Alasdair Watson

I’ve been meaning to get back to doing short fiction again for a while now – it’s a form that facsinates me. Don’t know if I’ll get back to doing it regularly, but anyway, this is an idea that’s been kicking about my head for a while now.

Dead Grey

It’s so cold in here. Everyone’s got their own problem with this job. With me, it’s the cold. Some people complain about the smell, but I just use a vapour rub on my top lip every so often – cuts out the stench, and keeps me breathing clear.

That’s more important than you’d think, breathing clear. Keeps the system well oxygenated, the brain ticking over sharp.

But it’s so bastard cold – got to be. They decompose faster than us at room temperature. They’re gone in under 24 hours at much over freezing. But it makes difficult. Doesn’t matter how alert I am if I can’t feel how much resistance the scalpel’s getting. No matter how often I study the damn charts, I just can’t get their muscular configuration right in my head. I need to feel the scalpel cutting that weird colourless flesh to get this right. Yeah, colourless. The grey’s a mucus under the skin – there’s not a lot of it, so it’s not a big problem except on that first cut.

Yeah, some of them squirt.

But yeah, I need to feel the slicing action. Can’t see the action properly through the mucus, and can’t remember the charts, so I need to feel the metal move. Besides, the charts aren’t always accurate – there are a couple of subtle changes we’re starting to notice that seem to depend when they come from

That’s right, when. Someone finally figured it out. The bug-eyed bastards aren’t really from another planet. They’re from Earth all right. Millions of years into the future. The weird radiation signature is a side effect of the time travel. God knows why they keep coming back here, though. There’s all sorts of theories about why they’ve evolved that way, but it pretty clear that they live somewhere cool and dark. I heard someone even suggested that they’re from a period after the sun dies, but that just seems crazy. I mean, even if we do evolve like these bastards, there’s no way humans would stay on earth that long. I don’t buy it. We’d get the fuck out.

What? Didn’t you know? Yeah, these things are human. Well, originally. That’s why we’ve got to keep studying them. We’ve already worked out a lot about their society. For example, we know that they don’t do manual labour – they’re just not strong enough – they can’t even stand for long periods, for Christ’s sake. The muscles won’t support it. They’ve probably got robots or something. If they can crack time travel, they can manage robots. And judging by the lungs and the liver, the air’s pretty toxic whenever they’re from – lots of filters and resistances to poisons we don’t even have yet in there.

Why what? Why do it? Isn’t it obvious?

We’re dissecting the future. Trying to work out what happens. Trying to change it. I mean, do you want your great-great-great grandkids to look like that?

Goddamn, it’s cold in here.

Spending a chunk of the redundancy cheque yesterday – a new suit and shirt, a cyberdog tshirt with flashing lights, new sunglasses, a few CDs – Cocteau Twins, Throwing Muses, Flogging Molly, and best of all, Gallon Drunk and Derek Raymond doing DORA SUAREZ, which is one of my favourite books. Not a bad haul at all. A bit more shopping to do yet – Marysia and I are probably off to Torture Garden at the end of the month, and I reall don’t have anything suitable in my wardrobe, these days.

I’m at home for a while this morning, waiting for my Thinkgeek delivery to arrive. So I was happy yesterday, to discover that the CD I had ordered for myself some weeks ago, Steve Earle’s COPPERHEAD ROAD was going to arrive as well. How very convenient. And arrive it has. What I wasn’t expecting was The Pixies DOOLITTLE from my wishlist, sent by my friends Fin and Ciara, as a “sorry you lost your job” gift. I feel somehow strangely ungrateful, given that I’ve rudely gone and already got another job. :)

If you’re in the Croydon area, their band Set In Stone is playing at The Cartoon on Sunday night (about 8:30), and you should turn up and show your support.

Thanks, ladies.

Julius Caesar’s weblog. A marvel, my children. Not enough people give do creative things with history, which is just a crying shame, and to see something like this is just ace.

If this works, I’ll have just posted to my Livejournal using my Visor. If I’d known that was possible, I’d have signedup to LJ long ago…

I have been made redundant, and will shortly collar a large cheque (although not as large as first thought, dammit) as a result. I have then scored two weeks holiday, followed by a new job that pays better.

It’s good to be me.

That’s a morning’s work done, then. When I’m done writing this, and blogger publishes that, I’ll run a script, and this will publish to my livejournal in an enitrely automatic manner.

I’m not in the office today. I’ll be in for my last two days tomorrow and Friday, but I’ve got a job interview this afternoon, so I’m staying at home. I’m got nothing dreadfully pressing to do in the office anyway. So far today, I have got up, done a bit of work, done my yoga (I’m going to try and do at least half an hour every day, while I’m unemployed) had a shower and some breakfast (museli with fruit – someone please shoot me) and am sitting down to work. Today’s jobs – the first stage of a PHP script that will convert a blog entry to a LiveJournal post, and some notes toward The Thing With Sean.

If you look to the bottom of my menu bar over there, you’ll find a new “Now Playing” section. This is dynamically updated whenever I click a shortcut on my desktop, with whatever information on which MP3 my copy of Musicmatch Jukebox is playing right now (or the last one it played, if it isn’t running now). No need for me to type or FTP anything. I’ve been meaning to sort something like that out for while. I like the “Now Playing” option on livejournal, but I’m not on LJ, and I’m too lazy to type it by hand, anyway. So I’ve sorted it out for myself, in PHP.

Photos from last week are now available – WEFUK on Saturday, Fiona’s birthday on Thursday, and Huw and Michelle’s do on Friday, along with some shots of London sights (rather more shots of them than people, actually). Here’s the one I like best, just to be going on with: