Currently Reading: Fires by Raymond Carver (Essays, Poems, Stories)

Every so often, I would come back to Raymond to reassure myself that even as I don’t even get a foothold into the fiction writing that I did when I was younger, I could still apply the creative rules that characterised his body of work - to life.

1. (on why his favourites were poems and short-stories) Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on.

2. A lot of writers have talent. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else.

3. No (cheap) tricks or gimmicks.

4. A writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing - a sunset or an old shoe - in absolute and simple amazement.

Winter reading

Notes

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipul
Salim journeys into the heart of Africa, into the same territory explored by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness nearly eighty years earlier—but witnessed this time from the other side of the tragedy of colonization. Salim discovers that the nation’s violent legacy persists, through the rise of a dictator who calls himself the people’s savior but whose regime is built on fear and lies (familiar isn’t it?).

Fires by Raymond Carver
One of my favourite authors, he says of why he chose to write short-stories: Nobody ever asked me to be a writer. But it was tough to stay alive and pay bills and put food on the table and at the same time to think of myself as a writer and to learn to write. After years of working crap jobs and raising kids and trying to write, I realized I needed to write things I could finish and be done with in a hurry. There was no way I could undertake a novel, a two- or three-year stretch of work on a single project. I needed to write something I could get some kind of a payoff from immediately, not next year, or three years from now. Hence, poems and stories.

Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame
When I was younger and struggling to find something to write about, I had actually wished that my circumstances were different. I actually believed that if I had struggled, I would have something substantial to write about. Well, I wonder what Janet would say about this: Frame was born to a railroad worker and a sometime-poet who had been a maid for the family of writer Katherine Mansfield. Her early years were marked by poverty, the drowning death of her sister, and the disruptions created by her brother’s epilepsy. In 1945, while studying to be a teacher, she suffered a breakdown. Misdiagnosed as having schizophrenia, she spent nearly a decade in psychiatric hospitals. From 1947, following the drowning death of another sister, she endured repeated courses of electroconvulsive therapy. During that time she read the classics voraciously and cultivated her writing talent.

On my 'shelf'

(from the NY Times review) In Törzs’s world, books of magic, all written in human blood, can do incredible things when someone feeds them a drop of blood and reads them aloud. Abe Kalotay collected these books to protect them from falling into the wrong hands, and raised his daughters, Joanna and Esther, as stewards of a beautiful and dangerous library that had to be kept hidden at all costs; in Esther’s infancy, her mother was murdered by powerful people who wanted the books.

A jaw-dropping exploration of everything that goes wrong when we build AI systems and the movement to fix them.

Today’s “machine-learning” systems, trained by data, are so effective that we’ve invited them to see and hear for us―and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Recent years have seen an eruption of concern as the field of machine learning advances. When the systems we attempt to teach will not, in the end, do what we want or what we expect, ethical and potentially existential risks emerge. Researchers call this the alignment problem.

Currently reading: Infinity Gate by M.R. Carey

I’ve had multiple dreams with varying contexts, but essentially all the dreams are in the same location.

A dark path into woodland with faint, fog-swathed light at the end of it. Winding, craggy paths. An abandoned villa with red adobe brick. A hill with a view.

We always look for second chances in life, but the ‘fantasy’ in this book is about finding something better- a 2nd, 3rd, 4th and even infinite chance. But this is not Marvel- you won’t find a version of yourself in the multi-verse and swap jokes about wanting to compare genitalia just to see if they’re the same.

But who knows because I’m just in the middle of it and wondering why a major character who dies in the earlier chapters is still alive.

But the science is titillatingly plausible; ironically, I checked it with chatGPT and it came up with the same theoretical assumptions, hmmmm. Scarier still is the fact that AI plays a major role in the book (of course it does).

What are you reading? Love & Other Rituals by Monica Macasantos

Get to know the author here

What's your fantasy?

In the Christopher Nolan film, Inception, there is a scene where Cobb (played by Leo Di Caprio) and his group tour a secret basement filled with sleeping men hooked to IVs and dreaming the equivalent of 40 hours a day.

‘The dream has become their reality’, the watcher says.

A scene from the movie Inception

When I was growing up, reading books had the same effect on me; I’d be in bed reading away for hours or days on end.

I would remember the books I read, but not the time I read them. There is a Christmas that I don’t remember to this day, but I vividly remember the book I read- The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy.

I was made to expect that when I finally ‘socialised’, or ‘got some friends’ or left the one-person island that my mother said I spent so much time in, things would be different. But alas, it wasn’t!

The world was boring! The people in it were as dull as the oatmeal I forced myself to eat every morning years later, in the (vain) hope it would lower my cholesterol levels. Or- it could all be just me. So to this day, I would dive right back to books when I needed a different and better reality.

I have a soft spot for fantasy; if genres were drugs, I would pick it not for the high but for its hallucinatory effect, and the longer the better.

The Chronicles of Narnia were the 1st fantasy books I read when I was in the 6th grade. It was so real to me, I kept inspecting closets for that secret door to another world.

In high school, I plowed through War & Peace and Anna Karenina- hardly fantasies, but to a 14-year old, 19th century Russia seemed exactly that- and I don’t think I finished either. In college- which really didn't get exciting until my last year- I passed the tedium of days reading through Tolkien (LOTR & The Hobbit ). Then it was the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, but I only got as far as the third book. Tried to start Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson with Gardens of the Moon, but couldn't finish it for some reason. I would have gone on and finished the entire Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey, but in the era before Kindle, it was hard to find books and they were also expensive- I only finished the 1st four books.

And it also happens that there are some books that are better off seen on screen. I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, but opted to watch the rest of the series on the big screen.

Lately, I discovered Raymund Feist’s Riftwar Trilogy which I finished while I was in Ashburton to visit Doyet and the family. It felt like being at home again in Pangasinan, comfortable with no care in the world; you read, slept and ate with the food magically appearing on the table.

Feist’s world-building of magicians, lords, dragons and sorcerers is familiar, but it’s the conviction in the writing that creates the illusion of being firmly in that reality. A thousand pages fly past like a fast-moving photo carousel and it no longer feels like reading, but living.

I finished the trilogy just as I was heading back to Auckland so I didn’t feel the full weight of that emptiness that almost feels like grief, as if you had just lost someone, when you finish a book that you’ve inhabited so completely.

You just sigh and face this reality with some reluctance.

Weekend reading

Gifts 1: A book subscription

It’s that time of the year! You grow old, you grow poorer especially if you’re like me and love showering yourself with gifts, but that’s another story..

This one is about gifts you’re lucky enough to get from other people. Mary got me a book subscription from Wellington company Good Books; you simply fill up a short questionnaire about what stuff you read, and someone picks out something you’d like. Leila is already doing this for me (!), but this time, I’m committed to reading it because you get a new book every month.

So I’ve starting out with an Aotearoa author, Bryan Walpert.

The novel Entanglement has been shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction 2022, and is about ‘a memory-impaired time traveller attempting to correct a tragic mistake he made in 1977 when, panicked, he abandons his brother on a frozen lake in Baltimore.’

The magic wish list

When R was younger and didn’t quite yet know the power of his mind, he relied on basic magic- crude magic, like writing affirmations on blessed paper (written after the last full moon prior to the new year), and burnt (conveniently and discretely with the fireworks) just before the clock struck 12.

For more serious stuff, he would write out wishes in the smallest script possible- in reverse- on a mirror fogged with humidity. If it was granted, the wish would disappear. But mind you, when he first knew of this, R was skeptical; it could have been a change in temperature, or that someone may have deliberately wiped it off. But since he did it in his own bathroom which no one else used (with his room locked for good measure) he was fairly certain, it was working as it should.

But more importantly, he had proven it for the last three years of what it granted, and what it withheld. His face burned with shame at the memory of the first two times he did it. Top of his lists for those two years was one word- fame.

Looking back now, he didn’t quite know what it really meant, or what he wanted. Was it adulation? Like people on a sound-stage screaming his name as he sang or danced, neither of which he knew how to do? If it was granted, did he miraculously wake up one morning singing with the voice of an angel, or moon-walked effortlessly across their verandah like Michael Jackson? (he had tried this, but his ankles were stiff and he didn’t move an inch). Did it mean money, because if one was famous, wasn’t wealth not far behind?

But he didn’t think of these things until later, on the 3rd year when he had ‘fame’ at number 2, and when he did look at the mirror after midnight, he had to look again, half-believing. But there it was; number 1 was gone (D will stop bullying me) and so was number 3 (I will do well in Math).

But number 2, ‘EMAF’, in all-caps, was there as it had been for the last three years, unerased.

But whether it was magic doing its work, or life taking its normal course (nudged by magic, who knows?) D stopped bullying him because he moved schools. And he did better at Math- just- because his mother got him a tutor.

But he never ever put ‘fame’ on his wish list ever again, even after he started to understand its strange dynamics. He knew that like a plant, it had to start as a seed, with magic being its oxygen and water, and having it flourish and bloom at a preternatural rate. But he had looked inside of himself, at his catalog of abilities and there was nothing there really that was special or extraordinary.

He wasn’t disappointed at this though. He knew that talent and skill can be granted, even if they were neither special nor extraordinary. Having something that he never had before, was all the magic he ever needed.

So he started to write his magic wish list:

1) you will speak French;
2) you will write something great;
3) you will get some muscles;
4) you will paint;

Reading list Dec 21 - Jan 2022

Jeffrey Euginides’ Middlesex: Primarily a coming-of-age story (Bildungsroman) and family saga, the 21st century gender novel chronicles the effect of a mutated gene on three generations of a Greek family, causing momentous changes in the protagonist's life. The novel won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction .

Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway: The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America. Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.

Joanne Tompkins’ What Comes After: After the shocking death of two teenage boys tears apart a community in the Pacific Northwest, a mysterious pregnant girl emerges out of the woods and into the lives of those same boys’ families—a moving and hopeful novel about forgiveness and human connection.

Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary: Is a 2021 science fiction novel by Andy Weir. It is his third novel, after 2011's The Martian, and 2017's Artemis. Set in the near future, the novel centers on junior high (middle) school-teacher-turned-astronaut Ryland Grace, who wakes up from a coma afflicted with amnesia. He gradually remembers that he was sent to the Tau Ceti solar system, 12 light-years from Earth, to find a means of reversing a solar dimming event that could cause the extinction of humanity.

Nnedi Okorafor’s Remote Control: An alien artifact turns a young girl into Death's adopted daughter in Remote Control, a thrilling sci-fi tale of community and female empowerment from Nebula and Hugo Award-winner Nnedi Okorafor. The day Fatima forgot her name, Death paid a visit. From hereon in she would be known as Sankofa­­—a name that meant nothing to anyone but her, the only tie to her family and her past.

Keri Hulme’s The Bone People: The buzz when The Bone People won the Booker prize in 1986 was all about the struggle Keri Hulme had to bring it to publication. First there was the monumental effort of writing it over a 12-year period, then the fact that nearly every publisher rejected it out of hand. Those who were prepared to look at it wouldn't contemplate bringing it to print without severe re-edits, prompting the author to declare she would rather have the book "embalmed in Perspex" than re-shaped. When the book was finally taken on, it was by Spiral, a tiny feminist press in New Zealand led by three women – two of whom had links to the same Maori tribe as Hulme. The initial print run was 2,000 copies. When they sold out and so did the next 2,000, Spiral approached Hodder and Stoughton in New Zealand, who shifted another 20,000 and brought it to the attention of the Booker judges.

What are you reading? The Riftwar Saga by Raymond Feist

Just finished Dune, and while I was tempted to continue through to the next books, I thought that the Atreides saga was a bit heavy on my mind as well as evoking too close to current events. For those of you who haven’t read it, the gist of it is this- be careful of believing in leaders who promise you everything. Some nations make this mistake far too often, and we know who these are.

The difference however with Dune’s protagonist-hero Paul Atreides and real-life leaders is that he’s truly fair and moral because of course, it’s fiction. In real life, you get GARBAGE like Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro and Duterte. Well, the people who vote for them can certainly lie in the beds they’ve made and I hope they rot in them. So leaving the planet Arrakis for now..

And because real life in 2021 is still shit, I’m still doing fantasy. I’m sure I’ve read Raymond Feist before, but I’m not sure, so I’ll take a trilogy please..

26th Nov

It’s normal the doctor said, and R remembered a time when he would have argued with him.

So I take a 20 minute bus ride, fall asleep and relive dreams so vivid that I can literally feel the time I spent in that dream; and they were weeks, months even. And then just like that, I wake up at the beep of the bus telling me that I’ve reached my stop. And the beep is no louder than a phone notification.

There was nothing normal about this.

But then he was 167 years old, ‘frozen’ at 52 and looked no younger than 35, so he didn’t argue.

He went home and realised when he was on the bus, that he was supposed to drop by the supermarket for some stuff. Some time ago, he would take this as a sign that something was remiss. He likened it to snow loosening, slowly but surely gaining momentum and mass until it became an avalanche, a total collapse of his senses and his mind, but beyond that, he couldn’t really imagine what came next. Would it be total oblivion, a comforting blackness like dreamless sleep? Or would it be an endless dream that flowed from one scene to the next, again also comforting like being afloat on a calm ocean with your eyes closed?

But he would look at his face in the mirror- bright eyes, bright unlined, dewy skin- and know that nothing was really wrong. That he was only half-hoping, half-fearing and these two feelings never really met half-way, and after a while- fifty years to be exact- he stopped looking for signs.

What are you reading? Dune by Frank Herbert

I make stories up a lot which I think of as being part and parcel of being a writer. But then I haven’t published anything; spent the last 20 years of my career being more of a graphic-designer-project manager type where copy was only a small part; and some have actually called me out that this story-telling is actually lying. Well.

Anyhow…I always claimed that I had read Dune. And I have read so many books that some I have actually forgotten until I’ve come across them again, and the 1st page is immediately familiar. And I have come across multiple copies of Dune when I was younger so in my mind, the probability was high that I had read it. The new movie version by the gifted Denis Villeneuve prompted me to try and re-read the book again so I bought a Kindle copy.

After the first page I was shocked to discover, that no, I actually have not read the book. None of it was familiar, even as I was equally shocked at how easy Frank Herbert’s prose is. In my mind, even the false memory of having read it, had within it, a false memory of what his prose was like.

What are you reading? The Last House on Needless Street

“That is when it happened. A soft white glow gathered on his chest, over the place where his heart must be. The glow became a cord, reaching out through the air. The cord approached me. I rowed and struggled. But I was held fast. I felt the light encircle my neck, link me to his heart. It didn’t hurt. It bound us together. I don’t know if he felt it too – I like to think he did. Then he brought me home to this nice warm house where I can sleep all the time and get stroked. I don’t even have to look at the outside world if I don’t want to! The windows are all boarded up. Ted made me an indoor cat and I’ve never had to worry about anything since. This is our house which is just for us, and no one else is allowed in. Apart from Night-time, of course, and the green boys and Lauren. I could do without some of them, to be honest. I”
― Catriona Ward, The Last House on Needless Street

I'm hungry

I reward myself with three things- tech, nice clothes and food.

Since I really need to think about retirement, I’ve put a sensible brake on the 1st two and as for the third, it’s kind of tricky, very tricky. In the Philippines, you can eat cheap, and it’s healthier. A bit of rice, heaps of vegetables and fish. I could live on that with pork barbecue and lechon once a month.

But eating healthy in New Zealand is expensive. You can count with your ten fingers, how many vegetables there are at any given time and even less in winter when your best bet is frozen. Seafood is not a staple and more of a luxury unless you were willing to rent a boat or go on a charter to catch your ow which is ridiculous. I love salmon but it’s not something you can eat every day and I’ve seen the price go up and up and up since 2008.

I avoid processed carbs, sugars and some fats (!), so essentially, my diet has come to consist of nothing but espresso in the morning; there was a couple of weeks at the start of this year’s lockdown when I had an oat-meal run, but I got sick of that; I would have the occasional bread, but would pick those fancy sprouted variants; for lunch, the previous night’s left-overs if there’s any would do; more coffee during the day and then dinner which is normally a protein and some carbs like rice or vegetables. I think I average less than 2,000 calories a day.

It’s a bit more than that during the weekend where I do have a proper lunch (sushi or a meal called Katsubi which is like sumo wrestler food but with more meats and veggies and less or no carbs; and then for dinner we rotate around chicken (baked chicken wings or air-fried), pork (belly) or beef roasts. And snacks! I love what they call crisps (potato chips) which I’ve started to lessen and ice-cream- I’m not completely lactose-intolerant and can finish off a whole container.

And because I don’t get enough vegetables, I’ve taken to taking fibre supplements along with four other supplements which I’ve been taking for the better part of 15-20 years.

But I’m hungry..I’m a hungry man…

What are you?...

Watching?

Foundation: American science fiction drama television series created by David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman for Apple TV+, based on the Foundation series of stories by Isaac Asimov. I came across this when I was in high school but thought of it as being ‘too scholarly’, so I passed and took on Ursula Le Guin, Ray Bradbury and Margaret Atwood instead. Apple does it great justice with Apple $$$$$ (image above is of the mysterious ‘vault’; drawn on Procreate).

Reading?

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers: The last time I took a literary recommendation from Wired Magazine, was the awful vampire novel Carpathia by Matt Forbeck. But what got me hooked to giving one of their recommendations another try was the word, ‘hopepunk’ - science fiction with the feels. Instead of being described as ‘critically-praised’, her novel, is ‘much-loved’. Now, what can go wrong with that? Synopsis of the novel from Wiki:

Fleeing her old life, Rosemary Harper joins the multi-species crew of the Wayfarer as a file clerk, and follows them on their various missions throughout the galaxy. The novel concerns itself with character development rather than adventure. Each member of the crew has a story that unfolds, or a crisis to face. They encounter several alien environments on the slow path to their destination. At the end, the ship is damaged by hostile aliens, precipitating changes in the relationships between the characters, setting them on new paths.

Self-published initially via a Kickstarter campaign, the book was shortlisted for the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award, earned a nomination for the British Fantasy Awards' 2016, won the Sydney James Bounds Award for Best Newcomer & was the first self-published novel to be shortlisted for the Kitschies Golden Tentacle for Best Debut Novel

(Image above drawn on Sketchbook)

On my reading list

How To Care For Wool

I

Impure thoughts should always be hand washed.

Soak them for ten minutes before rinsing thoroughly

until not a spot is left,

except for that bit that is hard and swollen.

Maybe cold water will help?

II

Our love and our prayers have been treated to prevent shrinkage,

making them perfectly safe to bring anywhere you wish,

to do with them as you wish.

If in doubt, check the care label for instructions,

or ask us again. And again.

But please, when you wring us inside out,

be gentle?

That’s all we ever ask.

III

Love should be gently folded & kept flat and neat.

Never, ever put it on a hanger.

When packing it up, at the end of the season

make sure it is fresh and clean

before storing it away, sealed and tight.

IV

My love stretches itself easily, so lay me down on a clean towel

and gently roll it up to draw my tears out.

Unfurl, reshape my love and let me dry

my face away from sun and heat.

I need the dark and cold

to bring back my natural softness.

Or you could do it the hard way, the violent way.

Shake me. Reshape me

And lay me flat to die.

Day 8: Lockdown (Writing Exercise: turn the following email exchange into some kind of story)

Ryan checks his watch- 9:30am and smiles realising he still had a full hour before the car comes to pick him up. Six – make it a full eight as Sarah has said, and that will be plenty of time. The helicopter- a CH-47F Chinook, the fastest in the world with maximum speeds of 310km/h- will be waiting in that hidden clearing in Awhitu.

Even without traffic, this will still be at over an hour’s drive. And the flight to Spirits Bay at top speed would be according to Ned, exactly an hour at full throttle. Coughing yet? Feverish even when you’ve had your favourite glass of 80-year old Scottish whiskey? This is the running joke with Ned, a hulking 6 foot 5 Irish-Samoan with the gentle disposition of his island forbears, but with a love of the drink inherited from his Irish father. Ned has been on the red circuit for a full 72 hours- red is when you’ve logged nearly 64,000kms with only two hour rests (if any) squeezed in there somewhere, stealthily shuffling members of the Faction between continents and within the European union. So far, none of the Faction leaders have been infected with the virus and if the communique was to be believed, the consequences if this happened would be swift and severe.

But for the lowly rank and file like themselves- and even if Ned was probably one of the best pilots in the world as well as a genius with an IQ of 170- who knew what the Faction would do. The virus was rewriting every rule in the book and he wonders how he would fare- a middle-aged Asian guy of modest if not average talents, put in charge of an isolated country in the Pacific with a population of less than 6 million.

He accepted the ruthlessness of this reality and of his fate because he knew that the end game was survival, at all costs, and the Faction was there to ensure that when everything that the public knows is there to protect them fails, they won’t. He could see his daughter’s face, his family’s in the Philippines, his friends…Camille? Failure is not an option.

He must have been musing far too long because his watch reminds him with an urgent alert that there is 15 more minutes before the driver arrives. He goes to the kitchen and in swift, precise movements unwraps the corned beef, puts it in the slow-cooker, drops golden syrup, cloves, onions (thank God there were leftover diced ones in the fridge) and vinegar as per Sarah’s instructions.

By the time he walks down the driveway dressed in cargo shorts and a black hoodie, the driver – in a bullet-proofed black Merc with diplomatic license plates- pulls up. They drive out in silence with only an occasional beep from the GPS tracker indicating that the local authorities have been informed why this imposing vehicle is going at least 20kph higher than the limit. The highway isn’t completely deserted-typical Kiwis, he thinks, though really, the situation isn’t as dire as the US or Italy. But he can’t really think this way, not yet. Hopefully, this rendezvous in Spirits Bay would be just as he is expecting it to be, an assessment and reassurance from the Faction that all was well in this isolated part of the Pacific. That life will go back to normal.

Arriving in Awhitu, he spies Ned waiting outside the chopper clad head to toe in leather that seems to have been poured over his body, his muscles rippling underneath the taut material. On his vape with no visible smoke coming out (who knew if the virus can be carried by vape smoke?), Ned gives him a big grin which he returns in kind; for once Ryan is relieved that their normal hugs is not possible. Ned’s hugs always feel like you were being swallowed alive by a really firm mattress.

‘Still alive big boy?’ Ryan calls out to him, wondering with a note of envy that Ned didn’t look at all like he had been flying all over the world for the past 72 hours. Ahh, youth! Ned is only 24 to his 44. Only four hours ago, Ned was in Australia touching base with Faction contacts in Sydney. Not really a talker, ‘all good mate’ is all Ned drawls out before effortlessly swinging his massive frame onto the pilot’s seat.

The chopper ascends almost noiselessly and quickly above the peninsula and even if he has seen this hundreds of times, the stunning beauty of New Zealand’s landscapes, one of the very few in the world left virtually unspoilt by man, never fails to make him wish that it would always stay this way. Let this country be safe, he prays.

True to Ned’s word, they reach Spirits Bay in exactly an hour. An isolated bay at the end of the Aupouri Peninsula near the northern tip of the North Island, Piwhane as the Maoris call it, is a sacred place and according to local legend, is the location where spirits of the dead gather to depart from this world to travel to their ancestral home or afterlife from a large old pōhutukawa tree above the bay.

There are hardly any blooming pōhutukawa trees there that he could see, but a large red object was easy to spot and for a moment, Ryan thinks he is hallucinating. Normally unperturbed by anything, Ned looks over to him, his eyes wide with fear; ahh youth, he was too young to know about Peregrine except in stories. But Ryan knows. He has seen this once- back in 2003 during the SARS outbreak. He had met Peregrine in the small Thai island of Koh Tarutao and it seemed mind-boggling how an aircraft could have landed on what was essentially a large sand-bar. But Peregrine was neither a person nor a craft; it was the Faction’s dreaded messenger system designed to deliver very urgent, and often catastrophic news. The craft that he saw in Thailand was a stealth and could hover and land vertically. The technology since 2003 has evolved and this one in the shape of something resembling a bat in flight definitely has all the bells and whistles, but one thing has remained the same- the red colour. No one knows for sure why the Faction picked red, but everyone knew it was deliberate. Red was the colour of death.

Ryan wills himself to step off the helicopter and in leaden steps, walks towards the Peregrine where the Messenger is already waiting- a young slender man with long blonde hair dressed in an expensive suit and dark glasses. Approaching him, Ryan sees that the Messenger couldn’t have been more than 17. Dramatic much, he thinks trying to make light of a moment that already feels as though it is a waking nightmare. In Koh Tarutao, the Messenger was an old Asian lady probably in her 70s and dressed in a silver cheongsam.

No words are exchanged as the Messenger hands him a black tablet with long thin fingers and walks back into the Peregrine. In no more than a minute, the Peregrine’s engines hum to life and Ryan has to step back as the thrusters push it up, expelling hot, invisible gas. It glistens for a moment above them, an angry slash of red against the blue sky before it pivots nose up and careens out of sight.

He turns the tablet face up and puts his thumb on the biometric reader. It opens and a sliver of laser light scans his eyes; he starts to read the document.

He doesn’t know how long he stands there on the grassy clearing until a huge hand gently on his shoulder nudges him out of his reverie. In the distance, he could hear the surf break and just around him, the song of birds. He looks at Ned’s face and doesn’t see the face of a physically imposing man who flies every manner of aircraft and could speak 4 languages fluently; he sees the face of one who has yet to see horror the likes of which he could only imagine. They thought they had ended this in 2003, that SARS was safely vanquished in a test tube in a secure facility in Asia. But they were wrong.

Ned didn’t have to ask him about what the message was. He begins to tell him everything and his voice is calm- as if he is already dead.

“It seems that the virus with the current death toll at 47,240 is not the real threat. Classified reports have reached the Faction that a cluster of infection, a family of 7 who recovered a month ago, have suddenly, inexplicably experienced a relapse. Three of those seven were at a medical facility for plasma donation studies when they started having convulsions. Death and paralysis happened almost instantaneously after that. Two minutes later, they were re-animated and according to the surveillance footage obtained remotely, had superhuman physical strength and aggression. They attacked and killed all but one of the 14 staff at the facility. It would seem that the virus which lies dormant and evading current testing hid its true nature- anabiosis; reanimation after death. The 13 staff were reanimated and the entire facility has been in a questionable status until more information is gathered on how to contain this. The complication however is this- four of the other family members who reside in other countries have all gone back home just before borders were closed two weeks ago. One has gone back to London, one to Germany and one to Japan..’Ryan pauses looking at Ned in the eye before continuing.

‘The fourth infected person arrived in New Zealand March 14..’