Righteousness and Retribution.

"In the year 2010 a mutant strain of the Bird-influenza virus became lateraly infectious in humans. The resulting epidemic first decimated, then devastated populations all over the world. Using the widespread chaos, outer-jihadist groups with access to Iranian weapons-grade fissionable material, carried out a series of co-ordinated suitcase-sized nuclear suicide atacks on all the major seats of Western Government. Headless, diseased and dying, anarchy reigned in Europe and the USA. And from the ashes, the sword of Islam arose.

In the year 2023, the first of what would become known as the 'propaganda parks' were opened in the Middle East, themed on late 20th and early 21st century Western culture, and carefully designed to show it in the worst possible light, to counteract the rise of subversive intellectual literature apologizing the West at that time."

Ever since the age of 7 Arif had wanted to be a cowboy. His parents had taken him to the city's themepark where he'd marvelled at the whooping horsemen. The hot summer sun flashing off their bright spurs and chrome pistols, the snorting of the horses and the smell of sweat and gunsmoke, all had mesmerized him. He'd pestered his parents relentlessly for a costume for weeks. The day it was finally bought for him he'd torn it straight out of its wrapper in his haste to put it on. He'd stood and spun in front of the mirror, admiring the PVC chaps over the thin polyester masquerading as denim, the tassled real-leather waistcoat and the floppy brim of his pint-size ten-gallon hat. He'd fallen in love with the twin plastic Colt45's, snug in their holsters, and soon wore the silver paint off the trigger guards through days of twirling them round his pudgy fingers.

Even in the thoroughly air-conditioned dressing room, the day's heat manages to sneak in somehow and make him sweat. Nervously he re-adjusts the rake of his hat and twists the rubber mask in his hands. Today is his first day on the job.

Ahmet, the most senior of the horsemen, lolls by the water-dispenser, his spurred heels up on the desk. "Important show today people, Vengeance day celebrations. You all know what to do. Arif - if you get confused, just give your horse its head - it knows the steps better than you do."
Arif nods and stands to clink over to the full length mirror on the back of the door. He stares at his reflection. fleetingly, he sees the child spin and whoop behind the figure in the glass. He thinks the memory should make him feel something. "Yes Sir." He hears himself say, still lost in the depths, "Important day."
"Well then, newbie - we're on in a couple of minutes and I need a piss. Get your ass on your horse - You'll be leading us out."

He'd learnt to shoot with his cousin Abdurrahim, up in the hills behind his Grandfather's farm, in the week of the Sacrifice Festival, the year he turned 10. Abdurrahim had dragged him out of bed at dawn, putting a finger to his sleep dewed lips. Saying nothing, the older boy had tugged an old automatic out of his sash and pointed out of the window. Quiet as snakes they had slipped out and trekked a mile or so into the scrub. Abdurrahim left him by a wind-scoured tree and paced 20 yards or so, scooping up flat stones to stack as targets, his brown fingers darting into the sandy earth like a bearcub hooking dead salmon from a pond.

The gun had made an awful racket, an explosive bark that seemed to echo off every rock. Arif watched, half terrified, half entranced as Abdurrahim had first clipped one of the rock piles, and shattered another.Then his cousin very carefully passed the gun to him and, enclosing his small fingers in his own, had squeezed off a shot. The gun had kicked back hard, bruising the heel of his hand, and the sand had kicked up a full yard from the leftmost of the targets. Arif had squirmed, whining to be allowed to shoot alone. Abdurrahim stepped behind him and, admonishing him on pain of death and damnation to be extra careful, had let him shoot until the magazine was empty.

The stables smell of old horse-sweat and dust, Arif throws his saddle over the Arabian Mare and threads the buckles. Punching the horse in the ribs to get her to breathe out, he cinches the strap another notch tighter. Making sure no-one is watching he pulls out his guns. They are fairly faithful reproductions of the classic Colts from the movies, only the cylinders are wrong: the calibur too small and loaded with simple wads of black-powder and iron-filings for a bang and some sparks. Clicking them out he stuffs them into the saddle bag. Withdrawing the replacements he's painstakingly made, he reloads his weapons. The chrome plate is off-colour, but he's sure nobody will notice, or care if they do. He swings up into the saddle and soothes his horse.

He'd met Nilufer when his parents took him to visit at the house of one of his Father's business friends. She had been too young then, to have yet taken the veil. Overtall and gangly, she'd been all limbs and hair. Her teeth had flashed like pearls in the dim light of the sitting room when she'd smiled shyly in welcome. He remembered that smile now, the first of many.

Arif clutches at the pommel, his breathing suddenly ragged. Nilufer swims again before him in his minds eye, the memory of sunlight dappling her cooling skin beneath the water

They'd been too rich, Nilufer's family, too rich to consider arranging a marriage between him and her. At 16, Arif had sat and listened stoically as his father quietly explaned that he had to forget her. "You must marry a suitiable girl." The aging patriarch had said. "We will find you a good girl, don't worry - someone who'll look after you, bear you sons, do you think I married the girl I wanted..?" Arif had nodded, but in his secret heart, rebelled.

And so they'd continued to meet, stealing moments together at sympathetic friends houses, always scared, always hushed, always over too soon, always hopeless.

"...In the Year of the Prophet 1379 Allah set a pestilence upon the infidel, carried upon the wings of his creations. Like the avenging sword it cut a swathe through the enemy, sparing none but the most hardy of the unbelievers, so that they may come to understand the glory of the one true God..."

The tannoy cuts through his remembrances, it's harsh tones reverberating through the loose-nailed boards of the stable door. His horse dances nervously on spot, nudging up against the steeds of the other three horsemen, all packed close for an explosive exit. He leans over the mare's neck and breathes nonsense into the horse's ear. Snorting, she quietens.

"...And in the wake of this plague did the bearers of God's retribution spread their holy atomic fire from one city to the next, beheading the governments of the infidel with divine and potent wrath... And the faithful men of these unclean countries did arise from the ashes, and ascend and wrest away the reigns of power from the evil states..."

Arif still remembers her face when she'd unclipped the veil, the glory of it seeming to light up the room. The sudden revelation of the woman painfully displacing his memory of the girl. He remembers the feel of her hair, oiled silk through his blunt fingers. Greedy and stupid and young and frustrated he'd pulled the Burqua from the body of his beloved and pressed his fevered lips to her olive skin. Seeking desperately to set his brand upon a thing he could own only fleetingly, his hands had clutched her pliant flesh and marked it with his love, and with his teeth he'd left twin crescent moons upon her shoulders. Fighting but not fighting he'd pulled her down into the cushions. Thus his, he'd sent her out once more away from him and sat and smoked in the darkness of a room still heated by their passion.

"...And thus did Allah in his wisdom bring peace to all the Earth..."

This is their cue: the four horesemen of the West, led by Arif masked as Bush Jnr., explode through the weakened boards and out into the street. Their end of the street is backed by facades, life-size reproductions of wild-west frontier whore-houses, shops and saloons. The other end - a destination they now gallop to meet, is sculpted sand and nomads' tents. Watching their approach is a wall of tourists, all sweating in the hot sun. The show has begun.

Bush Snr. and Blair peel off to the right and left, fanning out to fill the width of the hard-packed dirt. Sharon keeps pace with Arif, shadowing him slightly back and to the right. They wheel to face the crowd. Arif, as scripted, vaults off his horse and scoops up some dirt in his gloved hand. With his other hand he pushes home a plunger concealed on his belt: a gout of black crude suddenly mixes with the soil in his hand and seeps through his fingers, to fall in glittering onyx blobs to the earth.

"Oil." He shouts. "War for Oil."

At once a group poor Arab villagers break from the tents and run to face the horsemen. All save one kneel at the booted feet of the cowboys. A woman, flower of İslam in virginal white, approaches the masked, forboding form of Arif slowly, on timid feet.

"Please." She begs, her hands outstretched, "you cannot take away the land of our fathers, the land allotted to us by Allah, the one true God..."

There is a brief silence as crowd holds its collective breath.Then Arif breaks the tableaux and seizes her chin through the veil. He hurls her sprawling upon the oil-fouled earth. "Kill her." He shouts to the other Wild-Westerners,"Kill them all."

Arif had killed her, his father had explained. Killed her as surely as if he'd pushed her in himself.

Nilufer's Mother had seen the marks he'd left on her body. Nilufer's Mother, a dutiful wife, had told Nilufer's Father. Nilufer's Father, a pious man, had told the Mullah. And the Mullah, a man without mercy, had condemmed her to death. Nilufer's Father had decided she would be drowned in the family pool, to wash away the stains upon the family honour.

And so the two famillies had assembled on the poolside upon the allotted day. Arif's family facing into the sun, and Nilufer's on the opposite side. Nilufer had been quickly stripped by family servants, her hands and feet bound and weighted with stones. The family doctor had clamped open her jaws and injected a local anaesthetic into the root of her tongue, that she may not further blaspheme. Nilufer had looked pale and stark in the harsh sunlight, her knees shaking and bright jewels of amber urine bedecking her thighs. She had teetered on the edge of the pool, the chlorinated water unrippled and azure-blue below, inviting perhaps, on any other day but that. Her eyes, suddenly wild, had locked on Arif's - pleading, imploring, hopeless. And Arif's Father had suddenly gripped his arm like a vice. "You cannot help her now." He'd hissed through gritted teeth, "This is your doing. Do nothing to further disgrace our family."

Nilufer's Father had pushed her in. It had taken her a long time to drown. She thrashed, she floundered, she shrieked and gargled and coughed water. For a time she had allowed herself to sink, only to spring up again from the bottom of the pool, breaking the surface and drawing in breath. Arif had briefly allowed himself to hope that they would be moved by her courage, but the faces of the other watchers remained impassive. Nilufer grew tired, she missed her footing, hampered as she was. Her body convulsed under the surface, as she had helplessly sucked in water. Vomit frothed and curled, wreathing her face like a soiled bridal veil. She'd sunken slowly, limbs quietening, liquid, to gently stand tiptoe upon the bottom. Her outline had wavered in the water, eyes open, lips blued, a pale statue had stood where once their had been life. Where once there had been love.

Honour restored, the famillies had left the servants to dispose of the body and clean the pool. After his Father's final stern words, Arif had been taken out and lashed, 30 strokes across his back. Then, beaten, bloodied and disinherited, he had been thrown out on the street.

The guns bark and cough, clouds of cordite smoke and sparks fill the air, the villagers, white robes besmirched with fake blood fall where they kneel, to lie unmoving. Only the virgin remains untouched. Spitting curses under his mask, Bush Snr. leaps off his horse and confronts Arif; leaning close whilst brandishing his weapon at the watching crowd he whispers fiercely:

"Shoot her you stupid son of a prostitiute..!"
"My gun's are jammed." Arif lies through gritted teeth beneath the mask, "You shoot her."

Turning, Bush Snr. points his gun somewhere slightly to the left of the woman's face and pulls the trigger. The Woman throws herself backward to lie spread-eagled. The crowd crane their necks to look at the white curves of her revealed calves. Arif sees the twitch of her hand as she empties the hidden syringe that cowls her head in red.

The crowd grows indignant and low hisses of disapproval sussurate through the bone dry air.

Suddenly frenzied hoof-falls make themselves heard from the far end of the street. From beween the landscaped dunes, sunlight flashes along the bright edge of the sword of İslam. Bearded and fierce-eyed, the righteous slayer of the infidel, the scourge of the unbeliever, the hero of the people gallops into view.

Osama rears his horse and roars into the face of the West: "Allahu akbar !!!"

Arif, alone and penniless and despairing, had cast himself upon the mercy of his friends. And soon found that he had none. All were too frightened to be seen with him, even to speak with him. He was feared and shunned. Finally he'd found work, tiring and tragically paid, as a lathe operator in a munnitions factory. He'd eaten badly and lived poorly and eventually saved enough money to buy himself a gun: An ugly snub-nosed revolver of indescriminate make. He'd pressed out the barrel and machined a new one. He'd re-tooled the grip. He'd stolen bullets and practiced by night, trekking into the hills as he had as a child. After a while he'd become able to shoot down a bird on the wing: simply a shadow in the starlight. When he'd allowed himself to sleep, with his bastard Colt beneath his pillow, he'd drempt of Nilufer.

Of Nilufer, and of Cowboys.

The crowd howls in adulation. Bush Snr. takes a scimitar thrust through the chest and crashes to the dust - hawking a capsule's worth of blood into the dirt. He crawls, hands scrabbling, to fall across the body of the woman he's 'killed', slumping with his head upon her breast, his hat knocked askew. Osama wheels his horse and, seemingly impervious to the gunblasts of Blair and Sharon, rides them down, buffetting them from their horses. He dispatches the two of them with casual downward slashes of his sword, leaving them hunched and writhing in the dirt. Osama's robes swirl like some desert djinn, and a wordless rictus of outrage lights his face in a corona of hatred. The crowd roars like some many headed hydra and pushes against the rope that restrains them. The security attendants look bored, and tug them back.

Osama springs down from his steed and paces to confront Arif-Bush Jnr, holding him at sword point.

"In the name of Allah I will drive you from this land..!" Cries Osama, "No longer will your infidel hands disgrace the sacred land of our Father's or your blasphemous ways pervert the minds of our children from the teachings of the prophet, blessed be his name..." Slowly he raises his sword, the shadow of its blade falling across across Arif's rubber cheek.

He had begun to attend the themepark shows weekly, studying the moves. He'd returned home each night and practiced the dialogue he could remember. He'd saved some more, and bought himself riding lessons. Seldom speaking, he'd made no friends. He'd stayed away from the general houses his work-mates frequented. He'd listened unwillingly to their stories of loveless rutting on the breaks, and stayed silent. Inside his guts had twisted in revulsion, for them, for himself, for everything. Nothing had shown upon his face.

The week Bush Jnr. had gotten his leg stamped on by a horse, and the crowd had heard the clean, greenstick snap as his femur broke even above the furore, Arif had left early, gone home and gotten his gun. Returning he'd presented himself at the park supervisor's office and offered himself as replacement. The man had laughed, a dirty mirth, all tobaccoed teeth, and told him to leave. Arif had silently risen up from his chair and opened the window. The wind had been shooing dust along the empty street outside. Drawing his gun he'd shot the head off the cock on the steeple. Swivelling he'd shot a Coke can off the lip of the horse-trough. Feathering the hammer he'd blown three tight concise holes in a triangle around the horse-shoe sign above the Blacksmiths. With his last shot he'd nicked the rope of the flag-pole, and sent the Stars and Stripes to puddle in the dirt at its base. After some shouting, and later a quieter haggling over his pay, he'd been given the job. Arif had smiled. The expression had felt alien upon his lips. Later he'd sent his company-complimentary tickets to addresses he knew by heart.

"Dieeee!!!!" Howls Osama, spraying saliva, and brings the blade arcing down.

Arif knows he's supposed to die now. Just like Nilufer. There isn't supposed to be any choice. It is written. But this time, this time, they've forgotten it's only written in a script. The inevitability of his fate is questionable.

His hand blurring toward his holster, Arif quick-draws and shoots the scourge of the unbeliever in the face. The heavy bullet, soft lead he's shaped himself, and pressed into a cartridge he's hand-machined and primed and capped himself, smashes its way through of the back of Osama's skull and balloons out his Sheik's headgear, bright red-white chunks of bone and maroon-grey brain ripping through the material. Osama collapses in a wreck of flesh, his eyeballs popped upon his cheeks and his scimitar tripping from his hand. The echo of the shot dies, leaving a breathless silence it its wake. To Arif it sounds like justice. He has eleven bullets left.

Ten - he turns and shoots Blair the butcher through the temple.
Nine - he turns and shoots Old father Bush in the heart.
Eight - he catches Sharon the Boatman rising to his feet and blows the vertebrae out of his neck.
Seven/six - he shoots the security guards in their Desert-robes, one in the throat and one in the forehead. Bang-bang, they fall.

Its chambers emptied, he drops the gun and draws the other. Tearing off his mask and striding into the panicked crowd, he finds a perculiar silence in the cacophony. There he sees, and there.

Five - he shoots Nilufer's Father, whom he had invited, in the belly at point blank. Gut-shot, the man, old now, withered and shaking, drops at Arif's feet. Arif stamps and dances on the hands that pushed his beloved, breaking and crunching them under his heels.
Four - he shoots his Father, whom he also invited, in the mouth, splintering teeth and cleaving the tongue that stayed so silent during the thrashings at the pool. He wastes a breath to spit upon the corpse.
Three - He shoots the sun that dared to dawn upon that day.
Two - He shoots the moon from the bloody flag in the hand of a child.
One-
One -
One-

Alone now, alone in the dust and surrounded by the ululations of the women he falls to his knees. Sirens begin to howl in the distance, and the shouts and footfalls of men running echo hollow in his ears.

One - He takes out the photo and clenches it in his fist. Lips stilled, he finds he no longer knows the name of God. Opening his mouth, he presses the hot muzzle of the gun into his soft palate, his saliva sizzling and bile breaking in his throat.

He pulls the trigger.

[Click.]

He revolves the last bullet back into place by touch and cocks and pulls again.

[click.]

He chips a tooth unfeeling as he pulls the gun from his mouth, and lets it slip from his fingers.

'Masha'Allah.' He thinks, remembering at last, and laughs bitterly.

'God wills it.'

...Continued...

The Selfish Pixie.

"Once upon a time there was a junkyard: every type of flotsom and jetsom, thingammyjig and gee-gaw piled teeteringly high on all sides. Open to the elements it was lashed by wind, drowned by rain and lit by lightning. Sometimes completely by accident, something would fall exactly here, and something else would fall exactly there, and a pixie would be born.

Most times the pixie would stagger about and fall to pieces - but one day, a special pixie came into being... Let's call him Danny. Danny was different, when he stood up and looked around, he felt lonely, so he started to make another pixie, just like him. Then another, and another. Then the other pixie started making a copy of himself and that copy made a few more too. It started to get crowded.

One afternoon it was very stormy; lightning began to flash in the sky, approaching fast. One pixie on the top of a junkpile looked up. At that moment a great bolt of electricity struck him on the nose. This random accident scrambled his brains. When he made the next pixie, that pixie was different. This pixie, instead of imediately making a copy of himself, waited awhile, and made himself a little yellow hard-hat. Because he waited, he wasn't quite as fast as the others at copying himself, so they always vastly outnumbered him and his little hard-hatted friends. "Ooh - look at their stupid hats..!" the bare-headed would say, and titter into their little pointy beards.

But one day, their was a terrible hailstorm, with chunks of ice the size of apples whizzing down from the sky like minature meteorites. Within an hour, all the bare-headed pixies lay dead, their poor little heads squished flat. The hard-hat pixies danced and capered with glee "Hah-hah..!" they chanted, and shook their little fingers at their fallen brothers."

Extracts from Tabula's Notebook 1:

It is important to remember that a replicator is a chemical sequence that has only one fundamental trait: to copy itself. It knows, and can know... Absolutely nothing. Imagine a thousand paper boats floating on a river as it winds its way from the mountains to the sea, around rocks, over falls, across rapids. The boat that reached the sea first - if we had had a camera following it, and viewed the playback - we would see that the 'winning' boat, at each and every twist and turn and danger on its journey would seem to have made the 'right' decision, the 'intelligent' decision. But is still just a piece of paper. Replicators achieve what seems like 'minded' choice in hindsight, through simple brute numbers. Any one individual knows nothing. As long as 'winning' was possible - One of the boats was always bound to win. To win the race, all that needed to be done, was to build enough boats, enough designs.

So - Any DNA pixie does not know a 'good' change from a 'bad' change. The qualities of good and bad are imposed only in hindsight, after an enviromental change contextualizes it as such. DNA is not alive, it is only an illusion at the point where natural laws and chemical properties co-incide over time that makes it seem to 'change' in an 'intelligent' fashion. What looks like reaction to changes in the enviroment, is really not reaction at all. It is a serrendipitous pre-emption. The 'invention' always comes before external forces make it suddenly a necessity.

Say we had driven our car past the junkyard a few years ago - we'd have seen only bareheaded pixies, and maybe one or two of the mutant strain. We'd have thought 'Hmm - the bareheaded ones are the most successful..." Why..? - because, like the pixies, we had no way of knowing what was coming.

This 'not knowing' is the major stumbling block for our DNA pixies. Any Pixie that could develop a way to predict the future would instantly become the most successful pixie on the planet. The ability of prediciton is the holy-grail for DNA, though of course, they can't know that.

One way to bullet-proof against an uncertain future is to find ways of being able to pre-empt many many different 'possible' enviromental changes - latant adaptability. How do you enable adaptability..? By encouraging mutation. How do you encourage mutation..? By having a DNA code that is very suceptable to interferrence from external mutagens - hard radiation, sunlight, heavy isotopes, free-radicals etc. This method however has its penalties:

"Over the years in the junkyard, a new type of pixie emerged. The nudist. The nudist pixies wore no clothes except their hardhats and had pale, almost transparent skins. They also liked sunbathing. They stayed out in the sun so long that it often cooked their little brains right out of their skulls. They made copies as fast as the others, but those copies were sometimes wholly bizzare, and died very quickly. Some were pretty bizzare, but still worked - long wriggly arms, rubber wellies, raincoats, aqualungs, you name it, they built it, and kept, from the traditional Hard-hatters' point of view, wasting their energy in doing so.

The normal Hard-hatters were bemused. They went on making faithful copies of themselves, which almost always always worked, and multiplied at a rate massively outpacing the nudists. The odd shower of killer-hailstones was weathered easily, and things continued for a long-long time. Still, the nudists always hung on in there, as a minority. 'If nothing else', thought the hard-hatters, 'they provide a little colour'.

Then some things happened very quickly: After a particularly cold spell, all the old car-batteries in the junkyard froze. Then there was a red-hot heatwave. The Car-batteries cracked, and burst, releasing a flood of nasty acid. Almost all the Hard-hatters died, their little legs burned off at the knee. But the nudists, quite a lot of which had luckily made little wellies, survived. (Some of the Hardhatters, who'd been struck by lightning, had also made wellies by accident - even though their friends had laughed, they survived too.)

Soon later came a monsoon. It rained and rained and rained. The remaining Hardhatters, despite their accidental wellies, soon got waterlogged and rusty and stopped working. The nudists however, also had a group who'd invented raincoats, as well as wellies, and they kept on trucking through the downpoar. It rained so much, that soon the whole junkyard was underwater. But that was okay too - because some of the nudists pixies - the particularly crazy ones - had also made little aqualungs which let them breath, and long wiggly arms that they found were excellent for swimming."

Extract from Tabula's Notebook 2:

Maximizing latent adaptation in readiness for an unknown future with plain mitotic division (cloning) is wasteful, because for one 'useful' mutation, a zillion crappy and sometimes lethal mutations are also produced. This is because the nudist pixies' DNA - being necessarily 'wide open' comparitively to random strikes by mutagens - 99.99999 percent of the time produces unbeneficial effects, at least - unbeneficial at that point in time. This strategy is simply a 'try everything and hope something works.' Imagine studying for the most important exam of your life - but unfortunately, you have no clue as to what the subject will be. You have a choice -

1) Study one subject to its current limits, and pray it comes up. If it does - you hit the jackpot - and become outright leader of the world. If it doesn't, you die.
2) Skim absolutely everything from knitting to particle physics. Whatever comes up, you'll get a point or two, become a toilet-cleaner, but survive.

Now - the 'unknown exam' analogy is good to a point - and logically produces the two strategems I've mentioned. But... Enviromental change isn't like that. If it was a one off exam - with a myriad possibilities of subject, anyone with half a brain would choose option two, and survive. But enviromental change is more a constant set of exams repeated periodically, and as such - the pixies can look at the 'past papers', guess what the subject will be next year, and prepare accordantly.

Then their choice becomes:

1) Traditional - Study last year's topic to its current limits. (esp. if that same subject has come up every year for the last millenia.)
2) Eccentric - Skim everything.
3) Totally insane - Study a completely different topic from last year's to its current limits.

Actually - this is a lie, our pixies cannot yet 'see' the past just as they cannot 'see' the future - but this doesn't matter - just as the paper boat floating down the stream sticks to certain paths dictated by the currents of the water - which in turn obey the forces of gravity, and the lie of the land, so the pixies naturally fall into a set of unknowing and unchosen stategies, dictated by the medium in which they exist... Noticable only over a (verrry-long) period of time by an external observer.


"Covered in water, the pixies went on with the basics: picking up junk, and making copies. For a long-long time every new day was like the last. Because the water shielded them from the hailstones, the hardhats that had been so necessary became not so. So when some of the pixies got their brains fried and stopped making them, they didn't die. And because they saved the time they would have spent making them, and just copied themselves quicker instead - they slowly became the most numerous group. Simularly, the acid-proof wellington boots became less common, as they hampered swimming. And very very slowly, the pixies with the most flippery feet became the norm.

As time went by, and still nothing changed much, the aqua-pixies fell into three groups. The ones who didn't get their brains fried now did best, because they were already pretty well suited to the watery junkyard where they lived, and the copies they made all worked perfectly well without the need for any extras. One day, one of these traditional pixies went for a bask in the sun. 'A little bit won't hurt' he said to himself. But of course - Pow - he got his brain fried. But luckily - the next copy he made was still exactly like him, except for one small difference... It was wearing some real cool sunglasses.

Shades-Pixie was very successful, because the smoked-glass protected him from the nasty hot sunshine, so he hardly ever got his brain fried, and almost every copy he made worked just fine. Suddenly, nearly everybody in the junkyard had sunglasses.

There still remained a smaller number of unshaded-pixies who made mistakes in copying more often and sometimes gave themselves an extra bellybutton by accident, or grew a teapot on their heads - but since these modifications didn't actually mess with their swimming and copying abilities too much - they stayed around, on the fringes, trying to get everyone to believe cranial-teapots were the next big thing.

Of course, every group has its whackos - a tiny group that had had their brains fried once too often and made copies that wasted huge amounts of time and energy building themselves totally useless extras - arms so long they frequently tied themselves in knots - huge titanium hard hats that made them sink under the weight - colourful beach umbrellas the size of football pitches. Most of them died pretty sharpish, but some always seemed to hang on, dragging around whatever crazy extra that had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Time trickled by - each new dawn bringing the same amount of sunshine, the same boring old water, the same great heaps of junk lying around, just waiting for anyone to come along and pick it up - and so the Shades-pixies, the Teapot-heads and the Total-Loonies, even though they swapped groups sometimes, remained in roughly the same ratio to eachother. The total pixie population grew and grew and grew. Peaceful, happy pixies.

Then the junk ran out. And times got... Hard."

Extracts fromTabula's Notebook 3:

If you study any population of bacteria you will find a rough mixture of these three basics types:

A huge population of traditionalist types - very well suited to the enviroment they are in, and multiplying efficiently, perhaps with some means of protecting their DNA from mutagenic influence. These are the ones who have decided that next year's enviromental exam will be exactly the same as last year's. If they change at all, it will be toward a greater specialization in their 'favourite subject'. These types are the backbone of any colony, the ones that spread, carrying the others with them.

A smaller proportion of eccentric types - still well suited to their enviroment, but with additions that are not really necessary to the habitat in question. These guys are the middle management - still hedging their bets against a future change of subject. This group is actually the worst to be in. Remember the "Duck" - not the quack-quack version, but the amphibious vehicle version, prior to the hovercraft. It could travel like an armoured car on land, and like a boat on water. But it had a serious flaw: It was crap. It wallowed like a pig in the river, and drank petrol like there was no tomorrow on land, it was slow and hard to manoever in both elements. Out-competed by racecar and speedboat, the lesson of the Duck - specialize. Be good at one thing or the other. Don't consciously try to be so-so at both. While studying a number of subjects may seem less risky than only one, it really isn't, because unless the subjects they've studied all come up on the exam (a lower chance in combination than the one) they will either be outcompeted by the specialists if the same subject comes up again - Or quickly become outnumbered by the lucky loony who specialized in one of the new subjects that came up, if last years didn't and all the traditionalists died.

A tiny proportion of the totally insane. Mutagens strike regardless, and bad-luck (or good luck from another point of view) will always ensure that there is a small turnover of borderline-none-functional misfits that are 'ready' for any particular new exam subject that may come along in the future. Well, nearly any new exam subject anyway.

No system is ever stable, at least not for very long. Even if the enviroment at large does not change, and whatever life there is a so well adapted to that eviroment it becomes abundant - this very abundance in an arena of finite resource, forces change. We must remember that almost everyone and everything, is from a genetic point of view, a species of one.Every group, however easy it is to think of them as a whole, is a just a mass of competing individuals. And each individual, does not really give a monkies about the genes of the rest. It's "me me me", not "we we we", when push comes to shove, at least at the level our little friends are at currently.

The Pixies Go To War.

"When the going gets tough, the tough are all that remain:

For a while, the pixies just stared around at the big empty places where all their lovely junk had been. One of them got so distraught, he went completely to pieces. Literally. The junk he'd been made of sank slowly, swirling on unseen currents, to settle on the bottom with a forlorn little puff of dust. The pixies eyed eachother in a new light. You could almost hear the new thought rustling through their little noggins. "Really, really-really - there's just me here - All these other guys are just walking bits of junk... Hmmm."

You could have heard a pin drop.

Suddenly, every pixie that could freestyle, flail, jet, rotor or suction-pad, descended on the little pile. There was a pile-up. A bit of accidental pushing. A bit of friendly elbowing in retaliation. A few harsh words. Gloves were taken off. Sleeves were rolled up. A punch. A kick. Someone picked up a broken bottle. A chair. Only a complete lack of chandiliers prevented ariel combat.

War. War's good. War makes a lot of junk.

Those left standing surveyed the carnage, nodded distantly to eachother, and started collecting what they needed to build. They retired with their ill-gotten gains to their respective corners and got to work.

...Continued...