fallslikesnow

An hour later Jon was up in the hills behind the doctor's office complex. He forced his way through ankle deep bracken closely followed by his minder which bounced lightly across the vegetation. He reached a small gorge, ancient looking despite being no more than a century old. Crumbling strata of reconstituted asteroid rubble were criss-crossed by roots of geneered dwarf oak trees. He pushed towards the back of the ravine, branches and twigs whipping across his face. Against the smooth vertical cliff at the end was a small crude shrine - a low pile of rocks surmounted by a rough wooden crucifix. Orange thread linked the extremities of the geometrical figure. Jon knelt before the altar and bowed his head. There was a moment of quiet broken only by the drip of water from leaves. "What would your fans think, Mr Sorenson? If they saw you worshiping the kite?" Asked the minder in a voice like crashing waves. "Less of me, no doubt. You can't tell them though,

Jim Dingilian is one of those rare artists who stretch the limits of creativity with their amazing creations. He uses candle smoke to paint picture-perfect images on the inside of empty bottles. link

"You saw the Kite once, didn't you?" Jon pondered the question while looking out of the window. Reeds swayed in a shallow lake, the cylinder curving up sharply behind. "Yes. I was fourteen. One of the kids in my class got hold of a self-unpacking copy and sent it to me." A small attachment icon unfolding in the desk space to reveal a flat, hi-res image. An orange kite over a small wood on a desolate hillside. A deep sense of completion and a profound, unthinking rage. "It took four people to restrain me. I was in deep therapy for a year afterward." "And the boy? The one who sent the image, I mean?" "He was executed." *** Water features were a ubiquitous element of post-Ruin life. Large, complex ones in public spaces, smaller, more conservative ones in private. The doctor had what seemed at first sight to be a cylinder of flawless glass. Touch it, however, and it would be revealed as a non-turbulent flow of water. She

So, I did a google search for Shoal + alien to see if any of my Shoal Wars material showed up. I found, to my horror, that there is another, fairly successful, SF series that has an alien race called the Shoal... I just changed the Shoal to the Tessellation everywhere I could think of ...

"The Cone" is now available (for free!) at Smashwords, or you can pay for it at Amazon. It includes the title story (about a US marine who has been transformed into a housefly made of coral and the terrible revenge he takes) and two other stories. Go here . If you like it buy me something from my wishlist.

The long frivolous dream of the Puppetmakers erupted into savage transcendence with shocking rapidity. All their carefully constructed shallowness, the cities of colored glass, the refined arts, the chirruping vacancy of their puppets, counted for nothing once deep hidden urges surfaced in the face of circumstances that their programming considered to be just right. Survival in a Tessellation dominated universe was never something that could be assumed over the long term. The Puppetmakers had achieved it for millennia by consciously making themselves over into something they thought the Tessellation would find harmless. They engineered themselves as thoroughly as they engineered their own puppets, cutting viciously away at anything that could be seen as encroaching on the world of the Tessellation. Curiosity, the tendency to expansion, a desire to rule their own lives - all went under the knife, leaving a species that seemed as easy-going and unambitious as the Tessellation could ask