So, the Gods are in the break room. Indra (the CEO) and this other God, let’s call him Demi. Indra is like, “so how long you been doing weather?” Demi stops to think about it. “Aeons?” he said. Indra nods and takes a banana. Demi looks down at his coconut. Seems like he’s been eating the same thing for aeons as well. Indra chews and looks strategic. “They’ve got this traffic thing now, you want to take a shot at that?” Demi shrugs. He pokes around for something sweet. Looks like Ganesh took all the laddu again.

Ashok Leyland was watching the clock. As he watched, the clock ate a fly, rolled it along, and digested the living matter to make energy. There seemed to be some connection between electricity and life. Perhaps electricity was life. Perhaps in a hundred years they’d be mapping the evolution of an organism we’d call artificial intelligence and tracing its lineage down to fire and electricity via telephones and Atari. Leyland supposed that this would make as much sense as tracing his own particular lineage down to apes and rats and amoebas and transient bits of pond scum. He looked at Watson somewhat warily, wondering if the question answering machine was getting any ideas of nibbling Leyland’s toes or picking up errant skin cells. That fucking inchoate box never thought of anything it wasn’t asked, but Leyland decided to be a bit nicer in anticipation of a possible Robot Revolution.

On January 25th at some point in the future, fifteen thousand people gathered in Deliberation Square for no reason at all. Upon entry, each received $50. After hanging around for three hours, they received another $50 and went home. They had no idea what they were doing there and the condition was not to talk, besides saying, ‘down with imperium’. They all thought it very funny. The stock market didn’t. It was Friday and it just tanked. If there’s one thing markets don’t like, it’s instability. Somebody, somewhere, however, made a killing.

This is a short story. It’s not really edited or insanely thought out. I’ve been following the rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt with interest and hope. I’ve long thought of what would happen if a person could maintain (the illusion of) an online presence after they died, and how that could affect events if that person’s death was prominent. This is those ideas together. It’s called ‘The Blogger Who Died’ – There once was a blogger who died. After three days, he rose again on Twitter and Facebook, unleashing a flurry of posts, seemingly everywhere at once, even appearing in photographs, haunting, chastising the government until it crumbled in the face of an illusion more real than itself. And like that, he was gone.

They call it Slave Island. Where the Dutch kept the slaves, surrounded by crocodiles. Now it’s just ocean, surrounded by miles upon miles, of undersea cable, of infrared, of club nights when girls, should be home in bed. Instead they find themselves waiting in parked cars in Slave Island, imbibing burgers as nutrition for the night. There’s checkpoints everywhere, but Randy knows all the stops. They’ll stop you anyways, but Gihan knows all the cops. These are the same people who complain about rule of law, or how the country’s going to the dogs, but – dogs of the night – they will keenly slip a five or a thou to a cop and feel quite good about it in polite company.

In 2015 Google debuted Intelligent Ants (IA). IA were a set of biologically engineered ants which, following Google’s mantra of ‘Don’t Be Evil’, were finally helpful around the house. Par example: After eating some sausages I left the plate on the counter. In the morning it was swept clean. From there it goes direct into the low-power dishwasher, giving it a perfunctory soap and rinse. I think the sausage ends up in the compost, any errant plastic ends up in the sort, and the ants take 2% for themselves. It’s like AdSense for ants. AntSense. The ants are bred in some intense phenomenal breeding camp in Africa and they arrive here in a gradually edible tin. They eat it across the middle passage and if you just leave it out the thing disappears in a week. Just in time I suppose. You empty them out, they’re African so local ants stay clear, and then they go to work.

THIS IS FICTION. Skype Sex was the only thing holding our relationship together. Sadly, it was also tearing us apart. You know how it is, you meet a nice girl from the same gene pool, now expatriated within an inch of its life. And she’s in London. Then you move to London, and she’s in Singapore. It’s like transmetropolitan whack-a-mole, with your dick. That is, of course, until they figured out how to put your dick in the computer, so problem solved. Almost.

Sita, if you meet her,
Greet her, do beseech her
She’s unbridgeable, unmovable,
Serene

Sita, none is sweeter
Bird of paradise, Demeter
She’s slender like the ether
And tensile like the steel

Sita, be my preacher
Tell me when and how to meet a
Such a lovely doe-eyed creature
Swimming fish-eyed in the stream

But it’s a thousand miles to reach her
From her stomach to beneath her
It’s impossible to meet her,
In between

I had a dream I remember through photographs. I was swimming in a beautiful sunset, the sky shifted from blues to pinks to greens. It started raining in the ocean. I was worried about my camera so I swam back. The sun was going down, had gone down. I’d missed the shot. As I took my headphones out and folded clothes over my camera the rain stopped and the sun came out again. I could see both the sun and the moon, both white.

This is a dream I had, twice for some reason, so I remember it well. It’s a sort of zombie dream, I guess I was Grigoris and the girl I remember as Claire Danes. It felt very Soviet, very hard boiled, very noir. It wasn’t a bad dream, it was just like a movie. The first scene I suppose, is as follows – Grigoris was in the bedroom with the old man. He was lying on the floor, on a pillow. His daughter was waiting pensively in the living room, legs up, looking into the grey urban night.