Restoration

The restorer carefully removed the tomato soup

thrown by protesters that had infiltrated the gallery.

He applied solvent to remove the graffiti 

that had been rudely sprayed over the painting. 

He accidentally used a little too much. 

The solvent revealed the corner of another picture, 

hidden underneath the masterpiece, on the same canvas.

Further investigation unveiled a lost Renaissance fresco,

but it didn't end there: beneath that, an altarpiece,

one panel of a triptych, late 14th century. He kept going,

layer after layer: Romanesque, Byzantine, Alexandrian, 

an Egyptian pharaoh, in profile, and eventually bisons, 

antelopes, stick figures in pursuit, brandishing spears, 

and outlines where hands had been held up as stencils

directly onto the hard rock of a cave wall. 

He paused, admired his work, tripped, stumbled,

and fell against the image he had revealed,

and, oh no, erased some of the palaeolithic art.

But wait. What's this? Underneath it ... what? 

What is that? Is that stains? Soup stains? Tomato?

Scotland 2042

Vanora was awoken by the noise of drunks fighting in the alley behind her hotel. She would have avoided this journey to the dilapidated old Scapa Spaceport if she had had the option. 

Derelict launchpad facilities and disused fuel depots like this attracted people who would attack the detrivore drones that scuttled like car-sized pneumatic crabs across a sterile concrete seabed of industrial decline, pausing to strip debris for spare parts, tucking them into a basket on their back as they recovered discarded technomass for recirculation in the economy. Crippled survivors of the HaViD-29 pandemic, the hantavirus plague of 2029, a zoonotic haemorrhagic fever that originated in guinea pig enclosures in the Andes and spread to decimate the population of the world, would disable the drones and take the technomass to use in their own scattered settlements rather than surrender it to the global administration, the Kardashev Programme. 

The sun was coming up, and in the stratosphere a hazfap’s wings glistened in the dawn. Vanora’s earpiece pinged to indicate an incoming call, doubtless relayed via the network of high altitude solar powered highly autonomous pseudo-satellites, one of which she could see reflecting sunlight at an altitude of 20,000 kilometres. It was Francis. 

“Stop chasing ghosts, Vanora,” he said. He was looking out of the window of the Satinwood Suite in Glasgow City Chambers, where he had spent the night. A herd of deer was grazing in the long lush subtropical grass in George Square under the disinterested stone eye of the lions silently guarding the war memorial, and the bronze eye of a half-forgotten history that had thrust statues of men into prominence on plinths but their names into obscurity in the memory of subsequent generations. A lynx lazily surveyed the herd as it lounged on top of one of the monumental lions. The wolf pack that patrolled the deserted streets north of the river was occupied elsewhere with a carcass in Glasgow Green, prowling around the statue of James Watt whose insights there during a Sunday stroll one morning in May 1765 had precipitated the reckless consumption of energy reserves accumulated over geological periods of time that wrought devastating changes on the climate. 

“You’re needed over at the Rockall Platform. You need to take the elevator up to geostationary and catch a shuttle to the Belt. They need you to help with construction on the Scottish sector of the circumsolar helix. You speak Gaelic after all.” The habitat being constructed from material in the Asteroid Belt was helical so that rotational gravity and a diurnal cycle could be generated by a twisting motion as it orbited the Sun. Scotland had been assigned one sector and had designated it àite-obrach Gàidhealach, in line with the Obair tro Mheadhan na Gàidhlig policy, making it a Gaelic medium workplace. 

Vanora wondered when she would be able to return to her retreat in Linn Park. It was peaceful and secluded in the middle of woodland. It had been a crematorium once, but since everyone was composted these days and buried beneath a sapling in a memorial forest when they died, it had been abandoned until she renovated it as her home. 

Although Francis was an anthropomorph, a single physical instantiation of a networked artificial intelligence, rather than a human, he was still an MSP and a member of the Advisory Board of the Kardashev Programme. The global administration was elected by LPTP: last past the post. The number of candidates elected for each party was determined on the basis of the total votes cast, to establish proportionality. Then constituencies were assigned to parties in reverse order. Candidates for the party with the least seats were assigned first, in those constituencies where they had performed best, until they had been allocated their appointed number of seats. Then the seats for the party that had performed second worst were allocated in a similar way, and so on, until all seats were allocated. This meant that even if a party had only local appeal and stood in a small number of seats, if it performed well in those seats, the arithmetic of the system meant they would still win them. A threshold was applied to ensure no constituency was represented by a member of a small extremist party they had rejected. Therefore, legislatures at all levels of government, from Scotland all the way up to the Advisory Board of the Kardashev Programme, could be elected by a single uniform process applied worldwide, and the scope of governance at each level ensured peace prevailed.   

Vanora summoned a drone to take her to the Rockall Platform. After a few minutes an autonomous aerial vehicle arrived, its ceramic power cell humming with inductance from the superconducting currents it contained. The leading edges of its plasmafoils crackled as arc discharges ionised the air, to be accelerated to their trailing edges over surfaces that glowed blue and existed only as electric fields, incurring no drag. The drone rose to a height of a few hundred feet and accelerated to hypersonic velocity, the shockwave dissipated by the plasmafoil. Soon she reached the Rockall Platform: a circular shelf of ice several kilometres across, anchoring a ribbon of braided graphene connecting it to another facility in geostationary orbit. Wave energy acquired by an array of point attenuators pumped air to pressures of a hundred atmospheres at a depth of one kilometre. The heat generated by compression supported aquaculture that fed the world’s remaining population. When energy was recovered from the compressed air reservoirs, the air cooled on expansion, freezing the sea water to form the platform. As she ascended the elevator to rendezvous with the shuttle, Vanora looked down at the artificial iceberg. 

(Reposted here: originally a short piece submitted unsuccessfully to a competition - the publication didn't respond in any way, however it's been well over a year since I submitted, so I think I can safely assume it was rejected)

Black sun

A black sun sets:

an obsidian marble

dropping over the world's edge;

a bead of sooty spit

dribbling through the greasy lips 

of a smirking sunset 

streaked with colour

like a thin film of oil

smeared upon the dusky sky

as though it was the inner surface 

of a bubble. 

It falls out of sight, 

rolls over the Earth's rim

and into the fugitive light 

beneath this dim disk, 

the Lux Aeterna

illuminating the bright, 

immaculate night 

denied us in the blindness 

and febrile hallucination 

of the waking dream 

in which we reside,

through which we walk, 

which we call day.

We map this Earth 

that caps the night

with aimless wandering.

What beings follow in our footsteps,

matching our own 

on the other side of this surface?

Our sunset is their sunrise. 

While they pace purposefully,

stepping on our soles

as if walking on water,

we ricochet off each other

like billiards on baize pastures

and drop like gleaming lozenges 

to be digested 

in the tar pit pocket of our ego,

here where we live

in the bleached beached ribcage 

of the past, among the weed reek

and the piss stink, 

where we twist the tusks 

of extinct animals

to tune the lute 

on which we play

our insane solo

on a sky scraping stage. 

There comes a point 

when the difference 

between heaven and hell

is decided in a split second. 

The task is to postpone that moment, 

to stay on the right side of it,

to delay it as long as possible, 

but it is not marked on any clock face,

indeed, its existence is just a rumour.

However, the people 

on the other side of night

have already experienced 

this moment of decision

and know their fate

for better or worse. 

Are they laughing at us?

Do they feel pity? 

I an confident they do not envy us.

Mist hangs like rags on branches, 

filtered from darkness by the trees.

We speculate about hidden purpose,

guess at redemption, summon gods,

perform the ventriloquism of religion

with the images we make of them,

stuffing scripture in their mouths.

We stagger in shambling delirium,

drunk with gutter ecstasy

in this dilapidated Jerusalem

where faith and filth mix

in secret transubstantiation,

receiving soup kitchen sacrament

while Christ busks an electronic gospel,

and die no wiser than the birds

threading their farewell semiquavers 

onto the pale sun's last rays as they ascend 

into the fading noctilucence, and fall silent.