untitled.

The Maglev train sped just above the flat red metal rail; causing it to resonate with a gentle hum. Its four sleek cars were glowing underneath, with a visible line of electro-fire energy. That also sent in its flaming wake, violet spirals and sparks of pink spiked fingers of light; that stretched out along the rail behind it.
The train was accompanied by two other sounds. The gently falling rain, that hissed in the rising ever spiralling, late summer winds; together with the slow rhythmic, tapping scratch, made by the ancient desert crab spiders, who scuttled upon the old dry bones, that came up out of the long gone rusted sea; on this pale October morning, of the ghost planet, known to the earth men as Mars.
Inside the air conditioned train, the gentle clicking of the rain against the grey stained glass windows caused Shev Bland to look over her shoulder. As she stared, something inside her jarred; whether it was a vague memory recall, or something from the great consciousness, she wasn’t sure. She was certain that there was a message here, from somewhere, trying to get through. So, she turned upon her seat and moved closer to the glass; vaguely noticing how her triangular shaped face became a misted reflection upon the Martian dawn.
She noticed how the rain hit the glass firstly as single droplets, then, as the rain became heavier, she noted how the droplets became linked together, moving in slow, rhythmic pulses, against the forward movement of the train, leaving a water trail in their wake.
Is there something alive within the rain? She thought. She moved even closer, to study what was happening. Yes, she thought, they’re gathering together. It’s as if they need each other to grow…its acting like a living, micro-organism… it’s moving… like a snake…like a snake made of water…a water snake…we… need to work together…
She smiled as her mind made the connection. Her oval, pale blue eyes twinkling with wonder, as the image of a water-snake ran through her mind. Its water eyes glimmering; its water tongue extending; and as it slithered away from her, its water scales glistening like a prism, through the ever encroaching dawn, that shone through the grey window of the train. For a second she was lost to herself through her imagination; giving her a feeling of complete freedom and total bliss.
In the instant the idea was conceived, it moved from the Cerebrum and into the dream centre of her brain; where the idea became processed into an inner visual image. However, when the idea stimulated the inner visual cortex, it became a politically dangerous concept; a concept that the Northern Block Confederation of Earth would regard as a “creativity crime”.
She knew she had been caught, when she felt the all too recognisable twinge in her head just above her right eye. It lasted a second, but that was all it took to scare her into action. At first she felt frustrated with herself for letting it happen. Then at the system she had come to despise. She looked at her left hand and at the pearl crystal implant she had been born with; a gnawing agitation growing inside her.
How long have we been off the grid now? Less than a year…? She shook her head, her eyes becoming sad confused and then frustrated. ...Holder! It’s easier being a part of the grid! At least being a part of the grid meant- then she shook her head, because she knew the grid was not the freedom she had experienced since they moved to Mars.
She looked down sadly, and her mind raced.
With the Grid freedom meant a compartmental mind. A secret place where imaginative free thoughts could be allowed to grow, yet had to be shared before the warning was sent to Core Command; and then to the branch division of firemen. Freedom also came with a price tag of three hundred and fifty Renminbi a throw. That’s how much it cost last time to have the Nano blockers. And they needed updating every six months; which means there has to be a supplier that could be trusted. That’s also tough as the underground has little trust for me now and keep their sources tight behind a wall of silence. Except for… Dexter Sloat… she shuddered at the thought of him. Dexter was a bald little fat man, that smelt of stale sex whose sweaty effeminate looking hands, touched her intimately, simply because she didn’t have the fucking Remnimbi to pay for the injections.
That was why they had moved to Mars in the first place. She had no idea that the Grid had even reached Mars. She looked up at the crystal display that ran along the side of the train. The numbers were running the time down before the train docked into San Angeles. Two hours twenty minutes the screen so over three hundred Kilometres?
She went back to looking at her left palm, hoping that the tiny crystal implant would not change colour. But as she stared, the crystal changed colour, from a glistening pearl white to then ominously flash; red then black and back to red again. Blinking, off… on… off…on… letting her know that the illegal thought had been recorded on her bio-server and that a message was being sent to core command.
Not long now, she thought grimly.
‘Fuck!’ she said tensely. Her voice was barely a whispered hiss between her teeth.
She looked at her chronograph; the seconds began to take what she felt to be an eon. With painful desperation, she fought against her mind.
She told herself that the idea she had just had was rubbish. It was the wind, which wrapped about the train. She kept telling herself. It was the wind that pushed the rain, along in thin lines. That’s all the wind…the wind, yes the wind created the illusion of of the window snakes, that there are no such thing as window snakes and that there’s nothing mysterious, or mystical about it, in fact I just want there to be something mystical about it. I want to believe in window snakes. The dream is mine…mine…mine.
She repeated the phrases over and over and over. Like a Buddhist mantra. Until the little crystal dot upon her palm returned to glowing silver once more. Then she sighed and slumped both from exhaustion and relief.
She looked at her chronograph and smiled. Only one minute had passed. If she had not been that convincing, then the fireman would have been upon her at the next stop, and that would have meant internment. Her smile was cut short by the hard sounding electronic voice inside her mind.
‘Shev Bland 20, 10 2078 U8363824, you have been sanctioned for a minor creativity crime. You have been cautioned, one more offence and you will be…‘ the automatic response continued with its cause and affect threats, words that she had grown up with for so long she had never known any different. How many times had she been interred? five times, in five different camp’s. No one was interred more than five. It would mean the probe…
She had known one person who had been probed… David Preston… when was that? It must have been over fifteen years ago now she thought.
She smiled as she recalled his long curly brown hair, and his bright green eyes. He was so in touch with the great consciousness, he seemed to glow with inner electricity. A writer and beautiful poet; he seemed to resonate with something beautiful in the world. But he was also a major thought criminal, having written two books of poetry and one book of philosophical ideas that were being passed about the inner Web, the school and the underground night clubs.
Her parents had not been happy when they found out, but she didn’t care. Within a month of meeting on a hover train, and spending long summer evenings in core central’s park three, she had found that they had shared a connection to each other that was so deep, to her it was as if they were the same person. Within a year she had left home and managed to move into a small flat in the basin district, a short walk from park three.
Then, one fateful night six years ago, the firemen came in the middle of the night and stole him away.
For six long weeks she went to her district headquarters to find out what had happened to him, and for six weeks no answer came from the hard eyed supervisor behind the high desk.

to the when he was returned, six weeks later, the truly beautiful person she had known had been turned into the walking dead. The right side of his head had been clean shaven. And black wire stitches stuck into and out of the swollen skin of his skull in a frightening serrated arc.
With a dismissive shrug of her shoulders, that concealed her deep feelings of anxiety, she ignored the rest of the inner mechanical conversation; in the hope that it would go away. She shook her head and shrugged her narrow shoulders, then ruffled her dyed burgundy hair away from her face. Then she rubbed the sleeves of the heavy looking purple jumper she wore. In themselves they were actions any ordinary observer would consider having no real import. Yet for her, and those like her, they were vital; for they controlled the thought process and gave her a chance to get some control once more. They also told others that she had been “tapped.” Underground slang for being caught free thinking.
She rubbed her tired eyes and looked towards Jacob. She thought about telling her soon to be ex-husband about the incident; as she knew her movements had been ignored. But she saw how intently he was tapping into the A.I sheet that he had on his lap, His freshly shaved head gleaming with beads of sweat. So with another shrug of her shoulders she decided against it.
She looked at Jacob, and recalled those early years when they lived at Core Central. She recalled the long hard days at the factory, where she spent her time grinding out munitions parts, Pumping out steel and squeezing lubricants onto metal machines that would become the robots, built to fight the ever continuing war with the Southern Co-operative; mixed with the heady sweaty nights, when the tender muscles between her thighs felt soft, gentle and warm. She would tighten upon his choad, as he slowly thrust into her, causing her to gently tingle all over, while his moist and tender kisses filled her with electricity as he slowly teased her with his tongue. Mars was the chance they both needed for freedom, but it also ended their relationship.
Now they sat at forty five degree angles and away from each other. The green white and grey plastic moulded table between them now acted as a no-man’s land which she had decided she never really wanted to cross any more. So she slowly returned to the view from the window and the ever constant twilight, of the Martian day.
* * *
Shev and Jacob had left their home for the last time at a little after four in the morning, E.S.T. and in some ways she was glad to do so. As far as she was concerned she was leaving behind a hideous, grey and white corrugated metal box that was ugly, mass produced and conventional. Its only real benefit had nothing to do with the house at all, but the choice of its position, where the view from its porch was a breath-taking for it stood on the edge of the raised plateaux, just outside of the first expedition marker point, known to all the settlers, as York’s rest.
As she stared up at her home, she still felt that, despite the fact that it came from earth, there was something very alien about it. She found it hard to define why, until she thought about all the other earth made structures here on Mars.
Then a connection was made. Even the most conventional of earth like structures would look out of place on a world like Mars. A planet, she thought, that we desperately wanted to run to, yet longed to secretly shape into the very world that had we had been so eager to leave behind.
She smiled ironically and shook her head as she turned away from the house. Her breath was bellowing in heavy clouds, as she zipped up her thick heavy winter coat. Then beamed a huge grin; as slowly the warming comfort of its many layers begin to heat up as the heating system turned itself on.

She turned and then stared out towards the Martian foothills, and the ancient Martian homes that began to glow in the middle distance. As the dim sun very slowly rose, the ancient houses’ on the hills began to shine with a dry rusted light; their ancient brittle bone structure blending into the land that they were grown from. Their solar panels absorbing all the energy they needed to run their empty ghost houses. For their ghost masters, who forever haunted their ghost planet.
‘Do you think that they’ll ever come back?’ She asked absently.
Jacob stared at her, with bunch fists for eyes; his teeth yellow and pasty.
‘What makes you ask that?’ he said coldly.
She could hear his laboured breathing, as he started shifting the long green heavy metal box and knew the chill of the morning air was getting to him. She smiled. Her eye’s not concealing the enjoyment she felt at watching him toil.
‘Christ…’ he began shaking his head. ‘…Its always the same with you isn’t it? There are no Martians! They all died out after the second expedition… they found thousands of bodies… all dried up into blackened crispy paper from the pox.’
He coughed hard. A green lump of phlegm hit the cracked frosted ground by his feet. Making Shev feel nothing but loathing for him.
‘You going to help me with this fucking thing or not?’ he said aggressively.
She shrugged her shoulders and helped him place the heavy trunk in the back of the buggy.
‘There’s no going back after this, you know that don’t you?’ he said.
But his voice contained a thick edge of nervous trepidation. Yet it was not his own.
She nodded, but she wasn’t sad. The house she would gladly leave… but Mars… Mars had become to mean more than just a place to live. It had become a refuge from a world run by the Neo realist Movement. A world Of firemen, who stopped people from reading, and from bringing contaminated thoughts from outside the web. A world of medivec, a sedative to maintain an ordered mind, a world of wall screens that dully allowed nothing but neo-realism. Now they were going back. Back to the world she loathed and feared. Back to a world that teetered on the brink of one final war to end all wars.
She looked down at the long green box and smiled.
‘Better get goin’’ he said almost silently. And she nodded.
They set out in the black six wheeled land buggy. Jacob’s face a mask of grim determination that hid his real feelings. While she allowed herself the luxury of imagining what one of the old ones might have looked like, as they bounced along the ancient track that passed by one of the huge crystal and stone cities made so many centuries before. And then she thought of Gem and the flowers began to bloom.
In the back of the land buggy the box rested. They climbed a steep hill and the box suddenly slid to the back of the van and hit the rear panel with a heavy slam. Shev span a sharp stare at Jacob.
‘Ill be careful.’ He viscously growled, over the grinding of the wheels on the ancient stone. Within an hour they made the station at New-London; only managing a passing glance by the armed guard. And that was fine… Gem smiled at her, and that made everything fine.
*
Gem was one of the first born on Mars. It had brought Captain Wilder, the Colony’s commander to the hospital with a bunch of hydroponically grown roses; and a smile upon his face; just before he had been recalled to Earth.
Gem was special. She was special not only because she was the first free born from Earth. Which meant was also free from the implant procedure. But she also held a secret as old as Mars itself.
The memories she allowed to come to the surface were safe ones.
They were the faces of her long dead mother and father, of Jacob in better times even of Captain Wilder and the flowers he brought on the day Gem was born.
Jacob looked up and for the first time in two years he smiled gently.
‘Are you having a hard time?’ He asked. She nodded. But then he smirked cruelly. The rage and the pain he was in smeared over his face. The green box, kept floating onto the surface of her mind. Its contents wrapped in shadow. She fought against it and sensed Gem’s smile.
*
Gem grew fast in the thin atmosphere of Mars. At the age of four she stood as tall as a six year old. Her body slender and wisplike than the bulkier kids, who had come from Earth; which caused some mockery at the school.
When Gem came home with a bruise on her cheek, Shev went to the school. The teachers smiled but said that there was little they could do. Shev recalled the first time Gem said something out of place. She was five and bright eyed. Her hair was a rich red rust colour and flowed about her. At the time they lived in New Vegas, next door to Peter Giddings. Peter had just been around and asked if Jacob would be free for a game of cards that evening. She had said she wasn’t sure, but she would tell him when he came in. Peter just nodded and walked back to his buggy, ready for his shift at the mine. It was a normal event. Nothing strange. Yet Gem looked at Peter with a strange look. A stare that made Shev ask what was wrong.
‘what’s a fuck mummy?’
Shev’s face turned a dark, a mixture of anger, embarrassment and shame came to the surface of her mind.
‘A what?’
‘A fuck.’ There was the child like curiosity in her matter of fact voice. It was obvious that she had never heard the word before.
‘Did you hear Daddy-‘
Gem shook her head, ‘-No, it was Peter, he said he wanted to fuck you so hard. And the pictures he had in his mind were-‘
‘-oh, I don’t want to know.’
‘I don’t know what it means?’ came the whining reply.
Shev looked at the car as it drove away.
‘Did he say it when he came over the other day?’ and with that thought came a fury. She would have it out with him as soon as he came home.
‘No…’ Gem started ‘…he said it in his secret place.’
‘where?’
‘His secret place.’ She gasped as if she was talking to an idiot the thing an eight year old would do. ‘… You know mummy. The secret place where we all think things.’ Then she said something that chilled her to her core.
‘Mummy… do you want to fuck him too?’
Shev stared at Gem. Then she said coolly. ‘Just stop this! Now!’ She began. ‘And if you do use words like that again, then I will be very angry with you. Do you understand?’ And in her mind Shev had an image of her spanking Gem. Gem took a step back and began to cry.
‘Don’t spank me mum, please?’
Shev hugged her. ‘No darling, I promise, just remember…please try not to go into… peoples have secret places… and these secret places are for us alone.
Six years passed and Gem grew at twice the rate of the other children. Her heavy golden hair was tinged with lines of rust. It blew about her narrow face, her once blue eyes has a glimmer of gold in them. Her voice too had deepened, she was supposed to be ten, but in her actions and her talk she was that of a teenager; with all the joys and sorrows that a growing adolescence brings. Moreover her and Peter had become very regular, regular enough to consider getting away from Jacob. She was considering this when she stumbled into Gem’s bedroom three weeks ago.
Shev caught her balancing a ball in her bedroom, two inches from the palm of her left hand.
‘You don’t love Daddy any more do you.’ Gem said coolly.
‘That is none of your business.’
‘It is my business.’
‘Now you listen here young lady.’
Gem laughed as Shev felt herself being picked up and thrown bodily across the room. Then she felt an intense weight slam into her. Making it hard to breathe.
Gem giggled, there was a little of the old Gem there, but not much. Something had her now.
‘You can’t leave me, not with him.’
‘I wasn’t… I’
‘Don’t lie mother!’ Gem Howled.
‘Gem, sweetheart.’ Shev wheezed.
‘He’s touched me mum!’ Gem screamed and threw Shev down on the bed.’And I am changing every day I hear them calling me calling me getting stronger telling me to go to them but I can’t and I won’t you hear me! YOU HEAR ME!’
‘My darling, what’s wrong?’
‘This is wrong you him me this… everything here is wrong MAN DOES NOT BELONG HERE! ON MARS! They tell me the ghosts tell me they come into my room after he’s been and they tell me that they have a plan a plan to stop it all to-‘
The door burst open and Jacob stood there. Blood was pouring from his eyes and he screamed and screamed. The floor burst open and two faceless ones arrived.
*
The train began its final turn into new frisco. It came to a halt. Shev and Jacob made their way with their package, to the gate that led back to the rocket ship to earth. Then People began to cram in bustling past. Fighting for a place. Shev looked down and looked at the metal box that they carried between them. Then she smiled. She stared at Jacob. He smiled back with cold hate filled rage. They knew what they had to do. And they would do it. The box would open on the way home, and the final message sent from Mars would reach Earth a year later. The message would be a final one, that would tip the balance and bring the war.

From the Martian foothills, Mr.Aaa looked at Mr. Zzzx. Their golden eyes met, yet not a word came from their mouths. The package is being delivered. Thought Mr.Aaa. Mr. Zzzx cried a single golden tear.

Appendix 1.
The loss of freedom the growth of the Grid against the supreme conciousness. ~
AS A SOCIETY GROWS SO ITS NEEDS BECOME EVER COMPLEX, ITS BELIEFS CONSTANTLY REACTING AS ITS CITIZENS REACT AND COUNTER REACT. THEREFORE A GLOBAL SOCIETY WILL HAVE TO OPPRESS ITS CITIZENS IN ORDER TO MAINTAIN SOCIAL ORDER.
The philosophical issues that are being dealt with in this book are not that complex, but for ease of reading FOR MYSELF I thought it might help explain the ideas that brought this together.
I have come to believe that there is a form of great consciousness. Plato considered this, but never took his idea to its conclusion. Faraday considered this and Tesslar is known to have said “I have come to believe that there is a great global consciousness, that I am a conduit of.” This great consciousness has had a huge impact upon society, both for good and for ill.
The dystopiean world I have been creating is a recognition of that consciousness, its great success’s and its enormous failures. The Grid as is man’s construction of this consciousness. Yet, Like in Plato’s concept of the reflective image; its only a reflection of the real collective consciousness. The people in a position of power know this, and to prevent connection to the great Id, it subjects its citizens to a form of control. This comes in the shape of nano machines that work as a radar, preventing creativity of thought.