He got up from the little grassy hillock, closed the laptop, pushed the antenna back in, and gazed down the incline. The remains of a road were still visible, dual tracks in the white, sandy soil leading thru young bushy plants here and there, a few tall lanky wildflowers stretching up trying to catch a little sun between the large pines at the edge of the once-road. A few pine seedlings were growing where the ditches would normally be. A few thumb sized ones were growing in the middle of road. As he set off down the slight incline a whip-o-whil cooed mournfully in the distance; they always made him think of those old Hank Williams songs that always seemed to be twanging almost subaudibly in his grandfolks farmhouse, the little radio up in a perch in a corner by the kitchen. A bob white did its bobwhite sound to his right. What was the real name of the damn bird he wondered? Although he had left the tarmac road only about a half mile back, even the occasion car sound had disappeared.

As he got further down in the hollow, clouds of huge dragon flies took off and flitted around confusedly, snapping this way and that for the mosquitos hovering over the small sluggish stream, which he could barely see thru the willowly ferns and tall feathery things. It all had a primeval southern gothic look to it, a setting for some cheap Peter Fonda movie about moonshiners and fast cars. He forded the stream on a few broken planks laying in the water and the corrugated metal of a collapsed culvert. He moved a few feet up the road to an outcropping of rock whic had been exposed in the middle of the road. Do some hell on the undercarriage of a car now, he thought. As he reached it, the partial spoke internally, <<You realize that it will be dark in approximately 2.7 hours >> Never should have had the damn thing put in. He ignored it, sat down on the rock in the dappled shade and snapped open the notebook.

"My father certainly had that sort of worrying obsessiveness. But yes, wory, worry, worry, that's what I do best sometimes I think...sometimes it doesn t even seem to have any content, just vague, persistent forboding. (in high school my friends used to kid me because my father would say -- repeatedly of course -- `if you don t get an education, you re doomed, doomed!' As it turned out I was doomed anyway. And you know, my father was a teacher--an `educator' he liked to say--but I never once saw him read a book. In fact, I don't think he ever read a book in his life. At least I never saw him with one...of course I don t count textbooks...) Well, maybe partly it s sort of a southern `wise blood' disease passed mysteriously thru the generations A sort of Old Testament emotional plague and apocalyptic ferment coming from having to sit in too many tents, with sawdust scattered on the ground, and a couple of naked 60 watt bulbs hanging over a few scattered pews while some farmer/preacher harangues a few other farmers and their scrawny wives and their tow-headed kids, some of them still in their bib overalls, the preacher ranting and raving, but a strange kind of energy coming from poor guy, despite his painful articulations. But mein gott how I despised that!! And hated it more and more the older I got. But you know it was part and parcel of life in the town generally...so I had no choice but to hate everything. But a lot of that came later. When I was a kid it was actually pretty idyllic, riding my bike out to the grandfolks farm, picking blackberries down by the stream. I remember the cows used to keep the side of the hill by the stream, down from the farmhouse so clean, like lawnmowers had gotten to it..."

He looked up from the glowing screen -- hmm, sun HAS gone down quite a bit -- and glanced out at where the pasture used to be. nothing but piles of discarded pulpwood, scrub bushes, a lone pine tree here and there under the lengthening shadows

"...and collecting arrowheads from the hillside next to the farm (Chocta indians used to live at the end of the old dirt road. My grandfather used to catch possums, put them in a 55 gallon barrrel, feed cornmeal to them to `clean'em out'--scavengers you know--and sell them to the indians) while my grandmother made yellow cornbread on the old wood stove when I would arrive on my bicycle. Did all that shit really happen? No way to prove it...unless I go there--and what kind of proof is that, now? None. I could be sitting at home or be at the `farm' typing this and it wouldn' t really matter, would it? It just seems entirely too...too quaint maybe. I always used to fantasize about having an observatory on the side of mountain around the farm. Think that was some kind of escapist fantasy? Yeah, maybe...that' s also the time I started reading loads of science fiction novels. Hey, sometimes escape is ok, you know? I may have quoted this to you before but I like the quote that goes something like: `those most intent on preventing escape are the jailers..' and that just about says it right there. But there was always too much haze and humidity to look at the stars very much. Now New Mexico (or Arizona, or Nevada)...wow, stars like grains of sand, scanzillions scintillating away, seemingly a few feet from yr face..."

He glanced up to swat a mosquito, simultaneously hearing his partial <<Robert, You have 47 minutes, 18 seconds before sundown. I would advise returning now. You have dinner scheduled with your mother tonight and....>>

<<Yes, thank you Richard>> If he didn t respond the thing kept blabbing away...besides it was right. He abruptly got up, frightening something in the brush to his left, and headed further up the hill and toward the bend. He was determined to at least LOOK at the old farm, even if he couldn' t linger.

His boots slushed thru the foot tall new-green soft grass as he trudged around the bend, bending limbs from now-overhanging trees out of the way. Grandpa Raylor would certainly have been mortified if he could see the condition the condition of the road he worked on so hard by horse and by hand. A newer gate was set up five years ago to keep out hunters but of course it hadn t done any good. Old beer bottles and cans were scattered around and even on the other side. Stepping around the gate, like apparently everyone else, he hurried thru what was seemed to be the rapidly growing gloom. Crickets, frogs, and few other unidentifiable scrapings were getting louder as he approached the old farm house....which was more or less completely covered in kudzu he could now see. A bit of chimney sticking out (he remembered the smell of hickory logs on late winter afternoons--the only heat for the whole house, other than the wood stove in the tiny primitive kitchen; couple of cats used to sleep under that stove. He remembered sitting on a tiny stool gazing thru the tiny mica window at the glow.) Can any of this be real? He looked up at a few early stars beginning to flicker thru the clouds. Sunlight still played on them, giving them a reddish tinge; a tiny sliver of moon was out simultaneously. For some reason he began remembering ghost stories from his childhood and he shook off a slight chill.

Privet hedge had grown up 10 feet high all around the front porch, mingling with the kudzu...where the hell had the kudzu come from? Never had been any on the farm that he could remember.... The whole scene began shifting, from external to internal and back again, getting into the pink 57 chevy, the old horse and buggy (fancy two-seated, black with red-stripping), the chickens roaming around the yard, like some fuckin' computer simulation--or Twilight Zone episode. The place where he slipped off the horse because daddy didn t cinch it tight enough; the attack of the giant rooster; all the barns, sheds...gone. He had thought about going inside but he couldn t bear it. The abrupt collapse of time was too much. All of a sudden the universe was entirely too malevolent, time an actual palpable <thing> sitting, hanging in the very air, in the gathering damp, in the goddamn stars that were now coming out entirely too rapidly, some ghoul entent on gathering HIM up in its damp tentacles, folks beginning to clamour for attention in his head, DEAD folks at that, just too much. He began backing up rapidly, stumbling over a fallen limb in what used to be the old sandy drive way (it had originally been U-shaped, with two gates; he had first learned to ride a bike in that sand). He turned and ran, around the gate, thru the grass, kcking up fireflies, round the bend, half sloshing, half jumping over the stream. Something big jumped into the water. Part way up the hill, he turned, shifted the notebook to the other hand, and breathing deeply, looked back over the decimated farmland, a blasted hell of redneck loggers, fires they had set, gotten out of hand...Ghosts--maybe they had killed all the ghosts--or at least driven them away. A dog barked in the distance as he turned and trotted up the hill, not quite so spooked now but still not very much at ease.

He felt somehow...denser inside than when he was a kid, like there was too much stuff packed in. Not necessarily good stuff or bad stuff or even particularly interesting stuff...just events and then the decay of those events in some sort of an inexorable progression of which he surely knew the end. Fuck. He never used to think like this. He KNEW he shouldn t have come back...this was worse than those pictures flipping thru his head at night. Wasn `t this what he had spent whole decades of his life trying to avoid? This kind of mournful, melancholic crap...

He picked up speed as he reached the top of the hill, hugging the laptop tightly to his chest, the dark closing in, time thickening, turning into some howling void, filled with crickets, deafening cicadas, like the 3 K background radiation of the universe, now a godforsaked screeching; even the stars seemed to have lost that timeless feeling for which he had always valued them, turning into ash heaps of radiation, harbingers of BAD infinity...

He always liked that three mile walk back, even with the occasional pick-up truck whizzing by, a finger or two lifted off the steering wheel in an almost familial greeting. It was almost completely dark when he finally walked up the driveway. Lights out. Nobody home. He guessed she had forgotten about the dinner engagement. The lights came on automatically as he entered, sitting the laptop on the table on the way to the kitchen to get a beer. Popping it open as he sat down, he opened the computer, saw he had a response from his recent uplink but moved to another file and began to type:

Mardak sat at her desk, staring glumly through the large open window. In the soft summer twilight the quiet snuffling of a horse drifted thru the firefly encrusted night--a myriad of stars in between herself and the barn, the universe closing in--past the satellite link dish and echoed faintly off the large screen behind Mardak, in the near dark, its surface pulsating w/purple, occasional flecks of interference-white appearing randomly. In the distance she could hear the booming of the first of the night s Change Storms coming thru. She leaned back to his desk and picked up the statuette of Thoth, ancient Egyptian deity of harmony/order. Figurines, statuettes, funerary figures, scrolls, and seemingly more mundane objects of all kinds covered part of his desk and most of one wall, setting an eerie contrast to the aluminum/plastic/electronics which configured the rest of the space. The location of the station in such an isolated farm region (well, there weren t any more farms...the Change had seen to that) made it an even more archaic-seeming decision on her part. And enclosing the impervious, at least for all practical purposes, monitoring station in the facade of her great grandparents long demolished farm house made her even more suspect in the, well, she guessed you could call them `eyes', of her superiors. Such sentimental attachment to long dead essences most definitely did not fit in with the Change. She carefully picked up a bottle of glowing blue liquid from the stack of similar octagononal bottles at the side of the desk. As her uniform sleeve slid back from her wrist a patchwork of thin lines glowing with a similar intensity, so intense where they crossed, it almost seemed purple, revealed themselves, terminating in a complicated, dense pattern in the palm of her hand.

The Anumalesh, that s the closest name that's been attempted for them/it, had been making their/its presence known on the surface of planet earth for about 2 years now ever since they broke out of the cometary shell surrounding the solar system, at sub-luminal speeds. The 5-mile-long object threw a much larger `shadow' on detection screens on earth at the time, evidently due to some sort of force field effect. And of course the Change Storms which began shortly after the object's detection, have been attributed to the Anumalesh. These were apparently temporo-spatial distortions which created roving `hot spots', often accompanied by great atmospheric disturbances but sometimes not, which seemed to activate objects in unpredicatable ways and occasionally `fuse' them to the consciousness, thru the unconscious, of whoever happened to be in the hot spot. Sometimes this elicited memories of the most personal kind; at other times the thoughts/memories/imagies seemed to be of a cosmic, almost mythological nature. In fact at times the images / hallucinations / apparitions seemed to be drawn directly from some sort of species collective unconscious...and sometimes that species did not seem to be that of the predominant species of planet earth. It seemed as if the planet itself wanted to reclaim some aspect of the human species back into itself, resorb humanity back into its womb. Some people theorized that it was some form of interrogation that the Anumalesh had put into effect, a way to gain a complete "demographic" of the whole planet, although demographic seemed to be too light weight to account for the effects that were going on. More like a full PET scan while on various psychotropic confessional drugs. Whatever was going on, in five years it had changed completely the direction and nature of life on planet earth--and the changes still seemed to be going on. It was more than most of the population of the western, industrialized countries could take evidently; the suicide rate had skyrocketed. The Changes seemed to effect a certain percentage of the population in evidently horrible ways. Few of those so effected elected to stay around to explain to the more fortunate. It seemed as if a new evolutionary force had been put into effect with a vengeance and time scale that mocked the very idea of evolution--more like a pogrom. If it weren't for the huge increase in births.

She unlocked her hands from behind her head, removed her feet from the desk, turned to the flat screen to her right, turned the computer on and began to type:

He got up from the computer, stretched, and walked over to the old couch covered with a large faded country blanket. He laid down, crossed his legs and laid his arm over his eyes. Immediately he felt exhausted. It seemed like he hadn't had any sleep in days. And there it was again ...like some monstrous cyclonic force, lines of agitation, brute force, destruction, crackling lines of lightning forking through turbulence, constrained by some force not endemic to its own construction but finally, and awesomely: nothing but a thin shell swirling around an empty center. And it moves of course, the center moves, thereby it seems, um, `alive' or at least some sort of rudimentary will seems to be present; but a strange volition, one based on the crackling energies of the surrounding rotational winds. Yes, that's how it felt sometimes when he got up in the morning, like somehow there had been an emptying during the night, an evisceration of himself through the aegis of surrounding high tension currents/differentia somehow sucking everything out and zapping them, some sort of metaphysical soulbug killer (was he really being emptied or was it just a realization of how empty he was, that there was not, never had been anything at the core--and worse, that the same was true for everyone, that there were nothing but these thin violent crusts interacting? Had Something left--or was it just hiding?) Even the dreams had mostly deserted him, the one signpost he had that he might still be alive at night and not really fully occupied by some monstrous anabatic Other that seemed to be continually pulling him apart into strings of Brownian motion, then taking the particles, shards into the updraft of that thin shell of interactive systems that increasingly seemed to be a "him". He remembered reading about the Great Red Spot on Jupiter and that it might be the result of something called a Taylor Column, a fairly stable pattern that showed all the way through the turbulent layers of atmosphere, and was itself the result of extremely high winds that were somehow `caught' around some surface feature. But maybe, maybe, that was some kind of hope! If we were all Taylor Columns didn't that mean there was some sort of `surface feature' helping to generate it? But such speculation was useless--one could never make it through the turbulent layers to ever find that feature. And to make it worse, the winds seemed to be picking up, the electrical activity increased to a a web of scintillating lines criss-crossing, penetrating the shell, yes, taking on a life of its own almost (But wait a minute! After all it was HIS life wasn't it?--but it seemed to be collapsing into a not-his-life somehow, into the life of that fluttering, crackling crust. Which meant maybe a was-never-his-life. He didn't know whether he was terrified or ecstatic. And maybe there was a very fine line between those two anyway. Like Dorothy being swept from the flat plains of Kansas, surrounded by bits and pieces of her life, swirling by, fire fed by wind, a blowtorch melting experience, words, lives into a fine ash, a crematorium of souls whipped into dark clouds moving at fever pitch toward an ever receding horizon/Emerald City maybe searching for that surface feature to hook onto but everything had become a desert, a flat bleakness scoured into a geometrical precision by millenia of passing vortexes gathering speed as the terrain becomes increasing leveled, speedier, fed by roving skeins of electrical currents. He felt a great mystical fervor overcoming him, the emptying, hollowing only one part (necessary perhaps; inevitable certainly, in the long run--which was actually very short--of mortality, `consciousness') of a great Battery of energies and their flows, circulation patterns becoming visible, absences and presences all forming the same sort of vortextual collapse structure, the old in/out, out/in matey, ego becoming a vacated site and the vacancy of more importance (though `not of the moment' as was the ego--the interactivity skills of the vacancy seeming to belong to another dimensional structure) than its recent occupant. And besides it didn't seem to be completely, truly vacant. The desert of the center seemed to teem with ghostly bedouins, remnants, revenants of previous collapses, though now gaining their/its own form of diaphanous `solidity', possessing a peculiar `granularity,' particulateness through aridity, like all deserts. And like all deserts it no doubt teemed with life, but life of a different order, rhythm, and tension.

Moonlight filtered thru scudding clouds momentarily illuminating the woodgrain floor, shiny plastic coating reflecting back halfopened curtain window pane dividers as he crossed to the laptop, flipped it open while standing, pulled a chair over while he simultaneously logged on.

He turned to the window just in time to see the moon disappear completely in an interminable cloud bank, pitching the room into a darkness relieved only by the glow of the screen. The pip-piping sound of the automatic coffee maker echoed from the kitchen, along with a slight uneven hiss. The torso of a lone walker passed on the road in front of the house, baseball cap on, turned backwards; halfway across the window the walker began to trot. He turned to the keyboard.

He punched the third message up first and began to read:

Dear reader, either what you have just read or what you are about to read is a subterfuge, but a subterfuge to what end it is not clear, just as it is neither clear what is the fictive and what is the true here; perhaps, in some peculiar fashion that only those in love can speak of, it is both. Certainly, in these days, it is far from the authors task to try to fix those meanings....although what choice is there?

Perhaps there are those who would question placing into the public arena at so hasty a juncture such intimacies; yes, unseemly, and even apocalyptic in their own personal fashion upon some perhaps; most assuredly the letters are the result of the perforation of certain boundaries then holding them up to see the thin shafts converging to a certain meaty point. To those never involved in electronic information transfer they say no doubt: thus was it ever. Others may not be so sure.

As to why the writing should be exposed at all: perhaps its their gift to each other.

(They proposed the following as an introduction, after the above introduction [which have all been posted letters, at one time or another, which were also introductions of a sort], prelude to a last gift in The Last Days. The reader is warned that certain conventions may come and go...this warning being one of them.)

"...I do not have the courage not to write: I write to you, I write myself to you, I fail, but at least it is to your address. I dedicate to you all my wanderings, for which I do not ask you to forgive me.

...

But I am afraid of silence, I speak of you silently. I say to myself: <be quiet then. And write: nobody will read you in your presence. In your life nobody will not listen to you.> I do not know how to be completely silent...I cheat. I say to myself: <Write. When you write, you speak to no one.> But I am not unaware: if I write to nobody, it always reaches someone, myself first of all, which does not reassure me."

Helen Cixious/The Art of Innocence

"I have always been a gambler. It's a skill that comes naturally to me like thieving and loving...we gamble with the hope of winning but it s the thought of what we might lose that excites us."

The Passion/ Jeanette Winterson

"It is, however, a question of making a withdrawal, in order to let him try his luck on a gift without the least memory of itself, in the final account, the remains of a body, a pile of cinders unconcerned about preserving its form, a retreat, a retracing only without any relation with what, now, through love, I just did and I am about

to tell you--"

Jacques Derrida/Cinders

He turned from the screen to the window just in time to see the moon disappear completely in an interminable cloud bank, pitching the room into a darkness relieved only by the glow of the screen. The pip-piping sound of the automatic coffee maker echoed from the kitchen, along with a slight uneven hiss. The torso of a lone walker passed on the road in front of the house, baseball cap on, turned backwards; halfway across the window the walker began to trot. He turned to the screen and began to read the rest of the third message. The first Storm of the night seemed to be crackling in the distance. Would he be able to retrieve her next message before the Faraday Cage went up? Faint, violet flickering lit the tree line in the distance...