From: fabianb@tartarus.uwa.edu.au (Fabian Le Gay Brereton)
Subject: Puppet Head 0.1
Date: 29 Aug 1993 06:35:25 GMT

Hi, this is my first post to a.c.c.

I'm not sure how to represent / italics/  in ascii. I've settled on
putting stuff that is sposed to be read as italicized in slashes.

This is the first half (third?) of the story. The rest is barely
concieved let alone written so I would really appreciate comments an
critisism on any and all aspects of it, everything from my examination
of the ontology of virtual reality to my paragraph breaks.

One thing that concerns me when I read it is that it seems kinda bloated
and more concernded with language and being obtuse then with more basic
stuff like characterization or even advancing the plot. I guess thats
because the basic stuff is harder.

Anyway enjoy it and fill my mail spool with comments.
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		_Puppet_Head_

"But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited ?"
	--Kepler (quoted in War of the Worlds)

	/ Swish. Bottom of the net. My right arm is straight, up at
sixty degrees, my wrist is curled over. I leave it there - a victory
salute, grinning at Marie. /

	I wonder if I could still make that shot. Most of my inner-ear
has been mutilated. My macula and vestibular system have been replaced
by smart lumps of plastic. My perception of rotation, orientation and
angular acceleration are all controlled by the plane.

	I'm Seventy-six kilograms of chemically induced schizophrenia
wrapped in black ceramic and carbon fibre. A hi-tech homonculous head
hurtling through a bleached Australian sky at five-hundred knots.

	My cradle, free-floating within its armoured sheath, is slung
between the two oversized scram jets that form the planes fuselage. I am
hermaticaly and sensorially sealed from the world, curled in a feotal
ball, cushioned firmly within soft reactive plastics and suspended in an
ocean of oxygenated fluid. I dance in that strange sea connected to the
plane with a catheter and clusters of optical fibre, sub-cutaneous
sensors and i.v.'s attached to nutrient and chemical pumps. Each one a
magic puppet string. Most connect to the squat black helmet that
swallows my head.

	/ My fragile sensorium reverberates with rich burgundy stained
timber, high glass backboards, naked concrete and flickering fluro
lights /
	- the skeletal remains of my id. The rest of my identity has
been stripped away by chemicals. Nothing left to slow you down. When
your a complete meat-shot you don't have much to live for so they leave
us fragments - something to cling to when your drowning.
	/ The old brown spalding careers off the iron with a clang and
Marie comes down with the board, elbows flared. The score is
thirteen-telve, I'm up. She dribbles it out past the 'D' idly bouncing
it back and forth between her legs. /

	Within the stubby forward swept wings and the base of the
forward canards bundles of polymer fibres flex. The entire structure of
each wing is control surface, as they twitch we bank and the nose drops
towards the long curved horizon. The canards retract and with a violent
roar the scram-jets proper engages and the plane climbs quickly to Mach
eight.
	
	A million miles away the second sonic boom is a muffled thud.
Inside that three pound universe decisions are made - a biological
neural network to augment the artificial varieties that fly this beast.

	/ Marie's just backing me up towards the ring, I'm pinned on her
left hip. I skip around and swipe at the ball. She's ready for me;
crossover - hooks me with her right - spins towards the ring - left hand
baby hook and scores.
	"Whoo sistermine you no where. I been, I went."
	"Check girl", I kick the ball out laughing. /

	Somewhere back between the micro-channel lasers implanted in the
helmet and my visual cortex reality's happening. Ballooning
multi-coloured glass spheroids drift sedately, sparsely distributed in
an artificial computer generated space. They are concentric, almost
transparent, isosurfaces representing types and levels of threat as
predicted by the planes software. A fragile black dart threads, diving,
between the colossal green and yellow globes pregnant with angry reds
and purples. The colours dance sinuously, like spun glass, reacting to
the planes decent. At the edges of space the vast isosurfaces begin to
occlude as data becomes scarce.

	/ She sets at the top of the arc eyeballing me. I'm squatting,
knees bent, back straight, arms wide balancing on the balls of my feet.
She starts to move, I'm moving too. She pounds the ball hard with her
right but I see her eyes flick to the left. I commit and lunge and
connect with the ball as she skips it between her legs. Steal.
	"Steal", I shout it, "Learn it girl, that's what it is"
	"How can I learn whats not there, luckyslut", She trashes me
back. /

	Comically oversized navigation aids in bright primes hang
suspended over the landscape, on the ground geographical features are
named in mile high black sans-serifs. On my right periphery of vision
ethereal alpha-numerics tick over as the plane accelerates. Altitude
informs itself as a tapering background hum.

	I up the magnification and the dart is realised as a long
supersonic dragon - atrophied wings, cancerous pods, no angles and clean
lines trailing away to binary points. Vertigo threatens as I switch from
spot to cockpit view and damp down the abstraction. Now I'm a naked
blue-sky bullet, devouring whole chunks of hi-rez desert landscape at
eye-watering speeds.

	/ I slash fast at an oblique angle to the ring, Marie sticks
with me tight and low. I pull up hard at the elbow of the keyway and I
make to shoot the 'J'. Marie goes for the fake, I step around and scoop
the ball in with my left from just inside the stripe.
	"Shit"
	"Rimmed-out", she tosses me the ball  with a smirk.
	"Check", I pass the ball back out. She's still up by one. /

	A transparent luminescent red washes across my field of vision.
A wailing siren is an irritating counterpoint. Together they alert me to
our proximity to a probable zone of engagement. Unbidden the dark
brooding isosurfaces reappear, pregnant with portent. The plane begins
to flood my system with chemicals, I'm a zen warior on tap. The
scram-jets stage of the engine is by-passed, the plane is now powering
on conventional vectored turbo-jets in preparation for combat.

	/ She works her way to the post. Too strong to give her any room
there I step around and slap hard at the ball. Crack!	
	"Shit bitch, what you on." She spins on me glaring. /

	Angry, engorged with cancerous black - the centre of one of the
remote globes begins to twist and buck. Distant spiralling tendrils of
black and purple snake and corkscrew their way towards me. The planes
software has matched conflicting radar images and environmental data
with its huge database of previous conflicts. It switches to the active
detection systems (laser and IR) and trys to determine the type of
plane, its payload, perhaps even the particular pilot. Every movement
made within that shifting core of that tumour adds to an information
model representing the other plane.

	/ "I got your ticket headcase." I pass the ball out to the top
of the arc. "Fouls a foul girl, just get over it."
	"I'm up." She catches the ball and launches it, all one motion.
I leap high into the air, I want to swat her. She retains the ball,
palming it at the top of the follow through - very jordanesque. I fly
past as she screams down the centre of the key. JAM, a big two handed
break-away.
	"Happy Birthday." She howls it, she's laughing.
	Now I'm pumped. /

	Now I'm pumped.

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Copyright 1993 by Fabian Le Gay Brereton

--
 	Fabian Le Gay Brereton		"I was a big man yesterday--
	fabianb@tartarus.uwa.edu.au	 But you should see me now"