Your ship, the Antimatter, has been designated the empire's gatherer of experimental resources. It is spherical, diameter 1.8 megametres, 6 varying gravity simulation systems. Vast amounts of the ship have been dedicated to storage, living and operating quarters are positioned at opposite ends of the ship and are connected with multi-directional elevators. You have been travelling in an unknown sector, in what has been postulated as the oldest part of the universe. Of course, you have your doubts. The chaotic nature of the star systems, the blueness of the stars, nothing here feels old.

You are looking for what the crew colloquially calls "antifacts". They don't so much occupy space or time so much as change their properties completely, destabilising every scientific law without completely disregarding it, almost like chance as a quantifiable mass. Discovered by default, only their effect has been seen. If they exist, they have unlimited potential for use. You are the second ship to have come to this sector, the first lost contact around 300 years ago.

You have been finding pieces of the last ship, or what you think must be pieces. The probability of finding just one fragment of the ship hull is so minute, so completely incalculable, that you couldn't believe it. You have kept the first fragment, a fan of some making, it spins of its own accord when exposed to UV light. Quaint, really.

You are here in your private quarters admiring the object when the alarm sounds, a steady pulsing ting that lights the walls of your room an aggressive blue. You sweep on your white jacket and step towards the door when it stops as suddenly as it began. You decide to head towards the possible source of the false alarm. There are four places where it could be stationed. Either maintenance, the central dining quarters, navigation, or the storage athenaeum.

While you are walking you suddenly feel both weightless and controlled...

Maintenance is exactly like the surface of a star, a burning hunger. The maintenance team usually consists of robots made and distributed by PHRIF, himself a robot that he built himself. Now, however, there was nothing of the maintenance team, only a map that covered the walls and furniture like wallpaper, like human skin. The map was unexplored, but was also being explored, lines advanced on blank territory, filled it in. The lines glow and buzz. The room is filled with the activity of discovering. You know that if you touch certain parts of the map, you will be transported there. On the table in front of you you can see four points of the map, almost a constellation, that you feel an urge to touch.

You hear singing as soon as you enter the dining quarters. People singing at their loudest, pumping their lungs like limbs, squeezing every last drop of sound. What's terrifying is that the voices lack the organic quality or wooden timbre of natural voices, and are instead approximations of such voices. The difference was minimal but noticeable. What was more terrifying was that the songs were sung with a slight intonation at the end of each verse, almost as if asking you to join. What was still more terrifying was that the source of these sounds could not be located. They would get higher in certain parts of the room, almost as if they were emitting from the air itself. After a while you realise that only four verses were sung in this room, and only one verse could be heard. Which verse depended on your location in the room.

Navigation is a mess. Jungle creeper plants are growing all over the control desk. Tessa, Sky, and Robert and Bo who are meant to be operating said desk, are instead huddled in a glass elevator playing cards. A capybara rat emerged from behind a waterfall two seconds ago and digs a hole in the floor. The floor is no longer steel. Above your head, there is a helicopter that uses its blades like squid tentacles. It squirms in the sky. There are dinosaurs now, almost fabled creatures, they are holding fireworks in their mouth. Periodically these fireworks explode but instead of simple gunpowder flowers, this primitive resource displays an impossible chemical reaction. They explode in pixelated images that stay in the sky for as long as you can look. The pixels spell out visions of fascinating animal-machine hybrids.

The dinosaurs look at you after image is shown, seemingly angry. They are waiting for your response.

Gumping Dezial Groseph was the huzzwhat in charge of storage. He ran a pretty fun unit. Sometimes you would come here to dance the fandango. Storage now consists of a single ladder. After climbing it, you are confronted with a floating chair and table. You sit in the chair and GDG sits in the skin of an older lady with purple hair taller than your body. On top of the tower of hair was a small hat that you couldn't quite make out. Possibly a top hat. GDG asks you if you would like to know your future. You retort that you don't understand your present. GDG thinks for a moment, and then says 'Dancing. Dancing is in your future.'

You are suddenly caught between two mirrors that are somehow of four dimensions. Wherever you look is blank infinity. Each iteration of you is something completely different, and by putting yourself in your other shoes you can shift between iterations, almost as if having the power to be in parallel universes instantly. Dancing. There is a fog that obscures the mirrors past four iterations of you. It looks quite solid for fog, almost like malleable putty.

Streetlights were becoming more frequent. Karen slowed down a little, checking out shadows before she stepped into them. The buildings were grimy and overlaid with neon screenies. A tattered rights-to-life foetus had dimmed from sponge-pink to wall-grey above her. Across it someone had scrawled in red paint: 'Oldies have a Right to Life too!' Below that, there was an image of a couple in a byte car. VR cruising with their headsets on. Karen noticed the rings on the woman's left hand, the painted nails, the full-fleshed faces, the straight, white teeth. They were a whole lot different from the skinny smacked-out kids she saw hanging out at the byte clubs.

'Live Trade', Tess Williams

so yes, spend a few moments

upside down. tilt on that see-saw

of nontruth and unfiction. chase

?

Kevin Gillam, Between Ten and Twelve

Tessa Maloney, Clockwork Creatures: Birdbot

Charmhaven (Australia)

In April 2009, a young naked girl wearing clothes stood on the sidewalk outside her home. She stood waiting with her birthday, simultaneously excited and bored. She glanced up at the sky and caught an aeroplane disappearing into a pile of sweaty clouds. Meanwhile a pair of powerlines doing nothing but straight lines ran through the left side of her peripheral vision. Gradually titling her head back down, she followed the lines from telegraph pole to telegraph pole like a string of etceteras disappearing around the block, electricity travelling to places we'll never go.

A tap on the shoulder provoked her to turn on her heels. She was greeted by her friend, a young naked man wearing clothes. His eyes were browner.

Without a word he handed her the yellow box. She grinned with big bonbon eyes and pulled the Kodak Colorburst 100 from its squeaky Styrofoam.

'See if it works,' he said.

She pointed the Kodak Colorburst 100 skyward. An overexposed white square striped by a couple of black lines, they continued to move from birthday to birthday.

Daniel Hogan, Kodak Colour Burst 100 In April

You come back in, after exploring outside,

with grass clippings stuck to your fur

like iron filings clinging to a magnet.

Could it be you are no mere kitten?

Perhaps you are a new subatomic particle:

neither a proton nor photon,

neither quark nor lepton,

but the newly discovered kitton.

?

Renée Szostek, A New Bond

Tessa Maloney, Clockwork Creatures: Crabot

text by Erin Pearce, pictures by Mel Pearce

Click image to see large version

Some with blueprint skin

some with graffiti bones

some that eat their dreams

or feed through fractured skulls

?

A.S. Patric, Summer House – Doze a Sun

Tessa Maloney, Clockwork Creatures: Clockwork Butterfly

She was the daughter of a pencil salesman. Her youth was cluttered with obsolescent toys – stencils, felt-tip markers. She inherited not only her father's love of stationery, but an entire shop of such relics, on the corner of Croft and Milton. Everything there is expensive and exquisite and the place is quiet as a museum. It is with perfunctory satisfaction that Ira Pang locks her store on this afternoon, a winter Thursday, while the billboards change their colours to complement the night.

Elizabeth Tan, 'Pang & Co. Genuine Scribe Era Stationery Pty Ltd'

There is a place where people can go to heal their souls and obtain their heart's desire; and I take them there. This task is my livelihood. I guide others to put food on the table for my children. But business is scarce and becoming scarcer: this is an unbelieving generation.

…

In the evening, after I have woken and after we have had dinner, I go and sit in the tavern a town over. There I wait, hoping that a client will find their way along the unlit roads, drawn by whispered promises from word of mouth. No-one is desperate enough during the day.

Jacob Holmes-Brown, The Beach

I was the first MGM robot mega-star, long

Before those other two droids took over, my

Cult status endured cold wars, space races &

Nuclear menace. Built by Dr Morbius

from Alien plans, I obeyed Asimov's three laws:

?

B.R. Dionysius, 'Robby, the Robot'

Tessa Maloney, Clockwork Creatures: Clockwork Dragonfly

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