Lady Jo

The Premise of Lady Jo is that one person cannot impose their will on history against the will of a people, no matter how much power they command.

The conflict of Lady Jo lies in that of a woman versus a Machine(God).

The story covers the following: Lady Jo has been deposed, from the autocratic rule of Heliopolis, by an executive that consists of representatives of the denizens of Heliopolis. She has appealed to the Archivist who has ruled in favour of the executive. She appeals to the represenataive of the Manarchists on the Executive. He declines to help and so do the other Manarchists.

So she goes to Kanu, the Night Treader who initiated the motion that deposed her. She appeals. Kanu explains the reality of Heliopilia to her, and drops hints about the existence and purpose of the Engine of Life. Lady Jo is unable to make sense of this and she leaves.

All through this, we are shown delusions of grandeur crumbling in Lady Jo's pshyche. It would be fun to make her the mouth hysterical rheoric in the style of Thatcher. "We! Are! A! Grandmother!"

She seeks the Archivist, whom she knows to be in the Babelhaus, but she cannot find him. She meets the Guard and flees in hysteria, down, down...

Finally, the revelation. "I am the Engine of Life. In my mind isthere is a model of a thousand worlds and a million forms of life. My eyes are set into every wall in Heliopolis. Everything that happens, they scan. I was made long ago, by those like Lady Jo. Their technology gave me the hands needed to manipulate the chain of molecuse that construct life. Therefore I grew it. Their myths were shown to me, and I was told me to make them real. So I have done"

"The creation of life is achieved at a price. The price is death. Some things cannot be constructed or be deducted. Instead they must be wrest from dead flesh. I am the Engine of Life and I must be fed. The death of Lady Jo was planned long ago, like the decoding of the information in her genes. It is needed to construct the final myth. The adversary my builders so longed for."

"From your flesh, my dear, dead Lady Jo, will spring forth the seed that shall germinate into the Archangel Lucifer."

Programmers Parable

Bob the Boolean variable left his house and went for a walk. "Is this a nice day?". He could not decide if this proposition was true or false. Indecsive, he went to see Roger the Record who squatted in an abandoned building estate down by the gasworks. Roger did not listen to Bob. "You think you have something to worry about if you can't decide what your bit is?", he complained, "I've got a bum full of bytes. It's agony."

Not much help there, thought Bob, although what Roger said was definitely true. For some comfort, he decided he would look up his girlfriend, Sandy the String..

..to be continued..

Fiction

"Fiction has nothing to do with poetry, or socialism, or a writer's freedom, or even their happiness. That is merely it's soil. Fiction is like a flower: you can send it to show friendship; you can put it in front of you, to give you inspiration or give it to a lover to show love"

Ai Bei

Sharon Kill

She is Richard the Third,

She is Lady Macbeth

She is an old Woman

She is young and childish once again

She regresses and progresses

She is free

She is trapped

But there will be a ressurection.

by Sharon Hill Harrogate 1990

"I know John, my poetry is atrocious, but my brain feels like a scrambled egg today.."

The Cellar Dweller

Once upon a time I lived in a cellar. 'twas a nice cellar and it was rent-free and this was the early 90's and I couldn't find a job, so it wasn't as deprived as all that.
However, while I was a cellar dweller I read and wrote copious amounts. I don't think I have had such a time of intellectual and social ferment in my life before or since, and I wasn't even a teenager. I was long past that..

Today I have been cleraing the selfsame cellar and found things: scripts, poems and notebooks that were long thought lost. Some are cringeworthy, some are amusing. Some might even be worth salvaging. I'm going to be posting snippets on here from time to time. This is my soap box and I can rant on it if I want to!

Oh Yes.

I must do this unemployment gig more often. It's really suiting me. Not only do I get time to work on my own projects, and lots of interesting possibilities are opening up, mostly involving working outside the UK. Good. I'm tired of this smelly, rainy little island full of people with attitude problems. It's not that bad, honestly. I just need a change of scene after the seriously negative aspects of working for Rage Leeds, who have just had their third game in a row squashed by the marketdroids and are now reduced to using Renderpants (spit!).

Ahh, axe-grinding is such fun!

Unemployment

Yes I am officially unemployed. Rage have shut down the Leeds studio and I am unemployed..UB40 here I come !