they had been trying to get him to drink infopack won for weeks and he had refused – he was, so he said, allergic to datawater, and could only drink brand onezero. all the nanites in his bloodstream have been infected with a reception blocker so his IQ booster wasn’t adhering to the personality software they had grafted onto his existential base meme.

he was moving through the supermarket consuming vast quantites of free samples which on a purely symbolic levels were the agreggated physical metaphors of an alien language. indoctrination into anything in this day and age was very rarely an overt act – it would usually come at him like the subtext of a dream.

the ascension gate was disguised as a newspaper stand and the binary access codes were hidden in the structural atomic coding of the peanuts of a snickers bar. he chomped on the peanut chocolate goodness and felt the buzz on his tongue as the programming spiralled through the double helix echo-chambers of his material plane body.

kennedy was old as dirt, and he had lived in places that were not like this in the least – total absence of technology; very little in the way of advancement. he had been here for about a hundred years he reckoned and he could say straight up that technology never made life easier … it just made it faster.

he had first made this group’s acquaintance when he had been hired on a simple recon job. as he was sat there, camera in hand, he was being watched. he was prancing around like he was all secretive and stuff and they were walking behind him hidden in shadows just waiting for a good time to tap him on the shoulder and wake him up.

they had paid him for the film he had already taken, told him they would take care of his employer (which he didn’t like the sound of), and gave him a retainer to do basically whatever they asked him to do. so here he was – poking his nose into other people’s business in the employ of someone who would kill him if he stepped out of line.

kennedy hadn’t lived this long without learning a few things though – sure, it looked like he was backed into a corner but he was a data-rich seam and there was very little means of looking at what he was without taking some of what he was away with you. now people have just thought about that in terms of an infection that could be purged, but kennedy had no tech on him that was purely destructive – he saw no point in having something that didn’t bring him something in return. so programs that were loyal to him were operating remotely – sure, sometimes he stumbled into situations where he was unprepared for what happened, but there were always failsafes in place to provide him with back up plans.

the datapackets from the remote systems came in haphazardly, sneaking out in whatever signals they could compress themselves without suffering too much data loss. he knew they would know he was getting communications from somewhere but the volume of traffic on his communication lines would make any filtering system apart from the one he had custom designed choke up pretty quickly and pretty severely.

the retainer and the jobs he was given were bullshit, which suggested to him that either his initial investigation was getting somewhere, or that he was the person being scoped out.

so, what did he know? ex-military industrial complex private army on a agent provocateur program to destabilise new regimes. now why would they be interested in him and stopping his work? he accessed the back ups of the data his new employers thought they had removed from his grips and, seeing that he had pretty much been sent to locations to film things which corroborated their claims that their client was straight, and he could see how that might mess with the agenda of someone who was out to cause instability.

he set up an autoburst protocol in his data buffer so that when the next datapacket came in he would respond to it with a viral that would farm all the data for him, harvest their personal data and transmit it to their enemies, and wipe their own records. he knew his remotes would have the whole system mapped by now aand this would be a rapid movement.

his left eye involuntarily winked as the datapacket arrived, and he began to register new info uploading, and his employers systems going crazy and revealing all of their locations. it would soon be over.

kennedy set his personal security system to a rotating burst of emp and snowcrash viral as he walked away from the whole thing – pushing the data from his initial investigation (the thing which had started this whole mess) out to where it needed to go. out into nothing – an evaporating absence of information. kennedy was gone.

Conjuring up ghosts is like blowing smoke rings held inside from the moment they disappeared behind the curtain at the crematorium. Yeah, and sometimes she is a heart-attack; he’s an embolism; she’s bowel cancer; and he is brain tumour.

Depending on whether the memory resurrects itself through the sense of smell or some morbid hospital shadow of memory, they come to me as the figures they were before the illness, or the decimated remainders they became. One I like – the other is less pleasant.

I like photographs. I like kid’s drawings – presents for grown-ups that represent both a child’s state of mind at the time and an insight into what he perceived as necessary to communicate something to an adult. Innocence can peel away the latterly achieved carapace forged from layer of disappointment which dull the patina you should have.

i dream of a perfume that captures a life; a taste that lingers on the tongue and plays a symphony upon the palate. to imagine that i am crafting something for a deafblind person with whom there is no other form of communication than the olifactory sense. i wish to craft a joycean engine from which my own dublin can be reconstructed. each poem, each story, each book is a bottle of perfume.

he had been into the arcane science of flesh-shaping for a long time now and had been using stuff from different planes of reality whose frequency he had managed to tune into and had a pretty good business going selling sex toys made from the distilled essence of nub shiggurath and other lesser known gods from the abyssal realms of nightmare. that was how he had got into octopus porn and discovered midori 8.

he wheeled his chair over to the switchboard and connected himself up to several people he wanted to get together in a room for a new experiment he had devised. he promised the crack whores the purest drugs he had been able to secure – drugs he had obtained on a promise of providing the murder spree fuckbuddy cult Meathaus with fresh bodies. he had talked a coterie of beautiful failed suicides into showing up as well, so this was quite an exciting occasion.

as they gathered in what he had euphemistically dubbed the waiting room he flipped a switch and pumped a fine mist of LSD laced aphrodisiac into the air. octopi were allowed out of their tanks into the room and they too were coupled with in perhaps the strangest breeding program devised.

channelling the orgone energy through a quantum state, which he believed to be a replicated moment from one of his successful interactions with one of the eldritch ancient powers, he succeeded in opening a gateway and allowing Nyarlathotep to manifest. his god was pleased and gifted him with his desired number of tentacles and the woman he had fantasised about for so long. anthony was a happy hybrid.

you’re coughing up your profundity and spitting it in the sink while i am sat there in the background wondering why you can’t just set the germs free from the cage of your excuse? i don’t like to build my palace out of half-glimpsed shadows and undelivered promises, but you tell me that all we have is scrapbooks.

when we moved into this place there were ants carrying the sweetness of the previous occupants away. the fingerprints were still fresh on the formica; an old unemptied kettle and a novelty message on a mug that was not part of our conversation. we called it cleaning up and moving in – unpacking our reality and history from the boxes we had managed to sort it into. the post-it notes looked like diagnoses; fridge magnet haikus barely noticed. if we were to sit there and pick significance out of the alphabet soup how long would it take before we found something we could believe in or argue about?

i don’t like to see you unwell because it is all so unnecessary – an affectation you pick up as a useful prop to stir up the air when you think it has staled from inactivity. the way you come out of all these illnesses is you forget that you need to perform certain actions to make them real; like those guys who forget which leg they chose to be hurt. you’ll maybe stumble a little bit as you realise you’ve been caught out – that everyone, even you, knows there is nothing really wrong with you. but when you are feeling good and there is nothing holding the performance in place it is kind of hard not to smile at how daft you’re being.

you never needed illness to make you profound – like a lot of people when you start treading that invalid path you are scuffing your shoes on dropped cliches and tying your tongue in knots to explain away the flaws in your facade. when you are happy and you are really looking at the things which are before you, it’s easy for you to say something and watch as resonates with those who are listening to you. they don’t have to excuse away the passive agressive way you are communicating with them – they can just accept what was uttered for what it is: truth.

‘oh, by acting,’ he says ‘once they announced they had captured me and disposed of my body at sea people stopped looking. i got work on general hospital and other shows, if you can believe it, playing sympathetic moslems who were persecuted by people who associated them with the acts of terrorism being perpetrated by my so-called organisation.’

‘and what did you do if anyone remarked on your resemblance to a dead terrorist?’

‘oh, i would just tell them i was a lookalike and i was dressed this way for film work.’

‘and they believed you?’

‘sure, why not? saddam hussein had lookalikes – this kind of thing is just accepted nowadays. whatever they dream up in hollywood is nowhere near as wacky as some of the things which go on in real life.’

‘so, where have you been living?’

‘so-cal, on my own vineyard.’

‘are you worried that people are going to be angry to find out that your fate was a lot better than that of the people who were killed in your name?’

‘of course they’re going to be angry, and they have a perfect right. when i first joined the CIA i never expected to end up in the position i was in. some might call it deep cover but it was something entirely different. using money from a slush fund i was tasked with building an organisation that set the west supposedly against the moslem world; i was an agent provocateur.’

‘how do you feel that it didn’t work?’

‘well, it did for a while, and it did in some ways. i am glad it was not a total success though. half of us probably wouldn’t be here if i had succeeded. but think about it – the second remit of the mission was to make it easier for the american government to tighten homeland security and that worked like a dream; people were agreeing to things they never would have agreed to beforehand.’

‘so, do you still meet with some of the people who mounted the whole operation?’

‘of course – i still have a handler too. i probably shouldn’t say that, but yes, they have managed me from day one and i don’t see them relinquishing that in the near future, if ever. i am sure in the days to come that some of the other people who were playing this dangerous game are going to emerge from the woodwork, and you are going to be very surprised jjust who was involved.’

‘any hints?’

‘sorry, no – it would be more than my life is worth.’

the thin skein of patience by which he is tethered to his politeness is being sawed at by the held off future where sleep is already unpacked and transmuted from an angular torment to a flat plane of silken comfort.

coffee interjects as an aroma on a scrabbling sensory switchboard which is reaching for answers. he pushes it away. pancakes are coming and he knows that when he eats them some of his good mood will be restored and the sensitivity to everything he is now displaying will forget itself.

he touches smooth skin, runs his fingers through soft hair – and in the glissade of sensual poetry that is the body of his wife he eases away from his antagonistic perspective and opens like a blooming flower into the radiance of the idea of a new day.