Negative Spaces

I'd been checking my e-mail when my son's lego tower had toppled.

"Daddy" he'd said. "When you gonna finish lookin' your 'pooter..?"

"Soon" I'd said, for the umpteenth time. "Soon."

So he rebuilt his tower, this time the design both higher and even less structually conventional than its predecessor. The tower teetered... It swayed... And then collapsed in a multi-coloured rain of plastic bricks. The architect began to wail. "Daaddeeee..."

"Don't worry." I'd said to him.
"I'll stop." I said.
"I'll help you."

And with that, with those eight simple, everyday syllables, my life started to unravel.

It started with a tic. My off-hand would flip on its wrist, and the fingers pinch together convulsively - just for a split second. As if they were catching a fly. It didn't happen often - only if I was stressed, or tired. If I thought anything of it, it can't have been much, I don't remember worrying over it. Then there was what happened on the phone. I doodle while I talk, but I mean, everybody doodles.

This was something else. When I surfaced after a fifteen-minute conversation with some insurance guy over a niggle on payments, I found my left hand had sketched a thumbnail picture of a winding, wooded road, at what looked like dawn or maybe dusk, skewed on a slight slant off to the left, with a single figure standing in silhouette almost straddling the white line. There was a well-chewed HB-soft pencil clutched between my fingers, an unfinished line still under the point. Almost as if it noticed me looking, the hand put the pencil back down on the pad. I flexed it experimentally, the wrist ached slightly. I sat down, suddenly exhausted.

I picked up the sketch and squinted: it looked familliar somehow but I couldn't place it. "I'll stop." I said out of the blue. "I'll help you."

It got worse from then on. The doodling. I woke up with a hangover on the sofa after a dinner party my wife threw, only to find the road scrawled all over the cushions in smudged biro. I got a strange call from my Mother on her sixtieth asking me about the little scene she'd found inside her birthday card. I could have sworn I'd dashed off 'Happy Birthday Mom xxx' just like every year before. The final straw came in the Summer. It was our custom to sleep nude when the weather got too humid to bear and that night my wife awoke to find me, still fast asleep, drawing the road on her back with her eyeliner pencil.

She packed me off to a shrink after that. The same one that's just woken me up. Dr. Brunel.

He's clutching a handful of papers; he looks pleased with himself: Cheshire cat grin and one-hundred watt eyes. He snaps his fingers in front of my nose again, just for good luck. "Wake up Daniel." He says, "You're awake."

My hand hurts, and there's an indent on my index finger matching a groove on my thumb. What has he had me up to..?

First he shows me a slightly better defined version of the sketches I've grown used to over the last few months. You can see the leaves on the trees, and that the figure is a woman: close-cropped hair, flaring like a halo about her blurred face.

"You drew like a machine." Brunel says excitedly " - Like an automaton, you're the best example of automatic writing I've ever met..!"

"Great, do I get a discount..?" I ask, rubbing my wrist.

"And look here - I'll bet you've never seen this before. I asked you to zoom while you were under."

He passes me another sheet of A4 - this one's a close up on the woman's face. Jutting out stark and harsh from the paper in charcoal hardpointing. She'd be pretty I guess, if she weren't screaming. I've done her gums well, and her teeth gleam like pearls. Her tongue rears out of her mouth like a snake;I can almost hear the hiss.

Brunel's been playing with me like I was some kind of organic video-recorder - the next sheet is the same full view, but dated and timed: gaps left in the crosshatching tracing digital letters and numerals.

11:sept:1989 03:11 am

"That date mean anything to you Daniel..?" Brunel asks expectantly.

I shake my head, "I'd have been at university I suppose." I say, "Freshman year." I hate it when Doctors use your first name. What are we... Bosom buddies..? Will he be coming to my kid's birthday party..? Will it stop him looking at me like I'm some species of bug..? Or taking my money..? A whole lotta 'nos' queuing up to answer those rhetoricals.

"So neither the date - nor the picture itself - mean anything to you..?"

"I kinda remember the picture, but that's it - I couldn't tell you where it is, or if I've been there."

He hands me the last picture, this one printed on slick photgraphic paper, still smelling of ink:



And then I know.




Brunel's saying something about extreme stress, and pictures getting imprinted as negatives on the synapses of the brain, but it doesn't matter.

I know.

The trees flash by - lit strobe-light-bright by the headlights of my car. I'm fucking off my head - laughing, punching the horn, shaking my head like a wounded bear; joke-shop eyeballs jiggling and joggling like marbles in my skull - the cat's eyes on the road blur by under the hood like fireflies weaving across the sweating tarmac. Like lines on an oscilloscope: neon-bright pixels leaking from a damaged screen. I see her far too late of course. I'm not sure I even recognize her as different from the telegraph poles flanking the road. I only brake after I feel the impact. Something flies up over the roof like a giant white bird. The car slows. My arms are wood, my neck a metal ratchet as it cranks round on my shoulders. I cannot get my hands off the wheel. I see a boneless, unmoving shape slumped on the asphalt behind me - lit up a bright bloody red by my brake lights. The car still doesn't seem to be coming to a halt. I shout through the open window:

"Don't worry."
"I'll stop."
"I'll help you."

But then my foot slips off the brake and her body winks out like a snuffed candle. My eyes still rivveted to the rear-view mirror, I flail like a child at the sea-side, my feet hunting for the right pedal to tread. The car moves further away on its tyres. The gradient of the hill slopes away. Nothing to do with me. Then I hit the gas by mistake. The car lurches and speeds up. Everything seems too hard. I can't get my hands off the wheel. Can't concentrate. Can't get my hands off the wheel.

"Don't worry."
"I'll stop."
"I'll help you."

But it's only a whisper this time. The car just won't stop.

The doodling stops after that. But I start to wake up at odd times in the night with my car keys clutched in my hand - squeezing them hard enough to leave welts on my palm.

On September the first I wake up at two am in the morning - in my car. The engine idling softly, exhaust pluming out into the night air. I can't seem to get my hands off the wheel.

On the eleventh I drink a whole thermos of coffee and stay up late with the kids at my side, watching old cartoons and eating popcorn. My wife goes to bed at one-thirty, even though I beg, literally beg, for her to stay up with me.

It's half-past two now and the children are asleep on the couch, out like little lights. I catch myself nodding. I cat-

- The trees flash by in a strobe-light blur; the asphalt rasps under the tyres like the low, grating yowl of a cat in pain. I hit the brakes but my foot slips off the pedal, leaving blinks of red in the mirror. The car does not slow. It's too late anyway, I'm reaching the crest of the hill.

I see her framed under the trees, clear as day. But when the car hits her this time, she doesn't fly away.

The hood crumples up around her hips like a wave hitting a breakwater, and I dive through the exploding windscreen like some erstwhile Romeo into her waiting arms.

She holds me down on the warm road. She's a human-shaped hole in the universe. I see galaxies whirl in her breast and stars flare in her belly. It hurts when she puts her fingers in me.

"Don't worry." She says.
"I'll stop." She says.
"I'll help you."

...Continued...

Under Pressure

The Champagne designed to be sipped at twenty-thousand feet is different from the stuff mere mortals slurp at sea-level. Less gas. Drink it on the ground and it tastes flat, like day-old Cola left tepid in the glass. But let it flow over your tongue while you watch the clouds scatter beyond the plexiglass windows, and it is once more, pure heaven.

Atm is the trade abbreviation for an atmosphere, which in the wine world is the measurement for the working pressure used to produce sparkling wines. Technically, it's the normal air pressure at sea level: about fifteen pounds per square inch. In the production of a standard sparkling wine such as champagne or spumante the pressure should be six atm. Which means, that the green, dew-speckled bottle sitting on your table top, contains a liquid that is pushing out at a pressure of ninety pounds per square inch.

Ninety pounds is a skinny guy, standing shoulder to bony shoulder with a whole bunch of his friends, all trying to get out of that bottle. Now, if you should happen to fly that bottle up to the top of the troposphere, where the air is thin, and the pressure low... Suddenly those skinny guys beef up. And a bottle becomes a bomb. A case becomes a disaster.

"Excuse me stewardess..?"
"Yes Sir, how may I be of service..?"
"This Champagne tastes funny - does this stuff ever go off..?"
"I don't know - we've never had any complaints before... May I..?"
"Of course, be my guest."

He watches her mouth studiously as she lifts his glass and puts it to her lips. Rich, red lipstick leaves a smear on the rim as she sips the very smallest of sips. Then her perfect retroussé nose crinkles as bubbles of carbon-dioxide irritate the delicate membranes inside. She says:

"Uuuh - You're right - it's like drinking straight Alka-Sletzer. Please, accept the airline's apologies, I'll get you another bottle right away."
"Don't worry about it - I shouldn't be drinking anyway - All this turbulence has gone straight to my stomach."
"I'm sorry sir, the captain is doing his best. Rough weather out there."

He watches her retreating back up the aisle to the cubby-hole behind the curtain, his puffy eyes tracking the lines of her sheer-stockinged calves up to her trim thighs, following the cut of her pencil skirt, the liquid geometry of her buttocks as they move under the starched material.

He slumps back into the padding of the seat and inhales - the dry, over-conditioned air rasping over his teeth and into his lungs, leaving his pallete arid. He wishes now he hadn't complained. He closes his eyes and hears the clink of expensive bottles being sorted and examined, hears his stewardess say:

"These aren't the ones we usually stock, are they..?"

Then he feels a sudden draught. Thinks nothing of it. Then he remembers he turned the blower off about a hour ago. Which is strange. Then he remembers he's on a plane. And suddenly he jerks upright, his face batting against the yellow cup of the oxygen mask that's just fallen from a concealed flap between the nozzles of the twin fans. Becomes aware of his heart hammering in his chest. The intercom is saying something, a man's voice, with an edge just below the professional calm:

"Please do not be alarmed, we are experiencing a temporary failure of cabin pressure due to extreme weather conditions outside. Normal pressure will be restored presently, if you feel light-headed, please use the masks which should have deployed right over your heads, if you have trouble in using them, please call your flight attendent. We apologise for your incoven-"

His stewardess emerges from behind the curtain and takes a single step - one perfect leg lifting; skirt hemline riding up slightly over toned and silk-sheathed skin; a patent leather stilleto arcing down toward the close-packed weave of airline carpet.

The sound is not unlike an exhaust backfiring on a scooter - a rapid high-pitched popping, rude and unexpected - a staccato ripple of breaking glass.

The stewardess stops, simple surprise chasing sudden pain on her face. She shudders. A halo of green glass shards sparkle in the sudden sunlight and ricochet off the bulkheads all around her, wreathing her body like some medaeval stained-glass angel weeping in a cathedral window.

She staggers, grace gone, to collapse at his feet. The back of her head is flayed right down to the bones of her skull. The jagged ivory path of her vertebrae glints like a row of broken teeth in a punched mouth. Her pelvis is bared: both buttocks ground away to bloody gristle. Her legs are carved-up like cheap meat on a butcher's block; tendons and ligaments glowing obscenely white amid a morass of purple and ruby-red.

On his knees now, he heaves her over onto her good side and sits smoothing her hair as the plane lurches, and begins its descent.

...Continued...

Spring-Heeled Jack

It's not the start of the story, but rather the end, the part I always remember. It reminds me of a big musty bed shared with my little sister in my Grandparent's draughty old house, where we would cower and clasp eachother giggling like fools - half scared, half delighted, as Granny told stories in the dark.
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"This isn't funny Josh, it's getting dark already and I can't get my mobile to work - are you going to be able to get the car started or not..?"
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Granny would never start her tales in the traditional way, but rather she would start with "When ahh were naught but a girl." and then unfold the story from there. She was awful old my Gran. As wizened as an orange left out in the wind, she'd never admit to an age and yet, for all her claims of aching backs and ricketty knees, she somehow remained as and spry and hearty as a hawthorn bush, all whip and prickle.

She told us many stories over the years: stories perhaps that parents now would shudder at and not permit - penny-dreadfuls and burlesque - the big bad wolves always got cut in half and those stupid, bone-grinding giants would slit their own stomachs as Jack laughed. River sprites and leering elves and goblins and golems and gollywogs.

And of course Jack.
Jumping Jack.
Spring-heeled Jack.

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"Ah fuck it - let's just push the damn thing off the road and walk, it can't be more than a couple of miles, I recognise the road. We cross the river soon and then we should be able to see my Gran's old place across the moor. We'll get someone out to the car tomorrow. Better get your boots on though - the snow's thick."
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Gran lived in Winston: a little village hidden away in Yorkshire, between an old oak forest and high ridge of hills. A river ran through it, cold as Winter and rippled with fish. But Gran hadn't always lived there. In her youth she'd worked as a servant girl in Lavender Hill London and - she would tell us, her eyes far away and suddenly blank - one day as she was crossing the common, a strange figure leapt at her from the dark mouth of an alley. Jack.

"He leapt out t' shaddas at me grinnin' like the very Devil." She'd say and continue to tell of how this fiendish figure had pushed her to the frosted ground and ripped at her dress with his claws which were - and here Granny would loom close over the bed and hook her fingers and we would obediently shriek - "as cold and as clammy as a corpse's". Then she'd "Let out a scream anna whistle loud enought' wake dead" and brought the whole neighborhood running. Jack would escape by half bounding, half flapping across the rooftops "like a bloody great broken-winged bat."
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After half an hour's slog through the snow and still no bridge I realize two things: that I'm totally out of shape compared to the child that used to run all over the village before breakfast, and that we're lost. Quite seriously lost, considering we're wearing stupid fashion-imitation outdoor gear rather than the real stuff, and now the sun is gone the temperature is falling right off the scale. Beth's breath begins to steam like Granny's old iron kettle. She is silent, all her concentration set on putting her feet one in front of another. The uninterrupted whiteness and the great, overwhelming silence makes it hard to talk somehow, or maybe it's just tiredness, but it still feels like church.

I fall into a dull, leaden rhythm - boots crunching into the pristine crust and out again, breaking a path for my sister behind - and my eyes scan the snow-softened scenary for anything that the child long past remembers from his ramblings. It's cold, every breath is like sucking on ice.

I snort reflexively at how ironic it would be, were we both to die on the way to a funeral.
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According to popular folklore, little Mary Stevens' story ends with the escape of Jack across the rooftops of old London town, but according to Granny it is actually where her real story begins. Because - as she used to whisper in the warm light of the bedside lamp - when she moved back to her village...

Jack followed.

"The footprints in the snow suddenly ended..."

"That day, my wee ones, the snow were piled up like clouds on the hill-tops and mi breath came out mi mouth like steam from a kettle. Ah were walkin' 'ome cross back field from tarn when ah 'appened upon some tracks. Like normal footprints they were, but not right somehow. An ah knew, knew it right then it were 'im. Summin' crawled right up mi spine an' put up alla the hairs on mi neck straight as wires. 'Cos ye see children, the tracks they just started all at once from nothin' in t' snow. Ah hadda follow 'em too, ah couldn't 'elp it - cos they were 'eddin like an arra right for mi old Mum's 'ouse. This house."

At this point my Sister and I would squeal and gaze horror-struck out of the window, which my Gran would leave unshuttered, the curtains undrawn. And outside the window the snow would roll across the field like a great white ocean: frozen and frosted, crisp and brittle in sharp starlight.
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"Josh we've been walking for hours - you said it wasn't far - where the fuck are we going..?"

My Sister never swears, and that, coupled with the sheer noise of her voice bursting out of the great cathedral silence all around jerks me out of the trance I've been plodding through for the last couple of miles. I turn, my limbs leaden, suddenly exhausted.
"I'm sorry sweetheart, I think we're in trouble. You wanna try your phone again..?"

Then there is a strange wooshing noise behind me, and an explosion of snow. Beth screams, the noise furious, her breath blasting out like a fire-extiguisher in the luminous dark. I don't want to turn round. I'm seven again, and listening to my Granny's stories. And now as then, I can't help it, my eyes drag my head around, until I'm looking at it. Looking at him. Looking at Jack.
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And Gran would point out of the window with one shaking hand, gaze into our terrified little eyes and continue: "An when ah got t' 'ouse, e'en though it were colder than a witch's tit that day, ah were sweatin' like a shire'orse. And them footprints - well they got within a couple o' yards o' this very window and just stopped - just ended - like e'd jus' disappeared. An' near where they ended there were a tile come down offen the roof, stuck up in the snow like a teeny-tiny tombstone."
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Up close it looked nothing like the pictures in Gran's book. Just like she'd said. Blackness slid over it despite the starlight reflecting off the snow all around. It towered over us by a meter or more. Its head dark and featureless save for a banked-coal glimmer of eyes. No arms but more fins, or stunted wings perhaps, jutting out from a torso much too short for its height. It jigged gently on its legs, up and down, never still. It stank, even in the clean frosted air - a noxious smell, like stagnant swimming pools brimming with chlorine and rotten weed. One minute maybe, maybe two we watched it, watched it not breathing even as our own breath tumbled out of us like waves of fog in the icy air.

Quick as a knife it moved, a pale hard pincer grazing my cheek, hard enough to bruise but not hard enough to cut, and then it was gone - squatting down - its legs bending impossibly backward like a giant cricket's - and then whoosing, soaring, vanishing upwards with a sucking vaccuum that plucked at our frosted clothes.
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Then Gran would sit back and breathe and smile to show us the worst was over. "Well ah got inside the door and slammed it shut behind just as quick as a bird, an tied downt' latch wi' mi best knots ah kin tell ye. Fer a while ah just stood there and caught mi breath, then ah went t' find mi Mum."
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Spring-Heeled Jack streaked down again like a comet not fifty yards from where we stood, throwing up a great fantail of snow with the force of his landing. Then in a curious series of hopping bounds he began to move away over the moor at a diagonal to the path we'd been making. Every now and again he'd pause, and twist his head around in our direction.

Children again, brother and sister holding hands in the darkness, terrified, we followed.
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"- Ah found 'er in the kitchen proddin' at' fire. She turned 'roun and gimme such a clip roun' the eer as ye wouldn't wish on ye worst enemy. Then she told me not ta shove anymore snow downt' chimney. 'It's Jack' ah told 'er mi eyes bright wi tears, 'Spring-Heeled Jack's jumped up on our roof' ah said, 'e was the one that done it Mum, not me."
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There were lights in the darkness ahead, electric and warm. Our limbs suddenly full of energy, we rushed over the snow toward them, trampling through and over the marks of Jack's passing
without thought. And then we were at the window, and the footprints suddenly ended.
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"'No such thing as Spring-Heeled Jack my little lass' mi Mum said, wipin' away mi tears, but ahh knew it alla same, Jack was on the roof- lookin' out fer me." Then Gran would close the curtains and fuss with the blankets, tucking us in snug as mice in a sack. She would stroke our brows and soothe our fretful faces, cooing nonsense words and lullabies until we slept.

...Continued...

Homo Suburbia

The baby wakes him, chuntering in her crib - the little teeth pushing slowly through the thin of skin her gums making her short-tempered and fractious. Silently beside him his wife rises to offer her breast. Grey light slides uneasily behind the curtains, he doesn't know wether to get up or not - the alarm clock says it's five-thirtyish - he's got the option of another hour or so's sleep. Then the baby vetos the decision by refusing to return to the land of nod. A ball of softly flailing limbs pushes him off the edge of the bed and into his slippers.

The baby's wails awaken him. The fire has burnt down to a dull orange glow amid a heap of blue-grey ash. His woman shifts under the heap of furs and draws the infant closer, pushing her chapped nipple to his fumbling lips. The baby's cries soften and cease. An ember pops and hisses. At the cave-mouth the cold dawn sky brightens the rock and air sharp with Autumn grazes his cheeks. He rolls out of the furs and stretches, sinews popping in his neck and old scar-tissue across his back twanging tight. Strapping his feet and ankles with swathes of hide, chewed and pissed on, he strides out to the mouth of the cave, to consult with the other men.

Bracing his fingers across the nape of his neck he swivels his shoulders round and about as he clunks down the stairs to the kitchen. His eyes hurt from lack of good sleep and his belly rumbles. He hopes, he suspects vainly, that there is milk left over in the fridge for cornflakes. A cat meows somewhere from the depths of the house; he's not the only one up early. His suspicions were right - the fridge is devoid of milk. Emergency sandwich time. He juggles hard cheese and mayonaise, lettuce and bread; a tomato gets dropped to splat on the tile. Colateral damage in the war against hunger.

The meat from the last hunt is finished. The men decide to first visit the stash from the last kill they'd hidden a few hours walk distant. They hope to find the half-carcass of the great-tusk still resting, shallow-buried in the permafrost, untouched by the scavengers and the long-tooths. They take up their chipped axes and fire-hardened short-stabbing spears and march out in rough single file. Only Twisted-leg stays behind with the womenfolk to guard them from harm, or decoy away any large animals.

The cheese he finds is covered in soft aureoles of off-white mould. He bins it and hunts through the back of the fridge for a can of Tuna. Something winds itself around his ankles and purrs. Staggering he grabs the nearest surface to steady himself and roundly curses the cat for trying to kill him. Dealing out slices of bread like playing cards he smothers each in mayo and flattens out a layer of Iceberg on the top. Busy hacking at the can with the opener he fails to notice the cat which leaps stealthily up onto the Dishwasher behind him.

Most of the meat at the stash is rotten, animals or perhaps just the wind has shifted the snow off the tops of the stacks and the weak sunlight has set maggots writhing in the half-thawed flesh. Old pad marks are scattered around the site, but none they think are new. The men use their spears to prise off the top sections of the buried carcass in the hopes that the deeper layers remain untainted. Sweat starts out of their skins despite the deepening cold. Intent on uncovering the food, they fail to notice another shadow converging on their own across the snow.

Finally levering off the top of the can he sets it to one side for a second to hunt the knife. Quicker than he can turn or lift a hand the cat leaps onto the surface and buries its muzzle into the can, rough pink tongue busy amongst the chunks of fish and oil. Exhaustion and hunger flash into anger and he slaps the cat off the kitchen top and onto the floor, the cat taking the tuna can with it - spraying ruddy hunks of fish all across the terracotta. A paw whips out the rake the back of his hand as he bends to retrieve the can. Furious now he sweeps up the cat in a crushing embrace and heaves it out onto he back porch, slamming the plate glass slider in its frenzied little face. A sudden elation sluices through him and he grins and waggles his fingers derisively as the cat leaps vainly at the handle. Victory.

The long-tooth is on top of one of the men before anyone hears it; its great bladed inscisors hooked into the man's chest just below the collar-bone; its huge, musclar hind legs raking out the mans bowels in great arcs of blood and shit. Leaping back the men surround the great cat and prick at it with their spears - the blunt points scraping along the cat's fur as it shakes its head and roars - amber eyes darting, seeking weakness, seeking fear. Tripping over his own feet the man falls backward, bruising his tailbone in the hard-packed ice. It is only happy accident that brings his spear up, its butt slammed into the ground with the force of his falling body. In the same instant great cat leaps - its body blotting out the wavering sun above him. He smells its musky sweat and sees the light caught along the edge of its claws. The spearpoint takes the beast in the belly and punches out right through its spine, leaving it writhing spastically above him, until the haft of his spear bows then breaks with a splintering of wood to drop the dying cat onto him, his face pressed into its dirty fur. The man beneath soils his breeks convulsively either in relief or fear, he cannot tell. The others pull him out from beneath the corpse and then begin to butcher the big cat, now strangely small in death, with chipped flint sharp and shiny.

He pulls on his clothes and goes to work. The traffic is light and the parking lot empty. He swears he will come into the office early every day from now on. The day passes without event, and a little tediously - the colleague normally sharing his workspace absent, ill aparantly, flu. He hopes he doesn't get it and finishes all the stuff in his in-box in record time - working without the usual rigmarole of distractions and banter. He leaves early, whistling as he manoevers his car out of the now congested lot. Even stops to buy flowers on the way home, so great is his joie-de-vivre. He puts his key in the door and turns the lock softly, hoping to surprise his wife.

The cat's flesh is diseased they say, some thread-like worms in its lungs and liver. Useless. The meat from the stash will only fill one sled. His leg hurts: his knee twisted beneath the cat as they fell. They decide to load up his sled and send him back alone while they continue on to forage along the game trails till near-dark. He grunts at this dubious wisdom but accedes. Thankfuly the journey is without incident, beyond stopping at a fast running stream, still filled by off-flow from the glacier, to wash out his shit. The camp is strangely quiet as he approaches, womenfolk huddled over their skins, scrapers moving rhythmicly, but their eyes all slither away from his. He cannot see his woman among them. Throat hoarse from the wind and the cold he gives no holler of greeting as he reaches the cave mouth.

The house is quiet until he reaches the bottom of the stairs. Then he hears his wife's rough breathing and the familliar groan and squeak of their bed. Dropping his shoes he mounts the staircase cautiously, his feet slow and clumsy on the steps.

Over the low moans of the wind he hears the rough sounds of his woman's pleasure. As his eyes adjust to the gloom in the cave he sees the shape of her spreadeagled across the furs, twisted-leg's heavy buttocks thrusting at their junction. The baby gurgles in the furs nearby. He wonders now, if his son is really his. Intent on their union, neither of the lovers notice as he heaves a frozen length of meat from the sled, heavy and jagged with splintered bone.

Dragging up the stairs like a man on the way to the chair, he nears the open door of the bedroom he's shared with his wife for eight years. In the nursery to the left he hears his daughter shifting in her crib. Through the mirror on the vanity table he sees his wife folded over on the edge of the bed, her hair plastered across her face by sweat and sperm. And his colleague, looking remarkably spry considering his bout of flu: working his tongue into her as she grinds her cunt into his face. He knows there is a gun on his side of the bed. Two strides and he's there.

...Continued...

Triptych

Playing Chicken

I itch when I see them; their clucking and scratching and flapping and strutting makes my skin break out in hives. I hate the way their movements are so twitchy - all stop and go - no interim of speeding up and slowing down just a sudden walk/not walk, turn/not turn, peck/not peck - mechanical somehow, sinister. But still, fascinated, I have to look - little dinosaurs, do they remember us..?

I've been working in the battery chicken farm for the last seven years. A hundred thousand saw-beaked birds all squashed into one great hanger sized building, the air heated by their own scrawny little quill-bristled bodies; the air filled with the phosphate guano-stink of chicken shit and rusty cages. It gets under your nails and into your skin you know, rubs itself into your bones over the years, that greasey chicken stink.

Sometimes I practice strutting in the mirror: cranking my head back on my neck, jutting my chin out and folding my elbows and wrists back on themselves like a spastic, kicking my knees high and scraping my clenched-up toes on the carpet. Sometimes I can't help it. I sit up nights and I wonder how much chicken DNA I've got messed up with my own. My periods stopped months ago and now sometimes it feels like I've got something like a stone in my womb. I try to push it out, but it just doesn't come. I'm not a good layer, they'd probably toss my carcass in the bin and grind me up for cattle food.

I practice: One hundred Kegels a day - clench the muscles at the base of my pelvis like I'm trying to stop myself weeing real hard, then release and push down - just like it says in the text book I stole from the library. The egg still won't come though, so I massage my belly, in case the egg is in the wrong position - crosswise, stuck, hard shell grating on the submerged bones of my hips. I eat Rennies by the handful for the calcium, so my baby won't break inside. I cried when big sister's kid came round and put on that cartoon of the nursery rhyme. So sad they couldn't fix him. So now I sleep on my back just in case, and take great care not to fall.

My freezer is filled with frosted breasts, jam-packed with rock-hard thighs and rendered fats for sauces. I've taken to stealing a chicken a day from the bird-floor: tucking their heads under the stumps of their wings until they get sleepy and then tucking their malnourished little bone-bag bodies under my coat. No-one misses them. My Mother gets worried about my exclusive poultry-based eating habits. "You'll turn into a chicken one days" she says, and half laughs as she turns away to escape out the door, her words still hanging there in the gloom of the hallway long after the door has clicked shut and she is gone, just a tick-tock hickory-dock noise of heels on the staircase. I rub my belly and pomise to be better when the time comes; sometimes I almost feel the egg rocking in response.


Talking to myself

No offence, but I've never liked people that much. Especially when they talk. I can't bear it. All that air coming out that's been inside them. Filled with germs and half eaten stenches. Filled with words. Words to make you do things. Words to Make you feel things you didn't want to. Dirty things. Terrible things. Often I just have to walk away before my hands find something sharp to hold. These blown-up balloon people so full of air, so prickable - and me a pincushion-man barely able to hold my needles out of sight. Wretched and damned, I shut myself away.

No-one missed me. I shopped without a word online, and silently took packages from bored delivery guys - my credit cards doing all the talking for me. No TV no DVD no CD no cassetes no records no radio no newspapers no books no people no mirrors. I breathed open mouthed, so as not to hear even the faint bellows of my breath. Without my glasses I'm a blur so I smash them in the sink. Nothing to betray the stench of humanity. Quiet. Peace.

Urges. Instincts. My body is lonely. The internet is full of middle-aged perverts masquerading as girls. Lonely-heart columns filled with emotional train-wrecks. Gum-cracking, dirty-nailed prostitutes with vaginas full of disease. And they talk, they all want to talk. Spitting their inanities at me with great banana lips blown up with silicon and coated in grease the same colour as old clotted blood.

And then I found Chloe. I found her cruising the net. We approached eachother carefully from behind multiple blinds of faked e-mail accounts and lies about age and district and profession. A photo was sent. I found it pleasing. Some money changed hands anonymously - a number simply moving from one digital set to another. I got an e-mail telling me she was on her way. I cleaned the house until my fingers bled and my eyes streamed with chlorine tears. Everything had to be perfect for her arrival. Gleaming.

Like a vampire-bride she arrived under cover of darkness, in a box. Like some techno-Venus she emerged naked and perfect from a surf of polystyrene twists. She smelt like a new car. Unridden in. Virgin. Mine.

I read her manual. She was in delicate health my love, she needed treating well. Just like real people, she came with no guarrentee.

I lie her torso down in our narrow bed. It takes a while to work out just how to joggle and twist her arms into place and connect her legs without damaging her. Stressed, exhausted, we almost have our first row. And then finally she lay there. Inert. Speechless. Expectationless. Uninvolved and uninvested. Not selling anything, simply waiting to be used.

Her skin is as cool and slick as a snail's backside but I don't care, the manual says I can warm her in the bath if I wish but I like her this way; all loves have their bumps to ride over. And later, spent, talking to myself, I lean over her sleeping form and brush my lips against her ear and speak the words that I have wanted to hear from someone, anyone, for so long.

And in silence she shouts her love back.

Wreckage.

I didn't know what to do. I couldn't disappoint them again. My Dad with that knowing wink of his and his desperately hopeful "Don't do anything we wouldn't do eh son..?" as they left me alone that weekend. I often wondered if they were blind my Mum and Dad. They looked at me through some strange natural mixture of parental LSD and smashed dreams and saw this successful, personable, popular kid, when the truth could not have been further.

I mean I okay, so I wasn't a total spaz. I didn't wear specs with tape or have spots like volcanoes. I wasn't very short, nor very tall. Not especially bright, not dumb. I picked my nose, but not in plain view. Average. Save in one respect.

No-one really liked me.

The car pulled out of the drive; balding tyres skating over uneven gravel. I sat, the television on but muted, and watched my knees jump and bounce and jitter in front of me. I couldn't sit still. The clock on the mantlepiece ticked away the seconds. My Dad would come in first, bearing the suitcases, holding the door ajar for Mum with his foot or an elbow. He'd look about the place, its pristine state, the light going steadily out of his eyes and ask me what I'd got up to in their absence, what larks, what shenannigans. Always wanting stories.

What did you do today..?
Nothing.
Who' d you meet today..?
No-one.
Where'd you go today..?
Nowhere.

Each negative rubbing me out until they were left with no choice but to make me up again, invent a son to relate to. A tulpa-child, dreamed up and believed into being; sprung fully formed from their foreheads.

Determined not to disappoint I climbed the stairs, unzipped my pants and pissed a streak all the way across the landing. I ate Cheetos by the bagfull and gulped salty water to fill the vases with puke. I tipped half a bottle of whiskey over Dad's prize amplifier. I threw some coats I'd stolen from school half under Mum and Dad's bed. I wanked into some condoms and left them floating in the bowl. I smoked and ground the butts out on the carpet. And in my head I saw the party, catalogued the incidents, drew up the story board. To admit, to tell.

If I could not be the son my Mother and Father wanted, then I could at least collude in my own fictionalization, I owed them that much.

...Continued...

Dance Hall Days

We were drunk as fuck. Five quadruple vodkas-and-orange in different pubs around central Nottingham were as cheap a way to jump-start a Friday-night as we could find.

Don't get us wrong, we had class, we were just too poor to express it in our drinking habits. We were young then and always in a hurry - we drank as a means, rather than as an end in itself - a means of losing the part of ourselves that stopped us from taking risks; a means of eluding our self-consciousness, of drowning it out under a layer of cheap supermarket booze and a couple of ice-cubes. A means of becoming something both more and less than ourselves for one night a week.

And meeting women of course. Let's not get too poetic here. We drank mainly as a means to a leg-over.

The club we usually went was The Cookie Club - a couple of large rooms spanning the second and third floors of a back-street building just off the Council-House Square in the city-centre. Inside it was painted a utilitarian black with day-glow scrawls and garish insignia crawling every surface. A small bar outlined in twinkling rope-lights on the right, and a square dance floor wreathed in old cigarette smoke and sweat beyond. Upstairs a chill-out zone with a fag-machine and scattered chairs - warped wooden windows thrown open to let in the cool night air.

It was about eleven, the pubs had closed their doors and we were swaying on the stairs, queuing, laughing - jittery on our toes - expectant. Awash with stupidity and hope and wearing slack-jawed grins. Clumsy cigarettes in our hands and smoke dribbling from our nostrils; our ash feathered the heavy breath-filled air. The music from above throbbed in the cool metal of the hand-rail as we climbed the steps one by one.

It was Eighties night of course - even though Nineteen-Ninety had already come and gone. It was still too early in the decade for it to have aquired a musical flavour all of its own, and even though we were barely into our twenties, already we were nostalgic for the past. Maybe the familliar music made us feel somehow older, somehow wiser, more accomplished - the Eighties were something we'd done; somewhere we'd been; worn the tee-shirts for. And if nothing else, at least we knew how to dance Eighties-style - Adolescence had taught us that much.

We dumped our coats and lost eachother in the murk. Pubs were social but clubs were more of a singular pursuit. The music was always too loud to hear anyone below a scream anyway. I propped myself up against a pillar plastered in a sweating paisley patterns and watched girls dance. Waiting for a song that would pull me away from myself and onto the floor and into the many legged, many armed embrace of pissed humanity.

"We were so. in. phase.
In our dance. hall. days.
We were cool. on. craze.
When I, you, and everyone we knew
Could believe, do, and share in what was true -
An' ah said..."

There are some songs I still can't help liking. Even now - no matter how cheesey they may seem to my middle-aged ears - these songs tug at me and send me grinning back to the days when I could dance without inhibition, confident that the eyes watching me were indulgent. And then I pity the poor modern youth , so young and yet forced to pretend to be so old. Then I grimmace and smile and catch myself, and remember it was the same for us.

The gloom of the bar was ripped away in the blaze of strobes and ultra-violet arc-lights revolving overhead. The heat from the spotlights seared over my back as they passed. People's eyes glowed in the dry-ice and their teeth burned white-hot between their lips. Too soon the song ends and we who were so in phase one moment suddenly falter and break apart, drifting. Someone though, stays close and touches me fleetingly on the shoulder; feather fingers barely grazing my skin.

"Take your baby by the hair
And pull her close and there there there"

Her fingers flip the hair away from my face and I glimpse her face too - mottled and striped by the pinwheeling lights as we stand balanced on the very brink of the dancefloor - buffeted by shoulders on all sides as the music and the dancers change once more. She is pretty. And that is enough. She leads me upstairs.

"Take your baby by the ears
And play upon her darkest fears"

Whatever it is we do in the darkness of clubs it is not real communication. Whatever it is that bridges the gap between two pairs of whetted lips in the haze it is not words. While tongues twist and vocal chords twang in throats made hoarse by smoke and shouting the real conversation is being carried out by hesitant fingers, dragged back again and again from out of the darkness to touch briefly a cheek, a shoulder at the least excuse - just to make contact. In situations like these, we never trust our eyes. They've been fooled too many times, so we lower our lids and reach out. In situations like these, we never trust our ears. They've heard too many lies, so we let the words wash over us and reach out. In situations like these, only touch is real so we reach out and hope to feel love, however fleeting, however brief, beneath our fingertips.

"And you need her and she needs you
And you need her and she needs you"

...Continued...

Silence in Cacophony

It is a great pity that silence is not a tangible thing, rather than simply an absence. Imagine silence bottled, powdered, weaponized. Imagine riot-police hurling quiet-bombs at political rallies. Imagine immensely silent football matches, after mutually-assured-dumbness exchanges across the terraces by rival fans. Open-mouths endlessly filled with completely soundless curses; bruised lips stretched and tongues tie-twisted around syllables of taunt and chant. World-cup penalty shoot-outs acomplished in a divinely perfect hush.

I am a father, a husband and a teacher. Perhaps I value peace more than many.

I remember once, very early in my life here in Turkey, when I could neither speak nor understand the language, walking down the main shopping street near where I lived. It was possibly the first time I had dared to venture out alone. I remember the faces swarming around me, all human of course, but at the same time all subtley... different. The swells of brow and juts of bone; the curves of cheek and snarls of lip, all slightly alien, just enough to intermittently catch and fascinate the eye. It was like seeing all over again - a strange feeling when you sense your own thoughts quietly adjusting themselves within your skull: to feel them slip and slide like a knot of mating snakes across and around and over eachother as they expand to encompass the newness leaking in through your eyes.

The street was wide and crowded: streams of people all side-stepping and shoving and swerving; head-down and hell-bent; sniffing produce and price with equal fervour; a forest of elbows and knees and handbags and piled-high hand-carts. Little boys tanned deep brown in the sun darting like fishes in and out of the tea-shops with tiny glasses balanced on trays, or warm rings of sesame-bread piled high on their heads. It was noisy, loud like a packed theatre before curtain-rise is loud - hundreds of shuffling feet, coughs, conversational snippets just too juicy to wait, the crunch and crinkle of packets of sweets wrenched open, exhalations, exclaimations, sweat, meat-smell. People.

I walked open toed in brown leather and blue-jeans, long haired amongst the head-scarves, stared at, chuckled over, remarkable and remarked about. As I moved through them, the crowd opened and closed ahead and behind me like some living thing, cautious of this foreign body in its midst. I was acutely aware of how alone I was, how devoid of connection. It was like floating in a warm sea, with nothing but sky all around.

Of course the din was still incredible, both audio and visual (for every building was draped in signs declaring in a riotous confusion of font, colour and style what I could only assume were services and shops), rolling over my senses in great atonal waves. The sheer volume of chatter, street-barker patter, inquiry and retort would have been overwhelming had it been in English, but as it was in colloquial Turkish, and as such completely unintelligible to my foreigner's ear, it became as music, not soothing exactly but not drawing my attention either. And so I felt its buzzing pass, thrumming through my chest, felt the thrill of it in the lamp-posts as I leant against them - the only permanence in a moving world.

Alone and uncomprehending I was at perfect rest amongst a thousand people.

I think of this time when sometimes the baby cries once too often in the night, or my students grow overly restless in the Summer heat. I think of that place, that instant, when I found utter solitude in its absence, and a perfect silence within its total lack.

...Continued...

Dawkin's Legacy

The first thing to remember about evolution is that it doesn't exist. It's a none-independent term, like calling a place where two roads meet "the corner of 5th and main" or whatever. The road is only the fifth counting from some arbitrary starting place, the other is the main one because for some reason it's wider, the name would be meaningless without the roads, the roads undistinguished without a name and everything meaningless without cars or people to drive them. Nothing stands alone, it's all a bunch of dominoes piled one against the other.

The same with evolution. Evolution is the name we give to the point where life and death meet the enviroment and what happens there. It is a neutral term, it is not positive, or negative. It has no direction, it can go forward, or backward, or sideways. It does not care about sentience, TV or twinkies. Evolution loves the merest speck of shit-eating scum on the ring of a whale's ass just as much as it loves Shakira. Evolution is not God. It is not an it.

Ooh-ooh, I forgot mutation. That good ol' supposedly random mutation. Did you know that after heavy sunspot activity there is usually a flu epidemic somewhere in the world..? That's right, all those little flu viruses learning new genetic tricks after getting their brains knocked out by heavy radiation.

But hang on, a reliance on purely random mutation to solve your problems would require a whole lot of patience - tapping your fins while you wait for them to turn into feet. You'd have to be some kind of scaley ichthian saint. However, following evolutionary 'logic', a random mutation that then allowed life to generate its own 'purposeful' mutation would imediately become wildly successful, wouldn't it..? It would. Mutation, on a day to day basis, ain't random anymore. It's endogenous, a reaction of a species to enviromental conditions and change.

Your enviroment btw, is not just the green and brown bits: the trees and mountains. Nor just the moving bits like the mosquitos and pigeons and bears. Or the weather. Nope. It is also your neighbor, your mother, your lover, your dog, your toothbrush. Everything that is not you, including the bacteria that live in and on you, is your enviroment. Some of it you choose, most of it you do not, or at least you can't be bothered going to the effort that that choosing would require to implement.

The real enviroment starts from the gene up. In the big scheme of things I am single lily-pad on a very, very big pond which just happens to be the one that the frog of life is sitting on at the moment. When froggy hops to the next, I will sink from view, never to return. Only our genes move on in any physical sense, even then in the 'new blade, new haft - is it the same axe..?' sense of the word. Lonely little string of nucleotides in the big bad world. And the biggest threat from the enviroment is not so much the lions and tigers and bears, nor falling rocks or sudden ice-ages or drunken drivers. Just as in the modern macro-world the only real threat to man, is man - the biggest threat to our genes in the micro-world has always been other genes.

The gene. We've got lots and lot of them. Not just 'one-gene-one-job' either, but a web of inter-connections and inter-dependent functions that we are only beginning to percieve. Nothing wasted, nothing redundant. Diabetes is an adaptation to the last ice-age, still used by Eskimos. Sickle-cell anaemia protects against malaria, high cholesterol is an adaptation to increase high pigmentation vitamin D production. Nothing is black and white. Western Europeans are genetically adapted to beer. A gene for cystic fibrosis protects against tuberculosis. Nothing we contain is without use. Evolution allows no flab.

But if evolution allows no free lunches - why then is our genome is 97% shit..? Only about 3% builds and maintains our bodies. The rest rides for free down the eons, coding for nothing. Well, so the theory went anyway. We didn't adapt to many diseases, we integrated with them. We have married a whole bunch of viral and bacterial DNA on our way down the eons and now we have our own little genetic laboratory in every cell of our bodies. How else would we ever be able to produce the right antigen for every new bug that shuffles off the production line..? We have set thieves to catch thieves and now we cut and paste elements from this vast amount of stored genetic material to combat everything nature throws at us: Transposons - jumping genes - sample and remix the genome like frantic genetic DJs, trying desperately to find the newest groove.

It is more efficient this way. More robust. For example - You can chemically or radiolojically 'knockout' many of what were thought to be vital genes and absolutely nothing happens. You don't die. Why..? Because your genome treats this KO as a disease, as a 'problem' thrown at it by nature and works around it. Other genes borrow material from the 97% and utilize it to make up for the loss in protein production caused by the KO'd gene.

This oldest of methods of tweaking the production line is mirrored in our social reality: The business 'philosophy' of kaizen aims to eliminate waste (defined as "activities that add cost but do not add value"). It is often the case that this means "to take it apart and put back together in a better way." This is then followed by standardization of this 'better way' with others, through standardized work. ie - don't throw out the whole production line when a problem is encountered, tweak it till it works then make the tweaked version the new standard. Sound familliar..?

This internal panic button, that kicks your genome into hyper-mutation-mode, is pressed by stress. Which is good if you've got the latest strain of flu, or a glacier just moved in next door, but totally shit if it's just your boss bustin' your balls - because in the first case, mutation is necessary therefore potentially beneficial, and in the second unnecessary and potentially malignant: hello Mr. Cancer.

So - The human genome isn't really human. It incorporates bits and pieces from every virus and bug we ever conquered and/or got friendly with down the ages. HERV - human endogenous retro viruses - able even, it is thought, to breach the barrier between germ cells - sperm and egg - and body cells. ie. Able to pass on changes aquired within the parental lifetime to the next generation. We are not one pure thing but an alloy of the multitude. But what of the macro-world, the world we can see..? Cells, bodies - these must be discrete..? Separately evolved..? Mustn't they..?

Say on one area there are a couple of individuals who are just fucking great at one thing, but pretty mediocre at everything else: Joe can build a wall that'll stand for a thousand years with his eyes closed, but he couldn't put a roof on for toffee. Fred does great plumbing but electricity turns his head round in knots. Tony roofs and wires like an artist but builds walls like a drunken sailor.

On their own, they are doomed to live in half-finished houses, together, they would build works of art. The trick is to get them to co-operate. To trust.

Capitalism is much the same on a much bigger scale - Governments use the peaceful atmosphere the protection of an army and police-force to provide a system of commerce which allows networks of specialists to take something approaching mutual advantage of eachother, rather than all of them having to do everything for themselves. Would Picasso have had the time and energy to paint such nice pictures if he'd had to spend his days ankledeep in sheepshit growing all his own food..?

But capitalism goes all the way back.

Let us imagine the first cell. Let's call him Donald.

"Back in the day, when I was just a snot-nosed kid, I was a single cell with a floppy cell-wall and a really crappy generator. Luckily in the bit of sea next to me there was this little guy who did almost nothing but suck in the crap floating about and churn out exactly the kind of fuel I needed too. He got so good at it he made far more than he needed, and just excreted the rest. What was his name now..? Mito-Something, ah yes... Mitochondria. I stuck close by, siphoned what I needed, and put my feet up. Well - If I'd had feet, I'd have put them up anyway - I was a thinker. I had plans.

Lazy days. I took to a bit of DIY. Tried to fix up my cell-wall. I found I just sucked at building. As luck would have it in the pond around the corner there was this funny chap, foreign sounding name - Spirochaete I think - Greek maybe. Anyway - He looked like a frightened hedgehog - All spines made out of microscopic tubules. Sturdy. Rugged. Hirstute. I took to sticking to him like glue. I dragged him over to where Mitochondria and his family hung out and I was sorted. Lazy days under the veranda."

Note though, at this point, they are not a unified structure, they are three separate genomes, three separate entities who simply prosper better if they happen, at random, to be in close proximity to one another. One provides energy, one cover, one structure. Each supports the other. But if one divides then there is one too many, if one dies, there is one too few. Either way, it disrupts the pattern of symbiocy. The only answer is for then to begin to divide synchroniously. The easiest way for this to happen is for their genomes to fuse, become one, rather than three.

A mutation that achieved this would soon dominate the resources in the area. And so from three individuals with inadequacies, one supercell is formed. Good societies work under exactly the same principle.

Now we have cells, why build bodies..? The same principle. Arms race. Speed-trials. Diversification of appetite.

Perhaps in one area exist three types of single-cell lifeforms: One cell type is better at propelling itself. One better at digesting nutrients, different nutrients. One has a supertough cell wall, or produces chemicals that hinder rival cells.

Again, these cells would do better, thrive, if they exist in close proximity to one another. If they synchronize division, they do even better, if they clump together, adhere and eventually fuse genomes using special homeobox genes to regulate the number and location of cell types produced... They become kings of the castle.

Co-operation always makes sound evolutionary sense, wether or not the participants are sentient, or even communicative, it doesn't matter.

Of course direct fusion of genomes also derails any uncooperative behaviour.

Imagine if we only had 7 huge cells: Right leg, left leg, right arm, left arm, head, torso, and balls, all containing the exact same genome, though the individual genes of each are expressed and supressed in a slightly different manner to produce the relevant properties specific to each part.

Each body 'cell' works together in harmony to support the 'balls' to eventually produce a child with exactly the same genetic relatedness to each 'cell' - 50% if they reproduce sexually, a 100% if they simply clone. Each does exactly 1/7th of the work involved.

Now - Let us imagine a cell goes rogue: While the rest are sleeping, the left arm strangles the body and knuckles off into the blue. Then it grows some balls and finds a mate. Almost certainly a pity-shag. Produces a child. What has it done..? It has achieved exactly the same result as it would have if it had just been a good little arm and stayed attached, but - For a vastly increased expenditure of energy. It did all the work, rather than only 1/7th.

Duh. Was it a good idea..?

The co-operation of all the cells in our bodies, is not altruistic. They aren't doing eachother a favour. They are saving energy. Selfish little bastards.

So - basically the rule is: However many members you have in your body-colony, as long as all are 100% genetically related to the others, and each gene within that genome has an equal chance of being transmitted into the next generation, there will be no problems with cohesion of purpose.You can grow as big as you can, it doesn't matter. The biggest 'wins'.

Only gravity and the strength of your skeleton limit you. And resources/appetite/digestion - an army has always fought on its stomach. The reason why the dinosaurs were so damn big is the same reason old American cars were so damn big - there was enough fuel lying around to render 'economy-size' pointless. Our genes learnt the economy lesson the hard way, via a meteor and an iceage. Looks like we'll do the same. We're stupid you see, shortsighted, as genes, as their products. Live now, pay later, just so long as we live.

So, the clash of the Titans cannot go on for ever. A huge body is a great energy expenditure on the part of the lifeform in question's genome for the same result - offspring. It's a trade off - huge equals longevity and long fertile period, but a slow turnover of the generations, and a less dense population. A huge bodied species is slow to adapt to gross enviromental change - weather, drought etc. - but big bodies are strong and heavily defenced if the enviromental threat is another lifeform. Conversely - Small body = less biomass = quick turnover = high adaptability to gross enviromental change. So small bodies can be built in more diverse enviroments, allow higher population densities, but they are weak, easily killed by predators.

Simple, like stone/scissors/paper: Big beats small. Meteor beats big. Small beats Meteor.

Did I say small was weak..? I did. But only weak on their own.

Rather than have one giga-organism, co-operating through shared-reproduction-cohesion, 'all your eggs in one basket' so to speak - better to have a lot of 'separate bodies' acting in unison - a society - all your eggs with little legs of their own running about the place - that way, if some get stepped on, it don't matter too much.

The problem with a colony of truly separate bodies is recreating this unity of purpose that in a single bodied creature is policed through energy conservation and homogenuity. This is the problem evolution had to crack.

ie: Any species 'wanting' dominate all others, must find a way to produce a large-scale cohesive society. This is a rule of life and evolution just like any rule of chess or of mathematics. That man is a social animal, indeed the most social of animals, the most cohesive of social animals, and that man dominates the earth is no coincidence.

Insects in eusocietes manage to maintain and mimic a 'one-body' level of cooperation by concentrating the colony's means of reproduction into a single individual - the queen.

Human societies achieve the same end by setting themselves up so that it is easier to have children under the umbrella of that society than outside of it. All else, including technology, is on-going fine tuning to support, protect and secure resources for an ever growing population, the blessing and curse of societical success. This is why politicians kiss babies, because babies are the root of all society.

This ultimately makes social structures and abstract belief-sets as critical an adaption to the living portion of the enviroment as gills or lungs or legs were to the unliving enviroment.

ie: after a certain point, the 'fitness' of a society's infrastructure inevitably becomes more important than physical genomic fitness, more important than individual physical adaptations.

ie: Evolution does not need to remain solely in the physical realm to produce physical effect.

ie: Memes. Social concepts. Have real material effect by proxy of their living hosts, even if they are not alive themselves.

The gene is dead, long live the meme.

...Continued...