Samples

Ci's "Beach Vignette"

Last weekend, after it had gotten dark and most people had gone home or to the pubs, I walked down to the shore of the English channel in 80 mile-an-hour winds with gales up to 120 mph. The wind blew around me and pelted me with sand so that I was buffeted about and stung as if I was in the most violent blizzard I have ever seen. The waves surged up and obliterated the shore, time and time again, leaving the small hillock of sand that I was on completely unscathed.

Each time the waves would recede, they would suck further and further back out to sea, leaving a long sloping hill below me, stretching out into the darkness until I could no longer tell the distance or the depth. The wind would almost instantly cover the wet beach with fresh sand, and the entire length of the shore would be renewed—fresh and dry, as if the sea had never been.

Suddenly, there would be a flash of white in the darkness, a tower of wave taller than the hillock that I sat on, and the sea would reclaim the beach, struggling against the wind and itself as it collided with the land and finally spent itself in a small trickle of water that would make my hillock an island.

Then it would begin again; yet with all of this crashing and struggling and buffeting and biting sand, it was well over seventy degrees, and I was perfectly warm and comfortable.

An excerpt from Ci's latest novel

—Alous relaxed his tight fetal position and slowly opened his eyes.

He was not floating in total darkness, for he could still see the glowing status lights from the open door of the lights-out chamber far below him, or above him, it was hard to say. And at what appeared to be a great distance he could see a thin faint glowing line of plasma that stretched parallel to his direction of spin. He could tell that he was in some large air-tight container in a micro-gravity space, and everywhere he could see in the dim light there was floating debris and an almost pervasive fog. A faint mist of water in a liquid state clouded his immediate vision, and he could feel small particles of grit in the air around him and in his olfactory senses that may have been soil. He was still moving away from the lights-out chamber, but despite the considerably lower air density of this space he was rapidly decreasing speed as he continually collided with tiny fragments of whatever life had once been in this place. He created a custom process to monitor his skin for bruises or punctures, and added a protective transparent layer to his eyes and nostrils to protect them from contamination. He straightened himself out and swam slightly in the thin air to position himself relative to the door of the lights-out chamber, and named it; floor.

Above him, in what he named sky, was the thin reddish line, stretching to his left and right as far as his normal view eye could see. The fog near the line seemed particularly thick and glowed sympathetically with the line. At three times magnification, he was able to see that the line disappeared into, or emerged from, what appeared to be a plasma cannon to his far right, and to his far left he was able to make out a similar device when he looked at ten times magnification. Neither device responded to an authenticated query. He selected a wide range of bandwidths and broadcast a routing information packet with an intentionally invalid domain, but except for the muffled complaints of networked service daemons there were no sentient responses from any servers, routers, or proxies. Any conscious network engine in the infrastructure should have delighted in pointing out his intentional error, but aside from the low-level management of protocols there was no response.

He was alone.