It is the twenty-third century. Herb, a young entrepreneur, returns to the isolated planet on which he has illegally been trying to build a city-and finds it destroyed by a swarming nightmare of self-replicating machinery. Worse, the all-seeing Environment Agency has been watching him the entire ...
After a tumultuous beginning, mid-23rd-century Earth now peacefully operates under the constant surveillance of the Watcher, an all-seeing AI who has seized control of the planet—and of the minds and bodies of its people. But is the radical evolution that the Watcher has in mind a step forward or...
Society in the twenty-third century runs smoothly and peacefully with the aid of Social Care operatives such as Judy 3. Meanwhile benevolent AIs, under the control of the near mythical Watcher, seem to have solved all mankind's problems, and with their aid humans have begun to explore the surroun...
I headed to Belltower End to look for Second Eddie. I hadn’t heard from him in some time, and that’s never a good thing. In my line of work, it’s difficult choosing a good number two. He has to be competent, but not so competent he might get ideas about taking over your role. Was Second Eddie off...
Smile no so sweet, my Bonnie Babe: And you smile me so sweet, you’ll smile me dead. She’s taken out her own little awl And pulled the metal from her sweet Babe’s head. She’s lit a fire by the light of the night moon And there she’s melted her sweet babe in. As she was going to the forge She saw a...
The heat was almost unbearable. “There’ll be a way off,” said Francis. “Someone will give us a lift.” I was only half paying attention. I was thinking about my mother’s message, about Kaolin, about Jean-Michel Ponge… “This place isn’t like Dream London,” I said. “In Dream London everything was sh...
Metal pumping and flexing, pistoning and scraping, stretching and bending across the earth, metal tearing into the ground, thudding deep into the soil, metal rising up into the air in a swarm . . . The swipe of blades, the crash of cannon-balls, the spung and ricochet of bullets, the whirling of ...