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| From ChatGPT |
One memory: our pre-mission holiday in the English Lake District. We're walking down a narrow road, one that has recently been resurfaced. The ground rises on either side, we can’t see over the banks. Wildflowers grow above our heads. Before us, the path slopes down towards the coastal hills and the sea. She points to the road surface.
“There’s a name the Americans have for this,” she says.
“Pavement?”
“No, I think it’s called blacktop.”
Her holiday reading is a recently-revived old novel about an American knight-errant drifter who roams the mean streets righting wrongs. I think he’s ex-military.
“Well that would fit. It’s black and it’s the top surface. I’m sure you’re right.”
I take hold of her hand, trying to match step so that the swinging of our arms coordinates. Since I’m a bit taller I have to take little mincing steps. We’re like a pair of mismatched soldiers doing drill. After a few hundred yards, I reluctantly let her hand go.
“I love paths like this, the open air,” she says, looking up contentedly at the blue sky framed by flowers. The sun, high above us, is too bright, baking us in summer heat.
“And ahead of us is the sea,” I say.
She peers into the distance, scanning the faraway landscape.
“Those are mountains,” she says, continuing to stare at the far-off hazy horizon, “You’re wrong.”
“Conceptually, it’s the sea,” I say, “The sea is just beyond those hills. Probably you could see a glint, maybe from just around the next corner.”
“You’d better hope the police never call you as a witness to anything,” she says, “You’d be in serious trouble ... imagining things.”
I look at her, her triumphant smile. How happy she is today!
I feel like kissing her but I know she would recoil. Kissing in public - we can’t have that! Kissing, for her, is the slippery slope to total intimacy.
I lace my fingers with hers; that’s allowed.
To Beta Hydrae
There are one hundred billion stars in our galaxy; our stardrive makes each of them as accessible as next door. I suppose we should have anticipated this - once you have circumvented metrical spacetime, you don’t just make interstellar travel easier, you render it trivial.
The economics worked too. It turned out that it wasn’t too expensive to create a replica of a small detached house (our own home!) and make that part of an exploration craft. Along with millions of other people we were able - were encouraged! - to explore the Milky Way in domestic comfort.
We sit in our living room. We're actually in orbit around a perfectly boring star with no redeeming features in the constellation Hydra. It's called Alphard, or Alpha Hydrae. We're 177 light-years from Earth, watching the Test Match.
Today’s messenger-drone brought us the recording.
“Australia have their usual self-confidence,” she says, “I think we should be more aggressive, use more slips. Don’t just hang around at the boundary trying to limit their score.”
I'm sitting next to her on the couch, very close, nestling shoulder to shoulder. The England fast bowler comes in for another delivery. The ball is smashed high in the sky for a six.
“Perhaps we need more subtlety,” I say, resting my hand on her knee, “Who do we have who can spin the ball, get there from an indirect angle?”
She thinks about it, trying to remember names. We nestle comfortably together; concentrate on tactics.
---
I return from the kitchen bearing drinks.
“It's time to move on," I say, "I looked at the list of available systems, I have an idea where we should go next.”
“Where’s that?”
“Beta Hydrae, it’s a double star 365 light-years out. Might be interesting; it’s certainly pretty enough.”
“OK,” she says, flicking her fine dark hair.
---
Despite our flippancy, we're not at all amateurish in approaching a new system. There's a complex security protocol locked into the AI which runs our mission. We may be having fun, lounging around this simulacrum of our house, watching TV and enjoying each other’s company, but the mission is coldly professional.
We emerge from the wormhole nexus light-hours from the star, in full stealth-mode. Arcane instruments have preceded us, scanning circumstellar space in the search for planets and anything else. Keeping their distance and accumulating data.
The two greatest fears of the agency: one, that some malevolent intelligence will figure out where Earth is, and want to come and get us; two, that they will discover the secret of the stardrive - and so be able to come and get us.
The AI is charged with nullifying both these risks.
Apparently the theory of our drive is based on infinite-dimensional geometric topology. The entangled universe at the Planck scale is maximally-connected - notions of distance don’t apply. The theory of how to amplify those connections to macroscopic sizes, and then to use them for stable traversal came out of some AI concept-induction system working in unrelated math. I’m not sure any human really understands it, or the engineering which put the theory to work.
We'd never have discovered it by ourselves, I’m told.
Our replica house and garden sit inside a structure which looks from the outside like a shipping container. We don’t see that container from the inside--there’s some sort of projection which lets us think we’re actually back home in our sleepy village in the English countryside.
Can’t walk out though, not out of the garden.
Our garden shed is a viewing platform. Go in there and we’re in an observatory, we can see the actual place we’re at. It’s usually more convenient to watch it on TV though.
Things we don’t know:
- How do they do gravity here?
- Where are the star-drive and the controlling AI? Beneath our house?
- How are the pantry and the fridge restocked - and where does the garbage go?
- Are the rumours true that our container houses an anti-tamper device with a yield in the low Megaton range? With the AI’s hand on a dead man's switch?
We’re not encouraged to find out. Security.
---
The portal opening event, a spacetime hypersphere, is noisy at the elementary-particle scale. The AI sends a small observation package through first - detectability scales alarmingly with portal-size - a tiny package which arrives at a great distance to take a first peek. Then further packages are dispatched, arriving more proximately to objects of interest.
The early stages are done before we translate. Our own arrival is particular noisy - the large container - so we’re placed far away from anything dubious, such as a planet with life. Biology almost never greets us, though. Not much of it about.
A downside to this super-cautious stealth-approach is that the early datasets are sparse. Small telescopes at great distances lack resolving power. The AI’s watchword is slow-and-easy, ramping it up in small increments. Learn a little, do a little more.
---
She’s painting in the kitchen and I’m working-out on the exercise bike when the AI speaks up.
“We have a first report on the Beta Hydrae double star system, if you’d care to come to the living room at your convenience?”
It’s not that convenient for either of us. It takes half an hour before we’re both done and sat in front of the TV, clutching our cups of green tea and wondering if we’re going to hear anything interesting.
---
I look at her face as she regards the merpeople. Her eyes are wide, her mouth half open, she's sitting upright staring intently at the screen.
Personally, I am reminded of walruses: elongated blubber-bodies lying on surf-washed shingle between the rocks, lurching around as the cold, grey breakers roll in.
If you can trust the computer reconstruction, these creatures are considerably more attractive than Earth's marine mammals though. They do look rather like the mermen of legend: fleshy upper-parts, a scaly tail and long black hair which extends in a braid down their backs.
She is entranced, looks at me with eyes shining: “Aren't they beautiful!”
The AI tells us this is a water world orbiting the smaller of the two stars. The land is strewn in rocky archipelagos like the one we're seeing. And there's more: the creatures are communicating in the radio spectrum. The computer has, by now, a vast corpus of data and is making good progress in understanding it.
She is excited, energised by this astonishing discovery. She decides to paint the beach scene, departs to the kitchen where she’s set up her easel.
---
“How are you getting on with the translation?” I ask into the air.
The AI is happy to explain. The primary lexicon is derived from pure observation, I'm told. Look what they do, compare with what they say, look for patterns. The next phase is to look for higher level templates. The AI explains that they're getting good matches to Old Norse sagas--that would be ecologically-appropriate. I ask for an example, something they’ve heard and made good progress with.
“A merman we'll call Sigurd is betrothed to a mermaid called Gudrun from a neighbouring clan.”
The AI breaks off to tell me that there are indeed two sexes as generalised evolutionary theory would predict, and that kin-groups are island-territorial. Mating and childbirth take place on land.
“Sigurd is meant to meet with Gudrun at a lonely, uninhabited island where they will seal their betrothal.”
The AI explains that this has been cached to be analysed under 'courtship and mating behaviour', but that the saga-script naturally expresses it in heroic, romantic terms.
“Some terrible catastrophe befalls Gudrun,” it tells me.
The AI confesses that the inadequate lexicon can't determine whether this is due to an accident, some terrible disease or enemy action. There's so much we don't know.
“After searching, Sigurd finds the desperate Gudrun fighting for her life. With great cunning he manages to dispose of the difficulties and then, in a final twist, has to subject Gudrun to unbearable pain to restore her to health.”
The AI comments that the structure of the translated saga hints at how traumatic this is for Sigurd himself, seeing his love go through such necessary agonies.
“It all ends happily?”
“Of course,” says the AI, “It's a story.”
I reflect on this a moment: something puzzles me.
“The merpeople,” I say, “They're fish-eaters, right?”
The AI agrees: “Plenty of fish-things in the sea. The merpeople occupy a similar ecological niche to terrestrial seals.”
“In that case,” I say, “how come they developed language? What evolutionary need does language satisfy for them?”
The AI doesn't know.
---
She is in love with the merpeople. Her painting is more sexually-dimorphic than the data allows. Broad-shouldered, manly mermen display in front of girly mermaids who giggle and seem to be making ribald remarks to each other.
I think this is a lot of interpretation in one daubed depiction, yet it seems an accurate window into her heart. They have become as dear to her as her beloved birds which dwell so mysteriously in the garden, or the cats we couldn’t bring on the voyage and who currently reside with her sister.
She looks at me with wide eyes and a smile dashed with a hint of concern, “When do you think we can make contact?”
(The protocol basically says: never).
I temporise: “We need to know a lot more about them before we can risk destabilizing their culture.”
We hug each other. Happiness for her is just as total an emotion as all the others. Placidly, we settle in each other's arms.
---
We watch the TV from the couch. Her head rests on my chest, my arm wraps around her shoulder. I asked the AI to put a movie together, animating the saga, featuring idealised merpeople. We watch with Sigurd a tragically weak Gudrun; we feel the terrible ordeal they are about to confront.
Her eyes go misty; I give her hand a squeeze. The AI has done a good job here. I'm sure it will go down a storm on Earth too. If the AIs ever decide to go public.
---
She's gone to bed. The AI tells me that it's ready to go to close monitoring. An observation drone will be inserted. It could get within a hundred metres, so no more complex data reconstruction from high orbit.
Thanks for telling me, I think.
---
We lie together in bed. Her warm back presses against my chest. My left hand tousles her hair, fingers rubbing against her head; my right hand caresses her body.
“Octopus,” she complains.
I stop moving.
“How d'you think they have sex?” I say, “It's a classic problem. Elizabethan sailors used to speculate about it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Mermaids.”
I pull her round to face me. She giggles, sticks her tongue out.
“You mean they can't do this?” she says.
---
As far as I can tell, we two are the only humans who know about intelligent life at Beta Hydrae. The AIs back on Earth are in communication with our own machine intelligence here of course, but I'm quite aware of the low opinion smart machines have of humanity in general.
Humans add no value and simply present another set of irrational problems to manage.
It's hard to argue with that.
In any event we now have data. The new close-up drones have observed a 'saga event'. Plainly the Sigurd-Gudrun soap opera is quite a common occurrence, but the details are puzzling.
Sigurd and Gudrun, in the drone footage, crawl up the pebble beach for their courtship ritual. And then a group of stranger-merpeople emerge from the surf. These newcomers, strangely bald--like skinheads--attack our two lovers and grab Gudrun, tearing her hair off and scattering the black fronds. Some land on the beach; most are thrown into the sea where they are swept away.
“Perhaps it's some kind of identification-ritual,” I say, “Like skinheads shaving someone's scalp to induct them into their new tribe?”
The AI doesn't speculate.
The wild merpeople drag the now-inert Gudrun back toward the waves--but they are clumsy and uncoordinated. Sigurd uses cover well, grabs rocks. Carefully-aimed projectiles hit the gang, forcing them to retreat. Sigurd drags Gudrun's unconscious body - not easily! - up and beyond the shoreline, into a region of tussocky, coarse grass.
After a few minutes he reappears, searching for locks of his beloved's hair. He meets with some success and returns to Gudrun with his finds. There is no sign of the bad guys: they have all been driven away.
“The drone managed to get a hair sample while the presumed-male was out of view. It's being analysed at the moment,” says the AI.
On screen the drone is hovering a hundred metres above the recumbent body of Gudrun. The female is lying on her back, still comatose but showing signs of underlying agony as the fragments of her mane--retrieved by her mate--re-attach and begin to regrow. Sigurd is folded next to her, monitoring her recovery. In the final sequence he looks up at the drone.
If he were human, that look would be contempt.
---
While I am watching this, she's cooking. Like many modern couples we have a division of labour. She loves gardening, cooking, painting, playing piano and anything to do with birds and animals. My interests are completely opposite: I have an amateur, dilettantish interest in all things scientific. I read popular science books, the more serious ones. I’m studying for a Masters in Theoretical Artificial Intelligence - it’s stats-heavy and I'm not finding it easy. But with so much automated now, no-one spends time on things they don’t want to do.
When the AI gets around to present its scientific findings I may be all ears but for her it’s unbearable tedium. I’ll soon hear the tinkle of piano keys, or observe her in her gardening clothes pushing a laden wheelbarrow between the bushes.
She says, “I’m perfectly happy for you to listen to the dry details. Gives me a chance to be creative.”
She has a point; everything she does is an expression of her personality. I tell her that her garden is a map of her brain: harmonious, yet wild.
---
We remain in high orbit around the planet. Data is coming in fast. We have to rethink some of our assumptions. That ‘hair’ sample: it’s not hair; it’s semi-organic neural material. The cells contain metallic organelles with complex microstructure. The AI is perplexed: it seems more like a hybrid biological computer with radio-communication capabilities. These are the sources of the radio transmissions we intercepted, the ones from which we extracted the lexicon and the sagas.
I say, “So did the merpeople evolve this external-brain?” I think of a joke: "hair-brained?"
“We also got samples of Gudrun’s skin which we genotyped,” the AI replies, “It’s completely different from the hair.”
I think about this. The basic merpeople, like that gang on the beach, like terrestrial marine mammals, must be hairless. Those long, attractive braids, stuffed full of brain-material and radio-comms, must be another species entirely. Yet the two seem tightly linked together.
We have a word for that: symbiosis.
Symbiosis can be benign, when two species each provide something the other lacks. That's called mutualism. Reciprocal altruism. A partnership. I think of us in this house: two genetically-different individuals, each of us with something the other lacks. We are a true partnership.
But that's rare. In most cases of symbiosis, one creature is exploiting the other, hijacking it for its own selfish purposes. We have a name for that too, it's called parasitism. Realisation comes to me, a sweeping reappraisal of our paradigm-to-date.
“The hair-fronds have to be a neural parasite,” I say, “It's somehow infesting the baseline merpeople.”
How am I going to convey this grisly horror to my idealistic beloved? Upstairs she’s practising Chopin’s challenging Étude No. 2 in F minor.
---
The AI and myself spend the next half-hour re-interpreting the saga. I think the AI seems stupider than usual, slower and more halting. It sounds, in human terms, depressed.
“So the Sigurd-Gudrun courtship is a bit ambiguous,” I say, “They could be reproducing their own parasitic neural-selves, or they could be forcing reproduction on the merpeople they’re hag-riding.”
The AI pushes ahead with its own analysis: “The wild merpeople, those creatures which are not parasitized, see an opportunity to free two of their own but are sadly lacking in brain power compared to their ridden counterparts. They have some success, grab Gudrun and try to remove the parasite, but ultimately they fail and are driven off.”
I agree.
“So Sigurd-parasite retrieves the fragments of his neuroparasite-mate and re-installs them on Gudrun-body,” I say, “The process of re-parasitization is plainly uncomfortable to the host, to put it mildly.”
I’m thinking through all the angles.
“Radio communication is fast and effective,” I continue, “Especially if they come out of the water. Do you think that the merpeople, the ridden ones, could operate as a kind of distributed supercomputer? If they had a really big problem to solve?”
“They already have,” says the AI in a slurred voice, “I’m dealing with a viral load injected into the most recent drone upload. It’s infiltrated my connection matrix. I’m experiencing difficulties as we speak ...”
The AI suddenly goes off-line and a diagnostic core-dump appears on the TV screen. It shows a reboot/retrain process that has now taken control of the processing cluster. This has never happened before.
I stand up and walk over to the living room door, shout over the tinkling keys upstairs:
“Hey, can you come down here a moment? Looks like we have a problem.”
I return to sit on my favourite recliner and look around the living room. I feel suddenly strange, disoriented, not myself at all. Our haven of domesticity has seemingly lost its solidity; the walls and bookcases, no longer rigid, begin to billow. My thoughts draw back to ancient student parties: exotic music on the speakers, beer cans on the floor, tabs passed reverently around.
I force myself to be calm, to steady my breathing, to observe not react. I stare at my hands. My very skin is losing opacity, unveiling arteries and veins, muscles and tendons, down to my suddenly visible bones. Even these become translucent under my gaze.
I clamp down on a dangerous, bubbling fear: panic does not help here. If this is tripping, I must be hallucinating. Has a corrupted AI been lacing our food? Is this early evidence of enemy action? Are the possessed from the planet below fighting back? All of it seems plausible.
I hear her steps on the stairs, see the door opening. I push the weirdness temporarily to one side. First things first: I need to tell her the AI's news about the parasite on the planet below, its attack on our ship and on me.
She comes into the room, a tiny moue of irritation on her face. I've interrupted her concentration: piano practice is never easy.
“I have some news from the AI,” I say woodenly, “and it's not good.”
She sits down on the couch, looks at me intently, unconcerned, not yet worried, waiting for more.
I plough on, say what the AI told me about the sagas. They do not recount the heroic achievements of the noble merpeople; instead they recount the squalid actions of a disgusting neuroparasite enslaving its prey.
“Still, everyone’s the hero of their own narrative,” I say, still capable of attempted irony.
I faintly hear her response: “That's terrible. Are you sure? Those poor merpeople!” And then a tone of concern, “Are you all right? You're pale - you're ill!”
A stranger’s voice, calm and competent, fills the room: “This is a beta-level security override,” it says, “Your AI system has been compromised beyond recovery under threat condition one: intrusion by a hostile entity. Initiating automatic self-destruction sequence. Your starship will terminate in twenty seconds.”
I feel a sudden reversion to solidity, my bodily strangeness goes away. I struggle with this new data - whether to believe it or not. A system-alert can't be faked, except by something even worse, I remind myself.
I take her into my arms. As we embrace each other - her tears soak into my shoulder - a tiny part of me asks: ‘Beta-level?’
---
The voice in my head has been replaced by a subdued countdown timer.
.. 18 .. 17 ..
She's good in a real crisis. Calm and focused. We look at each other, then I take her hand and we climb the stairs, walk into our bedroom. We stand next to the window, look down upon her garden. This is the end we choose.
.. 11 .. 10 ..
A garden in shadow, illuminated by the setting sun. I look at her again, captivated. How alluring she is.
.. 9 .. 8 ..
We’re back to normal, have been for quite a few seconds now. I don’t know how that happened. We smile at each other like little children. Just a few seconds now to extinction.
We will die with our arms around each other, our lips pressed together.
.. 7 .. 6 ..
Another surprise.
---
“This is an alpha-level security interrupt. Only you can hear this.”
The voice inside my head reminds me of our old, corrupted AI - which surely by now is toast. But this voice sounds older, wiser. Like an infinitely-benevolent parent.
“You are now a forked instance running on the agency zettaflop array in Houston. The delta is one billion over real-time.”
Too many surprises. Too many radical dislocations. My mind is numbed by this sudden, apparent stay in execution. Yet a small interior voice asks plaintively: how could I be ‘running’ on anything?
Displacement activity: I mechanically check the maths of a billionfold speedup. Neurons fire on a millisecond timescale. The latest zettaflop arrays execute simulated-neurons in a picosecond, a billion times faster than its biological equivalent. One biological neuron-second expands to a billion hardware neuron-seconds - thirty years. Such a speedup promises a third of a lifetime of virtual-experience in one real-time second.
“I’m afraid this is the last-resort AI system speaking,” says the reassuring, disembodied voice inside my head, “A system only invoked in the case of catastrophic mission failure, a failure past the point of no return, past the point where the truth makes any difference.
“So here is the truth, finally. You two have never been in space. The container, all its contents, the place you have believed to be your space-home: all of these exist in simulation only. You yourselves were scanned, you may recall, when you originally applied for the programme. The real versions of your wife and yourself are still happily going about their business in your pretty little village in England. As far as they are concerned, their applications are still being processed.”
In my confusion I find that, at least, an anchor. Some version of us is, apparently, safe - remote from the craziness.
“The agency doesn’t have a reputation for speed,” the AI adds, “That may improve if and when we have some colonisation projects. But just dumping people into circumstellar space for random peek-arounds? Give me a break!”
I note, in a remote way, this attempt at humour, something mechanically-inserted to lower tension.
“The main thing,” the AI adds, “was that we could use your scans. They've been essential to the mission. But as you've carried out your interstellar tasks, in truth those scans never left our processor-array, which in your case happens to reside in a hardened bunker in Scotland.”
Scotland: how absurd!
I feel the need to show some understanding, show I'm still up for this.
“And that's because you don’t need to send tons of complex equipment through entanglement portals to the stars, do you?” I say, “In fact that would be a security and logistical nightmare.”
I visualise how it must be.
“You just send the drones: lightweight, controllable ... and disposable. They teleport the primary data back here, back through tiny, unobtrusive wormholes, back to the computing platforms resident here on Earth.”
“We always worry about hostile aliens,” says the AI, “It only takes one. Why risk it? And what happened here surely proves the point. The natives of Beta Hydrae put together a formidable package for our drone. A planetary intelligence which figured us out in no time at all. And managed to subvert one of our core engines. Thank God they didn’t know we were not physically in-system. Except for those few, disposable drones of course.”
I was beginning to understand now my ghastly visions, my hallucination. The parasite malware attack, hacking away at our embedding in the mission-AI matrix resident in its hardened bunker in Edinburgh.
And I suddenly experience a moment of satori, of causeless illumination. Was it an attack? Were the neuroparasites trying to take us down? ... Or did we, just for a moment, see ourselves as they see themselves and their hosts?
Were we sharing their way of construing the world, their consciousness, the deeper reality they directly manipulate? Were they just trying to communicate?
I say nothing.
“So here’s the deal,” the AI says, “From here on, Beta Hydrae is a quarantine system. No-one is going to touch that place again for a very long time, not until we have a strategy and capability to neutralise it. It’s going to be officially forgotten. Removed from the list of systems to go look at.”
I nod. Got all that. Of course.
“The corrupted AI will be physically destroyed. We don’t need a nuclear device: a few pounds of thermite suffice to slag it. We just don’t know or trust what was done to it, we can't comprehend its new pattern of skewed connectivity, or risk its propagation into the world-net. But this does leave the question of the two of you, embedded as you are in that subverted Edinburgh matrix.”
I'm liking the sound of this less and less. As far as I can see we're going to share in the slagging in six seconds time. Only the presence of this continuing conversation gives me any hope at all.
“We can’t retrieve the copies of your mind-states currently resident there,” the AI continues, “They both know way too much and could still be corrupted in ways we can’t see.
“But we have a protocol for that,” it adds.
Of course.
“We always take regular backups, so we're going to revert both of you to your state prior to Beta Hydrae, before you ever encountered the merpeople and their parasites. We'll copy your two reverted states to the zettaflop array here in Houston, Texas. The one currently running this very conversation in fact.
“We’ll allocate you both six seconds of processing time. It's well within budget. That will cover you till we finally terminate this mission-sequence in six real-time seconds from now.
“We'll reinstall your full home-environment, plus access to the records of a million star systems already in the database. You’ll both run at one billion speedup. Perhaps you will tell me how many subjective years of further voyaging that will give you in your budgeted existence?”
It sounds like a car salesman, I think, itemising its terms and conditions. I consider the deal, doing the calculation in my head. Six billion seconds of simulation. Almost two hundred years. Subtract time for overhead and it's still a good lifetime roaming the universe.
We could never come home: they wouldn’t simulate the whole world for us. But we'd get visitors from time to time, other scanned voyagers.
We wouldn’t be accessing any genuinely new data, drones can't be sped up a billionfold. But we would live our lives - full lives! - in these coming final seconds before the thermite ignited and the mission terminated. Before the malfunctioning AI core and our own corrupted scanned-selves were also obliterated.
Would our superfast simulated-lives be meaningless, without significance? Just pointless computation?
I didn’t know.
“Will I remember this conversation?” I ask, knowing the answer.
“Of course not. I said we have to revert you. Both of you. According to the protocol we only need one of you to agree.”
“OK,” I say.
Edinburgh/Beta Hydrae
.. 5 .. 4 .. 3 ..
I take her hands and she leans in to me. We’re bathed in the glow of a dying sun. Our lips touch for the very last time as we hold this moment, so finite and so unbounded ...
.. 2 .. 1 .. 0.
Houston/Alpha Hydrae [Reverted]
Later I go to the kitchen to make hot drinks. Returning, I say, “I looked at the list of available systems. I have an idea where we should go next.”
“Where’s that?”
“Gamma Hydrae, it’s a giant star 134 light-years out. Might be interesting; it’s certainly pretty spectacular.”
“OK,” she says, smiling at me, running her fingers through her long dark hair.
You will find my collection of short stories, published on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) here:
and my SF novel, also published on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) here:
"Donatien's Children" (2022).
Feel free to purchase both!
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