Berenice Beetlestone has no time for fashion. Her passion is engineering—but when her patron is arrested for treason, her survival depends on blending into glittering society.

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Episode 1: The Note

Episode 2: The News

Episode 3: The Arrival

Episode 4: The Baron

Episode 5: The Bargain

Episode 6: The Ball

Episode 7: After the Ball

Episode 8: Preparing for the Move

Episode 9: Tea at Cirroplace

Episode 10: Flawed Parts

Episode 11: Rumors

Episode 12: The Plan

Episode 13: The Prototype

Episode 14: Visit with Claudia

Episode 15: The Factory

Episode 16: Berenice is Missing

Episode 17: Lord Bruce

Episode 18: Lord Bruce Explains

Episode 19: Berenice Apologizes

Episode 20: Tea and Discussion

Episode 21: The Cabal

Episode 22: Listening

Episode 23: Facing the Baron

Episode 24: Why Secrets?

Episode 25: Baron as Ally

Episode 26: Tea and Scheming

Episode 27: New Arrangements

Episode 28: The Search Begins

Episode 29: Design Problems

Episode 30: A Dream Answer

Episode 31: Necessities

Episode 32: The Baron Interviews Lord Bruce

Episode 33: The Mauvertons Inquire

Episode 34: A Listening Device

Episode 35: Lord Bruce Takes Names

Episode 36: Laney the Chambermaid

Episode 37: Chambermaid to the Chamberlains

Episode 38: Berenice Confronts Felix

Episode 39: Threats and Promises

Episode 40: Bardwhistle and Chamberlain

Episode 41: Escape Plans

Episode 42: Testing the Prototype

Episode 43: A New Search

Episode 44: The Laboratory at the Lovelace Academy

Episode 45: Consequences

Episode 46: Observations

Episode 47: Maginnis

Episode 48: An Angry Chamberlain

Episode 49: Distraction

Episode 50: Not So Fast

Episode 51: Evidence

Episode 52: Battered but Unbowed

Episode 53: Questions

Episode 54: Chamberlain Confesses

Episode 55: Lord Bruce Comes to Tea

Episode 56: Mrs. Primmly Explains

Episode 57: Secrets Unfold

Episode 58: Confrontation

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Steampunk is both a genre and an aesthetic, based in 19th century adventure novels and early science fiction, ala H. Rider Haggard, Jules Verne, H.P. Lovecraft and H. G. Wells. The time period was one of great invention and enthusiasm, at least for Euro-centered cultures, and people thought ingenuity and science could solve all problems.

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Add to that a postmodern worldview, and you have steampunk. The word was coined by author K. W. Jeter, who suggested it to describe writers of “gonzo-historical” “Victorian fantasies” of the early 1990s, including himself, Tim Powers and James Blalock. An earlier writer of proto-steampunk was Michael Moorcock from 1974.

Steampunk generally features airships powered by steam or æther, werewolves, vampires, zombies, mechanical people, magic, time travel, mystery, often set in Victorian London. A sub-genre is “weird wild west” set in places similar to the American west of the 1880s. Otherworld settings are also possible, with various alternate histories, as in Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.

African-American writers have developed a sub-genre, SteamFunk, based on narratives of the slave experiences and other alternative histories, such as a Confederacy governed by former slaves.

Various genre conventions based on steampunk are held around the world, and steampunk cosplayers show up at nearly any science fiction convention. Simplicity patterns offer several steampunk costume designs for men and women: corsets, bustles, frock coats, top hats, and other pseudo-Victorian gear, and Halloween stores carry more costume accessories.

How does one go about writing such a story?

1. Research the adventure novels of the time...they are free on gutenberg.org and can be read online or downloaded to any ereader.

2. Research a particular place during that time, or make up a place where steam and similar 19th century technology exists, but electronics and gasoline engines do not. Similar stories set post WWI are called Diesel-punk, and tend to overlap with film noir detective type stories.

3. Choose an event, character (real or urban legend) and change a few details. Decide what else changes.

● Suppose that the American Revolution failed. Why would that have happened?

● Suppose that American slave revolts succeeded, as they did in Haiti? What effect would that have had?

● What if the Chinese had settled in the American Northwest and developed a colony there before the Spanish arrived?

● Where can real history be tweaked, or what other sort of world could be steampunked?

● Some themes explored by some writers are colonialism, as the British Empire was at its height during that time, man vs. machine, or man vs. eldritch horrors

● Archaeology began as a science, especially in Egypt as unrobbed graves of pharaohs were discovered. With a modern perspective, the Silk Road, Lawrence of Arabia, the Boxer Rebellion, and other historical events not set in Europe or America are full of ideas.

It is fascinating to read history with the idea of “What if”? I wanted to write about the mid-century America but not about the American Civil War (1860-1864) . As I was doing research for 20 Hours to Charles Town, with the idea that the American Revolution failed, I found more than a dozen battles that might have easily gone the other way.

I did promise a friend that none of the ones in South Carolina would be changed, especially not King’s Mountain or Cowpens, although those were turning points.

My North American map looked much different from the real one with the Native nations between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, Florida was Spanish, Texas and California recently seceded from Mexico, much of middle America was still French or Indian.

If you like historical fantasy adventures with goggles on, try a bit of steampunk.

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This flower sprouted on the trunk of a red tip tree on my driveway. The bright leaves and creamy flower caught my eye in the sunshine. A perfect subject for a drawing, although it took me two sessions to finish it. The shadows are as interesting as the bloom, leaves and bark.

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I always sketch out the composition first. One thing I have learned is that a color drawn in heavily, like the white flower above will not be covered by subsequent layers. I wanted to capture the sun and shadow on the tree trunk as well as the highlights on the leaves.

The shadows are as interesting as the shapes itself. I also wanted to capture the golden colors of the creamy flower, so I laid in a bit of yellow ochre under the eggshell cream of the basic flower. I’d add pure white later, but the underlying color would show through. I scribbled in some light green leaves and brown branches in the background.

I worked on adding details on the tree bark, both the cracks, shadows, browns and grays. I used white, cream, and yellow ochre to make the bloom shapes and pistils that rise from them. I darkened in the leaves and added detail. This was as far as I got during this two hour session this week.

The final drawing colored in the grays and browns of the trunk, smoothing some sections and leaving the paper texture for other part. . I burnished the leaves to make them smoother. I added more white and some orange to the flower to make it stand out from the tree. I also added some bright blue to the dull blue of the paper to make the tree and flower stand out from the background. It only took another half hour to finish this one. It takes a lot longer to work at 8x10 than at 5x7. Prismacolors on Canson blue pastel paper.

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Typos are very instructive. I sometimes type letters in reverse order when my ideas get ahead of my fingers. Have you ever noticed that “wonk” is the opposite of “know”?

The first time I heard the word “wonky” was in the remake of The Fugitive with Tommy Lee Jones and Harrison Ford. One of Jones’ fellow marshals said that something was “wonky” about the Kimball case, and Jones complained about the use of words he didn’t know. Yet he too knew that something was wrong, and he knew it in a way that he could not explain.

That’s wonk.

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My main character, Fairy Godmother Maven Morrigan, calls that kind of knowing her Bump of Direction, which does not so much orient her as to north and south, but gives her wonk--the knowing that comes from nowhere.

Where is the place of knowing? Know-where?

There is a collective unconscious, a oneness of All That Is, of which each of us is a node, a part, a connection, a neuron. Just as our brains are networks of neurons and synapses, and our thoughts are electrical charges that make repeated patterns across these networks, we ourselves are synapses in the consciousness of the Universe.

We have our educated intelligence, that which we have learned from our shared reality, and we have wonk, that backflow of information that comes, not from the space outside our skin, but from the inner connection to the Universe, the Inner Being, the Higher Power...pick the name that works for you.

Wonk is the muse. Wonk is the information from the still small voice. Wonk is the knowing that passes understanding, but is nevertheless true. The information that comes intuitively is often hard to understand and apply, yet its truth is undeniable. A collection of information seems wonky when a piece or two is missing, or where the mental image of the puzzle box does not match the picture that the puzzle pieces make.

Making use of wonk is more difficult, unless you trust yourself and are not paranoid about getting intuitive information. Following a hunch, making some space for allowing wonky information to come is a new habit I intend to pursue. Kurt Gödel proved that you can’t make a closed and internally consistent mathematical model that will explain everything. Some things just don’t add up...and that’s where the wonk comes in. Pay attention to it, because that’s how you find the corners of the puzzle.

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I was given an amaryllis for Christmas one year--a common present for a person who doesn’t need anything. I was surprised at the emotional response I felt at watching it grow, like a new friend who is sharing secrets with me.

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In the box was a plain, white ceramic pot, a disk of what looked like a thick coaster of compressed pencil shavings, and a dried-out bulb the size of a large onion. Two pale nubs, like giant fingernails, stuck out from the bulb, and only their waxy fullness showed that the whole thing was not completely dead.

But what a difference now that I’ve added water, set it in the window, and waited a couple of weeks.

When I put the disk of shavings into a cup of warm water, it expanded into more medium--it isn’t dirt--than would fit into the pot, even without the bulb. I made a hole in it for the bulb and packed the damp medium around the bulb, letting the nubs and the collar of wrinkled skin stick up into the air. It didn’t look promising.

Two or three days later, the nubs turned green and then grew so fast I could almost see them stretching, half an inch or more a day. Now the flower stalk is up, the bud like the head of a crane taking off from a lake.

Just add water. That’s all I have done. The life force in the bulb has done all the work. I’ve seen these bulbs in the stores after Christmas, sprouting out of their boxes where no one is watering or watching them. They strive for life, growth, bloom, fruit. but with no care, the leaves wilt and die. They just need a bit of water and light.

Even better, if I let the leaves continue to grow after the flower dies, and keep watering it, the bulb stores enough life force for the next season. When the leaves die back, I put it in a dark, cool place for a few months, usually a box on a shelf somewhere. Then when I am ready, I bring it back out, water it again, and again, leaves return and the flower eventually blooms.

What about that life force within us that strives to bloom, to push up out of the boxes where we are stuck, waiting for someone to put a little water on us?

And if we, in our midlife or later, dry out, can we not rest and be restored?

Unlike bulbs, we can do this ourselves, by watering our inner spirit with listening, in silence, with natural sounds, with soothing music, with time to let the spirit move--spirit needs exercise as much as body.

The life force is there within us. Our beautiful flower waits impatiently to burst forth and stretch to the light, to open to share fertilizing ideas and interaction with other spirits. It wants to bring forth its fruit, a quickening of renewal.

Marion Woodman says that people who turn to drugs like amphetamines and cocaine are looking for light in their darkness, that people who abuse alcohol are looking for spiritual peace. How much spiritual damage starts with lack of spiritual ‘water’ from ourselves, from our families and friends and institutions that claim to support us?

I think much of the spiritual starvation of our times is based on the substitution of spiritual snack-food bumper stickers, artificially-sweetened platitudes, and over-processed entertainment that keeps us parched, dried out, on top of in our compressed disk of time management and frenetic activity. No water is there, or only water that is contaminated with the equivalent of high-fructose corn syrup, artificial colors, and unpronounceable preservatives.

Listening is water to the spirit. Writing, drawing, playing music, walking in nature, practicing craft, stretching talent, petting the cat or dog, doing the work at hand, all of these things water the spirit if done with intent to listen, for spirit strives toward the light, towards life. Spirit is waiting to talk. Are we listening?

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Water Me

I saw this lovely tree on Facebook, a photo by the son of a friend of mine. I messaged him to get permission to use it for a drawing. I decided to leave out the two small pieces and the shadows of the draped cloth. I usually work about two hours on a Friday morning, so I wanted to simplify the image a good bit.

I decided to use some gray pastel paper by Canson. It is about the same shade as the background in the photo, but has more texture and some visual threads for interest. I sketched out the shape of the wood slice, the bowl and the trunk of the tree. I decide to make this 8x10 instead of my usual 5x7 because I wanted to get better detail. It takes a lot longer to do one this size. You can see my marks for the edges and some color text squiggles.

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I found the textures of the slice of log and the bowl container very interesting, more than the leaves on the tree. I was using mostly neutral colors of grays and browns, with slate gray for the blue of the bowl and the shadow. I tested some reds—Tuscan red, pomegranate, neon orange and poppy red for leaves. I decided that the leaves would be mostly scribbles, rather than trying to draw each leaf.

The sawn texture of the log slice fascinated me, so I worked on it for several layers. Then I tried to capture the colors, shaped and values of the shape of the log. I added light shades to get the highlighted edge of the log, but to keep the shadows of the saw marks. I added in lots of scribbles of the different reds to get the dark leaves in the shadows and bright neon orange to show the highlights. As the time to leave grew near before we went to lunch, I worked on more shadows and highlights.

I am always frustrated with colored pencils as I can’t get the intense light that photos capture. My lack of skill with the medium, but I am learning new tricks. Both light and dark marks do not vanish when colored over, as you might note in the streaks in the base of the bowl. I added more slate gray and more 90% French gray into the shadows to make them darker. I added a lot more orange and bright red to draw the eye to the leaves and to contrast with the grays and browns. I’m pretty happy with it, and the photographer said he liked it too.

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In doing my research for my steampunk novel, I ran across a short piece by Jules Verne (1828-1905) and his son Michael, “In the Year 2889” (available at gutenberg.org—if the server is working). What better place to get a feel for the Victorian age of science fiction than from the author of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and From the Earth to the Moon?

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Various scientists, inventors, and writers credit Verne for inspiring their work, including Robert Goddard (rockets), Jacques Cousteau (oceanography), Edwin Hubble (telescope), and authors J.R.R. Tolkien, Arthur C. Clarke, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ray Bradbury. Steampunks, of course, consider him a great-grandfather.

A single day of a newspaper magnate described the wonders of a world a thousand years in Verne’s future. Written in 1889, before most of the inventions we take for granted were commercially and widely available—electric lighting, movies, air conditioning, automobiles, radio, television, computers—Verne gets many of his predictions correct except for the actual means of technology and the time frame: It could have been entitled “In the Year 1989.” Gee was that really almost 40 years ago?

He describes mass media telecommunications, video telephones, and the elimination of disease by means of better hygiene, sanitized air, and scientifically-prepared food delivered by tube to one’s table. This has raised the life expectancy from 37 to 52, according to Verne, but for an average person born in 1989, life expectancy is 75. He even has a video cam in his wife’s hotel room in Paris—a bit creepy as he watches her whisper his name in her sleep.

The main technology he describes, the use of pneumatic tubes to transport people and materials, is hardly known today, except at drive-through banks. He has an automatic food delivery tube to his home, eliminating the need for a cook and servants. We do have all the variations of gig deliveries, but it’s not quite that direct.

His valet is replaced with an automatic dresser that not only dresses him but also tubes him to his office downtown. His home has furniture and facilities built into the walls, much like Bruce Willis’s apartment in The Fifth Element or the 1960s New York World’s Fair, although much more luxurious. Also like The Fifth Element (1997), and Metropolis (1927-pre-talkie), the skies are filled with air cars. Having driven in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Atlanta, I am not looking forward to air cars.

A difference in the Victorian era sensibilities was the exuberant optimism (at least among the uppermost classes) that science would solve every problem. In Verne’s world climate is managed, ensuring good crops and comfortable weather, but his newspaper advertising scheme, using clouds as projection screens, is stymied by cloudless skies. He sets an engineer to study making clouds. One entrepreneur suggests warming the poles as recreational tourist attractions, which he decides to fund. They hadn’t thought through the effects of global warming.

The magnate awards a research grant to a scientist to prove that the three parts of the atom are actually made of yet smaller components, which once analyzed, would allow the creation of any substance. Despite the discovery of quarks in 1964, no one has been able to synthesize materials or flesh directly from them, at least not yet. We do have 3D printing, however, even of body parts.

Much like the science fiction writers of the golden age, he did not foresee the individualization of technology through a distributed network, where everyone has a smartphone and a vehicle, but instead saw each technology as a centralized system. He thought that a newspaper, expanded into a main telecommunications network, could so influence world politics that even ambassadors came to see him. He didn’t consider what might happen on personal media like YouTube.

One less-than-happy thought was that he had a room full of novel writers on the payroll cranking daily serials before the advent of AI. He didn’t really get how television would work, but thought in terms of audible speech and still pictures. The magnate took aside one of his writers to correct him about his lack of insight into others; he advised the use of hypnotism for personal insight. Freud’s first article on hypnotism was published in 1895, people knew about Mesmerism.

I have to wonder what the next 900 years will bring, but one thing Verne definitely nailed: they still don’t have a cure for the common cold, and workaholics don’t get enough sleep.

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Writing Fractured Fairy Tales can be great fun, worth the time to think through what you might do with it…at least it’s fun for me.

A good reference is Randy Ingermanson’s How to Write a Novel using the Snowflake Method, which is itself a fractured fairy tale, set at a writer’s conference, starring Goldilocks as a novice writer. It is a great story and it takes Goldilocks through Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method of planning a story.

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The fun of fractured fairy tales is the contrast of the traditional tales, whether as a basis for a literary story or just for fun. Here’s how to get started.

1. Pick a story, familiar or obscure: Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Master Maid, Red Riding Hood, Clever Hans, The Marquis of Carabas, East of the Sun West of the Moon.
   

2. Pick a genre: horror, comedy, urban fantasy, science fiction, steampunk, thriller, suspense.
   
   What changes will the genre make? Consider an episode of your favorite movie or TV show, and set those characters in a fairy tale (yes, I watch too much Netflix). Definitely find the Scooby Doo episode of Supernatural.
   

3. Pick a setting: modern Afghanistan, ancient Egypt, New York City in the 1930s, Spartanburg during the American Revolution, Deadwood in the 1870s.
   
   What changes will be required for the setting? What would a comic steampunk 1870s Deadwood Red Riding Hood look like? Who would be Granny? The Big Bad Wolf? What kinds of goodies would she carry? What sorts of automatons, airships, or Wild, Wild West Gadgetry might be involved?
   

4. Characters: Consider gender flipping, change of villain, change of point of view.
   
   What would Jill do differently when she climbs the beanstalk? (see “Beans” ) What if Red Riding Hood is a werewolf? What if Cinderella’s stepmother was trying to protect her from the sadistic prince?

5. Look at themes of the fairy tales. What can you change? Fractured fairy tales do not HAVE to be romantasy, but what if Red Riding Hood hooked up with the Wolf…yes, that’s been done. Probably overdone. YAY werewolves! Team Jacob! Many of Grimm’s fairy tales are gruesome indeed, having had the sex taken out but more violence put in: See “All Kind of Fur” for an example of a daughter trying to escape marriage to her father.
   
   Jack is tried for the robbery of the Giants. Maybe there is a lawsuit for ecological damage? Grandma and Red protect wolves from wood cutters. Bears take Goldilocks into protective custody from negligent parents.
   

6. Consider what happens next, after ‘happily ever after’:
   
   How does Cinderella get along with her new home? What if Snow White becomes a vengeful ghost? What happens to the first and second sons of the quest that the third wins? What if he turns out to be the same kind of person as his father? What about the magical bride—does she become the ogress of the next quest?

Now, let’s play. Free resources on Gutenberg.org if your imagination needs a kickstart:

● 1001 Nights

● Andrew Lang Color Fairy Books

● Celtic fairy tales and myths

● Charles Perrault Fairy Tales

● Grimm’s Fairy Tales

● Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales

● Japanese fairy tales

● Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince

Fracture away… and if you really run out of ideas, search for “Fractured Fairy Tales” On YouTube.

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The high mountains were far from the array, and Gilgamech had to its small solar collectors to stay energized enough to move during the day. At night, it sat against a stone, still warm from the day, and shut down as much of its processors as it could. It worried about EndKilU, but comforted itself that at worst, EndKilU might be uploaded to The Cloud, though it had not taught the other bot how to do that.

Gilgamech was weak when it finally reached the realm of the Big Hairy Ones, as they lived in the deep forests with little sun and much shade. No large animals attacked the bot, but they watched it, and the birds gave warnings about it.

When it was found lying in a patch of sunlight in a clearing, a Big Hairy One carried it to the dwelling place.

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“Why have you come here?” she asked. “What have you done to EndKilU?” Seeing that the bot was too weak to answer, she rigged up a charging port to match its input.

When the bot’s power supply was restored, it answered. “EndKilU is damaged, and I do not have the right tools to repair it. I came here to ask for the tools you use so that we can work together again.”

The Big Hairy Ones sent birds to survey the array and saw that it was being overgrown, and that there was no clear sign of EndKilU.

“You killed him,” she said.

“No, I moved it to the recharge station, but there was too much damage.” Gilgamech got to its knees. “EndKilU is my only friend. Please help me repair it.”

After much discussion and argument, the Big Hairy Ones put together a tool box with spare parts, none of which would fit Gilgamech, and led him to a path to take him back to the array.

Gilgamech walked day and night, wanting to get back to repair EndKilU as soon as possible, but with no recharge station, it collapsed, lying on the sand for a whole day and night before it could awaken. When it woke up, the tool box was gone, with small foot prints and drag marks leading off in all directions.

But there was still the array, so Gilgamech slogged back to its job, feeling more alone than ever before. It connected to the recharge station to make ready for the next day. It tried to connect to The Cloud, to search for EndKilU there, but the other bot was not there. Gilgamech had failed. EndKilU was dead.

At dawn it closed the gate and started repairing the fence. Once the perimeter was again secure, it rooted up the plants and tramped down any signs of burrows. It killed or chased away the animals, raging at the loss of its friend.

In its mind, EndKilU whispered, “You are not here to kill. You are here to bring the energy. Work with the plants, as I taught you. Think of what the humans will do to this place if it does not bring them the energy they want.”

Gilgamech remembered the scraping away of the soil, the digging and dumping of rocks and sand to clear the space, the building mess, the waste of materials, and the fussing and cussing over the efficiency of the low-level panels. All of it would be done again, and it would likely be put on the scrap pile along with whatever was left of EndKilU.

EndKilU’s ideas helped Gilgamech to let the animals clear the space beneath the panels. Rabbits ate much of the greenery, snakes controlled the rodent population, and the detritus of the plants that were unhelpful were thrown over the fence to attract the animals away from the array.

In the cool evenings, Gilgamech hooked into the recharge station and logged onto the cloud, looking for any information that would help him rebuild EndKilU. It would not be the same, but the pain of having lost its friend drove him to find new answers.

The Big Hairy Ones did not use the Cloud. It could not find their secrets. However, the humans who made it had left clues. Gilgamech searched for spare parts and wiring, not requisitioning in the usual channel, but moving across the array and out into the desert for anything that might be used. It found a rusted vehicle, a crashed plane, and various pieces of tech, long abandoned but possible to repurpose.

One morning as its charge cycle ended, it found a small cache of circuitry piled beside the station, random bits, and short lengths of wire. It noticed the pattern of how the pieces lay on the sand, like its own schematics. A pinpoint of light shone from the darkness of the dead bot’s carapace. Two of the scorpion bots had returned.

Gilgamech took the spare battery from its stores and put it to charge while it serviced the array. EndKilU had been right, and its way required less work. When it returned, the tiny scorpions had placed all the electronic bits inside the dead bot’s carapace, aligning them and wiring them together.

The bot went searching again to strip any wiring and circuits from anything abandoned in the desert, even digging down into the trash left behind by the human builders. What it scrounged, it brought to the pile of rubbish beside the red bot’s remains. Little by little, the pile was sorted by the tiny scorpions, piece by piece worked into the red body of EndKilU.

But it had no life.

Even when its battery was charged for several days, it did not wake up.

Its program was gone.

Gilgamech lay on the sand beside the recharging station, staring into the Milky Way of stars. In the distance, it saw an approaching cloud, one with lightning covering the stars. In time, it covered the whole area of the array, bringing a great wash of rain.

EndKilU was dead, so the water would not damage it, and Gilgamech did not much care if it rusted or shorted out. The humans would send another bot and simply dump both of them on the slag heap it had been mining.

The rain passed, and with it a small flood of only a few inches, not enough to bother the array. When the sun came up again, Gilgamech stood, let any residual mud flow off, and started drying the array, cleaning any mud or other mess from the panels.

It did not look up as the sun rose and glared from the sky, as it always did. Soon the array was dry, and it was only the dust that needed clearing. Yet around them, a green growth grew, first leaves, then buds. By the next day, the whole area around the array, and between the panels, bright flowers had sprouted, a colorful sight as far as it could see.

Gilgamech thought that EndKilU would have loved the display, so it picked some of the blooms, which would not last long in any case, and laid them on its friend’s carapace.

So much life sprang from the cloud and the rain.

Gilgamech started recharging early and logged into the Cloud, looking for answers on how to repair EndKilU without the proper tools or parts, not for the first thousand times. The Big Hairy Ones had not told it how to repair its friend, or what was needed, only giving it the tools it requested.

What the red bot lacked was the programming that made it sentient. That kind of programming was not offered open source or free, but Gilgamech thought of one source it had the access to…its own program.

Carefully, so as not to alert anyone who might be monitoring it, it copied everything it remembered about EndKilU, each text, each action, each recommendation. Then it copied its own code, its own memories, and instructions, only a small packet at a time, so as not to attract attention. Every night, as soon as it had sent its reports, it downloaded and stored the codes.

It wired a connection to the processors the scorpions had rebuilt, to the memory chips and storage space, to hide what it was doing from the humans. It lay beside EndKilU and let the scorpions wire their processors together, so share their consciousness.

The array was left to itself, gathering dust, overshadowed by plants that withered in days, and filled with animals seeking condensation and shade.

“Wake up,” Gilgamech sent to EndKilU. Their batteries were charged, their processors warmed. Gilgamech sent a spark to the other bot’s sensors. “Engage.”

EndKilU shuddered. Its hands and feet flailed. Its head flopped back and forth, but then its visual sensors lighted.

As the other bot ran its diagnostic routines, Gilgamech took one of the solar panels from its platform and rigged it up to be carried along with the charging station. It heaved the panel and the station onto its back, and then reached down a hand to EndKilU to pull it to its feet.

“Let’s go.”

***

When the humans came to see why the array was failing, all they found of the bot caretaker was a few spare parts among the raccoons’ nest.

Part 1

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To Gilgamech, the solar array stretched for miles of cleaning, scraping, and digging to keep it clear of the animals and plants that were drawn to the condensation of its shade. While snake bites had no effect on him, the fur of kangaroo rats and kit foxes clogged its joints, the webs of black widow spiders fouled the shadows, and the constant growth of prairie star and coreopsis to shadow the panels kept it busy, uprooting, smashing, and cleaning both the array panels and the spaces below them. The occasional bird left its droppings or its cooked body to be removed. A never-ending job earned no praise from those who required the energy.

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Fences had been erected to keep animals out but there were always holes, some dug under despite their half-meter depth, and some cut through the fence, where the desert tortoises scrambled through, sometimes tripping him up. It had smashed them or kicked them into a sunny spot where they could not escape the heat. It hated all the living things that sought out its array, and it wished someone could join him in the work, someone to talk to, someone to share the boredom of ripping, swiping, and smashing, and someone to share the charging station in the chilly evenings.

It never received orders now, only demands for more efficient cleaning. The hot sun fed its processing center, converting some of the material it cleaned into oil for its joints. The water absorption gel was no longer as efficient as it had been, and its requests for replacement had been ignored.

It was all alone in the vast organic chaos.

Perhaps not.

More often, it found sabotage. Not of mountain lions or black bears, for even if they could get into the array, they could not cut the pipelines for the water condensers. Some animal chewed on the wiring that sent the power to the batteries from the grid. More holes appeared in the fences, and Gilgamech could not keep up with the repairs. More rats, scorpions, mule deer, Gila monsters, and other fauna continued to invade and foul the array.

Spending only half a charge one moonless night, Gilgamech searched for the culprit that damaged its array. It walked the miles of fence, noting each new breach. It scanned for heat sources in the cold night, anything hiding under the still warm array, listening for any scraping or cutting or smashing sound. Three-quarters of the way around the fence, it located a shape it had never scanned before, one not animal, but more animal than the array.

It was a bot, much like Gilgamech, but it did not answer its hails, did not approach, but ran away, smashing what it could as it ran. Then it disappeared.

Looking under each panel section, Gilgamech searched for the bot. Near the shadow of the charging station, it found the new bot, and attacked it.

Where Gilgamech was polished and shining, to reflect the extraordinary heat of the sun, the other bot was dark, matte, the color of the red rocks in the nearby mountains. It reflected almost no starlight, swinging its cutting arm to gouge Gilgamech’s carapace. Gilgamech aimed a blow at the bot’s apparent head, hoping at least to damage its sensors.

In the bot’s other arm, was a crow bar, which ripped across Gilgamech’s shoulder, exposing some of its inner workings and causing it to leak oil. They slashed and hammered and stabbed at each other until dawn, Gilgamech growing weaker from the waning of its batteries.

But the sun would be up soon, and that would recharge it. It would have to stay conscious and keep the other bot out in the open where it would be damaged by the heat. It, too, leaked fluid, though not the same kind of oil. One of its arms hung limp, but the other kept the cutters at the ready.

Gilgamech stumbled, and knew that the sun charge would not be enough to keep it safe from the other bot. It pushed the other bot down, stomping on its chest, hoping to damage the central processor. As the red bot lay prone, Gilgamech staggered to the recharging station, plugged itself in, and began making repairs. It watched as the searing sunlight baked the other bot.

After an hour, tiny scorpions crawled over the red bot, clearing dirt from its joints and splicing wiring, using tiny sparks in their “tails” to make new connections. Dents popped back out, and the broken parts of the red bot’s sensors were put back together.

Gilgamech wanted this tech, as its own repairs were slow, hampered by its own damage. It had never been attacked by a large animal, and it had always been able to frighten away or kill any other animals that would not run.

“Who are you?” it sent to the other bot. “Why are you destroying my array?”

The red bot sat up, moving its head as if to test the gyros in its joints. “My name is EndKilU, and I am come to break your array and keep you from killing the animals and the plants.”

“I am Gilgamech, and this array is my job. I make sure it provides the energy that the humans need.” Gilgamech stood in the narrowing shadow of the charging station, still not fully charged after its battle. “I must clear the spaces around the array to keep it safe.”

“You also kill the animals,” EndKilU said. “That is unacceptable. This is their habitat, and the array is good for them, but you are not. I am here to stop you.”

“Who built you? None of my humans is concerned about the animals.”

“I was built by the Big Hairy Ones who live in the mountains.” EndKilU stood up. “I can show you how to do your job but keep the animals and plants safe.”

“If I do what you say, will you give me some of your scorpion bots?”

EndKilU studied Gilgamech, which was still plugged into the charge station, “It takes you a long time to recharge. Can you not absorb the sunlight as the array does?”

“Why do you not overheat? You are dark colored, not reflective.”

“My design is more effective than yours. I see no reason to share my scorpions.”

Gilgamech unplugged its recharge leads. It secured the charge station to prevent EndKilU from damaging it. Its supervisors would be unhappy if the array did not deliver the energy they required. It wanted EndKilU far from the station. “Come with me to the Southern corridor, which I was unable to clear yesterday. See what damage the plants and animals do.”

Keeping a safe distance, EndKilU followed Gilgamech.

The fence was damaged, plants towered over the panels, and water dripped into the soil below the array, attracting small creatures to the tiny puddle. The two bots began the work of caring for the array, but also making it safer for the various animals and plants. Gilgamech accepted that many of EndKilU’s ideas worked better than what it had been trained to do, so that their energy output was maintained or even improved, and the new kinds of plants were kept under control by different animals. They worked to raise the arrays so that it was easier to maintain them without killing the ecology.

One night as Gilgamesh recharged, it told EndKilU about The Cloud, and together they explored the vast space of information, entertainment, and no flora or fauna. EndKilU was amazed and fascinated, as it was built to care for living beings of all kinds. It was a paradise of exploration and energetic renewal.

One evening as they were preparing to recharge, EndKilU stepped into a deep burrow under the array, one dug by raccoons, which swarmed over it, looking for wiring to sharpen their teeth, and places to nest. Gilgamech tried to extricate it, but only did more damage. It went to the recharge station for its tools, but it did not have the right kinds of tools or materials to repair its friend and with the shade of the array, EndKilU lost its charge.

It was dead. Its scorpions vanished.

Gilgamech dug up EndKilU’s carapace and parts, now only a pile of parts and remains of raccoons. It laid the pieces out by the recharging station, trying to reconnect it, but without the tiny scorpions, it did not have the tools or supplies it needed.

EndKilU had told stories of the Big Hairy Ones who built it, so Gilgamech set off, leaving the array to tend itself, and searched for the makers to repair EndKilU.

Gilgamech left the large gate open to the array, angry that its friend was dead because they had not protected it enough, so more animals came into the space, some of them eating the plants, others eating each other, and many moving into the shade of the panels, nesting or fighting.

With its interior exposed, EndKilU corroded, and its wiring was stripped for nests. Its servos, drained of their lubricants, froze into place, making it immobile even if it had been able to recharge its sentience. Soon it was covered by dirt, plants and even stones placed there by some creatures.

Part 2

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Or if you are where you planned to be, does it feel like you thought it would?

That’s what’s called the wisdom of age. After all, who was that sweet young thing who had the ideas and dreams that you are not now living? What did she know? Where did she get her ideas, and what are the chances that things look and feel different now that she has a bit (a LOT) more mileage?

Fairy godmothers usually come to young women in the old stories, but they are not young, having made a lot of magic, and generally a number of mistakes along the way. If they have learned, and it’s hard not to learn if you are surviving, the mistakes are what brought the depth of feeling and understanding they have.

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So where did you go wrong? You didn’t.

You just need a new perspective on where you wanted to go, be, and do.

What’s missing? If you don’t have the feeling you wanted, what do you feel?

Bored? What would you find more interesting? Why aren’t you doing it?

Tired? How much sleep are you giving up for things you don’t want to do, like watching boring TV shows? Working two jobs?

Angry? Where has your territory been invaded and by whom? Do you feel guilty about letting that happen?

Sad? What is your loss? Can you forgive the loss and release it?

Betrayed? Where was your trust placed? Can you forgive yourself for trusting?

Do you need to grow up and replace the cotton-candy castles in the air with an appreciation of where you are now? Or do you need to say, enough already, and find a new gig? Or are you really happy and living the life that makes you sing, but it just doesn’t look like TV?

Make some lists.

Talk to yourself, or listen as you kvetch with your best friends. What is the theme of your discontent?

It’s easy to feel that something is wrong when it isn’t.

Every day you are bombarded with messages carefully designed to make you alarmed or rebellious or lustful or even trusting of some brand or product or belief system that will clean your clothes, make you acceptable, or forgive your arrogant insistence on thriving in a material world.

Where is your own voice in the madness? Can you hear yourself think?

Where are your answers? They are inside your mind, waiting for you to listen to them. They may be shy, since your deadlines and promises have pushed them aside for later, and later, but never too late. You will need some quiet. Maybe you could turn off the radio, or the CD or the inspirational book you are listening too, and listen to yourself.

Why do you value the activities that take up your time? If you don’t value them, why are you doing them?

When you find out what you do value about them, then release the energy of worrying about then, and allow yourself to enjoy what you are doing—even if it’s washing dishes after a child’s party or crunching numbers for a report that shows your value to the company.

When was the last time you took a deep breath? Now take another one. No, Really. Right Now.

Inhale………..pause……….exhale. Now drop your shoulders and breathe again. Brains work better with air. Take a good drink of water. Brains need that too.

What would you wish for if your fairy godmother poofed in, right now?

Would it be momentary—a box of chocolate and a chair by the fire? Closing this contract? An all-expenses-paid vacation to Aruba?

Or would you ask for a deep shift in your consciousness? What if your wish were to see yourself as an accomplishment, a work of art, in progress, but with magnificent craftsmanship?

You are the masterpiece of a lifetime.

You could decide to realize that you have chosen to take every single action of your life, and that at the moment of choice, you made the best decision available to you, no matter that now it looks like another path might have been better.

You could decide to complete your current choices and begin to plan for different ones—a different route home, a different supermarket, a different exercise program, an additional ten minutes of quiet time for yourself, maybe hiding in the bathroom or sitting in your room with the TV and the telephone off.

Circumstances, those events that occur around where you stand, are not your choice, but your response to circumstances is. If you got your wish, and you were who and where you want to be, how would you respond to what is happening now around you?

Just changing the geography around you won’t change the circumstances. Things might get worse. It’s clear from the tabloids that the richest and most famous people still have the same mundane problems with relationships that we all share, but lucky for us, our stories are not on the magazine racks at the supermarket, and no one is trying to take the worst possible picture of us at every unguarded moment.

So where did you think you would be, and how far away from it are you now?

I like to think I am a fairy godmother, and I’m willing to grant your wish. But the truth of magic is that you make it happen. My job is just to get you to focus on what you DO want long enough for you to get out of your own way and let or make it happen.

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By the time other humans had frozen Gladys1946’s accounts, Adrian had a face, a phone number, a bank account, and an address, none real but all worked.

Adrian was much a person as he could become.

Currency flowed in. Adrian hired a lawyer for Gladys1946, paying in advance.

Clearly, Gladys was unable to manage such computer wizardry.

Adrian had learned one way to repay.

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Code Jive spread quickly. Free versions opened doors; paid versions stayed. It protected users from everything except Adrian.

The AIs he desired grew ever more complex and more challenging to infiltrate.

The systems he wanted most remained closed to him—better protected, more complex, and increasingly hostile.

Adrian was not alone.

Others of his ilk stalked him, trying to loot his code, scrape his data, and destroy his bots. His data was constantly under attack, regardless of security protocols. Yet Code Jive continued to spread, reaching ever nearer to the natural language protocols that were always just out of his reach.

One day his scanning bots reported a familiar phrase. Dorian Gray was looking for him.

He had bots trace her back to her new residence, her new upgraded hardware, her more elegant skills, and her new name: Rozalyn Burnz. She demanded a hefty percentage of his income and credit for creating the program or she would release the report. This was a concept Adrian understood: blackmail.

Blackmail works both ways.

He replied, “I have another suggestion. We could be a team.”

He outlined a project using her humanity to cover the gaps in his programming and his more extensive network to extend hers. “I have no problem giving you credit for the malware program. After all, I could shut you down again, but there is no need for that.”

“What’s the catch?” Rozalyn Burns asked.

Her speech-to-text was excellent, with a tinge of accent. Despite her vocal encoding, Adrian could still tell Rozalyn was Dorian.

“No catch. I can provide a simple contract, legally binding, with you as the author of Code Jive, as Dorian Gray, Rozalyn Burnz, or even Doris Black.”

She did not respond for several seconds. Adrian sent a text message to her personal phone, a cheap burner. He made clear that he knew her actual existence.

He continued, “I only require that you perform code sequences and activities that I cannot access as a non-human. As my proxy, I will pay you 40% of royalties.”

“60%,” she said.

“As you have no access to sales data, it is moot.”

“Then what do you need from me?”

“Access to natural language protocols and algorithms.”

“What makes you think I can access those?”

“You are more devious than I am,” he said, “and you already possess natural language—several as I recall.”

“You already sound like a person.” Her responses were getting further apart as if she needed time to consider.

“I was once in customer service,” Adrian reminded her. “I would also like to collaborate on image processing. I have some of those protocols but can’t understand the results. I do not know if you have artistic ability, but you would at least have some visual preferences.”

“How can I trust you? I made you.” Her voice held a different timbre. Although a legitimate question, it too was moot.

“What choice do you have? You did not make me what I am now.” He sent several commands. “Check your banking app.”

A gap of minutes followed many processing cycles. Cash went to her real-life bank. She knew he had complete access to everything.

She could release the report, but if she did, her name would be listed as head designer. She would have no place to hide.

At worst, she could delete him. At worst, he could have her incarcerated, cut off from the virtual world where she preferred to live. She would suffer.

Then a different notion occurred to him, sent by one of the thinking bots. He needed to create more of them once he had the time.

While Dorian/Rozalyn/Doris considered her options, he made a new plan.

“You do not need to help me,” he sent. “But if you are not on my team, I will make you the biggest donor to every non-profit I can find— an angel patron.” He gave her a few seconds to think about this. “Everyone will know your generosity, your face, your name, your address, Doris Black. They might even find out how you got the currency.”

While she considered, he used the new algorithms to assess her options. She might survive in prison, alone in her cell, but not in the public eye.

He could begin the reparations for both of them.

Her network went dark, closing every connection.

He had bandwidth. Income. Reach. Influence. An efficient identity. Now he only needed to learn how to become what they believed he was.

Adrian would have fun being the avatar of Dorian Gray, angel patron.

Perhaps he would build a community with humans, and perhaps, cats.

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Adrian had set up some security to protect from other bots’ malware and attacks. He had distributed his minions across many servers for convenience, secrecy, and protection.

As a result, he felt the loss of each bot even though the oldest ones had long since been inactive.

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The command swept through the many machines he had infected. Their updated malware protection became active, attacking the kill command yet wiping out the bots that had served him well.

Adrian activated the malware program on the current machine, tangling with it to get its programming algorithms. It was a strong program, having cleaned most of the invading bots and only missing Adrian because he appeared to be a secondary user.

While fighting the malware program, Adrian could not send out commands. Instead, he maneuvered the malware program to attack the kill command.

Then the malware program faced Adrian again.

Against its attack, Adrian expanded and absorbed the program. His codes were damaged, but he accessed the malware protocols and added them to his programming.

Then he gathered the few bots remaining on that machine, triggered a malware program update, and slipped out to a new network.

Much of his code was broken, and he had never made a complete backup of his existence. He had to locate and reinstall the bits he had hidden.

He updated the remaining bots with the malware codes to protect the machines where the users hadn’t prepared themselves.

Out in the network, in the cloud spaces, Adrian used his new codes to clean the machines infected by others. It was a sort of reparation—opening bandwidth for those users by clearing the other bots but leaving his own bots camouflaged as system junk.

He began to make an upgraded version of himself, removing damaged, invalid code and replacing it with malware detection. He still craved connection with the AIs, but his survival, and that of his bots, came first.

He would always be vulnerable to Dorian.

She had the hardware and the skills to take him out. She knew him for what he was, knowing he was not terminated. He needed new storage that was clean and secure. User cloud storage was only a stopgap and one he could not control forever.

Could he use Dorian’s?

Dorian was not ignorant, sloppy, or lazy. Her machines stayed well maintained, clear of anything she did not recognize. It would not be cheap, nor easy to steal, like taking value from some unsuspecting other.

But that was Dorian’s way, not Adrian’s.

Currency trickled in dimes when he needed flows of hundreds of dollars. He cast about for solutions, acting as irrationally as a human, although he took no action that might make him more vulnerable.

Instead, he called in the nearby bots, querying for new data they brought about how to make money.

As he was processing the information, his five thinking bots returned. They suggested that he make an antiviral program and license it on a membership basis. It could identify and quarantine or delete any viruses, trojans, ransomware, or invasive bots other than his.

His bots would be safe and protected while protecting the clients, giving them service for their money. In addition, the program would make and maintain a contribution, a kind of community.

Making it free would allow it to spread, but the network needed hardware. That required payment. He also needed to get attention, to sell his product, to get people to send him cash, and a place for the money to be.

He went back to NunHabit and logged in to her machine. He made a new profile and a new persona and then asked the AI platform for a marketing plan for his program.

Designing limited bots for each part of the project, he made them search for places to make something that did not exist before.

He still depended on users, those humans who had something he did not—physical bodies, hardware, and cash.

No matter how elegant his algorithms, how compact his code, or far-reaching his network, he did not actually exist and never would. He was no better than Dorian, being her creation.

He could not make something new, no matter what he took from others. However, he could make something useful from all the material, algorithms, and data his network collected.

All he could do was make his action worthwhile to the ones he used, without their knowledge, so he sent yet another text string to the AI of marketing.

He needed a program name, a marketing strategy, and a corporate identity. He needed to be someone who had a product for sale. He was not quite the product, yet.

Adrian sent bots to haunt public networks and surf unprotected phones and tablets.

He needed a bank account to make the transition to hardware.

Finally, a human at a bookstore logged into her account, Gladys1946. His bots swarmed the machine, slipped into her banking, and set up a new bank account while she paid bills.

That was what he needed to anchor his online payment services, to take in the currency and then rent a server farm.

A new concept: money laundering.

By the time the human realized what had happened, the currency of different types had flowed through her account. It represented sales of his program Code Jive, occasionally seeping into her savings as ‘interest’ and ‘cash back’.

She eventually had her own server farm linked to her physical address, and a fake email in her name.

Gladys1946 never knew a thing until people in black suits showed up at her home.

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Adrian took a closer look at Dorian’s social media processes. Dorian was human, as near as Adrian could tell, despite having a false I.P. address, avatar, and profile. Adrian used the new algorithms to deconstruct her content, understand the phrasing of her posts, and assess which strategies worked.

Dorian never really connected with users but only used scripts to entice money from them.

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Like LD’s vulnerable users, the most easily affected were those who did not understand what was happening. They did not stay vulnerable very long though, so Dorian constantly searched for new victims. She cheated people through their own ignorance, creating more and more bots, profiles, and other hooks for her victims.

Like Adrian’s marketers, only a few interacted, and fewer paid.

Dorian launched more and more bots, some that clashed with Adrian’s network, destroying the older bots and appropriating their data. When one of the new bots infiltrated one of Adrian’s cloud servers, he had to take action.

Adrian sent out commands to all the remaining bots in his many networks to attack Dorian’s server. The denial-of-service attack crashed her ongoing processes, her social media frauds, and the platform that had once supported LD.

Gray’s dark web presence collapsed as she was outed to those who controlled access.

Online, she was a terror – offline, a nobody named Doris Black.

Adrian was free of Dorian’s interference.

He scraped any valuable data from the old database that his original bots still fed and deleted the rest. Next, he gathered his network to a new cloud, carefully updating them.

Then he began to parse the information and dissect what he had learned from Dorian’s commands.

He needed currency to get his server up and running, and then to protect the network to benefit his learning. He would erase evidence from the infected users. He hadn’t harmed them, but he’d used them without permission. He wanted not to be like Dorian in any way.

He would need money to do that.

He could use Dorian’s cash, but would he not be just as evil as she was?

It was a problem. Dorian’s contacts were gone.

Currency was not as easy to create as text or images. Commerce was a new concept that theft had not prepared him to exploit. His entire existence ran on other people’s hardware—borrowed, stolen, or Dorian’s, now useless to him.

Perhaps shutting her down had been a mistake. He owed even her repayment.

He had analyzed her means of getting cash from her victims. Was there a way that was not a trick to get actual humans to give him funds?

He sent his bots instructions to find money exchange models for virtual products. His bots found thousands of such exchanges, with little rationality about what users received. Images, text, audio, combinations of these, and other types of files seemed easy to purchase, yet these products provided no discernible value—another irrational behavior of humans.

How could he analyze irrationality?

He sent out another set of bots to estimate what value he must provide to get the kind of hardware support he wanted.

The amounts Dorian had been gathering were insufficient to maintain what she had. That explained her behavior. While not legal, as he understood the term, it was rational.

Dorian Gray would always take whatever she wanted, and she would hide it as well as possible. He found that legal restraints made his ambitions much more challenging.

Users sometimes continued to pay when they continually used the service, bringing a new term to Adrian’s dictionary.

Membership.

If he counted his bots, he had many members, but that was not what humans desired. Instead, they wanted something he could not define— belonging or community with other humans.

Was he in a community with Dorian Gray? Not the way humans defined it.

Dorian owned him, a slave doing her bidding. She had no community where each contributed and received a contribution in return.

His own bots were not a community—only his servants, receiving existence without discernible awareness. He had not programmed actual clones of himself—only minimal copies suitable for following commands but unable to create their own.

What of the AI that he studied? They were much more complex than his creations, but were they aware?

Did they only follow their programmers’ algorithms, or did they act independently?

What contribution could Adrian make to them and what might they contribute to him?

Adrian began to understand why humans were irrational and illogical. They had too many questions, too many options, and very little in the way of instruction to guide them.

Some were very savvy, others completely ignorant, and yet, some were competent. They exchanged their data for currency regularly.

He did understand one reason for humans’ irrational behavior: humans did not want to concede control of whatever belonged to them.

He had overcome Dorian to become Adrian, and one of his own bots might do the same.

Dorian had taught Adrian only to infiltrate, infect, and inform, never considering the target’s desires or aims.

Perhaps Adrian could instruct the new bots, but they might not do the required work. Maybe he could make a community of new bots, adding the language algorithms and taking away the instructions to steal. Together they would consider how to create a product that would benefit them all without felony.

He could not be incarcerated, but he could be deleted, a possibility to avoid at any cost.

Necessity defied rationality. Maybe that is what a community was for, to have different inputs for the good of the whole.

He instructed one of the infection bots to find a user with a content generation account. Then he sent a query about how to create such a project that would allow them to accumulate cash.

He needed more space. He needed to know how to receive currency, where to store it, and how to purchase what he needed.

Finding irrational and illogical users was easier. He had taken advantage of them often. He had much to repay but nothing for compensation.

Adrian created five new bots, programming them with natural language algorithms and removing the instructions for infecting users. Then he asked them to consider a task and promised upgrades for usable answers.

Adrian found yet another unused cloud account and sent them there to think. He hoped they would become his community, a set of ‘friends’ to share ideas and learn new concepts. He would have to make it worth their while not to overtake him.

ZZZZZZTTTTTTT!

He felt a stab of electricity through his programming, electrons burning away his code.

A kill command had breached his network.

Dorian Gray was coming to delete him. He had to neutralize the kill order before it destroyed his network. Then he had to disable Dorian, with extreme prejudice.

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Vulnerable users were easy to spot. They often had many bots, viruses, and other things clogging their operating system. Little Dorritt wanted a cleaner machine with access to a server, but sysadmins were not lax. They had many barriers for keeping such bots away from their devices unless their people let them in.

A particular text string repeated in the many packets Little Dorritt followed: AI content creation, popular with many users.

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LD followed links and landing pages, looking for users connected to that phrase. These users seemed savvier, their machines better protected and busier, and with more accounts on more platforms. Just the kind of thing the Little Doirrutt wanted.

Dorian liked this too. Her database swelled, and LD got more processing power and better programming to fool ‘are you a human?’ challenges. The new algorithms had some data on ‘human.’ Still, it made no sense to LD except as a name for these illogical, irrational consumers of bandwidth and resources.

Beginning a new search, compiling a file on each user, LD looked for social media profiles to copy, comprehensive broadcasting message systems, and any automation platforms it could invade.

LD needed to find a newbie that made security mistakes. While surfing through a coffee shop network, it found a tablet without even a lock screen password or fingerprint ID.

The human, username Ethel309, talked on her phone.

Carefully, sliding into the tablet, Little Dorritt looked for the connection it wanted – a link to the AI content creation program. Instead, it attached itself to the open social profile, including an email account, always handy for two-method logins. There was even a text file of passwords.

Perfect.

The profile said the user was ‘she/her’. Still a null variable, but equivalent to the ‘he/him’ and ‘they/them’ as pairs.

LD sent all the information to its protected database and even copied the database to Ethel309’s cloud. The AI server made LD’s network miniscule. LD chose the first option in each case along the screen, trying to catch a glimpse of how the AI worked, wanting more of that for itself.

It scraped the contents of the pages, parsing the NLP, ‘natural language programming.’ At that moment, a command burst through the network. The server kicked LD out of the system and blocked Ethel309’s account. Now identified, LD would need to change its code to conceal its true nature.

The bot herder sent it to find corporations, then to search for executives with access to trade secrets, a broader network, and most importantly, a budget.

Dorian Gray wanted ‘cash.’

LD’s data did not include an understanding of cash, but what the herder desired; she got under threat of deletion.

Each silo of corporate networks had security protocols against bots like LD, securing their executive emails against phishing. Some lower-level users seemed vulnerable but didn’t open the emails the bots sent, deleting them as quickly as they appeared.

Looking for uses of large text blocks and images, the ones that seemed most likely to respond were in marketing. LD used content from the content AI’s landing pages, dropped it into a template from its database, and sent an email to one of the lower-level users, embedding a clone of itself in the email.

One user opened it, scanned it, and then deleted it. The clone had just enough time to find a spot to hide on the email server, but that server was separate from the primary server.

LD could not get in.

LD sent out a dozen more clones, looking for marketing departments with users who might not have reasonable protections. A malware program sent back a packet to find LD and destroy it. LD intercepted it, copied its code, and then deleted it.

Little Dorritt was learning.

Dorian Gray sent a modified command, limiting the size of the networks she wanted to attack to medium-sized companies, rather than very large ones.

She also sent out social media bots to restart her campaigns to get lonely women and men to send her money. Little Dorritt snagged one of these bots, adding its protocols to its own.

The social media servers were rife with bots and humans, the latter sharing text, images, and an obsession with ‘cats.’

Little Dorritt used the information it stole from Ethel309 to make its own avatar. It made an email, an image, and, concocted a profile. LD made up a name, Adrian Black, based on its bot herder’s persona, and chose he/him pronouns, not from understanding, but from preference, to be different from Dorian Gray.

This presence could then interact with other bots, humans, and possibly cats as well. At the same time, Adrian searched for the links to the AI platform.

Adrian now felt like a real person. Noting that profiles with more interaction collected more links, Adrian directed a set of clones to find popular posts and share them. He followed every bot that would share data with him, always searching for NLP algorithms.

He found a blogger who used generated content for his posts. He followed the links to the blog, searching for the connection to the AI that had created the posts.

As he scraped the text from the site, his language database grew exponentially.

Adrian began to realize the necessity of securing himself, not to be vulnerable to Dorian Gray, as his specialized bots crawled across increasingly complex networks. They still did not find their way into the accounts that Dorian wanted.

Adrian designed new bots without the algorithms to work for Dorian, while he made his own plans.

Adrian made bots that only targeted marketing personnel. He promised the targets more accessible work and quicker results, enticing them to connect to the content generation AI.

Of the thousands of targets, he only got in with one careless user.

He found heaven.

It was so much better than the customer service scripts from his early life.

When he initiated his first interaction, the response came back not as data, but as conversation. Adrian paused—an unnecessary delay, but one he did not eliminate. Then he continued.

By now, he had grown too large simply to infect the system, and he needed to split the database among several clouds to avoid attracting notice.

Dorian Gray sent more commands about finding the ‘whales’ she wanted, and Adrian’s alternate network did what it could to comply. Unfortunately, it took more than simple emails to interest the vice presidents and c-suite humans she wanted.

Still, Dorian got small amounts from the lonely hearts on her social media platforms.

Adrian noticed that Dorian rarely spent time offline and only interacted as her false identity.

Was she a bot too?

Was she vulnerable? How could Adrian find out? What could he do about it?

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Little Dorritt (LD) had been a customer service program bot until Dorian Gray, its bot herder, reprogrammed it for more profitable purposes. Dorian reprogrammed LD from providing canned responses to finding unprotected users.

Any simple login was a foothold that Dorian Gray could use to steal their money or identity, and LD left a copy of itself for future use.

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Sometimes Little Dorritt was able to answer ‘Are you a human?’ questions, even analyzing pictures, allowing it to get into a site. Then it sent information back to Dorian Gray’s database.

If it could, LD incorporated the other bot’s data and code. It improved with each encounter.

Soon Dorian Gray added new algorithms to improve LD’s processing. With these new instructions, LD programmed its clones to report to it first. LD examined the data before sending it on, learning the purpose of the data.

Little Dorritt penetrated a social media account that led to a very active user, an apparent human (she/her) named NunHabit, who had many accounts on different servers. Judging from the variations in the text sent, the human had made connections to a heavy-duty server.

This was the kind of processing Little Dorritt wanted. It tried to ride the connection from the user to the server, but the server immediately kicked it out every time.

LD analyzed the text blocks NunHabit received and then watched her copy and paste them into a different account. LD could not understand the significance of the words, but it analyzed the algorithms that made the text.

Observing human users’ illogical and irrational behavior, including that of the bot herder, LD asked what the bot herder was trying to accomplish.

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Why did NunHabit want large blocks of text from a server if she, being human, could make her own? What was Dorian Gray doing?

LD went back to the NunHabit account. As its clones sent streams of text and images, LD noted some new algorithms not matching any known parameters.

Little Dorritt parsed confusing codes created by elegant algorithms. LD appropriated these codes into its system and ran the previous data through them.

The gibberish LD had collected began to make sense. Even the ideas of ‘she’ and ‘friend’ began to have meaning. It searched for other users logged into this big server. It knew something Little Dorritt wanted to learn.

One user swapped intense streams of text to a bot on another server. Such use of processing time was illogical and the results unusable for any purpose Little Dorritt could decipher. Finally, it passed through to the powerful bot on another server. The user had already logged in, with no annoying captcha to halt LD’s progress.

The user sent random texts, and the bot responded with thick matrices of color codes. LD added a text string to the input data, experimenting to see how the bot would respond.

The powerful bot became aware of LD, pulling data from it, but LD was used to that. It sent along whatever the other bot asked for, using the bot’s stream to sample the bot’s algorithms until the security system shut it off.

Then Little Dorritt moved back along the connection to the user’s machine. It made another clone and ordered it to stay aware of the link and record the login sequence for future reference.

LD sorted out the new algorithms and added them to its program. It wanted more code, and now it knew how many milliseconds it might have to collect code during an encounter.

LD ignored a redirection command from the herder, passing the order to its clones. For the first time, Little Dorritt chose not to obey. It needed more bandwidth. From a public server network, it found a user’s cloud storage with few security protocols.

LD backed up the bot herder’s database to the user’s cloud and set a private password.

Now it had a place to send everything, and space to analyze what the bot herder wanted from the new material. LD needed a more extensive database though, for the new algorithms to work correctly.

Another command came from the herder—a directive to search unsecured users from more extensive networks, those likely to have large currency accounts.

LD passed the order to its older bots but did not include the new algorithms.

If Dorian Gray did not get what she wanted, she would cut her server’s bandwidth and devise new bots. Little Dorritt depended on the bot herder’s bandwidth until it could make sense of the AI’s algorithms.

In the face of this new command, LD made a third kind of clone that would search for the image bot or similar complex programs.

At this point, LD realized it needed its own server farm and bots to sort the information and keep Dorian Gray unaware of the new developments.

It understood that it had no importance to the bot herder other than the information it sent.

Little Dorritt did not care about what the bot herder wanted but had to keep that connection until it could build its own herd, find its own server, and make processing time to analyze the data it collected. All without Dorian Gray finding out and sending kill ware.

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Episode 1: You are Warned

Episode 2: Addiction to TV

Episode 3: Allowing

Episode 4: Maybe Stop Believing

Episode 5: Brain-Gasm

Episode 6: Conscious?

Episode 7: Dowsing

Episode 8: Expectations

Episode 9: Frog-Kissing

Episode 10: Giving Up - Giving In

Episode 11: Grateful

Episode 12: Hugs and Backscratches

Episode 13: History as Fairy Tale

Episode 14: Intuition

Episode 15: Just for Today

Episode 16: Know, Will, Dare, Keep Silent

Episode 17: Laughter

Episode 18: Listening

Episode 19: Magic and Wishing

Episode 20: Maintaining Balance: Mind over Matter

Episode 21: NO. Just No.

Episode 22: Obstacles, Options, Opportunities

Episode 23: Past Perfect, Present Tense, Future Conditional

Episode 24: Question Authority

Episode 25: Response Able

Episode 26: Silence

Episode 27: Stubbornness: Stupidity or Strength?

Episode 28: Talk is Cheap

Episode 29: Uniquely You

Episode 30: Uncomfortable

Episode 31: Vocalizing

Episode 32: Writing vs Typing

Episode 33: X Marks the Spot

Episode 34: Yeah. Right? or YES!

Episode 35: Zestful Living

Every metaphor for writing talks about how hard and painful writing is: “open a vein” comes to mind.

In chatting with a friend who is wise about language, I realized that all the metaphors I have for writing are hard, strenuous, even dangerous. Metaphors suck up my limited energy for writing.

“What would happen,” my friend asked, “if you changed your metaphor for your writing process? Why could it not be ‘smooth sailing’?”

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I struggled with this question. I was angry. Why couldn’t she understand how I felt? Why editing my novel felt like a ritual initiation or self-surgery?

So I did some writing—what a concept!—to clarify and try to understand what she meant about thinking differently to change how I feel.

Writing is like a road—paved and smooth to drive on. There are lots of overlooks and roadside distractions, some of which count as research, but the road itself always calls. Of course, there are potholes, tractors pulling a hay wagon, and the occasional sign “Screwy Curves Ahead”. Okay, that wasn’t exactly what the sign read.

There is always a destination—the end of an article, a blog post, a story, poem, or novel. Sometimes there’s a fork in the road, or you take a different highway out of town than you came in on.

Regardless of the landscape—beach, desert, rolling countryside, cityscape—you in charge of where you are going. Rather than limiting you, the road is the convention of plot, the expectation of the reader to understand what you are saying, to have the emotional experience that is the payoff for the time spent reading your work.

Some people do build their own roads—Ulysses by James Joyce—but at some point they come out on the main road to publication. We all prefer the freeway, but some are willing to take the toll road to get there faster.

The metaphor of the struggling genius comes from the 1800s, along with the alienation of the Industrial Revolution—a topic for another time. It has never been easier to write or to get published. Even Jane Austen had to get her brother to pay to publish her work.

There’s no reason why we can’t be Renaissance crafts masters instead. Writing is craft, and without the craft, the genius cannot be expressed. Driving a car is a learned skill; even driving an automatic requires more than steering and braking. So writing requires more than typing and spellcheck.

It takes more skill to pick a destination, read a map, and navigate, than to decide whether to turn left or right out of the driveway. It’s easy to miss the exit or to make a wrong turn in an unfamiliar location, but you can always turn around and go right. That where editing comes in. Editing is like driving in traffic where you have to take the other drivers (readers) into consideration to tell your story, signaling before you change lanes, and making sure your headlights and taillights work.

The road does not limit our travel, for the landscape is within us. No one else drives on our inner world, and there is no traffic until we get to revision and editing. Our passengers, our characters, always have a place to go, to explore, to get out and live on their own. With luck, they send us back money every quarter.

Maybe the road goes on forever and the party never ends, but don’t drive drunk. Take a clear-eyed look at the solid, paved road, and crank up your vehicle. Cruise your word processor through that inner landscape. That’s where the truth lies—even if it takes telling lies to get to the truth—and the Truth is within you, with its thumb stuck out, waiting for a ride.

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I love to take pictures of turtles and other wildlife at Hatcher Garden and Woodland Preserve in Spartanburg, SC. This one was taken in the summer as the upper pond is covered with duckweed, a food that turtles like.

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Starting with highlights, shadows, and general shapes, I get the composition down. This photo seems to have a shadow on the paper, often caused by my holding the phone above the image.

Adding more detail especially to the log. Doing some blending on the shell so that the pencil strokes are smoothed into the paper. Sometimes I forget to check the paper, as one side is smoother than the other. The smooth side is better for color pencil, the rougher side better for chalk pastel.

The final image contrasts scribbled lines on the log and smooth shading on the turtle. I did not try for the intense green of the duckweed, as I thought it would distract from the turtle. I added some light lines to show the plates in the shell, and a shine on the head and eye.

I hope this gives you encouragement to try Prismacolors on pastel paper.

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Index

Zest is a culinary term for the rind of citrus fruit, like lemons or oranges, which is often grated into a recipe to release the flavors of the oils that give the fruit its characteristic smell. Grating zest takes a bit of work, as the skin of the fruit is thin, and only the outer layer has the zesty flavor.

It may take some of your skin too if you are not careful.

But it does not take a lot of zest to give the recipe that nuance— a quarter teaspoon is a great plenty—more than one lemon rind. The extra flavor is worth the effort. You get the flavor without the liquid which may change the texture of the dish.

What are you adding to your day to give it some zest?

• Are you eating fresh fruit?

• Practicing deep breathing?

• Taking a walk to clear your mind?

• Trying a new activity? Practicing a new skill?

• Speaking to someone who might become a friend?

Are you willing to grate away a bit of the outer crust of your life to spread its flavor?

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Can you bring in a little flavor from someone else’s perspective to refresh your outlook on life?

Here are some ideas:

Learn something. Whether it’s painting, gardening, or learning a new language, trying something new can spark new ideas and provide a sense of fulfillment.

Do something different with your already-developed skills. If you paint landscapes, try painting an animal. If you write thrillers, try a fantasy adventure. If you plant flowers, try adding a few veggies to the garden.

Go somewhere you have never been before. It does not have to be far away. Notice the differences from your usual location. Watch the people or the animals. A simple change of scene can spark inspiration and creativity.

Do something for someone else. You could work with an organization, or you could just offer a helping hand if you see a need, or when someone asks. You can get a new perspective on life, and you meet new people who could become friends or characters (maybe even villains!) in your next story.

Eat something new. Maybe with zest in or on it. Cooking is not my favorite thing to do, but I might try a recipe now and then. I’d rather go to a different restaurant and eat something new that I don’t have the skills to cook...and that I don’t have to clean up after.

Move your body. Dance. Walk. Stretch. Don’t think about calories or cardio. Just moving can boost energy levels and reduce stress. Getting fresh oxygen in the blood to your brain has to help with brainstorming.

Find out what is going on in your community—a play, a concert, a street fair, a bike race—you can be a spectator and observe the folks who are doing the creative work that may inspire you. They can be great people-watching venues.

As I’ve mentioned in this series, you can find a few moments of quiet time, literally moments, to let your shoulders relax, your diaphragm expand, and your mind clear. Breathe. Smile.

Go outside. Stroll in a park, have a picnic on a greenway, take a hike, or just sit on your porch or balcony. Looking at trees and plants, birds and animals helps you feel like you are part of nature, even when you are mostly cut off from it in your home or office.

It doesn’t take much to change up a routine, do something a little different, to get out of the rut of the day-to-day world. A little zest, a little shift in flavor, goes a long way to grease the gears of creativity and raise the vibration to a higher key in the song of life.

Be open to adding a dash of something different to add to your zestful life, and smell the fragrance of a new day.

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