliminated the disruptive  ones.

Increasingly popular, *H*U*G* unified governments and all other major organisations via monops-controlled networks.

all printed book collections were impounded after spurious translations flooded the network. academic work on them is still in progress, hampered by the fact that no printed books existed in pre-d linguish – they were no longer printing paper books and very few scholars existed who had a firm knowledge of any of the archaic languages such as French or Ugandan that could be verified. hard evidence was scanty and beyond the evidence. academic opinion diverged wildly until monops imposed restraints and requirements acceptable to the public.

the most accessible texts remain diagrammatic pre-dee technology.

intelligent people are cautioned not to believe any of the non-official stories circulating about pree d because no one really knows. they’re best disregarded except as folklore.’

‘go on.’

but that was all. it was a short study course and only one of the topics i studied.’

‘the official stories, aah? ‘

‘iggy’

‘iggy.’

‘I didn’t do history.’

‘what caused the data loss?’

they suspect sunspot activity causing electromagnetic storms here on earth. there is no proof, but it is highly probable, and there’s virtually a critical mass of evidence pointing to it.’

and what f the folk-lore.?

‘na. try cally, he is a gamer.’

the guy kept right on writing.

‘do you mind telling me who you are? who you’re working for?’

‘well all right. if that’s all you know of your own culture’s history, it won’t mean a thing to you. you know gotlin, of course.?’

‘not personally.’

‘but you know who he is?’

‘yes of course. he’s adder-lady’s chief regulator of community affairs.’

‘I’m his predecessor.’

‘his name was Christy.’

‘that’s the name he goes by. it’s not his real name. monops selects its officials’ names scientifically. chatten means something in a once widespread pre-dee language that might imply subliminally to some minds that what I say is trivial.’

‘you don’t resemble him.’

‘you never met me. you’ve only ever seen retouched photos. I was thirty years younger and anyway, heavily made up. I’ve put on weight and lost muscle tone. monops wasn’t giving me my fortnightly newmoon rejuve, iggy. I have done something that under the tender protection of monops you have been spared from ever seeing. I have aged.’

‘yeah. uh. I wa trying not to look. I feel sorry for you. I wish my belt could pick up a signal, reconnect… I’ve got e liksya. that does you a great rejuve, while you sit back and relax, watch something, do gaming, whatever. I’d could let you use it… at east all those saggy pouches and baggy bits gone. what do use for skin care?’

he looked more like a pig than ever, with a double chin extended as he leaned forward and squinted at me, a little grin nervously coming and going beneath a bristly red moustache.’

‘you work, socialise, learn and play mostly through monops.

yes.

so you use hug most of the time.

yes.

how good is your linguish?

I can understand rapid fluent linguish with a core vocabulary of 750 words. that’s what I’m assessed at. that’s at an intermediate level of competence.’

‘can you read it?’

‘no.’

all right. you’ve told me that there is no genetic basis for feralism in humans. is that monops fact?’

‘feralism?”

ferawsi-ism’

‘yes’

are you aware that when feralism was first identified by monops it was by dna analysis to discover the genetic basis for antisocial personality.’

‘yes, but that’s discredited now.’

‘oh yes, mind body soul spirit, the divine mother will of the planet operating in us all.’ I laughed, as anyone would. ‘well, it’s all ‘beyond the evidence,’ I reminded him. ‘but yah, if you’re going to believe in anything…’

‘yess, yes, but look at this diagram.’ he handed me a book and I looked at the drawing. not sure why, but the pages of old typeset text made me feel anxious and oppressed. I saw a sort of graph, showing complex inter-referentiality amongst a number of points. I listened as he explained how this related to the upper echelons of hug, the key performers and their specific attributes and the contextising points that maintained them, keeping them centred and focused around their fields of activity. then he showed me another diagram

which he said represented a translation of that diagram into an abstraction which simpler though it was was still complex. this pattern he said caused genetic formations in laboratory cultures.’ and he had pages of paper with drawings in ink.

‘I’m not a scientist,’ I said. I could feel him lose the power that was driving him, but sorry. I know a total kook when I see one. I said nothing, but he read my expression loud and clear.

‘what is your religion?’

‘I’m not religious.’

‘I suppose it’s a bit out of fashion.’

‘not really. mandi and su go to church.’

‘which church?’

‘reconstructed bible-path of holistic living’

chatten laughed, or rather his sides heaved under his bulky clothing, and he wheezed.

‘aha.’ and he wrote. ‘Cally?’ he asked, pen poised.’

‘he’s a gamer, and he takes his game-world pantheon very seriously.’

‘that’s very interesting. is that your whole team?’

‘yep, one to drive, one to track, and one to do all the hard work. hahaha.’ i tried to click lol and remembered there wasn’t an electronic interface. in fact I was getting very tired. I was coping reasonably well with the traumatic vibrational events but totally fazed by waking dreams in which sequences similar to real experience which went however far beyond real experience into the fringes of psychosis characterised by paranoid delusion and loss of rational intelligence. I was under the totally delusional impression that he and I were wrestling in some strenuous non physical way, as if he were trying to make me not see him and see the old Christy instead, and he almost seemed to succeed and of course, Christy was much handsomer than this little fat moist pig-like chatten.’

day twenty one

half moon waning. my sabbath. i’m doing watery west magic for the planet today so no nanowrimo till tomorrow. blessings of the waning moon. good time for banishing pain and suffering.

day twenty

I mean that’s what it was with what I was eating. anyway, as I said, one quiet burp and its gone. cally was quite knowledgeable about what was in it. the productivity of ferawsi grasslands was limited by the sickness of the plants and the harvest a  matter of snatch and grab while the watchers stood guard and the gatherers went grabbing. it was all done at night when the scanners could be seen and their coming anticipated which reduced deaths from snake bite so that was something. but there was oats wheat and peas in the corn mush that they boiled up into that cake. and ground nuts. and three sorts of acacias , and eucalyptus seeds collected like flour on stretched skins, and all collected at night when the scanners can’t get you. just whatever was brought in every day got put into the staple.

it always tasted strange, yeah, like tight, twisted flavours.

‘they could be growing stuff in the mountains,’ teddy said. ‘they should be growing stuff hydroponically.’ yeah, they prolly do.’ said cally.

‘I mean, shit, there’s enough light, isn’t there? everything was sweetly beaming with a mysterious white luminosity, its whiteness lost in the general whiteness of the surrounding paintwork so that it seemed to come from it. ‘so yeah, you could simulate daylight. so it’s not just that they’ve got a lot of stolen stuff. *H*U*G* hasn’t got indoor lighting like this.’

‘we don’t know what *H*U*G* has got that isn’t public yet …’

‘yeah, but look at this light. any amount of it. faaaaak, it’s practically daylight. so they could grow two or three crops a year of pest-free grain no shit and piss and all the side salads they want with or without snails. why don’t they? they are nuts.’

he scratched his back. ‘we’re being force-fed their shit!’ he was making me feel ill.

‘teddy,’ I said. ‘remember your training. you knew the risks when you signed up to become a hunter. eating contaminated food for a while won’t hurt you. you well know how to lower your standards to suit the occasion. that’s part of what life’s about man. by crikey, did you want everything paved and signposted for you? did you think bounty hunting was all beer and skittles.

I heard myself going on and on and getting louder and clearer and when I came to the end I was totally abashed to see that everyone was looking at me. passers-by had stopped to listen. ferawsies were looking up from their work. kids were dawdling up towards us. then first one and then another ferawsi began to laugh and they all joined in. we all turned our backs to the wall, shoulder to shoulder to face them, like three stags facing the hounds.

but they only laughed and threw a few taunts I couldn’t quite catch, not being sure what language was being spoken and anyway, not a linguist.

‘they’re not allowed to hurt us,’ said cally as we watched things return to normal. ‘because of luck. they obey luck.’

‘are they scared of him?’

‘some of them. see there’s those closest to him and they all accuse them of sucking up to him and they get accused of being jealous. it’s to do with power. luck’s got all this gear… that rough gang I was with despise that. they are all full of their own magic. they use all sorts of stuff with plants and stones and bits of old glass and metal. they don’t trust the people in the mountains at all. they don’t trust new escapees either. they say that in the old days if they were psychic they used to send them straight into the deep ferawsie centres for complete training but they give them all straight to luck nowadays and he spoils them for the good magic that heals the earth. they end up going after luck’s magic, which is all ego driven ambition and power-greed. it’s about controlling people. luck takes em up and puts em down and they get power, but it’s different. not ferawsi. it’s luck’s power. not the magic of the mother planet.’

‘magic’

‘yeah. we know monops on magic.’ cut in threadgold, starting to giggle. ‘these cunts don’t.’

‘calm down, teddy.’

‘let’s read it to ‘em eh?’ and he started to: ‘the perception of ‘magic’ is always the result of delusion caused by disturbances in the brain. some common causes of delusion are stress, anxiety, mesmerism, trance states, drugs, toxins, waking dreams, allergy reactions, fugues, fanaticism, gullibility, irrational thinking, hypnopompic states and other mild to serious psychiatric disorders all closely related to psychotic conditions including such possibly dangerously homicidal psychopathic conditions as schizophrenia, a range of autisms, obsessions and fanaticisms, aspergers, dwychen’s syndrome… and he twaddled on comfortably, the words trippingly off the tongue in deep monopsian trance-learn and recall mode.

‘does he still get his medicine?’ I asked cally.

cally looked him critically. he looked pale and stressed out. not that we all didn’t but he had a sort of tight-lipped, scared expression and looked fanatical. ‘do you think he needs any? yeah, now that you mention it,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask someone.’ then he grinned. ‘and I’ll get us a beer ration too.’

‘good on ya.’

cally wandered freely and said we could go anywhere but this is where they put our camp. and we couldn’t get out the cave because that was guarded.

but they came and got me before cally came back with the beer. they walked me down several flights of hand-hewn whitewashed stone stairs, all mysteriously lit to near daylight levels of brightness, through some long corridors where work was still in progress, down a pole with hammered in foot-holds, into a smallish cavern with rough but luminous walls and a slab seat upon which I was made to sit, facing a sort of counter with an arched doorway behind it. everything was white.

people came and went. I was made to stand and given a sort of medical examination, a filthy grotty young woman listened to my breathing, took a pulse count, prodded my muscles and forcing open my jaw counted my teeth. if she’d asked I’d have opened my mouth voluntarily.

she took a swab of saliva, a sample of hair and a drop of blood which she extracted by pricking my finger. I wondered what sort of magic they were going to do.

then she let me into another room where the stone sofa was covered with snowy white sheepskins and was almost comfortable to sit on.

I suppose they must have been enthralled with my samples because I heard nothing more for a few moments after which at last in the doorway I had entered through stood a short, fat, bald man with a squint that made him appear to grin, and drew up his nose and mouth into a snout. in he came tottering on tiny feet in tiny shoes, in through the door, and he sat down on the seat opposite me.

he was bizarrely dressed in period costume, the worse for having been slept in every night for a long, long time. only the shoes were bright and polished. he had the brisk manner of a social worker and not a trace of ferawsie about him. I say bald, but I mean only the top of his head. he had a fringe of long black hair that reached down over his shoulders, and a sparse black beard and moustache.

‘I’m chatten,’ he said.

‘ignatius feld.’ I replied.

‘yes, feld, iggy, may I? I see your friends do. I have been studying your file.’

‘yes, iggy.’

he wrote it down on a pad of paper with a pen. I used to be able to write a bit, but I never had any use for it. now I’ve got about 650 icons which is par for the course to negotiate the web, but nobody learns to read and write anymore. he laboured over it, there’s no doubt.

‘now I’m going to ask you some questions and I want you to answer them. think of me as a kind of psychiatrist. I just want to understand certain things about the way your mind works.’

‘I do not consent to this,’ I said. ‘will you please record that?’

he looked surprised then he laughed and looked pleased. ‘certainly,’ he said and write cheerfully on his pad.

then he said, ‘but I’m going to do it anyway. if you don’t willingly answer, I have recourse to coercive technologies.’

I broke into a nauseous sweat.

‘but you’re afraid because you think I will harm you.’

‘the ferawsies routinely harm their hostages,’ I said. at least I would go down fighting for my sanity, even if their victory seemed assured.

‘no we don’t,’ said chatten. ‘*H*U*G* does that and blames us. they are covering massive corruption and telling huge lies to justify mega crimes. you are not hostages, you are criminals, likely to be pardoned because you are, as the wildborn say, robotised by your upbringing and enculturation as a citizen of *H*U*G*.’

‘look I’m a well-adjusted, sane healthy man. I’m not running amok wasting my human potential for the lack of some discipline and management of errant impulses. these kids need the security of *H*U*G*. the sanity of MONOPS.’

‘they have indicated that they don’t want that.’

‘that is because they are not properly enculturated.’

‘they are enculturated when you send them home?’

‘ye-es. very often successfully. these are our kids, our tearaways. we love them. we want them returned to their families and friends and given a second chance, and persuaded to give them a second chance, to give *H*U*G* a fair go…’

I stopped short, reminding myself of a training course voice. the last few sentences had been almost word for word.

I giggled.

maybe it was his gum-baring grin that set me off though that had more to do with the maintenance of his squint than with any shared mirth.

‘are you familiar with the science of genetics?’

‘I am not superstitious,’ I scoffed.

‘superstitious?’

‘I do not believe that genes govern  people’s behaviour any more than an ingredient in plastic can drive or glide a plastic car. there is no evidence for a genetic basis for non physiological traits in human beings. even the brain can’t govern us. it streams experience. we are experiencers. our bodies are merely tools. they serve our species and we die, leaving space for someone else.’ the little bald man looked utterly amazed.

‘now look mate,’ I told him. ‘I did a course in the absence of any regularly observable genetic indicators of a high likelihood of feralism in humans and I know monops is pretty thorough in its research.’

‘unlike our ah predecessors.’

‘pre-dee history is not my subject.’

‘how little do you know about it?’

‘I don’t really remember my childhood schooling. I dod well at it and uh moved on.’

‘I think you could remember with a little help.’

‘look I’ve got this technique where I press my thumb and forefinger together and when I do that I’ve trained myself to give myself a mind-blast of memory power.’

‘good, iggy. that’s to be much preferred to er superstition. would you like to do that now?’

‘all right.’ I did. I took in a deep breath and visualised the memory streaming like a coil of sparkling imagery back to accessibility to me.

‘yes, I now need energy.’

‘we have no suckies.’

‘she’ll be right.’ I breathed a few times and rubbed my shins to recirulate the energy of my system.

chatten looked me up and down in perplexity. ‘why don’t you understand that that is magic?’

‘nope. it is all scientifically proven. we don’t know why it works, but we don’t understand that about life itself, hehehe.’ I sounded like the manual again.’

he smiled. ‘ah. proven. it’s scientific if you know that it happens.’

‘yes, I said. there is a scientific explanation and we haven’t found it yet but when we do we can be sure it will be a scientific one, and magic is not scientific therefore if it happens it isn’t magic, it’s nature or some kind of delusion.’

chatten nodded several times as I spoke. then he wrote for some time on his pad of paper while I tried to rub the hollow between my calves and my shin bones on the outside of my legs in order to gain energy.

‘well, having thanks to this fine instance of *H*U*G* wisdom retrieved your commendable schoolboy’s not too bad memory of pre-dee history, will you now please regurgitate it for me?’

 

day nineteen

my eyes strove to open as my awareness surfaced, recentering itself in my body, but I suddenly had that falling sensation that often occurs when you’re dozing, which I was not, and jolted awake in a state of confusion.

I looked for luck but he was not there. I was not in that room. I was in a room with a white high-domed ceiling with the taste of whitewash on my tongue and in my nostrils when I breathed. there was no visible light source, no doors, no windows, yet the whole room was evenly lit with diffuse shadows; and I had the inescapable impression made by a sense of sounds below the audible range that I was deep below the ground.

the floor was warm, hard and uneven, and I felt as if I’d fallen onto it – ouch – and maybe bounced once or twice. I was slightly winded, and as I began to move, tender in the places that apparently had hit the floor first.

I was totally alone. I didn’t see any exit until I was standing up and with all the walls, floor and ceilings lime-washed white, I had to search for it. it was a hole in the middle of the floor just wide enough for a man to go through. a man-hole. a wooden rail with deep footholds cut into it leaned against the rim.  I didn’t hesitate. not that I’m claustrophobic or anything, but adrenaline makes you want to flee. just like any scared pigeon. it was only about two and a half metres. I landed on a white, hewn stone floor in a much larger room with a much lower ceiling. I could stand comfortably, but the ceiling was only a hand’s breadth above my head. and the subaudible rumblings were now audible as a constant murmur of human voices muffled by the acoustics of whitewash.

this room was huge, oval, and full of feawsies. they sat cross-legged on skins on the floor, a couple of hundred maybe, in sprawling family camps along both sides of the walls and a broad swathe of them down the center. a busy stream of foot-traffic flowed up and down between them, like shoppers in an arcade. feral eyes glinted under thick fringes and above beards and moustaches left to grow as wild as lions manes. dirty animal faces all turned towards me with hostility and derision. people talking ferawsi and laughing sardonically at me. robot was one word I caught more than once.

well, I was where I could see them all, so they could easily see me. the floor was bare around me as if for a stage, and I couldn’t have been more conspicuous. but that was their only reaction. they stopped staring and went back to their own affairs pretty quickly and quickly ascertaining that not only did I not have a belt full of self-defensive weaponry since my change of clothing, I ventured to enter the melee.

‘g’day, boss.’

‘g’day, cally!’

what a shock he came as. still in animal skins but without his belt-ful of tools and weaponry, he’d lost his ferawsi look and in his face, seeing beyond the beard growth and dirt, he looked every inch a mild-mannered citizen of *H*U*G*.

we clasped each other strongly for a long time, dancing and swaying each other and almost shouting for joy. then I asked him ‘where’s threadgold?’

‘up home.’ he jerked his thumb over his shoulder and half turned. I patted his shoulders. ‘let’s go.’

one of the wall camping spaces was bare except for floor rugs and in the corner, teddy, face down on a straw mat, fast asleep.

despite being so crowded the room was as quiet as an airport or busy activities arena. everyone bent over their work. up one end they were tooling leather or stitching up fur or processing skins. it stank, but bearably. around us they were processing fur for felting or fleece, spinning, knitting, weaving, sewing, and some peeling wands for spindles, knitting needles and loom roods.

kids were as absorbed in the work as the adults and as the ripples my appearance had caused died away, tunes and bits of melody started up among the different groups and soon there were songs in full progress, as different groups joined their voices as their tunes faded away, all forming a kind of background against which people called to each other, shouted across distances, laughed, kids squealed and chattered in play and their guardians called them out of people’s ways. I just sat still for a while taking it all in.

there wasn’t much else I could do. our conversation sounded so loud to us that I thought we must be being overheard by everyone in the room, though we kept our voices low. we sat down next to teddy and he didn’t stir while we talked for over an hour.

he told me in rapid low linguish, which not too many ferawsies know that he’d finally been found out and had been called out of a work gang he’d been succeeding as an unsuspected part of since before he arrived, and he was taken under guard into the mountain for the first time ever. he’d heard of such cities, it was a hunter’s great dream to find one. to be taken prisoner and held in one was the cruellest irony to cally. he expected they would lose their sanity, although he said they thought themselves to be morally superior and pride themselves on treating prisoners as well as conditions of war  permit.

finally cally woke threadgold up by turning vaguely in his direction while talking, so that he was suddenly talking over teddy’s head.

‘fucking hell, you. I thought they must have killed you.’

cally suddenly got up and walked a few nervous strides away. he’s high-strung, cally. his teeth started chattering and he shivered violently for a few moments. I think he was ashamed of himself.

‘where’ve you been?’ teddy asked me.

I told him and answered some of his questions. ‘what about you?’ I asked.

‘these cunts are weird, nuts, froot-loops, through the hoop, whoop di doop stark raving bonkers – and dangerous with it.’

his dread communicated itself to me and I asked in a panicky voice, ‘where are we?’

‘we’re up in the mountain. you know that mountain up behind the house to the right that the kids came down from where the village is where I got caught on the lower slopes of…’

‘under…’

‘und…’

‘under the mountain?’

‘yeah. you know the village? I’ve seen that. it’s little huts and hovels along the rockfaces and there’s an entrance there into the mountain, itself. that’s where we are. they’ve hollowed out rooms. they’ve hollowed out most of the fucking mountain. so all the scanners and mappers that hack in report only a few huts and meanwhile there’s a whole fucking ants nest of the cunts pullulating away, breeding up big, inside the fucking mountain.

‘they’d know. monops’d hack into that in a flash, even if they jammed it with everything they had.’’

‘course they fucking know. they’re corrupt as all fuck. but us poor stupid bounty hunters, lesser beings as we apparently are, can’t get the permits for that sort of searching equipment…’

‘they are scared of the fewawsies,’ opined cally. he looked sort of dogged. ‘they can hack in because the ferawsies scramble the data. I don’t know how but I don’t believe they’re using technology.’

I looked at the ferawsies. they looked Neolithic.

‘hmm,’ I said.

‘cally says they got dozens of these cities, under mountains and in the deserts and out in the donga and no one can hack into them because of… hey, cally.’

‘because of what?’

‘you know. you have met – yeah you’ve met that crazy guy with the eyes.’

‘not such a clever hypnotist. you can see through his tricks.’

he grabbed my short front in some desperation and peered fiercely into my face. ‘but you know who I mean.’

‘luck…’

‘yeah, they got people like him. magicians, or something, like wizards. I thought, crap, but jesus what they fucking do to you, and the rest of them aren’t far behind…’

‘ease up teddy,’ I said. he was digging his fingers so hard into my arms the bones hurt.

he let go with a start, amazed at what his hands were doing to my shirt.

‘there isn’t any magic.’ I had to say this tensely because I knew that cally held some superstitious beliefs. I quoted a passage from monops on the subject. I recalled every word perfectly because I’d acquired it through rapidlearn where they stream the material once through your brain and because of the preparatory meditation with selected subliminals it is virtually impossible to disturb the least datum of the memory of the entire text.

cally drifted back over flexing his fingertips together and managing his facial expression with some difficulty.

was teddy joking? now that it was obvious he was one of us, why would he suddenly turn on him? but he asked him belligerently as he got back, ‘who’s side are you on?’

cally just pressed his lips together firmly and shrugged his body.

no one bullied him any further.

‘they don’t seem to want to hurt me,’ suggested teddy. they call it debriefing. feels like torture, like you say. they drop you through all sorts of holes in the fabric of time and space.’

‘well they could be just cleverly deluding us. it’s ‘going beyond the evidence’ (deadly sin!) to ignore that possibility. it’s mobs more probable than magic.’

a ferawsie knitter leaned in front of her neighbour to call to teddy, ‘it isn’t torture. it’s liberation.’ a murmur of agreement went through the group.  it’s liberation.

she was knitting a pair of knee breeches like I’d been seeing on some ferawsies, not much looking at her rhythmically flashing needles. I wondered how she could link the concept of liberty with the necessity of hand knitting your trousers. threadgold gave an involuntary hiss and looked like he wanted to claw his way through the wall. ‘see, crazy,’ he said.

we turned then to watch a disturbance at the far end of the room where a wheeled trolley made its appearance. people got up and went to it, and it progressed slowly down our aisle and then up the opposite walkway distributing hot food. coconut shells full of a thick herby stew with limp leaves of something and lots of fat mushrooms and meat which I did not recognise, but observed to be small game and recalled that it could be anything from lizard or rat to bandicoot or pigeon. I just ate it with the chopsticks provided and mopped up with the lumpy cake stuff. I didn’t find any snails but that didn’t mean… hem hem the less said the better.

here’s a little trick I learned at a training camp once, long ago. you press this spot right here on your wrist, in that hollow there that’s right, google it when you get home and you won’t throw up just thinking about it.

‘bread… you can get used to it?’

‘yeah. yes, yeah, it’s good bread. nutritious. seeds and grains.’

‘yeah. vitamins, minerals.’

‘yeah. it’s healthy. I haven’t got sick on it. teddy did but that was scurvy. not enough vitamins.’

‘yeah. cally’s training had included courses on nutrition, and he shared from memory a page or two with me. fascinating, what our body’s are made of. of course, I did biology so I’m biased.’

and to be honest, as I was getting over the horrors of ferawsie hygiene, of which I was so ignorant that making up horrifying fantasies about it was the best I could do with it, I was also getting more analytical and less naively spontaneous about the flavours and textures of food grown in human er, waste. I retutored myself so often about the impossibility of any particle in any way recognisable as being from human fecal matter that I began to believe it, and argue against the irrefutable truth of the fact that there would be a howling great homeopathic presence of personal deposita, now wouldn’t there?

and this is how I dealt with that. I made myself swallow but then drew to my gullet a warm fart consisting of all the undesirable impressions from – hey cow, manure, if you like. or any sort of natural organic animal dung fertiliser, even non human. I ask you. really now. then I sort of snort it through my nose like a sort of sigh or reverse snuffle. and imagine it as a dark, cloud if unpleasantness floating upwards (because heat rises) and dissipating forever. and would all the little atoms and molecules carrying such memory coded of such myriads of small impressions left upon their imprintabilia encoding the complete memory file detailing their entire evolution including their brief participation in a human excremental production continue carrying the stored accounts of their adventures as they continues its evolution as a multifariously participating and minutely informed little piece of god stuff.

day eighteen

she had a cafino ready for me and one for herself. she looked at me with one eyebrow raised as if to give me leave to express my, shall we say, concern.

I said, ‘so you are corrupt.’

she said, ‘no. I’m acting under coercion, like everyone else here.’

‘botted?’

‘no, more subtle than that. and of course I’m under constant surveillance. incidentally, so are you, ignatius. don’t attempt to escape or you’ll be botted for sure.’

‘iggy. by whom?’

‘monops.’

I smiled comfortably. she did too. the coffee was real, not cafino at all. I should have known. I managed not to splutter and made the adjustment necessary to swallow it all without tasting.

‘I’ve got permission to tell you that you are being held for processing.’

‘whose permission?’

she indicated the computer.

‘and what kind of processing.’

she played wetly with the rim of her mug.

‘I can’t answer either of those questions, iggy. be strong.’ she said the last two words into the mug where they echoed muffledly.

then she laughed. ‘my god, it’s a crazy planet. this is a crazy life. if I were writing the script I’d have given me a break… ’ and she used a good ol guys folk gesture of come and join me in a guffaw and I found myself helplessly guffawing on cue.

‘have to go to a personal meeting with some colleagues. monops is ready for you. you are logged in,’ she smiled and shrugged and gave the cup back to the computer.

then she left via the front door, through which came briefly the smell of concrete dust and geraniums and a shaft of daylight. I watched it shut and gave the computer back most of my cafino. I had almost learnt to do without the caffeine hit.

after she’d gone I tried to lie down but felt over-activated by the coffee so I go up and paced the floor instead. I heard a vehicle start up nearby and found a window to peer through, which showed me the back wall of another building and a short piece of pathway. the kitchen skylights showed only sky. the other room’s window showed me a broader path with a row of plants, some in bloom, and a high brick wall five or six feet away. not much else.

it was a while before it crossed my mind that I could go outside. of course, the enemy would immediately know, but at least I could find out where I was and maybe get some kind of message through to something genuinely *H*U*G*.

but as I made the decision to do so, suddenly my legs turned to water and my stomach turned over and every bit of strength drained out of my body. a cool fine sweat broke through my skin, and my lung deflated and refused for a moment to fill again.

in a way I was trying fairly successfully not to let myself know that I was mightily bewildered, and I had this sinking feeling that something in me was going to have to yield to a critical mass of evidence and start believing that something stranger than tricks with technology and hypnosis were happening here, to me, or else I was insane, hopelessly, and pam was a psychiatric person and I was fantasising a screen reality to blot out a terrifying isolation trauma…

a wave of mental confusion took me and I sat on the bed trying to steady myself when the door opened of its own accord and in walked a fair-haired man in his forties, a tall, thin man but broad-shouldered, and intense blue eyes.

‘luck,’ I said

‘that’s right, iggy. as pam said, don’t try to escape. we read your mind. we can stop you. you are my prisoner.’ he was speaking in oddly accented but precise *H*U*G*.’

‘fair enough,’ I said. ‘I’m to be… processed…?’

‘I want you to understand what’s happening to you.’

‘I’m all ears.’

‘this planet is about to change hands and the slaves are going to be set free and the ferawsies released from the malevolent spells of monops.’

‘uh huh. you’re nuts,’ I said. and began to back away from him.‘

‘you’re going to help me.’

‘that’s what you think.’

‘yes, but you will, iggy feld, because you are as they have told you a robot.’

‘well if I’m not I will be by the time you’ve finished with me. or something worse. you’ll make me do what you want done and then you’ll erase my mind and send me home gaga.’

‘we hope to send you home healthy and proud and in full possession of your faculties. get over the fear.’

‘bullshit. you ferawsies have never done that.’ I was thinking of a man I knew.

‘I’m not one of your ferawsies,’ said luck, fastidiously. he ran a practiced hand over the keyboard and stood back, with a gesture of invitation, like a friend who had something interesting to show me. you can get through to monops now. ‘call your chief regulator of social affairs and tell them that you are well, that you are my prisoner and not soon to be released.’

the girl was impassive. she handled my call as if it were routine. ‘thank you,’ she said, ‘I will refer your call to the cr asap.’

well, she was a bit mechanical.

‘it’ll take them five minutes to get a military unit here,’ I said to luck.

‘they won’t come here. they can’t. they cannot trace us. we are untraceable.’

‘if you try to drive me mad you will probably succeed,’ I responded.

‘the military unit will not be sent here, said luck airily. ‘I’m a man with a keen sense of justice. the call will be traced to the home of an innocent young financier in a cbd office who will be able to tell them nothing whatsoever. it will be the only interesting event in his whole life. now lie down, please, iggy. that’s that you must do.’

I thought of my military training in self- defence, of flying suddenly at his jugular vein and strangling him with my bare hands but the thought of it left me, and all enthusiasm for the idea drained away along with the strength to do anything but comply. before I’d finished that enticing little hero fantasy I was on my back on the bed with the distinct impression in my mind of having been put there though he hadn’t moved from the computer and no one had touched me at all.

he turned around and took up a position in the room where I could see him without twisting my neck. considerate of him I suppose, but I chose not to look at him. his eyes made me feel transparent, insubstantial, like a vaporous ghost of a man.

‘we’re not robots,’ I said.

‘you are excessively mind-controlled. shut your eyes.’

they were shut before the sense of his command registered in my mind.

‘look at this’, he said and my mind exploded with light and colour and I found myself looking at a flower. a great big scarlet-petalled flower with bright yellow stamens and clusters of emerald green leaves all around it, so beautiful I actually shouted for joy. ‘yaha!’ I went. my hand involuntarily rose from my side to reach out to cherish its beauty. I felt full of love.’

‘now watch.’

I saw a fat, beige pneumatic looking caterpillar come up from under the stem side of the petals and begin to demolish them. I recoiled in disgust. in no time it had eaten down one petal to a shred and was starting on a second. suddenly it lifted its tail and disgorged a glistening  khaki pellet from its rear end so real and wrap around that I imagined for one wild moment that I would also smell and hear it.

I shuddered and went ‘ugh!’

‘see,’ he said. ‘totally conditioned, deeply programmed, like a robot.’

so that was it. on about that was he? well, monops had well provided me with answers to stuff like that. sock it to me. ‘so is that caterpillar,’ I shot back.

‘oh yes, so are we all, even the plants, even the elementals. so many things condition us. it’s a matter of knowing who and why and how…’

‘nature,’ I sneered. ‘life,’ I scoffed.

‘and anyway, it’s instinctive to hate pests’

‘pest. it that nature’s classification? that caterpillar is a favourite food item in its home land. very nutritious, too, and easy on its host plants. humans who know it love it. you see it’s beautiful.’

as soon as he said that, for the first time I saw the fine details of the patterning on its skin, the soft, flexuous velveteen and the rhythms of its curves and movements, and the gleaming helmet it wore, natty and a bit flash, the fine hairs radiating a gentle luminosity.

‘and it pupates in a golden chrysalis and emerges as a beautiful butterfly.’

‘well, yeah, if only it hadn’t… uh…’

‘hadn’t what?’

‘well, okay, it can … er do it’s…er… poo.’

‘oh, okay you bless that?’

‘sure. it’s fertiliser. yeah, it’s lovable stuff. yeah, it can, er, do poo.’

‘the nature spirits will be very pleased to hear that.’

I didn’t have a response ready for that. I sort of wriggled and squirmed. I regressed and sucked my lower lip. my face tried in vain for a succession of expressions and finally I went, ‘eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee’

luck smiled and scratched his elbows.

‘yes, it’s a mtter of being sure we know who the programmer is.’

‘you are trying to imply something about monops?’

‘you sit and think about it, feld.’

well, I could see what he meant. nature doesn’t use the same techniques to condition caterpillars as *H*U*G* uses to achieve social harmony among the rich diversity of its citizenry. but I was feeling irritable and not willing to cooperate.

this could have been shown to me on a screen but instead this guy was tinkering with the delicate neurology and biochemistry and biochemical processes of my brain. obviously, somehow, my person had been bugged and although I was conscious of no pain or scarring such as any kind of intrusive surgical insertion or similar might leave. nevertheless, I knew he was being smart about the superstitious belief in telepathy that the ferawsies all had and wanted to tease me with it. so how had he faked it?

I forced myself to look at him.

‘who are you, then?’ I asked.

‘you know that my name is luck. more than that would ring no bells for you, feld. you are too smart or that.’

he had a lean, angular face, a sparse fringe of soft blond beard along his jaws.

his eyes, so hypnotic seeming to come  out of the sky at you, were now just deep-set human eyes, in craggy hollows, eyes of a clearer than usual shade of blue, but just a man’s eyes. nothing like the ferawsies expression ever flitted about those eyes. but they weren’t *H*U*G* either.

‘are you anything to do with this war?’

‘well, yes, someone has to make sure no one gets hurt.’

he suddenly looked like an old fashioned soldier and I said so.

‘ suppose you could say I’m a warrior of sorts.’

‘which side are you on? obviously not us. therefore them.’

‘my investment is in peace, in peace process.’

and when he spoke a mild blue light seemed to shine from his eyes. he suddenly directed a visible stream of that light at me, and I sank, resisting like a cork at first but finally succumbing, into a depth that was somehow inside me. I felt I reached a point or condition of being which had no locus, no locative referents, and I panic. I felt a convulsion of flailing fear while my body lay still and clam not moving a muscle.

then suddenly a sweet, soft feeling of newness came stealing over me, and I felt buoyed up, as if the cork were suddenly released.

 

day seventeen

I’m a sound sleeper especially under stress. stress makes me sleepy. I was sleeping from sun down to sun up and taking an afternoon nap as well, and sometimes I dozed for a while in the mornings as well. nevertheless I was usually alert and active at the first disturbance, not ballistic like teddy, but ready enough, however slight, so it came to me as a shock, in fact I panicked, when I woke up one morning in pitch darkness and, feeling too warm, I tried to throw back the furs from around my shoulders.

but there was no fur. I was on a bed. my body’s contours were scientifically supported in the moulded smart cushioning of a proper *H*U*G* bed. the cocoon of warmth hygiene and humidity,  that protected me invisible about me, yet fragrant and soothing like a syrup of love. it gave me a gentle, relaxing vibration and I lay still, will to wait for understanding.

obviously they’d slipped me a mickey finn.

I found the wall, clean, smooth and silken. I found the floor, a measured distance below me, with the taut spongy texture of office floor tiles, or the floor covering they use in motels.

I had an hour to wait before dawn. the first sign of it was the grey square in the middle of the middle of blackness a couple of metres away from me. It got paler and paler and began to shed light on an armchair, then on a floor rug, then on painted walls, a desk, a couple of small tables and the walls, floor and ceilings of a perfectly normal *H*U*G* bed-sitter, much like the one I’d lived in as a student. I was perishing with thirst. I got up, went to the desk and found the computer under the lid, opened up to monops and ordered a mangarango. it’s what I always do when I’m at home. I’m fond of mangorango.

tapupamangotapuparangotapupamangonowman you know the jingle. I always sort of sing that while I type in my order. I went to the toilet while I waited for it. (don’t mean to embarrass the reader with irrelevant details, but there, I was away for a while while monops manifested my mangorango, and anything could have happened, while I was in there, and as long as they didn’t make any noise they’d get in and out in time. anyway I took a big long greedy thirsty pull of it, and swallowed it down before I realised that it wasn’t echt mangarango. it was completely the wrong taste and texture. the flavour shrieked insanely in my mouth. it cloyed down my throat and spread through my gut like a disgusting stain. I thought I was poisoned. I slammed down the cup and began to flail about, feeling for my belt buttons and gasping for breath.

‘I’d keep it down if I were you. it’s all you’ll be getting for a while,’ said a voice. there was laughter, middle register. I had to turn round and blink tears from my eyes to see her. she stood in a doorway I hadn’t seen yet, or had mistaken for a cupboard, close to the foot of the bed I’d woken up in. it was the corrupt official who had given them my file.

‘it’s real, real mangoes, real oranges, freshly juiced. no additives, not even sweetener.’

I fought down my fear of it and relaxed. ‘I can handle crude food,’ I said. ‘I just didn’t know what it was.’ and to prove it, I even nonchalantly took another slug of the stuff and with a perfect poker face I finished the drink.

meanwhile she ordered a raspa and distractedly perused her emails and social notifications while she waited for it. she sipped it voluptuously when it came.

‘I’m Ignatius,’ I said, hoping to extract a name from her to call her by. ‘I daresay you know that.’

‘pam’ she said.

we shook hands.

‘so what’s it about?’ I asked.

she made loud roaring static noises in the bottom of her cup with her straw for a while before she said, ‘by now you know there’s a war on. this is about that.’

‘the war the ferawsies think they’re going to win?’

she laughed and blew through her puffed up cheeks and twisted up her hands and went, ‘well, so they might.’  sort of squirming till she spun on her toe lightly like a dancer and came back smiling rather sardonically. ‘well have to go through the whole bloody process of finding out the hard way though and some of us will bleed, no doubt.’

I tried to think of a way to ask which side she was on but my tongue felt thick and heavy and when I spoke I said instead ‘well surely it won’t come to that. haven’t we all got families?’

her eyes and lips dilated and with a quick intake of breath she took my hand and squeezed it, looking deeply into my face with earnest gratitude. then, speechless, letting go of my hand she clasped her hands between us as if to implore mercy and no more was said on the subject.

but she apologised, sort of, saying vaguely that everything was ‘so secret, you know?’ and she advised me to ask no questions, because you never know who’s listening in.

‘meanwhile.’ she suggested, ‘you must be very culture-shocked. and of course, you’re traumatised, too. severely.

now I hadn’t been until then, but now that she mentioned it, I found myself rapidly becoming horribly fragmented, disoriented, preparing totally inappropriate responses to everything and insanely fixated on some of the more anguish-filled features of the scenes I’d just left. how is my team? where is cally? why didn’t mandi come back? where is baboon? why can’t I get home? why can’t I hold the puppy?, and I began to tremble, shake and whimper, and I said at last, ’I want a sucky.’

and we went and tapped up some nice sweet euphoric tranquilising pain-easing ones with scientifically formulated chemical subliminals instead. while I unwrapped it

I eyed the green trousers I had on. not what I’d have chosen, but I’d pass in a crowd. a russet-coloured shirt,  all bright new and clean,. my beard was gone, my teeth were clean, my hair was clipped short and my mind felt clear and focused. I’d been machine washed, clipped and manicured like a hospital patient. had she done it? surely not. she’d have needed help to lift me. I felt too shy to ask, but it worried me. and besides, it occurred to me that it mattered a lot not to trust too easily, not to let her gauche old-maidish, innocent manner beguile me into forgetting that she was a corrupt official. and I hadn’t been able to ask which side she was on.

I saw her shudder and chuckled as I understood she was dealing with the waves of nausea that followed from her raspa. she was obviously being acclimatised. but why? I was mystified.

she twisted the rings on her fingers and clasped and unclasped her hands, pacing the floor constantly.

‘oh win or lose, I just want it all to end,’ she said, sounding like a bad actor reading a bad script. I gave her a neat social smile. she returned to the keyboard and typed some more and then asked me if I wanted to sign in to any of my accounts.

I was rolling up my sucky wrapper and I pointed with it at the computer screen. ‘that isn’t *H*U*G*, I said.

‘hmm?’

‘it doesn’t give us what *H*U*G* calls mangarango.’

‘no, it’s a bit different.’ she twitched nervously, coughed and swallowed hard.  ‘do you want to sign in?’

‘well, I’m worried if it’s not *H*U*G*.’

‘oh, it’ll get you through to your account. that’ll be echt. but no, it’s not *H*U*G*. but it’s just like it. just the same. you can’t tell the difference once you get in. don’t you want to contact your wife, your friends and family?’

I was silent for a moment, grappling with my disbelief.

‘I live alone. my team are my family. i… I’d like you to tell me where we are and how i got here.’

‘I told you I can’t tell you anything. not today. ‘

‘today please,’ I pleaded. ‘being kept ignorant while traumatised makes it soooo much more acute. please tell me… things. just little things. j-j-j-just things-s-s-s.’ I was starting to stutter. ‘I even said please.’

‘probably not today. it’s not up to me.’

‘can I ask where threadgold is?’

‘yes, but I can’t answer you, so you might as well not. who is threadgold?

‘lad on my team, he was with me up on the mountain.’

‘mountain? what mountain?’ from the computer came the sudden drift of uplifting semi-baroque harp music that said she was logging into muscle-mind, and I could see that she wasn’t listening to me. ‘there’s breakfast food in the kitchen.’

I left her and monops sharing mindscapes and went to see what there was to eat.

the nutreeentya was made of real plant materials broken bits of nuts grubbed out of the dirt, seeds that had been squashed between gritty dirty rocks, lets hope they dusted off the biggest bits of birdshit, with big bits of leathery jelly jube stuff, probably old fruits that the birds left, with bee-goozied honey withered fruits and other ingredients drawn from other equally suspect parts of the biome and a bottle of dairyair which I heated and ate with slow careful chews and suspicious pauses, swallowing only after searching carefully for earwigs and cockroaches. nearly made my gums bleed even when I softened it in warm dairyair, it was real mother’s milk from the rapture-traumatised cow deprived of her own calf, and it stank of cow fart.

but I ate it, and benefited like a hardened bounty hunter.

I tried to remind myself not to mutate. next I’d be wearing that ferawsi look, like an animal, streaming the data through sensoria configured in whole other ways, like a big wild mega-smart monkey, lost to the gentling influence of civilisation. I remembered threadgold and his puppy and was moved.

there was a menu built into the wall, offering the minimal array of motel fare: kipsi in nine different flavouraries offering a guaranteed 32% of my personal daily nutritional needs and I asked for one, a goobboy veggy one and was given something that resembled a real kipsi but made out of that vegetable sludge the ferawsies give you piled high and compressed. boiled leaves and root pulp, all in shock from radical harvesting. lumps of transparent white stuff with cells so big you couldn’t fool yourself it wasn’t a plant grown in soil and they put shit on it.

sorry. I DO NOT MEAN TO OFFEND. but that’s what that food is grown in, dirt and shit and rotting carcases.

and the flavour was not the well-blended symphony of scientifically measured nutritioaesthetica, it was a blaring cacophony of a million undisciplined flavours most of it more relevant to plants, caterpillars and aphids than humans and the rest a vain effort to ward us off.

I thought I detected a disgusting roar of tree-bark toxins with medleys of lighter coloured flavours bedded in it.

the worst part is it stuck to my teeth the way the ferawsies bread did, real *H*U*G* food is soluble. melts in your mouth. nevertheless, I carried it back to the room I’d slept in, chewing it, and benefitting, as I had been not starving, but serious underfed for a long time. the supply of enough energy to my musculature for more than the feeblest activity was enormously welcome and I let myself feel it with gratitude, trying to feel it like a bird or a fox who can appreciate any sort of nutriment, as long as it’s remotely edible.

and after all, it is what our ancestors ate. fruits of hahaha nature, hahaha.

pam was closing the lid of the desk when I went back in.

day sixteen

That was a little better. he was more like a twelve year old for that.

seeing us slumped against the veranda rails, staring listlessly at the mountain, the woman who brought the bread reminded us sarcastically that monops would be real pleased with us if we remembered to do our exercises. I did it to please her, knee-bends and push-ups and so on for about half an hour at a time whenever I felt unbearably tumultuous inside. predictably, teddy got fanatical about it. he went up down right bend left bend back forward up down right bend left bend etc etc solidly, like a machine, from daybreak till noon, not even really stopping when he drank his milk in the morning, just marked time running on the spot while he gulped it down. he didn’t stop till the bread came. it nearly drove me nuts. after dinner he rested and then got up and jogged on the spot, boasting how many miles he’d be clocking up and shouting out anecdotes about people he’d heard about that had effected miraculous cures just by jogging. how good his arteries. I ended up crawling under the veranda with baboon, where I didn’t have to see him and the rhythms of his footsteps and hyperventilating could merge with those of nature, the breeze through the gums and pines, the chatterings and shrieks of birds, the lapping of the water on the shore.

it was when he was looking for something to use for weight-lifting that I noticed that the ferawsies had been very careful not to leave anything lying within reach. if we’d been frantic for a weapon we could have prised up the veranda boards I suppose, but the absence of any heavy, liftable and therefore throwable thing made me begin to hope that more thought had gone into our captivity than I had imagined. we were not just tied up with orders to be fed till further notice and then forgotten, though that was the flimsiest of straws to be grasping at.

neither of us had actually seen the village. a lean-to built onto the side of the old house blocked the view and we couldn’t reach the other corner where a path to the lake came from the village up behind the house.

teddy had snatched such a scared glimpse he had not seen a trace of the village when he made his break for the forest.  we could smell their cooking fires and sometimes we heard music and singing at night. the voices of kids, or of kids being called and occasionally the laughter of adults drifted down to us. I judged they weren’t more than two hundred metres away. they were quiet people.

only one incident interrupted us in the whole time of threadgold’s regression. it was a couple of weeks after the escape attempt failed. the woman who brought us our dinner brought cally down with her. he squatted on his heel, and looked at us without smiling.

‘I told him you wanted to know about him.’ said the woman. was she needling me?

‘I only mentioned him,’ I said defensively, embarrassed to find that I was not able to meet cally’s eyes.

threadgold chewed slowly, levelling a look of pure hatred at cally, which I still thought was premature. there were gaps in the story concerning cally.

but we’d been talking and threadgold was beginning to agree with me, that cally had not been lifted out of our reality magically at all, the idea is counter-indicated by pages and pages of links. therefore he had turned and scarpered leaving his team-mate to face the danger of the drifta alone. so traitor or not and hey wasn’t the evidence building, the cunt was a craven coward and not a man.

cally said something in a softer ferawsi than I’d ever heard him speak, a longish sentence or two or three shortish ones. it was a shock how natural it sounded after so short a time.

the woman laughed. ‘he said, “it’s the way you robots are programmed, to lusssst after data.’

of course, he had to play the part, but was he over-acting? Threadgold hissed at him like a frightened cat, and I was scared of what he might do or say to betray cally. but as soon as he’d finished eating he went back to his jogging, and his features wore the bland look of an inwardly focused adolescent that they took on when he exercised.

cally wasn’t wrong. I was half crazy for information.

affecting a ferawsie accent he spoke to me in clipped, minimilistic *H*U*G*, the way he was hearing the wildborns talk to the new escapees, telling me he had nothing to say to me, nothing to tell me at all. he seemed non-committal. he left with the woman, listening to her attentively as she spoke to him in her best ferawsi, taking full advantage as it seemed of a chance to practice.

as the equinox approached and the cold weather started, the wind began to blow. the woman said it would blow from the equinox on for a month and then ease up. she gave us fur blankets made of the fur of a dozen different species and new, thicker straw mats for our beds, with sheepskins to lay over them. they stank of animal.

the veranda roof was okay and kept most of the rain off, but sometimes it would rain horizontally into the veranda and we’d get wet. we stayed reasonably warm under the skins, but somehow, threadgold got sick. his fever ran high, and he was delirious within a day or two and on the third morning I told the goat kids to tell someone.

they handed me the milk straight away and the boy dashed off up the hill and came back a few minutes later with a man in a fur parka and bare, reddish-brown knees. he had short fur boots on too, but his legs were bare and the parka although long didn’t cover anything. modesty didn’t come into it for this geek.

what I mean to say is I could see his dick and balls and if could so could everyone else including the woman and all my personal paradigms explode when it gets like that. still, okay, that’s just something that I as a lad from perhaps a sheltered background, doting parents, devotional education, and narrow career path, and I might be neurotic. but whether I wanted to be or not I was queasy and giggly and didn’t know where to look. yet without staring fixedly in another direction, which would look strange, it was always there in the peripheral of my vision and my throat jammed when I tried to talk and I croaked as badly as threadgold without even having a cold.

he had short fur boots on too, making his skinny legs look even skinnier and he had the face and movements of a fox.

he was nursing something in his parka. he squatted a little way away from threadgold, sniffing at him, squinting at him, tilting his head to look sideways at him, and reached out a hand to quickly brush his wrist with his fingers. then he licked his fingers and meditated for a moment.

then he took from his parka the small bottle gourd, its neck stopped with a wad of grass that he’d been coddling there. threadgold was lying on his back in his bed with his head near the wall. this guy clamped his head between his knees and when teddy opened up to roar, he jammed a large white sheep or goat femur into his mouth and locked it open. then he trickle fed him the contents of the gourd. teddy bleated a bit at first, but then surrendered.

then he took threadgold’s share of the milk from the hook on the pole and drank it himself with what looked like real enjoyment even though I’d goozied in it and the enzymes had had time to begin to work…

to say nothing of the germs.

chapter six

he slept like a baby till late afternoon, and woke up well. weak, but cool and calm and not particularly dizzy if he didn’t attempt too much too soon.

within minutes of his waking up the foxy guy was back, as if he’d had whiskers out for it. he gave threadgold honey from his finger dipped into the jar, again force-feeding him what he would have taken willingly enough. he dipped his finger again and again holding his jaw open with the pressure of his thumb, until teddy wriggled free. he sat up and refused any more. then. looking more than ever like a fox, he squinted straight into my eyes, and then seized and examined one of my hands. next day and each day after that we were given a sticky liquid in a wooden cup to share. it was sweet and more than a little alcoholic.

I asked the woman what was in it and she said, ‘I dunno, herbs, I suppose.’ she brought it to us an hour or so after lunch.

it must have been the right thing. threadgold threw his knucklebones away and when he went back to exercising kept it to a more moderate routine. further more, as his mind retrieved its focus, he seemed more of a man than I’d ever known him, at least on and off.

cally wandered down to see us alone one day, since no harm had come of our earlier meetings. no one had suspected anything. if anyone came by he’d just stopped to look at us on his way somewhere.

he said, ‘they are talking about some kind of an experiment, and you seem to have a part in it. they only talk about it in fast, advanced ferawsi so I only pretend to understand most of the time.’

‘are we hostages?’

‘they don’t have many hostages. no, prisoners of war. and they have plans… I’ll keep listening but that’s all I know for now.’

he remained tense, one eye roving back along the path he’d come by, and flitting over the lakeside, keeping nit. but his face relaxed a bit and he lost that feralwsi look, and seemed like his old self again. he said ‘trust me, boss, I’m doing what I can.’

and I believed him at that moment, whole-heartedly, and reached for his hand. but he froze with fear and threw furtive glances up and down the path, leaping straight back into the ferawsi mode as if someone had changed channels.

that woke me up and left me wondering which was the act, the *H*U*G* persona or the ferawsi. I hesitated between trust and distrust until, no longer able to hide my suspicion I said, ‘what are you up to, cally?’

I wanted to hear him say something like ‘trust me, boss, I’m doing all I can,’ but that wasn’t cally’s style.

threadgold remained morose and aloof. once or twice I noticed him gazing quizzically at cally and I had the hilarious impression that he was assessing him as bounty, how much would he fetch?

it was so incongruous I nearly laughed. maybe my amusement showed on my face because suddenly he looked at me and laughed out loud, as if I’d caught the joke.

probably something hallucinogenic they put in the tonic was making us mix up our signals and read them a-wry, putting superstition interpretations where none were justified.

time passed, I calculated it was well into may. winter came early to the mountain. they moved the goats away from the lake. I was lonely without them.  the two kids still brought us milk and they hadn’t yet succumbed to clothes. the cold didn’t seem to worry them. they stood barefoot in frost as comfortably as if it were a sandy beach in summer.

baboon got in pup, had her litter in the village and hardly ever came down to us anymore, but when she did she brought one of the puppies, seemingly the only one left, with her. teddy called her bear, and since no one else seemed to, he made her his pet, and persuaded the lunch woman to bring meaty bones for her and he shared food off his plate with her. he kept her in his bed under the furs and gradually as she was weaned, she bonded up firmly to threadgold.

nothing could have done him more good.

day fifteen

‘so you know him?’

‘no. I said I didn’t.’

‘don’t know anything about him?’

she sniggered. ‘if I knew anything about them I wasn’t supposed to tell you I wouldn’t tell you.’

‘just making conversation.’

‘well, he’s taken up with that lot down there. they’re a work gang. I don’t know any of them very well. they’re wanderers, that lot. they go wherever there’s work to do.’

‘are they all freeborn?’

‘no, they speak *H*U*G* mostly. and I’ve heard him speak *H*U*G* and I wouldn’t say it was all that good.’

‘how good’s his ferawsian?’

‘well, I don’t know. mine’s not real good. he wasn’t saying much when I was close enough to hear. I just remember it was in ferawsian. somebody said he was from minilch. that’s going back a while. you’d remember minilch.’

‘yep.’ minilch was an entire ferawsi farm village population we took from the eastern slopes about seven or eight years ago. a legendary feat and they’d made legendary hunter heroes of us for a while. younger hunters still  tried to emulate us in courage, skill and determination.

‘he’s a survivor out of that.’

I let her believe that. I even almost didn’t laugh. but what could I say? if he wanted to make a break, run, he’d end up like teddy, dragged home by the sky man and chained to a post. if he didn’t he could have a grand old time living like a ferawsie, he could defect, and maybe he was facile enough. coward enough. maybe he’d already done it. but I couldn’t believe it. I folded my arms and gave a sort of grunt.

but teddy nearly hit the roof. he stood up, and went as close to her as his chain now looped around the same steel tubing as mine, would permit and looked at her in disgust. ‘that deadshit.’ he said, over his shoulder to me without taking his eyes off her.

she laughed raucously, provocatively right in his face.

‘why what did he say to you?’

I came up behind teddy and laid a hand on his shoulder. teddy stopped himself from speaking at the touch and pulled himself up. ‘nothing we could understand,’ he said, after a pause loud with frog song.

‘he had a funny accent.’ she said but her mind was on standing her ground while teddy menaced her with his broad shoulders and best tough-bastard expression. mockingly she put her hands on her hips, pouted up her lips and leaned forward till she was fawning on his manly bosom. ‘you don’t know us ferawsies half enough, baby,’ she said. ‘we remember minilch. it was like a piece of our flesh torn from us. we remember and we never rest, because we know the future and we know that we will win this war.’

‘the war is all your fantasy,’ I explained yet again. ‘we are simply cleaning up the rebels.’

‘you are sitting here chained to a post, waiting for a decision to be made about you.’

‘well, that’s more than we knew before,’ said threadgold, staring down at her upturned face disdainfully. ‘go away you smell.’

‘poor baby, you missing monops?’

after that we got only more evasive taunts and jibes and then she left us.

‘he’s a traitor,’ said threadgold.

they were my own thoughts but I said nothing about them to him. ‘we don’t know what he’s doing, teddy. he might be getting himself into a position to do some useful spying and we’re only putting him and ourselves in danger by asking too many questions about him. he wasn’t trying to hide, but maybe that was his best way of being inconspicuous.’

teddy sniffed uncomfortably, his eyes scouring the mountainside. ‘spying, yeah, but who on? look what a sneaky cunt he’s being.’

‘what else could he do? they’d kill him if they knew who he was.’

‘hey, he can’t really speak it?’

‘it’s on his cv. he’s done the course. he passed. so he’s theoretically able to. every team’s got to have someone who can communicate with the wildborns. and it’s a monops course, and cally’s super-learning software would be state of the art.’

‘she might be lying, he never pretended he really could, just say a few stock phrases, that’s all the job needs and that’s all I’ve seen him do. I mean, it’s only a six week course.’

‘yeah, well he wouldn’t know enough to be chattering away to the ferawsies about minilch, not and get them convinced. so she’s lying.’

but it is true that cally knew something about minilch. some years earlier when cally and I were both working on another man’s team it had been cally’s strategy that had busted minilch village and brought just about its whole population into our hands. it had been like taking candy from a baby. we made a solid whack out of that. I remembered his pride at the number taken, the completeness of the victory. ‘no,’ I said. ‘it’s them he’s conning.’

and I was half convinced but only half. sure, dressed like that in skins and tattooed, unkempt unshaven and unwashed with dirt ingrained in his face and hands, and the ferawsie habit of glowering from behind a tousled fringe, he didn’t much resemble the bloke we knew, the natty guy he’d always been until you got up close. and even then you had to let your imagination clean him up, clear away his beard growth, apply his normal workady make-up, his khol, his cheek-shadow, his lip-dye. to identify him at all.

but what a risk he was taking, and surely he wouldn’t have taken such a risk if he’d had any choice. sooner or later there’d be some escapee who’d been through his hands who would recognise him and his voice, and his distinctive ‘funny accent’ when he spoke his little bit of training course ferawsian.

‘maybe he fucked off with the truck,’ said, teddy, giving free rein to his paranoia. that cautioned me. neither of us could really afford to do that. I reminded him and myself of the danger of stress-related hallucinations leading to serious psychotic delusions and that monops suggests staying sane by not going too far beyond the evidence.

‘he’s just winging it, getting away with what he can.’

‘they still haven’t told us what they’re going to do to us,’ said teddy querulously.

‘they’re probably just fattening us up for some grisly cannibalistic ritual,’ I joked.

threadgold laughed immoderately.

later I tried to get threadgold to tell me all he could remember about his night on the mountainside while memories of it were still disturbing his mind. it might give us some clue, I told him, about what cally was up to. he’d been snatched up into thin air too so someone up there knew who he was, luck knew. that’s if luck was just one person, and not a whole race of sky people all snatching earthlings off the ground like eagles taking mice.

but these memories terrified teddy so much that he couldn’t stay with them, and couldn’t say more than a few disjointed scraps of sentences that made no sense to me.

he swore they’d kept him flat on his back for at least three days in soaking rain, not just one night, and that also they

d taken him to two or three different places that were extremely weird and done horrific things to his mind there. ‘I saw these people who…’ then he’d panic and start writhing and gibbering. ‘there was this fucking enormous fucking…’

more panic.

I couldn’t get my…

and again, more panic.

when I pointed out to him that he couldn’t have been flat on his back in the rain for the whole time and zapped about all over the place at the same time, he just dispiritedly whispered that he was.

when I asked if he’d seen cally while he was gone, he just looked blank. obviously his memory wasn’t to be trusted, any more than my sense of reality.

when he was first captured he spent so long staring at the drifta he hadn’t seen cally take fright and scarper into the scrub. there wasn;t a sky man. he was just up against a screen memory of some sort, a post-hypnotic command would do it, same as I was, and there was no need to be superstitious.

Anyway, I left off the interrogation thinking he’s remember more after he’d recovered from the shock. but the whole thing was fading from his mind like a dream and within a few days all he could say for sure was that they’d ambushed him and terrified him with nightmares he could no longer recall.

in a way teddy’s rapid deterioration helped keep me together. one of us had to stay sane. I had to be there for him. the vibes that filled me with painful tensions and muscular cramps made him fidgety as all hell, and he resorted to playing noughts and crosses with himself and later found five well-chosen stones and began to play knucklebones with them. I ended up joining in with five stones of my own, just to kill time. he boasted he’d been a champion at it when he was a kid, but he had the right sort of plastic stones, all moulded the way they are, like little dumb-bells.

he won every time, but I noticed that as he got absorbed in the game he began to regress. he started by letting kids’ slang words enter his speech, saying ‘lefties’ for ‘left-handed’ and ‘blindies’ for ‘blind-folded’. to score he kept pretending that a small section of the back of his wrist was a wristlink, and he kept talking into it and reading out to it what he pretended monops was displaying back, or turning his head on one side and speaking for it like a ventriloquist with a dummy.

that filled me with unaccountable pain, as if a gargantuan emptiness that already filled me suddenly swelled up and almost burst my soul.

MONOPS. separation from monops, isolation from *H*U*G*, from civilisation, from the real world. I was keeping it down, this howling need, and teddy’s insanity was like really pushing my face into it. I was aware of how often I’d almost wept with the frustration of not being able to consult, to confide in, to report in to monops, for help, for advice, for medical treatment, for guidance as to how to fulfil my role as team leader now that two of us were captured, and threadgold’s mind so rapidly deteriorating right before my eyes.

I’d tried every button on my belt and made a pitiful fool of myself, clicking again and again on icons that gave only brief spurts of static at best, and did not communicate even with the tools and resources of my belt. since they all depended on the jammed wireless network and could not be operated here at all. more than anything if I were honest it was that – the fear. it was huge, paralysing fear I had to ward off.  I had to keep calm and sane. fear.

I stopped playing, but threadgold became insistent, and whole sentences came out of him in the speech of a child. He pestered me to play, to keep on playing, his voice rising to a dog-like whine, and I succumbed. it didn’t help not to. so we played knucklebones for an hour or so two or three times a day and the days passed.

after a couple of weeks teddy had regressed to where his whole personality was that of an eight year old child. he was okay in the mornings and the evenings seemed to bring him back. he treated me as if I were his dad and would wear me down with whining if I tried to opt out. he even threw tantrams, roaring at me for not playing along.

apart from the joylessness of watching him lose his faculties for a few hours each day, I was bored to death with throwing little stones up into the air and trying to catch them on the back of my hand while threadgold squealed with pleasure. so it was my idea to add mathemental to the games, and a couple of others from musclemind which monops recommends for keeping mentally fit as you grow older, but they serve to focus and strengthen young and traumatised minds too. teddy was half-hearted about them, but consented as a kindness to me.

day fourteen

this is my black sabbath, the sabbath of the new moon, so no nanowrimo today. this is my day for earth elemental magic and world healing. peace throughout the world! awen awen awen.

day thirteen

I had my head between my bulging biceps which blocked my view and he was so dumbstruck he left me holding up the roof for longer than I thought was humanly possible while he stared at it, before letting me know that it was done.

I lowered the roof back down onto the crumbled stone and heaved a sigh of relief.

I’d underestimated our teddy. he wanted to hang a around till I got free too, but one glance told us both it was hopeless. the rail I was chained to was of a piece with the whole front rail of the veranda, which incorporated three steel posts and another rail, several metres of heavy tubular steel welded every couple of metres in a closed formation I could do nothing about.

‘Go get help, son,’ I said, feeling the old affection again.

he looked with dread into the mountain wilderness, then he covered his fear, carefully edged out to where he could see the sleeping village, and he gazed at it, whistling as if amazed, for a long time before he dived into the scrub. baboon followed him. it began to spit, a spirited little breeze reared up and then it began to rain in earnest, softly and steadily, filling the air with a fragrance so sweet that in my vibrationally traumatised condition I moaned and began to weep.

a minute or so later I saw them both emerge from scrub beside the reeds down by the lake. they parted the reeds as they went through, and later I saw the dark wakes they both left as sometimes they waded sometimes swam over the lake till they were out of sight.

spasms of terror shook me through the night and I sat peering into the darkness long after teddy had gone. it was broad daylight when I awoke. the children had been and left our milk ration leaning on the veranda step. it was calming, but I was feeling queasy. the ferawsies are not hygienic and my system was feeling panicky. it was interesting that teddy’s disappearance had been no doubt reported but no fuss had been made.

the woman came down with the lumpy cake and some warm plant sludge and a rabbit leg. ‘where’s he gone?’ she asked.

‘just slipped out for some lite beerades,’ I joked. ‘Something to complement the cuisine.’

She laughed, throwing back her head, and for all her years in the wilds she looked for all the world like Mena Altiona out of Witch Way Home from Hell. Now that’s a sitcom nobody ever watches anymore, though it was amazingly popular back in the early fifties. It made me feel nostalgic, and after I’d eaten the cake and sludge, which I ate because the woman told me would prevent hysteria and I had to try something, my stomach felt full of explosives, and I kept gulping and sobbing without feeling a reason for it. I was scared, yeah, but okay, but ripped into by the vibrations of the place, each moment was sheer, near hysterical agony. she said it was warrigal greens, good for ya.

The sludge did help but all alone like that I spent the afternoon in a state of deep despair. I even yielded to the temptation of a paranoid rationalisation: they were keeping me here uninformed like this to torture me. that felt better than wondering why, so, while I was aware that I was going beyond the evidence, it was the easiest conclusion to bring my tormented thoughts to and that’s where I let it rest.

if I were ever to get out of this alive, it would be as one of those statistics of one of those very few bounty hunters captured by ferawsies who ever got out alive, and so far all of those had been permanently damaged by the ordeal. vegetables or close to it.

baboon came back late that afternoon. I was glad to see him. he looked for teddy and not finding him wandered off in the direction of the village.

when I woke up the next morning threadgold was back too. I had slept through the noise of his return, so they must have been pretty quiet, although I was dead to the world with the mental and emotional exhaustion of the previous day.

he’d lost a lot of weight for such a short time. he looked ill. he’d lost his *H*U*G* clothing and had been given a rabbit skin tunic and wool undergarments like those cally wore but no ornaments.

at first I thought he was dead he was so pale and stiff-looking, his lips grey with cold, but he jerked awake when I nudged him with my foot.

hus eyes were sunken and glazed over like bits of imprecise enamelling. he snapped them wide open and spread his lips back in a grin. his body stiffened until his back arched up off the mat, his penis erect under the rabbit skins. then he went limp. then he stiffened again and relaxed again. He repeated that a few times and then finally gave a soft, sad moan. his teeth began to chatter and he began to make small whimpering sounds.

‘come on, teddy, it’s me,’ I pleaded and slapped him sharply across the face. the kids were just going past in the rain down to milk the goats. ‘come on, teddy.’ it’s almost time for breakfast. don’t want to disappoint the kids.’ but I wasn;t feeling much better than him. the vibe pain was excrutiating. I felt like my brain was vapourising every cell crazed with the fatal vibration. I had to stay focused and not loll about squealing. so it was a hard tense slap and he reacted to it.

slowly his eyes came to focus on mine and he shut his mouth. He groaned and shut his eyes. I let him rest and watched the kids milking the goats. teddy sat up trembling, badly shaken, but more or less with us when they brought us our sack of warm milk. he drank some spilling it down his beard and left me more than my share. I was used to the flavours, even when it tasted of thistles and wild radish, and it would have been one of the least horrible parts of our diet except that they always gave it to teddy first and so there just always was this little bit, small though it might be of teddy’s goozy in it and it spoiled it for me. I still had to repress an inclination to gag before and after drinking it.

I only drank my share and then tried to get the kids to leave the sack for teddy to finish his when he felt better, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t understand my pantomime and the girl ended up taking it from me by force.

she fixed me with a commanding look that locked my eyes to hers and took hold of the bag by the rim. then she disengaged my grasp py bending one of my fingers so far back she almost broke it. my other fingers sprang open as if by a mechanical action, I had not a nerve at my command. she was on her way and already out of sight before I realised what she’d done. my finger hurt much more than ot should for a long time.

the milk did threadgold good and gave him back a portion of his mind. I congratulated him on his brave escape attempt and asked him what went wrong.

‘I think they can read fucking minds,’ he said. ‘they got me… just up there…’ he pointed across the lake to the mountainside on the other side. about halfway up. cunts were waiting for me. laughed their arses off.’

‘that was a whole day ago.’

‘what? just one?’

‘yes. where have you been?’

‘ah… I been… dunno… lotsa places…everywhere… all over the place… I don’t fuckin’ know. I haven’t been anywhere but flat on my back, in the fucking rain, fuckin wet. they’re eeeeeevil.’ he started to tremble again and I tried to think of a way to calm him down.

belly full of hornets, I had to let out sounds, so I spoke again. ‘haven’t seen cally since that time…’ meaning I hadn’t, but he took it to mean ‘I don’t suppose you have…’ and he answered ‘yeah.’ without hesitation.

‘what do you mean, yeah?’

‘yeah, I saw him there… somewhere… can’t remember…’

‘with them?’

‘yeah. like he was one of them.’

did you talk to him?

‘no… yes, i… no, I don’t remember. I remember a time he wouldn’t look at me…’

it didn’t make sense. it was dangerous for him to try what he was trying. how did he expect to keep it up and what did he think he could gain by it? ‘he’s really got em conned,’ I said, with less conviction than I’d intended.

‘yeah, or us more likely.’

‘us and all *H*U*G*?’

‘fuck, I dunno. shit. that’s be high treason.’

I had an intense inner struggle for a moment and shuddered violently, like a hanged man on a gibbet kicking himself out of his corpse.

Threadgold suddenly looked up sharply to the other side of the lake where a dozen ferawsies were pulling the punt out of the rushes. there were two or three ferawsies doing all the work and the rest, two in *H*U*G* city clothing and three in the uniforms of detainees, were standing by waiting for them to ready the punt.

‘looks like some more escapees, boss.’ how often had I seen Threadgold’s keen eye narrow at the sight of escapees, and I could hear the cogs turning as he quickly calculated their value as bounty. but he looked frightened like a child.

‘lot o’ bounty there,’ I said, chancing a quick broad smile, hoping that the idea might help to bring him back to himself, but he flung me a look that made the goose flesh prickle on my arms.

it was a weird wild look as if the whole expanse of the sky were in his eyes, the look of someone who’s just seen forever at a glance and had swallowed it whole.

the alien look of a soul from another sphere of existence that had nothing to do with the rock hard facts of this real world, nothing to communicate to one of my own species except the insurmountable fact of its own alienness.

like he’d internalised his predator, the way prey animals do, luck, in this instance, and was now projecting the terrifyingness of it at me to defend himself – and channelling some of the power of it to explain, sort of. threadgold flashing these reflections at me of the thing, the being who had shocked him half to death. and I realised he didn’t know he was doing it.

it passed. it hadn’t lasted long, but it had had its effect. when it was gone it was the same old threadgold looking at me, not quite trustingly, but then,  he’d never been trusting, or trustworthy in fact. that was one of the things I’d mentioned to monops about him.

we watched the escapees out of sight and that was the big event for that morning.

the woman brought the lumpy fish and a slimy brown puree with lumps of fish flesh in it and seeds and bits of leaf and stuff. she was almost kind to poor old teddy, eho treated her with contempt.

the punt started back while we were talking and among a small group of ferawsies who went down to meet it was cally.

‘do you know that guy?’ I asked her pointing him out to her.

‘why do you ask?’ she was peering at him as if she didn’t.

‘he was asking us questions, said he was just curious.’

‘what about?’

‘I couldn’t work out what he was on about.’

she shrugged. ‘no…’ she kept staring, wagging her head doubtfully, stroking her chin.

‘he speaks ferawsian.’

‘uh huh.’

cally half-turned and almost faced us looking towards a young ferawsie woman who was running after him and his companions, calling to them. he gave us a good clear view of his face.  then she recognised him.

‘oh yeah, him.’

day twelve

so we all laughed until we felt less uncomfortable about it, tapering off and staring once again at the mountain and there it was again, that same weird effect. the almost transparent mountain, almost invisible under cally’s eyes. he looked spaced out. Teddy looked as mesmerised as I felt, but neither of us said anything. maybe he wasn’t seeing it. maybe cally wasn’t conscious of it either. maybe it was just me.

But then at the same time the birdsong got louder or seemed to me tom and the chattering of the water got clearer, until I could hear every drop as an individual sound, as clear as a musical note and could deduce from the sound the form and shape of every ripple it made as it hit the surface, of the exact shape and colour of the pebble it shattered upon.

and I remembered then what I hadn’t let myself recall about cally. in his company the bush was always more articulate, though he wasn’t when he talked about it. but this was taking things to a whole higher level…

‘they asked me this question,’ said cally. ‘they asked me how many computers there are in the *H*U*G* world now. I tried to think how many billions, and the answer is…?’

‘give up,’ I said.

‘one’.

slowly as the implications of that began to dawn upon me I felt the hair begin to prickle on the back of my neck. somehow, a sense cally had managed to communicate exceptionally well of the deliciousness of that ironical twist connected itself in my mind with that ferawsie woman’s smiling, sarcastic hatred when she said ‘we win this war, robot.’

Threadgold sneered, unconvinced, ‘yeah, I’ve heard people say that. monops knows all the dangers. it’s all under intelligent sensitive human control. ‘

‘yeah, monops is, but it doesn’t know where we are.’ said cally.

‘yeah there are gaps.’

‘in the maps’

‘yeah’

‘did they mention any war?’

‘war… well, they got big plans to infiltrate and destroy monops, get control of *H*U*G*’

‘what kind of technology have they got?’

‘they got magic.’ cally said that last in a dramatic whisper. but he looked scared.

a couple of days later threadgold got loose.

day eleven

he was smart enough, cunning even, yeah, crafty like a fox, but nah, he wasn’t a thinker. he’d do anything to save his life, nothing to make trouble. he wasn’t even very proud. just when he tracked he went… like them. but nah, he liked his nice warm *H*U*G* life all bubble-wrapped and ducted comfort far too much ever to be suspected…

until now, while I still hadn’t jacked my jaw up off the ground.

they say you can read minds when you get like that. did he read mine? it was only a momentary anxiety but it shocked me. whoa, hang on there. way back. drop the mouse, brake firmly, grip the manual. where’s MONOPS? no one can read minds. I’ve got a sqidfile on it in my kit. I can remember some of it. the forest of interpretativity and inter/cranial samsaric negotiationality surrounding a single mind-reading event would render the exercise strenuous and ignominious, and even dangerous. most of us have such robust subconscious psychic self-defence systems that anyone who tries it insistently even with a friend soon begins to develop the symptoms of damage from the psychic weaponry defending the subject’s private inner mind. No one has ever proved that it can happen and there are recorded instances of irreversible damage to the fine structures implicit in the inner complexities of the exquisitely intricate molecular architecture of certain organelles in the neurons in the brain, which affect consciousness, and which, if affected in a certain way could make the difference between healthy activity and wild malfunctioning, wresting irrational fictions out of the data instead of the truth. in other words, seriously trying it can make you insane. people who still believe in it after having read MONOPS’s hard firm scientific opinion on the subject should be regarded as soft in the head and treated as such. believing you are actually doing it is registered firmly with monops as possibly a symptom of a mental illness and MONOPS keeps an eye on your web activities. wanting to learn to do something that can hurt people that much is simply evil.

nothing the matter with that. *H*U*G* has done plenty of research on the subject, against all reason considering how few people were interested in the lunatic fringe. couldn’t get more scientific. I even hitched up a smile. but a sort of gargle of fear almost caught in my throat like a sob.

‘wow cally, you so cool,’ Threadgold kept joshing him about the garb. he nudged me and suddenly a vision flashed into my mind’s eye of cally up for sale on the black market as an unregistered slave, not needing to be accounted for to MONOPS. I’d never much liked teddy’s sense of humour.

getting back to cally’s story, which came out in bits and all out of sequence, so that’s how you’re getting it from me, when the drifta showed signs of stopping, he’d been standing about ten metres behind teddy who had flagged it down at the roadside. as it drew up, teddy started jogging towards it and suddenly there was a man with blue eyes standing right in front of him and he blundered into him and stopped short, gripping his sleeves, staring into his face. in a blurred momentary glance he had seen but not believed in a scene from another landscape surrounding him, and his eyes searching frantically for threadgold, he craned his neck over the man’s shoulder, because he was taller than cally. but threadgold and the landscape containing him were vanishing in diminishing blinks winks and glimmers while the man and the new landscape surrounding him were stabilising as absolutely as if he’d stepped off a bus – or rather, been pulled off one, although he was the one doing the coat gripping, which was all that stopped him slumping to the ground as he took in his new surroundings: the broad lawns and tidy hedges and shrubs of a semi-formal garden surrounding a wide shallow round lily pond with a fountain in the middle of it. he got his footing and released the blue-eyed man. the ensuing conversation would fill a book, and we could look forward to hearing about it, but for now it seemed we had a name for that blue-eyed sky man. His name was Luck, or so he told cally.

and then he’d been held by the shoulders and sort of pushed out of that landscape and deposited by that roadside, so many days walk ago.

then he laughed and looked vague and admitted that he had just as clear a memory of talking to that man as he had of talking much more and being interrogated much more deeply by the enormous goldfish that swam in the lily pond. he could still hear the frogs singing in the reeds. but that’s nuts, he acknowledged.

yeah, screen memories, I agreed serenely. I had found the manual. technology and the ferawsian herbal pharmacopeia would explain the rest. well, I was a product of my time, my culture, and I hadn’t learnt to recognise these strategies as the mechanisms of denial yet. I certainly knew I could avoid a lot of very very achingly tediously mind-numbingly cripplingly inappropriately would be helpful if it could be counselling custom made for who I not quite am if I kept doing it. safe warm wholesome ol family values *H*U*G*.

So how come he got back with his memories intact and neither Teddy nor I did? Teddy talked as if we weren’t allowed to, as if Luck had erased it deliberately before setting us down. but to me it was obvious. he was one of them and could get on and off their wavelength as easily as they did, whereas for me and threadgold it was a painful tearing violation of all that registered as reality.

I mean, I could imagine cally on his gorgeous, luxurious days off, back home, plugged into some of the most sophisticated state of the art vr you can get, off in some ferawsie gamewelt of his own engineering, no one but monops leaning kindly over his shoulder and tuning into his naughtiest secret dreams. he could be gone for days and monops would ask no questions.

and could he read my thoughts? he even laughed then and it was right on cue for my train of thought but out of place for the spoken conversation. he looked a bit embarrassed. but he said he didn’t know why he was allowed to keep his.

and he looked so disingenuous I immediately dismissed everything I’d suspected as paranoia, as the beginnings of a delusion, and I kept to my strait and narrow path of *H*U*G*-born truth. whatever struggles might be passing through his spirit now, he was one of us. we could trust him to the bitter end, I had no doubt of it.

but it nagged at the edges of my mind that I knew him to be that easy-going. he could turn the ferawsie mindset off and on, like an actor. but the corollary of that is that he could turn the *H*U*G* one off and on just as easily. and underneath it all, just like anyone else, he was willing to switch on or off whichever was wanted.

he told us all that and more about the ferawsies that he’d learned during the days walking. Threadgold got stuck into him at one point.

‘can you really talk to these cunts? Can you? can you understand em?’

cally gave him a strange look, half-humorous and narrowed his eyes to stare away in the direction, he gave us time to work out, of adderlayd.

he always did think a bit before answering even the simples questions. he was easily fazed. he then looked up the hill to where the ferawsies had their village. course, most of the ones I’ve met so far speak some *H*U*G*,‘ he said at last, and that was his answer.

but my stare was still following his up the mountain, or almost. it was as though cally had made it transparent by looking through it, I was aware of – I was practically seeing the distant city, like a giant gleaming animal at rest, predatory, stupid and smug, evil in its stupidity. I was shocked. never had such a thought occurred to me before. morbid thoughts are part of the complex of mental trauma associated with loss of contact. I shook myself out of it, recalling at once my sense of that beautiful, tranquil city of fine noble people and beautiful children, okay, not perfect, but pretty indeed with the blind pride of a fancy animal that knows its own creations, its own fantasies and fictions, but does not know, except as rather ‘noisy’ and therefore mostly undesirable background, the planet it grows upon, the planet that gives it suck. doesn’t know the mysterious power of mountains. doesn’t know the valleys and hidden springs of its own hinterland, infested like a dog with fleas with ratbags and hoodlums and swaggering hooligans and raving radicals gone feral.

gone feral and talking of war.

cally raked his fingers through several days of beard growth and drawled, ‘yeah, robots, they call us. well, you anyway. that’s what we call you,’ and he laughed. Teddy kicked him again and said, ‘hey whose side are you on, and we all laughed a lumpy sort of laugh that ached in places.’

I involuntarily touched my own rather luxuriant growth and saw teddy’s hand stray to his own as well. beards were right out of fashion in *H*U*G*. pre-d. because since the decimation we’ve feared beards… I remember a documentary about it… I daresay you could find plenty out there on it…

‘trouble is,’ he said, ‘they took my teckybelt, with all my uberkool stuff. told me to grow my hair and learn to smell instead. now what do you think they meant by that?’ he wet two fingers and stroked down his fast-lengthening elegantly curling sideburns which he always kept boyishly minimalistic with a tiny wispy kiss-curl faint as a breath just in front of each ear . ‘told me I should grow a beard.’

we all laughed at that. but yeah, none of us had anything to shave with.

which might be hard for you pre-D people tp understand, but suffice to say wearing a natural beard in the *H*U*G* community except as a joke or for theatrical purposes was listed as one of the primary symptoms of several fairly common sociopsychopathological diseases, and was reportable and compulsorily treated. such people are microchipped and if the condition warrants it, they are fitted with a godbot, as they are jocularly called in the slang which sure, exercises a fair amount of control over their decision-making until the root cause of the problem has been found and dealt with.

so it hit me that a high level of anxiety which had been mounting in me with regard to threadgold was due to a repressed fear of his growing beard. well, it certainly added a helpful perspective to consider that mine might me just as alarming to threadgold. i made an inner adjustment. beards are natural, and natural people are savage and dangerous. stopping shaving is letting go of thousands of years of hard won civilisation. but in reality someone with a beard does not necessary go straight for your jugular vein. nevertheless, it could go along with a loss of concensus co-resonance with *H*U*G*, and we should be cautious with ourselves and each other.

I only thought this and said not a word but even teddy looked slightly scared as he said, ‘hey come on, mate, we gotta get away from here, okay. can you find out what anyone’s got planned for us? can you get us tools? shouldn’t be so hard to sheer off them bolts, or laser though the steel posts.’

Cally said he’d keep alert and try to keep in contact. he even mumbled something that implied that he was afraid of being overheard, not by spies hiding nearby, but by remote minds monitoring. I can’t remember how he implied that and I had to take it as his attempt to warn us. there are some things too sensitive even to think about.

I let the conversation degenerate to an admiring investigation of his clothing, made he said out of wallaby pelts, with large pockets for foraging and a belt of coarse bark fibres twisted into rough string and woven into a stiff band clasped at the navel with a medallion of carved wood clutching the small tip of a goat’s horn, with various small tools tucked into the belt. no laser unfortunately – we had plenty of time to look. all hand-made, very neatly finished. ‘they gave me these,’ he said. ‘just thought I’d show youse guys what style looks like.’ and he struck a pose to make us laugh.

that’s the big lesson, keep up the morale. I had done a semester on the psychology of keeping up morale, and had read the sqidfile on the subject in my kit, and could recall some of the important advice in it. morale is all-important.

day ten

Then she brought it to me, keeping herself well back so that I had to reach for it. ‘What happens if I refuse it?’ I asked her. Threadgold answered ‘they force-feed you.’ I drank the rest of the milk trying not to think of teddy’s salivary enzymes already starting on their pre-digestive fermentation process. I managed not to be sick and then sat very still, determined to keep it down. organic food is nutritious enough, just a bit hit and miss by MONOPSIAN standards. I was in ace physical and mental condition when this expedition began and could stand it.

The girl took back the bag and the boy suddenly stepped up and touched me as if experimentally. I must have looked fierce because he withdrew quickly and followed the girl away to the other side of the house round the corner and out of sight.

I slept all morning. I vaguely remember waking up and eating some of the lumpy cake I was already acquainted with and drinking some luke warm soup, and being dimly aware of a woman moving in a shadow that seemed to be her own emanation but was, I learned later, a garment made from many small pelts sewn together. She talked *H*U*G*. I snoozed through the afternoon too, but was awake, marvelling at my muscular stiffness when a grim-looking, hairy man brought us cooked meat and some fleshy-pulpy grainy stuff that seemed to be of vegetable origin, some limp, boiled leaves and something sour and crumbling that could have been goat cheese mixed with bits of plants and seeds.

He watched us eat it, and then took the wooden slabs he’d brought it on and vanished,

That night I slept as well as if I hadn’t slept for a week, and didn’t wake up again until the kids came down to milk the goats.

The days that followed were all so much alike I soon lost count. The kids brought milk in the mornings, the woman brought cake and soup at noon, and the hairy man brought some kind of stew, sometimes with meat or fish or eggs and we got used to it. several ferawsies gave us fruit and berries as they passed on their way to and from the lake.

We struck up a kind of friendship with the woman who brought the midday meal. She was *H*U*G* born, and had that derisive attitude that *H*U*G* born ferawsies have for *H*U*G* and bounty hunters in particular.

Threadgold asked her right away what she thought they’d do to us. She exploded in a spluttering snigger and said ‘well, I hope they kill you, you cunts. do it maself if I had the guts.’ and ‘and what da ya expect, robots, kisses?’ and ‘duzz oo wantza sucky?’  but she stayed around while we ate and took her time leaving. I guess her ferawsian was probably fairly new since she was using fairly recent updates in her fluent, slangy *H*U*G*. she was probably relieved to get a chance to speak her native language, kind of take a reality check and grab some continuity with her past.

She had nothing much to tell us. no one had told her anything. She talked almost exclusively about herself, her past, the job she used to have, the places she’d lived in, her parents and family. She hated them all.

I asked her what was going on up behind the house where we could not see but actually could feel the sub-audible tensions of the roil and wrangle of a busy community, perhaps quite a large one, from which people came and went to the lake but were otherwise hidden from our view, going about their work with an intensity of purpose that was nothing short of sinister. She was evasive, saying only that the village was up there. She wouldn’t say how many people. I asked her about cally. she didn’t seem to know. I asked her why they were keeping us alive at all and she seemed to be telling the truth when she said she didn’t know.

She got Threadgold’s hackles up with her heckling and he boasted that by now *H*U*G* knew where we were and would destroy this village and capture all its inhabitants in one leisurely afternoon, and none would escape. They’d all be forced to be good and work for their living and that would be that. she laughed in his face and sneered, ‘robot, we know for a fact that we win this war.’

but we couldn’t get her to explain what war.

the vibrational disturbance levels were, going by the best I could guess at where we were on the map, among the worst in the country. that partly explained why monops had no real detail for the maps of these areas. it was a disturbance that jammed the radio connections, and scattered the signals no matter what you do and the scanners could make nothing of the data. and the elf waves fisted into you so hard you could feel them. so the telsient neutrinologue was useless nevertheless the ferawsies, even the *H*U*G* born, seemed healthy enough physically, if filled with sick emotion and crazy thoughts.

Threadgold had episodes of sighing, whimpering and looking frightened alternating with what looked like labour pains. I was doing all right, but I experienced cramps, periods of mental confusion and incongruous emotional displays unrelated to my feeling. when I complained the woman said she’d send down a drummer for me. that afternoon, not one but two long thin young people, couldn’t tell which sex, brought handmade drums down and an older man with a didgeridoo came down and played their instruments all afternoon beside us, sharing a flagon of water with us as if we were all good mates.

it soothed us certainly, physiologically speaking, and I awoke next morning less badly affected. they came again every few days. I can’t quite explain why but the weirdness of such incongruous kindness scared me and teddy admitted to a kind of aching dread, as if that kind of drumming were associated with being dragged off to some kind of hell…

I kept worrying about cally and looking out for him among the arrivals at the lake shore. I couldn’t shake the conviction that he’d turn up. and one day he did. I’d lost all sense of time and have no idea how many days had passed. and one day, just as the sun was going down up he meandered from the lake with a couple of ferawsie companions. he was dressed like one of them in a short leather tunic over some kind of woven material and a furry hat. he had thin leather soles tied to his feet with leather thongs. He looked softer-skinned than the others, that’s how I picked him, the reason I looked closer, but otherwise he looked and even moved like one of them. tattoos were visible under the grime on his face.

They were speaking to each other in ferawsian and cally was making noises like he understood and when he came up near me he signed goodbye to his friends and strolled on over to us. the others kept on going up the road to the village and were soon out of sight, but anyway, cally, without trying to be secretive, grinned a totally *H*U*G* grin and squatting carefully on his heel, just like Grad Groinda in Golden Valleys, said, ‘G’day, robots.’ He seemed pleased with himself and he looked excellent. I laughed out loud, it was so good to see him, and yeah, infiltrating the enemy ranks. how had he managed that? and what was he telling them? and did he have any idea what they intended to do to us two?

‘g’day cunt.’ teddy gave him a friendly kick that nearly overbalanced him. cally told him to get fucked and we all laughed for a few moments, just managing the emotions.

cally answered all our questions with short answers that told us nothing much, keeping his trade secrets, as he said. he was using his little bit of ferawsian to impress recently escaped *H*U*G* born escapees and retained his reputation for fluency in it by saying nothing much and laughing at the jokes as soon as any of the others did, and that suited the morose taciturn manner he was affecting, as a characteristic of all the real, freeborn ferawsies.

he mimicked himself doing it, speaking it, even commanded the dog to sit, and it obeyed. and he looked the part, with that wild look I told you about and he frightened me with it – deliberately perhaps. he turned it right on me for a moment and held my gaze as it faded. I saw his whole face relax back into his nice, easy-going *H*U*G* look. it crossed my mind that he could easily be fence sitting, hedging his bets, keeping his options open and for now playing safe by either pretending to be an escapee turning or turned ferawsie, newly arrived from a distant village, that way, like a rhinoceros that can turn on a sixpence, he’d be able at a moment’s notice to take that fatal step and defect. defect. defect. distinguish carefully from defect.

but surely cally wouldn’t. prevarication, I could easily believe, because I’d seen many instances of it in him, just in small things, so to save himself, he’d play it very cool. but he didn’t have the nous for that kind of strategy. still, he’d got this far by being guileless and non-committal. I didn’t after all know whether to suspect him or not. it seemed advisable to treat him as potentially very dangerous. I asked him about the tattoos. You did that to yourself?’

‘No, got em done. I met those ones when I got set down and they brought me here along the road, and we camped along the way in a cave where they tattooed people and so I had one done do you like it? shit I was just going along with anything.’ they were dragon lizards, very life-like in full display with their tails curled graceful around his jawline to meet in tow spirals on his chin.

didn’t you get infected?

no.

it’s very well executed, I ventured.

I’m glad you like it. because they’re hellishing hard to remove, said cally.

and they really think you’re one of them?’

‘yeah. no one asked me anything. round these parts you can get near killed just asking things about anyone. so I just joined them and the more they talked *H*U*G* the more i talked only ferawsie or nothing at all the more they got exaggerated respect for me and by the time we got here they all thought I was freeborn and nobody has questioned that yet. shit, my ferawsians not that good, they’d catch me out if they tried.’

and they hadn’t. that meant he was getting good at keeping up the pretence. and it wasn’t the first time the hint of the idea flashed into my mind that he actually was one. and here he was practically identifying as one.

*H*U*G* never claimed to catch all ferawsies escaping from *H*U*G*. It had always admitted that there were undetected ferawsies living within the cities and towns of *H*U*G* scattered through the populace generating problems as serious as they could make them for the logistics of MONOPS, upon which the whole concept of *H*U*G* depends. it’s the uniting principle, the medium, the universally shared mindscape.

cally wasn’t smart enough to live that double life. I wouldn’t say he was loyal to anyone or anything. shocked to the core, I realised I wouldn’t put it past him to defect if it made his life easy. facile he was.

Bounty had made him rich as it had all of us and he’d spent his money carefully in ways that would never arouse suspicion in any of monops’s perusal of her personal data should any such ever be authorised as for example in the case of crime or death under suspicious circumstances. He was mainstream, *H*U*G* as you can get. he had a spectacular beach house he never visited, a ritzy little farkar to get around in, and all the fancy toys and glorious holidays that wealth can buy.

day nine

i’ve handled hundreds of escapees before and never encountered either of two things: technology or magic. so which ever it was all my flimsy paradigms were softly exploding in silent whimpers all in the last fading afterglow of happy from my last sucky.

‘i never expected you to wake up,’ said teddy. ‘i thought you’d die.’ he was speaking in a near hysterical falsetto. he reminded me of sir andrew aguecheek and i had the uncomfortable impression that i was being threatened with the roll of sir toby belch.

‘well i still don’t know if i did or not!’ was all i could say and it was true. someone’s idea of an afterlife where you. ‘it’s not making sense…’

to be honest i felt ill. what had happened had had an effect like a real physical jar on my sense of reality. ontological insecurity, it was and it had frightened me, yeah, but like i said what scared me most was the discovery in myself of a capacity for that much that intense fear. if my primal voice had uttered it would have beseeched the universe ‘okay, i’m your prey. don’t scare me anymore. just kill me.’

and the next thing that happened brought me suddenly, terrifyingly into a direct encounter with that one isolated fact again. a face loomed out of the deepening darkness at me, so suddenly it seemed as if it had materialised spontaneously there. at first it was all deep animal eyes and warm, wet, noisy breath. when its face came into focus it was all the wrong colours and wrong shape. where there should have been shoulders, arms, torso, there was nothing at all except a dark shadow tapering off into darkness. there was just the head, far too close to mine to let me focus and an increasing pressure on the centre of my chest. i drew in a shuddering, hollow breath and almost gagged on a rising scream.

but the thin, high-pitched mew i heard came from the face, not me. black lips split to bright pink grinning back from the sharp white serrations of fangs. a tongue came out and dragged a swathe of warm friendly wet across my mouth, and i was overpowered by the potent perfume of dog.

‘i think we must be hostages,’ said, threadgold, totally unaware of my predicament. dizzily i made my way back from the edge of panic and watched the rest of the dog appear over the edge of the veranda. it took another swipe at my face, leaving me with a wet left ear.

‘can you call the dog off?’ i asked.

‘baboon!’

they’d obviously met. the dog padded obediently to his side and teddy hugged him. ‘well, he looks like a baboon,’ he explained as if i’d asked him, ‘with that ruff sticking out all around. i used to be scared of him but he just licks you.’

‘i’m not scared of dogs,’ i said, rather loudly, and it helped me feel brave. it did.

i found myself laughing as if we were lounging round a pool drinking freshahola on a warm summer’s evening back home, while my quaking insides hurt with an unnatural cold. yes, fear. real fear, and the worst thing it had done that had given that wrench to my sense of reality and the monstrous fear it had awakened in me, was that it had torn the veil for me, shredded the curtain of only-pretending emotionality that hid the bestiality of the human animal within me. i had let it whimper like someone else far away and paid it no attention. only a wimp would heed it. and i had let the funky *h*u*g* generated paper tigers terrorise me as if they were real so that i would never have to face the monsters that were in me, real and devouring, the real fear, the weakness in reality that can shatter to pieces while you giggle and squeal the fabric of that scrap of awareness that is me.

crazy fear of crazy things more real than the reasoned fear of things that monops taught us all from our cradles were harmful, dangerous, threatening to ourselves and others, to our planet, to *h*u*g*, things that monops could manage for us if only we click like.

yes, there was that, that shock, as i teetered between superstitious belief in my own trauma-related hallucinations of magic as suggested by the foolish prattle of braggards who knew next to nothing about it, and the simple sanity of monops. i knew i had to guard against that. the temptation to trust my own perception when it was clearly delusional was to be resisted at all costs. i was in a deep psychosis and would wait for either death or rescue.

yes, it was a near betrayal of *h*u*g*, that glimpse of other vistas, of other realities, of other ways of negotiating reality, that i had to guard against. that’s what baboon had shown me. no way could i control the events to come, but it had to remain in my power to control my response to them, to stay attuned to the *h*u*g* reality as encoded for us via monops.

i watched the moon, now shrouded by the thickening clouds, as threadgold entertained himself with the dog.

teddy talked ceaselessly for another hour or so, so ready or not i was regaled with his story. this was is as far as i could piece it together from the rambling account he gave.

he and cally had tracked our truck back across country and down along a disused research road to where it joined the patrol road from town which headed south and eventually connected up with the tube. monops controls all tube traffic, but outside the towns and main arterial roads the traffic has to make special contact and you need the right licences and permissions. scanners picked up illegal vehicles using the remote untubed roads, it was a remote road that seldom carried any manned traffic, but even so it didn’t seem likely that the ferawsies would be staying on it for long. cally reckoned he knew which way it had gone and only an hour or so down the road they found the place where it had left the road, leaving tyre marks over damp ground that they’d made no effort to hide.

they driven into the scrub just far enough to be out of sight of the road and stopped. no more tracks, no truck.

cally said, “must have gone up.’ and looked up into the sky. and that was according to teddy utterly hilarious. fair enough that ruck wasn’t equipped for gliding so it was impossible. so was any other explanation you could think of. the tracks just stopped. they hadn’t reversed back on them. if they’d stayed parked on that soft ground for any time at all they’d have sunk down and maybe got bogged. but they didn’t. they just stopped.

picked it up from the air, i suppose, i suggested. teddy’s voice was leaping from cheerily even mirthfully serene to high hysteria and back again like an adolescent’s voice breaking carried to a higher plane. i felt the need to assume a calm deep tone and i used it then to calm him.

‘yeah. air-lifted, it had to be.’

they went back to the road to try and flag something something down as they walked back to camp, expecting a long wait. amazingly almost straight away a lowslung drifta came gliding low at a leisurely pace and stopped just as they rounded the shoulder of the hill. much as they needed something like that, that was pretty scary. no one in their right mind would stop for a couple of unidentified hitch-hikers this far from civilisation. all they wanted was for whoever it was to notify monops and send someone official out to find us.

what happened next happened fast. when cally didn’t push past threadgold to do the talking, threadgold had glanced around anxiously to see where he was, hoping to slink back behind him. he didn’t know what to say to these cunts – rich bastards with special privileges. but he’d gone. totally vanished. he spun round open-mouthed and still he wasn’t there.

when he turned back to the drifta, though he swears the driver hadn’t had time to get out he found himself staring into a pair of eerie, mind-sucking sky-blue eyes…

he’d been conscious most of the day. he wasn’t sure how many he’d missed. he’d been well-enough treated, better than me, and they’d carried him most of the way.

‘hey boss, at least i’ve found you!’ he started filling me in on things, an old hand introducing a newby.

the food, awful, the dog the most informative communicator. if i go to the end of my chain and shit there the chooks’ll get it.

i did need it and as i tried to swivel myself over towards it i discovered that the leather that bound my hands and feet had stretched in the damp weather and become weak close to the knots where i’d been gnawing at them. i did a bit more work with my teeth and it didn’t take long to get my hands free. my feet were even easier. i was still chained by the neck to a steel rail but at least i could stand up and walk a few steps. i used the bucket and by the time i’d finished, threadgold was snoring again with the dog stretched out beside him.

the long, cool hours of that intermittently moonlit night passed silently away first light gave me a sense of where i was. the eastern horizon was the dark, forest-clad back of a mountain. so was the western one. the lake threadgold had mentioned was not much more than a large mountain pool fed by a stream that entered the valley as a waterfall about a kilometre to the north and spilled over another fall at about the southern end of the lake,

the veranda was attached to the remains of a solid old stone house, pre-d. it could have been between three and four hundred years old. dense tufty grasses gave place to reeds down by the lake. in the foreground small black and tan rough-coated goats grazed. one goat was a billy goat, his musk sweet and pervasive at the approach of rut. i’d mistaken it for flowers. tender were the voices of the does as they woke up and responded to the dawning of the day.

the first humans i saw were two kids, stark naked in the chilly dawn, who ran down from behind the house with leather bags slung over their shoulders, across the grass to the goats. they opened one of their sacks and fed the billy goat from it, emptying it onto the ground for him, then they milked the nearest nanny goat into the feedbag while she ate the contents of a second bag which was shaken out for her. then they went to the next goat and so an down the line. when they’d milked all four they brought the milk back up the slope towards threadgold and me.

the bigger one was a dark-skinned, blue-eyed girl of about eight. and the smaller one was a red-haired, golden-eyed six year old lacking his front teeth. they were both filthy,

‘robot! robot!’ they skirted warily round me and the girl kicked threadgold awake. he was sleeping face down on the mat and his violent frog-kick, which they were evidently expecting, made them laugh. they shot me glances as if i too might laugh with them at him, but i was yawning.

‘’fucking hell,’ said threadgold. he shook himself awake, saw the bag og milk and slumped, shaking his head and blowing through his lips in distaste. the girl giggled. she evidently liked threadgold, and yeah, to a kid that age he could be good-looking, in a thin-faced, slightly, perhaps, disarmingly gauche sort of way. you could have put him in the local pantomime as prince charming. you know what kids are like.

‘you saw where they got this stuff from, boss, out of fucking animals. out of animals that have been sleeping in their own excrement. those animals there. i watched em, and they do.’

the girl said something to him in ferawsian. ‘robot’ was the only word i recognised. he gagged, swallowed hard, took the bag of still-steaming frothy milk and shutting his eyes tight he drank, gagging at every gulp, until the bag was only half full. then he shuddered and gave it back to the girl. brave man, a credit to his training.

 

day eight

They talked for a few minutes. never had I so regretted not learning the language. The woman dived into the MULTIMODE and fished out a small book, the antique kind, made of paper, with printed pages and a shiny cover. ‘See that, now, Iggy,’ said Gilpin to me as she handed it to the giant, ‘it’s a print-out of your file.’ I had no idea what that meant, so I said nothing. I’m not a secretive man. I’m honest so I don’t have to be. As MONOPS keeps explaining, if you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to hide, so why hide anything. Anyone could compile any sort of file on me from social networks, training courses, career and education related sites – you name it. They could have my file.

I didn’t see what the giant did with it. He grinned and it disappeared from view in his huge hairy hand. There was more conversation and I lost track of it. He no longer seemed to have it in his hand when he came over and lifted 170-22 and carried her to the MULTIMODE. I was lifted too, as easily as a child and put into the MULTIMODE beside her. The two *H*U*G* officials got in and the woman took the controls.

We lifted into the air and flew up over the mountains undetectable here by MONOPS, buffeted by rising winds and squalls of rain, till only half an hour later we swooped down between peaks, skimmed  tree tops, slowing as we got lower down till we stopped, hovering over a flat expanse of rock halfway up a mountain. A yell came down to us from a ledge of rock above. We landed.

Gilpin and the woman lifted me and 170-22 out of the MULTIMODE and left us both lying on the rock. Then they left. I sat up, and after searching the rock faces for the source of the yell and finding nothing, I started to chew at the bits of leather that bound my wrists together. They were cutting in tight and I was worried about my circulation. I managed to roll onto my knees and I had my face covered by my hands so I didn’t see the four Ferawsies arrive. I’d been looking in all directions but they were just suddenly there, about 200 yards away.

They hadn’t quite reached me when I heard sounds of a scuffle behind me and then a resounding, reverberating, rip-roaring raucous shout. I swivelled round involuntarily just in time to witness one of those miraculous escapes the authorities never say happens. Say never. Never say. Bear with me – this was a high-strangeness moment.

170-22 was standing up, hands in the air clasped over her head, mouth still open and face still stretched to the limit for the shout I had heard. Her eyes were a-blaze with power. Her restraints were melting ­and dribbling down over her clothes like some kind of glassy syrup. Her monitoring system lay on the stone at her feet. I saw her gag and helmet peel away from her head and fall empty to the ground. That was impossible. My training teaches me to distinguish between reality and trauma induced hallucination, and when you see impossible things happening, you are hallucinating. That meant of course that is was now impossible to trust my own perceptions and should regard myself as delusional until MONOPS could get someone to me.

And they’d better be quick. The Ferawsies were coming, their voices clattering over the rocks like handfuls of gravel, light laughter, their movements quick and prancing in the storming air. These were going to take me deeper into the contaminated zone, where the most profoundly and unpredictably radiation affected, wildest human beings on earth would determine my fate.

Okay MONOPS had more data than MONOPS was choosing to share. Be that as it may (and ain’t that always the way, hey, hey, hey?) there was very little information of a hard nature that we bounty hunters could refer to about the deep interior of what amounted to Ferawsian territory. My official knowledge was scanty – most bounty hunters were ill-treated and the few who had escaped and got home or were recovered by rescue parties all suffered from trauma-induced dementia and never recovered their faculties enough to give us any sort of useful account.

I took fright, for sure, and sucked my sucky tightly.

They were taking forever to reach me across that expanse of rock.

Crazily I found myself wondering why the fuck the slave hadn’t done that before. If she could do it now, why couldn’t she do it yesterday or the night before when we were all sleeping and her comrades were all lurking about after the truck? I entertained myself with the problem in some detail for a moment or two. It was more engaging than the present situation to say nothing of my future prospects.

I vaguely noticed that the Ferawsies had fanned out and were standing in a sort of semi-circle around me looking slightly upwards, and then I ceased to focus on anything in particular, not even conscious that my mind had gone fuzzy-edged and my thought process weren’t being articulate. Slowly I too looked up and began mildly to enquire of the sky…

It really was a few moments before I became aware that I was staring straight into a pair of transparent, luminous, sky-blue eyes set in a pale face that had come out of nowhere, a face like a skull with eyeholes through which I could see only sky…

I could see nobody. The face did not belong to anybody standing near me on the ground. But there was a hand. It cupped my chin and held my face still when I tried to turn away so I was forced to stare into those eye-holes. No, it wasn’t a skull. It was a face, translucent, full of light, and those eyes were real. They held my gaze relentlessly, and I felt the power of their magnetism, taking hold of me, magnetising me, melting me and making me flow until I felt like I was entering the sky.

MONOPSIAN counselling aside, I’m a braver man up to a point than most people I know. The code of ethics that governs natural phenomena states, or ought to state, that nothing ever should ever scare a grown man into gibbering idiocy. I like that code to be there, and I like it to be obeyed. This was a gross breach of it.

I mean with MONOPSIAN fear attacks you’ve read the script and okay, it’s not too far below the surface you know you’re only going along with it as long as your courage lets you, and you play the game or your out and I’m playing bounty hunter, team leader, risk taker, danger man. so I play a fear game and it’s play-fear and rewarding enough as far a psychodrama goes, and sure we all do need some in our lives, but yeah, up to a point…

and of course you don’t tell yourself it’s a game. to do justice to myself I had believed in the fear I’d been experiencing until that point but at that point I knew real fear at last. real natural fear. It was even generating a real natural whimper from my inmost depths. It vibrated almost sweetly through my HAPPYSUCKY mood until I stopped being the yawning blue-eyed sky and went back to being one aching man hogtied in leather thongs on a hard rock surface.

Every sense I still had told me I’d been gone for three or four heartbeats. The pallid face had seemed to spread out and become the sky, obviously a clever trick of some sort. The blue eyes had gone and I remembered them as anyway, having been easily seen to be fake, had I had my wits about me. Where the mouth would have been was a round orange disk and it seemed to be feeding back into my body,

I could soon see that it was just the moon rising over the mountainside… but I was not lying on my back on that windy rock anymore, I was half-sitting, half-lying on damp straw and the cold heavy feeling round my neck was because I now wore a steel collar and a long chain in addition to the tight leather thongs. The cold pressure in my back as I returned to it was caused by a real solid object, to wit, a steel veranda post and the rest of the veranda was dimly a-glow in the light of the newly risen three quarter moon.  For some reason I spent a good minute sucking my tongue, my sucky having been sucked away completely, and working out the mathematics. I calculated that that moon was a good two days thinner and a couple of hours later to rise than it should have been. It was too cloudy to see the stars. It comforted me to think that MONOPS would want to know these things when they came to rescue me and I’d be able to tell them.

Missing time. MONOPS was investigating a strain of fungal spore released around certain types of tree at certain times, causing temporary or permanent impairment to certain neurological process in the temporal lobes of the human brain. Perhaps it was true, the rumour going around that they used herbs and could do as much harm with their herbal wisdom as MONOPS and all its crew with their array of mind control tools and remote-range weaponry.

I felt still and cold. Someone was snoring close enough to my feet to be the cause of the warm breeze that alternated with the cold one over my insteps. I was barefoot! My boots were gone. No wonder I felt rough all over. I was dressed in rough, bulky, smelly hairy clothing. The snoring was loud enough to gradually bring my attention round to it and when I began to believe that my mind really was still working, that what my eyes were seeing was real, I began to understand that those nasal orchestrations really did have the characteristic purling sound I knew so well,

Not having much freedom to move, I found myself positioned to chuck the moon-beshadowed sleeper under the chin with my big toe. “Threadgold,’ I whispered.

‘Yeah, boss?’ came between mumbled snores followed by another louder, longer snore.

‘Hey, Teddy!’ This time I gave it a bit of voice.

‘Yeah?’ This time he moved. He’s one of those people who snap to attention when they’re wakened suddenly. He reacts to the sound of his name as if it were a gunshot. I’ve seen him go from dead asleep to upright so fast he was a blur on the way up. He tried that now and made a lot of noise doing it, but only ended up in a sitting with his bare feet pawing at the straw in front of him. ‘You’re back,’ he said, forgetting to swear.

‘Back? Where have I been?’

He shrugged and answered by letting his head droop down on one shoulder shutting his eyes and letting his tongue hang out, which I could just see in the dim moonlight.

‘What’s more to the point,’ I tried, ‘where are we now?’

‘Fucked if I know,’ he said. ‘West ranges? Not really a village – cupla cabins, about thirty or forty Feraws more than half of them kids, tame dogs, fucking goats tied up down there, canoes for lake fishing, walking paths going right round the…’

He was going to give me a tourist brochure if I didn’t stop him. ‘How long have you been here?’

‘I don’t know. Two or three days. I’ve been unconscious too, on and off… You missed most of it. They brought you in comatose this morning. You only breathed once an hour at first. I mean you were out.’

‘I missed most of what?’ I asked. In a job like mine sometimes you need superhuman patience. I breathed deep.

‘The trip here. I was brought here in a *H*U*G* skymat. An old model. You were carried up from the lake on a litter from a boat coming in from upstream.’

‘Okay.’ I didn’t want answers. I didn’t even have questions. I knew there were no questions or answers here anyway. But I felt terrible and wanted to settle the scramble of terror that had possession of my guts and not panic. not freak out.

day seven

wyldwyverne takes sabbath of half moon waning off to do magic. peace in the west. peace in the waters. peace in the waning. peace throughout the world!

day six

We found our way to a brisk little stream, and to hide our tracks, we walked along its rocky bed. I’m a strong man – not like Mandi, but broad-shouldered – and could bear the weight, but walking on pebbles through knee-deep water even wearing boots designed for bush-walking is very hard work, and since then my ankles had become quite sore and painful and each step began to jar, just a little, but I felt the need to stop and rest. I even considered asking the wild born one for a moment to remedise. If I fell down lame and exhausted it would have to carry its own burden. And where would be any advantage to it in that?

But you can’t reason with hatred so I didn’t ask for mercy. I was anyway a long way from exhaustion. I’d been staggering a bit for a while but could have gone on, or so I deluded myself.

But suddenly something big came hurtling at me down over the rocks and landed in the water in front of me and I stopped, dazzled by the sun when I swung my head up to see what it was. Before I could see again, the burden had been lifted from my arms. There was a roaring in my ears that could have been a waterfall as yet unseen round the next rockface. Off-balance, I teetered crazily for a moment and groped for the support of what I thought was a rock. But the ‘rock’ stepped aside and I fell backwards into the water. My fall cushioned by the few inches of bright sparkling water, I sank slowly to the bottom on a bed of soft-edged rocks.

Water in my eyes. I was surely hallucinating. The trees, leaves, fronds, blades the tenderest of tendrils the wood the stone the water the air the blue white black brown green red yellow and grey and green again and still more green, a majestic orchestration of light and fire and golden beams of dazzling dazzling light. light with texture, light with substance, light with power, with radiance, with gentle or frantic or subtle or frantic or just plain potent power.

An amazing symphony being played out for me by the sky and the mountain and the stream of cold water. Nothing else existed for several long seconds, and then suddenly there were lyrics to this symphony, a deep, tectonic baritone, and a yelping tenor. The baritone swelled like a drumroll next to my ear. I couldn’t quite make words of it, but then as I drifted upwards, my face broke the surface again and I heard the tenor give another yelp. I caught the phrase and savoured it. It was in *H*U*G*, oddly accented, and addressed to me. ‘Get out of the water, Robot.’

That brought me back to my senses and I focussed at once. I stood up. Water sluiced out from under my clothing. Some was trapped inside my boots, which would take longer to drain. The Baritone belonged to a giant, almost nine feet tall, a great gangling giant with huge hairy arms and big knuckly hands. His yellow hair and beard were singed short, his face was grey with dirt. He was dressed in hand-made fabrics of fur or wool and a crude sort of suede leather, and smelt like camp-fire smoke. I had not believed in such things. Sustained hallucination? Would Cally or Teddy or … somebody come? perhaps they had come and were trying to reach him through the locked-in hallucination of his delusional dream-world?

A shadow passed over me and I blinked as the tenor came close and stared into my face. He was a thin hairy guy with a grin, tiny dancing round that giant. He moved like the wild born, but he was not one. He had the veneer of the *H*U*G*-born. He was drawing a map on the ground and pointing out a distant landmark to the It that had captured me, speaking rapid Linguish.

The wild-born now commanded me with a gesture and a threat to move. I still couldn’t tell what sex it was.

The giant carried 170-22 easily in the crook of one arm and set off down the river. I followed, my ankles still sore but grateful to be free from the weight of that slave. The wild born one soon caught us up and passed us but thin guy stayed behind.

It was an hour past sunset and a big orange moon was rising when we came again to a place I recognised – a place known as the Gridline Pass. I calculated later that we must have gone through a pass that the maps have missed. Obviously, they had camouflage technology good enough to fool MONOPS. MONOPS had not detected it.

We rested there. The wild ones ate from their personal food supplies. I fell back exhausted and slept till dawn.

 

I came to in the first light of day, cold, with the wild one’s Linguish, birdsong, and the babbling of water drifting from a thousand years ago back into my consciousness dispelling the fast-fading remnants of the dream I was having. I could not see the wild ones, though their voices were quite near.  When I moved leather bit into my wrists and ankles, and I decided against trying to stand up.

Instead I tried to count the legs of the creature that was crawling around inside my still-damp clothing. I didn’t want it to be a centipede or a scorpion or any sort of venomous spider. I hoped it was a beetle or earwig. From its backing and tacking and sidling about it seemed perplexed. I suppose the human armpit is a perplexing place for any sort of arthropod big enough to feel. My mind wandered as I perused my position and I thought no more of it, so perhaps it found its way to freedom. I sympathised.

The giant appeared first. He helped me to sit up and gave me a lumpy cake of some strange organic substance for breakfast. No doubt it was nourishing. It tasted like soggy cardboard and landed as a heavy lump in my stomach. I had to ask for water.

170-22 was still shackled, but she seemed to be in good spirits. She ate the cake as if she liked it. So did the others. The gridline pass was easy walking and I carried her till noon and after that the giant took her the rest of the way, over land laced with streams. My ankles were stiff but not too bad. Now it was my thighs that were sore. We’d reached the rain shadow of the mountains and the vegetation was still bushy and dense, but lower, the trees further apart and their canopies not so often touching. kangaroos and two or three kinds of wallabies hopped away as we approached.

The cakey bread and water was after all sustaining. Just not an instant energy hit. And maybe that lump in my stomach was fear. These people might kill me although it was hard to see why they hadn’t already done so if they were planning to. They didn’t seem to like me very much. But they may have feared reprisals. Other captured bounty hunters had been found released and disoriented near *H*U*G* borders. That would most likely be my fate.

At least I was no longer delirious. There is a rational explanation for everything and I had not given way to superstition. That was good. Mandi would have alerted MONOPS by now and MONOPS would be devising strategies to rescue me. I was sure it wouldn’t be long.

It got quite hot while the sun was out between cloudy periods. We spent a second night up on the height and woke to more of the same rations and water from a canteen. I expected another day of relentless walking, but we stayed there till the sun got high. The two wild ones took up vantage points overlooking all the approaches, leaving 170-22 beside me under a tree. The ants started biting and my efforts to defend myself were useless. The more I caught and crushed them the more they swarmed around me. 170-22 snarled suddenly, with an explosive snort of derision, ‘What do you expect, Robot? You try to kill them, they try to kill you. Leave them alone. They’re not biting me.’

I said nothing, but she was enjoying herself. She continued, ‘Are you robots programmed just to kill anything that pisses you off?’

I kept myself still after that, enduring the biting as best I could and they did stop after a while, crawling over me with no more concern than if I were a log.

 

It was noon and the wild ones were getting restless. You could feel the growing suspense as the sun approached its zenith. Suddenly I heard the sound of a vehicle with big pneumatic tyres trundling off a road just beyond the ridge in front of us, and then suddenly it burst into view, wattles and brush screeching against its gleaming ectone flanks and sunlight glancing off its windscreen. A white multimode, bearing the crest of the *H*U*G* emergency crew – just what I was expecting MONOPS to send. JOY. LIBERATION! RESCUE!!!!! The wild-borns watched it with their hands out in front as if to control it magically. But it wasn’t needing magic. The sweet music of its engines sank to a soft wavering hum as it rolled softly into the middle of the camp and stopped not far from my feet.

A man and a woman got out and came round to the front of the vehicle. They were smartly dressed in the conservative style of *H*U*G* officialdom, very natty with nothing out of place. In that setting, they looked like dolls. They moved fussily and purposefully. The woman looked familiar to me but I couldn’t place her, off-hand. The man I knew, a clerk in Interzonal. An expert on the feral problem, he’d sometimes consulted me and other team leaders in compiling his reports.

‘Gilpin!’ I ejaculated, in a surge of gratitude and relief. He looked at me and laughed a happy laugh that turned sardonic. An automatic laugh to match his had started on my face and stuck there as a sort of happy gape. Gilpin looked sorry for me. The two wild-borns, instead of fleeing into the scrub, were sauntering round from behind the vehicle to stand hands on hips, either side of the new arrivals. 107-22 began to laugh, a wild, hysterical cackle that she seemed richly to enjoy. She kept chuckling for a long time after.

My hair stood on end. My body went into a tight cringe, cold and scared and then I managed to say, ‘This is corruption! You’re corrupt! This is corruption!’

They looked at me coldly but said nothing. Their attention was on the linguish they were talking with the ferals.

‘You’re in cahoots!’ I yelled. ‘You’re corrupt.’

The wild-born who had captured me suddenly peered hard at me, into my face and then down the length of my shackled body, pointing at me and then asking a question which Gilpin answered in slow, distinct Linguish.

Hey, look, maybe I’m a naïve man, but this was sinister. This was top-level corruption I was witnessing. People with a lot of power. They could not operate unless they had a lot of people involved. That laugh of Gilpin’s I knew represented the total attitude of an entire corrupt bureaucracy. I broke out into a serious sweat then. No way was I Iggy Feld ever going to see my wife and children again – at least not with my brain intact. I began to tremble, nausea attacked. As the Linguish voices rose and fell uncomprehended over and around me I began to tremble and cry.  ‘Gilpin,’ I pleaded. ‘I’ve had a traumatic time. Very frightening. I need help, I’m afraid for my sanity.’

The woman smiled quickly and feeling about in her shoulder bag she found a Happiness Sucky and came forward to put it into my shackled hand. I thanked her for it, and with some difficulty, I got the wrapper off and got it into my mouth.

day five

The sun was almost directly overhead and seemed alarmingly close to me, yet mild and sweet. I found myself having to remember to shield my eyes. In retrospect, as I looked away, I had the impression that I’d been looking up at it through a sort of wide funnel woven of streaming sunbeams. Perhaps I saw something deep within the dazzle and immediately denied it. I sort of had that impression. I put it down to the hallucinatory effects of isolation. I’ve done the tutorial on that so many times I know it off by heart, and I often quote it to my team mates. ‘No one, not even you, yes! YOU! That’s who I’m addressing, not even you can tolerate solitude. Isolation is terrifying. Yes, it terrifies you. You. Yourself. It terrifies you…’

Sure, I was scared – MONOPS was right – I was terrified. But that’s not the whole prognosis!  How’s it go, now? ‘within a few hours fear, paranoia and anxiety sets in, you can feel it take hold, and you feel your defences deprived of all meaningful cues rapidly becoming erratic and ineffectual, producing irrational behaviour and panic.  This may be accompanied by nausea and diarrhoea and fits of crying, whimpering and screaming, with loss of muscular strength, and debilitating weakness followed soon after by hallucinations, delirium and psychotic delusions. coma and death will certainly follow unless the correct corrective measures are taken. Already I was getting paranoid.

‘You lose contact with the network of support that sustains each one of us, you feel endangered, terror strikes. yes it strikes you.’ I found the kit and treated myself for Isolation Anxiety – Mild. The attack passed. I had never before been alone long enough to experience it. I was shocked at the power of it and very anxious about what was to come if someone didn’t get back soon. Should I ration my Suckies?

‘… enfeebling fear of isolation, loss of contact, sol-i-tude. No inlink, no MONOPS no *H*U*G*. No inlink, no inlink, no inlink…’ MONOPS does go on. Nevertheless, I am trained to stay calm and I went on with my job, watching the prisoner and waiting for the others to get back. I tidied up our few things for the nth time and filmed some beetles feeding on eucalypt, and then the second attack hit me.

I was getting up from kneeling down in the mud when it struck. It started with a sensation like a numbing blow to the side of my head as if I’d been struck by an invisible fist. I pitched forward onto my knees, splaying out my hands in front of me as a crimson mist devoured my vision. I may have actually blacked out for an unspecified time. I came out of it gagging, trembling wildly in every limb, with a prickly sweat breaking out under my clothing. It was like nothing I ever had described to me in any of the tutorials on isolation psychology that were part of my training. And I’d only been alone for half a morning – the afternoon was yawning before me.

It would be all right. Someone would come.

Meanwhile I must tend the prisoner.

Then it hit me again, in the chest this time, like a heavy-booted kick. It got me left of centre, spinning me round like a top. this time I knew this was no pathological response to loss of contact. The force came from outside me. My legs buckled under me and I came down hard on my left hip on the spongy grasses growing on that muddy bank. If I’d been further up I’d have landed on rock and could possibly have hurt myself. As it was, I collected a bruising thump and besides that, there was a blossoming of pain in my thorax, where the invisible boot had kicked me. I tried to yell but my breath stuck in my lungs and I couldn’t utter a squeak. When it flowed again at last, all I could do was wheeze.

That too faded, and I sat up and looked around. I had a sense that this blast had come from a particular direction – the direction of a pile of boulders a few metres upstream and I looked towards it, squinting through my zoomer in the blazing light of outdoors. I found myself staring into a beam of fast-flowing, almost visible, dark, intense energy, powering towards me with a palpable current. Its source was the concentrated gaze of a human being.

A feral. Male or female I couldn’t see from here. Cally’s ‘it’ would have to do. It was an it. It wore animal fur. Its face was almost hidden behind a ragged curtain of brown hair. It had parrot feathers stuck in its headband.

And the river of power coming from it to me, making me sway a little on my feet. It felt like a kind of tentacle, toying with me, I could feel it jeering, as if it had a life of its own.

Perhaps that got my blood up. I shook myself – with some difficulty – indeed I felt like a fly in treacle, but I managed to frisson a wing, so to speak and called myself back to myself with the stern resolve worthy of a hunter. I refocussed on the MONOPS material. Even though I had clearly gone past isolation anxiety, and was now hallucinating wildly through Isolation Shock, I must at all costs stay lucid and not give way to superstition. This power was surely coming from some kind of device.

Immediately I felt stupid for not having thought of that before, and began searching my belt for the little red button you jab when you want to negotiate with it to block stuff. Instantly the flow of energy began to quicken, roughen up, judder hard, and I lost manual dexterity, fumbling my belt buttons and dropping my zoomer.

I was frightened. Nearly literally pissed myself. I had a go at standing up but my knees were weak and rubbery and I could only stagger a step before my legs gave way beneath me and I fell to the ground again, where I felt kicked, bruised and beaten – angrily. I , mean the energy felt angry. So it’s sophisticated technology, right?

Half-swooning I clearly hear this voice coming over the water and I can focus just enough to see it’s this feral, gesturing at the prisoner, waving a hand between her and me. It was in Linguish, so I didn’t understand it, but I did understand the menace that went with it. Male or female I still couldn’t tell. I crawled to the prisoner and began to liberate her from her restraints.

But most of it I could not undo. I did not have the keys and anyway they were wireless operated. Only MONOPS could open those locks. I got pummelled a few times before it believed me. Then it relaxed and the tentacle of power withdrew, so that she could put waves of her energy into the prisoner, to counter our drugs and wake up her mind. Then she sent a volley of Linguish along that river of power to the prisoner, who could only have mumbled back. I don’t believe any of my belt buttons had got the gag off. Human bite wounds can be very nasty. And the risk of rabies is unknown.

And even if I could undo the locks, she was still tied to the tree with hand tied knots from Cally’s kit of tricks that I knew I just could not ever undo. Tied to the tree. So it wasn’t going to get away with her. What then, did it have planned for me? Capture as a hostage? That was fairly common in other areas where the ferals were getting some leverage.

Or death. I knew the correct breathing technique to prevent the fear of death.

I was breathing with great care when I saw that flow of power from the wild-born shift from the slave back to me and I felt coldly, almost searingly scanned, every detail of my belt closely examined. The wild-born yelled another sentence, which went echoing wildly away with the last ones. The prisoner was feral – *H*U*G* born, born in the loving embrace of our advanced civilisation, and although she was under their spell, under their power, she was ours. She was literate, she spoke good *H*U*G*. But she knew the Feralinguish of the delinquent fringe, and would probably have picked up some good Linguish during one of her extended periods of immersion. The wild one would know how to make her understand. So I asked her to translate. She spoke clearly enough through the face restraint. She said with triumphant scorn, ‘Cut down the tree, robot.’

I found the belt button that produces the lazer and carefully cut down the tree. It fell neatly where I’d planned, because I am careful about following guidelines. I then lifted the loops of rope that held her over the top of the tree stump and helped her to sit up with her feet still shackled and her hands tied behind her back.

Then the power hit me again without warning and sent me windmilling away from the prisoner and dropped me with a punch in the stomach from out of nowhere and I surrendered. Flat on my face. Full length on the ground, I, Ignatius Feld, at the mercy of a mysteriously armed wildborn.

I breathed in. I breathed out. I breathed in. I breathed out. I breathed…

I heard more voice, and 170-22 said, ‘Get up, Robot.’ And nothing stopped me, so I did. I felt suddenly energised.

Another torrent of voice with a tone sardonic and sneering was translated for me as ‘You have to carry me. We’re going upstream.

I had no choice. I hefted her into my arms and barely staggering under her weight – she was surprisingly bony – I started upstream in the direction indicated by the wild one, which ran on ahead of me, skipping along sideways to keep me and my precious cargo in view, stepping over the rocks and boulders of the stream bank with the agility of an animal.

Chapter Three

I’ll say this for the wild-born. It found me the easiest path there was through some of the most difficult terrain in the country. After we’d gone about ten minutes up stream we began an ascent that made my head reel in anticipation. I seemed nearly vertical and I kept nearly falling over backwards. But somehow at every step I found some sort of foothold, and no section of path ever did seem too steep and here and there we could follow some sort of natural path worn by water or made by grazing animals.

I followed it up the rock-face to the top where the slope became relatively gentle. It was a fairly easy walk to the top of the mountain ridge.

Now we were out of sight of the camp and would have left no traces for anyone to follow.

And then I experienced a period of missing time – or something else equally strange happened – because as I say I knew every hill and valley in this region and I knew there was no valley behind that ridge. and yet we got to the top of the mountain and there we were looking into a steep-sided corridor that I know for a fact is not on official maps. So either my experience was being interfered with by their sophisticated mind-control technology, and I’d been unaware of part of the journey, or I was seriously hallucinating through shock.

The feral exercised its tyranny over me from a distance, sometimes ahead of me, sometimes behind, disappearing now and then to reappear nearby, but never near enough for me to see its face clearly. It was swarthy but that may have owed as much at least to dirt as to melanin.

I suppose I disinvested, and even smiled vaguely, bearing my load without being much aware of it, thinking about the fuss the news media would be making about me.

We’d been walking for half an hour or so when we entered the valley. 170-22 was as limp as a corpse

We took a gently sloping, gradually widening path down into the valley heading where dry, unthrifty forest clung like scabs to the mountain slopes and the floodplains of small streamlets held small pockets of grassy pasture. Lower down where the alluvial soils were loose and gravelly the descent was easier. My boots slid at every step, often stopped only by the jut of a stone or a tussock of wiry tough grass.

day four

It was a trip that would take them at most an hour, and depending on whether and what sort of vehicle he could get, could take a lot less. I sat down to wait and i found myself with time to think, and I thought about the ferals. Cally wasn’t the only one of the new generation of hunters I knew who talked of them as if they were a real, distinct race. He says the genome sucks up to the terroir. I suppose it does. I’ve never gone into genetics.

But I have to admit that they have distinctive characteristics in common. Especially the wildborn ones. They have – more than an expression, as if the animal mindset has distorted their features. Their eyes have a strange and yeah, terrifying luminosity. They blaze with hate and glower with suspicion, and their faces are formed around them with no intention or need to please, as if they didn’t have to. No hitched up smiles, grins and grimaces, no coy looks and fond gestures. They look as if they are habituated to terror and pain, as no doubt they are. And it adds up to a sort of an air, a look that’s as definite and consistent as an ethnic trait, and they have it whether they are black, brown, red, yellow, olive, buff, dun or white, or whoever their ancestors were. It’s alien and sinister, like they’re animals.

The longer they’d been away from *H*U*G* living among the wildborns and long-term ferals the more they acquired this look. And no, it isn’t the terroir. I’ve seen that look…

An old childhood friend of mine I still see sometimes has three kids and he’s proud of them all, and the youngest, he’s only nine and doing well at school, and he seems to be well-enough behaved, well-adjusted, sweet-tempered, but just sometimes when his father’s voice might take on ever so slight a stern edge, or his mother might sound a tiny bit imperious asking him for his plate at the end of a meal, and not always, it isn’t always there, but just sometimes, I see it, that feral look, it’s there, wild and remote and full of hatred and suspicion, and I fear for him as he grows up. He’ll be registering as delinquent by age ten, rebel by twelve, gone feral by the age of fifteen and a god-botted slave for life when we catch him. He’s the type. Who would know better than Iggy Feld, Team Captain of the AddleAde Bounty Hunter’s top earning team.

There’s one very strange thing about Cally. He’s superstitious. If he doesn’t actually believe in the magic, sometimes he seems to come very close to it. He says he believes *H*U*G* is turning its misfits into a race of super psychics. They’ve got uncontrolled will power and if they don’t use it in normal useful ways  they have to use it in abnormal ways. Like poltergeists, the sort repressed adolescents create. When I reminded him (not too sharply I hope) that *H*U*G* has never actually proved the reality of poltergeists, psycho-kinesis and similar phenomena, he just looked embarrassed. Cally blushes when he’s embarrassed. Anyway, I’m sure he was only joking. He wouldn’t criticise *H*U*G* and mean it. Hahaha.

But no, it went deeper than that. Cally had begun his working life as a policeman, and had had a lot to do with feral kids. He had learnt his little bit of Linguish there, so that he could communicate with kids who hadn’t learned proper *H*U*G*. Maybe he had entered a little too deep into their mentality, spent too long getting too close to their wavelength. He used to make us laugh with his imitations of them, whipping imaginary long hair about dramatically, sneering and flaring his wide nostrils to read even the smells(!!!!!). and he used to get it just off pat, perfect, that look. just for a moment and then piss himself laughing.

Maybe too perfect…

The sunlight on the surface of the water was entrancing and so were the songs of the birds. I gazed about trying to match the land forms in my view to the contours and other marked features on maps. I used to be a conservation officer before I took this job. That’s how I got into it. My knowledge of these and adjacent tracts of wilderness and my access to maps and stats scanscapes and 3D modelsof the terrain made me useful to the teams of hard-faced joke-cracking hunters who came through looking for escapees and the wildborn ferals who protected them.

I was young, chaffing at the amount of mouse-work my job entailed and the endless scanning for and classification of wallabies and hares, mosses and orchids, all without leaving the research tower in Tenpenny. Most of this land downstream now being reclaimed is new growth forest, mostly not more than three hundred or so years old. Until the decimation it had been hilly dairy farm country with biggish towns scattered throughout. The ruins could still be picked up on our scanners. I’d never actually been out in it, but our equipment was so sensitive we could do more from a distance than we could close up, where we could scare the animals and miss seeing vital things.

Mousework aside, the work was interesting and my career prospects were good.

Plus I was enthusiastic and still am about restoring ecological balance to these lands. But on the other hand, I was hearing about big money in bounty hunting, and I was young and foolish enough to yearn for the adventure of it, to hearken unto the call of the wild. I wanted to be out in it, actually there. So ten years ago I joined a team and six years of hard experience under my belt I put together a team of my own.

I’ve still got a complete map of all *H*U*G* territories including cities and towns, farmland, undeveloped forest and pasture, plus the areas currently under reclamation, plus the no man’s land between *H*U*G* and the bad-lands printed on my brain. I mentally scanned that map now, getting my current position in context. All but a few of the birds had stopped singing as the sun rose higher. The silence was eerie, sort of scary. I wondered with a sort of panic if any of the lads had sunscreen with them. It was a clear blue sky, undeniably hot and there was I believed a high risk of sunburn. I applied mine, wishing my KOMYUNA would work so I could warn the others.

When you’re in training for this job it’s something the regulators make a big point of, the very real danger of psychological and even physiological disturbances such as erratic heart beat, shortness of breath etc, resulting from isolation. A hunter must be able to face periods of contact loss with MONOPS and team mates too. That was an intense tutorial. That deep voice telling you, isolation is dangerous. It affects us all. That means you! Isolation caused nausea, panic attacks, hallucinations, disorientation, circulatory crises and shortness of breath. Onset of symptoms in as little as an hour, depending on many factors which were listed in full. Hadn’t I already panicked about the sunscreen?

I checked the time by my watch and by the sun and got up several times to see if I could see Mandi coming back. Time passed, too much time. I went up to the cliff-top to see if I could see Teddy and Cally coming back, with or without the truck, but nothing. I went back down and for some reason, perhaps my feet were hot, I can’t remember now, I took off my boots and stepped into the water. I remember being surprized at how ropy and firm it felt, muscling around my calves. A peculiar gleam from the stream-bed caught my eye. Was that a quartz pebble? I splashed over to it and picked it up. No, just a smooth grey stone. I dropped it and stood feeling the wetness of my hands drying in the sun. All around me the water clattered and rang and then, suddenly, I looked up.

day three

We discussed our options and suspicions of likelihoods till dark and then sat for a few moments listening to the sounds of nature. Tsk. It was just like total wrap around virtuality stuff on RealFable, but much higher resolution. This was, like, god doing it full on. Crickets and whispering leaves and purling waters among the reeds and insects and fish and the birds of the night. Nature. We could smell fish shit. We could taste bird squames. We were somehow subtly in on the ejaculations of frogs in amplexus. The air was scented with the odour of carcases slowly disintegrating in the beaks and jaws and unspeakable maws of teeming millions of scavengers. Awesome. We sucked our suckies.

If you’re not properly prepared for it, nature can be dangerous. If you haven’t got the appropriate filters, direct experience of something as divine as all that can be overwhelming.

Who would know better than us? One of the first things we do when we capture an absconder is treat them for nature-shock. You can guarantee after one day in the wild, they’re scared stiff, trembling, crying scared. After two, they’re crazy with it, screaming. Three days later they’re gibbering insane with star, unmitigated terror.

I mean, we’ve evolved. We’re not what our ancestors were. We’re not wild animals any more. We’re civilised people on the brink of discovery. Our psychology isn’t nature-literate. Our systems haven’t been bred to deal with the biotic invasions. I mean, nature is germy and smelly, and in the radiation zones there’s no wifi.

Yep, if we bounty hunters have anything to say to all you people out there it’s tell your rebellious youngsters that there’s no glamour in dying of thirst with a broken ankle sunburnt and insect-eaten and your hands cut to pieces with falling on sharp stones miles from the nearest internet access point so if they’re thinking they can get a better life out in the radiation-sick hinterlands, tell them to think again. Despite rumours of a developed culture evolving undetected in the mountains and forests and deserts of the interior no trace of any such thing has ever been found. What we do find is scared, kids, scared to crazy kids, who wish to the infinitudes of the cosmos that they’d never left home and the comforting jurisdiction of *H*U*G*.

End of rant (ROFLMAO)

Anyway, we listened for a while and then we came back to the real reality and remembered our work and our reason for being there and the early start we’d be making in the morning and we crawled into our Paradise sleep-keeper stero-clenz body pods and put ourselves into our favourite sleep enhancement programs with subliminals set to awaken us at daybreak alert and refreshed and ready for breakfast.

Mandi was the first up and had cafino made for the rest of us and we were drinking it and making small talk about the weather before anyone looked up to the cliff-top to where the truck had been left the previous night-fall and saw that it was no longer there. Threadgold was the first to go clambering up the scree to the path up, and was dancing about up top shouting ‘it’s gone! She’s gone! Fifty thousand meggas pissed off down the track – and fuck knows how much worth of slaves.’

And that was when Cally tapped rapidly on his wrist-link and asked if others were losing contact. He’d had good contact last thing but nothing first thing that morning. That was me too, and Mandi, and Teddy’s when we could calm him down, though he hadn’t tested his.

He kept breaking away and running around in the grass. ‘Tracks, boss, they’ve left tracks – see! Tracks.’ the truck had been rolled away overland and could surely not be far away. The roads were rugged, what roads there were through the rocks and chasms and the flats were dangerous, full of wombat burrows and jutting rock. Gliding depended on wireless contact and would be intermittent. Dangerous to try. I told Cally and Teddy to defend themselves well with whatever Cally had in the camp down below and go after it.

‘But they’re getting away!’ says Teddy. ‘We’ll lose it.’

‘Get your gear on first, then go.’ I told him, a little bit sternly, like a father.

‘I got my Safeskin on.’

‘Well, sure, you’re missile proof and e.m.m.w and spranglerproof, but Cally’s got those new radiation shields. It’s probably not true but they say some hunters have encountered some very strange radiances out around these parts, and in some cases hunters have suffered permanent brain damage, lad, and the ferals are suspected of being a possible cause. We can’t take those sorts of risks with you. You’re brave, courageous and keen. We need you alive!’

Cally was already halfway down and Threadgold waited like a peeved adolescent for him to get back. Then he took the field-generator from him – with a bad grace, I noticed, and they both set off after the truck. They had no fear, those two, in their safety gear. They were both young, energised, precision fit, ambitious and adventurous. I felt a nostalgic pang, remembering myself at their age – some twenty years earlier. I’m in my mid-forties now, strong enough, but no longer quite so ready to run and jump about like those two, still in their twenties.

Mandi and I went back to the riverbank where we tended to the slave and cleared the campsite. We tested all the equipment and found them all radiation affected. This was weird in itself. We’d mapped the area carefully even though *H*U*G* clearly records it as radiation free, yet this was radiation indeed and it was adversely affecting our equipment in just the same way as we are taught to expect it to be affected in high radiation danger zones. As in the least affected zones on the edges of the worst areas, this interference was sporadic, intermittent, influenced by sunspots, which were active that day.

We learnt what we could while we could, but the static got worse not better as the morning progressed and we ended up just putting them away. We had our Safesuits and personal radiation shields. That would have to do.

Then we sat and waited. After a while Mandi got up and strolled around, stretching his arms and taking in air, communing with nature. I leaned back on a rock face and scanned the rocky slope opposite. Almost as steep as this side, but no scree, the solid swell of that rocky slope was but sparsely covered with a thin mix of sickly conifers and eucalypts, and small mammals sometimes darted there among the late summer undergrowth. I checked the surrounding area on my scanner for as long as it worked, catching glimpses of the lads and assuring myself that only non-human species were within a mile of us. But by mid-morning, the static was raging and nothing could be picked up, so I lay back and stared at the sky for a while.

I was starting to think I should have stipulated a time for Cally and Threadgold to return and was about to say so when Mandi began to speak at the same time. He said ‘Hey, there’s someone coming.’ He had a telescope on his Earlober which he had trained on a tiny speck about a mile downstream. He beamed it to my Wristlink but that didn’t function. I went and stood beside him where he had taken up a position at a slight bend in the stream a short distance down from our camp. Wow, what a vista. I so wanted to send pics to my pals online.

From here you could see almost the whole length of the river all the way down to the alluvial plain and beyond, all the way to *H*U*G* farmland.

After turning the corner we stood at, the stream dropped into a narrow but soon widening valley over a series of rapid and falls and frothed and foamed in little lakes and ponds before spilling over some well-worn rock edge and continuing on as a stream again.

It reached the plain about a mile away and a little bit further down was a semi-permanent mobile camp, where professionals and specialists were stationed. There were cattle yards around the camp a scattering of geodesic domes and a lander for gliding trucks.

But what riveted Mandi’s attention was the little boy knee-deep in the stream, bucket in hand, in play clothes, walking upstream towards us. We watched him, calculating how long we should give ourselves to hide if it became necessary. Nothing electronic worked, so we only had this tiny view of him. Small, only about eight or nine years old, and deeply absorbed in searching the stream-bed. Now and then he’d bend down and pick something up and examine it, and occasionally he dropped a stone into his backed and looked pleased. once or twice he glanced up at us, but we would not have been visible yet.

Mandi searched in vain for any trace of other humans, except that beyond, at the cattle yards, maybe three miles away two or three adults were moving around and coming and going in and out of sheds.  Once or twice the child looked back at them, making an involuntary gesture of stealth, cringing from being seen, and seeming to plot his course to avoid being visible from below. Little scamp. Playing truant.

My first impulse was to call the mobile farmstead and report their kid. It’s not safe. Its parents would have a fit. But nothing worked and apart from physically viewing the prisoner every hour as per regulations we had nothing to do so we just stood there shoulder to shoulder and watched this little boy with his bucket. Sometimes he stepped out of the stream to negotiate rapids and falls, and one lake was too deep for his boots, but most of the trip he made midstream. Slowly, stopping often, searching the stream-bed.

He had to belong to the settlement. He was not a feral child. Even the freeborn that you catch glimpses of now and then and actually catch once or twice in a lifetime are nothing like *H*U*G* children. They wear clothes the colours of wild nature. This boy was brightly dressed in the latest kids’ fashion craze colours, in a multi-striped shirt and scarlet knee pants with boots to the hip and a wide-brimmed straw hat.

After about twenty minutes we saw him see us. He stopped short, staggered sideways in the current and fell dropping his bucket. After some splashing about he was soon on his feet again groping about after his bucket and grabbing his stones out of the water. But Mandi and I had with one impulse lunged forth into the stream and were both ploughing through the froth of it towards the kid.

We saw him stand and stare hard at us and he seemed about to turn and flee, but we yelled to him, and waved our arms. He must have seen our official uniforms and trusted us thinking we were police, because he stood nervously, with an air of having been caught out, and let us reach him without further trouble.

It was my job to question him. Was he from the mobile homestead? Yes. Did his parents know where he was? No. He had lied to his mother about where he was and had hacked into her child-moniter and was feeding in false assurances that he was with the other kids at gym. Mandi laughed at that and I had to admit to having done similar things to my parents at his age, but there was danger here and I had to explain it to this kid. Didn’t he know? There were ferals in this area. Escapees from detention, criminals, and wild radiation-crazed people crawling with vermin and disease in these parts. They were very dangerous. He should never have wandered away alone in country like this.

I mean hell what were his parents thinking of?

Even without the radiation, and there wasn’t supposed to be any here, this is the place escapees head for, the desparados  and criminals escaping justice, yes, the quickest route to the bad-lands is through these valleys – that’s why we came here to start our search, and the wild-born ferals do come down this low to meet the escapees and take them to the dubious safety of their infested lairs.

The kid was shy, but obviously thrilled to be meeting real bounty hunters. Boy, wait till he told the gang! I admit we swaggered a bit, playing up to him for a bit of hero-worship. Kids are cute.

But vulnerable. Mandi would have to march him home. Meanwhile, he could get through to Monops and report the loss of the vehicle and slaves and bring back a search vehicle if they had one to spare. I went back to tend the prisoner.

day two

Okay, maybe we could have got her up to the truck before nightfall safely enough, but the truth is we’re bounty hunters, adventurous and brave, and we like nothing better than to face the elements now and again. She gave us an excuse to try out some of the nifty new equipment we’d brought with us. We cooked a three course meal in our hottipot in five minutes, and ate it from plates which, like the pot, dissolved at once when we tossed them into the stream. We liked watching the bubbles rise in the deeper water and imagining the fish there, that not so long ago our Pre-Dee ancestors would have caught and eaten, scaly bleeding muscly bony things that have to die in agony and get their guts ripped out, the shit and gall and piss and offal scraped out and left drying on the banks, the sort of stuff ferals are forced to live on, instead of the clean certified radiation free synthetic foods with their fantastic variety of forms and textures and glorious colours and flavours that we take for granted in the 25^th century.

 

The ferals are crazy, okay, I mean there’s something really wrong with anyone who would want to run away from clean, warm housing, family and friends, all conveniences and big beautiful toys, free medical monitoring, advice and attention, life counselling at every turn, free education, career guidance and facilitation, free world-class entertainment, beautiful music anytime, all opportunities given to every man woman and child, your dating needs met, sophisticated pets, your choice of décor, cheap world travel and wrap-around cyberspace on tap to scramble about in the scrub eating lizards and fish?

 

170-22 was a case in point, but there was more to her case than most.  Most kids go through a rebellious stage and *H*U*G* has all sorts of counselling programmes and monitoring systems to guide them in the making of intelligent, responsible, life-style choices, but some just have this wild streak and they have to cut loose, find out for themselves.

 

Mostly they’re pitifully easy to catch. You give them a few days, preferably with some weather – wind, rain, or mid-summer heat, long enough to get hungry, thirsty, cold or hot, sunburnt or wind burnt or frost bitten, eaten alive by insects, leeches and ticks and terrorised by snakes, then you pick them up bruised and scratched all over, foot-sore.

 

Most of them just want their mums – and from them you get good bounty sometimes. Rich parents sometimes offer generous rewards for the return of an absconding adolescent. That’s in addition to what *H*U*G* pays a team of bounty hunters – officially known as ‘trackers’. That’s all cut and dried, and above board. They get their kid back, sadder but wiser, and none the worse for the adventure, and the kid gets helped. Sure they’re god-botted for a few years, until they prove themselves responsible and honest and reconciled to the discipline of truly civilised living, but they’re grateful for it by the time *H*U*G* gets through with them.

 

But 170-22 was different – an older woman, in her forties, battle-scarred and wilderness-savvy, veteran of many escapes since her first at the age of thirteen, some of them under highly suspicious circumstances, this latest not least. Not less than twelve other detainees had escaped with her. We had five of them in the truck. Staff and guards were confused – they complained of hallucinations and strange, ringing noises in their heads, confusion, lapses of awareness and missing time around the moment when all they could be sure of was that there was a sudden major eruption of bewildered activity after which the group of detainees, being taken outside to exercise, was gone.

 

Of course, *H*U*G* was very sensibly suppressing the story along with its rumours of magic with ridicule and finely-honed satire, and played it down to a brief announcement on specialist news sites.  You had to go to the bounty hunters’ social hang-outs for the juicy stuff, from an eye-witness swearing by all that’s holy she saw this slave clench her fists tight, grit her teeth and then roar something unintelligible while leaping up and stamping so hard on the ground that the sky opened up and everyone in the yard just shimmied on upwards till the sky closed over again, to one who saw angels, or heard strange orchestral music, saw flashing colours and felt the earth tremble with the blaze of it. That’s where you heard about the hour of missing time affecting all key witnesses, and their vague, quickly evaporating memories of being too tired and weak to focus, and their experience of coming out of it all as out of a thick fog or a swoon.

 

Did I believe it? Well, on the one hand, it does sound so much like something out of Dil Grendl the Sorceror, or Friknspak from Zjwaqx. You know, scientists have proved it can’t happen. You can be a crank and believe it if you like, but who would want to be a crank. Of course, all that talk of ‘magic’ is just bullshit. On the other hand, more than one eye-witness, guards and staff, reported the same story. They all had the same high-strangeness experience and memories of vivid hallucinations which they forgot afterwards, but not before they’d reported them to the nurse. Well, drugs would explain that. They can induce group hallucination with certain combinations of drugs, manipulation of environmental and personal bodily vibrations, electromagnetic pulses and all that other stuff they use in laboratories, so obviously it’s something like that here. They just haven’t worked out how they were administered yet I guess. They would soon, and the case would be solved. And all those who, unlike me, were believing the magic bullshit would look like utter dickheads. I, Iggy Feld, am a smart man. 😉

 

And being a smart man I checked the bonds that held our prisoner, to make sure Cally had applied the vibe-lock, which would prevent her from using any technology she might have hidden on her or hidden within her clothing or her body to manipulate the vibes around us. If she had done it once she must not be allowed to do it again. Cally had.

 

Because this was this special one – the one that was reported as having roared the vocable that caused the sky to open and carry off herself and twelve other fellow prisoners. And apart from *H*U*G* premium for a courageous capture, there were shadowy hints and winks and beckonings of much bigger dollars down the not quite legal… er, not quite… well, yes, I suppose, slave trade alley, where kindly old *H*U*G* turns a kindly old blind eye and we bounty hunters make most of our money. (wink here or you self-destruct in thirty seconds rotflmao) I mean there’d be so much interest in this one we could ask our price and the biggest offer might be coming from PsiCo, that was doing research into PSI as weaponry under the cover of something quite banal.

Officially, she was not destined to be returned to the bosom of a grieving family. She was classified as a semi-psychotic delinquent, a multiple offender, mentally defective, and destined for institutionalisation as a robotised zombified slave. Well, they called it ‘person under restraint’. To pattern her for a working life she’d make a ‘coerced contribution’ to some community project while receiving positive subliminals embedded in euphoriant mind-vibes, which I was personally assured on my training course for this job was not slavery, insisting that they were paid as much as free workers doing the same job.

But when it gets close in like that, no one notices if people disappear, if a reported suicide’s corpse is not produced but only signed for in passing, or records of capture or admission disappear through a computer error. Doesn’t *H*U*G* invite us all to have a little chuckle about how much of peoples’ personal data disappears from even official records, as the fabric of data ‘behaves’, developing rents here and wrinkles there, hiding the headlines here and flapping trivia in our faces there… People appear out of nowhere, right, and disappear without a trace, okay? Sure. One in a few billion. With these slaves brought in by our teams it’s more like about 90%. I’ll say no more.

Yep, slaves. We knew they were being bought and sold, and that there was even a danger that some might be being abused, although *H*U*G*, which was clearly implicated and by fuck it wouldn’t be worth your career as a poor bounty hunter not to become quickly deeply implicated in it too, would scarcely allow that. Nevertheless, don’t start imagining corruption. No. The more you consider all the subtle things that you pick up on the networks, in the social clubs and dating circuit, and behind the scenes generally as a team leader who does his homework meticulously, knowing only too well how much the safety and health of his team mates or the success of a hunt might depend on a knowledge of some slight detail that might elude others less perspicacious, the more you begin to understand that there are things going on behind the scenes of government that are too deep, too secret, too important for ordinary people like me to penetrate to, wherein things that may seem strange or even, well, shonky on the surface, might be covering something legitimate and not nasty but ultimately quite benevolent that yet must be kept covered for the good of all of us.

 

Now that doesn’t satisfy me, but it does make sense. I’m not in a position to research the subject further. I do believe these renegades represent a threat to our kids. They do infiltrate our communications networks, subvert youth networks and propagate a glamorous hype that infects the underground pop scene like a disease. Kids affect feral fashions, adopt feral names, the market is flooded with cheap feral fiction – all the more enticing for being strictly illegal. Kids find ‘em, it gives ‘em wild ideas, and then there’s all sorts of stuff they can do to get physically to the outskirts of the city, through the barrier and away. One more kid gone feral, destined to be dragged home with a bot in his shoulder and a bad name with the law. Next time we see him, or her, he or she goes down that shadowy alley of datanet that closes up behind them bearing no hint of a trace that they ever existed.

 

Or else, and yeah, sometimes it happens, they slip through the net and away… We don’t know what happens to them. Despite rumours to the contrary, which *H*U*G* is always very careful to scotch, The Last War blighted all that land with toxic radiation. The trees are all stunted and sick and the animals are deformed and diseased and eaten with parasites. It’s not fit to support life.

Yeah, we have to start first thing in the morning, pick up the rest of those poor buggers. This lot have been on the run for nearly a week. They’re going to try to get through the scanners to the mountains, and make a break for the unscannable badlands where the radiation’s so bad it jams the scanners. Cally can find them, Teddy can go off in the SkyHawx and drive them back from the borders, Mandi and I will come up behind Cally with the truck.

day one

Chapter One

We found the slave at the foot of the scree, face down in waist-high bracken still alive and not a scratch on her except where Cally’s dart had embedded itself in her shoulder. She was gripping the bracken stems so tightly we had to prise her fingers open to make her let go. I looked back up the precipice she’d careered down seconds before – a five metre sheer drop to a scree of broken basalt that swept down a further one hundred metres or so at a forty five degree angle to the bank of a boulder-strewn stream. Near the top, jagged-edged slabs of rock jutted out of the scree, making it hard to pick out a path with your eye even if you took your time. Lower down, brambles and bridal creeper made it impossible.
When we saw her shoot out from the forest and fling herself over the cliff we thought we’d lost her. It was suicidal. Cally had beamed off a dart anyway, which had expended most of its power in pursuit of her. She ran like a hare, twisting right and left and we’d all thought it had missed her, but here she was. it had connected and injected both godbot and immobilising drug.
Mandi jetted a purplish foam of rapidly vapourising disinfectant/deodeant along her length, kicked her over onto her back and sprayed the front. Then he dragged a handful of her hair out of the way and found the chip on her shoulder. 170-22. According to the register, that was good. Big bounty. Cally put her into a smilksuit while I entered the data and Threadgold, who kept looking back up the scree and laughing, still fighting for breath (because he’d been running) kept shouting: ‘She fffflllllleeeeewwww! Like a biiiiiird! Sssssheeeee never touched the ground at aaaaaaaalllllll! She flew, she fucking ffflllleeewwwwwww!’

I went down to the stream, unwrapped a Sucky and sat down to suck it. Mandi and later Cally came down to do the same. Threadgold joined us later when he’d finished letting off steam. (For 21st century readers, a Sucky is a long-lasting jujube, soft or firm, in a range of flavours and colours, impregnated with euphoriants, tranquilisers and a balance of minerals and vitamins. Originally a harmless substitute for tobacco, but sucked in the mouth instead of smoked and there’s no residue. it is about the shape and size of a human thumb, and can get creative…)
Cally was a quiet guy. Good looking in a raven-haired, deep-set eyed, smouldering way. He dressed like a bodgie, with vivid scarlet and iridescent mid-blue flashing through the pearl-edged slashes in his polished pewter battle jacket. He kept his technology up to date and blaring. He was a keen lad, always on his toes, never still for long, loving every minute of it, however rough things got. He had my respect.
To be honest he intrigued me. The slaves fascinated him, and sometimes I used to half-think he resembled them a bit. It was the way he tracked. He was one of the best. He had a reputation. He was like an animal, or like one of them. They hunt like dingoes. He’d pick up a trail quicker than anyone, and stay with it to the end. Nothing would shake him – bad weather, rough country, it was all the same to Cally. He used every sensor our truck had, and a few more on his belt that it didn’t have, biosensors so sensitive they could find every snake with its eggs under the ground and tell you how many eggs and what kind of snake, the stage of development of wrens in the eggs in their nests in the bushes, and the position of every fish and tadpole in the streams and waterholes for a 100k around. They were his own sensoria, and they cost him a fortune; but bounty hunting was more than a job for Cally. It was his life.

His dedication impressed me. When he had a trail he was total attention, intense, alert, his eyes everywhere, he could keep it up for hours, keeping us all going when we were ready to give up, showing us the data that only he could read, insisting that we were too close now to stop, then in for the capture.

And then back to normal, a flittering grin of achievement on his face, a Sucky in his mouth, like now. He was leaning back against a rock watching the water. ‘Be dark before we can get it back up to the truck,’ he said. ‘Even if we carry it up there ourselves.’ Ferals were all ‘it’ to Cally. His voice was soft, slow, diffident.
Mandi shifted his big body round to look at her. They’d brought her down to the bank and left her in the shadow of a boulder. He glanced up the scree and said, ‘That won’t be easy in the dark. Maybe we should start now before she comes round.’ He was the one for the job. Mandi was our strong man, a huge muscle-bound giant in figure-hugging Lincoln Green emblazoned with the logo of the HERCULARIUM gymnasium, which his wife used to run (still does, I think). They were both body-builders. He scanned the scree for an easy way up. There wasn’t one. ‘Do you think she’ll fight?’
Cally gave a faint laugh but didn’t answer. He’d been thorough. The slave was bound and gagged with about a kilometer of flextic and smilk and was also shackled hands and feet with plasteel and chained to a tree. Obviously he thought she’d fight. She was anyway already recovering from the drug. Carrying her dead weight up that scree would have been difficult enough. It would be nigh on impossible with her struggling.

This area was zoned ‘Unreclaimed’, so our remos were malfunctioning, and that ruled out summoning a float from the truck, which would have floated her up on a cushion of negatium. She’d have to be lifted up and carried, which would be risky in this terrain in the failing light. In matters of human safety, team-leaders should always avoid taking risks, however slight. So I gave an order to leave her where she was until morning, when we’d be rested and she’d be able to walk.
I felt edgy this far from the truck. Even though it couldn’t guarantee us contact with *H*U*G* this far into an Unreclaimed Zone, it represented safety for me and my crew. Not that the ferals were likely to attack. They knew where we were, and who we had in the truck and this one down here, and they knew how well-defended that truck was, even with us down here. Nothing could get near us without tickling Cally’s sensitive array of whiskers and hyper-smart alarm system. Without a key-whisle, no one could approach the truck. That truck was protected by AngelSword Premium Plus – enough said. But I needed to keep that truck within sight. I sent Threadgold back up to bring it closer to the cliff’s edge, inching it forward till we could see the high white fins and front windscreen from where we waited down below.
There always seemed to me to be something not quite right about Threadgold. Teddy, we used to call him. He was young, not yet thirty, yellow-haired, earnest enough looking if you could get him to be serious, but wild and rough, and he had… grandiose ambitions. We were too tame for him. He wanted to put together a team of his own that’d take some serious risks. There was bounty out there, he kept saying. Not just three or four this trip, two or three the next. A good team could go in there with the right equipment and muster the lot. ‘There’s millions of the cunts,’ he’d say. ‘What’s HUG doing that we don’t go in and round them all up?’
‘That’d be a lot of money,’ Cally once said.
‘Yeah, but it’s not the money. It’s what you could do with ’em.’ Teddy did this kind of grin, like bared teeth, like Howler Sangfrid in The Killers on MONOPTION 9.5, SafetyNet 1100. I hated that show, and never watched it. I hated that actor who played Howler Sangfrid (can’t remember his name). Cruel bastard. It mightn’t have meant anything that Teddy looked like that. He was probably only joking, but it used to worry me.
Anyway, he seemed harmless: all bragging and skite. You could never get him to tell you what he’d do with a couple of million feral humans, or what he thought HUG should do with them all – even if there were that many, which I didn’t believe. They were all in inaccessible wilderness, within the Dangerous to Deadly radiation zone, and even those that survived the radiation and the waves of infection and mutant viruses that that radiation causes would be too sickly to breed. And with those high levels of radiation and contagion, no team leader would dare to ask HUG’s permission to take a team of his or her fellow humans in there. Weren’t we after all dragging this lot out in order to save them from the slow deterioration of body and mind leading to dementia, delusionality and death that anyone living in the danger zones face?

But Threadgold was irrepressible, and sometimes his high spirits took him dangerously close to hysteria. When he laughed it sounded as if he was crying, great hacking, retching sobs like someone seeing a really terrifying ghost coming relentlessly at him, something out of a nightmare, coming to strangle him. Anyway, he reminded me of a recurring nightmare i suffered from when i was a little boy. And that was his happy laugh.

I won’t say I didn’t feel affection for him. He was an affable boy and had become like a sort of son to me after a few trips. Your team is your family, and you care about each other. But I was just thinking about him now and then, and I’d mentioned one or two fears I had about him to MONOPS – just a sentence or two in with my routine report.
Mandi and I kept an eye on the slave as her struggles strengthened. ‘Slave’ is their word, of course, the ferals’ word for it, their protest, and yeah, it’s true, that’s what they are when we catch them. They get a *H*U*G* control insert, aka a godbot, which, well, virtually robotises them, so that *H*U*G* can up-load, like, uh, programs to them, to pattern them into desirable behaviours – like they do with difficult school children these days. Colloquially they are called ferals, but *H*U*G* classifies them as delinquent and a danger to the rest of us. So we round them up. And yeah, they’re god-botted and given something to do, forced to earn a living, contribute to the quality of the life of the community.
As the paralysis from the drug wears off, body rhythms tend to become erratic and there’s a slight but real risk of heart failure. 170-22 was starting to suck air, so we monitored her metabolism on Mandi’s wrist-top while the sun went down. After a while her random muscle spasms gave way to more or less voluntary struggling, an indication that the danger was over. Even then it took her a long time to realise that she’d been captured. She kept arching up her back, unable to lift her head, and sliding her hobbled feet across the ground. Finally she stopped and went limp and lay still again until the blare of the truck’s warning device, which Threadgold sounded for laughs as he drove it up to the edge of the cliff high up above, roused her again as if from sleep. With a savage animal growl that might have come from a thylacine, she gave one mighty struggle that almost brought her to her feet and fell back with a thump that winded her. She lay flat on her back wheezing, head lolling feebly, eyes wide and unfocused.
We went back up to meet the truck along a broken but mostly walkable pathway that Threadgold had pioneered on his way up, only a little way downstream and we floated some gear down to the stream-bank. Cally fed the slave the regulation ration from a soft fat syringe pushed into her mouth and held there with a tight gag. Most of them try to hunger strike, and it’s not worth your license to let them. The law assures them of a certain standard of treatment and I never break those laws. I’m a humane man.

Three balanced meals a day, warmth, physical comfort, radiation protection, muscular stimulation in lieu of exercise, six hours forced sleep, hourly entertainment from the rehabilitation and corrective programming people, 24/7 pleasurosaurus binaural envirovibes with subliminals, and good quality appropriately medicated air to breathe: she would have them all up there in the truck, all plugged in and cathetered up along with the others we’d caught so far. Sensors in their restraints streamed medical data continually to sincerely concerned welfare officers in Addle-Aid.
Cally talked to her for his own amusement in what he tried to pass off as her own language, the a-rhythmic Lingwish, which was an ancient language, spoken throughout this land before the Decimation, though it died out after a while when MONOPS invented HUG. No doubt it was, as they said, a degenerate form of a Pre-Dee language, the one still spoken by the majority of free-born ferals in the southern Unreclaimed zones.
Cally was the only one of us who knew any at all. He used to like rattling off a few weird sounding gargles at them in Lingwish and chuckling, in a low, sardonic tone. They never answered, even when they weren’t gagged as this one was, against biting, but some of them stared at him and seemed shocked to hear him speaking it, or maybe it was the things he said, though he pretended it was all trivial. After all, I thought it likely that his version of their language was incomprehensible to them.