Aryan engrossed in his work had no idea that Shiver, Mist, and Monovalent were altering the perceptions and gaming experiences of those who paid to be part of Monovalent realms, he would have been mortified if he had. Shiver and Mist changed the gaming experience of various Monovalent realms users from whatever fantasy they were pying out, always turned it into some sort of nightmare, and inserted themselves into the game as key pyers.

  They called these little fantasies the hell-pce and could barely speak of them without snorting with malice and ughter. They kept many of these people trapped well past the six-hour-a-day limit in Monovalent realms, not allowing them to leave until the game was over.

  Monovalent analyzed the records of various users and chose ones who lived alone and who had no family members or friends living nearby so it would not be noticed if they pyed outside the time limit.

  These people were hooked up to Monovalent realm along with their little computer-controlled water rehydration units so they didn’t dehydrate as pying six hours without water could be quite dangerous in hot climates and summer. These people thought drugs or alcohol interfering with brain function were the reason they were being tortured.

  Jacob was a sixteen-year-old who lived alone in a shoddy little apartment and worked as a trainee electrician. He spent all his hard-earned money on Monovalent Realms and despite having friends was a bit of a loner who often spent day alone in his house reading or pying Monovalent Realms.

  In this game they sent him to all the inhabitants were killed off one by one by the shadow beast for rebelling against socialism. They made themselves king and queen and divine upholders of communist rule.

  The pair pyed the hell-simutors also as a nice escape from the heat as the shadow beast game took pce in a perpetual winter world where mist, snow and ice covered everything, turning the pce into a wonderful frozen city.

  Spring had become summer, and the humid heat was both nauseating and searing and neither Mist nor Shiver could stand it. The pair had been spending a lot of time in Canberra voting on parliament bills and contributing to parliamentary debate. Being so zy and also just completely disinterested in the proceedings, they were taking what they felt to be a much-needed break. Waterbaby was on the floor his sandy-gold fur bristling as he attempted to catch a little, white mouse cowering under the table.

  “Don’t hurt the mouse,” Shiver said almost imploringly. “it’s so cute, look at its big, dark, pleading eyes.”

  “He’s just hungry Shiv,” said Mist derisively. He felt a fleeting annoyance at having to look up from the musical notes he was writing. His long, slender, porcein fingers now flexed about a sheet of paper, then curled frustrated into the beautiful white hand they belonged to. Mist was composing a song for his violin, and it wasn’t going as well as he would have thought. Later he and Shiver as they did every Thursday night, pnned to sing along to lyrics from old songs and hymns with Mist’s violin pying in the background. They had both been blessed by their creators with beautiful, melodious, childlike voices and their old-fashioned private schools had taught them to modute them as youths.

  Being talented and highly-intelligent and more than half-knowing it, Mist found it highly frustrating when he couldn’t do something he put his mind to. A really superior being like a Shiver should be able to write ground-breaking music whenever it takes his fancy, he thought. Of course, evidently, this was not the case for him at the moment. Shiver put down the sketch of Waterbaby she was making and frowned.

  “It’s so humid today I can’t possibly concentrate on anything,” she said and flopped down on the sofa with a lethargic sigh. She bolted upright spontaneously; dark eyes alight with her soul’s passion, when Aryan swept elegantly through the front door. “Aryan,” she cried ecstatically and rushed over to throw her thin arms about him. Aryan stroked her lovely, red-golden hair tenderly but also a little awkwardly “hello my beloved one,” he said gently to Shiver. “I need you and Monovalent to create the painkillers for my aching head and heal my leg,” he procimed authoritatively with a wince and a limping slight from a wound.

  “It’s only requiring of small proliferation you can do so without consequence.”

  “ I assume you’re both still doing this for the seriously, chronically ill and the dying who cannot access medical treatment, there’s no reason for their suffering. I’ll be checking in on your progress with your assigned task Shiver, ter. Good girl.”

  Shiver nodded enthusiastically; eager to comply. He turned to Mist.

  “So how are you doing Mist,” he then asked in his polite, formal way.

  “Fine,” said Mist not looking up from what he was doing and treating Aryan with his typical antipathy and contempt.

  “I have just come for some papers, dinner's in a few hours but I have to go out before that, I’ll be back around six, “Aryan informed them curtly.

  Shiver looked quite hurt her beautiful, kittenish face dismayed, even crestfallen at this. Mist however was relieved and merely called out “see you then.”

  As Aryan was leaving one thought was trailing through his head. My family, I finally have a family I can trust never to leave or as Emanuel would put it, relinquish their presence and abandon me. Shiver and Mist, Monovalent it may not be conventional, but the love is there. For the first time in years Aryan’s pale, prettishly-handsome face showed euphoria. Yet they bow before me as my father said everyone should. Aryan found knowledge of this power he wielded over them soothing, as if all things were in their natural order and pce. In his head danced a scene with his father after having beaten him, so he was a trembling gibbering mess and touching his hair gently, which made Aryan mildly nauseous.

  “You will not fail. Discipline is the greatest asset of man, capitalism the only fair system where everywhere has a chance; without it, mass death counts and cultural decline that communist and totalitarian governments leave in their wake. Welfare state, drugs, drink and video games sckers and letting people opt not to participate destroyed first-world countries as third-worlders build armies and buy our nd and we indebt ourselves to them.”

  “We need those who can lead others to greatness in the field of science or business think lucrative expansion of goods and technologies and industry to regain our lost power and finances; wealth they may bring you too but well-earned. Master of your own fortune and inventions. None will you need to bow to. For they will bow to you, you will be a great man.”

  It was nine minutes past six o’clock, nine minutes past the time they were supposed to meet for dinner. The temporary residents in the manor had gone home. During the week from mid-morn to te afternoon when the main occupants were mostly out; many excess rooms had been turned into pyroom child centre for disabled, foster and poor children whose parents couldn’t afford it or who’s young needed specific and more intensive care. Shiver and Mist secretly hated it and grumbled all rolled eyes and feeling put-out, out at the sound of the hollers and squeals heard, if they happened to be home.

  I send this with my love.

  You y still upon the earth eerily; though with a life somewhat halted. Soon the rushes of warmth will be forever reposing. In abyss nguishing. In a soldiered flock, russet sparrows lie. Amidst a tear-stained vale. The soul shearers ying where hounds await.

  A songless thing beside the bck-and-blue lyres and neath a porcein-web tailing, I dwell. By the same snaking creepers that sughtered the spirit of the calf and half-departed flowers on Hades hillside. Come to my fever ivy and purplish fg irises. Leave his feeble, red embering of tall mallow. Shudder.

  Aryan’s morality is feigned: sickly, ill-bodied, it amasses inutile; suffers a fevered famine. A drab, heathen soul. Never to y amidst the hallowed. Wired to and mired in the toothless nest. He is a might-righter, a musted, rose-in-the-Wicklow. Lives as a mere storm of ashes aimless, alongside lost wile and wood, your artistry and Mist's weeping violins. In dreams, I hear you both sing to me sweet and mystically: a lulby of death without a mere sembnce of clemency.

  Purplish thistles and thorns are buried in your tresses, golden-softly. Coloured in a hayfield's sted-dusk adorn. In despair, I sometimes feel your blessed form’s new garment has none of my Sibyl-

  Yet you're indeed still bloomed in her ce fiments.

  Eternally-wild, the whispers of wrath pgue you into oblivion: plummeting to a windwell. To the lightning white as a desote angel’s wing. You he’d fling will-o-wisp frail from every cliff’s snowy trail. Spindly-limbed Dire maiden forsaken afore the night epses yet how the lost unshells the delicate in your hue. Made your' cheek’s rose-ivory lovelier and each one interned within nd-gated sea, cold and shivery.

  Past the rushing maid of spirits, you’re most little if galnt of the ghost moths: bleak and flighted in a morn’s pale, misting drear.

  You, my earlier honeycreeper, did fleece my grove. Travailed till in a nguishing thatched. We dreamed of an Old-World; of gray light in cobwebbed threads and no more over-lighted hedges. Ivy forming a living fence over stone-walling alongside bluebells and oaks. A high, soft, delphinium climb. A multiple-foot pntation of a by Engnd-gardens-blued, flower. Beautiful, wild miles of foliage turned nowadays to run-down mileage, yellowest pinpricks of light fracked and fell broke; mined from the golden shaler.

  Very seasonal nd briefly rose then fell, prettily. To its doom. I miss being amid the droughtless. Never-felled rain and dampness falling. The fallow grass.

  Reaper visited upon my frailties trespasses. Thoughts once buried did to surface glide. Your saviour upon a lock of craven hollyhock, was strewn. As you visit though the teeniest slip of shadows to me haunt, I will joyously feel once more your kiss, till lips cracking dryly as vaely a heart is bleeding. ( Blood in drops)

  Shiver, all of a paled God shied as did farewell those vast, void eyes.

  In a harsh and hardened morrow, a sun's light is hailing. Your return was joy; till halting every holy hedge. Utterly. Darkness was availed afore the st sliver of sun moulted. Yet at a cost.

  Everywhere, bizarre beasts suffer a self-mutition of their own creation. Upon them, I want to commit foymalere. ( fy of the mal and the eerie).

  Skies of myriad silver nterns are evermore from their station shunted. The star's common fate is to be merely traversed away murkily. Shan't in the night heavens dally. A riesling swills. Lord's cup runneth. Silverier and further up the universal heights, cliffs, and swales became shadowed by the bck-willowed. Yet both once shared their pce in the light. Now wilting in modern-era.

  Former incidence. On an innocent bedside I y. Noting first beams in yellow and rye. They lolled in each obscuring nook zily. Though technically shadowily-hidden by hair, shoes, skirt, to deceptive perceive of an eye, rays brightened most of all where you curled.

  Overid so they slid through everything, the ghost goat's horns were curling into the morn's purplish-rose. We'll remake the titan-pink dawn's duskiness, a lighted engine rich and that toward day motored so deeply red, I do it envy. Soon we'll in blue, raise midnight.

  Silently putting the note aside, Shiver resumed sitting and drumming her trembling fingers on the table and stared with that expression of the utterly unenthusiastic, at her food. She was alone. Neither Mist nor Aryan was here yet. “I’m sure they’ll be here soon dear,” said Laurence reassuringly, readjusting his chef hat at a funny angle to make her ugh. It induced a weak but grateful smile. There was a dark, wooly rug on the gray fgstone floor. The table she was seated at was meticulously carved, mahogany wood from the seventeenth century set with a white ce cover and porcein ptes. Pretty indigo candles lit Shiver’s face and clothes and the stone walls, deep-gray.

  Shiver had dressed for the occasion in a pretty, flowing, crimson-silk dress with a pattern of delicate, purple flowers, and a rge navy-blue, felt hat on which she had a tacked a rose from the garden and little strappy, bck sandals on her slender little feet. She studied from various angles her reflection in the mirror hanging off the dining room wall and smiled to herself.

  Golly, I look very nice today, she thought to herself proudly.

  Her slender, dainty hands which were slowly stroking the dress’s delicate fabric were on edge though, as she waited anxiously and with rising distress for Aryan. She began to slowly pick petals of a flower entwined in hair’s red-gold out, one-by-one scattering them upon the floor. There was another purpled rose in a deep- blue cobalt vase on the table, that her fingers itched to pluck. The vase contained myriad midnight-blue flowers, all thorny and long-stemmed and had ornate, silver handle.

  Monovalent to distract her, turned on the air-conditioning, and the music sensors. It had also turned on the dish washer and porch lights, in case Aryan arrived te again, possibly after dark. The computerised stereo could py music anywhere in the house. At the moment it was projecting Shiver’s favourite, songs straight to her brain. Mist arrived three minutes ter and sat down groaning “Gee the old guy’s still not here”. “He’s not old he’s young,” said Shiver sounding defensive.

  “Yeah, you would say that, because you have thing for the oldie. He’s really seventy-nine Shiver, he just looks forty-nine,” Mist said.

  “Forty-one not nearly fifty and he actually looks more like twenty-five,” Shiver snapped at him indignantly.

  “Whatever. Not vegetables again!” He excimed suddenly staring at his food in dismay.

  ‘Master Aryan is a vegetarian as you well know Master Mist,’ Laurence Samuel Burns reminded him.

  “Yes, but I’m not,” Mist pointed out.

  “You’re supposed to be while your living at the master’s household,” Laurence reprimanded him sternly. He, as the manor’s gardener, household chef and Chauffer, was understandably quite exhausted and not in the mood for antagonistic, spoilt brats.

  I miss meat, thought Shiver sadly her stomach churning and staring with equal dismay at her organic vegetable casserole. The pair, who often lived off chocote bars, scrambled eggs, biscuits, cheese-and-spaghetti on toast, instant noodles, ice-cream, fast food including pizza, hot dogs and burgers as well as coffee and tea, were not the world’s most healthy eaters even at the best of times.

  “It’s probably going to be fruit for dessert again too argh,” Shiver said.

  “If we’re lucky it’ll be coconut slice, carrot cake, blue-berry pie or chocote brownies again yum. Hey, remember how we’d sneak down to the fish and chip shop or The Blue Café for tea and scones with jam and cream or the Chinese pce for fried rice, roast duck, and spring rolls before Aryan got home?” Mist said. “ Or when we just went and bought all those lollies, chocote bars, and biscuits and ate them till we were sick, then told Aryan we were too tired to be hungry that was so great,” Mist ughed.

  Shiver nodded wistfully. “We just ate and watched great films, all day.”

  “I wish he wouldn’t still make us come to his stupid little dinner banquet every night,” Mist said.

  “You know what Aryan says,’ Shiver droned monotonously her face stiff and robotic in expression; “Family must make time together and grow as one… and to achieve this, must always spend the time it takes to learn and appreciate each other... To each accept the other in all their wonders and foibles. Only thus shall we attain comradery and love.”

  They both ughed as it was such a good imitation of the speech Aryan regurly gave with such passion yet still always seemed to come out sounding like it came straight from the mouth of a robot. Shiver took a sip from her delicate, porcein cup with patterns of trees, leaves and birds designed by some Australian artist and turned to Mist.

  “We’re the only family he’s got,” she said somewhat more seriously “but I agree this little family nightly ritual does get painful especially around these times. He never gets to see us on some days though he’s so busy working. Which I guess is why it’s so important to him.”

  “Well, I suppose we are his only friends” Mist said in a conciliatory fashion, “so it does seem cruel not to humour him, plus he lets us live in his massive home.”

  “Yes, and it’s even bigger than it was st month what with those two room expansions,” Shiver said smiling.

  “Yeah,” Mist nodded. “Aryan's been spending big time ever since he made that extra bucket load of money selling his online holographic world technology to the military army and the police force. Now they can practice killing criminals with guns and bombing war-time civilians within their own virtually designed realistic world or Aryan’s anyway. No more pitiful sort of 3D but closer to 2D simutions and target practice boards. Now they get the real thing or close enough,” said Mist.

  “No more using animals to practice their aim or see what effects their weapons have either thank God”, said Shiver referring to a scandal published about 20 years ago in the newspaper.

  Neither mentioned why they really were beholden to this ritual and any other that took Aryan’s fancy. This being the threat Aryan had hanging over their heads. He could kill the young Shiver anytime he wanted without repercussions. Shiver didn’t really believe he’d do them in over something as insignificant as missing dinner or refusing to go to dinner, but she couldn’t be sure and certainly did not want to risk it. Thus, she remained ever bound to his whims.

  “Making a carnivore eat leaves it’s truly disgusting,” said Mist a minute or so ter when Aryan still hadn’t arrived.

  He then asked strange question.

  “Shiver, with the severing, impairment or blocking with a wall, that connection that allows us feel empathy wholly in a beyond merely-intellectual way, do you feel it at all.”

  “Well, sometimes as I see something genuinely sad or merely sentimental, I’ll feel closed off and a little numb as usual but a part of me that I can’t quite reach, that’s closed off and alien almost like someone else will be reacting, feeling something intensely. Tears will be in my eyes, without me realising for a while.”

  “A little of that feeling will cross over into me, to my not-walled off part.” She replied after gentle pause. Before turned our maiden, those for-a-killer-too-kind eyes and now delicately raised brows, toward her male companion.

  Shiver not quite in these words but felt sentiments simir yet more lust-worthy and they both had noticed how he looked just like a Greek boy- muse or marble Roman statue causing Shiver’s ivory cheeks to blush dusky pink rose-tinged hue rather becoming.

  “Well, almost carnivores, and really more like omnivores”, said Shiver trying to distract herself from our boy Mist handsomeness and especially his slender, muscur arms. “We can still get nutritional value from pnts say better than a cat can we just need to digest meat as well.”

  “Well either way I’m growing adolescent who is now, no thanks to Aryan and his diet regime, over six foot,” Mist said. “I deserve better.”

  Laurence who was standing politely next to the kitchen door waiting for the master’s arrival home made a soothing noise. “Shiver tilted back her old-fashioned wide-brimmed hat exposing her little heart-shaped face and smiled up at Laurence sweetly.

  “See Laurie gets what we’re going through at least’ she said. When she smiled, she exposed her very small, even teeth baring them wolfishly and the quiet butler couldn’t help flinching slightly

  Mist smiled: “It’s interesting how our cells are hybridised with virus and bacteria DNA. Viruses insert new copies of DNA/RNA into cells and that’s what we do, we just insert our memories and our current physical form in as well. Some cells shut down and become less effective at repairing over time due to certain genes like R 16. Our gene R 16 was switched off. Some cells are less affected by these genes and still age. Experiments show the cerebral cortex will still atrophy even without R 16.”

  Shiver sighed “I wish we could eat meat more than twice a week,” she commented oblivious to Laurence’s continuous flinching. ‘I mean why should we be not allowed to eat animals because it’s cruel, but we’re not allowed to donate some of our excess money to charity which could save starving or disabled/homeless people because we need it to buy that new computer?”

  “Isn’t that a more frivolous reason than eating for protein and maximum health?” She went on. “After all, don't vegetarians lose brain cells faster than regur people? A semi-carnivorous diet is what made our ancestors smart and stronger, makes us the Shiver even smarter and stronger. Meat-consumption helped our human ancestors get the iron, high- protein and energy needed to increase brain size and capacity while in development in the womb”

  “Was that ever conclusively proven?” Mist asked. “About vegetarians being less healthy or is that spread by the meat industry? On the other hand, food companies who market to vegetarian interests have all their own studies ciming vegetarians and vegans as healthier and their cims are just as likely if not more so, to be bogus. Not to mention increased height and muscle mass are linked to meat consumption as is adequate absorption of protein and iron essential for growth, physical strength and menstruation” Mist said making a slight face at mention of the st one.

  “Besides we do donate our money,” Mist reminded her.

  “Yes, but we could donate a lot more if we gave up this luxurious life-style,” Shiver said.

  Shiver gnced over at Laurence as she spoke, as he himself had come from a very working-css background but his face was impassive, unreadable. Mist’s lovely face when she stole a look at him too was pensive; his beautiful deep, purple-gray eyes had an unusually softened look almost vulnerable. “Are you alright Mist?” Shiver asked hesitantly.

  ‘I’m fine,” Mist said snidely. “I was just wandering why you love your precious Aryan so much when he treats us so terribly and you disagree with his most of his personal opinions and policies on animal welfare anyway.’

  “I don’t disagree with them!” Shiver said fervently. “I just don’t think he pays enough attention to animals in the right areas. Like how he said commercial human surrogacy, especially when outsourced to poorer nations like India, is so barbaric when paying for kittens and puppies too young to leave their mother and using their mothers as breeders is the exact same thing. Puppy mills abuse the dogs something terrible and keep them in cages. When the poor dogs get ill, they don’t treat them.”

  “Farm animals are used as surrogates too, made to have babies to suit human agendas” she continued. “Where’s their right to bodily integrity? Where are the rights of those poor, human babies born to surrogate mothers and sold like commodities for that matter? God, I hate people and their stupid individual rights system.”

  “Euthanizing and sterilising cats and dogs because their overpoputed and not doing the same to people who are far more overpoputed is also disgusting. We might have brought them here but that gives us less not more right to punish them for our past transgressions. We should let them all go free and kill the wildlife. After all we kill millions of animals and destroy their habits and nature itself. So, the very least we can do is award other species that privilege. At least it would be fair.”

  “They wouldn’t be endangering any native wildlife if we hadn’t bought them here in the first pce. If their popution explodes, they’d also starve, famished, mangy cats racing about everywhere” Mist pointed out. “Besides what do you care?” Mist taunted her grinning, “You eat these beloved animals of yours and Aryan at least is a vegetarian and an advocate of stopping animal abuse.”

  “I don’t think animal consumption is wrong, and I would never eat a highly intelligent animal.” Shiver informed him hotly.

  “I don’t thing keeping animals captive and for consumption is right, but I think if you weigh it up against the alternatives (not eating meat at all) it’s the lesser of two evils. I think as long as you ban factory farming and give them companionship and wide-open spaces, feed them well and kill them humanely it’s probably okay.”

  “Zoos and medical testing where they keep them in those tiny little cages and their purposely made ill to test antidotes even killed is far worse however,” Shiver continued.

  ”You don’t eat clever animals Shiver? I thought pigs were supposed to be quite intelligent” Mist said to her.

  “They are brighter than chickens,” Shiver said “but whatever those pseudo-science tests say to the contrary a leopard that has to strategize and think on its feet all the time to catch its prey is more intelligent than the rather docile pig. Birds and wolves and foxes and other big cats are brilliant too. You can see it in the eyes,” Shiver said, absently chewing on a red-gold lock. “I’m sorry but I don’t think cat and dog intelligence can be compared to cows or chickens or even pigs that are very sweet but just not that bright,” Shiver said. ‘That said I don’t think we should eat more than necessary we should really cut down on are meat-eating.”

  “I’m just saying like Aryan once did;”

  ‘“A being is judged on many things in this human society “appearance”, status often using and procuring objects that convey said status; money, housing, the perfect family, a respectable career... but intelligence is sadly underrated, and I fear many humans are losing their brains and more and more have little of this brightness left to boast of.

  Cleverness is undervalued, stupidity and cunning too often praised.... Cats and dogs and wild animals on the other hand can often be far more intense, deep and intelligent than your average human. As they do not live a caged, sheltered life as many humans do and if they did not have their wits about them would die in an environment as harsh as what we call the wild.”

  “Worth in my perfect world order, would compromise the ability to think, feel and comprehend profoundly, talent but only real talent in science, art, maths, economics, history, music, industrial retions and being highly knowledgably and literate as well as to live a long, healthy enjoyable life full of recreation and rexation. It is the highly skilled workforce with the best quality of life and opportunities for success offered to all that shall best foster talent and technological innovation. As well as good quality products than one that relies on cheap bour and products”’

  Shiver finished what was an impressively long quote.

  “Wow,” said Mist in a mock-impressed tone “quoting our wondrous, ever so humble prophet the great Aryan Alexander Gray, are we? “I mean isn’t all that from one of the speeches Aryan wrote expining his communist ideals? He gave it to me read the self-aggrandising cretin when I compined about how dumb people were. Still think for yourself loving the old guy doesn't mean quoting him and treating him like the Jesus the holier than thou bloody prophet” Mist said viciously.

  Shiver blushed red and glowered at him, enraged. “I hope Aryan gets here soon, as you fucking suck today Mist you arrogant, vindictive bastard.” she yelled loudly. Mist’s only response to this was to ugh with great mirth. Shiver looked like she was going to cry.

  “Don’t you dare take that ughing, disdainful tone with me again Mist” she said the sound of her voice not teary but utterly enraged.

  “It’s Aryan's fault not mine,” Mist said in protest seeming rather unabashed. “If he arrived on time, we wouldn’t get bored and hungry and irritable like this. Your altercation is with him not me, so resolve it with lover-boy.”

  Laurence with thin, almost-slumped dark cheek aloft and who’d been observing the entire scene, reflected this was true. The two of them always fought when Aryan was te. It was a real pity as they usually got on so well. He sighed and ran a finger through his hair, praying the master would arrive as soon as possible.

  Shiver frowned feeling sullen and miserable; a fairly standard state for her and her look toward any who dared share the same space, at once cold and contentious. She sat upon something with a somewhat sharp, lined edge that pricked her winged, little hip slightly.

  She begun retrieve it, with that shaky show of haughtiness that conveniently masks the immensely-wounded. Emanuel had said of people he deemed narcissistic;

  "Their pride even small things effect but conversely their self-adution others may only shallowly debride. They remain ones nevertheless, of fairly rich self-accode".

  Shiver meanwhile continued in her endeavor to stop the irritating prickling and took out the crumpled mess poking her form.

  It was pale little fledgling from Shiver knew Emanuel, whom Monovalent had told her was to be her saviour, and the one whom created her in the first pce. All the wonders he achieved just to see her again she thought dreamily and read what was written

  I send this with my love. My little fiend, here’s merely part of a poem penned … Read its beginnings: hold the note with nimble fingers and feel papered wisps and inked whisperings light-filled. Cmour to its core as I attempt to you with sorrow rend most dearly. Wait to see how a soft little ending tails... Be my Elusive Isnd of sandstone finding. I am sincere yet consigned still, to my own flowering-in-folly. Little evil one, my self-pride near-infallible wells; all should dwell upon the glory of the scaled yet mammalian beast and his beloved deeply.

  Through the gentle moisture of a beautifier’s blink, I near see your cold limbs and fetaling incarnation, from within the confines of my cavernous ir. Courted death, did she, frozen-in-fairness. Death's unfathomable and cruel and you offered it your refusal. Inevitability; proved its falsehood.

  Via my bright-mindedness and longing born of needful impoverishment. Suffering and learning that which misers and shysters know not, the pride of loyalty and contribution to others well-being and love’s true value.

  Feel it’s across lifeless, computing climb and binding that mortar of golden descent into inhumanity. Yet were are still beastly and in grasses-wrought. Clouded in fme with a warming. See my far from fickle heart. Fund my wandering; how often since commissioned, were you given my blissful bestowal. Are you now undergoung or awaiting, assimited cellur faerieyre? Akin in bond, yet perfect in your differing to my orginal maiden. For not matter how dustily-mallowed will thus soon be faetaled.

  Poetical Verse two,

  Those Summered where beauty shied

  Abandon fellowly to the forgotten folium

  despair

  Told nary of desertion as hold them

  yet never their flighting from a starriest vale spare

  Love’s silveriest but comatose

  No emotion upon otherling spent we bear.

  Absent, see nothing in lieu of the spry

  but a share

  Of that hail in once a summering-fair

  Extinct-near,

  pale-billed flowerpeckers

  shed drearier

  as humanity pick the unhealing penny tearier

  Theirs the mal of thorn

  That alongside trinketed raining

  send many to staining dawn

  Of craven wines, shills, and lies born in new morrow

  That bereaved heart of the fathernd

  into the Sheol-hollow

  Spirit's fireless fleet whence it fled

  Was not merely anguished, for lo

  went brokenly and never-to snowier wallows

  Modern-day retions summered-without-beauty or barrow

  Are twin to now's hayfields that soon fallowed

  The immortal once-harked,

  Yet loves now soonly fly to a graveyard hallowed

  A once pure-dweller

  turns to a beast whence in swampnd y

  Readied to ensnare fledglings fey

  Engineering poison-violet wrickkets

  onto Wisteria’s little climbing rings

  As fatal white boneset strings

  py for us seldom sweeter-self sought otherlings

  In dismal death or joyless

  our feral sanctuary we sling

  Upon tattered but overly-bright shoulder,

  And away richer meanings fling

  We under monster, miser wilt

  Till my Farling Lille taketh to air and lilt

  Little Farling. May I take pride in you first experience of the soft spry of infatuation even if not by my hand. Refuse to hush the verve as it should never be lost-creakingly. Shan’t be dead in or veiled bluely. When Titan's fallow.

  Sibyl Farling. Wickedness is gathering love’s assaints. Loveliness’s dismantlers. The unapologetically-bleak made light pollution’s haze. Rendering a demagogue dreary, a starless night-clouded. Since the heavens but dutifully weep, yesterday rose with a raining. Tools have destroyed the nd. ( Malflintvale.) Today was another day silver-dawned with swallows yet absent all neighbouring fellows. Only held sad farlings and starlings.

  Come see my castle's vast stone pilrs and walls unbridled. Snaking flowers, winds harping, and honeyed air’s gentle streamers. I’ve stood alone alongside my flowing, blowing, purplish-rose curtains. Past the draping of ce and walkway mped.

  Nature-friendly architecture carves my manor, that nd winged. One gardened and grassed. With greenery and verdure, a chandelier. Statue of a weeping angel, forever-idling. In the nd of the wanters, voices are ever-wistful; ringing with a love hollowed and a beauty grave. Lost to famine and pgue. They trod upon each little spindle. Siphoned multi-bright greens and left a woeful perish. Brightly attuned to the shearing in the Valley of the Shadow of death and without a shepherd flocked softly, simply dying.

  Struggling wintery buds torn from genetic legacy of thriving ancestral flowers. Lie obsoleted and willingly consigned to ways of exile.

  Every medieval name hath come to fleet yet may be returned, for exist faith both live still buried in fairer alderlevest. (Dwelt hid in fairynd beloved.)

  Ail sicken and sallow many a vale as waste to naught, yet resurgence of gardens awaits. Their tilted paths abydeth. (Stay) Therein shall I vie for the fayeyre?( Will I against other suitors seek the fey?)

  Genderless trysts and ill-bodied nihilists acted as smiting ruffians. Gender traitors and impassive felons sought to have man and maiden-head shed.

  Low-css warriors gone. An insanely-tangled trail of silent homeless taken. Abandonment of female and male pority and chivalry, leaves love faceless.

  Impoverished are forced from dwellings, gathered without nudge by covert tactics of developers. Land sold to foreign investors. Immigration in oversupply and corporate migration to needy nations inspired by greed now their but heartless ending nigh.

  Loyalty, kindness dutiful, are a highness bestowed from truth. Genuine optimism. The martial and familial, the faithful and community lost to critical decriers. The chivalry and love deniers. Stole the things that made a pauper a king. Rendered them a purported evil.

  Must unmask grotesque, malformed face of white-colr felony. Wherein graffiti artist, shoplifter faces jailing, massive fines to loss of livelihood leading and housing. Tycoon siphoned millions away in stolen funds with little to no reprimanding.

  Corrupt courts favouring the upper and middle-css, w loopholes. Moneyed wyers lessen sentencing, even falsely alleviate wrongdoing. Millionaire made our surround a venomous furnace. Sustenance and everyday trinket is a cancer-den killer.

  How vance, duty, loyalty reigning need return. Gift freedom to myriad masses distracted with identity politics, material trinkets into subservience silenced, world where oft people of poverty who care for others in charity and make up nation’s defenders are not heroes, but corrupt politicians and miserly business tycoons are.

  Fatherhood is denoted superfluous and motherhood pales to careerism and promiscuity, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Wherein people don’t, won’t others serve. Mothers pce their party lifestyles, polyamorous retionships and interchangeable makeshift office duties over children and fathers walk away to simir frivolity. Must revitalise lost art of valour.

  No more pennies; shillings are the silvery flowers of dreariest dwellings. The carnation of consotion. Handing of a vile bloom.

  See family and community once more at heart of policy whilst allowing truly creative to flourish and not have every individual believe destined for greatness, indulge selfish boredom-staving over duty. Insidious materialism, sex and culture homogenisation. Career- extolling propaganda. Once freely spoken, entertainment controlled to point much boycotted. Mostly mocking self-righteously, ninety percent stricken by poverty.

  Unfairly condemn as makers of own bedding of graveyard stone, of own dismal fate, these famished hounds. In deserved, dismalness pleading. Such power confiscated from trusting hands of citizens of a country, every family and humanity. Creatures impoverished and its rare seed that to cypress climbed. Most are downtrodden. Wealth usually birth inheritance.

  Farmers provided sustenance daily, teachers’ young cultivated, for centuries many carvers, engineers, and filmmakers made loveliest creations of depth and worth. All to illuminate sunlit surroundings and keep civil livelihood afloat only to often be bereft of his fruits of toiling. Good men were meanwhile exploited via overwork and factory poison. Lost limbs and vitality by high-css, moonlit thieves. A competitive mentality never shares the spoils of communal treasures. The modern-day’s, power and profit-only miser makes things of cheapness. For their share of silliest little farthing. I see it daily past the worn walling amid rose-wine curtaining’.

  People once hanged for thieving bread, now obliterated by bombings for oil. Land, resources, health thieved and naught but monetary scraps that can be traded for next to naught given to alleviate loss.

  Least a charitable little mender shall be left softened sweetly, ignite all earth humanity once funnelling into unified darkness. My wedding bell thoughts unspoken becoming helplessly fevered and as old loss harrow another summery wildfire is annihited, fought of noon and shadow.

  Hear with amusement fledgling bride, fey in disguise, unhampered changeling brought by human thievery of nature-made, genetic material ramble lovelorn from unfeigned, insane heart. Took refuge from tragedy.

  Found mired in the mady of ailments feverish. A frail, daylight-forlorn, star-veiled night was shorn and a lover spurned: both withered and whetted, he was closely creeping.

  Promising from a restless distance faraway to be watching, till st dear little glimmer from a beloved’s eyes sweet, is leaving. All winded promises unkept still eternally in heart dwelt, near surreptitiously forming silvery veil. Love’s sanctuary and charity remedy the self but stricken with maise we’re all now famished.

  Till I did my heart bestow. A heart buried in a great, reptilian beast’s stony scales: in the colourless flicker of the demon’s eye is longing alongside brutality. Soon infecting your malleable mind.

  I am gratified your body’s slender, branching veins will never with poison fill and your virtualizer wings shall always whitely-feather. Man, nowadays is a creature of cowardice and less intimidating than a soft bouquet of the roses-fair. Beauty long-stemmed from his hands thorny, he fling. No matter how ambushed by life, by deformity or disability pgued, I take what I will.

  Gave up steady income from cybercrime for trial of honour. Become aid to the warrior fleetingly, no not armed fighter firing on the battlefield afore nineteen, but young Aryan and I did work on DNA editing and 3d prints and rapid, algorithmic cures for various ailments. AI-aided healing.

  Faster healing of injuries in first and third-world nations. Many of these, ailments of violence and hygiene-divorced and diseased lifestyles. Good, old self-infliction.

  Unforgotten, the beastliness and bloodshed seen. My duties and devotion in vain. To its cataclysmic beauty become unwedded. Such ills to never again deny. Long as night held this wailing, ailing bckthorn. Yet you my heart mended brightly and daily in nds, till broke apart. Gravened to shale valley.

  On the first day we met, we climbed to our holiest Father. Our way lit by desert candle, softened by foxtail fern. You were hastening to become a winged nymph fledged. I was to such a maiden forever pledged, from youthful, school grounds to old, mahogany aisles. The ste-gray and white-flowered chapel was all fairing, neath soft shed of sun’s gold bale as we dreamed of quieted evenings in the countryside.

  Gathered saddest compints heed, made to no-one and The Almighty. You I did farewell, from southern to northern hemisphere. Alongside misty, once hilltop castles now manors and little, greenery-filled vilge in fall unleaved and which flies beyond spring’s beautifying. Or the modestly summered-in-gold. As now warmed and saturated overly.

  Alongside ruefully-assailing dusky ntern, wonder of sailors’ sea-faring across unexplored nds now in ruination Everywhere mire’s icy-flowers, visible the frozen air-swilled.

  With an eye on every ray of softness, felt we could only lose the grain. Our docking overy was wedded to the streetmp. Dimmed it.

  In cold command, billed the bright. Till hailing of the heavy-fallen. Though still starklinged, earth’s joy is not vast but yellowed-garish, in this time. I miss the sunray moulted-lightly. Upon earth such forsaken things gathering holy.

  More needed never failing to be than whence tunnelling frozenly-harshest. Sinisterly snows the beautiful fell. Frozen ke, seasonal frost warmed yet they made very souls shiver, near cold as winter solstice shadowing the sun as it splintered.

  Lest neglect to mention all things split into forgotten half-weed. Since from time dearest parting, mented absence of marriages and horse-drawn carriages; family forsook for camity. Softly-faltering, rider into a blue-nighted blinding. Cobblestone streets within view. The cliff-grass overwrought. The wildly-entangled soon only in dreams, of every untamed, silveriest, starriest valley.

  Bolts pale against us. An angelic collide over-polluted city dark, dusky and unfurled greyly. From Versailles to Nellidae. Varley, Fallow mead, Lis and Voire. Wiltshire. Humanity’s colpsed tunnel ensnare: we reap wildfme, melting gciers, wind unruly as eyes fill with welling soon hushed. Blinking, away crestfallen, tears darkling irises, staining cheek hollow.”

  Lightening missiles in wilds once-belled, now flied felled. Soon see lost, bckbird, and braes. Humanity’s newly bought homes and hills send gild-dared arrows to pin them and away with their nd and goods, flight. Startling, sighing, scarlet-throated, mistletoe bird. Colpsing that precariously banced stair, that holds the existence of all beasts fair.

  Maligning frozen climates, rivers be dammed. Only false-mping, no stars shedding. Light-free, fallen cities.

  Dust-reddened, mankind’s elderflowers decay, pces even raven relinquished. Repced by hapless homes deprived of wilderness beast. Foliage. Myriad apartment complexes ced with the serpent. Darkness in form of people of cruelty.

  Earth’s ephemeral garden has distinct hedging to let us find wherein its ending might be yet never found, is love’s curtailment. Love’s man buried at his muses’ feet. The mother of any species who braves all to spare her child facing injury and death. Lovers from youth fruitful till utterly aged, akin to pair-bonded birds; living as one till feathers fall.

  Now godless convent of the rainbow broken yet not you the faetaled. Like beasts readied to self-famine if mate earlier departs; farewell curbless pain. Till with Father flighted.

  Before you were dismantled, I found every rose were tinged with ivory. You were like the fables; seemingly enfeebled and impoverished and fraught with a folly that abounded; yet genuinely blessed. A seldom churlish fledgling. Dark, dangly blue bows always frayed. How healthily-flushed and limber afore your time of self-famish. You let in the malleus seed. I despair at all the lost greenery.

  Hopping sweetly, naively from one foot to another, in mere straggly, disheveled rags of misused, formal uniform. Ones as sweet to me as wisped, well-tailored ce and dark-stockinged silk; you were ever, my little bck-footed walby. How becoming your dusky blushing, let me them once more see.

  Sincerely Emanuel Roe.

  “Pretty but preachy. I don’t care that much about poor people.” Shiver grumbled slightly. “Should talk more about me.”

  Returning matters to young Simon he had just started to form a resistance group albeit not much of one; containing in rge amounts people he tracked down who had been victims of the hellion realm Shiver, and the others called the tampering with Monovalent realms to make it a nightmarish game. Monovalent wiped the memories of most who were hell-game victims but let a select few remember, few enough that if they told no-one would believe them.

  He also informed them of the virus his carriers Shiver and Mist had infected them with. It was a dormant virus that could fre up actively with a single electrical impulse instruction from him and divide and spread throughout bodies their killing them. He told them that the virus could even become flesh-eating so they would die in agony within an hour if it was activated. Thus, there was no chance of them going public especially with no concrete proof.

  Monovalent continued to help Simon by sending him these names to lead him off track. He was crucial to his pn to overthrow Aryan. If he told Shiver, Aryan pnned to kill her and Mist, once he had established rule and humanity’s great protection, she might not believe him and might turn against him.

  If he told Simon and got him to make Aryan confess in a moment of drunken weakness; (Aryan was susceptible to alcohol) Shiver would believe it. Simon's inherent qualities of honesty and integrity were absent in him, Monovalent, and Shiver knew it.

  Simon knew of course he was being maniputed for ulterior motives but didn’t know what they were only knew if he was to stop Aryan, he would need as much information as possible. Aryan knew Simon knew but did not consider him a threat.

  Aryan met with Simon upon his request to expin the same things he told Mist and Shiver three years earlier that he did not “relish killing or torture but that it was necessary.” Then proceeded to pour them both some of the rich red wine Simon brought.

  “That's a load of bull”, said Simon “Besides capitalism can work, it has in the past, but socialism has always proved a failure.” Aryan frowned “But communism or democratic communism as you call it, has always been the governing system in poorer, less advanced nations it has never been tried in a first-world, technologically advanced country.”

  “Capitalism is too unstable the private and business sector always grows too greedy and power hungry to be kept in check.” Simon then, feeling a little tipsy, decided to confront Aryan head-on; ‘are you really going to kill Shiver and Mist, after all, you made them the way they are.”

  “In a sense they are your children, yet you treat them like servants,” he said perfunctorily.

  “I assume you heard that from Monovalent,” said Aryan slurring his words slightly “and yes, it’s true I don’t deny it, but those two are evil and sociopathic fond as I am of them. Once my goals are achieved, I will y down my weapons.”

  “Once we have won, I will be downed, life-taken. I also pn to deactivate Monovalent's ability to harm any living creature under any circumstances and if attempts are made by another programmer to change these alterations Monovalent will destruct also.”

  “For now, I am holding my ability to eradicate its programming and fickle, artificial life completely over its head to prevent undue bloodshed. He’s harmed comparatively few despite his and the Shiver’s mischievous games which I believe have stopped.”

  “They weren’t supposed to know of my impending doom, Monovalent did. He can, based on extensive human history and full society and mind profiles and studies of groups with their tendency to more homogeny, people’s behaviour predict. Often with much accuracy. He can partially understand even my thought processes as our minds work simirly). It’s a knowing talent Emanuel had and perfected in machine form.”

  “His knowing of my impending demise wasn’t an issue until I noticed he become perhaps a little attached to these saviour-children charges of his, ours. He needs to understand humanity is his duty and loyalty should be to them. We need to keep tight rein on the mission.”

  “He was too destruct automatically if communicated his knowledge in any way, including after I die to keep people believing in validity of the cause, an earnest and not hostile takeover. However, Emanuel also with fair understand of how my minds works and only one whom could have gone through the programming and found the information and informed the Shiver personally somehow.”

  “What about opposition if you let yourself become vulnerable,” Simon inquired.

  “I do not believe that will happen,” Aryan said “once we have achieved a more compassionate and civilised world order, the majority of people will appreciate and accept it after all they have so far. The only reason I have had to resort to devious means at all is because the private sector is so corrupt and powerful but ordinary people who know what it is to suffer and go without are not.”

  “Remember Marx’s prediction was that communism was the end stage of capitalism,” Aryan finished.

  This was not going as Simon might have preferred. His mind wandered on to Aryan’s weapons of biological warfare, his carriers. Shiver and Mist, he had often been curious about the retionship between the two. Clearly, it was very amicable, cordial but was it more than that? He thought since he wasn’t getting anywhere with him on the political front he might as well ask about that. “Are they friends even lovers”, he asked Aryan. Not really, Aryan told him they considered each other “more like family.”

  “You mean they're like brother and sister?” Simon asked.

  “Well… not really,” Aryan said, “sometimes I find they rather act like an old married couple.” “Shiver loves you though…”Simon said.

  “She does Aryan nodded but I think that she loves a lot more men they she lets on she’s a confused child. She definitely has a crush on Emanuel since Monovalent told her about him when he sent the love letters and the dress, and she is infatuated by Monovalent despite his being a machine and she’s rather attracted to you too.

  “She’s always especially admired and been enamoured of Mist though since they first met long before she knew me. I feel that she sees he is very beautiful like her but more self-possessed and stronger of character which draws her to him.”

  “They are also the only of their kind so in a way destined for each other. As for Mist well Shiver is the only person, I have known him to like. He always mocks her for her feelings for me and I suspect it is more than just his natural inclination towards taunting people.”

  “Are you saying he loves her…?”

  “Not exactly that no,” Aryan shook his head frowning, his very low, melodious voice puzzled as he paused for thought. His rge eyes shone and appeared redly dark and troubled and almost heavy with his regret.

  “Mist really is a sociopath in the truest sense of the word I do not think he is capable of love in any conventional way. I believe he cares for Shiver in the same way Monovalent does as a superior creature, something special and unique but he could never love her more than he loves himself as in true romantic love.”

  “The difference between him and Monovalent is that in regards to Shiver he is highly attracted to her which Monovalent is of course incapable of. Shiver herself has always experienced sexual tension for humans, but Mist considers himself exclusive and above that, he would want another Shiver and Shiver is the only other one of their kind. Genetically despite being modified the same they are not reted. They share no genes, no blood.”

  “Their closeness, their having been conceived together, looking physically simir keeps them apart though, it feels too much like incest. That of course is another reason I could never love Shiver. I created her and though we share no blood, and she is not my daughter she is too close to that for comfort.”

  They don’t find it is too much like incest, to be together. Or they got over their reservations fast. Shiver and Mist have been intimate on more than one occasion. “

  Aryan started. An almost envious look on his face. “ I miscalcuted, I guess. Well, they weren’t reted or raised together though a lot of commonalities share. So, fair enough. Oh, you were inquiring how they were made. Well.”

  “Mist was created from Mary and James’s DNA, Shiver from a dead, young woman called Ivy she is essentially a heavily modified clone. Emanuel used strand of Ivy’s hair to copy full genetic code but didn’t use any of her actual cellur material to complications avoid associated with prematurely aged DNA.”

  Couldn’t manufacture Shiver from pure-human DNA in any case. He had a sample from little silver locket he gave her, but she returned to him after their breakup along with reddish-gold lock it held to remember her by as he was far from over her. Only for him to ter create Shiver in her image, quite romantic really.”

  “Did you ever meet Ivy?” Simon asked.

  “Yes, a few times, introduced bizarrely to me as his bride, “Sibyl Farling”. Did not learn for ages that wasn’t her true name. Very sweet. Brought in to do the visuals whilst we were working on God’s image.”

  “Emanuel holding her little hand and from the outside one would assume it was very much a dominance thing; she so delicate-featured. A pale, small creature rather mesmerising with those huge, soft eyes downturned and behind his twisted, bony bulk hid.”

  “At first, she drew on her own and Emanuel gnced up intermittently to tell her rather abrasively to join in and converse, yet she stayed still except for the times she wondered round dreamily, danced almost, in a fairylike way. Girl basically ignored him. Not sure she even heard.”

  ‘“Well at least she, rarely stationary, doesn’t spoil and stomp in her each pale step of ermine’s narrowly feet. Such a light form ought move varied and graceful as most well-commanded thing in flightiest levitation. Oh, and yes, I’m aware lost to the faerie, such elfin ears, and interests not by my humble requests piqued”’ he, Emanuel, most unperturbed had at st, said.”

  “Then when he made a calcution mistake, very rare for him, with his fast-equating, computer like gift for numbers she looked up and ughed, not meanly in particur. I would have been wary to do that even, but he reacted well, returning the humour. His face taking on mirth and a rare gentleness. Then pure, simir joy when showed him her artistic work. I suspect their retionship less clear than I first assumed.”

  “He seemed remarkably un-jealous of me over her, saying only ‘“she doesn’t find men like you attractive.”’

  “We only argued about her over her death. Where I said ‘“it was tragic and perhaps, he somewhat badgered and demanded overwhelming affection of one so young and didn’t treat her well enough,”’ and he said ‘“I didn’t know anything about it and had not right to comment and that I didn’t get her at all.”’

  “He and I were close for brief periods but keep mostly to ourselves. Still not enough to prevent inevitable gay rumours that emerged at the university we attended together. Yet our rapport didn’t include being lovers. Like many bright young men of old and literature it was simply a meeting of the minds. Funnily, modern day Western society is far more unable to believe males can love ptonically than many a past one.”

  “Why did you not avoid dating Shiver to honour your friend’s lost love?”

  “He is not owed her, simply because she and young Miss Parish come from the same DNA, I brought back her beauty and artistic gifts and that is all I promised.”

  Simon nodded, finding it very hypocritical since Aryan had made her for a set purpose and was using her as much in a different way, the fact it wasn’t sexual might make it better in Aryan’s eyes, but Simon didn’t see it so.

  “Well, she likes him anyway,” he commented.

  “I may think his possessive cim not right, yet I am not cursed with such naiveté that I don’t see his appeal, he’s a great man. Adores her in his own manner as well.”

  “Shiver told me you said you loved her and were going to marry her” Simon said. Aryan bnched and looked lost for a reply for a second.

  “She told you….that? Alright I do love her it’s not something I want everyone to know. Highly shaming to love one of you own creations something created for a purpose not idealistic love and musical, lyrical romance. Who couldn’t love her though she is beautiful nothing compares to either her or Mist.”

  “Shiver is special though... though she is just seventeen,” Aryan voice trailed off for a second. “My dear little one is what she is. As Emanuel says she is so very reserved and feminine, so full of love and wild romantic notions as well as beauty and eloquence and soft-spoken grace, so rare in a woman or man to be fair nowadays.

  “She does have elegance and css her and Mist so rare to see but so wonderful,” Simon agreed. Simon too spoke and moved elegantly and so could recognise those traits in others. His cssic charm was one of the reasons as well his immense good looks that had caused Shiver to agree to be friends with him.

  “So, Emanuel what can you tell me about him…” Simon asked with abruptness born of one of those funny bursts of insatiable curiosity.

  “I actually don’t know him tremendously well; certainly, better than most. He was quite the hacker in his youth you know, even worked for a major Leaker organisation. I won’t share which one. All this long before we realised our shared dream of a network of free information and an interactive, online system of unencumbered political and social expression and government transparency some might foolishly call anarchist, anyone can access everything easily with Monovalent no secrets.”

  Except the cssified ones you keep, and you are using him as surveilnce and using people’s information against them, Simon thought.

  “Emanuel shut down major social networking sites for kicks as well as hacked multiple government files. He confessed to me after the fact, he was once involved heavily in cybercrime and piracy and made quite the ample profit from it. Enough to fund housing for himself till made enough off of his revolutionary, anti-viral software. He started all this very young, I recall some early adolescent age, but I don’t know the exact details.”

  “I meet him freshman year at university: he told he me he pyed pranks before that at school with his “skills” but as I said, am not awfully privy to that. Brilliant man though. Solved a famous math problem as child. Monovalent wouldn’t exist without out him no doubt, even named our great, Mavierie Machina. The wondrous design of the Shiver well, much of that’s him too.”

  “Oh, there’s an interesting story involving him. A transgender individual showed up to the Openly-Debatable Philosophy in Applied Science group we founded once. Strode in with indignation to demand we expin our “cking diversity.” He was slim but broad-chested and quite tall with stretched-to-infinity shoulders and a heavy-boned face with a few girlish features poorly enhanced by liberal (no pun intended) applications of makeup.”

  “There are no females here and no one of differing sexuality, identity or race,” he pouted.

  ‘“I do mean that,”’ his thin, red-sthered lip actually quivered. Though seconds ter winked at me all flirtatious, little disturbing and pitiable, confusing really was right term.”

  ‘“This is not an official institution,”’ Emanuel informed him very polite, “we are more a gathering of like-minded men akin to a club near. There’s a young dy who joins us sometimes she does visual things for our project in God’s image.”’

  “He gred angrily at us both.”

  ‘“This’s discrimination; there’s many women, other-identified and systematically oppressed people whom toxic masculinity, white superiority and ck of interest in equality is keeping out and you need make room for their needed contributions or project will suffer from inefficiently differentiated, creative and valid ideas only these individuals with alternative experiences may bring.”’

  “Emanuel’s face once calm, did at this point I recall, twitch in distaste. His collected demeanour slightly rankled.”

  ‘“Having a girl do minor things like pictures does not count as enough,”’ the trans-identified figure continued aggressively.

  ‘“I would wish to see women having very real accomplishments in every capacity and homosexuals too.”’

  “Emanuel stood up. ‘“To address your first point; for one who bthers about equal standing, you certainly dismiss, rather idiotically I might add, the value of artistry and the visual. Alongside moulding hands, his detail-discerning eye is one of man’s greatest gifts to inventing. Secondly, you’re not female, so adding you would simply compound the problem, wouldn’t it?”’

  ‘“People believed their bodies or souls misaligned with the human form they were given for years, without scientific evidence. Even supposing wrong wiring were to bme (concurrently unproven) mutition and cosmetic fakery don’t change biology. As someone born without healthy body; that an attempted extreme of fixing might have done more harm than good to, carvers and butchers and their proponents deserve a jail-cell not a medal.”

  ‘“I you…you….bigot”’

  “I recall that Emanuel rose to his full, impressive height and grasped him by the shoulders quite intimidatingly.”

  ‘“Listen you uninvited cretin your movement is one that supports surgery and incompatible hormones warping the beautifully-fair; a healthful, human cloth tussled and tattered into freak shows so torn they may not even be able to use the bathroom properly or via grim infection demised.”’

  ‘“Including children many regretful and would change minds as ninety percent of such behaviours right themselves but even if didn’t, your misgivings deluded. Giving into such demands and prociming them valid is inadvertent cruelty at best, money-making for butcher surgeons, corrupt psychiatry at worse. Experts are not on this subject unified nor infallible and further afeared to criticise as may be struck off for criminal opinion.”’

  ‘“Surgery is barbaric and need never be performed once we perfect injective cellur repairs. No more body modification zealots, whose unholy image of yourself as needing be different, a woman, thinner or curvier, a doll, or tiger-like being catered to at expense of the truly needy.”’

  ‘“Sight of sickness and disease you never see but reign madies elsewhere even herein and bring it unto oneself through foolish, self-sought need to have resonation as female, is repugnant.””

  ‘“Loss of sacrosanct, abandonment of moral oaths leads back to human experimentation, deadly womb transpnts, disabling those who feel disassociated with limb and incurring from fellow beings state-provided care, time and resources for the once perfectly built whilst thousands perish as hospitals overfilled.”’

  ‘“Having child to harvest their bodies and risk injury to for use on another cancerous youth, taking organs from our fit and healthy, endangering them for sake of those already ailed.”

  “Even support for third-world subpar-science madmen whom without necessary knowhow would waste millions to attach head of executed felons to the dying and leave but paralysed or disabled, abze with madness.”’

  ‘“As without mind psticity and ability for body’s electrical impulses to adapt to being regrown or connected to foreign neural pathways now humanly impossibility I’ll create genetically, safely. Otherwise nguish in agony as thousands drained for their care when exist far more humane stem cell therapy and other less radical treatments to perfect.”’

  “The Trans ran at this point frightened, coward unsurprisingly, but called from behind;

  ‘“I’ll have you both terminated from studying here. You’re completely ignorant and retarded, uneducated don’t understand…Listen asshole hate-speech and bigotry have no pce in higher learning or anywhere and keep out (through fear and bullying tactics) more talented and open-minded minorities.”’

  If won’t apologise that is. Read up on research, academia on the issue and acknowledge you’ve lot to learn. Realise your ideas and backward values hurt people who suffer enough under oppressive institutions…Shut-up, stop your disgusting behaviour and listen to me, let me be me. Been hateful, insulted my very being…”

  “He looked righteous yet desperate for the approval, reassurance of his brave-saviour and the return of his martyr image and worth and his ability to teach us and correct our heretic ways.”

  “Neither of us looked up and he stomped off; I swear the noises made; strangled sounds of outrage, crying and frustration.”

  “Emanuel rexed and ughed heartily.

  “Thank God left with those humble partings, could always report him for his disgraceful bigotry toward retards,”’ he commented.”

  ‘“Honestly, I more detest the sentimental, Victorian-vapoured weepers and political pundits going with the vote, the public tide who support this harshly-lighted madness though.”’

  “As university’s most promising students and possibly making them a lot of money from private investors down the track, kept our livelihood. Yet if happened under tightened ws today or the accusation where lobbied against someone less valuable for innocent expression of different viewpoints, well might have been let go.”

  “Interestingly the young Trans’s older male partner ended up ter coming out too and marrying as a woman so to speak. Oh, funny and tragic story I heard. See, his former wife and infant child were sughtered by home invasion whilst he hid and escaped out the window during the commotion.”

  Was as Emanuel fred ter “weak-willed and effete and part of the doused in riches flourishing of an all-for-themselves mentality, ripe for hostile take-over by militant groups either off or on-shore, who’d do anything to protect their own and their ideals.”

  “Yes, but the Shiver truly are something else” Aryan murmured. “I shall not go through with my promise of marrying her though, adore her as I might,” he continued. “For she is pure evil my Shiver and must die and though it breaks my heart to do so I must be the one to kill her. After all, only one who can. Mist I have also grown to care for, but it is my duty to eradicate them both when their purpose as weapons is served and I shall do so without hesitation when the time is right.”

  Simon frowned though the man sounded so sincere Simon had trouble believing you could in cold-blood murder someone you were in love with. He left Aryan’s presence with more questions than answers as often happens with conversations of such an intense, philosophical nature.

  Later doing some research for party affairs he heard in his head Monovalent’s voice “you wish to know of my gloried creator. I thought I gave you ample knowledge yet seems my work never to be accomplished wholly”,

  Simon saw he was no longer in a simution of people discussing voting options but, in a house, “my maker’s earliest remembrance” he was informed. This memory seemed to be Emanuel overhearing a foster-mother, speaking on the phone, with a potential, new carer.

  “Don’t worry, he doesn’t cause much trouble, he is very unlovable though. I cared for him as an infant. Yes dear, absolutely were and still a hideous-looking thing, they do say he’s a genius though, well he’d need something positive about him. Very odd too: from only a few months would seem to tell me he wanted me to fetch something first by motioning for it and then actually making the shape with his hands.”

  “Seemed highly frustrated at not being able to speak properly and the…um… inarticute sounds he uttered. Would watch my mouth annoyingly for ages and imitate its shape whenever I spoke different words.”

  “Used his nimbler feet to grasp things when slightly-spastic hands were too weak and even put them together in weird combinations that delighted it.”

  “One wire he had bent from a perfectly good toy; it was expensive ( albeit donated) and well, he turned it into one of his abominable “little creations.” It hooked into tch that unlocked the bedroom door as to let him steal more household items to build into little towers to crawl on to see outside the apartment window.”

  “He’d spy on me whenever I did things especially involving electronics, I’m sure he turned on the heater on really cold day when no-one else was home after I dipped out very briefly for some cigarettes or gin and tonic. I needed a break, deserved it.”

  “Whenever I got upset over David or my toddler charge Molly’s screaming well it would look at me. I swear with judgement and even ughter, little brat.”