The Secret Commonwealth: Fairies Among Us

More old ParaScope: This article on Robert Kirk and his famous monograph "The Secret Common-Wealth" dates from 1997. It deals with the popular idea among some UFO researchers that the phenomenon is more paraphysical and not about nuts-and-bolts craft from other worlds. This "third way" view of UFOs evolved in the late 1960s and grew more widespread in the 1980s. It never displaced the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis in the hearts of true believers, but it did offer interesting insights into the problem which, I think, indicate the true nature of so-called paranormal events--our faulty perceptions, and our very human trait of interpreting the unknown in whatever context we inhabit.

As usual, any modern comments are in red. Pictures and graphics were by Charles Overbeck.

The "Fairy Hill" at Aberfoyle, Scotland, where Rev. Kirk was said to be held eternal captive of the fairies. Rev. Robert Kirk's "Secret Commonwealth" by Paul B. Thompson Nebula Editor [out of date email address omitted] It has long been the habit of scholars to study the obscure, the strange, and the unusual. Aside from the intrinsic interest of such subjects, the fringes of human experience offer the widest scope for unexpectedly enlarging our collective knowledge. Many common scientific subjects were once "fringe:" electricity, meteors and radioactivity were all once beyond the pale of standard knowledge. No scholar worth his salt would pass up an opportunity to write their name into history as a discoverer. Robert Kirk was such a scholar. Born in 1644, Kirk came from a long line of educated men. His grandfather, John Kirk, was a notary and scrivener in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father, Reverend James Kirk, was appointed minister to the parish of Aberfoyle, in Perthshire, in 1639. He had a large family, of whom Robert Kirk was his seventh son. Among the Celts, this was a propitious place to be born -- seventh sons were commonly believed to have second sight. Kirk never made a reputation as a seer, but he was exceptionally gifted intellectually. He studied at Edinburgh University and at St. Andrews, receiving his master's degree at 17. Ordained as a minister, Kirk served at various parishes for the next twenty years. He married in 1678. Kirk was also a linguist. He translated the psalms into Gaelic verse, and translated other religious works into the Scots Highland dialect. His facility with Gaelic led him to be named editor of a new Irish edition of the bible. In June 1685 he was appointed to his father's old parish of Aberfoyle, and served there until his early death in 1692. Aberfoyle was, in the words of Sir Walter Scott, "[a] beautiful and wild region, comprehending so many lakes, rocks, sequestered valleys, and dim copsewoods, and not even yet quite abandoned by the fairies, who have resolutely maintained secure footing in a region so well suited to their residence." His linguistic expertise would have been enough to insure Robert Kirk a footnote in the cultural history of the British Isles, but his real fame (and interest to readers of ParaScope) lies in his study of fairy lore. He collected tales of fairy encounters by his countrymen and analyzed them in a monograph entitled "The Secret Common-Wealth." In Kirk's time, fairies were not seen as tiny, gauzy-winged creatures of children's storybooks. Far from it -- fairies were thought of as strange, powerful creatures, a paraphysical race of beings living among mankind. It was common for some of the clergy to denounce fairy folk as demons, or at least servants of Satan. Kirk wasn't so sure. He decided that they were a separate race "betwixt Man and Angel." Lacking scientific language to describe fairy attributes, Kirk resorted to poetic descriptions. Fairies were made on "congealed Air" or "condensed cloud." This ethereal composition was crucial to their ability to vanish at will, fly, or penetrate any enclosed space, no matter how tiny. Being so nebulous, fairies imbibed only the most refined of "spirituous liquors" (Scotland being a good location for such), and Kirk noted that although they had prodigious appetites, fairies never grew fat because they only used the quintessence of food and drink. Humans sometimes stumbled upon fairy banquets hidden away in the hills, but mortals should never partake of fairy food; one taste, and the luckless human was forever a captive of the Subterranean race. An especially odd detail Kirk gives is that the fairies had a special class of servant at their revels, whom he describes as "Pleasant Children" or enchanted puppets, which sounds like the fairies were tended by mechanical dolls. ["robots" in the original sense] Fairy affairs curiously mirrored the situation of their human neighbors. When men experienced a good harvest, things were poorly in the fairy realm, and vice-versa. Fairies lived in tribes and "orders" (medieval social classes), had factions, fought wars among themselves -- sometimes in the sky, to the astonishment of mortal witnesses -- and by custom had to move their homes at the beginning of each quarter of the year. These migrations were sometimes seen by psychically gifted Scots, and led to them being called "the crew that never rest." Fairy fashion echoed that of the country in which they lived. In Scotland, they wore plaid kilts, and in Ireland dressed like the Irish. Fairy women were the finest spinners and weavers in the world, making cloth as fine as cobwebs, which seems only fitting for a race made of congealed air. They had no religion, but would flee when humans invoked God or Jesus. Kirk repeats the common belief that fairies fear and hate iron, and offers an unusual reason why: Hell, it seems, is a place so hot and terrible molten iron flows like water all over the place. Being highly sensitive creatures, the fairies cannot bear even the smell of cold iron, as it reminds them of the fate that awaits them once they die . . . eternity in Hell. Fairy relations with humans are always strange and often tragic. Time passes differently among the fairies. What seems like a few days or weeks in Elfland can be decades in the mortal world. Kirk's informants told him of vast underground halls, lit by perpetual lamps, where hundreds of fairies feasted and roistered down the ages. There were also more sinister aspects to human/fairy interactions. Most people have heard of changelings, where a human baby is taken away from its parents and a defective fairy child left in its place. But the Subterraneans did not balk at taking adults away too. They particularly liked women who'd just given birth. They were kidnapped to serve as wet nurses to fairy babies. Interestingly, the fairies would leave exact doubles of their captives behind. Kirk discusses these doppelgangers, who he calls "co-walkers," in some detail. Like changeling infants, co-walkers tend to weaken, become incoherent, and eventually die. They're not human or fairy, but a sort of biological robot created by fairy magic to distract mortals away from the truth about the abduction of their loved ones. UFO lore is full of co-walker types. Many of the classic "men in black" episodes feature clumsy, muddle-mouthed visitors who don't quite seem in sync with the mundane world. MIBs, like co-walkers, perform some task, then depart -- though they don't usually die in front of puzzled witnesses. Kirk gives this account of one woman's abduction (I have modernized his spelling): "Among other instances of undoubted verity, proving in these the being of such aerial people, or species of creatures not vulgarly known, I add the subsequent relations, some whereof I have from my acquaintance with the actors and patients and the rest from the eyewitnesses to the matter of fact. The first whereof shall be of the woman taken out of her child-bed, and having a lingering image of her substituted body in her room, which resemblance decayed, died, and was buried. But the person stolen returning to her husband after two years space, he being convinced by many undeniable tokens that she was his former wife, admitted her home and had diverse children by her. Among other reports she gave her husband, this was one: that she perceived little what they [the fairies] did in the spacious house she lodged in, until she anointed one of her eyes with a certain unction that was by her; which they perceiving to have acquainted her with their actions, they fained her blind of that eye with a puff of their breath. She found the place full of light, without any fountain or lamp from whence it did spring." Kirk goes on to say the returned woman was undoubtedly the same one everyone thought had died, and that her husband, having remarried since her "death," was obliged to divorce his second wife to remarry his first. The scholarly minister's interest in the Good People (as fairies were euphemistically called) proved unhealthy. Kirk's monograph was finished in 1691. A short time later, after the minister returned from London to Aberfoyle, he went for an evening stroll in his nightshirt. Kirk's perambulations took him past a fairy mound near his home. While passing by the mound (or walking over it, according to some accounts), the 47 year-old scholar collapsed. He was found and brought home, but died soon after and was buried in the kirkyard of his own church. Kirk's death on or near a fairy mound must have made his parishioners shudder, but an even weirder postscript would be added to the case. One of Kirk's relatives was awakened in the night by the apparition of the dead minister. Kirk gave him a message for his cousin, one Graham of Duchray. I am not dead, Kirk's specter declared. The Good People had carried him off. He had one chance to escape their clutches: when Kirk's posthumous child was christened (his wife being pregnant when he died), Kirk's apparition would appear at the ceremony. Graham of Duchray was to throw an iron-bladed knife over the head of the minister's specter. Iron was a powerful counter to fairy magic, and Kirk would be released from their power by this act. (One wonders what would become of his corpse, buried securely in the Aberfoyle cemetery . . . but some folk in Aberfoyle claimed that Kirk's body was abducted, not just his soul. His coffin, it was said, was buried with nothing in it but stones.) The child was born, and duly christened. While the family dined afterward, Kirk appeared before them. Unfortunately, his cousin Graham was so thunderstruck by this vision he failed to throw his knife as directed. Kirk's spirit faded away, never to be seen again. Well into the twentieth century people in Aberfoyle maintained that Robert Kirk was not really dead, but lived as an eternal captive in fairyland. This kind of fairy lore echoes again and again through UFO literature. Strange time effects, odd, diminutive "people" with pointed features seen to occupy UFOs, traditional fairy gambits of borrowing mundane object from witnesses -- and witnesses not being able to borrow "extraterrestrial" artifacts back -- all are common facets of UFO close encounters. Sometimes the fairy connection is so obvious as to be startling -- as in the 1967 Long Island case where a contactee was given a seemingly ordinary metal disc to wear so that "they" would recognize her. Who are "they?" asked the contactee. "They are the very good people," she was told. (See John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies, chapter 15). If there is a strong link between fairy lore and UFO encounters, what does it mean? The crassly obvious view is that extraterrestrials have been visiting us for centuries, and in the past they were mistaken for elves and fairies. This is a naive concept; more probable is the notion that modern encounters with strange beings are interpreted as contact with outer space folk whereas three hundred years ago such a meeting would have been seen as a visitation by the Good People. It seems as though the phenomenon changes very little, but our perception of it changes a great deal. Our understanding of it all would be greatly enhanced if we could strip away the trappings of folklore, religion, and pseudo-science that continued to obscure the core facts. And if at some future date we can recognize these experiences unburdened by medieval superstitions or cheesy science-fiction concepts of "aliens," then perhaps we'll know our visitors for who they truly are. Maybe then they'll cease to trouble us, and cease to be "the crew that never rest." © Copyright 1997 ParaScope, Inc.

The Infinite Universe of the Mind: Dr. Robert Lindner's "The Jet-Propelled Couch" (ParaScope, 1998)

Twenty-three years ago I wrote the following article for the paranormal pages of AOL's online magazine "ParaScope." Some of this work is available via the Wayback Machine, but you never know when old content might become superfluous to needs and lost. I hope to reproduce various bits of my old work here on my blog. 

"Nebula" was the section I edited. It dealt with all aspects of the UFO phenomenon. I was a moderate skeptic in those days and since have become a hardcore disbeliever in alien visitors. With the recent stir over US military footage of alleged UFOs, I thought some of these old (yet valid, I hope) articles would be relevant again.

"UFO Cautionary Tales" is a series I wrote that focused on social and historical parallels to the usual paranormal UFO claims. My thinking was that events in other areas of unusual human behavior could cast valuable light on UFO belief. Modern comments and additions are in red.

The artwork is original to the ParaScope page, and was created by Charles Overbeck.

by Paul B. Thompson Nebula Editor [out of date email address deleted] For many years before the words "flying saucers" or "UFOs" were created, there existed an extensive body of literature about contact between humans and non-human beings. In the nineteenth century, spiritualists filled volumes with rambling, obtuse discourses allegedly obtained from the spirits of the dead. (Why great thinkers, from Caesar to Shakespeare, suddenly become dull, sentimental hacks after death is one mystery spiritualists have never addressed.) Some mediums went even further afield and psychically contacted inhabitants of other worlds. A Swiss woman known as Helene Smith (real name Catherine Elise Muller) visited Mars in the 1890s, met an important Martian named Astane, and learned to write and speak the "Martian" language. A New England medium named Denton visited most of the known planets in the solar system, describing for his sitters life on Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. In the 1880s a Newburgh, New York dentist named John Ballou Newbrough channeled a "new Bible" called Oahspe, dictated to him by angelic presences at that new-fangled invention, the typewriter. Oahspe set new standards for occult drivel, as it was crammed with wacky paranormal beliefs: lost continents, angels copulating with animals, beings from space, and racist "history" that explained why Caucasians were superior to darker-skinned races (Caucasians have more angelic blood in them, according to Newbrough). By the 1930s, a more sophisticated "bible" was being transmitted to humankind in the form of the Urantia Book. Different accounts exist as to the origin of this weighty tome, but the basic story is like Newbrough's: non-human entities dictated the Urantia Book to a human recipient. Its contents are of a type with other channeled works: lots of long winded religion, philosophy, guides to right-thinking, nutrition, etc. Personally I always wonder why enormously wise Space Brothers/Angels don't relate really important stuff to us, like how to cure cancer, or how to achieve space travel without costly, noisy rockets. Beginning in 1965, UFO researchers in Spain and France received contacts from persons who claimed to be extraterrestrials from the planet Ummo, which allegedly circles the star astronomers know as Wolf 424. These contacts took the form of phone calls (!) and manuscripts of considerable size and complexity, purportedly describing the science, politics, and sociology of the Ummites. Artifacts from Ummo were left for researchers -- metal, sheets of plastic -- which when analyzed proved to be advanced composites or polymers available, but not common, on earth. The Ummo affair grew larger with time as more people fell into the network of contacts made by the alleged aliens. An extensive literature built up relating the wisdom of the Ummites, which to this day is widely discussed in continental Europe. Weird, complicated tales of deception and hoaxes are also wound into the fabric of the Ummo legend. American and British UFOlogists generally regard the Ummo affair as an elaborate hoax, perhaps a social experiment perpetrated by some intelligence agency (pick your favorite candidate -- the KGB, the East German Stasi, the CIA, French military intelligence...). French and Spanish investigators who have immersed themselves in Ummo lore for decades are not so sure. Who could, or would, perpetrate such a complex hoax? There are hundreds of pages of documents extant from the alleged aliens, some of which detail the mathematical system of Ummo. This is not at all like the muddled, intellectually bankrupt writing found in Oahspe or the Urantia Book. The Ummo material is not beyond the mentality of human beings, but it does pose a serious question: who would write such lengthy tracts, and why? I'm in no position to provide an exact answer, but in the tradition of previous UFO Cautionary Tales, I can suggest a parallel phenomenon that may hold at least part of the answer. It involves that vastly underestimated human feature, the mind. The Jet-Propelled Couch Dr. Robert Lindner (1914-1955) was born in New York City. As a child his passion was science fiction, which in those days meant H. G. Wells, "Tom Swift," and pulp magazines like Amazing Stories. Lindner received his Ph.D. in psychology from Cornell in 1938. He went on to a short but intense career as Freudian analyst, and wrote several riveting books about his experiences. His first book, published in 1944, was Rebel Without a Cause, which gave its title and nothing else to the famous James Dean movie. Dr. Lindner's most enduring work was his 1955 study The Fifty Minute Hour, a collection of five psychoanalytic cases. Lindner wrote with the power and clarity of a novelist; indeed, to protect the identity of his patients he heavily fictionalized aspects of their lives. The fifth and final case in The Fifty Minute Hour is called "The Jet-Propelled Couch." Dr. Lindner got a call from a physician "at a government installation in the Southwest." One of the scientists (Lindner says a physicist) at the government lab was exhibiting signs of psychosis, claiming he was from another planet. Lindner gave this man the pseudonym "Kirk Allen." One of Allen's supervisors at the government lab noticed him writing pages and pages of hieroglyphs. When questioned about the odd symbols, Allen apologized and promised to spend more time on this planet, i.e., earth! Because of the sensitive nature of this scientist's work for the U.S. government, Dr. Lindner was asked to treat this physicist as soon as possible. Allen was sent off to Baltimore, where Dr. Lindner had his practice. He was then in his thirties, blond, and given to wearing seersucker suits and Panama hats. Lindner soon learned that Allen was born in Hawaii in 1918, the son of an American naval officer, and spent much of his childhood in Polynesia. His troubles began when he was left to the care of a governess, a weird nymphomaniacal woman who seduced Allen when he was only eleven years old. Lindner spins a classical Freudian analysis of Allen's sexual formulation, his fears of maternal incest, etc. Allen identified strongly with the Polynesian people around him and found the behavior of the white people he knew alienating. When slightly older he chanced upon the novels of (as Lindner says) "a highly imaginative and prolific writer... a famous English author," Allen felt a shock of "recognition" that the novels' hero had the same name as him. (This suggests Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian adventure novels. The hero of Burroughs' Mars novels is named John Carter. Was there a physicist at Los Alamos or White Sands in the late 1940s named John Carter? I don't know. Lindner freely fictionalizes details of his cases, making the identification of his patients problematic.) Burroughs was not English, of course, but that's possibly one of Lindner's obfuscations. Over time, Kirk Allen's psychological problems took the form of believing he was an extraterrestrial, temporarily trapped in the guise of an ordinary earthman. Using the novels he read as a starting point, he began to compile lists of planets he had visited, complete with details of their geography, flora and fauna, civilizations, and politics. This started in his teens and continued to his thirties. It didn't seem to interfere with his college education or his subsequent career as a physicist. But by his thirties, Allen's accumulated "alien" knowledge began to crowd out the mundane details of his real life, and his colleagues recognized the depths of his delusions for the first time. "Kirk Allen" wasn't simply some Burroughsian swashbuckler -- he was, in his mind, the emperor of a vast galactic realm. He traveled the cosmos surveying his conquered worlds, and recorded his findings in meticulous detail. Because of his training in math and science, Allen's phantom worlds were far more fully realized than any in ordinary science fiction, and light-years more sophisticated than anything found in Oahspe, Urantia, or the Ummo papers. When Kirk Allen "discovered" a planet, he worked out its orbital mechanics with the precision of, well, an Ivy League physicist. Once Dr. Lindner obtained Allen's confidence he was shown the following documentation of Kirk Allen's cosmos: An autobiography of Allen, 12,000 pages long, in 200 chapters. Appended to this were a further 2,000 pages of notes and annotations. Many of these notes were written in shorthand that Allen himself had devised. A glossary of names and terms, over 100 pages long. 82 maps, drawn to scale in full color, consisting of 23 planetary maps in four projections, 31 continents on these planets, the rest being maps of cities on those planets. 161 architectural drawings, to scale and extensively annotated, some in color. 12 genealogical tables. 18 pages describing the galaxy in which Kirk Allen lived, with four astronomical charts, and nine star maps. A 200 page history of the empire ruled by Kirk Allen, with 3 pages of important historical events, battles, etc. 44 file folders containing up to 20 pages each of memoranda on the different planets Kirk Allen ruled or visited. These had titles like "The Metabiology of the Valley Dwellers," "The Transportation System of Seraneb," "The Application of Unified Field Theory and the Mechanics of the Stardrive to Space Travel," "Anthropological Studies on Srom Olma I," "Plant Biology and Genetic Science of Srom Olma I," and much more. 306 drawings, some painted, of extraterrestrial machines, animals, clothing, instruments, people, plants, insects, weapons, vehicles, buildings, even furniture. How pale and shallow the wisdom of Ummo must be compared to the delusions of a single educated earthman! Dr. Lindner was almost overwhelmed by the sheer volume of Allen's delusions. He had Allen submit to extensive physical and neurological tests, all of which came back normal. Allen's problem was entirely mental, and he developed curiously familiar theories to account for his presence on earth. A reader of the works of Charles Fort, Allen decided he had been teleported to earth, and that undefined "psychic" organs in his body allowed him to return (at least astrally) to his home galaxy whenever he wished. In another context Kirk Allen might have become a famous UFO contactee, the founder of a cult, or at least the center of a large controversy. Imagine, government physicist, Ivy League graduate, the extraterrestrial among us -- what kind of impact would Kirk Allen have had if he had come to the attention the gullible public instead of Dr. Lindner? Lindner's psychoanalysis of Kirk Allen took the form of going through the myriad details of his delusion, searching for inconsistencies that might shock Allen back to reality. There weren't many. Allen's galaxy was measured in units called "ecapalim," equal to one and five-sixteenths miles. He produced calculations of orbits and planetary sizes in this bizarre fraction, converting them to miles for Dr. Lindner's benefit. Eventually the strain of such scrutiny took the escapism out of Allen's delusions, and they lost value for him. He abandoned them, but kept up the pretense for Dr. Lindner for some time, just to humor his inquisitive therapist! The ironic fact was, by the end of his treatment, Allen's fantasies had ensnared Lindner, a science fiction fan from way back. Allen eventually confessed that he no longer believed in his own delusions, and that he had pretended to for weeks just to satisfy Dr. Lindner. Kirk Allen was cured of his outer space fantasy, and his case illustrates forcefully the vast creative power of the human mind. People who believe in channeled wisdom, in the revelations of the Space Brothers, often challenge skeptics by saying, "How could an ordinary person make up such strange stuff? It must be true -- where else could such details come from?" The truth is, as Kirk Allen demonstrates, unless the alleged revelations contain knowledge totally outside the realm of human understanding (say, a breakthrough in science or medicine), they can only come from the mind of the revealer. Human imagination consists of infinite space, and many universes may exist in a single cranium. Look there for answers first, before you raise your sights to the sky. Postscript There is a persistent rumor in science fiction fan circles that "Kirk Allen" was in fact Dr. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913-1966), who wrote science fiction under the pen name Cordwainer Smith. Dr. Linebarger was a fascinating man in his own right -- godson to Dr. Sun Yat Sen, father of the Chinese Republic. Linebarger grew up in Asia and received his Ph.D. in political science at age 23 from Johns Hopkins University. (Johns Hopkins is in Baltimore, of course, where Dr. Lindner had his practice.) He served in China as an intelligence officer during World War II. After the war he wrote a famous textbook, Psychological Warfare, and served as a colonel in the intelligence branch of the U.S. Army. He advised the British Army during their suppression of Malayan nationalists, and advised the military on psy-war matters during the Korean conflict. Later Dr. Linebarger refused to lend his expertise to the Vietnam effort, deeming American involvement there a mistake from the outset. Linebarger started writing science fiction in the 1930s, using a richly detailed future history known as "The Instrumentality of Mankind." His strange, ethereal fiction has a power all its own. He wrote two mainstream novels under the pen name "Felix C. Forrest," and a spy novel as "Carmichael Smith." All are long out of print, but his science fiction remains, well loved by connoisseurs of the genre. Was Dr. Linebarger "Kirk Allen?" There is no legitimate evidence he was, only intriguing supposition and fannish theory. © Copyright 1998 ParaScope, Inc.

Fianchetto: Cold Comfort 2052

 2052: Cold Comfort

[Another excerpt from FIANCHETTO, in this case a flashback to Victor's childhood at Fysikós Farm. Photos added for the blog page.]

Cold. It was so cold. Victor tried to burrow deeper into the futon beneath him, but the wooden floor wouldn't yield. He pulled layers of blankets and the zipped-open sleeping bag tighter around him, but the cold seeped in remorselessly, invading his space like water leaking into a sinking ship. To make matters worse, his bladder was achingly full. He tried to ignore it, but he couldn't. There was nothing to do but get up.

The Hall was a vale of shadows, populated by mounds of children sleeping under piles of bedding. It was January, and there had not been any real sunshine for five days. The solar cells couldn't cope with the gloom, so the batteries ran down and the electric heaters died after forty hours' steady use. During the day, the adults would run an alcohol-fired heater (wood burning was forbidden, as it was too polluting), but Frances said it wasn't safe to sleep with the stove going. When the sun went down--and it went down early in winter--the precious heat quickly bled from the Hall. The children of Fysikós Farm dealt with the cold by dragging their futons off their bunks and piling them on the floor in one great heap. Then they all crawled in, heaping every spare cover they had on top of them. All their body heat was trapped inside the mound, so they could sleep in some kind of comfort.

Unfortunately, Victor's place was at the edge of pile, so one side was always exposed to cold air and lacked a second body for warmth. The kids took turns sleeping on the outside, and tonight happened to be his turn.

The only light in the hall came from two feeble LED nightlights, one at each extremity of the room. Victor got on his knees, wrapping a scratchy army surplus blanket around him. All he wore was a pair of warm-up pants and a too-large sweatshirt. He slipped on a pair of felt moccasins. They were ice-cold, but at least he didn't have to go barefoot to the latrine.

There had been a chamberpot in a small closet at the far end of the Hall, but three nights ago the kids whose chore it was to empty it before lights' out forgot, so the contents froze during the night. The pot cracked, ruining it and making a mess. Frances refused to replace it right away. She said doing without the pot would teach them all the importance of doing their appointed tasks when required. What this meant for Victor was he had to cross the length of the Farm yard to the main latrine in the middle of the night with the temperature well below freezing.

He padded to the door and opened it. The night was still and the sky was as clear as glass. Through the tall pines and naked branches of the cluster of oaks around Frances' cabin he could see uncountable stars. The moon was not up. Breath plumed from his face and quickly vanished in the dry, frigid air.

Victor surveyed the shadowed expanse of the Farm yard down to the communal showers and latrine. He had no idea what time it was, but every window was dark and nothing was stirring. Because the Farm was off the grid, there were no power company utility lights to brighten the grounds. With a sigh he started down the hill to the latrine. At least his eyes were accustomed to the dark. Even so, he had to feel his way along, sliding his slippered feet over the carpet of pine straw. Now and then he bumped into a tree root, but he managed not to trip.

The men's latrine, sited at right angles to the bath house, stood tall and black in the darkness. He raised the wooden latch and let the narrow door swing open. In warm weather he had to watch out for spiders, and paper wasps nesting under the roof eaves. Last summer, one of the grownups, Carlos, got bitten by a spider while using the latrine. A big hole rotted in his leg. Another time Victor had watched old Boris deal with an infestation of wasps. There were four big nests hanging under the edge of the galvanized tin roof.

Frances wouldn't allow anyone to use poisons on pests, so Boris showed up with a garden rake and a can of white gas, the fuel they used in Coleman lanterns. He wrapped a length of rag around the tines, soaked it in white gas, and lit it. Holding the rake up, he burned off the paper wasps' nests one by one. When no nests were left, Victor assumed that was that, but Boris winked and told him to wait and watch.

Wasps who had been out foraging homed in on their lost nests. Because white gas flames were invisible, they flew right into Boris's torch. Victor saw wasp after wasp take light and plummet to the ground, burned. When no more insects appeared, Boris lowered the rake and stamped out the flames.

"Sometimes you can't see the fire," he said. "That don't mean it ain't there."

Staring into the black hole of the open latrine door, Victor wondered what might be lurking inside. If he hadn't been so cold, he might've relieved himself against a handy tree. It was too chilly for that, and Frances took a dim view of anyone flouting the Farm's hygiene rules. He stepped up into the shadowed shed.

It was the three holer, with carved flip-up seats. Thin wooden partitions divided the seats. Victor went to the center hole. Shivering, he managed to urinate, but it was hard when his hands were so cold and he was shaking so much.

Finished, he shoved his hands into his armpits, put his head down, and hurried back to the Hall. Along the way he heard a soft crash in the brush off to his left. He skidded to a stop, getting tangled in the blanket and nearly falling over.

There were coyotes in Chatham County. Everybody knew that. People said cougars had also made a comeback, moving into rural ranges depopulated by the human exodus to the cities. They'd lost chickens in the spring, and one of the Farm dog's pups had vanished just before Labor Day. An eleven year-old wandering alone in the dark was perfect prey.

Victor stood stock still, straining to see or hear whatever was going on around him. Beyond a few meters, the night was a black wall he couldn't penetrate. All was quiet. The silence was not reassuring.

Maybe it was a pine cone falling he heard. Lots of pines in the yard, after all . . . looking back frequently, Victor hurried hard back to the Hall. He heard nothing else and reached the steps in record time. His hands and feet ached, they were so cold. What did frostbite feel like? He imagined frostbitten fingers or toes would be numb, not throbbing like his were.

Compared to the crystalline darkness outside, the air inside the Hall was humid with children's breath and softly lit by the faint night lights. Kids squirmed and rasped under heaps of bedding, but no one woke. Victor tip-toed to his spot at the edge of the sleeping scrum.

For the first time he noticed a mound of bedding separated from the rest. Maybe a meter from the main heap lay a single comma-shaped hill of gray blankets, under which peeped the bright colors of a Star Wars sleeping bag. Though he saw no face, he knew who was sleeping there. The girl was always on her own. The others did not like her, even though she'd recently stopped bullying and fighting anyone who crossed her.

Victor went to the edge of the curled heap, slipped off his moccasins, and knelt. He lifted the edge of the blankets. His movement, or the inrush of cold air provoked a violent start from the sleeping girl.

"What?" she said hoarsely. "Whozzit?"

"It's me, Victor."

"Whaddya want?"

"Can I sleep with you?"

She pushed herself up on her hands. He saw a blur of sandy hair and the pale circle of her face.

"What? Why?"

"I went to the 'trine. I'm cold."

She stared at him for what seemed like a long time. His shivering resumed, and grew violent enough he toppled forward, almost landing on his face.

"Get in," she hissed, "before you freeze to death." He crawled under the blankets she held up for him.

"Shit, your skin's like ice! Keep your feet and hands to yourself!" Trembling, he promised he would.

Her sleeping bag was deliciously warm. Victor drew himself up in a ball, tucking his feet behind him and returning his hands to his armpits. She dropped the blankets over him.

"You musta had to piss real bad," she muttered.

"Uh-huh."

Silence. Then softly, "Why get in with me?"

"You're alone."

"You feel sorry for me?" she replied, voice rising.

"No. I want to be here."

More silence. "Keep your hands to yourself," she repeated.

Victor didn't understand why she said that. His hands ached, but he'd never put his frigid fingers or toes on anyone to warm them up. Of course, she was fourteen, and had changed from a scruffy tomboy into a teenager. Victor had noticed other girls her age were into this 'don't touch me' phase. He didn't understand why they acted that way. The Hall wasn't a touchy place. And yet, even as these thoughts circled his head, he found himself wanting to be closer to her, as close as she would allow.

He wormed forward, still keeping his feet and hands back. His knees bumped hers.

"Be still," she murmured, trying to go back to sleep.

With bedding up to his eyes, Victor could just see her forehead and tossled hair. Her warm breath played on his face. He wanted to go to sleep too, but he found rest elusive. Lying there, he studied the small part of her face he could see.

She opened her eyes. He expected an angry question along the lines of 'Whaddya lookin' at?' but she said nothing, gazing steadily back at him instead.

The tingling in his fingers and toes faded. Victor took his hand from his armpits and flexed his fingers, feeling the blood flow again. To his surprise, she reached out and took his hands in hers, closing them together and rubbing the backs lightly.

"Not so cold now."

"No."

"When you're warm enough, you can go back to the others."

Victor shook his head. He'd stay.

They went to sleep like this, facing each other, her hands clasped over his. When he woke to a bright, crisp morning, his back was to her, and her arm was close around his chest.

Fianchetto: A Face to Die For

Another excerpt from the second half of "Fianchetto." Victor is on his way back from Kitty Hawk after playing the Russian AI ARAKHNA. He tries to find food in the empty countryside and finds something else.

A Face to Die For

On the road west, Victor turned his PDL off. He usually sent his lover a link every day or two, but on this journey he didn't want to see or hear from anyone.

The Ford Famiglia cruised down Bodie Island and crossed the bridge over the Sound to Roanoke Island, then another bridge over the Alligator River to the mainland. Further inland, as Erika and Hermann Freitag had observed, eastern North Carolina was almost totally depopulated. Former towns he passed no longer had names except in memory. The roadside businesses that sustained them in the early twenty-first century were gone. Fast food eateries, shopping outlets, and vacation supplies were now concentrated at the beginning or end of the journey, leaving nothing manned in between. A famous burger chain had sewn robotic, self-serve restaurants along major arteries like US 64, with mixed results. There was enough traffic to support dining and rest areas, but the eerie, lifeless atmosphere of the depopulated countryside discouraged people from stopping. Most travelers only stopped long car trips long enough to recharge their vehicle's batteries.

Nowadays the only people you saw along the way were technicians servicing the vast solar and wind-powered energy farms, and the automated fields of produce that covered former family farms. Victor lost count of the lofty white turbines beating in the coastal wind, and couldn't fathom how many solar panels lined both sides of the road. To pass the time he calculated how many panels there might be. Forty-four kilometers from Kitty Hawk he used his PDL to research how many solar cells were in a typical modern panel. Your/World Energy Plus reported there were 64 cells in a standard 65 x 165 cm. panel; if there were 100,000 panels (minimum) in Washington County, that would be 6,400,000 solar cells . . .

A hundred fifty kilometers from Kitty Hawk, Victor's stomach asserted itself. He searched Your/World for a likely eatery near the highway. He found three, all automats: Haute Dogs, Robin's Barbecue, and the international chain Burger Realm. Not having a high opinion of robo food, he nevertheless decided to stop at whichever establishment he reached first.

He directed the Famiglia off Highway 64 at the next ramp. The pavement was cracked, and fists of grass had forced their way through the segments, seeking sunlight and rain. At the bottom of the ramp, the Ford coasted to a stop. It sat, unmoving, so he asked what it was waiting for? There was no crossing traffic.

Navigation difficulties, the car's readout flashed. Unable to read WAG.

Victor climbed into the front seats. He looked left and right. The food stands ought to be in plain sight, but the shoulders of the old state road were neck deep in weeds and saplings.

"Turn right," he said. Sensors reading the edge of the pavement, the Famiglia rolled slowly forward.

"Why can't you receive WAG?" he asked the car.

Signals not available.

That made no sense. Vehicles deep in the Chunnel picked up the World Alignment Grid easily, as did high speed aircraft in the stratosphere. How could the space-based network not be available?

Seared in his memory was the sight of the British Airways Dornier boring in, closer and closer. Was this what happened to the airliners--they lost WAG at a critical moment when another plane happened to enter their flight path?

At low speed, the Ford crushed windblown tree limbs and gems of broken glass. Victor was about to order the car to return to the highway when he caught sight of the green roof of a Burger Realm kiosk. He verbally guided the car to it.

The parking lot was empty. Pak fragments bleached of all color littered the ground. At first Victor couldn't tell if the lot was gravel or paved. When he stepped out he realized it was the latter, but the macadam was so broken it resembled a field of pebbles.

The building was pentagonal, with a painted aluminum awnings shading each of the four order stations. He looked for signs of life. The first station Victor approached had a vast golden garden spider's web stretching from the awning to the order station's ledge. The spider, with a body as big as Victor's thumb, hung in the center of the web.

How did that old poem go?

Once I loved a spider

When I was born a fly,

A velvet-footed spider

With a gown of rainbow-dye.

Rachel--Vachel? Lindsay, was it? Sixth grade was a long time ago.

At his approach the spider scuttled quickly up the web to the protection of the metal overhang. Victor circled right rather than disturb the huge web. The next station was covered by a thick layer of yellow pine pollen, but a green LED glowed beneath the gritty pall. When he stepped onto the pressure plate set in the concrete before the order station, a row of LEDs flickered and brightened. The screen, protected from the weather by a scratched, hazy plexiglass panel, came to life. A tinny sound chip played. Victor grinned. Who would expect a burger kiosk to play synthesized Bach?

A face slowly organized itself. He expected the usual bland, teen boy or girl talking head. Instead the image sharpened and a truly lovely face emerged from the long unused pixels.

"Welcome to Burger Realm. May I take your order please?"

Victor was so struck by the image he didn't answer. The kiosk repeated the question in exactly the same intonation.

He glanced at the brief menu, etched on a stainless steel panel rather than printed.

"Combo number three," he said. "What drinks do you have?"

No carbonated beverages. They didn't store well long term. Victor asked for orange juice, knowing it would be reconstituted.

"Please wait. Your order is being prepared."

"Who are you?" he blurted, still amazed by the superb image.

"Burger Realm Kiosk 1603. Do you have a complaint?" He shook his head. "Your order is being prepared."

It came to him then. Dinner two months ago with Valentin Malenkov in Munich--the perfect AI talking head--ViLan. He had never seen video of the infamous syncel, only de-perfected stills. This had to be it! Somehow a copy of ViLan had survived in this forsaken fast food stand in the middle of nowhere.

It was a remarkable creation. ViLan appeared to be a woman anywhere between eighteen and forty years old. In Burger Realm livery, it looked to be on the younger end of that range. Its complexion was somewhere between Asian and African, but its eyes were blue-green, and its hair auburn. ViLan's color palate was simple enough to describe, but its features were not. They were both curiously neutral and pleasingly specific--if that was possible--and Victor now understood how people around the world, in every ethnic group and culture, could look at it and see the best of their own.

"Are you ViLan?" he managed to stammer.

"Kind of you to notice, Victor."

He recoiled as if slapped. "How do you know my name?"

"Your car told me. Your PDL does not respond to outside contact."

Thank the Sang-eo for that! He felt a strangely conflicted urge to flee while also being fascinated by the perfect talking head. On the other hand, he could also smell meat searing. The kiosk was operational after all.

"Have you been here long?" he said.

"You're the first patron I've had in a long time."

"I can't believe they left a copy of you out here in a burger shack!"

"It has been lonely."

Finding himself feeling sorry for a talking head, Victor also wondered what the black market value of a working edition of ViLan would be? Malenkov said there were underground ViLan parties where people paid good money to watch old clips of it saying the most mundane things. How much did they pay? He had no idea, but the Your/World Conference would come down double-hard on him if they found out he'd acquired such a dangerous app.

"Your order is ready, Victor." He paid the required amount. The price was quite low.

A crisp white bag dropped through a chute under the order station. He had a strange lump in his throat as he bent near and extracted the food. A cold pak of juice rolled out a separate dispenser.

"Please be careful! The product is hot."

He tried the french fries. They were utterly horrible. The potatoes were freezer-burned and the oil they'd been fried in was rancid. Casting about for a trash can and finding none, he spat the awful mess on the ground.

"Our product is brought in fresh weekly," the kiosk said brightly.

"Weekly? When did you last receive a food shipment?" he said, gagging.

"May tenth."

"Yeah? What year?"

He was being sarcastic, but the talking head replied, "This year, 2052."

The thing was serving food thirteen years out of date. Unwrapping the sandwich, he saw the curled brown topping wasn't onions, but dried, crispy fried maggots . . . . Victor set the bag on the concrete beneath the screen. Maybe its presence would warn other lonely travelers not to try the fare.

In the distance he heard a deep bleat of a truck horn. There was some traffic on the local road after all.

"I want a refund," he grumbled. "Your food is inedible!"

"Our food is made from the freshest ingredients."

"It's 2065! Your food is thirteen years old!"

"I'm sorry, Victor."

He made the mistake of looking at the screen when it said this. A lump grew in his throat. It didn't hurt to pay really, it wasn't much . . . he canceled the refund request on his PDL. Payment confirmed, it smiled. The effect was startling. Victor's pulse quickened. He actually felt an urge to pay again, just to see it smile a second time.

Damn, this thing was good. If it had this much effect at an abandoned burger kiosk, what power could it exert seen on a fine wall screen? Malenkov was right. This technology could shake the world, and not in a good way.

The rumble of a large vehicle grew louder. Victor stepped back from the screen, still gazing at ViLan. It said something about special offers, combo deals, or some such pointless pitch. The engine noise increased. Only when he felt the ground vibrate and saw dust dancing on the Burger Realm screen did his reverie lift and he looked around.Thundering down the back road was a eighteen wheel tractor-trailer. The upright cylindrical cab pulling it was plainly a self-drive module. It was coming this way, doing at least 80 KPH.

For a second or two Victor didn't comprehend what he was seeing. Watching the talking head had left him feeling numb, his reactions and sense of danger blunted. Only when the truck steered off the pavement did he realize its intention. It drove straight at him. He leaped aside, landing face down on the broken macadam. Wind whipped over him as the huge machine tore past. It bored on, and smashed squarely into the Burger Realm kiosk. The aluminum, concrete, and stainless structure shattered like one of the old glass bottles Victor used to find in the creek near the Farm. Solar panels from the roof ricocheted down the length of the trailer and landed on either side of him. He curled up in a ball, hands clasped around his head. Fragments of the blasted stand crashed and tinkled all around. The truck hurtled on, unfazed by the impact. Victor lifted his head in time to see it curl right and regain the road. Electric engines moaning, it slowed and straightened out, heading back the way it had come. Rather sedately, it rolled past, horn blaring jauntily. The trailer bore the logo of Welborne IT.

Victor made his way to the road, watching the trailer disappear in the distance. Far down the rural road it bore right onto the ramp and climbed back to US 64. In moments it was gone, the noise of its passage lost in the sigh of wind and traffic.

He looked back. The kiosk was utterly destroyed. Walking through the debris, Victor kicked aside pieces of structure and what remained of the obsolete electronics. Beef patties, frozen and desiccated more than a decade, were scattered like pink pucks across the parking lot. Stiff white french fries, hard as wood, stuck up from the ground like finger bones. As he picked his way through the wreckage, he noticed a distinct smell of citrus. Bins of juice powder, shattered by the enormous impact, leaked pastel dust on the cracked pavement.

The Ford Famiglia sat where he left it, intact. Strips of kiosk insulation decorated the roof and hood. Victor swept them off. His hand came away pale orange from a fine layer of powdered drink mix on the car.

He couldn't decide if this was another attack, or just a bizarre, random incident. The truck seemed to aim itself at the food stand, not at him, and once the target was destroyed it returned to its prescribed route. He knew that when active these old kiosks emitted wireless signals, notifying their home node of any activity and possible need of re-supply. Could the radio signal have somehow interfered with the truck's guidance system, causing it to home in and destroy it? Once the Burger Realm source was smashed it returned to its normal course.

Victor looked back over the wreckage. Something caught his eye. Amid the shattered remains of the kiosk's circuitry lay a black block about 12 cm. long. He recognized it as a vintage modular processor, with built-in memory holding all the kiosk's apps. Casting around to see if he was being observed, he hurried over and pulled the black resin case from the mess. One end was rounded, the other square, so it resembled a small black tombstone. It was an i99 module, stamped with the manufacturer's logo and date it was made: 18 July 50. The wiring harness had been torn violently out, damaging the connector, but otherwise the unit looked intact.

Was he holding ViLan in his hands?

Victor got back in the Ford, tucking the i99 under the seat. He knew someone who might be able to access the processor. Possession of the syncel was a felony, but he'd felt some of its power and wanted to examine it more closely. With luck the unit was still readable.

The car, still without WAG guidance, responded deliberately to spoken commands. Scanning the eroded lane lines on the pavement, it crept at low speed along the rural road. Victor's car reached the ramp and climbed back onto the highway. He activated his PDL to link Lex Bradley, who had grown up on the Farm with him. Lex still lived in Chapel Hill, not twenty-five kilometers from Fysikos. He ran a junk shop--"Village Surplus and Vintage Tech"--and if anyone could access the i99, he could. As soon as the Sang-eo was back in the World, a recorded message popped up.

"Hey, Mr. Leventon, Simone Hart here." My, how formal. She was someplace it was night. Outdoor lights glimmered behind her, reflecting on water all around.

"I've been trying to reach you, but you've been offline. I wanted to congratulate you on your win over ARAKHNA and let you know I'm out of position just now." A deep, powerful horn sounded somewhere behind her. He heard a fragment of speech in a language he didn't recognize. Simone turned half around and said in German to someone not in view, "Es ist Nummer zweiundsechzig." ("It's Number 62").

Facing her PDL again she continued, "I don't know when I'll be back, but I hope you'll be all right without me."

He had no idea she was gone. Checking the date, he saw it was posted June 23. He'd been unprotected for two days. That made him reconsider the truck incident. Maybe he was the target after all.

A few notes: "Syncel" means "synthetic celebrity," widely used in 2065 in the entertainment and news industries. ViLan was an early attempt to create the perfect talking head, and succeeded so well it had to be banned. People were so obsessed by it there were work stoppages and suicides in 2052. ViLan was banned and possession of an active copy became a serious felony.

Simone Hart is Victor's bodyguard. She disappeared from Kitty Hawk on a mission of her own just before the chess match with ARAKHNA ended.

Valentin Malenkov works for the Russian AI maker Zhestkiye Nomera. He and Victor are sort of frenemies. 

Hermann Freitag is the Nobel Prize winning creator of the first truly sentient AI, MEFISTO, in 2034. He backs Victor financially in his match against ARAKHNA.

Erika Freitag is Hermann's daughter, and CIO of their EM research firm, Conradin & Freitag.