After finishing Down, I immediately started a new novel called Woodcode. This time, unlike Down, I had the entire storyline mapped out and much of the sub-plots ready to go before I started writing.

Woodcode is set in the near future. It concerns the events which occur before, during and after the advent of a process for encoding a human personality into a computer. I wanted to explore my vision of a future where the non-existance of the soul was a proven fact, and people were as ready to abandon the richness of real life for the fake power of existance within an artificial universe, as they are now ready to abandon their morals in search of success and money.

Then I got bogged down in more immediate events. I had to find a job, and before I knew it, I was working and living almost exactly as the mean character in my novel had been. Over the past few years since that time, much of what I planned to write has happened, except for one thing. The "Winter of Love", a huge wave of dissillusionment which I predicted to roll over the human race during the millenium, hasn't happened. Yet.

Read the first chapter yourself, and see what you think. Recent;y I have been pecking away at parts of the novel on my Psion, and maybe soon you will be able to read the whole thing. Before events overtake me yet again.

WOODCODE

a sample
©Matthew Spong 1995

The streets are empty and the streetlights are off. It's dark, and scraps of plastic glide slowly down the centre of the traffic lanes, propelled by a weak breeze. They make the only sound.

The sky is clear. Stars shine brightly, hardly twinkling, their light cold and distant. Other stars move across the bowl of the heavens, satellites, their light equally cold.

Here and there in the silent buildings a gray, flickering light outlines a window. It plays across the walls inside in random waves. Inside, on desks and tables, computer monitors are active.

In a sumptuous office a large, ostentatious black terminal takes pride of place on the black glass surface of the desk. A sculpted metal swivel chair, padded in gray calf skin, reclines before the monitor. The walls are lined in shelves, well furnished with books, both ragged paperbacks and finely bound volumes. The desk, the chair and the books are coated with fine layers off dust.

On the monitor, a large flat screen perched on a cantilevered arm, scenes of battle are enacted. Heavily armored humanoid figures hack and slay their way through endless landscapes of alien terrain. The battle takes place on a plain studded with twisted, gnarled peaks of rock, black obsidian thrust up by volcanic eruption. The spaces between are carpeted with the bodies of the dead. Fantastic, multi limbed monsters trudge slowly about, seeking live combatants, their eyeless faces turning, huge nostrils sniffing the wind. Some desultorily poke at fallen bodies, hoping to stir some sign of life that they can then extinguish.

Suddenly the viewpoint changes. It falls from its high position, presumably the top of one of the pillars of rock, to a position roughly six feet above the plain. A hand swings into view at the bottom of the monitor, a bloody, heavily scratched fist, roped with muscle and bound about with leather thongs, gripping the butt of a battered black raygun. Even as the eyeless beasts turn toward the viewer, their tiny batwing-like ears flapping madly, the gun erupts and engulfs them in clouds of white hot plasma. Their bodies fall backward in the force of the blast, they stagger, trying to draw their own weapons, even as their armor is peeled back, layers of leather stripped into flaring tatters, iron plates glowing dull red, chain mail scintillating and throwing off sparks.

The cloud of heat blows away, leaving the fallen in a steaming heap, and the point of view moves forward, bobbing slightly with each footfall; for it is obvious, we are looking through someone else's eyes. The eyes glance down and roam over this landscape of baked and monstrous flesh. The hand returns to view, with a hunting knife held point forward, to poke and pry at the armor. There are treasures hidden here, jewels and gold and slightly singed scrolls secreted under metal plates and bundled in pouches strung around the necks of the dead.

---

Elsewhere, in a crowded, over furnished, shabby room, another monitor throws its lights on a wall completely covered with photos. There is a bed, piled with blankets and threadbare quilts and stained sheets, and the floor is covered in layers of old carpet pieces, trailing ragged wool at the edges, obviously rescued from the gutter where they had been thrown after being ripped from someone else's floor. There are piles of magazines in the corners, and every table and chair is layered with unwashed dishes and cups. The smears on the plates bear growths of mold like white plush, two centimetres high, and the cups each have a floating island of greenish blue in the coffee dregs at the bottom. The air smells stale, close, well breathed, with the thin essence of electronics, the smell of something solid state that has been left on for awhile.

The computer here is more modest, a light beige in colour, pasted here and there with stickers and the black marks where other stickers have been removed, and the traces of gum left behind have accumulated dust. The monitor is a box, the old fashioned sort, with the curved glass front.

It shows a garden. Short cropped green lawn, dotted with small white button flowers and petite rings of mushrooms under the trees, hedges of oleander and yew, mossy fountains tinkling, lichen topped stones, white marble statues, Classical Greek, of maenads and dryads and discus-throwing athletes and seated lions, coated liberally with the moss of peacefully passing time. Everywhere is charming vistas. Everywhere is moist verdure, ancient oaks reaching down with thick branches as though to touch the carpets of ivy that surround their bases, and beds of black velvety earth blooming with daisies and periwinkle and dandelions and sunflowers. Neatly bordered paths of brick wind between the flower beads, meeting and turning towards a small lake, crossed by an ornately carved and covered wooden bridge. Huge, hollow willows reach right over the gabled roof of the bridge and down the other side to touch their reflection with trailing strands of leaf.

There is a copse of wood at the edge of the lawn, dark and close but so small that the light of the other side can be glimpsed between the boles of the trees. Laughter, faint and bell-like, drifts through the slightly misty air. High laughter, sweet and pure, the sound of a pair of young women sharing a secret joke.

So we press through the wood, where forgotten statues crumble under their burden of trailing ivy and low brick ruins brood in shadowed silence, and pale white toadstools swell through the thick carpet of leaves, and we come to the other side. Lawn again, a broad expanse that runs down to the sea. There are gentle waves lapping at a beach as yellow and perfectly crescent as a slice from a melon. Tall, picturesque cliffs of granite rise on either side, crested with tough, sunburnt grassy sod, and deep black caves beckon at their base with their promise of respite from the days heat.

In the centre of the lawn, just where it begins to slope down to the beach, stands a tree and a pavilion of striped silk. Long tapering banners, rainbow coloured, wave from the tent poles, and within can be glimpsed a huge four poster bed of black wrought iron, piled high with shimmering white quilts and tartan blankets, all untidy and twisted like the nest of a young animal.

The tree is the tallest and most regal of the oaks. It's limbs soar upwards as though nothing can stop them, straining towards the sun, and a boat swing hangs from the highest and stoutest. The ropes that support it are braided gold, and the swing is white wooden slats, the seats upholstered with red velvet.

The laughter we have been following comes from the swing, from the pair of maidens that propel it to ever more dizzying heights. They shriek with laughter as the ropes creak dangerously, and call to each other in fair voices. Both their hair is as golden as the ropes, and their dresses are white as the swing itself, their voluminous full-length skirts trailing over the side and fluttering in the wind of their passage. Their faces are angelic, impossibly beautiful, blushing like new peaches and fresh roses, tall foreheads, full cheekbones, pouting smiles of pale pink lips. Their eyes are blue, irises blue like polar ice and whites blue like buttermilk. Their eyelashes are long, jet black and perfectly curled back to lay against their cheeks like the wings of gauzy moths, and their noses are perkily upturned buttons framed on either side by a perfect spray of faint sunfreckles.

Back they swing, towards the copse of dark trees, and forward again, out over the downward sloping lawn, and the ropes separate with a series of loud whipcracks. Their delighted shrieks turn to squeals of alarm, but all is safe. For the swing, instead of describing a downward parabola according to the laws of physics and heading for a crash landing on the beach, instead decides to rise, to accelerate away from the earth. The girls smile with delight, revealing teeth like rows of pearls in their little mouths, and grip the sides tight as they look down over the side. Quickly the little cove disappears behind them as they rise, trailing their golden ropes, and the earth beneath starts to roll itself into a ball. They arc upwards, swinging away from the sun which roars majestically in space like a huge bonfire, and veer towards the moon. Crescent as the beach, it hangs in the void, studded with craters. Tiny creatures emerge from the craters and wave to the two travelers as they come in for a gentle landing on the inside hook of the moons curve.

---

Here, in this average free-standing suburban house, surrounded by rank uncut lawns and overgrown hedge pines, a terrible accident has occurred.

The computer takes pride of place in the study, standing proudly in the centre of an old wooden office desk before an antique wooden swivel chair upholstered in leather, a relic straight out of innumerable westerns, the chair that telegraph operators habitually lean back in as they absentmindedly tap away at the Morse key, green eye shade jutting from bald forehead. The terminal is modern enough, dark gray, slim line, sleek and powerful looking. The flat screen monitor was once propped up in a wooden lectern as was once used to display open dictionaries or bibles, but it now lies flat on it's back next to the keyboard, and a large crack runs across its frame.

Across the room, the diamond-paned window swings open in the light breeze, and many of its panes are empty, their glass lying in small fragments on the water stained Turkish rug beneath the sill. A large dead branch leans over the sill, fallen from a tree in the garden during a gale.

Since the window was breached the elements have had time to get in. Wind driven rain has ruined the carpet and even had time to warp the timbers of the floor, such that the boards buckle and rise in a series of shallow humps like the swell of a calm sea. The rain has even reached the desk at times, dampening the leather surface, swelling the calendar pages and spotting them with mold. The surface of the terminal is marked where drops have run down through the light coating of dust, each drop trailing a clean line behind and ending in a dark fingernail of dirt where the drop finally evaporated and deposited its cargo of crud.

The monitor still works despite its cracked condition. The colours swirl around the crack, which is a jagged line of quicksilver, but the rest of the picture is clear.

There is a nightclub. Crowds of bizarrely dressed patrons sit at small tables, bathed in a flashing nimbus of laser light, and the dance floor is packed solid with a stomping crowd of enthusiastic party people. Everyone smiles. Everyone is beautiful. The music is intense, with wild swirling electronic chords improvising reiterating changes over a rocksteady dub beat that sounds like a huge boulder being brought down hard on another huge boulder. It's impossible not to feel the rhythm, not to want to join the dancing crowd.

Suddenly, something changes. The beat begins to falter, hesitating slightly, and the lights fade and pulse, all in time. They go out for a minisecond, or rather, everything vanishes and is replaced with black void for that time. It happens again, and again. No one notices. Now the gaps are longer, up to a second, total blackness and silence that cuts back into the nightclub exactly where we left, as though the film was halted and then run again.

Amid the smiling faces one worried frown stands out like nakedness in church. One man fights his way clear of the dance floor and stands looking around, eyes squinting against the bursts of coherent light from the lasers. He wears a long sleeved mauve shirt, very loose in his stick-thin frame, the sleeves hanging below his hands and the shirt tail descending almost to his knees. Black stovepipe jeans sheaf incredible lengths of pipecleaner leg and disappear into comically large motorbike boots encircled by dozens of straps. His hair hangs straight and black down to his waist, and despite the frenzy of the dancing there is not a drop of sweat on him.

Again and again the scene falters and drowns in blackness. The worried expression is replaced by terror, and the man turns, slowly, moving in the brief intervals between the raven wingbeats of blackness, towards our viewpoint.

Painfully, heroically, he fights his way across the stuttering room, until his face fills the monitor. The silver crack bisects him like a knife slicing a pie. Horrified eyes go abstract, turn inward as though he is wracking his memory for some secret key, some word to stop the nightmare.

Darkness. Light, and he begins to turn to his left. Darkness. Light, and his arm swings up, reaching for something. Darkness. Light, and the arm finishes its upward sweep, but fails to find whatever it was meant to encounter.

Darkness.

Light. He turns, strobing badly, transverse ripples of jagged black scrolling down over him, and his voice cuts through the music, now tinny and flat as AM radio.

"Holy sh-"

Darkness.

The computer powers down, the demon eye of its power indicator fading, faint descending whine as the hard drive slows. For thirty seconds there is only the sound of birds from the garden outside, and a faint tick as some hot element on the motherboard in the terminal cools.

Then, an automatic reboot event occurs. Hard drives whine back into operation, the screen flickers and clears to gray, icons appear and scroll down, reading out the process as the system loads from the disc and feels its way out into circuitry like someone pulling on a sweater. Red warning messages scroll down, describing the damage a few drops of water have caused inside the case. They say that one of the two heatpumps that cool the main processors has been shorted out. If the computer is allowed to run for too long using the remaining heatpump, it will overload and the processor will malfunction, forcing a premature shutdown.

OPERATION LOG FILES SHOW THAT THE PROCESSOR HAS FAILED 55720 TIMES ALREADY.
PLEASE POWER DOWN AND CALL YOUR LOCAL SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE. WARNING, REPEATED USE WITHOUT SERVICE WILL TAX THE REMAINING HEATPUMP, SERIOUSLY SHORTENING THE PROCESSORS USEFUL LIFE AND INVALIDATING YOUR WARRANTY.
PROJECTED TIME TILL NEXT FAILURE: 5 minutes

The computer flashes its warnings for a minute, but there is no-one to respond, so it blithely continues to reboot, restoring itself to the last recorded state of it's operation: the nightclub.

Once more rocksteady dub pounds forth, once more the monitor is filled with dancers and laser lights and people drinking and talking at small round tables, and there in the crowd, blissfully ignorant, a tall thin man with long black hair and dubious taste in shirts dances on.

---

One final room, before our story begins in earnest.

This room is small. Below the single window is a rolled up pallet mattress, then a small section of floor, a single chair and a large metal table. The walls are continuous bookshelves, crowded with books, rolled papers, box after box of diskettes, tapes and cartridges of various formats, and the various machines needed to read them. There is a small bar fridge with a hotplate fixed to the top.

The view from the window is unremarkable. Streets, deserted, and buildings, blank windowed except for occasional flickering lights from monitors. This is a warehouse district, many converted to dwellings during the great economic downsizing, when the worlds economy swung from being primarily goods-related to primarily data. The ceiling of this room reflects this; close spaced wooden beams, with rows of X shaped cross joists running beneath, designed over a hundred years before to support the weight of loaded forklifts and tall stacks of boxes.

On the metal table layers of papers and books lap like a sea at the base of a large terminal. This machine bears the scars of much modification. The case has been cut open in places, and plastic boxes glued over the openings, to accommodate various daughterboards and expansion cards inside.

Wired into the computer are several peripherals; an old fashioned video camera on a stand, a large cubic data storage module, a high capacity optic modem with three fibres plugged in, and a printer. The printer is in operation. Fanfold paper rises from a box on the floor beneath the table, to glide over the edge of the tabletop and pass through the small thermal printer, to emerge from the top and spill back down onto the floor in untidy loops. Each sheet is printed in close set black text, font New York. The paper box is almost empty.

The monitor is large but old-fashioned, television style with a 21 inch screen. It flickers slightly because of its age, and the colours have dimmed with time, but it displays rugged engineering that most later technology lacks, and will obviously last the distance.

It displays a simple landscape, an endless plain of smooth black glossy rock beneath a dark red sky. In the distance a line of black cubes hovers, receding diagonally towards the horizon. The sky glows like the surface of an old star seen from a planet in a decaying orbit which is just about to plunge into the photosphere.

The only movement is a simple, old fashioned, diamond shaped kite that dips and plunges in an invisible breeze. The kite is blue, its tail a line of paper bows tied with twine. The kite string is just visible, arcing down to the hand of a young man who handles it with great skill. He carefully pays out line when a sharp gust of wind draws the string taught, and reels it in when the breeze fails and the kite starts to stall, dipping and threatening to plunge from the sky.

Nearby, sitting cross-legged on the smooth black ground, a young woman holds a plate of what look like sandwiches in her lap. They are triangular, white, buttered and sprinkled with multicoloured particles like pixels of video static. She nibbles with great relish from the corner of a slice, savoring the taste, as though she was enjoying some rare gourmet specialty. While she eats her eyes follow the kite as it swirls and darts across the redness overhead.

A third figure stands slightly separate from the couple, also watching the kite, although it doesn't have any eyes. It has legs, a great many, triple sectioned and furnished with complicated hydraulic joints that jet tiny puffs of steam whenever it shifts its weight. The body is a low slung horizontal unit suspended between the legs, and looks like three short cigars merged into each other and upholstered with dark blue felt. Elaborate structures grow from either end of the body. There are fuzzy pompom balls on stalks which wave backwards and forwards like metronomes, and clusters of silver feelers like bouquets of car aerials, and triads of long whip feelers that remained coiled tightly like butterfly tongues but lash out to lightly touch the surface of the ground whenever the creature moves a leg. A blunt rectangular organ the size and shape of a hotel register covered in blue shag carpet rises from one end, supported by a limber arrangement of hydraulic joints and pistons. It's flat face tracks the kite as it moves. The body is slung about with belts and harnesses of braided rope that support satchels and esoteric tools made of glass.

On the desk, the modem comes to life and hisses as the fibres light up with incoming data.

There is movement in the sky. From behind the nearest of the floating cubes a huge winged animal soars into view. A dragon. It glows in all colours, like oil on water, and flies on a pair of black bats wings. The long barbed tail coils and lashes behind it as it changes direction, twists in the air and dives down in a vast loop that circles the three figures on the plain. They all wave, and the man carefully reels his kite a little lower as the backwash hits them.

Too late! In a sudden surge of wind the kite string pulls taught and the cross strut of the kite snaps, sending the pathetic blue wreckage fluttering to the ground. The dragon seems to notice this, and roars in amusement as it recedes. The man shrugs and walks forward, gently picks up the kite and straightens the strut. A pass of his hand across the break and it seals as good as new, and he throws it at the sky where it flutters a moment before the wind catches it and carries it higher. The dragon, meanwhile, has landed some distance away and preens its wings before creeping toward the three. Huge fangs are bared in its grinning mouth. The girl stands and walks toward it, tosses a sandwich for it to snatch out of the air.

Meanwhile, the printer on the desk is nearing the end of its paper. The man with the kite reaches out and snaps his fingers; a flat window unfolds in the air before him. A few jabs with his finger and he flicks the window away. The printer stops, then starts again, slower now, printing smaller text. The last page glides through and falls to the floor and the printer shuts down. The man, the woman, the alien and the dragon chat amiably, their eyes (or other things) constantly darting up to the cheerful blue kite that flies above them.

There is one cable leading from the computer that doesn't end at a peripheral. A fat tape of optic lines runs from a bulky plug in the side of the machine, loops down to the floor and disappears under a narrow door.

It is the bathroom, a tiny cubicle barely large enough for a shower, sink and toilet to exist together. The tap drips slowly in the sink, a monotonous sound, but the occupant of the shower isn't bothered.

The cable snakes around from the door and plugs into a light gray circlet that crowns the withered head of the mummy that reclines in the shower cubicle. The features are shrunken, fallen away, the dried flesh clings tightly to the bones beneath, but the face can still be recognized; the face of the man who flies a blue kite against a red sky. Some of the hair has fallen away, and the cheeks are starting to crumble. The plastic tiara that crowns the skull is starting to slip down over where the eyes used to be. The rest of the body is well preserved, a light puce colour, ribs and hips showing, knob knees reminiscent of starving African refugee children. The only clothing he wears is a pair of white boxer shorts. One hand still grips a large plastic squeeze bottle. The dregs in the bottle are exactly the same colour as his skin.

Outside the little room a cold breeze springs up and sweeps the streets of their garbage. The city broods silent and ominous beneath the gathering clouds. The stars are hidden behind gray walls. The streetlights haven't come on, and they never will. There are no sounds, no voices or engines or music. Nothing. The only sound is the wind through the power lines, a low moan, and the buzzing of streetcorner transformers on their poles, and deep underground, the spastic switching of telephone routers in their tunnels as they pass the data backward and forward, here and there, endlessly.