Sue Thomas
 sue.thomas@ntu.ac.uk

http://www.innotts.co.uk/~thomas

^^^^Bring your lovers and trap them in The [+]Net[+] of Desire! ^^^^

Here you are weightless in the dark, spinning in the soft velvet air.

Your bodies are

*everywhere*

~twisting~

and

~coiling~

lusciously pleasured by the delicate tendrils of the Net of Desire.

You have a thousand limbs - or none.

^Stretch out!^

^Reach!^

^Open!^

Louise scans through the mail once more, then closes it and moves into another window. She will scribble a short note later, before she leaves for the day.

Right now, she takes another sip of her coffee and sets down the mug carefully next to the keyboard. It’s nearly time to head for home, but first she wants to leap into the knots and streamers of cyberspace just one more time.

Like millions of other netsurfers she’s constantly looking for something new. And there’s always something new to be found.

Louise is light-skinned with mid-brown hair. The tan she has acquired from three years on the West Coast of America is starting to fade. She dresses a la academic, in comfortable unsophisticated skirts and blouses. On the back of her office door hangs her stained cotton lab-coat, streaked black from silver nitrate and spotted with a range of unidentifiable yellows.

The computer is encased in pale grey plastic and has a small purple label at the top right hand corner of the screen. It is quite noisy, and produces a loud hum which at times can turn to anxious grinding as the hard disk struggles with itself.

People often see in Louise a warmth which is more illusion than reality, and she has learned to react to this with a calm and distant friendliness designed to keep them well away. Indeed, she has found this summer of enforced isolation really quite enjoyable. She’s finally finished a major paper that never got done while she was in the States, and she’s learned to surf the internet. It’s ironic that for the last three years she could have accessed the net any time, and yet she hardly ever used it for anything other than email and the occasional chemistry search, but here at home, where most English people think of cyberspace as some sort of science fiction invention, she’s finally discovered the World Wide Web as the playground it undoubtedly is.

Over the last few weeks, her small office has become a portal to worlds known and unknown and Louise has fallen head-over-heels in love with her machine.

She is bewitched by it.

She can't come into the office without switching it on.

She thinks about it all the time.

Who’s logged on?

Is there any mail waiting?

What's happening out there?

Has she missed anything while she was away in Real Life?

This is her desire for the machine in action. She is not yet properly aware of her longing to enter it and be entered by it, but that knowledge will soon come. For now, she fritters away her time adjusting the settings and downloading software she will never use. Any excuse to slide the mouse across its pad, to tap the keyboard with hungry fingers and suck in images through her greedy eyes.

It’s early September and the corridors of Midland University are very peaceful right now. Most of her new colleagues are still at home or sunning themselves on a Mediterranean beach somewhere with their families or lovers, but Chris is five thousand miles away and has already returned to the classroom grind. If Louise had stayed in the States the term would already have begun and she too would be labouring at the chalk-face, but here in England teaching does not start until October and so by transferring here she has somehow been granted an extra month of leisure.

Meanwhile, she is falling faster and faster into the increasingly tangled World Wide Web.

She’s already learned that the information superhighway waits for no one. Even as she turns to answer the phone or goes to buy herself some lunch it continues to roll onwards like some enormous snowball, collecting jewels and detritus alike as it forms one ever-larger amorphous lump.

And she just can’t bear to switch it off!

When she goes home at the end of the day she burns with jealousy at the inequity which situates the machine here at the university. By rights it should be resting beside her bed, bathing the room in a soothing digital light, winking and glittering to comfort her through the long nights when she cannot sleep.

But the fact is that it does not belong to her, and it is far too bulky to carry back and forth, so each day she turns it off and goes home alone. Then she sleeps just a little - just enough to dream about broad azure ribbons of hot light streaming through the air, whilst back in her tiny office the machine dozes uncaressed in the darkness.

Every night, alone between crumpled sheets, she floats through the ether while voices call out to her as she passes...

'Download the latest software!' click here

'Send mail messages to all your friends!' click here

'Listen to this...' click

'Look at that...' click

click

click click click click

The bluest blues, the greenest greens.

Pink.

Yellow.

Ochre...

Oh! she loves this machine. She adores it! Sometime she imagines herself thrilling to its electric touch, wired up, surging with ecstasy.

Every morning she is in her office early, logging on, tuning in, conjoining with the world <out there>.

The first thing she does each day is look for an email from Chris. There’s always something. Occasionally pages and pages, but more often just a few lines. That morning there had been a short note, but now the machine suddenly beeps again and brings another mail.

Her brow furrows in thought as she fingers the gold chain around her neck, Chris’s parting present. Does she really want to go back for Christmas? She’s not sure.

When she lived in California it had surely felt like home. But in the years of her growing-up Witham had been home too. Now she’s not sure where she belongs, but cyberspace is fast becoming much more comfortable than any other place she has known.

Her computer is set up so that it opens several windows at once, and each holds an application she uses every day - molecular modeller, word-processor, spreadsheet, email, and web-browser. She can glide smoothly from one to the next with a simple twitch of the mouse. Right now, she directs the flickering arrow onto the angular N of Netscape and double-clicks, staring rapt at the screen as her pupils expand, her skin tightens, and her breathing quickens in anticipation. The red dot glows brightly, searching for a starting point, until...

Now!

Connection is established. She glides forward into virtuality, her brain opening itself wide like a rolling summer sky in cinemascope.

The beeps and clicks of her synapses tune in with the fast running machine and together they sweep melodiously through the sea of information parting before them as they approach.

This is meat and electricity conjoined, as they should be, as they were designed to be, as they always have been. Now, in virtuality, the partnership is enhanced and extended beyond the physical as it surfs into the realms of pure spirit.

She hurls herself into the web and wanders through interactive fictions where stories grow and come alive before her eyes.

She peers through remote cameras at fish swimming in tanks thousands of miles away, and stares at the sun rising on the other side of the world.

There are paintings, conversations, diagrams, stories, letters and even music. There is a flower shop, and a cookie jar <<help yourself!>>, and a remotely-controlled garden where she waters a thirsty begonia in a lab somewhere on the outskirts of Helsinki. There are archives, histories, memories, oracles.

Oh, she has found many wonders.

But now... just now... she comes across a type of site she has never seen before, never even heard of. It looks fairly dull - she almost glides past - but something stops her.

What?

She leans back in her chair, takes a mouthful of cold coffee, and skims through the information.

There are no graphics, no sounds, just a long list of places with rather cryptic annotations, and at the end of each one the familiar underlined blue text: Click Here.

Near the top of the page there is a tiny box in which the word HELP flashes in day-glo orange - perhaps it’s this glorious spurt of colour which keeps her there long enough to click and enter:

She smiles in amusement. An anonymous page offering portals into other worlds. Intriguing! But should she try it?

Curiously she scrolls to the end to find out who compiled all this information but there’s no signature, not even an e-mail address. She presses the Reload button to make sure the whole document is there, but it’s no better. The thing still seems to tail off into the ether, as if the last entries got lost somewhere during the transfer. Or maybe they disappeared a long time ago. Or perhaps they were never there in the first place...

Like Alice confronted with the tiny bottle, she ponders for a moment.

<<Drink.>>

If she does decide to enter one, which will it be? She scrutinises some of the places on offer:

Fun? She's forgotten what that is.

When was the last time she had ‘fun’?

And so Alice makes a decision - she lifts the bottle to her lips, doubleclicks, and enters PuppetMOO.

*** Connected ***

%%%%%%%%

Welcome to PuppetMOO!

%%%

Here on PuppetMOO you can be anything you want in as many bodies as you can invent.

You are limited only by your own imagination.

We ask simply that you respect the wishes and desires of other players, however bizarre or unusual they might seem.

Have Fun!

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

Today your name is Hummingbird_Guest.

Now what?

Louise stares at the screen, bemused, re-reading the text over and over again. It tells her she is in a room, but it doesn’t look anything like a room. There’s no picture, just a screenful of words. She has no idea at all what to do next. But finally she gathers her wits and types what everybody types when they are confused in computerland.

HELP

A readme? What the hell is that?

Suddenly, jerkily, the screen starts to scroll again:

You look around to see a voluminous Chesterfield sofa upholstered in an embossed purple velvet. But as you snuggle down into the luxurious material, far more expensive than you could ever afford to own, you feel something pushing into your hip. Reaching down into the cushions, you pull out a small machine the colour of dull gunmetal and with a minuscule keyboard. As you turn it curiously in your hand, a line of text appears.

Hi! Ask me anything. Type ‘help’ followed by the subject of your query. For example, try this: ‘help begin’.

She does as she is told, typing slowly and carefully.

There is a short pause, then the text begins to scroll. She is surprised to see that it is quite formal and carefully written, bringing an oasis of calm to this cyber-madhouse:

The Internet holds many secrets. It contains huge amounts of data, but finding what you want is becoming an almost arcane art. The World Wide Web links many of these places together, but there are still plenty of sites which are also accessible by lesser-known routes.

One of these routes is called Telnet, a very simple text-based system which allows you to log into remote computers and type/talk in real time with people around the world. Telnet can be used to access public databases (like university libraries, for example) but it also provides access to hundreds of Virtual Worlds, each one created and maintained by some research project somewhere, and each one providing a permanent and constantly growing imagined environment rather like the ‘consensual hallucination' described by William Gibson in Neuromancer. They’re called MUDs (multiple user dungeons) and MOOs (MUD, object-oriented).

You can visit these places, build homes in them, create objects, make friends and have virtual sex in them. Some people even get moo-married in them, although moo-children seem much less common.

MUDs were originally designed to enable gamers to roleplay online in real-time. Think of a game like Dungeons and Dragons, where you're given a character to play and various powers and objects to go with it - to be able to be invisible for example or to own a magic saddle (if you think that could ever possibly be useful!!). Now imagine playing this game with other people not around a board in someone's front room, but on a computer network. Imagine that the forests and castles you fight and frolic in are preprogrammed so that they're always there, and your character remains yours for ever, so every time you log on you go back to where you were before with the same spells and possessions etc.

Now imagine a similar world but one where you don't choose pre-designed characters - you invent your own. And you design your own body. And your own buildings. And belongings. And every time you log on, there it is - you just slip into it like a familiar suit of clothes. And of course there are other people moving about in the world too, and generally they're all anonymous.

What makes these places different from the multimedia hustle and bustle of the World Wide Web with its realaudio and Cu-seeme and quicktime movies is that they are created solely out of words.

There are NO PICTURES.

Everything which exists here is built out of text alone, and indeed, it’s sometimes hard to decide which is more real - the player/character, or the flesh-bound typist who services their needs.

However, as a guest here, your range of abilities is currently very limited. You may, however, apply for a character name which will allow you to fully participate in life at PuppetMOO.

If you would like to join us, type HELP @REQUEST CHARACTER

There is no doubt. Without a second’s hesitation she types the line and enters her request.

Thank you for your request. It will be processed as soon as possible. Meanwhile, please accept a free trip to The Sensorium!

And she is whisked off again to...

As soon as she enters, Infrared announces "We have a new guest! A beautiful humming-bird! Just look at those feathers!" She smiles and starts to unbutton her blouse.

Era blows Hummingbird a kiss and Louise suddenly realises that *she* is Humming-Bird Guest. She is the recipient of that burning gaze which seems to shimmer across her skin like a long-fingered caress.

You shiver.

What?

You shiver. She realises that the machine is telling her what she feels, but there’s no need - she’s feeling it anyway. When Era’s thin lips break into a slow smile and the machine says ‘beneath your clothes your skin has become as hot and sensitive as an open wound’ it is speaking the truth.

Infrared takes your hand and kisses it softly, but even as you thrill to her touch Era whispers "She can’t speak. She’s only a puppet..."

But how can such a temptress be just a toy? You look at Infra’s description:

As you gaze at her, she runs her finger around your mouth and slips it inside for you to taste. Puppet she may be, but her flesh is warm and sweet. Meanwhile, Era traces a line along your arm and smiles.

"But *I* am no puppet!"

Your lips wet with Infrared, you turn to stare

Era smiles, while with fluttering fingers Infrared kneels to part your thighs and begins to caress the softest innermost skin.

This is too much, and you recoil from the puppet, unsure.

"Just a moment," protests Humming-Bird Guest, "None of this is real..."

"Real? Am I not real?" murmurs Era, and at the sound of her voice you’re seized by such a mad desire to devour that silver flesh with such fine red and blue markings that when she takes your arm you have no choice but to submit.

"Come!" she insists. "Play with me in The [+]Net[+] of Desire!"

The room fills with purple light and for a moment you are overcome by a strong scent of lilacs, and when the brightness fades you are alone with Infrared in The Sensorium. Era has gone.

Undeterred, the puppet smiles and begins to unwrap the length of crimson satin binding her breasts. She offers you the silken cord, but before you can take it a voice whispers inside your head "Join me!" and you are pulled through a corridor of air into a pulsing emptiness.

"Steve! Where did you put the... oh... oh... I’m so sorry..."

Shocked, she jumps to her feet. Her heart is pounding. The door has been pushed wide open and in its frame stands a tall angular man running his fingers through his hair and blinking repeatedly like a mole who has rushed into the light.

"I’m so sorry, so sorry, so sorry... I thought... Steve... where is he? This used to be his room. I’m so sorry.."

"It’s ok," she replies, her voice shaking. "We all make mistakes. He’s moved to Room 106. I’ve been here all summer."

She is amazed that she can speak at all. Did he see her, looking so distracted, her wet fingers pushed into her mouth? Her face is strangely red and hot and her head feels like it will burst at this sudden interruption, but he seems not to notice her distress as in his embarrassment he actually advances further into the room rather than backing out of it.

She turns back to the computer and quickly minimises the MOO window so that its place is taken by a screenful of red and green atoms, but he has already loomed up behind her and is peering over her shoulder.

This is another intrusion which she considers inappropriate. One’s screen should be private. She has always thought of it as rather like queuing at the cashier’s window at the bank, when each customer must keep a discreet distance from the next. Personal space, she believes, should be respected at all times. But this guy seems to have no sense of the invisible markers which dictate the protocols between "someone I’ve never met before" and "person I’ve known all my life".

She feels herself pull away, but at the same time recognises this as an instinctive intellectual reaction which does not really mirror her physical response. That, she realises, is a little more complex.

"I’m sorry again," he is saying. "Not only did I barge in on you but I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Oliver Ashby."

"Louise Green. Are you in Chemistry too?"

She stands up and they shake hands awkwardly.

"Ah, no. I’m not at the university at all. But I live quite close by."

"Ah."

Now that they have called pax he can’t just leave. First they must exchange a few niceties. And since they’re both staring at the images dancing on the computer that seems to be a good place to start.

"This looks pretty," he remarks. "What is it?"

"It lets you build molecules on the screen." Grateful for the diversion, she demonstrates the program. "You use it to predict how they’d look in 3-D. Here..."

She hands him a pair of stereo spectacles, one lens red, the other green.

"Take a look."

He puts them on to find the space between his face and the screen suddenly full of twisting angular creatures, but as he reaches out to grasp them his fingers encounter nothing but empty space. They are there, and yet not there. Real shapes have been projected, shuddering with newness, into thin air. Incorporeal figments of a joint imagination - designed by Louise, deciphered by Oliver. A consensual hallucination enabled by the marriage of a highly complex machine - the computer, with an extremely simple one - the coloured lens.

"Very nice! So this is what you chemists play with all day!"

"Hmm. Play with...well, not quite. If only!"

She smiles, and so he presses on, encouraged.

"But I’ve guessed what you’re *really* up to! You can’t hide it, you know!"

Her hand on the mouse gives a little jump, making the arrow shoot across the screen for a second before it comes to rest, quivering, at the centre.

"May I?" He’s going to enjoy his little joke.

He reaches past and takes the mouse as her hand moves automatically as if to retain it before falling back into her lap.

"Oh well," she is thinking resignedly. "What does it matter? I’m only surfing the web a little. And he wouldn’t have clue what a MOO is anyway. Besides, it’s all stupid. Be anything you want to be! As if I’d want to be any different anyway! I’m happy enough as I am..."

All this is running through her mind as he clicks and brings up a small rectangular screen.

"There! Minesweeper! Best little game ever written! I could see it peeking up from underneath the mail window!"

He clicks around a few of the squares and, sure enough, he steps on a mine.

It explodes.

"Hah!" he laughs, but when he looks at her he realises she is not amused.

She puts out her hand.

"You’re still wearing the 3-D specs."

Chastened and embarrassed, he returns the glasses to her meekly.

"Sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude. I..." He reverses, moving well back from the desk. "I’m always getting in the way. I do apologise."

But he’s so clumsy with this. People always seem to think he’s too close.

Poor Oliver. Keeping his distance is something he is still learning how to do, even now after all these years, and whenever he feels uncomfortable with people, as he does now, he can sense the whirring search engine in his brain as it goes off on the trail of some ancient cached memory which might have some faint relevance to the current occasion.

Louise sighs inwardly with relief. So he has not discovered her after all. Now it’s her turn to be embarrassed. She wishes she had not been so abrupt, and tries to put him at ease once more.

"Oh well, okay, I confess!" she tries a smile and seems to manage it. "I admit it, I’m a Minesweeper addict!"

Actually, the game just came with the machine. She’s never even noticed it before.

But he has heard nothing of what she just said. His mind is far away, remembering his mother and that so very un-intimate family bed. Then he intercepts her glance and starts.

There’s a small mirror on the wall beside the door, and as he catches a glimpse of himself he suddenly realises he looks a terrible sight. His chin is stubbled at the end of a long day, his gaunt frame draped in a worn beige shirt with badly frayed sleeves and to top it all he has lost a button somewhere - the neck of the shirt is hanging open to display his bony chest strung with thin dark hairs. When was the last time he went shopping for clothes? And - oh God - more button problems. He surreptitiously fastens the left side of his collar and makes a mental note to smarten himself up.

"Well, sorry once again. I have to get going now. It’s nice to meet you."

"Yes, and you too. Nice to meet you too." Now it’s her turn to be embarrassed by her clumsiness in echoing his words. She had believed that California had cured her of her English reticence but the moment she stepped onto English soil again her personality had closed up and shrunk back to its former mummified state.

"Room 106, you said?" he calls through the wooden panelling.

"Yes. That’s right." Her voice from the other side of the door is muffled and distant.

Standing out in the corridor is not at all the same as being inside a room with her. It seems as if fragments of her atmosphere are still clinging to his clothes and he feels dizzy with the abundance of her soft brown hair, choked by so much creamy skin. As he climbs the stairs to 106, he curses himself.

If this were a line of program code, he could rewrite it and run it again and again until it worked to his satisfaction, but sadly it is not. It is a human being, and a rather recalcitrant one at that, and unfortunately there’s no user’s manual for this type of interaction.

Meanwhile Louise is quietly locking her office door to keep out any more blundering intruders.

Seems a nice enough guy, she muses, for an Englishman. She chuckles to herself, imagining what Chris would have to say about that comment.

And then... there is also a very vague feeling of having met Oliver before. But where?

Never mind. She has more interesting things to do. Carefully, she moves through the screens from window to window, past graphs and directories and E-mail alerts until finally, at last, a tiny orange icon appears, floating in the pink clouds of the desktop. On her click it expands to reveal once more the ephemeral and fragmented list, and she is able to continue at the point where she had been interrupted.

She checks her watch. She wants no more interruptions. Will there be enough time before the porter comes round to lock up? Yes, surely.

But she can't afford any more panics. Carefully, she pulls down the bookmark menu and saves the page. If anything goes wrong now at least she'll be able to get back here later on.

Now, at last, she is ready!

But...

Suddenly the whole thing seems a little too risky.

How terrifying!

She gets up again and paces the room, stretching out her arms to feel the muscles exercise themselves, sensing the separating out of sticky vertebrae down her spine one after another, and the lifting of each sluggish rib.

Well, she thinks, why not? It’s only virtual, so it’s perfectly safe. None of it’s real, after all. Not in the sense of being true.

Each night I climb up the ladder and snuggle down into my bed. The mattress and pillows are stuffed with fresh sweet-smelling hay and there is a round hole in the wall. Through it I can see the mountains and beyond them right down into the valley.

Beyond her office window, and past the sports field, a narrow lane winds its way up the hill. The Chemistry Block is hidden away at a distant edge of the campus, just where the countryside remains untouched by development, and this ancient pack-road leads straight into the village of Witham. Many people here live within walking distance of the campus - it’s an attractive rural site and very pleasant to saunter through even on a damp evening like this.

Now she stands at the window, exercising her aching neck. Her limbs feel sleepy and unused, as if she has been in hibernation all summer. Outside, the bare foot-printed ground is studded with fragments of silvery gypsum, and today each one glints like a cheap jewel in the pallid light.

When she turns back once more to her desk the screen is winking like a fairground hawker trying to pull her into a murky booth.

Oh, come on! She says to herself. This is silly. All that’s happened is no more than a simple textual interaction with somebody somewhere else in the world who also has a screen and a modem and a keyboard. Era had seemed like an inhuman, almost unhuman personality, but really she was a simple deceit. An invention.

It was just somebody typing.

Louise remembers a guy who had once come to dinner, Jerry, a friend of Chris’s. After the meal, when they were all a little drunk, he had showed them how to log on to an online internet chat room. But it had been very different to PuppetMOO. The screen was tidy and controlled, with little boxes for text and the names of the participants and all sorts of switches that allowed you to be private or public as the spirit moved. Not a mass of interwoven text running so fast you could barely keep up. And of course, the people, as far as she could tell, had been real. Not puppets, or women with engraved and tattooed skulls and clothes crackling with electricity.

As he filled his glass for the tenth time, Jerry had confessed he was an addict, that he logged on every night and had dozens of friends and lovers.

"Oh really?" said Chris. "But how do you know if they’re men or women? Doesn’t that bother you?"

He had clearly fielded these questions a million times before.

"No, it doesn’t," he replied. "You get to know people in a different way on the internet, and it may sound crazy to you but there just aren’t as many barriers in real life."

"I’ve guessed it!" Louise had nudged Chris. "I bet he’s a woman online!"

"Yeah, one of my personas is female, sure. Does that bother you?"

"Oh! Well, yes... it does. It makes me look at you in a whole different way..."

All the time he was talking, Jerry had been sitting at their home computer flipping from one chat-room to the next, dipping in and out of conversations and throwing in a contribution now and again, but at this he stopped and gazed seriously at Louise.

"So, does that mean if you met someone online and became close to them and then later discovered they weren’t the gender you thought they were, you’d break contact with them? Is that what you’re saying? Even if they were the most incredible person you’d ever met? Even if they were the love of your life?"

"Of course she would!" interrupted Chris. "Because she’s in love with me, so that’s not likely to happen is it?!!"

"Oh no!" cried Louise.

The two wrapped their arms around each other and presented an aggressively united front to Jerry, who just winked as he continued to scour the ether for an interesting chatroom.

"Ah, here’s one. This looks like a serious conversation. Let’s lurk for a while and listen in."

Somebody called Lawrence B. was telling John Xentophanes about the death of his wife from ovarian cancer. While they were talking, Mary-from-Kansas joined them and it turned out that she too had suffered from this disease but was now in remission. The atmosphere was gentle, supportive, and excruciatingly open and soon the room was silent as the three concentrated on following the conversation. Louise had been impressed but also desperately embarrassed by the honesty of the talkers. She could not imagine ever wanting to participate in such a public activity.

But Chris soon got impatient. "Just a bunch of people who can’t relate to anyone unless they’re hidden behind a computer screen. Literally! I don’t know why you find their sad little lives so interesting. None of it’s probably true anyway. I bet they’re making it all up."

Louise had not argued back, but later that night she had lain awake next to her lover and wondered how Lawrence B. was feeling, and worrying about whether the cheerful Mary would suffer a regrowth of the tumours which had already nearly killed her once.

The next day, when Chris was out, she had tried to log on again to see how they were but could not find the channel, and as time passed she forgot about it.

But now she has discovered PuppetMOO, and although the atmosphere is not at all the same, the medium of online exchange is identical - she had typed a line, and Era - he? - she? - had typed a reply. It was only the content which had transformed the whole interaction and made it so incredibly compelling.

Compelling, yes. But not a good idea.

The whole thing makes her nervous.

And so she decides against it. There are quite enough people in her life from day to day without meeting any more.

And so she turns off the computer, locks her office door, and starts for home, leaving the most recent mail from Chris forgotten and unanswered in the belly of the quiescent machine.

She makes for the hill over which, to the south, lies the village of Witham. A spread of post-war houses with greying roofs and white painted walls, each long garden lawned and trimmed with privet, and beyond them the older cottages coiled around the church spire like a snake in its nest. Just outside the village is the source of everyone’s pay-packet, catalyst for the building of the estate and also, two hundred years earlier, for the tall church spire: a series of long single-storied sheds, powdered with white dust - the gypsum works.

Louise grew up here, stitched into place by the pull of invisible threads joining her to the factory, the village, and the landscape. Sometimes she had wondered if it would ever be possible to leave, but university and then America had severed the ties quite neatly and surprisingly painlessly.

But now she is back. Living in her mother’s house with none of her own belongings because all her books, music, domestic items, even nearly all her clothes, are still in the San Francisco apartment she shares with Chris. Louise has nothing here with her beyond herself, her own body and thoughts. She had expected six months or a year of seeing out the days with her mother, but that was not to be, and now she is stranded in Witham, bound by a twelve month contract to a place she thought she had abandoned long ago. Her job back home is filled until next year by a temporary replacement.

The sky begins to fade and soon it will be dark. From up here she can just make out the eddying white dust along the margins of the road below, and the faint noise of heavy lorries entering and leaving the plant. There is a humming of machinery too, making a steady undertone to the rustling breeze and the goodnight calls of wood-pigeons. In the weakening light the pale gypsum glints up from the footpath and she stoops to harvest a lump from the soft mud. She rubs off some powder with her finger-nail and blows the tiny glittering crystals out into the darkening air. Some sticks to the skin of her palm and without thinking she licks it off. It scatters instantly on her tongue.

Yes, she thinks, but what do I want to be?

What am I now?

"Play with me!" Era had said.

Already she wishes she’d gone back to PuppetMOO.

She glances around to check that she’s alone, and then raises her voice in a strange new song which has suddenly come into her mind.

It is high-pitched and peculiar, a little like the tuneful humming of a modem, and it trills inside her mouth while tickling the sensitive inner skin of her lips in a most sensuous fashion.

High above the tall pylons whirr and drone, echoing the deep-down rattle of excavation conveyor-belts, and she knows she is connected to every electron everywhere. Treading the path as the autumn evening gathers itself around her, Louise elaborates upon her song, a sonar whistle bubbling up from far inside the earth.