The Avatars of Paradise… coming soon…

Murder

Attempted Murder

Art

Sex

Death

Grief

Temporal Disruptions

Small Town Follies

Wide World Intrigues

Artificial Intelligence Anarchies

Getting nearer to publication… another extract…

      

The perpetrators of the Italian airport bombing that killed his mother and six others were never found. Officially.

He lay half-awake in the late night, thinking about the informal speech that Alex Heron had given at Hi Step, just before the attempt on his life:

        ‘One of our main interests these days is robotics, A.I. Research. Alternate ways of looking at medicine, for example. To a certain extent, these are interlinked although the company structures are tailored to the individual areas of research, still, the one thing they have in common is the fact that they are interlinked. As is everything. This goes beyond into other areas of course. Which has given rise to some concerns... ’

     

     ‘Some concerns.’ That provoked a hand grenade tossed by a suicidal geriatric genius...

      Brigg: things always change. Nothing remains static, just the illusion of stasis, which is usually cheap nostalgia, a mood of fear that resists the inevitable movements of time, the contemplation of which sends me into trances where I think I could follow everything intermingling simultaneously until I am falling through a vortex into some swirling dizziness that seems the precursor to full blown madness so I surface, riddled with vertigo and disoriented to hell. Continually wonder at this yearning for intensity, the surging emotion that sweeps me towards these attempts at an almost mystical ecstasy spinning out of philosophical speculations. Traceable to the booze I have drunk, hooking into flashbacks. And the drugs I sometimes take. And the echoes of the bombs, linked across time. Rare but intense. 

ENCORE UNE FOIS… extract from THE AVATARS OF PARADISE

      Framed by two explosions. 

     The first blew him forwards savagely into the future. The second blew him back into the past. Shielding Heron from the detonation of the grenade that Sergei shakily threw in one final thrust of elderly wasted muscle. Instinct and training. Split second. Grabbed him crashed into thepartition which folded immediately taking them down and low in enough time to dodge most of the blast. Crashing into enough space to live. Possibilities opening. Possibilities closed to Sergei hit by bullets just after the explosion hit him peripherally. Which he may have survived even given his age. The crazy old fucker. But a bodyguard dived low and shot at the same time. Training. Instinct. Heron sustained bruises, a couple of broken ribs. A sudden reminder of mortality. Random madness on his home ground. Brigg limped away with Heron's heartfelt gratitude, some scars, some short term memory loss which may have been caused by a sudden connection to that airport blast years before and short-circuited his synapses in a violent psychic attack. Lying in the hospital bed in his jolted mind he fell in and out of a landscape where his recently dead wife frequently appeared to him. Standing in front of his mother. Mary in the shadows. Michele in the distance. Alice somewhere felt but not imaged. A long gone possibility. The dead he had encountered professionally were present somewhere but beyond his consciousness, felt like an obscure pressure of the circumstances of being and career choices. He had never been haunted by them before: awareness of the consequences of power had never troubled him, the traumas of violence all being personal even as they had been the causes of his entry into that world, a swirl of possibility and causation bound by metaphysics or blind chance.

     He woke to see Heron sat beside the bed.

     ‘Been there long?’

     ‘Long enough, my friend. We were getting a little worried about you. The external injuries came from bits of shrapnel, some of it caught your leg and chest, hence the bandages. Flesh wounds, superficial. But you hit your head when you took us through that partition. Which saved my life, by the way.’

     ‘What I'm paid to do.’

     ‘Above and beyond, Brigg, you’re much more than a bodyguard, always were. But training will come through. But how are you feeling?’

     ‘Don't know. Fuzzy, suppose it's the drugs. How long have I been out?’

     ‘Thirty six hours. Approximately.’

     ‘Sergei? It was Sergei, I didn't dream that bit, did I?’

     ‘Sergei.' Heron said, sadly, shaking his head. 'Didn't see 

that coming down the pike.’

IT’S HYPING TIME AGAIN… a random extract…

 

You step into a bar. You step into a charged space where fictions, narratives collide, dance, importune, seduce. A random encounter can suddenly become meaningful. Or dissipate into irrelevancy. When the door closes on the street outside you enter another universe. Stay long enough and your trajectory acts on the adjacent trajectories. Your narrative engages with the other narratives. Even by not engaging, your silence becomes a mystery to be noticed, a topic of speculation. Sooner or later to be named, tagged. In a sense there is no escape if you remain.

     The phenomenology of drinking/alcohol fuelled narratives.

     A table. A couple of windows. Alcohol. 'Interesting' clientele. Ext. Day Ext. Night.

     Memory. A street. A church. A tower. A plain. A river. Rolling hills. Flatlands. Sea.

     Sea. Flatlands. Rolling hills. A river. A plain. A tower. A church. A street. Memory.