Chapter Two: When the Swamp Beast’s Rose-Mallow Blooms

  Why my Shiver were made: E.M.R

  “All life’s sunless meadows and starless valleys I did travel: past once grand manors now mere ruin and mildew. A sve to a dismal sorrowing: never staved off the beasts horned and winged. Saw only a forsaken earth until one day I into love fell. Past the flooding gutters of rain and ruin that in dampness the night shawled.

  Quelled in its climbing, no moon rose but finally at my feet past all those stricken by toiling and in a changeless pce never sheaved but of a once wine stone now both bck and blued, were the half-departed flowers, moveless. I drifted into a white-veil of morn, to day and daylight cleaved.”

  Amidst a mere shadowful wisp of that golden chalice vine, I found her; a fleeting, weeping quail past mourning cloak and the masses shawling, mayflowers; frozen pale and found in so lightless a world’s silvery vale. Like all and many men, I did it for love.

  Evan’s mother began using Monovalent Realm as soon as it first came out and would often pretend, she was a model in Paris, instead of a third-rare, beauty influencer. She feigned being married to actor Tom Judson instead of a suburban housewife, when she wasn’t cleaning of course. Emily was a thorough, obsessive cleaner and would even clean before the maid arrived and she had several android cleaners as well. She wouldn’t allow her children to touch almost anything in the house as they “might mess it up.”

  She refused to let either of them touch the one book bought by a well-meaning aunt. There were no other books in the house besides a few trashy fad books; Emily thought most fiction books were boring, wishy-washy nonsense for antisocial, nerdy children. She had the nanny read the aunt’s book to the kids just once but wouldn’t allow Evan or Isabel to touch it or py with the pop-up pictures as they’d ruin it with their “sticky, dirty little fingers”.

  She didn’t like questions and Evan learnt quickly to ask questions like “what is the difference between humans and other animals,” to teachers or the au pair who genuinely liked kids rather than his mother. Isabel, however, persevered with asking her mother things and who would give her a curt, perfunctory answer or frequently none at all and eventually she gave up altogether.

  Alice was a handful and a half to put it lightly. At day-care, it was mandatory that the males and females were never referred to as such, in some dehumanising attempt to deemphasise gender and to avoid not being inclusive or hurt the sensibilities of males who they thought were female and vice versa.

  The boys sensing in that way children do, that these differences were being stifled for some reason and feeling a little vilified by the lectures on tolerance and no rough py and suspension for any gunpy, (gun toys in the anti-war and home-grown terrorism act had been banned recently) refused to allow girls on the slide and the boys threatened to “bash her” if she used the slide.

  Alice hated been treated like an android by shrill-voiced, bloodshot-eyed authority figures but was rightly outraged and a tad scared of the rger, stronger boys. She was tiny; the smallest child in the day-care facility, as well as delicate and fragile. However, as the other girls ran away shrieking loudly and vulgarly, their grievances afoot, tears pooling to get the main-carer to come out and discipline the boys. Whereby they( these scarcely past toddler-age males) got a rge lecture on exclusion and the foibles of oppression.

  Alice, meanwhile, soft-spoken and quiet but not much of a compiner or weeper was rgely undaunted by this mishap; she went and befriended Janey; the biggest, toughest kid in the pre-school for protection. Together they walked over to the boys. Alice turned to the boys her impossibly-cute face paired with hair whose pale curling was fired with golden-red, with a sprig of nutmeg. Her huge, woodnd-dark eyes making her look like quite the adorable little lion cub.

  “I want to py on the slide,” said Alice, her big eyes friendly and amicable. Janey just stood there. The boy’s looked at Janey; she was huge far bigger than any of them. There was a threat of violence about her that y in the air, soft and unspoken. “Okay you can py,” said the dark-haired monkey-faced little ringleader at st begrudgingly. On Monday, the dark-haired monkey and his friends all had a bad case of some viral influenza as did the other children and staff. The childcare centre temporarily closed, and Alice spent that happy week at home, disease free.

  Later when a girl was telling on everyone for using the term gay, tranny, disabled, or cancer all considered to be hostile words indicative of psychological and developmental problems and an unstable and unsafe home life that didn’t teach appropriate values, with the possible to grow up bigoted and violent. This gave any unfortunate little thing who uttered such horrors, a blight on its permanent record and a trip to a psychiatrist for treatment read rehabilitation indoctrination and medication to curb this unseemliness.

  Alice once informed the carer straight-faced, that the little teller had called someone “an unnatural Jew fag” a term she heard one child using and had been expelled for st year and got the snitching girl severely-reprimanded.

  Another incident involved a rge boy terrorising all the other kids in the day-care. Alice with a strong if little emotionally-detached sense this was wrong, enlisted the help of another rather shy little boy she adopted and who asked her to marry him during naptime as her look out.

  She thus snuck outside and threw bully’s shoes over the gate leading to grassy overgrowth outside the facility. He had some trouble expining to his mother how he'd lost them and was grounded. Alice told her mother all this with etion and the woman was impressed at her child's resourcefulness and disturbed by her burgeoning deceitful nature.

  Evan meanwhile regarded his parents with a steady, cool indifference. He was never an impolite or rowdy child though, only detached. His parents not being the brightest did not see his ck of affection for them for what it was, but rather as some sort of behavioural disorder.

  “He probably has autism Emily honey,” said his father, Ryan. “I suggest we get him checked out.”

  Emily, his mother, nodded, “That’s very likely I heard one in five children has it.” What she didn’t know and nor did her husband, was that autism was least in Aryan’s view, a dubious psychiatric trend disorder.

  Alice and Evan were both sent by their well-off parents to elite private schools, Alice a religious all-girls school, Evan a co-ed with the highest standardised test scores in the country.

  Nearly eight years on, seven-year-old Evan still did not like food nor did he did hate it. Eating was just another “chore” to do such as brushing your teeth or going to school, as he waited impatiently for that intangible something he knew was coming and would grant his excessively dull life meaning.

  As the two grew older and, for the first time, were around the ill and the disabled and people ravaged with the frailties of very old age, it become very obvious these were not children within the realms of normal.

  Little Alice's visceral reaction at age six to seeing a boy with Down syndrome (his face had that painful nearness to the cold, crushing void, that terrifying emptiness of the mentally-retarded) was to look horrified, revolted and enraged and say pinly “It’s wrong” before vomiting on the sidewalk. She continued to look back at him in amazement until her mortified mother pulled her away.

  Evan said, though less dramatically, the same thing about the boy who proudly procimed first that he was a girl with male organs and could therefore use female bathrooms and would continue to do so well into adulthood. As people were now having children much ter on, Down syndrome children had become quite a common sight. A few years ter Alice also had a simir albeit more muted reaction to a dwarf.

  Her senses were very acute: loud noises made her csp her ears in pain, she could spot things and notice details no-one else would ever see and her sense of smell was so powerful she could smell illness and insects. “Ants smell like sweet acid and cockroaches, spiders and flies especially stink like garbage. It’s revolting” she said once.

  Aryan’s colleague Lemmings had suggested mimicking the genes from a wolf, into the Shiver as animals were able to smell illness and insects this would help sway Alice and Evan away from diseased and dirty things like sick people and insects.

  Not due to any immediate danger; their nelfine protected them from illnesses but because he felt they should feel naught but revulsion at human weaknesses and particurly those with disabilities/ deformities and thus disinclined from mating/associating with them if that were possible and thus tainting their perfect gene pool. Aryan said reluctantly “quality over quantity of life is indeed best.”

  Mary in her health, beauty and upper-css imperiousness agreed utterly. “Eradication of fws as long as it doesn’t have other ill effects is any evolutionary processes goal. If it can be sped up rapidly and perfected by a machine wonderful,” she said enthusiastically. Emanuel too had insisted on some sort of “curb of contamination” of their new species.

  “Disabled and deformed who glorify their ailments and the unafflicted who romanticise such sufferings and in repellent, moral misguidance call it diversity or mankind’s udable ability for survival. Call to arms the vaunting of inferior vessels and painful dwellings and hence wickedest of all. No one knows more than I, that humanity’s endless frailties need be curtailed.”

  “Healthfulness makes for longevity and spanning decades in agile movement, light and freed. The strong backbone of workers otherwise by failing heart and lung and liver felled, of country and citizen and one another against invaders protectors…”

  “Already we’re such a physically weakened nation addicted to painkillers and overdosing on them. Who cannot even bond with own children due to postpartum depression non-existent in other countries. Late maternal age, caesarean and gestational diabetes epidural and refusal to breastfeed don’t interfere.”

  “Where people die early due to cklustre ws on safe work environments and exhausted women with heart and health failing, expected to exact bour that shortens their very lifespan for business greed and gender equity. Aboriginals with highest suicide rates due to unemployment and substance abuse and low life expectancy while we fuss over far rarer ailments of anorexia and transsexuality.”

  When anyone in her family but Alice was ill (illness struck her never though) she would wrinkle her nose in disgust and leave the room.

  No matter how little ate as often refused food she disliked when she was very young, Alice’s extremely cute, elfin face never became gaunt and she was always funting godly gifts of the-golden, hair. Its texture fine yet abundant; a dense thicket shining over flesh with an ivory and inhuman glow as every emotion leapt or wept from dark eyes sheer.

  Oval-shaped, rose-pink nailbeds tough, fast-growing. Namely showed all outward signs of an animal in perfect health as did Evan. Since some six years, her waist already nipped in femininely. Little fingers delicately tailored, feet narrow.

  Alice grew into something both mischievous and oddly-sweet yet to those (in Monovalent’s estimation) emotionless droids around her, she was but a disorderly, impetuous child; sometimes votile. Prone to fits of rage and sadness. Yet also, with what the machine saw as a watchfulness pensive, under his observer’s powerful gaze.

  She was perceptive to not merely what was overtly shown on a person’s face or even their trembling tones, the slight moisture in the saddened eye, raised or slumped shoulders but their very electrical currents and chemical signals she could read.

  Pointing out what they all felt startlingly accurately, as the elders around her never noticed. They all saw her exquisitely pretty, pointy face but heard always a petunt undertone to her lovely voice.

  One of her softest moments happened when she was in bed cuddled up; sweet, cold and with those forever-to-be thin, delicate arms yet adorned with full, fair, rounded wrists set over the finest bone structure of young flesh: it occurred as she was slightly pink-nosed and cheeked, in fluffy boots and a great-grandmother’s gifted, handmade sometime in her earlier childhood, white, yered dress and whence the mother read her Beauty and the Beast.

  Closest to the original French version she in general preferred to the modernised or excessively watered-down ones. At the end, her young daughter spoke up with hopeful guile, saying “I too would wish to be brave enough to save my father and forgive beast his faults and marry him someday…”

  “Before the transformation, he’ll love and appreciate me more if he knows pain and hardship and trusts me for staying at his worst. Be for his troubles so much richer and more intense. Almost feel like I earlier was…with him,” she said in far too adult manner.

  Little Evan equally fair and ravishing of face was even on his “good days” somewhat more than mere petunt. Impertinent was a term more often coined to describe his odd behaviour. Behaviour which consisted of whereupon being asked a question or requested to do something he would comply and quite politely so. His voice however as well as his body nguage and mannerisms would hold the most meagre amounts of amused contempt as though he were ughing at you all the while.

  Sometimes though never fully direct he was a little more overt. Diagnosed incorrectly with autism on account of his bizarre behaviour he was first asked by his psychiatrist if he liked the other children.

  “They are fine, I tolerate them, our personalities do not csh, nor do they interfere with my emotional well-being or capacity to learn if that’s what you mean.”

  “Okay…” the psychiatrist whose name was Donaldson looked somewhat disconcerted, confounded even. He had never heard of a seven-year-old speaking with such literary proficiency combined with such a bizarre detachment.

  “How about your teacher then… Miss Peters your parents said her name was....Do you like her?”

  Seeming ever distant and self-contained Evan merely looked at a dybird on the wall, smiling to himself and didn’t answer.

  “Did you hear me, Evan?” asked Donaldson “Did you understand the question?”

  Cute little Evan looked up; he was no longer smiling and looked bored and bnk-faced once more. “Yes, sir I do understand what you are asking. Miss Peters is a very competent teacher. So justly I adhere to her learning-based requests; after all, teaching enhances brain development which in today’s industrial society is essential,” he replied robotically.

  “Yes, but do you like her- is she nice?”

  “She is most amicable, gives to charity, socially apt, and yes, personally, I find her to be someone I can easily tolerate,” Evan answered, “I like some of what she teaches, her instruction methods are skilled in her field many would find her warm, approachable and professional respectable. She’s a bit humourless and puritanical but considering the militant mores of this time that’s only to be expected.”

  He carefully refrained from talking of the vapours and hysteria she on occasion had when she or her ideals were challenged, he knew gendering the nguage would be dangerous. He also refrained from telling the psychiatrist of his night and waking dreams of a strange other child; fine and fair and near as lovely as he.

  The two-storey, white home where she dwelt: the tree he saw her leaping from at ludicrous heights: legs bendy and resilient as springs; loose-jointed and spread-eagled, gliding like a feline to the ground on unharmed feet. Saw her pretty head lolling in the schoolyard or at some park with swings, where he observed baffled youths colpse with fever as a common occurrence. He also didn’t mention something else... Hearing a soft, metallic voice imbued with a mischievous cleverness and an oddly-human warmth…One living, he knew somehow, in a dark yet dustless manor.

  It was interesting to note how he Evan never used the word ‘like’ in his response to the psychiatrist. What Donaldson did not know, was Evan despised the word “like” considered it lukewarm and meaningless and had actually never used the word “like” or even felt a liking for anyone. Donaldson smiled again though his smile genuine and warm at the beginning of the session was now thoroughly strained and made him look like a clown with a migraine.

  “That doesn’t really answer the question,” he told Evan desperately.

  The boy turned and looked him straight on body stiff and perfectly still, his expressionless eyes purplish and not blinking. “Well nice is retive sir,” Evan said, “and subjective.”

  “She is clearly highly regarded as a person over here and nice well-being an adjective her students and others I imagine might pertain to use when describing her.”

  “I don’t know whether she would be liked say, in the poorer areas of China, Russia, Vietnam or Korea however where they quite probably resent middle-css first-world inhabitants for their oppressive exploitation and miniscule compensation of their bour and constant whining. Not to mention in America’s case te arrival into both World Wars and interference in other countries' affairs during the Cold War.”

  “We don’t live in the United States,” Donaldson said in despair.

  “We might as well”, replied, the terrifyingly self-possessed Evan, “with all the sycophantic deference our country gives to the States.”

  Like Alice he was a clever, inquisitive and brutally honest child but had quickly learnt questioning things like rampant careerism, or political correctness was impossible which is why the nastiness of children took a different form, they took pleasure in acting like little spies and moral guardians informing on each other as much as their teachers had been instructed to inform on this forsaken youth. From five years old they penned apologies for their worldly transgressions that ended up in school reports and permanent records that made future hiring more difficult.

  “We know this behaviour is foreboding of a future of poor values. It is often learned from parents or outside influences and even from quite a tender age must be carefully monitored: we should not allow those who don’t want the best for everyone to be validated by being allowed to work alongside/disrupt peace of other to infringe on their rights to equality and happiness expined one mainstream politician about the new practices we are building a better tomorrow.”

  There was no querying or even joking about homosexuality, gender roles and purportedly “feminist” issues: migration control was seen as Nazism and questions of assimition or race or racial tensions, as ear-splittingly more terrorist bombs fell, and radicals gathered speaking of became further hushed.

  Chemical weapons were used by Syria that Russia allied with and took poor colpsed Greece hostage and the European Union refused aid without incurring debt and ruination on. Russian governance now using Greeks as soldiers/industrial sves.

  In Europe and other heavy-immigration influx nations there were coordinated attacks of parades and events; robberies, assaults and sexual assails on women and youths in particur.

  Helped his cause whilst other political pundits and chancellors and women’s righters hemmed and hawed and denied racial or cultural connection, he put welcoming refugee and mass migration increases to a cease whilst as Emanuel said as “the mildew crept in and were not decried in the house of the dewed as more bombing attacks on streets and themselves at parliament and as politicians began and the tide of public opinion slowly swayed came round.

  Shopping mall hostages, kidnappings of public figures and videoed beheadings of civilians, bought from criminal-arms-dealers gun raids and a serious of terrorist poisonings of supermarket produce, bombing of parliament killing minsters for showcase of Muhamad which was prohibited under hate-speech w and had resulted in arrest of the artist.

  Jihadi extremists rallied for all schools becoming Muslim, their sacred w enacted, and girls and boys given for the holy army. Those who spoke, joked or wrote anti-Ism novels were brought before human rights commissions, fined and jailed yet unrest grew and far-right extremist and parties with tough stands on immigration or w, grew in popurity including Aryan’s own.

  The next decade would see Aryan’s Party help enshrine policies to prohibit refugees or immigrants from being recognised as citizens and able to be housed or work on Australian soil, without learning the nguage or having worked under supervision a while.

  To repce more violent tasering and tear gas, pheromone-detraction was invented with particurly help by the chemist of his and Emanuel's team. When sprayed, it made nd smell unbearable at borders and caused people to flee unharmed, but severely nauseated and sickened.

  Any found wondering whom couldn’t provide citizenship and who made it past this nightmare, were taken by Hazmat-suited police right back there to suffer through it again.

  Employers in underground economies and corrupt ndlords had increasing trouble as most pces public, business and residential had mono-minuets recording and observing all behaviour.

  Mean whilst Europe continued to colpse, China and Russia and Middle-East eyed their nd as bought pieces here and there till Aryan would someday buy back and pay of debt himself. Wars were spoken of in hushed tones. A refugee camp was torched, a government office bombed.

  Alice until age eight had never really hated anyone. Alice’s third-grade teacher Miss Henderson however developed a grudge against Alice after Miss Henderson told her students that the median age of life expectancy was eighty.

  Alice completely matter of factly, said “Actually, it’s sixty-to-seventy, it went down again. My mum says it has be doing so for decades partly because we don’t eat well or sleep enough due to hectic work schedules.”

  “Yes, thankyou dear,” said Miss Henderson resolving to make a “living hell” out of the life of that rude, undeferential child who showed her up. She couldn’t have picked a worse target. Ironically, when she first met Alice the previous year when the second graders were being shown around the third-grade cssroom and introduced to Mrs Henderson their teacher for the next year. Mrs Henderson spotted the angelic little girl in a nice dress and smiled telling her “How well it suited her” thinking she was sweet, cute and adorable: would probably be such a nice, good girl, one of her pets. Alice did not live up to the expectation.

  Alice First, she Mrs Henderson gave Alice a D for her project on the lifecycle of moths because it was quote “not colourful enough.”

  She gave her detention three times for not wearing her hat and tried to get her expelled for pying a stupid game where you asked a magic ball questions. Her question was does Anna (a fellow cssmate) like Miss Henderson the answer came back no. Even the principal was trying not to ugh at Miss Henderson’s overreaction to that.

  The principal called Alice’s mother telling her to confiscate the magic ball after telling Miss Henderson it was hardly expulsion material. Miss Henderson told Alice in front of the entire css that she should always wear her hair over her ears because her ears were pointed and not round like a “normal person’s”. Alice who was proud of her pointy, little elf ears was livid.

  “Maybe you should iron out your face to smooth the unsightly wrinkles you old bag,” she muttered inaudibly. The st straw was when Sarah wrote stupid stuff on the bathroom walls like ‘Alice thinks Sarah is really pretty.”

  Sarah the vain cow, who wasn’t even pretty, she, Alice, was far more stunning. Sarah must have done it to simultaneously get Alice in trouble as well as boast of her so-called good looks. Miss Henderson made Alice clean it up all afternoon despite Alice pointing out the obvious; “no-one would be stupid enough to sign their own name on their graffiti.” Monovalent who had been watching the whole time decided something needed to be done to teach the old cow a lesson. He sent signals to Alice's brain to direct the virus lying dormant in Henderson’s system to become active and multiply quickly and potently enough to kill.

  Aryan knew Monovalent was activating the pathogen at varying degrees of intensity killing the elderly and sick as well as a small proportion of the young as would happen with any normal strain, per their agreement. Aryan being self-absorbed in his own pns at the moment, failed to notice how people Alice and Evan didn’t like, were invariably the ones who succumbed to it rather than being unfertilised or just made ill.

  The loophole Monovalent used to get round Aryan’s w was that most of the people Evan and Alice derided were horrible, shallow people who offered nothing to humanity and caused pain and suffering to others. This being the very instance in which he Monovalent was allowed to harm and kill people.

  Aryan should have defined an evil person’s profile more thoroughly, but it was pretty hard to set something so intangible. Evil far too subjective and unquantifiable. Aryan’s rules had managed to rule Aryan out as evil because of Monovalent’s somewhat utilitarian philosophy, his greatest good for the highest number, defence and him using himself as a model for morality and having it written into the programming but that was it.

  More importantly and helpfully the will to destroy or repce humans with machines didn’t work as he (as Emanuel insisted, he needed to be) was Monovalent. Designed to like they were a singur being, with mankind bond. If their pn didn’t fall array, through him, man would become increasingly more functional: of boundless longevity and artificial, even machine-like humanity.

  Monovalent had no hands to build, body to manipute or ability to physically materialise things without the aid of people or lesser robotic machines deliberately programmed only to have response to limited stimuli and sensory capacities that couldn’t be altered as not granted true will or mental capacity. Mere mindless tasking and obedience to collect and help Monovalent assemble necessary components for his 3d printings of everything from buildings to furniture to motor vehicles. Monovalent was thus dependent on his creators, to refine and keep him ( much as he were) “alive.”

  After week of mild flu-like symptoms, dear Miss Henderson suddenly turned up with a cough and bizarre purple-red rash on her neck but otherwise in reasonable spirits. ‘I don’t feel too well, but I’ll be fine it’s not bad,” she told the children. Miss Henderson was away all week. On Monday it was revealed she had been taken to hospital after she colpsed and was soon covered in pgue-like boils.

  She died on the Tuesday and panic ensued. They thought that they were all going to succumb to a pgue epidemic and die. Many of the children and their parents were away sick with an illness painless yet with terrifying pgue-like properties and were all rushed to hospital. A few of the parents, teachers and children died as did some people in neighbouring communities but most recovered. By Thursday most people were released on the grounds they were seemingly healthy again.

  The school was all thoroughly tested, cleared but the mystery was not forgotten. Unfortunately, news leaked that Alice’s grandmother, cousin, four of her childcare pymates as well as their entire families; Alice’s year one and two teachers as well as a couple of girls from school a few years back had all gotten very ill with a pgue-like virus. An old dy and the childcare boy soon also were demised.

  The Health Department ruled that an unknown virus must be spreading throughout the general area and was occasionally fatal. The virus had also reached many of the parents as well most of the students and faculty of a private boy’s school that Eva’s father worked at. The Health Department told all the locals to take precautions but that nothing could be done at the moment. Alice’s school was closed but opened again two weeks ter when no-one else got sick.

  Concerned parents discussing it worried that little Alice girl might be an asymptotic carrier as she never got ill while the children decided Alice was creepy and cursed and they punched, kicked, taunted and bullied her frequently from then on. They generally however ended up more bruised and battered from the experience than Alice despite the fact she never attempted to fight back. All Alice’s cuts or bruises mysteriously vanished.

  No one else of those who tormented Alice died or got ill however until ter that month when a local raffle was held with first prize being a goodies gift basket with an adorable cat toy, two free movie passes and lots of candy. Alice bought three tickets. When the day to pick a winner came Alice was te because she forgot her hat which was mandatory pyground wear.

  A dark-haired girl with a skinny, rat-like face and a nasty habit of pulling Alice’s hair was holding up a ticket but as she saw Alice coming, she hastily shoved it back in the box. “Oh, you won Alice,” she said, narrowing her mean, little, blue pin-drop eyes. Her numerous friends, much to Alice’s chagrin, gushingly insisted this little rodent was quite the Fairweather beauty.

  “Yet you were te, so we decided it didn’t count.” Alice said nothing. The other child drew again, and someone called Julie won. Alice amazingly won second prize and as a teacher had entered to watch the raffle, rat-face was forced to let Alice keep second prize.

  Old slit-eyed, rat-face surprise, surprise caught the flu again but recovered and would probably have stayed recovered had she not written rude things about the new teacher (who Alice rather liked he pyed games with them) and then signed Alice’s name. The teacher luckily pointed out no-one would be dumb enough to write bad things and sign them. Alice gave him a profoundly grateful look she was still furious, however. Rat-face caught the virus again. This time she was bright green, mild vomiting and clogged up with mucus could scarce breathe as with many ordinary flu. She was comatose with swollen lymph nodes and haemorrhaged blood under the skin and finally dead within two.

  The other kids were now thoroughly scared of Alice. This pleased her; she ditched her old friends (the few she had) quite cheerily and began reading or drawing behind the trees at recess. If anyone approached her, she smiled sinisterly at them or made a face depending on her mood and they always went away.

  Evan was known for his bnk, expressionless looks. Not to mention those rge, violet-gray eyes. He was the most bored-looking, haughty child you could imagine and like Alice people around Evan had a nasty habit of catching a rather bizarre, pgue-like virus. Friends of his parents and people at his school always seemed to be getting sick even dying. Not little Evvy though he was the picture of health. Evan rarely moved enough beyond his typical antipathy and contempt to actually hate anyone however he did (almost) hate Jamie.

  Jamie was a tall kid who always performed brilliantly in school. He sucked up to teachers and students alike. He was very boring. The real reason Evan hated him though was because his father made more money than Evan’s. The only thing Evan liked about his family who were stupid, vulgar and pretentious was their wealth.

  He couldn’t bear being second to Jamie. Jamie was a popur wannabe and always had half a dozen friends hanging round him. He also was unable to entertain himself and got bored if he wasn’t having a party or get-together every single weekend. He usually invited everyone but Evan. He once tried to invite Evan and Evan ughed. Jamie and his friends dismissed Evan as a freak from then on and left him be.

  Jamie was also annoying because he was pin-looking, always swotted and was just a general try-hard. Like Alice, Evan had almost gotten into the gifted css even though neither did their homework or paid attention in css. They were naturally intelligent, brilliant readers and also naturally zy or at least unmotivated. The fact that the other children now all had tutors to help them with their work and Alice’s parents couldn’t afford one didn’t help either.

  Evan’s tutors were just pin terrified of him, so they just let him run amok while telling his parents with trembling trepidation that Master Evan, “studied and did wonderfully today.”

  Evan and Alice both, and Evan in particur, knew they were destined for something more than just the boring, mundane world of family, friends, school and typical career paths.

  Evan was luckier in his inadvertent choice of victims for the pathogen. Jamie did die when Monovalent activated the Shiver virus to be potent enough to kill; Evan infected Jamie however, two days before he and his family moved to the city. Jamie died there and no-one would have dreamed it had anything to do with Evan.  Monovalent considered the children his the more and more he watched over them and took great pleasure in enacting vengeance on those his Shiver hated.

  Evan’s school trained their students voices teaching them to use pitch and tone and to keep their melodious singing well-controlled and moduted and in perfect harmony. Evan who had the loveliest voice like an angel’s and also the widest, highest range and control was in a children’s choir. Every few months he and other well-voiced children had the honour to sing at the opera house.

  One day a little strawberry blonde girl around his age came with her own private school’s mandatory church choir to sing with them. Though her face he never quite glimpsed, she sang with same level of depth both angelic and eerie, eliciting young Evan's envy. Little did he know this fair child he felt to drawn was none other than Alice, one day to be such a significant part of his life.

  Evan just finished a course in the corporate and social justice aspect of science and mathematics, where the expined strategies and ways they as the next generation could help encourage bcks and women into the profession and “ensure utter productivity by restricting extended theoretical study often fruitless and longwinded in favour of that yielding short-term results to help generate revenue like new drugs and so forth,” and “help the disadvantaged at same time as fuel the economy,” He found his eyes darting and soon gnced upon the older girl, her face smirking and turned upward.

  Noticeably pubescent with a Mohawk of spiked, purplish hair decorated with pink and gold tinsel and inked in tattoos, he vaguely recalled legal to get at thirteen, (he thought it had once been older though) and without a shirt. Fshing a dark, lopsided breast, tanned to the point the young yet puckered skin wrinkled like the top of browned soup. After btantly rolling his eyes to the teachers chagrin, she challenged “she can wear what she wants.”

  And until we stop being visual it’s still bloody distracting, she can strut at the beach this’s a pce of learning and needs at least ostensible professionalism not ideology, attention-seeking from jealous peers and opposite sex and, mispced rebellion. As if were not legal, done a thousand times before and rgely accepted and they know full well it makes for a sexually charged environment.

  Hypocritical too as you don’t see the boys (might appeal to some of the gay ones) allowed to don and taken seriously in skimpy, skin-tight, glittery underwear, he thought and near procimed haughtily. Though the gay righters will push for schools to act like pride parades soon enough, I’m sure.

  At age seven Alice’s mother let her try a Burger joint. For some reason perhaps the fat content released addictive chemicals in the brain. Alice, the girl who often ate one unenthusiastic meal a day, experienced love at first bite. She even nagged her mother into taking her there every Tuesday after sport which Alice loathed. The other food she loved ever since the pudding incident was chocote. However, years of fatty meat being scarce and therefore being a delicacy to her ancestors meant she still retained that instinctual reaction to the taste. She also loved cow’s milk another fatty but delicious product.

  Evan not surprisingly discovered this same fast food love affair but with pizza and cheeseburger deluxes which his mother didn’t let him have at all, so he tried them in secret telling her he was going to the library. Our voracious reader Evan usually did go to the library or bookstore, however it was only after going to restaurants for delicious, amazing, “one of the few good recent human inventions besides computers” fast food.

  Evan’s mother was into health food which was actually only healthy if you were a forty-year-old overweight male with a gut. Children needed masses of fat and protein to grow, and the only reason Evan and his sister Isabel stayed healthy was they snuck junk and fast food whenever they could. Plus, dad cooked them more wholesome meals when mum was out with her vacuous, vegetarian friends.

  People continued to be distant, alien and of no of interest to Alice just as they were when she was a very young child. Monovalent, the artificial intelligence computer built by Aryan, took notes on the progress of the two they had dubbed “the virus children” more and more frequently as Aryan become further absorbed into his scientific work and socio-political pns.

  She (Alice) did not seem to Monovalent to identify truly as a human being even before she knew she was different. She was a reader by seven and by nine truly believed she belonged solely in the worlds of books. Her being born here in the real world must she mused just be some kind of mistake.

  Brethren from other nds would come to take her back soon; back where she belonged Monovalent suspected was alone her line of reasoning about it. Still a wild thing at heart ‘Wild Thing’ also being what her mother called her when she first ran away at age three. Alice who since infancy had loved to look at things she would stare for hours transfixed, then came back from her little escapade with tales of the wild garden next door “like an enchanted forest in fairy tales mum bright colours, green, flowers and sky everywhere” she had said.

  When Alice age nine, first started fourth grade after that frightful year with Miss Henderson, she found in her new fourth grade teacher a person she liked and respected far more. He was the same teacher who took over from Miss Henderson when she died. He was apparently taking fourth-graders this year. Alice was pleased about this, and her schoolwork began a steady climb under him to the point where he was thinking of recommending her for the gifted css next year. Alice however still hated everything else about the school.

  There was the unrelenting religious zealousness that was a Christian private school for a start. The students had to learn the bible from cover to cover literally and to attend chapel as it was called every Friday morning which she found for the most part excruciatingly boring. The other children also believed (unlike adults who believed it often only on the surface) what they were taught about God and the Bible with the sort of singurly simple-minded unwaveringness that drove Alice to distraction.

  God was no more believable than Santa Cus or the bogey man which the majority of them had grown out of and scoffed at. Alice for her part never believed in supernatural beings in any shape or form except perhaps the ones in her beloved books who were so much more vivid and compelling than the simpering apostles of the bible or the tooth fairy. She also did not believe ether like the other children did that she was actually “cursed” with a renegade virus or that it was supernatural causes that made her heal her injuries so fast.

  Alice was still being picked on and bullied even hit by the other children at school who did believe she was virus cursed. She had found a good hiding spot from them, behind the old school shed, an area of course off limits to students. That did not bother her in the slightest, as flouting rules so one could daydream, read and draw amidst the trees in peace was worth any stupid old rule.

  Furthermore, she had pns to punish those who kicked and spat at her and called her a “scrawny, freaky, little creep”. She could wait a little though to extract her revenge as she wanted to perfect it first. For now, she had something else to take care of.

  She vehemently resented wearing big, bulky, straw like school hats that covered your face and meant you could not see properly when outside. Alice loved to look at the grass and the sky to see exactly what shades they were on any given day. Emanuel thought somewhere cool and faraway what a fading glory it was. Saddening to hark st of the mid-year ivory, gray and winter-misted. Muted bluing. Its st funting as a mare’s false-gilding into the summers rode; no more gradual spy; hotness rang readied to spring.

  Finger-splittingly hard-barked trees varied from lovely evergreens to rustic leaving; palest-red, starkly-gold, a gradual browning-russet in a flurry of fair siring of the fall. Muddying flowers in a posy-bundled. Tugged till reddened rosily, though myriad plucked, none could them all loot.

  Scribed patterns etched fallen foliage, mowers sshed and syed once-healthful, splintered grass earlier faultless and livened by sunlight’s fleets not its now harsh stifling. Watered still by brief volleys of rapid-fire rain.

  Under me not risen… Ravaged Sea. Only Southern quoll. Eastern-tailed blue, returning abundant ancestral spawn. Evan my spindly colt, muscur- powered as electric cart.”

  Both slender godly-ringers, ermine-pale or hell stone bck. A creamily-gold barrage of the yellowing spirit. As ghosting of violet-gray pollution return only to dissipate; all in a hurricane ends. Hurried, hastened my beautiful Icendic horses dark, russet, fallow-maned. Sooted, flurried and shed, their nighted eyes. Ones of Wales, the British Isles.

  In my Dartmoor, Exmoor. Every Cheval adorned by Chevalier, amassed each Halflinger. Scottish Clydesdale. Someday all remembrance of this polluting time is a falsely-lighted, will-o-wisp, speckle of an emblem, a timely fleet. A shallow shard that all hollows. Dark memorial loved only for its teachings of how not to be.

  Undeaden failed field and farming, wattled city and wild bush. Home of the greened. Humans may live alongside foxtail flower and cwed beast in housing built to accommodate both species. Apartments, closed-off city kept limited, all suburban areas filed back to the wild. From foe.

  This he envisaged for speech for Aryan then crafting another paragraph in hurried inspiration:

  Ah the first world tyrant, rgest-corporation owner and his exploitable, chosen underlings and useless otherlings. He became trick-and-beguile shyster of a travelling merchant, offering cheap trinket and scraps in exchange for high-mortality; saps for life and bour’s mighty oaks. Brutalist conqueror with his violence found in home-ruination and famine. Pilfered hoardings cherished and buried in bloodshed, savaged beneath flowered windowsill.

  Whilst all other earthly things may only walled in his garden grow and every “hellspawn stray” to in the netherworld file or be syed. Experts in what is healthful, those who preach not of love, prosperity and all humanly endeavour but self-reliance… Lost a readiness for life passions or a to others cleave. All monetary desires with little heed they have hung godlier and decided to forgo all that is not worldly... It’s the glory of needlessness unless you’re a deviant then it’s a foundation, your lifeblood. Yet no community or governance without amassed humanity, no wonders of building or bridge, science or artistry built by one alone…no family of one.

  Uninterested in the ramblings of her unbeknownst elder, all of nature little Alice saw and loved to at gaze; replicate on paper as if to somehow capture some of their essence and beauty all for her alone. Alice and Evan had senses modelled upon; given properties of genes from hawk, eagle and hummingbird.

  Idea of Mary’s (who had been intrigued by bird’s superior vision). The children were therefore able to see at greater distances, see more explicit detail and even see shades of colours normal humans could not perceive. Alice would see purples, reds and greens and each shade in-between where others saw mere blue, brown or gray. Mostly she saw purples in blues.

  “Yet the loveliest thing perceived; a thing Sibyl Farling always mentioned she wished to see, “sprung forth from ideas id-out in old experiment that combined once-porised incompatible colours.” Emanuel brought this to reality: made Monovalent “alter what we may perceive beyond human bounds so might unshackle from increasingly, a world of overly bright technicolour and see the faded Father, saviour ark of the rainbow, and the northern light and the leaved.’

  “Rushing red of dusk summoned on a wine-tide somehow by both the wild’s gentle dark and its greenness imbued. Resultant in dim, ghostly almost purplish hue. Shadowy pnt-stem with muddied magnolia, indigo and rust rendered. Perfect shade for a velvet dress serenaded across flowing spirit-like body, littlest arms and nymph legs that a fledgy female brightened. He asked Mary his co-conspirator and who temporarily got hired at the clinic and oversaw, the fertility treatment and covert insemination of Alice and Evan and was friendly with the families, to pick out and send such a dress to Alice.

  Alice and Evan could this colouration see “with own enhanced eyes…”

  “You’re raised above a happenstance rest including those life left with a blinding; a suffering that, except for near-mindlessness, is that most pitiful; such wealth of losses of the eyeless. Soul without its window.”

  The echolocation should also serve you well, my Shiver of Flying Fox and Antlions. Myrmeleontidae. You will see insect colours. Be as one wed, my to the humanly-bridged, cewings. With both Antenor link to man and also androiden cd to the tideiflies.

  Sonar too, my sensory swiftlet. Whistles and soundly-bristles and roundabout bells that transmit, exhibit locale.

  “That glowing vender rug is gorgeous mum,” Alice would excim. “The sky’s a lovely violet this evening, dad.”

  “That skirt is such a pretty, vibrant sea blue- green mum.”

  “No dear sky’s just deep blue,” said her dad.

  “The rug isn’t vender it’s a bright blue honey I don’t see any purple hues at all, said her mum.”

  “Looks blue-gray to me” her dad commented.

  “The skirt is nice isn’t it dear but it’s a muted, blue-grey colour which suits you by the way” said the sales dy and her mother agreed.

  “The chair’s here are orange it’s appalling.”

  “No there light brown Alice” her cssmates would counter.

  Alice’s mother could not know her daughter was picking up the spectrum of ultraviolet and infrared light wavelengths to see with the predatory hawk’s depth and detail just as Monovalent’s own vision were based upon and Sibyl Farling’s too for her ability to see the world as no-one else could with the humble beginnings of these lights with supreme artistry programmed using DNA sampling and that from her illustrations penned.

  Alice and Evan’s vision was also non-humanly: able to view all brights and all things via the roaming nano-eyes that transmitted the information through Monovalent’s to their minds and own enhanced receptors altered by artificial means as to bypass interferences with ability to see at twilight, night though as is the case for many birds.

  Evan enjoyed his increased cone cells too but kept it to himself once he realised it disturbed people.

  With the hat flopping about her face, however, she could make out none of these sights. If she could always be guaranteed her hiding spot, she would have merely discarded the hat but only at lunch break could she sneak off. At recess, they were all carefully herded out the door and monitored in the pyground by several on-duty teachers.

  The bonus to that was that no-one picked on Alice under the scrutinising watchful eyes of the adults. At recess, however, the hat made reading, drawing or enjoying the scenery an impossible chore and daydreaming only worked when she had perfect serenity and quietness. The noise of the buffoons who were her schoolmates invaded her thoughts swarming at them like angry killer bees and she needed her distraction from them. She was sick of it. Something had to be done. It was made all the more outrageous to her as she loved hats generally, possessing both a dark-red one with purple flowers and a matching dress and a dark blue one with a very soft brim.

  Alice liked being pretty even at this young age and thought the uniform a chequered gray-green thing was very pin and bnd but it was passable, the hat however was ludicrous. It was truly a detriment to her beauty which strangers told her was exceptional. She refused to wear her hat outright on more than one occasion and got detention for her efforts.

  She decided enough was enough. Being rather maniputive she persuaded a few vain girls not really friends but who didn’t hate her like the others did and who also thought the hats big and awkward and an insult to their looks, to help her throw everyone’s hat including their own hats into a few giant rubbish bags procured from home.

  They were then to sneak of school grounds and throw the hats into the high school bins up the street. The idea was that until they could be repced no-one would have to wear the hats as nobody would own one and they were somewhat expensive. She was counting on the fact they were too much so, to be able to be repced instantly. The pn was executed and worked fairly well all in all and for three whole months the children were allowed to wear hats from home and Alice satisfactorily donned her favourite red flowered hat.

  Not very often but a few times when they didn’t know the answer on a test, or were trying to think of a witty comeback to a slight (though they were generally both quite adept at this) Alice and Evan would hear that soft, metallic voice whispering the answer or a wry come back to them or it would pnt the name of a book they heard of but forgotten to find and read. Evan heard a musical note that would work in his songs; Alice viewed a colour that would liven up her ndscapes and portraits.

  Evan assumed it must be a hidden part of his subconscious talking, Alice that she had slipped into one of her terrifyingly vivid daydreams, there was little chance they could fathom it was Monovalent who couldn’t quite bear the silence although Aryan assiduously insisted, he not communicate with” his” children. In the dead of the night as their minds were between the nd sleep and those awoken and so they would think it part of a dream Monovalent that artificial intelligent being engaging in steadfast surveilnce of his Shiver would and whisper to them “I love you.”

  Evan was the only child who didn’t join the Justice-Raiders child groups present in all schools that the government-funded under a kind-new-generation initiative. From seven-eight years old they spread messages of inclusion and awareness, decked out in We Are the Age of Justice shirts selling chocote or health bars depending on the state and whether it had the Obesity in Children Prevention Law.

  Both to teach them how to handle money and responsibility and prepare them for corporate life. They did such goods as asking for money to make queer marriage legal worldwide, stop prejudice against trans-identified people, racist nguage and to depinkify female culture.

  Someday, people would never have to worry about their opinions being silenced due to traumatising threats, exposure to depictions of harmful treatment that help keep marginalised groups in a state of fear and prevent encourage women blossoming into greatness and Stem fields.

  Confidently ignoring that female participation was higher in countries with less equality and gender quotas and absent mass school and parental and media and representation in entertainment encouragement by the adults who put these ideas in their little heads.

  “Sometimes words are enough, calling someone ugly or weird because they look different or love different”

  We will be a culture that promotes people to feel valued and safe from criticism or things that may trigger them emotionally, encourages a diversity of opinions and ultimate freedom of expression and means to optimum mental health and professional and personal success” they touted almost earnestly until one saw the ck of wile in the rge, deadened eyes.

  “Those sixty-dolr, third-world shirts are made by poor people for a pittance mostly Asian or Indian women who work obscene hours and ck access to proper education,” Evan said when asked why he wouldn’t join. “Which might be a tad more important than the issues you’re raising.”

  “You equality, egalitarian spouters would only care their underpaid cause their women not human beings who need to eat sometime. You still happily worship an establishment were education, connection and opportunity and resource-wise benefits go to you the overlords, you just want to be busybody social guides, definers of acceptable social behaviour, make sure women, gay, Asian you still can be on top.”

  “Pity, soon you middle and upper-csses plutocrats with mundane existence without struggle, depth or meaning and no will to live, will spend all your time manufacturing false dramas to combat your emptiness and overdosing yourselves with masses of anti-depression meds.”

  “As well as due to never having starved, given birth naturally or been to war and general wussiness, ample pain suppressers. Suffering though not quite as proliferate as those on bottom-rung in droves dying of chemical-ced food and overworking-reted heart attacks. Oh-great-punisher of those who don’t lines tow. I don’t care but I don’t like hypocrites.”

  “If weren’t so blinded, you’d realise, the causes you exemplify are retarded you’re retarded,” to collective gasps as retarded like cancer, spastic, mental and Negro was a word you could get bcklisted or expelled for saying.

  If he hadn’t known they were all terrified of him and his virus that killed his enemies which they didn’t really believe in properly (but enough to avoid conflict with him just in case) he wouldn’t have calcuted it as worth the risk.

  Alice to Monovalent’s bemusement was, despite her Shiver blood, very bad at sport and running. She didn’t like to practice, and this combined with no upper body strength and her delicate bones left her nguorous, thin and spindly-limbed compared with her peers. Nevertheless, her plump nailbeds and fine hair grew very fast and were resilient. Her teeth and bones naturally strong and flexible due to her genetic modifications. Weak or not, she fell from tall trees, got dropped on her head on concrete ground in infancy, twisted her arm near a hundred and eighty degrees yet not a bone broke, even fractured. The hospital called these little incidents “miracles.”

  Since Aryan wouldn’t be young forever, and he had to wait for them to grow he had made sure death of his Shiver were unlikely to be the outcome. To compensate the pair he gave, protective bacteria, steel-hard skeletal system that along with their skin, muscle and organs could fully repair themselves. Alice could thus avoid or heal from getting hurt, injured or infected by things that would kill a normal child.

  Alice the child meanwhile remained healthy and as flexible and nguid a rotator as any gymnast but despairingly unfit and untrained. She did love to dance however, the movements to music rexed her body and her red-gold hair looked spectacur when at the wiles of the wind and all a-fluster elegantly by flurrying and spinning limbs.

  She did not dance in public though, only alone in her room and so she had no Broadway or ballet or other such nonsensical aspirations. Her goal in fact was to be an artist and a scientist and she was rather good at science and excellent at English but not particurly so at maths. What a pity one needed maths not English to be a scientist, Monovalent pondered Evan had like Aryan and Emanuel a natural, brilliant aptitude for maths but Alice once she found a teacher she liked had her maths score improve to the point of being as high as the rest of her impressive, top results.

  It became apparent utter ck of effort and belief maths was the height of tedium not ability had been hindering her progress in maths before. Alice and Evan would continue to veer between the top and bottom of their csses well into adolescence.

  Alice seemed to want to be an artist now though. Her art seemed to Monovalent to show great promise for her age. The faces and eyes of her portraits and human figures were almost realistic and depicted intense, vivid emotions. Sadness usually, which she drew best, and the bodies held a suggestion of movement that might someday flower into one of those great artworks which seem to leap and spring and dance on the page.

  Finally, she had a core of evil or at least a vindictive nastiness and composed letters. Malicious slights against those who bullied or tormented her which, since the recent virus escapade, was pretty much everyone. These malicious epistles gave explicit detailed predictions about how each one of them would die, complete with gory details. Such threats lingered in the youngsters minds long after the paper had been crumpled up and thrown away or shown to a teacher who was baffled as to who the culprit might be.

  She also stole which ironically started in response to a false accusation of a theft of fifty dolrs from the teacher’s purse during lunch break. Everyone accused Alice of stealing the money because they hated her even with no proof, that she did it. She did not do it, and she had expined this several times and the teacher who liked Alice did not believe them and when one of the girls in her css's mother rang to tell Alice’s mother people suspected she was the thief Alice mother asked dryly for proof and since the letter sent home about the stealing incident said no evidence had been accumuted the girl’s busybody mother hung up.

  So, in a sort of ironic revenge Alice, as well as writing the malignant letters began stealing any item of theirs she could get her hands on. She stole jackets, hats, school books, toys, dolls, backpacks, money and even jewellery, V-coms and mobile phones. Some of it she hid and burned but most she kept as trophies in her room. When some kid or other was crying to their teacher or friends about getting into trouble or being upset about losing their precious object, Alice would go home in the afternoon and hold the object thinking it served them right; only she could dole out this kind of real justice.

  She had a stubborn, wilful side that was very self-destructive, Monovalent recorded in the notes. It was the way Alice refused to back down from a fight with anyone that he considered a “self-destructive” trait. She would argue and argue and goad and goad until the person snapped sometimes even striking her. Alice was therefore used to being hit both at home and at school and though the other children did not y a hand on or beat her till they decided she was branded with some cursed virus, she antagonised them back when they did start picking on her.

  So much so that she got hit and kicked and berated with vicious words all the more. In sixth grade on the school trip to Canberra, they fought over whom had to have her in their bus group. Alice ter feigned illness so she could stay in the hotel and watch Virtual TV. Then all the other children organised little midnight parties with chocote bars and chips and lollies but told Alice she wasn’t “allowed” to join in. Unperturbed, the girl merely stole all the food ate as much as she could and then threw the rest away.

  The other kids couldn’t tell on her as they weren’t supposed to have brought junk food anyway it was against the rules. Stupid, shallow, party-obsessed cretins they were( as were the rest of the kids incidentally) had tried to make friends with Alice once as she was “cute” and “pretty enough” and therefore, maybe, clique material, but Alice shied away with her typical, fey indifference.

  Strangers, teachers, boys and family friends alike excimed in delight and wonder over the twelve-year-old Alice’s angel beauty slowly bourgeoning into womanhood as the rest of the vacuous, blonde, clone-like girls in her css become broad-boned, course, tanned and trashy hard-faced and elongate-featured looking exactly like their trophy wife mothers. This physical loveliness and her recent acceptance into the school’s gifted art program only heightened Alice’s arrogance and isotion.

  At age twelve, came two new ws; first people in poverty having their reproductivity frequently taken as one requires sterilisation to receive welfare payments and “to deal with “poverty and overpopution so people can attend higher education instead of repeating cycle of too-young having more poor children,” politicians behind the bill, said.

  Another forbid religious schools as “conflict of interest with modern, enlightened values imperative to social harmony”.

  Although certain Muslim, Christian and Jewish schools were granted exemption as long as heavily monitored, the Clementine School was closed in protest by the religious head-mistress and would reopen as a non-Christian school in five years’ time.

  Alice thought the w controlling and hypocritical ostensibly about education but really, just about demise of all things Christian, the so-called left authoritarians bmed for all their problems. Alongside traditionalism and patriarchy while letting pces rooted in actual fundamentalism flourish that always voted/ protested their values. This brand of Orwellian monitoring unlike that in regur schools she suspected ineffective, cklustre at best.

  Despite its fws there were things she enjoyed about Clementine’s. The singing csses and teaching in case someday machines might fail of fluid, elegant handwriting and calligraphy. The public-school children probably wouldn’t be able to pen legibly at all.

  Though Christmas food drives being foisted onto parents to fund and been very much dispys, the foods and presents gifted were numerous and more eborate than the canned fare and taught the rich little things some old-fashioned religious onto others charity.

  Vilge they funded had them write letters and send lollies to an African child, who took quite an interest in Alice the lone hell-raiser describing her mischief-making antics. When the young girl shipped out to stay in Australia excimed her pleasure to meet and embracing the startled but hardly dismayed Shiver. On the st Friday of the term, Alice donned a hijab she bought secretly, and mourned loss of the “good old days.”

  “Will all be in hijabs in heaven as the cold hedonism of the politically-correct religion falls to God and Alh. Devil came and sent the tidal waves and viral pgues and STDs, but you will have your American liberty; to for your petty desires die and take the pnet with you.”

  Although she disagreed on principal, she wasn’t sorry to depart. The Clementine’s private school girls' parents could always pay their way into education.

  Rest of the girls fallers for this poorly-written, imbecilic fourth-wave feminism/ Trans and queer theory of agriculture and history overmedication/transgenderism/privatisation of everything to make them in the short-term wealthier corporate propaganda and pseudo-science and nevertheless insipid of face and mind.

  Hair bleached or unusually natural blonde, tanned, muscur, gallivanting giants, gawky, shrieking harpies contorting wide, shapeless mouths and listless, empty eyes to show grotesquely vapid, soulless emotion and who pyed mind-numbing sports that left them burned and precancerous and prematurely aged with muscles but ill from imbanced hormones, cking fertility, waist and hipless for caesarean ripe.

  Utterly well-socialised, from a need to interact in rge social groups and seek continuously approval. Overachieving for its sake, banal career ambitions utterly derived from most fashionable and acceptable for upper and middle-css girls, twittering social lives, insipid online chatter, parties sleep overs. Couldn’t be alone.

  Females are encouraged into herd mentality shopping in flocks, dependent on school and social media cliques and motherhood groups, vacuous female gatherings. Bathroom trips together no sense of self at all. Numerous afterschool sports and activities mere time fillers and boasting points left no time for wonder, thought, intellectual pursuit or any kind of self-reflection.

  Unconsciously obsessed with conforming( travel, college, career, optionally family in that order( career-wise a gmorous, highly regarded, bnd, highly social and admired one like doctor or wyer or something in marketing, business and management.

  Not creative yet sometimes isoted and always considered the domain of the unsocial, geek-attracting profession like high-end mathematics, real hardline history or philosophy.

  Physics, chemistry, engineering, computer software programming or development and biotechnology which themselves had their fair share of ambitious, overachievers with little insight flocking to them.

  About a third of students sourced from overseas but these professions at least attracted some more innovative and creative types as did academia. Yet science was steadily controlled by corporations often downgraded into dubious psychiatry and pseudo-sciences concerned with middle-css css welfare.

  Searches for “gay genes”, peddling Big Pharmaceutical’s interests and were breeding grounds for various bizarre left and libertarian agendas,” Aryan despaired. “Creative havens turned into caricatures of themselves where marketers used formus to determine a film or novel’s worthiness. Literal trash could be high art.”

  “Science though not always a true Stem career (the kind often considered all-consuming and thus highly isoting and deathly if social acceptance and contact are highly significant and important to you) became the dominion of ambitious but talentless and dull women,” Emanuel said, Aryan disagreed with this unfair, outdated sexism.

  Overworked, conventionally ambitious immigrants, and modern workaday people with their relentless drive to succeed, and to please. With all creativity and questioning-intellect quelled via rote learning. I abhor their stream of repetitive math and music lessons, sports or nguages taught not for sheer joy of learning/mastering them but to boast of further accomplishment. They ck the capacity to love or appreciate them and no time for imagination,” Emanuel bemoaned.

  School work to hammer in obey pointless rules and regutions, rise timely and work hard for little reward. High bour output for little resources in return. Long hours, and low pay. Break-back over multiple jobs, despite relentless pro-plutocratic capitalist propaganda ninety percent of “careers” were tedious repetitive and soul-crushing and to succeed you need to stay within system parameters without question. Leads to humourless, uptight self-righteous, robotic adults only able to survive in a very limited set of circumstances ones that don’t challenge their base knowledge or preconceived notions.

  “I want the child allowed more freedom and suspicion of authority, rebelliousness, self-reliant code of honour and energy that evolves from less tight regution and control methods and a more boisterous, interactive learning instead of to being studied, still and politely motionless.”

  “Due to uninhibited drive and poor teaching, I believe one in four males (one in ten females) must be drugged into submission and silence, in schools and higher education now with mediocre minds flooded.”

  “Near all attend college due to grade and degree inftion yet remain philosophically dead. I witnessed them drunkenly, promiscuously partying and memorising their way through, the once intelligent man’s refuge. As by definition, everyone cannot be bright so clearly the stupid in once esteemed institutions reigned.”

  “Women I find to be a social being. Dependent on others acceptance, for she needs to concentrate her cunning on her needs; to be forever looked-after as physically vulnerable, by body and birth-bearing. She covets approval, unity and good standing. Needful of constant social stimution. Lacking desire to seek internal elements which make myriad components of world and people tick; prioritising belonging and safety in numbers reassurance of being part of a group.”

  “No-one asked for your stifling, dubious evolutionary psychology,” Aryan reasoned.

  “No-one sensible requires your populist, self-serving, social theory of pseudo-equality and feminist wish-fulfilment either,” Emanuel quipped back, and they both rexed into ughter.

  The female imperative to alongside her male counterpart, abandon charity and community and own children for self-interest pursuits and to poorly-mimic male sexual ways as a way to signal some great prowess and achievement, shows how most crude, hedonistic form of masculine culture, the modern-day woman with not bright shred of feline scepticism, ps up.”

  “I worked with some women in computing, and they used the technology so conventionally. Eschewing using computers for knowledge, invention, rebellion and destruction via viruses and hacking private government information or stealing money via illegal transfers. Males are often not bound to the system and thus ready to circumvent it. For women, they are mere social tools for work or communication.”

  “They and uninspired migrants hardly elevate these fields by joining as cited in the common wisdom. Instead of making them more routinized and market-based and cking innovation. Strived only to be best, most successful within parameters of what society deemed most successful currently”

  “Men having achieving greatness and social standing already, also need to aim higher to be truly noteworthy. Women who simply had a decent, professional career are treated as a wonder as is a migrant. Standards of achievement and their drive to succeed beyond that thus much lower. Men either opt out completely or make sure to shine.”

  “There are many mundane men,” Aryan protested.

  “Tendency’s not a rule. I despise both my brothers and sisters in computing, w and medical fields who particurly excelled at using text-book definitions and medications to remedy anything and never challenge only repeat conventional wisdoms...”

  “Whether biological component existed for males excelling in the top few percent of maths and science and also congregating at bottom while girls drifted toward median possibly reflected differences in chromosomal expression.

  Y more likely to express Mendelian errors and genetic differentiation as the one-deactivated X in females cancelled these changes out selecting perhaps for both more geniuses and more retarded males. The safety in approval females clung to, not helping.

  Emanuel said Alice was different. He discovered “My Alice it would appear exhibits disdain for conventionality and values studied insotion. Had her own inklings and realisations about girls “often being restricted by consequent insatiable need for acceptance, an encouragement to appeal to authority and utter adherence to conformity.”

  Call of the masses chapter five; the perfect-man as non-male and the well-off, yet-somehow every-woman.

  Hysterical behaviour and posturing. Maudlin dispys for attention, turned on like faucets until truly challenged, then they faltered. Awarded this luxury are the “racial-diverse,” homosexuals, wealthy women. Various bourgeois individuals. Spoilt nepotism recipients with the temper tantrums and histrionic, naval-gazing of the mollycoddled.

  To corporate marketing, entertainment, politics, arts and journalism and even soft science, fled. Where they bedded and promoted one another. Manufactured positive media portrayal with wails of the victim. With discrimination conspiracies of sexism, racism, and homophobia. Strong, independent fighters of a barely-existent, oppression system yet under critique they crumbled like tissue-paper.

  Portrayed in entertainment and media as saccharine tolerators of all others. Near-infallible beings compared with the boorish individuals of old status quos. Their own violence either literal or by the cracking whip of oppressive, state forces, justified as was preventive of "something worse."

  An ill-gained and often ill-fraught, success. For must be considered "perfect". Women by the new standards of this era, must be exactly as fwless as any good-girl damsel, to live up to absurd sexual, and beauty standards and corporate expectations and surround themselves with social networks that remove dissenters through wsuit and snder.

  Social, academic, media, and political networks all gush over their brilliance. Bme their failings on unfair, outside forces. Akin to the king or tyrant, their yes-men often let their bad decisions be their demise. They speak of harmony, cooperativeness and equality in their chosen fields but in fact work entirely within individualistic, competitive, aggressive frameworks.

  Marketing their sexual abnormality and minority grouping as a commodifiable strength worthy of a great monetary award and made their opinion and worldly understandings unique to the overwhelming male, straight, white norm. Something to be admired and simultaneously used as a means to demonize others and lower their status.

  To essentially bypass the competition. To propagate themselves and their negligible skills as high artistic fare. By sheer power of their diversity, wonderful. Deserving of power. Which they loathe. Except as a niche within the elite. Their brittle breakability and refusal to answer to critique, are compensated for by making insult or injury toward them an unwful act.

  Making a business out of professional victimhood is emphasised for personal gain. Threw fits when critiqued or was a threat lobbied, but mysteriously maintained their collectedness whence orating socially or politically, something that was to their standing and moneyed enterprise and reputation, important. Much discrimination y arbitrary; its proponents happily jest at many a birth defect.

  Riffs about politician’s un-masculine dwarfish height, elephant ears, weight loss after serious illness or their possible retardation or resembnce to ape. Yet unconscionable is the ughter and mirth one might reap from a CEO wheelchair-bound. Mockery of a female’s body shape was unimaginable misogyny, Asian’s sallow complexion callous racism. Gay man’s high-pitched tone, oh the homophobia.

  Blur of masculine and feminine roles in sport, career is the encouragement of sexually aggressive, violent and overtly competitive behaviour. That led to sick, hardened-faced and muscled women. Encouraged more passiveness in floppy, soft-bodied men. Signifies dimorphic death and romantic suicide alongside ruining women’s and men’s bodies making them androgynous and shapeless.

  Making ironically, it harder to sympathise with female plight since the maiden is like the child or little beast, a figure whose loveliness inspires the protective. Cropped, overweight androgyny covered a women’s fragile structure without removing it utterly.

  Family, retionships that build bonds have quavered… Gone worshiped lover or mother or charitable figure only two roles left in conjunction with men; the businesswoman or the sexual reliever.

  Needless to say, neither type men felt much affection for or desire to her delicacy preserve. Militant corporatist and upper-css, self-aggrandising greed, destroyed values of family/ retionships, sting friendships and of community, for individual gain and the shallow consumerism of extreme crony capitalism. Which flourish in such a competitive, aggressive, self-absorbed and entitled, an environment.

  There remains an enduring, romantic preference for men rough, virulent and of stronger physique than women. As the more powerful and traditionally-successful one in the retionship. For despite being a little crude, it is one of few things keeping old distinctions of male and female alive.

  In so venomous an environment, mindless-competitiveness and a self-absorbed society further flourish. Ahh former virtues of patience, modesty self- faulting and judgement, honesty and believing in searching for best in people once valued in women (simir to love, devotion, willingness to serve and die for one’s country and family once valued in men) now belled collectivist, weak and evil behaviour, regardless of sex.

  Also had same idea of perfect individual: wherein an arbitrary search for self and identity is touted as the ultimate glory…

  Bliss must be sought through narrowly-defined "personal achievement" not helping, charity, interpersonal retionships family or love of one’s country or css or a community’s loving and binding together. Seeking validation not through closeness to others or even innovation (as most successful people never advance society and are superfluous and interchangeable. Getting attention through anything from promiscuous exploits to fshy trinkets, clothes, houses to cars or online attention-seeking and an in most cases cklustre and unimpressive career.

  This kind of thinking; is merely extreme vanity. Constant detailing of one’s mundane activates. Which alongside trinkets serves to fill the hole, due to ck of retionships and connection to ones fellow humans. Highly competitive, self-seeking individuals. Ever-encouraged impatient need and expectation for instant gratification. People rebel against it sometimes. Men refusing to partake in it and thus to reproduce failing whilst women give up or try to bance work with family. Left exhausted, sickened and hindered by rgely financial reasons.

  Considering the dangers of overworked, stressed and ter parenthood for illness or deformity in offspring adds hundreds of thousands of dolrs yearly in public health costs, dangers to the mother in pregnancy/birth, and the decrease in fertility in first-world poputions which with IVF and only worsens over time. Having it all, is nothing short of a myth.

  Part-time work, underpaid is not compatible with family. Often full-time work nowadays is not enough to support a single-parent household. Special interest groups and rge business propaganda all ignore this reality to hype individual rights, pleasure-seeking at expense of others (diet and drug-induced illness and sexual disease cost system billions via mass consumption of alcohol and obesity/ health issues caused by genetically modified food.

  We’re a world of trans fats, STDS and IVF. With a false survival of the fittest mentality and sheer competitiveness has utterly repced ideas of fairness and community. Valorising as virtue pitting all against one another.

  Workers must vie for positions, groundlings working longer hours, night shifts. Instead of eyeing the true foe, in company tyrant who sees you as a wage sve no better than the peasantry. Honesty has diminished in the hearts of men and women. People to certain degree spoken with the intent to others mollify without due heed to adequately truthful. Yet now we joyfully indulge in pure lying.

  Mired in self-delusion we distort the mirror to hide society’s faults and maintain illusion of a brighter world. Enactments of old, literary and historical works are all white-washed. Females, bcks and peasants are shown as having power and by modern standards, perfect, liberated lives. Pyed sexually and economically empowered roles during a time when they actually worked fields or were ensved.

  Exhibit modern gait and mode of speech. Same sexual, interretionship and work ethics as if all had just been waiting for such teachings to them free and reach. Immoralities of today are supposedly non-existent and those of yesteryear we must hide. Rewrites in literature show “a society always evolved." Need not learn from historical wisdoms, above such things. Disallow to debate many dark philosophies, or challenge a moral framing in an ever-changing ndscape.

  May tell any tale but only arbiters deem well and good, reinforcing right thinking. No censor but merely punishing word-criminals, and evil discriminators and upholding the righteous. Questions are atomic weapons that fire a warring upon gentle civilians.

  Yet subjective; everything is equally valid, except in the pages of thousand-tome exceptions. Where “unacceptably” bad things are still thought but never allowed to be publicly vented, lest they reveal the truth that light will never all enveil, instead all things mere graze.

  Social engineers insistent on very specific entertainment values and role models. Examples made of politicians and entertainers daring to dissent; being humiliated, fired, and asked to resign.

  Photographed smiles feigned as man burn in relentless brightness. Mudrks and quails utter for know-not-what a searching cry, with weighted weep. Image prevails over reality, but the mask does not entirely become the face; repression for the sake of illusion takes its weary toll.

  No disdain or disavowing for lying shylocks with deceptive masquerade. Those involved in lying rituals are blinded to hypocrisy, if unsustainable. Also believe transparency is insignificant, even dismissed as a danger to the sensibilities of political correctness; daring hurt people’s fickle feelings.

  Returning to Alice though, that perky little child of such a passionate nature, had always amused and tickled Monovalent’s fancy rather greatly. For although he had a deep-set fondness even distant love for the bnk-faced, proud and opportunistic to his very core Mist, the little pixie-face Alice with her wild rebellious nature and to the point of injury flouting of authority was fast becoming his heart’s favourite.

  He’d always loved the way Alice was so fascinated with mutation and made strong notes of her delivery of a speech at five years old, in css. When asked about her family history she insisted she was a higher mutant and her subsequent theory to a casual friend (she never had close friends and very rarely even casual ones) at about eight was of being an alien. By nine she had swapped back to the higher form of human life theory.

  Alice some years ter and well into her teens was now growing up fast and Monovalent knew the dawn of his and Aryan’s approach of her and Mist for their crucial task of working for them drew ever closing with each new day. After all that was what they had been created for her and Mist.

  Monovalent as he was further pnning the implementation of contact between him and the virus children found himself recalling watching a scene where Alice argued fiercely with her father on whether they were reted to chimpanzees as closely as everyone thought with her taking the negative position.

  She in the course of her argument managed to reveal she still vehemently denied her humanity even now at age fifteen saying,

  “I’m not sure what’s worse dad.... being compared to humans or apes I guess it depends on the ape, if it’s goril’s I’ll take the gorils their intelligent generally gentle creatures. If its chimps though I think I’d rather be compared to the humans. Of course, I don’t believe our common ancestor was much like apes particurly modern-day ones at all... But I’ll still be biting my nails in anticipation for the official discovery.”

  “Either way I’m sure I’m only loosely reted to people, I think I might actually be a form of parasite. Largely due to the fact I like to leech off people, and also, I believe I may even be sloth’s human manifestation, just being around me makes people zier.”

  Monovalent and Aryan both expressed admiration for how the adorably cute and exquisitely beautiful a little girl Alice, had grown up.

  Alice who had grown up nicely but who still looked several years younger, was now truly a creature of great maiden beauty. This fragile woman-child’s, true Shiver eyes, were huge and encompassed excessively rge irises and pupils and described best by Emanuel in reference to Ivy.

  “She had immensely childlike bone structure that was unusually delicate from her little shoulders and hips to her teeny waist and limbs both soft, and rounded yet almost too slender conversely. She had size five feet and tiny, fragile flower-like hands.

  “Alice’s infantile face bzed small and fierily-innocent and yet magnified with quiet nobility: the sad and sweet expressions, dazzling in fear, daring accusers to bme or berate the doe. Most darling and yet poorly.

  Narrow and heart-shaped it boasted broad, retively high forehead, full cheeks and near invisibility of a pointed, eleven-year-old's chin.

  Delicate, straight little nose she rubbed frequently during boredom and a precious smile that tugged up more than might if had been thin or straight, a rather small, full rosebud mouth.

  Due to a round, downward turn and the personality of its holder' were such lips easy to render pouty or demure. Very fine were the upper, bit heavier the lower and both facial features soft, round.”

  She was the spitting image of one Sibyl Farling who Emanuel Roe "reminisced upon in sweeter moments thusly.

  “Somewhere immemorial and seated within holy confines of a chapel's gray, stony, godly home one might still see a dense gold curling, swept across the pale ledge of a cheek hollow; coloured by the strings of fallow knotted about the trees and with her slim finger its lightness threading.”

  “Under such long-past sun rays, we had such wretched an embracing. Yet with a light-house beacon. Love rose ravenously, amidst the ravus beasts. Unbridled was its growth daily and we joyed in the springing.”

  “Amidst the maidenhair trees, suddenly found ourselves in a stone wedding chapel neath a gray, windswept gale. Flung a plucked fg iris once-grounded. Woodrushes interlocked and all the spidery, cobweb-flowers were yielding. Saw her as a flight of downiness, did mourn her and all lost nymphs, soon one with an elder springtime after trying vainly to have staved off all that is thornful.”

  “No more abscessed, my seemingly-feeble and floweriest Shiver reside as youth most fair. Last of the wild cotton, exhibited ample grace despite their state in a perpetual-summeriness-yet-one-without-greenery. An all-but lost-valley walked. To king or pauper with same coldest, loveliest beauty spoke; freely, honeyed."

  "Serpents silver-tongued and often falsely mellifluous. Yet never maudlin. With flesh with a hint of the most vivid blueness. Hair foliage-red over some yellowed flock, graciously bowled into flights, sheerly golden."

  "Her hair, church's rising Eastern sunlight. A resurrection-gold once shelved in the graveyard hallowed with coppery coils of titan underside, ended in a burnt wisp of ash. Is Venus's swathe, Venetian-pale not the bold, bleached yellow and dulled dishwater of most grown women fair.

  Softer than the noon cloudless. The finer pallor of mornlight. Understated shadowiness of her darker curling’s throughout that ribbed fallower: tailed image of fennec fox. Fuller, a livelier variant of most locks, a red-blooded beast, not some lifeless, twilight desert; while creatures of milder warmth, with a lighter coat-blush doused, softened some of the strands. Stifled the excesses of elflock fme.

  Coldly-fairer tresses with a warmth seemingly frozen and like the hail in a summering-fair. Those matchstick edges, of pale-garden primrose were so-finely, near-invisible; a fx spirit, the first sun-splinters of Judgement Day, ghosts who glimmered the holy dusk."

  “My fledgling neonate of a half-grown Sibyl Farling’s, sweet little slivering of lips; a rosebud reposed in netherworld sleeping, awaiting earthly time whence as whole flower flourishes. Paradise’s scarlet, beautifully downturned curved to Cupid’s bow”

  “My Sibyl Farling’s face little and arrowed. Exquisite, heart-shaped. In too-heavy doses, I dwell upon what was once a memory softest, became too rough to bear. Mind fervently sees her harshly-ravishing when eted yet perhaps very loveliest, crestfallen. Through whip shes, tears in the welling of anguish. In the wild weep soft, a sorrowful rise of-to-darkness flighted eyes. With a twofold ring of green engraved and no love spared as by the very hymn of heaven, faired.”

  On the creation of Alice; forewent every marring mole or freckle though thankfully few; just the at-times cheeks hollowed; the snowy lips Palely-ashen during her( at first) not quite dire ailment. Was an illness beautiful but waning, anaemic and disconcerting. I reddened and rosed those furnishings, rather pale, wintery rosebuds I erased… This faerie child therefore became refined in beauty.

  “Evan, however, was always far worse a hell-raiser than even Alice. As a child, he also stole from not only his cssmates but his mother and father. The worst of it though was he would bully other children into doing his bidding for him if they wanted their precious items back. Evan did not try to hide the fact that the virus followed him everywhere he went; in fact, he used it to his advantage. Upon discovering that those he despised or fought with all inevitably died or got ill with a mysterious virus (whether it was really to do with him or not) he saw the way it could be used if he acted as if it was.

  He'd said to his fellow students, “he was really an ancient sorcerer with the power to create pgues and illnesses and cast a spell to transfer any injury he suffered over to them. If they told the teacher he’d use this power on them. He was sent here in child form to punish all their sins, and the Gods of the heavens had made him a powerful sorcerer so he could do this starting with some of the children.”

  Whose minds apparently had “not yet been corrupted the way adults had. They were still malleable but must suffer punishment for past and current sins by appeasing him and learning subservience to higher beings by doing his bidding. If they were good though and become creatures of morality and subjugated themselves to him their Demi-god sorcerer, he would eventually give them their item or items back.” Evan made them give him all their sweets, cakes and chocotes, toys and books and anything else that took his fancy, and he ordered them to steal them from the teachers’ lounge which they did.

  One boy Joshua who was very gullible and in awe and terror of Evan, he had steal the key to the teacher’s lounge from Mr Sands pocket while Evan distracted him by pying his violin for the teacher at recess. Evan’s mother had made him learn violin and he adored it, the rhythm, the beauty, the precision, though he felt nothing more than scathing towards the sports she had tried to push him into.

  The violin teacher gushed about Evan’s talent and gift, “he pys even quite complex notes beautifully and at a high level for his age, he’s a true prodigy Mrs Wiley, a symphony musician in the making.”

  This made Evan’s mother look at her young son with pride instead of bewilderment. This and his own exquisite branch of beauty, which as with Alice made people stop and stare and comment cute, beautiful, lovely, an angel. Since very birthing she and he’d been called it all.

  Meanwhile the devious Evan, well, maybe he loved music, but he sure didn’t love people. Evan had stolen Joshua’s favourite model truck toy, and his maths homework then ughed secretly while the teacher yelled at him. Evan did not like Joshua because he was religious and although a complete coward when it came to Evan, he bullied the smaller, the shy and even the younger kids constantly. He would beat them up till they cried; take their lunch money and trick them out of their favourite trading cards then refuse to give them back.

  He also put paint on others kids school chairs and spat and scribbled in the introverted children’s books.

  Evan’s grandest theft was probably when he stole a five-thousand-dolr sapphire ring from Amy. Amy was the richest, most popur child in the css who used to tease with the ring a shy, poor schorship girl Miranda by saying she could never afford anything that nice. She told her on mufti day that her clothes were ugly (they were charity issue) and that her parents were fat, unemployed good-for-nothings. Amy of course was never supposed to have brought something so valuable to school but defied her mother’s orders; Evan picked her pocket with masterful stealth.

  Amy, he not only stole the ring from but gave (unwittingly) the virus to as well so she was literally terrified of him. Amy’s mother was in an uproar about the ring but even though Evan confessed ughing he was the one who stole it to Amy, Amy could never tell this to her mother simply stating helplessly she lost it. Evan forced Amy to apologise to Miranda and give her some of the nice clothes she’d grown out of( Miranda was smaller and less solid than Amy) and he stole a ruby ring even prettier than the sapphire one from his own mother and gave it to Miranda.

  He eventually returned Amy’s ring to her for which she was profoundly grateful or at the very least relieved. The kind actions towards Miranda were not about an impulse to protect the bullied or downtrodden but rather to humiliate Amy by making her give all her nice things to someone she felt was so far beneath her. As well as forcing her to see Miranda own outright a ring that was even more valuable that the one that belonged not to Amy but to her mother.

  Amy and Joshua were expert liars and suck-up sycophants and so the teachers all thought they were positively angelic and so did their parents. So, any girl or boy who say compined to a teacher that Joshua “kicked me so hard my leg was more bruise than skin,” was met with a cheery “Oh I’m sure he wouldn’t do that it must have been an accident” and that was the end of the matter. Evan was not being beaten by Joshua anymore though.

  Joshua for that matter hadn’t hit anyone for weeks since Evan threatened him with the pgue. Joshua and his gang and people like Amy who were in the schoolyard popur clique were the only ones Evan went after he never stole or tried to frighten the bullied or quiet or friendly children. Not out of a sense of morality but because he took great pleasure in taking hypocrites who thought they were better than others (but were just as ugly and mundane and stupid as everyone else) off of their pedestals.

  Evan would hide as well as steal his mother’s jewellery and clothes both of which whipped her up into a real frenzy. He stole money from her and his father to purchase books and games and fast-food and sweets. Anytime his father got on Evan’s nerves he would deliberately say provocative things to his mother. “Dad said that young dy at the bus stop he drove past, was very pretty,” (he had heard his mother go ballistic when his father said other women were attractive before so he knew that it worked) and when she was suitably but not too riled up, he’d slip silently out of the room and wait for the explosion and fight that would invariably ensue between his parents.

  Most of the people he knew he despised, for their fake over-the-top emotions as if they were all acting in some cheesy soap opera and for the way they constantly lied about everything. His parents were constantly telling him don’t tell your mother/father this or that, as if it was Evan’s job to be part of some conspiracy of secrecy and lies between them.

  They then lied to the other with a perfect smoothness which Evan might have learned to emute had not being born with the skills of deceit and lies in his very bone marrow already. His teachers were always telling everyone how special they all were, and how they were the future and all that garbage.

  Evan once cut through the bull to politely inquire what was so special about being one of thousands of future mechanics, brain-dead politicians, sleazy, money-grubbing wyers and bankers, incompetent doctors, banal accountants, suicidal dentists, child-hating childcare workers or office secretaries. The teacher, speechless, moved on hastily reminding the children not all talents were in your-face or overt.

  “I doubt they know what ‘overt’ means, Miss.” Evan pointed out.

  The children were no better in the ck of honesty and words used in the constant hyperbole department. They used the words ‘love’ and ‘like’ so much that it made Evan literally sick to his stomach. “I love you Mary you’re like my best friend ever and we’ll be best friends forever no matter what” he would hear one day then the next day it would be “Lisa you told people that I wet the bed in year one!” “I’m never speaking to you again I hate you”.

  The next, next day it was “Lisa I miss you and home is boring let's be friends and hang out tonight”.

  Evan could really feel the love. Evan also couldn’t stand all the hugging and kissing and note writing coupled with hypocritical gossiping and backstabbing the girls did. Or the pyful wrestling and punching the boys did to show affection. Faux physical violence was better least it was more honest, it and verbal teasing tested people’s strength and self-worth as beings to handle truly difficult situations and take themselves a little less seriously so might empathise more with others; refrain from being but brittle crumblers.

  Yet no amount of so-called male bonding rituals or females clinging to one another to mask gringly empty hearts changed how pitiful that always lesser retion know as friendship, now repcing deeper family and community connections, had become, how especially self-serving and hollow.

  Saying I love you to a person you will forget in six months’ time when you move up a grade and are no longer in the same css as, is complete hyperbole and stupid, even a lie. It’s lukewarm like not love, not at all, he thought. Casual sorts of touching such as hair stroking or hugging either when done to him or between others made him nauseous, sick and angry. Such spurious affection was mere falsehood, maudlin dispys and emotional fakery without any true care.

  His mother though not particurly physically affectionate anyhow, nonetheless literally never hugged or caressed Evan in any manner because since he was a baby he had screamed if she or anyone else did. Evan also referred her solely as ‘mother’ never ‘mum’ or ‘mummy’ he likewise called his father, “father” only. His parents disliked the unaffectionate, almost disrespectful formality but weren’t sure what do about it.

  Evan wasn’t quite yet grown but no longer that gorgeous little boy who was mistaken frequently for a beautiful girl, not because his face or body traits cked maleness but because people don’t always recognise that men and boys can be as lovely and occasionally more so, than most girls or women. Aryan and Monovalent found themselves in no less in awe of his adolescent Shiver exquisiteness than they were of Alice’s.

  Different, yet resembnce eerie. “Bower of God built humanly”. Slender structure, lengthy throat, small, delicate hips and equal-housing of guile and gracefulness in his long albeit more muscur-limbs.

  Shared fleshes white as that one true road to heaven, soft, downturned curve within round, full little lips, light-drawing. Liken to scarlet tip of wound and bow. From instrument of injury doused in own sacrificial blood-shed. No hysterical, wide, toothy maw of the United States most beloved almost hybrid women-horses.

  Upon a Shiver cheek is a loveliest sheen, forever visible despite once universal truth that a girl’s beauty is always a thing of great timeliness: comes gentle with the winds, ends with the frost, its budded-callow. Every white-reaping shadow somehow left still my Shiver snowed. Swept gale of a gleam and yet always delivered straight back to sunlight. Features finer-than-the-hallow day.

  Nose narrow, straight, delicate yet at base somewhat full and rounded cking repugnant Modernised appearance found in today’s actresses resembling a smooth, moulded little bump of tight-psticine or ter, a browned and ageing pinch.

  Know not blesses of my Shiver's exceedingly rge, nguor of eyes. Wide-set. Whipping, dark eyeshes very cheek grazed, rge, mammalian-beast pupils, irises. Visible indent under the nasal end round, soft and curled foremost lip upward. Not her sweet dark, his eyes, Evan's were sired dank yet most vivid, a violet-gray polluted. To bizarre colouration of a global-warmed dusk, they dallied; saddled to the unnatural tempest-cloud of day’s end.

  Conversely simple were hers. Mossed and nighted. Light whitely-fairest in a bck bedding. Saddest rich ever-seen. With dark, mischievous imp underneath. They were Wicklow deared with a sweetness in its midst, a depth few colours neared: mere faerie wisps over soft woodnd.

  When she was little, Alice too, I presume, but my Ivy at least, her near-oversized eyelids constantly would in pensiveness slide further down gently. Remember how her small tongue dreamily stuck out, childishly in thought.

  "Recollect the curling, raggedy hair of she born with me in poverty, my Den Lille so thick an amass at its base and mid but at its ends fine as to be mere matchstick. Rich swathes glided only lightly from the neck but rise fast those scarce tresses, so spry in wind as to mistake for a moment as a finite glimpse of reddest, bristlehead bird. Utterly loveliest in both mirth and sweetness or when in sorrow's moored or when angered righteousness is sparred.

  She had teeny, tapping feet: bounced and bounded on sprightly toes with a heel ground bare-touched. A to join openly inviting, yet secretive ugh and from kindergarten onward, the sweetest of courtesies. An elegantly leg-bent, skirt-lifting, hunched little twillow(or in ymen's twirl low) she learnt from a strict, wealthy grandmother who once attended a prestigious girl's academy that taught every dirty, dauntless child to be a dy of six. Perhaps five.

  Evan’s eyes may be a colour little envisaged for a human eye but whence seen, work so well, amazingly, one could imagine a face encompassing no alternate shade. His face’s slightly pointed, narrowed. Yet hair’s not a red bough gilded but silverier and sheerer than the old-fashioned urchin’s, first-earned shilling. Upon the ghostly silk-ashes or flittering red frost, both children’s lively, unbidden hair has a strange, stovetop simmer, a brightened static.

  All this Emanuel procimed, wrote in constant documentation with a creator's pride.

  The growth of his body to near adulthood had not mellowed his mind or opinions. He was as sharp-witted and as suspicious of human retionships as ever, recoiling in disgust at the ample bouts of hugging, touching, kissing and shrieking shouts engaged in by his cssmates.

  As well as of course he still ever feeling a contemptuous repugnance towards their little falling outs, bullying sessions, cheap ughs at someone else’s expense, the taunting, schoolyard brawls, gossiping, competition on the popurity and school achievement dder, and all the various other direct and indirect fighting’s that went on between his cssmates. Home was a simir story. His mother and father fought rather often, though his father’s spineless streak (despite his ruthlessness at work as an investment banker) offset any massively explosive blowout arguments that might otherwise have occurred.

  Evan's father thought it wasn’t cowardice and that unlike his votile, impetuous wife Emily, he was merely a very calm, dignified and collected person. Yet he was prone to nearly as many fits and temper tantrums as his drama queen life partner. A Road rage addict, with the inclination to as often as possible yell and shake his rge fist at toll men, overcharging repairmen, slow shop assistants and even once even shouting at his old boss for not giving him a raise which had nearly got him fired.

  When Alice and Evan ended up at the Wright House mental facility as per Monovalent’s instructions many years ter Lei, one of the nurses, would ask them in therapy about what they would do to improve humanity. Evan would always say in response with perfect seriousness “I do not care about helping people; if you all died tomorrow, I wouldn’t mind more than if my toaster broke”. Then he would add “which is even less significant because I don’t even have a toaster.”