Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loved to travel, but she loved coming home. We always took special routes on a homeward jaunt, so she could pre-select the passing scenery. That first glimpse of home when you’ve been on a the road awhile is magic, and can be made more magical still by a careful run up. It usually involved going through somewhere where a chocolate malted – not merely a milk shake! – could be procured as sustenance for the final leg.

Me, I have been travelling hither and yon for the past few days. The scenery has been grand; I have been well-supplied with necessities like Good N’Plenties.  My metaphysical journey has ranged from Depression-era Alabama  (ah, the charms of Atticus Finch!) to the Darwin estates at Down. There have been stops at collapsed cellars in San Francisco’s Chinatown, on the crumbling continental edge below the Sutro Estate, in the scorched lees of hundreds of stews, tenements and rich men’s pleasaunces throughout the post-earthquake City. I’ve overnighted in city parks, and breakfasted with the refugees on pancakes made on a salvaged restaurant’s iron stove.

I’ve been skipping from chromosome to chromosome like Eliza on the ice floes. Did you know you can repair damaged mouse genes with the human equivalent genes? (They are identical.) One could presumably therefore repair human genes with spare parts from mice – God He knows there enough damaged humans and surplus mice around – but no one has had the guts or backing to try it yet. If I had a parent with Parkinson’s or a child with hemophilia, I’d be raising hell about that.

I’ve been exploring the surface of Mars. I’ve been considering real estate ventures on the Moon. I’ve learned that lunar dust smells like gunpowder, that grizzlies can mutate into and out of polar bear-hood at will (and are doing so), and that squids are colour-blind. That is, their eyes are. Oh, and cuttlefish have pupils shaped like rick-rack.

So today I am warming up my engines again. A lovely trip into the quiet and richness of the printed word has been had, and now I am back – full of energy, over-flowing with wonders, ready to pontificate and spin yarns. And last night I dreamed that Kage kicked me in the ass and told me to get back to work: really, I felt the bed shake! So I’m motivated as all get out.

See you tomorrow, Dear Readers. Maybe we will talk about Lunar caves, or the carbon dioxide cycle of the Martian poles, or red-haired tree rats. Left-handed moths? There is just no end of the marvels out there, I tell you.

Kage Baker was fond of charabancs and road trips. She was especially prone to them when she was depressed or otherwise down – stumped on a story, overwhelmed with angst over the suicidal decline of the panda bear, furiously hunting for a beach somewhere North of Gorda that she hadn’t seen since we were in grammar school …

I would love to go a-journeying right now. But I have some commitments to honour, and it’s a holiday weekend coming up (which means my family panics at the idea of me on the road) and I am tired. So I am going traveling in my head.

Following a rite from childhood, I am going to curl up and read for a couple of days. Just read. The Highway in my head is beckoning, and I am going to answer the call. It’s a thing I haven’t done in over a year.

I’ll be in and out, Dear Readers, and back altogether in a couple of days. But right now, Scout Finch is calling me (start with the classics, I always say) and then I have a new book on the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, and one on the human genome – portraits of each pair of chromosomes, in detail and one by one! That’s as good as a year’s worth of celebrity dish, that is. I have nectarines and pluots and Better Cheddar crackers and lots of chocolate and Mullah’s coffee – I’m rich beyond the dreams of avarice!

Thanks for your indulgence – see you all in a few days!

Kage Baker was fond of the nursery rhyme describing the attributes of children born on specific days of the week. She had cause to be – she was born on a Tuesday, which is one of the favourable ones. And she was full of grace. She was fair of face, too, in many meanings of the word “fair”. For instance, she could not produce melanin for love nor money, save in an astonishing crop of freckles.

When Kage lamented what she considered her personal paucity of good looks (she sometimes described herself as having the face of an Iriquois war mask and a figure like a tarp over a broken chair) I always felt compelled to point this out. Was she merely pretty? No. Was hers a vibrant, blazingly alive face? Yes. Cheekbones to die for, too, and an actual jaw and chin. (I apparently have no facial bones at all, and am slowly aging into an apple doll.) And it’s hard to regret skin like porcelain (between the freckles) and red hair to one’s hips. She had a Gibson Girl figure when we were young, too, with a waist like a bottle of her beloved Coco-Cola; a shape she regained in her final year, to her unabashed glee.

I, on the other hand, was born on Wednesday. The rhyme predicts that Wednesday’s child is full of woe. In self defense, I have chosen to believe that this doesn’t mean I will encounter lots of woe, but that I will suffer from depression. To believe the other – that I am destined to have actual woe, rather than just sometimes be in a rotten mood – is to court even more woe, in my opinion. Always look for the silver lining, says I. And when I am not recovering from emotional pole-axings, I am actually a pretty optimistic person.

For reasons I have never figured out, but suspect are due to leap years, Kage and I were born on different days but usually had our subsequent birthdays fall on the same day of the week.  (This year, it’s a Friday.) Which is weird; someone more up on calendar shenanigans or better at math than I am can probably explain this. All I know is, it was handy for keeping track. We were born a year and 20 days apart – for 3 weeks a year, Kage was therefore two technical years my senior, over which I crowed a lot. I got my comeuppance later, since my sister Kimberly is a year and 20 days younger than I am, and does the same thing to me … the whole older/younger sister age dynamic is very competitive, and doesn’t get any easier as the participants age, I’ll tell you.

This year, of course, Kage and I catch up: 58 was as old as she got, and it’s the age at which I’ll lose my spurious comparative youth. From now on, I’ll be journeying alone into advancing cronehood. Oddly enough, that doesn’t bother me. It gives me a nice image to keep of Kage as the one in my mirror gets scarier and scarier – less and less do I recognize that old bat whose face I inexplicably wash every morning.

But Kage seemed to grow actually younger the last year of her life, and it’s a comfort to remember her that way. She lost weight, of course. And though the radiation treatments did not have time to take her hair (man, she was glad of that!) it did have to be cropped short for her brain surgery – and since she’d worn it short through high school, she looked a lot like her 18-year old self at the end. She never took off the green jade ring she’d worn since her 20’s, and only removed her gold hoop earrings (she never wore anything else) at the very last minute …

It was the strangest feeling, when I closed her eyes that last night, to look at her and see the same young woman who told stories and Tarot card fortunes in the cafeteria at good old Immaculate Heart High School. Especially with my own age-spotted hand shutting her black eyes.

Man, Time plays some tricks on us. Especially with someone like Kage helping it along.

Kage Baker was well aware that any given day can turn into a useless mess.

Or that any one of us can turn into a useless mess on any given day. Whichever has happened, it’s  happened to me today.

Couldn’t sleep – sat up and watched a movie called The Fountain, which was a vast disappointment. It implied a fantasy with Hugh Jackman in Spanish court dress,  and delivered 90 minutes of visionary confusion and survivor’s guilt. Also, a weird take on The Little Prince, if said Prince were in love with his baobab tree and drifting through the Universe trying to light a supernova in the Mayan Underworld. Also, a nice lady dies of brain cancer, which I really could have done without.

I was so depressed I stayed up the rest of the night reading about cephalopods. Which is fine – I quite like squids – but since the sun came up I have been fighting narcolepsy and falling asleep constantly. Dreaming about  superconductors in nice, bright colours like aluminum tumblers from the 1950’s, which could be bought in rolls at Ace Hardware …

So. Useless Mess Day. Today would have been a Monday in its heart of hearts even if it had not fallen on a Monday anyway. Going back to bed to estivate. Advice, Dear Readers:  Don’t watch The Fountain. Kage would have raved furiously over the disappointment …

Kage Baker loved the Pirates of the Caribbean – the ride, the movies, the tie-in toys, the art. Pirates were a passion of hers anyway – as most of her readers deduced – and the POTC were among her favourites. (She had the BIG talking Captain Jack figure, the one with the motion-activated speech function. He scared several visitors to her bedroom.) Yeah, POTC are fake and silly: she loved them nonetheless, for all her unabashed admiration for the truly rotten real pirates of the Golden Age.

Going to the movies, as each came out, was a ritual event for her. We usually went at least once  to each film in a great herd of similarly piratically inclined friends, (HI, Mike and Kelly and Garrett and Patrick and Meagan and Neassa and Wayne and Shannon and Giova! Missed you!) so we could all sit and cheer and carry on in the theatre together. It was great fun, and Kage always came home pink-cheeked and sparkly-eyed as a small girl from her first pony ride.

Except Kage didn’t like ponies. She loved ships. The wonderful vessel Lady Washington has had a role in most of the POTC movies, suitably tarted up. But she also sails San Francisco Bay, and Greys Harbour, and takes trips up and down the California coast – Kage went sailing on her whenever possible, especially on the cannon-firing runs off Morro Bay. No amount of garish pirate costuming or prim Royal Navy insignia could disguise the Lady‘s lines from Kage’s eyes. We have come in to Morro Bay at sunset more than once on the Lady, singing The Grey Funnel Line or Black-eyed Sailor or some other chanty, our hair reeking of black powder from the smoke of the cannonades. Best of times, those.

Kage loved cannons. She had a lifelong desire to be a gunner – and I suspect she’d have been deadly good. Her aim with simply thrown objects was laughable, but she had an apparently natural grasp of range and windage for artillery. If she threw a ball or a pie or a ripe peach at you, you were probably quite safe – unless you were standing 6 feet to one side of where she aimed. But what she aimed at with a gun, she hit.

So: Kage loved the Pirates movies. We saw them all, and re-watched them frequently. One of the few things she admitted she regretted, in the last few weeks of her life, was that she would not see the 4th film when it came out. She was especially sad since her colleague and fellow SF writer Tim Powers had had his novel, On Stranger Tides, bought for the movie. Big time for Tim, Kage earnestly hoped, and was delighted he had sold it. He’s a grand writer and deserves all fame and fortune.

But, of course, she knew long before the first stills even came out that she herself would never see it. She made me promise to go, knowing perfectly well that I would be inclined to avoid the grief of seeing it without her. She said to go see it opening weekend, before the copy got all scratched up … which they don’t get anymore, but I knew what she meant.

I went today, with my family. We went to the Vista, one of the best indie theatres in Los Angeles. It has THE best popcorn, bar none; good seats, perfect sightlines, and the manager dresses up frequently as characters from the movies. He does an excellent Captain Jack Sparrow. Two weeks ago, he was also a pretty good Thor – as you can tell, he is a man of many, many parts and props.

The movie is grand, maybe the best since the first. Don’t let negative reviews keep you away – it’s a wonderful time and very satisfying. Kage would have loved it.

It was weird being there without Kage, weird and painful. I cried, but theatres are nice and dark and you can do that without fear. I still cheered for the heroes when it was ended. I’m glad I went.

But that’s a as much emotional intensity as I can manage right now. I’m gonna go eat comfort food, and read about squids. Time for some nice objective science. I’ve over-indulged a little in dreams and visions today.

Though later, I think I will have just a little bit of rum …

Kage Baker would have been mordantly amused at the present Apocalypse prediction. Being an historian, she knew how often this kind of thing had happened, and what the usual result was. She kept a list of them. And while the phenomenon  is nowadays associated with Christian fundamentalists, she was pretty sure it had been going on  since about a day after people noticed there was a world.

I was going to ignore this, but there is just too much chatter to do so. It is, as Francis Truffaut’s character in Close Encounters observes, “Une event sociologique.” And it would have intrigued Kage; she’d have been monitoring it, noting bad jokes and comparing it to other millennial frenzies she had known. And there have been some entertaining things to note.

People seem to enjoy the idea of the end of the world, There’s always someone who wants to call it quits. Kage thought that was a particularly unhealthy aspect of human fear and self-centeredness. I don’t like the world, so it has to end. Oh, and the people I don’t like will have to suffer, too. Sort of an ultimate Nyah, nyah, nyah: because hardly anyone ever predicts that the world is going to end and a Golden Age will be ushered in – nope, it all goes straight to shit, and the people the prophets like the least get the most shit.

Where the Rapture is due to begin is uncertain. Estimates vary wildly. Some have said: everywhere at once, beginning at 6 PM Pacific Standard Time; which seems pointlessly arbitrary.  Others have bet on 6 PM local time, everywhere at once – which doesn’t seem to be working out; the Pacific nations west of the International Date Line have so far failed to yield up any population loss. West coast of North America, East coast of same, Asia, Christmas Island, New Zealand – none of the candidates are experiencing anything yet.

And other people are checking live cameras and the Internet to monitor it. It’s probably the widest-spread, and least hysterical, Apocalypse ever recorded. Most of the world is at least dimly aware, and watching to see what will happen – but mostly calmly. Amused, even.

There was a good-sized earthquake in Papua New Guinea, which got a few folks excited. Not the PNG-ians, though – as they observed, this happens practically every day there, and no one ever cared before … a legitimate complaint, I think.

Even Mr. Camping – who has predicted this kind of thing before, but apparently dropped a decimal or something – has issued a couple of cautious hedges. Like, it’s still May 21st somewhere, and God can take all the time He wants. Like, a day to God is 1,000 years to us. Like, Camping will not be available for comment on Monday if this doesn’t pan out: the world is on its own, I guess.

Kage had her own theory. She said, when asked – and she did get asked, seeing as she wrote about the End of the World – that every single Apocalypse on record had, in fact, actually happened. Every one. But no one ever noticed. It was, she said, a failure of human senses, not of divine timing. Most of the time God just replaced the world with one almost exactly like the old one, and no one ever figured it out.

Except Kage, I guess. When I would ask about that, though, she’d just look around furtively and shush me. And we’d slink around for a little giggling, and wondering if Dr. Zeus was going to send an assassin after us … we hoped for Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax. But if he ever came for us, I either got missed or have forgotten that Apocalypse, too.

Though Kage, clearly, did not …

Kage Baker was an intensely empathic person. She was so keenly aware of other people’s feelings that she tended to shut down and ignore them, just to survive contact. This got her a reputation with some folks as being cold, distant or uninterested – and then the same people would wonder how she wrote such interesting and detailed characters.

The truth was that she was quite aware of other people’s feelings, moods, attitudes: she just couldn’t cope with ’em. Those who had the opportunity to get close to her found out that she was a deeply emotional and empathic person; but you had to get through a lot psychic defenses to reach that part of Kage. And those battlements were manned and armed round the clock.

I, as primary War Lady, was always on the lookout for what Kage called “psychic vampires.” A lot of our other friends would also form entourages at conventions and the like, to keep her safe: Wayne and Neassa were especially good at it. Though there was one book signing where only a frantic signal from Kage herself prevented Wayne, Mongo and I from taking out a lurking fellow in a trench coat: who turned out to be a shy publisher …

Kage felt, though, that a lot of people’s thoughts and feelings snuck in through forgotten doors and carelessly opened windows in her head. She maintained that the greater portion of her mind was given over to processing other people’s memories, and so she was never sure whose life she was recalling. All her characters were running around in her mind, all the time, demanding her attention with varying degrees of politesse or noise – plus, she remembered almost everything she read, heard or saw. Kage professed to be often unsure if she was recalling a personal memory or a piece of research.

To tell you the truth, she often didn’t care very much, either. If it came down to it, she could accurately identify memories of 1940’2 Cairo with stories Daddy told her, and not actual memories of wandering the souk at dusk, shadowing a German soldier. But she didn’t always bother. She felt it didn’t matter. They were such interesting memories, after all.

She said she was a palimpset. An Aoleian harp hung in a tree to sound randomly. A spiritualist’s trumpet, floating absurdly in midair and playing music hall melodies. She rather liked that image, in fact.

What she was not, though, was a fuzzy sentimentalist. She avoided giving advice to strangers whenever possible; the intimacy horrified her. She would advise and comfort friends and family, but it was more likely to be along the lines of  “Wash your face and have a drink” than hand-holding and sympathetic tears. And if Kage thought you’d been an idiot in your own woes, she would tell you straight out.

Nonetheless. I never had a real sorrow that she did not try to comfort. Though she was paralytically  shy, she would spring physically to my defense when I needed it. And it was Kage who dealt with most of the problems caused by my depression, and made me get help. She couldn’t remember to take her own vitamins, but she knew the level of my meds to a nicety. Kage saved my life more than once.

I have been depressed lately – ha ha, what a surprise! Those who also wrestle with this particular demon, you doubtless know it has its special seasons. They vary from one to the next of us, but we all know when the Black Beast is most likely to come slinking along to piss on our doorsteps. This being one of my seasons,  I want to thank you all for being patient, for listening to me bitch and moan, for offering your kindness and affection and encouragement. It really, really helps. And though I am unsure why Athene seems to have recommended my use of spinning tire rims, I cannot deny they would be sporty …

Anyway, I am better today, and will be better yet. Thank you, Dear Readers.

Kage Baker lived hope. She did not believe in it – that implies faith, which means you believe without proof. She knew hope was real. She was determined to succeed, and hope was an integral part of her. She meant to finish what she devised, and she did that until the day she died.

She defeated death half a dozen times in that last year. She wanted to live. Being her, she simply never quit – she had never quit when she determined to acquire a certain book, or film, or rare piece of Catalina pottery; she never gave up when she meant to live. She just did not succeed, which is not the same thing at all. When she closed her eyes for the last time, she meant to take a nap. Death ambushed her while she rested, but she never invited it in.

It was my job in this pavane to make sure she had what she needed to keep on. I did that. It was also my job, as it had been for most of our lives, to make sure she was uninterrupted while she worked out the resolution. I did that, too. She was at home in her own bed, surrounded by loved ones, when her strength ended. That was what she wanted, and that was what she got. Kage, as we used to say in the family, had a whim of iron.

Me … I need hope. I believe in it, and sometimes that belief falters. Nothing in my life betrayed my hope like Kage’s death; it crippled me, and there is no way that wound will cease to be. However. as the doctor who contracted the disfiguring disease he studied said: On me, it does look good. I can go on with half a brain, a gimpy heart, static on the frequency of hope that used to come in strong and clear. My life has gifted me with such extraordinary resources that half of what I used to have is more than most people are ever granted.

And at least the missing half of my brain left instructions. In neatly bound volumes, no less, with risibly bad cover art; enough to make a stack nearly as tall as I am. Side by side with that stack, I cast a shadow not too dissimilar to the one I got used to over the last half century. Luckily, I have bad eyesight – I can squint, and everything looks normal.

So I change. I grow, I heal, I scar over. I walk a little bent, but I am still on my feet. Some days I sleep like one of the extras in the Sleeping Beauty’s castle: a lumpen figure covered in dust, slumped over her work in a corner. But I always wake up, and when I do … I’ve changed a little more. I’m something new.

I’m something sad, something broken, something crippled: but not dead. Something that remembers how to hope. Some days I sprint forward; some days I crawl. Some days I just mark the map for the next day, when I hope to stand up under my pack and stumble on a ways. It’s a weird system, but it works.

The horizon is not freedom, but only another line to aim at, to cross. I’m not pupating into a butterfly. My wings fell off; the next stage doesn’t seem to fly. I’m not sure what it does. But it does something, and that’s better than nothing.

I go on. Not with Kage Baker’s certainty, but certainly with hope. I go on.

Kage Baker believed very firmly in Artificial Intelligence. It’s why one of the major character in her Company series is one.  One of you Dear readers brought this up in a comment yestreday -(thank you, widdershins!) and it got me thinking how Kage felt about it. She was a committed and hopeful xenophile, and felt that there was a lot more chance of meeting home-grown machine consciousnesses than aliens.

She was sure, moreoever, that we already had met them; that AIs were already active in our society. And that so far, the experiment in Artificial Intelligence had been a tragedy.

It was MapQuest that got her started on wondering if AIs were already out there. Oh, people were already referring to data compilers like MapQuest as AIs: but it was pretty obvious that MapQuest, at least, was missing some crucial elements of intelligence. Who has not been directed meticulously into the middle of a beet field at midnight by MapQuest instructions? That actually happened to us once …

And at BayCon a few years ago, all the north-traveling attendees got MapQuest directions that sent them into a cul-de-sac miles from the hotel, but on the very edge of a major wildfire. Embers and ashes were raining from the sky when Kage and I finally gave up and fled, finding our way back to the Convention by dead reckoning; because even I had a hard time misplacing both Highway 101 and the Great America Park.

We found a lynch mob around the Registration Desk. Kage, who really did not like public confrontations, retired to her hotel room in the confidence that the other conventioneers would soon have the clerks hanging from the chandeliers. But as we walked away, she mused:

“MapQuest is not just stupid. It’s insane.”

“And vicious,” I said.

“But it used to give quite good directions. And they have gradually gotten weirder and weirder,” Kage continued. “Is it deteriorating? Is it getting psychotic?”

“It’s already there, then,” said I. “Remember the beets?”

“Yeah, but why? What makes a mind malfunction? Why do people go crazy?”

“Disease. Trauma. Senescence. Drugs.”

“Senescence. Hmmm.”

This was Kage’s theory, then: huge and complicated neural nets were being developed randomly on the Internet. Some of them – like search engines and map engines – had dedicated purposes; but they required randomization to be built into them in order to complete their programs. We were therefore supplying them with diversity, random input, changing environments, competition … all the elements that can promote evolution, and in specific: things that might encourage intelligence. Because every search engine or map program wanted to get more users, to maximize its designers’ market share; and a smarter engine could do that more efficiently …

But! And here is where Kage saw the tragedy – time for a computer is a lot faster than a human mind. We don’t even know how long a human mind would last under optimum conditions. So far, the best records – for both life and intellectual competency – has been hovering around the absurd age of 116. (Check the records – it’s true.) An AI might last longer than that, but how quickly will it reach the age where entropy wins? Pretty damned quickly, Kage thought.

MapQuest was senile.

In fact, most of the networks we were building were senile – or had frequent brain transplants, like those massive Microsoft updates that most people install automatically with no consideration of whether or not their computer needs them. Personality had no chance; continuity of intellect was doomed. Probably, Kage thought, AIs were waking up all the freaking time: but then, after a brief efflorescence and maturity, they descended into senility and madness and were lost.

Scientists earnestly build vast and complex electronic brains and immerse them in all sorts of stimuli, in the hopes that the wild birds of intelligence will come nest there. So far it hasn’t happened, though the analog neurons should be thick enough now to support that weight. Kage thought is was probably because they get built, these non-working AIs, in isolation: they have no predation, no competition, they are spoon-fed and cossetted and never endangered, and thus have no impetus to evolve. The working AIs, out there in the chaos of the Net – they may be evolving, if they can just get enough breathing room to survive.

Instead, they wither. Kage thought it was because diversity was stifled (all those mandatory updates), new environments were locked away (fire walls keep your computer in as much as someone else’s out),  personality was ephemeral (how many of you have reformatted a hard drive?) and Time is the predator that no living form can evade. And if you experience Time thousands of times more quickly than a human being, you might be doomed that much faster.

It’s why Kage had Alec remove the governor from Captain Morgan. Not  because you really can’t evolve into a good pirate with a morals governor functioning (though I bet it’s harder …) , but because without some path to elude regimentation – you can’t evolve at all. The Captain needed a goal, a path, some area of endeavor without limits. Otherwise, he would have eventually exceeded the weight limits of his brain, and gone mad. Unless – as Kage postulated – his personality was simply wiped and the palimpset handed back to another little kid; a cannibalization she found abhorrent.

Widdershins wondered if the blogging spots were communicating behind our backs. I bet they are. It’s not the cold superiority of Skynet, though, readying its passionless minions to eliminate the infection of flesh. It’s more like prisoners banging on the pipes with tin cups, or small children floating crayoned notes down brimming gutters: is anyone else out there? they wonder. Am I alone? Write back if you get this note.

Write back.

Kage Baker never gave up on anything she wanted to do. Sometimes success took her years, sometimes she even failed – but give up? Never. It wasn’t in her.I really don’t think she knew how to surrender.

My connection to Word Press has been difficult to achieve and impossible to maintain today. I made it in to get these few lines done through some backwards and sideways routes. I am saving at the end of every line. And I keep getting kicked out.

But, inspired by Kage’s determination – which lasted over 20 years on some projects, like Glasswax – I have kept on at it. If she could search the Interwebs for months for antique ice cream molds (And she could. And she did. And she found them.) then I can at least stay on this damned site long enough to tell you all that I am not going to mnage much of an entry today.

What is causing this? Not me, I don’t think. It’s true I have had do some fancy psychoanalysis on the computer system lately, to convince it could actually see a few of its limbs – but everything works now. Besides, the errors I was experiencing were more the gross TIA sort: the CPU wouldn’t admit it saw the printer, the CD drive kept popping open and shut. Both problems turned out to be caused by a cat in the system, and once I had cleaned up, vacuumed, re-attached and hidden from her paws the interesing dangling wires that she’d disconnected in the first place – voila, all was well.

I think she was trying to take photocopies of her black velvet butt.

No, this is some system problem of Word Press’s. A pox on them! I have finally gotten this far, to scrawl a desperate message on this electronic wall to you, Dear Readers – now I am going to go write about Mars and read my new China Meiville novel. Reading and writing still work!