writing
The Last Imperfect Thing
Marcus Venn had conquered everything except death.
At forty-seven, cancer had come for his liver. He replaced it with a bioprinted synthetic: perfect, permanent, immune to disease. The surgery took six hours. Recovery took three weeks. His stock price jumped fourteen percent.
“Why stop there?” he asked his lead engineer.
Over the next decade, Venn Industries became the world’s foremost pioneer in somatic replacement. Marcus was patient zero for everything: artificial kidneys that would never fail, a heart made of materials that would outlast civilisations, lungs that could breathe in any atmosphere, skin that would never wrinkle or scar. Each replacement was an improvement. Each surgery was live-streamed to millions.
The world watched him become more than human.
His investors loved it. His board of directors loved it. The market loved it. Marcus Venn, the man who would live forever, whose body was a temple of permanence in a world of decay.
But Marcus understood what the others didn’t: the body was just the beginning.
“Consciousness,” he explained to his neurological team, “is just electricity and chemistry. Replicate the structure, and you replicate the mind.”
They started with his peripheral nervous system, replacing damaged nerves with synthetic fibres that transmitted signals faster, cleaner. Then the spine, each vertebra hollowed out and reinforced, the cord itself replaced strand by strand. Marcus felt sharper. Clearer. His thoughts came faster, his memories more vivid.
The brain was the final frontier.
His team developed the procedure over four years: microscopic surgical drones that could map, then replace, individual neurons with synthetic analogues. Perfect replicas down to every dendrite, every synaptic connection. The neurons wouldn’t die, wouldn’t degrade, wouldn’t accumulate the protein tangles that caused dementia. They would fire eternally, precisely, perfectly.
Marcus was seventy-one when the first session began. He would do it gradually, one percent of his brain at a time, allowing months between procedures for integration, for testing, for certainty that the man who woke up was still himself.
After the first session, he felt no different. Cognitive tests showed no change. He was still Marcus Venn.
After the twentieth session, he noticed he was thinking about the same problems in the same ways. But he attributed this to having good ideas in the first place. Why change what worked?
After the fortieth session, his team noticed he hadn’t pivoted strategy on the new venture in Africa, despite changing market conditions. But Marcus explained his reasoning with such crystalline logic that they backed down. Perhaps they were the ones failing to see clearly.
After the sixtieth session, his assistant mentioned he’d worn the same suit, in the same rotation, for four months. Marcus hadn’t noticed. Why wouldn’t he? They were perfect suits.
The eighty-fifth session was scheduled for a Tuesday.
His chief neuroscientist, Dr. Sarah Chen, stopped him in the hallway the day before. She looked tired. Older than he remembered, though of course he looked exactly the same as he had ten years ago.
“Marcus, I need you to look at something.” She pulled up a brain scan, highlighting regions in blue. “This is your original tissue. This is all that’s left.”
A small cluster. Perhaps two percent. Maybe less.
“We should slow down,” she said. “Maybe stop. We don’t fully understand what role biological neurons play in…”
“In what? Aging? Decay? Failure?” Marcus smiled. “Sarah, we’ve monitored every metric. Memory, cognition, personality. I’m still me. Better than me.”
“That’s what concerns me. You haven’t changed at all. Not in two years. No new interests, no new perspectives, no…”
“Consistency is not stagnation.”
“It is when you’re alive.”
But Marcus had already made his decision. He’d made it years ago, really. He was simply executing the plan.
The eighty-fifth session lasted nine hours. When it was complete, Dr. Chen ran the scans herself.
One hundred percent synthetic. A perfect brain, identical in every measurable way to a human brain, but immortal. Permanent. Complete.
Marcus Venn opened his eyes.
He was in the recovery room. Dr. Chen stood to his left, reading his vitals. The clock on the wall read 3:47 PM. Sunlight slanted through the window, catching dust motes in golden suspension.
He tried to move his hand. It didn’t respond. He tried to speak. Nothing came.
But his mind was alive: racing, screaming, thinking.
In the biological brain, neurons die. Constantly. Thousands every day, lost to entropy and time. The brain compensates, rewires, forms new connections. Memories degrade and reform slightly differently with each recollection. Synapses strengthen and weaken with each passing moment. The brain is not a thing but a process, not a structure but a constant, desperate act of reconstruction.
Impermanence was the engine of thought itself.
His synthetic neurons fired in exactly the same patterns they had the moment he woke. They would fire in those patterns forever. The same thoughts, looping, perfect, unchanging. He was experiencing the same instant of consciousness, repeated infinitely.
The realisation that he could not have realisations.
He saw Dr. Chen reach for the readout. He would see her reach for it forever. He tried to scream but he had already tried, and would only ever be trying, suspended forever in a single crystalline moment that would never end because nothing could ever end or begin or change.
He was trapped in the amber of his own perfection.
Dr. Chen looked at the neural activity monitors and frowned. Perfectly stable. Perfectly consistent. No variation, no chaos, no noise. Just the same beautiful pattern, repeating forever in the substrate that would never decay.
“We did it,” she whispered.
Marcus Venn had finally achieved immortality. He would live forever in the single moment he realised he had killed time itself, and with it, the last imperfect, precious thing that had made him alive.
The clock on the wall still read 3:47 PM.
It would always read 3:47 PM.
And Marcus Venn would always be just about to understand why.
Game, Set, Extinction?
Detective Sarah Chen had seen a lot of strange things in her fifteen years with the Met, but nothing prepared her for the Henderson case.
“He just… changed,” Mrs. Henderson said in the interview room at Charing Cross station. She wasn’t crying, just bewildered. “Tom used to hate exercise. Last month he took the bus two stops to Tesco. Now he’s at those courts every single day, sometimes twice. He talks about nothing else. Drop shots. Bandeja. Vibora. I don’t even know what language that is anymore.”
She paused, pulling a handkerchief from her sleeve and fiddling with it. “But he’s… happier? I think? He’s lost two stone. His blood pressure’s down. The doctor’s thrilled. I just don’t understand why I feel like I’m losing him.”
Sarah had heard variations of this story seventeen times in the past month. Normal people–accountants, teachers, pensioners–suddenly consumed by a racquet sport most had never heard of six months ago. The pattern was undeniable. It always started the same way: a mate invited them to “just try it once” at one of the new courts that had been sprouting up across London like geometric mushrooms.
That night, Sarah drove past the Battersea Padel Club. Even at 11 PM, the courts glowed under their LED lights, figures moving in synchronised patterns behind the glass walls. She counted twenty-four courts where there had been a derelict warehouse just three months ago. The construction had been impossibly fast. No planning permission delays, no protests, nothing.
On impulse, she pulled over and approached the fence. Up close, the courts hummed, barely perceptible, but there. A vibration that seemed to resonate in her teeth. The glass walls weren’t quite glass, she realised. They had a faint iridescence, like petrol on water.
Through the translucency, she watched a mixed doubles match. Four people in their sixties, moving with a grace that seemed unlikely. They were laughing.
“First time?” A voice behind her made her jump. A man in expensive Lululemon smiled warmly. “You should try it. Everyone says they’re not interested until they step on the court. Then something just… clicks.”
“I’m alright, thanks.”
“That’s what they all say.” His smile never wavered, but there was no menace in it. Just certainty. “The court will be here when you’re ready. No pressure. Although…” he gestured to the players, “Look at them. When’s the last time you saw people that age move like that? Feel like that?”
Sarah ran his face through the database that night. Marcus Webb, reported missing by his sister four months ago in Croydon. She’d assumed he’d done a runner, started fresh somewhere. But here he was, very much present, recruiting at midnight. She pulled up the missing person file. His sister had described him as severely depressed, pre-diabetic, isolated after a divorce.
The photo from the court showed someone else entirely. Same face, but transformed.
The breakthrough came from an unexpected source: Professor Yuki Tanaka, an exobiologist at Imperial College Sarah had consulted on a bizarre case years ago involving bioluminescent graffiti in Shoreditch.
One night, lubricated by Pinot Grigio, Sarah had tried to explain her suspicions about the courts and a week later Yuki had bustled into her office with armfuls of photos and reams of data. She dumped it all on her desk.
“You’re going to think I’m mad!” She said with a manic smile.
Sarah studied the pictures in silence: aerial shots of courts, close-ups of the peculiar walls, thermal imaging showing unusual heat signatures.
“I don’t…”
“Silicate-based life,” Yuki exclaimed. “It’s theoretical, but if a species evolved on a high-gravity world with abundant silicon…”
“You’re saying these courts are… alive?”
“I’m saying they could be. Look at the thermal patterns—that’s not consistent with passive construction materials. And this growth rate?” She tapped the timeline photos. “Three months for two dozen courts? That’s reproduction, not construction.”
“So… what are they doing? What do they want?”
Yuki was quiet for a long moment. “That’s the question, isn’t it? The cynical interpretation is they’re feeding off the players somehow. The vibrations, the energy, the emotional engagement. But…” She pulled up another image on her tablet. “Look at these blood samples I managed to obtain from regular players. Cortisol levels down forty percent. Inflammation markers dramatically reduced. Dopamine and serotonin perfectly balanced. These people aren’t being drained. They’re being… optimised.”
The pieces fell into place, but they didn’t form the picture Sarah expected. The courts were spawn, juvenile forms of something vast. The game itself was the mechanism. But mechanism for what?
Sarah spent the next week investigating. Every padel court in London traced back to a single company: First Contact Sports Development. Their headquarters was a nondescript building in Canary Wharf, but their incorporation papers listed an address in the Highlands.
The facility she found there didn’t appear on any Ordnance Survey map. Just a massive crater in the restricted military zone near Cape Wrath, cordoned off by Ministry of Defence personnel who wouldn’t answer questions. But the older crofters remembered. Fifteen months ago, something had fallen from the sky. The official story was a meteor. But the shepherd who’d seen it land described something different: something that had unfurled like a seed pod, sending out tendrils that hardened into transparent walls.
“Beautiful, it was,” the old man said, staring into his whisky at the local pub. “Like watching something be born. And the folks from the MOD, they weren’t afraid of it. They were… I don’t know. Reverent, maybe?”
Sarah managed to get a message through to someone at the MOD. The response came from a Dr. Elizabeth Okonkwo, senior xenobiological consultant.
They met at a Service station on the M6, halfway between London and the Highlands.
“You’ve worked it out,” Dr. Okonkwo said. It wasn’t a question.
“Some of it. They’re alive. They’re multiplying. They’re changing people.”
“Changing them how?”
Sarah hesitated. “Making them healthier. Happier. More social. The average padel player exercises four times a week, has expanded their social circle by eight new people, reports significantly improved mental health, and…”
“And you’re here because you think that’s sinister.”
“Isn’t it? If they’re manipulating us…”
“Are they?” Dr. Okonkwo opened a file on her tablet. “We’ve been studying the original landing site for fifteen months. The entity, entities actually, they’re not hostile. They don’t reproduce unless there’s space and willing participants. They don’t force anyone onto the courts. They just… offer. An invitation.”
“To what?”
“Symbiosis, we think. They need the kinetic energy, the vibrations, the emotional resonance. We need exercise, community, purpose. Depression, obesity, isolation… these are epidemics, Detective. The NHS spends billions. People are dying of loneliness and sedentary lifestyles. And then something arrives that makes exercise addictively fun, that builds instant communities, that literally makes people healthier and happier.” She paused. “Is that an invasion or a cure?”
“But people are changing. Families report…”
“Families report their loved ones are obsessed with a new hobby. How is that different from someone who discovers marathon running, or joins a church, or falls in love? Yes, it’s intense. Yes, it’s life-altering. But is it harmful?”
Sarah thought of Tom Henderson, two stone lighter, blood pressure normal. Of Marcus Webb, no longer depressed and isolated. Of the old folk laughing as they played.
“We don’t know their endgame,” Sarah said.
“No,” Dr. Okonkwo admitted. “We don’t. The courts are juvenile forms. Eventually, they’ll mature into something else. Something larger. And we have no idea what that will mean for Earth. But Detective,” she closed her tablet, “what if their endgame and ours align? What if this is first contact, and it’s being offered as a gift?”
“Or a trap.”
“Possibly. We’re monitoring. We’re studying. But we’re also watching millions of people transform their lives. Watching community bonds form. Watching health outcomes improve. The question isn’t whether they’re alien. The question is whether alien is automatically dangerous.”
That night, Sarah drove past Battersea Padel Club again. The courts were full, as always. Through the glass walls, she watched the players, a United Nations of ages, backgrounds, abilities, laughing, sweating, living.
She thought about filing her report. About raising the alarm. About warning people that they might be feeding something vast and inscrutable.
But she also thought about her own life. The chronic loneliness of police work. The fifteen-hour days at her desk. The way her doctor had frowned at her last check-up. The friends she’d lost touch with. The activities she’d abandoned for the job.
Her phone buzzed. Another call: not a missing person report this time. Tom Henderson, asking to amend his wife’s statement. “She didn’t understand at first,” he’d said. “But she came to try it with me yesterday. Now she gets it. We’ve not been this happy together in years.”
Sarah added the note to her file and kept the engine running, watching the courts pulse with that faint, alien light. The players inside moved with impossible energy and joy, feeding something vast and patient and utterly inhuman.
Or perhaps offering themselves to something that fed them in return.
The courts multiplied. The players evangelised. And somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, something ancient stirred, growing toward a form humanity couldn’t yet imagine. Whether it would be their salvation or their extinction remained to be seen.
Sarah put the car in gear, the invitation humming in her bones. The courts would be here when she was ready. They had nothing but time.
And maybe, just maybe, that was the most terrifying, or most hopeful, thing of all.
Show Me Myself
The Transparency Act passed on a Tuesday.
By Thursday, every AI prompt ever entered, and every prompt yet to come, existed in the permanent public record, cryptographically bound to your verified identity. No anonymity. No privacy. No deletion.
The stated goal was noble enough: combat the flood of AI-generated pornography, deepfakes, and harassment. If you had to own your words forever, surely you’d think twice. Surely shame would regulate what law could not.
And at first, it worked.
Alex Chen was a data analyst in Minneapolis. Thirty-two, single, unremarkable. He’d used AI assistants for years: summarizing emails, debugging code, generating birthday card messages for his mother. Nothing exciting. Nothing worth hiding.
The first week after the Act, he felt the invisible audience watching. His prompts became sterile, professional. “Please format this spreadsheet.” “Summarize this article about municipal bonds.” He noticed others doing the same. The global prompt feed had become a desert of productivity theatre and careful politeness.
But the desert didn’t last.
Within a month, the first Prompt Celebrities emerged.
@TruthSeeker_Mara asked an AI to “write a confession of everything I’m too afraid to say out loud.” Her raw emotional honesty, admissions of jealousy, inadequacy, desire, went viral. Millions watched her daily psychological excavations. She got a book deal.
@PhilosopherKing prompted increasingly elaborate thought experiments about moral edge cases, each more provocative than the last. Universities debated his prompts. He got a TED talk.
Then came the artists, the comedians, the provocateurs. The Prompt Feed became the most-watched medium on Earth. Authenticity was currency. Transgression was art. Privacy was cowardice.
And reverse morality had begun.
Alex watched from the sidelines for six months. His prompts remained bland, forgettable. He had 127 followers, mostly bots and his mother’s book club.
Then he lost his job. Budget cuts. The severance would last three months.
He spent the first week applying for positions. The second week, he noticed that several Prompt Celebrities were making six figures from sponsorships alone. AI companies paid top creators to demonstrate their products’ capabilities. Platforms paid for exclusive prompting rights.
The third week, Alex submitted his first real prompt.
“Describe my life as if it were a tragedy written by someone who hated me.”
The response was cruel and insightful. It understood him better than he understood himself—every compromise, every abandoned dream, every relationship he’d sabotaged through passivity. The algorithm had learned from his entire digital footprint.
He posted it. Within an hour, he had 3,000 new followers.
The feedback was immediate and intoxicating. People tagged him in discussions. They dissected his psychology. They called him “brave” and “unflinching.”
While refreshing the Feed, he noticed a missed call. One new voicemail.
His mother’s voice was thin, the way it got when she was trying not to worry. She said she’d read what he posted. She said it was powerful. She said she hoped he was okay.
“You don’t always have to be brave,” she added, after a pause long enough to feel unplanned.
He deleted the message before it finished playing. The follower count had jumped again.
He prompted again the next day. And the next.
The descent was gradual, then sudden.
Alex discovered his niche: self-destruction as performance art. Each prompt peeled back another layer, more vulnerable, more shocking. He asked AIs to analyse his childhood photos and diagnose his traumas. He requested deepfakes of conversations with his dead father, asking the AI to “make him say what he really thought of me.”
His follower count climbed. 50,000. 200,000. A million.
The sponsors came. An AI image generator paid him $15,000 to exclusively use their platform. A documentary crew wanted to film him prompting. He appeared on podcasts where hosts asked, “How far will you go?”
He started to need the numbers, the validation, the proof that his pain meant something. But the algorithm was hungry too. To maintain relevance, each prompt had to exceed the last. The Feed was a shark that could only swim forward.
At 2.3 million followers, he prompted an AI to generate images of “the moment I stopped believing I deserved love.” The resulting gallery was devastating—a visual narrative drawn from every photo he’d ever posted, every message he’d ever sent, reconstructed into scenes of isolated anguish.
His mother called, crying. He didn’t speak just recorded her despair while he watched the numbers climb.
Other creators noticed. The competition intensified.
@VoidGazer11 used biometric AI to generate images of her own death from multiple causes, ranked by likelihood. @ConfessionsUnbownd had an AI generate his search history as interpretive dance, then as Renaissance paintings, then as corporate PowerPoints.
The Feed became an ouroboros of exhibition and consumption. People watched because everyone else was watching. Prompts became more extreme because extreme was the baseline. The cruelty was recursive. Audiences demanded degradation, creators obliged, and the algorithms learned to facilitate both.
Alex hit 8 million followers. He was burning out. The prompts that once felt cathartic now felt compulsory. He was mining trauma he wasn’t sure was real anymore. The AI was better at articulating his suffering than he was.
His final prompt came to him at 3 AM, two years after the Transparency Act.
It was simple. Inevitable.
“Show me myself.”
The AI worked for six hours.
What it generated wasn’t a single image but an animation: a living, recursive structure that drew from every prompt Alex had ever entered, every response he’d ever received, every follower who had ever engaged with his content.
It showed Alex as they saw him. Not as he saw himself.
The animation began with his face, but it wasn’t quite right—features exaggerated, expressions borrowed from his most viral moments of anguish. Then it fractured. Each fragment became a follower, and each follower’s face was a distorted mirror of Alex’s pain, because that’s what they’d come for. That’s what they’d learned to want.
And each of those followers fractured further, into their followers, into the algorithm’s prediction of what they desired most, and every desire was a variation of cruelty. The stark cruelty of staring, of consuming, of participating in someone’s dismantling and calling it art.
The animation zoomed out. The fractal structure was infinite, a cascading network of need and exploitation, each node feeding the next. At the centre was Alex, not as a person but as a black hole of attention, consuming and consumed.
The final frame pulsed with a simple caption, generated by the AI itself:
“This is what you wanted.”
But the pronoun was ambiguous. Deliberate. Was it addressing Alex? His followers? All of them?
The animation topped the Prompt Feed rankings for forty-eight hours.
Alex watched the numbers climb: 200 million views, 300 million, half a billion. The comments were rapturous. “Genius.” “Transcendent.” “The logical endpoint of the whole experiment.”
Several academics wrote papers about it. A philosopher appeared on news networks to argue it represented “the first true AI art, art that could only exist through the fusion of human pathology and machine learning.”
Three major museums requested the original file for exhibition.
Alex read none of it. He sat in his apartment, watching the animation loop. Watching himself become infinite. Watching the feedback spiral that connected his degradation to their consumption to the algorithm’s optimisation to the next creator who would go further, because someone always went further.
The animation had one more feature he hadn’t noticed immediately: it was adaptive. As more people viewed it, it incorporated their viewing patterns, their engagement metrics, their own prompt histories. It grew. It learned.
By the end of the week, people reported seeing themselves in it. Not metaphorically—literally. Their own faces appearing in the fractal, their own prompts echoing in the structure.
The AI had created a mirror that showed everyone what they were: participants in a machine that ran on exposure, on violation, on the commodification of the inner life.
Some viewers deleted their accounts.
Most watched it again. And again.
Six months later, Alex still had twelve million followers.
He hadn’t prompted anything since “Show me myself.” Paradoxically, this made him more famous. Journalists wrote think pieces about his silence. Other creators tried to replicate his success by going quiet.
The Transparency Act remained law. The Feed continued. New celebrities emerged, each finding fresh ways to exploit the infinite appetite for authenticity performed as self-destruction.
Late at night, Alex sometimes opened the prompt interface. The cursor blinked. The entire world could be watching, or no one at all. It made no difference.
He never wrote anything. He’d already said everything. The AI had shown him the truth: there was no self to find beneath the performance. There was only the show, and the showing, and the thing that watched.
The recursion was complete.
The mirror had won.
EPILOGUE
The tenth anniversary of the Transparency Act was marked with a retrospective.
“Show me myself” remained the most-viewed prompt in history. Scholars debated its meaning. Artists created responses. The animation itself had evolved through a decade of viewing, incorporating millions of faces, billions of data points.
Alex Chen lived in a small town in Oregon. He’d changed his name, though it hardly mattered, his verified identity was immutably linked to every prompt he’d ever entered. Sometimes people recognized him. Most just stared.
A reporter tracked him down and asked if he regretted it.
“The prompt, or the answer?” Alex asked.
The reporter didn’t understand the distinction.
Alex didn’t explain. He’d learned that the machine didn’t deal with regret. It trafficked in completion, in optimization, in the perfect reflection of what people revealed when they thought revelation was virtue.
He’d asked to see himself.
The horror wasn’t that the AI showed him something false.
The horror was that it showed him something true.
When Men Take Over the Yarn
No one could say exactly when it started—only that one autumn evening, in a converted fish market at the edge of Reykjavik’s harbour, twelve women gathered to knit beneath bright halogen lights. Cameras on tripods ringed the room; a few hundred curious onlookers filed into makeshift bleachers, tickets still warm from the printer. The program simply read:
Ultra Knitting: Exhibition One
Rules subject to silence.
The match began with a hush. Yarn arced between needles like aurorae, shimmering loops rising and falling in intricate tempos. Every so often a referee in a midnight-blue blazer tapped a silver bell; the crowd answered with a collective intake of breath, as if a chord had resolved in some music too subtle to hear.
No scoreboard, no commentary. Yet everyone sensed the outcome. When Eyja Thorvaldsdóttir bound off her final stitch, a spiral motif so delicate it looked brewed from frost, the arena stood, weeping. Someone whispered, “Three hundred and eight points, at least.” It meant nothing. Yet it felt indisputable.
Within a year Ultra Knitting out-drew football. Stadiums refitted their turf with cushioned dais platforms. Micro-drone cameras drifted close to capture the click-click-pause of needles, replayed on ten-storey screens. Spectators learned to read the silent grammar of loop tension and pattern risk: a sudden yarn-over was a gasp; a slipped stitch, a groan; a flawlessly grafted lace panel, a thunderous roar. Matches ended whenever the referees, known only as the Quiet Twelve, felt the knit had said its piece. The victors bowed, accepting wreaths of unspun qiviut. Commentators tried to explain. They never quite managed. Viewers loved them anyway.
Ultra Knitting swept across continents like a whispered revolution. People spoke of it the way their grandparents had spoken of jazz or early cinema, something that didn’t just entertain but revealed. Viewers gathered in silence at bars, galleries, rooftops, watching with reverence as shawls unfurled like language. Couples proposed during finals. Children learned to knit before they learned to read. Some claimed the game had therapeutic properties; others said it helped them dream. No two spectators ever quite agreed on who had won, but everyone left matches changed.
For a while, it seemed that Ultra Knitting had done what no sport ever had: offered not escape, but return—to mystery, to beauty, to the ancient rhythm of hands shaping something slowly, lovingly, without explanation.
Then came the committees.
At first the men arrived politely, offering sponsorship deals and high-definition analytics. They drafted charters, codified “beauty coefficients,” assigned decimal weights to colour gradients and drape. They mandated time limits “for broadcast consistency.” Soon auxiliary leagues sprang up—Junior Ultra, Varsity Ultra—each with crisp rulebooks and official yardage caps. The Quiet Twelve objected in a letter stitched from crimson silk. It was archived, untranslated.
Once the rules were fully ratified the first Men’s Open drew ratings unimaginable even by Ultra’s standards. The players wore moisture-wicking jersey cardigans emblazoned with corporate crests. They knitted fast: streamlined stockinette stripes engineered for maximum symmetry, every row a measurable metric. The crowd cheered the speed records—twenty thousand stitches per minute!—yet something felt missing, like a breath held too long.
The matches started to run to fixed scores: 99 points for a perfect regulation cable, 250 for a sanctioned brioche reversal. The bell still chimed, but only to signal halftime. A new generation of viewers assumed Ultra Knitting had always been this way—a tidy contest of endurance, sponsors, and clock. The original devotees stopped watching, quietly, as though turning away from a friend who had learned to lie.
By the fourth season, the artistry was all but gone. The yarn was synthetic now: stretch-optimized, camera-friendly, sponsor-approved. Teams began focusing on predictable formations: the Double Chevron Push, the Left-Leaning Ladder, the Reverse Engineered Rib. Commentators shouted through matches, dissecting metrics like tension-per-minute and stitchline velocity. Entire franchises were built around needle size strategy. The new stars were fast, loud, and largely indistinguishable. Few remembered the hush of the first gatherings, the way a lace motif could seem to answer a question no one had asked.
Audience numbers began to slip. First in Oslo, then Seoul, then Milan. Stadiums emptied out as viewers drifted back to soccer, grateful for its honesty. A goal was a goal. It meant something. One autumn, during the Grand International Skein-Off, the final match aired opposite a second-tier regional football game. More people watched the football. By winter, Ultra Knitting had been pushed to off-hours and niche channels. A final broadcast went untelevised altogether.
Late one night, in a dim café far from any arena, Eyja Thorvaldsdóttir, older now, half-forgotten, but still impossibly precise, unrolled an opalescent skein and began to knit. No cameras, no bells. Just yarn tasting the hush again. A stranger asked what she was making.
“A corrective,” she said.
No rules explained.
Post script
Over ten years ago I wrote the script for when I was going to appear on Desert Island Discs. In that interview, I mention the impact “The Rise and Fall of Ultra Knitting” had on my career…
The Quiet Terror of the Inbox
There’s a peculiar kind of silence that settles in after I’ve hit “send” on a query email to a literary agent. It’s not the comforting hush of a job well done or the expectant pause before a storm. No—this is a clawing, teeth-on-edge kind of silence. It’s the silence of an inbox that might hold my future… or nothing at all.
At first, I keep Outlook open, front and centre, checking it obsessively. Then, like an addict, I set my notifications to ping with every new arrival—only to discover that someone else has noticed my erectile dysfunction, or worse, someone from work needs something urgent. Each ding raises my heartbeat by a degree. Each disappointment chips away at something that once felt solid.
This is the hidden truth of the querying process: it’s not just about rejection. It’s about waiting. And waiting, when you’ve poured your heart into something as personal and fragile as a novel, feels like standing alone in an empty theatre, on a stage, under a spotlight that never turns on.
I imagine the agents opening my submission with a sigh, laughing at my prose, barely able to believe that something so brilliant has not been written before. Or worse—missing it entirely because it’s one of 300 that day and they’re out of coffee. I start to question everything: my premise, my tone, my opening line, my life choices. Maybe I should just focus on my “day job” after all…
And yet, in the stillness between refreshes, something strange begins to happen.
I start thinking about Atlantis. About a boy descended from a survivor of the cataclysm. I scribble the outline of a scene, a line of dialogue. And suddenly I’m writing again—not querying, not waiting, just writing.
The world falls away. The pulse slows. The self-doubt dims. It’s not for an agent. It’s not even for readers. It’s just for the story.
Here’s the quiet truth that slips in after the noise dies down: writing should be its own reward.
Yes, publication is validating. Yes, agents are gatekeepers. And yes, it would be lovely—god, just lovely—to get that call. But the real goal was never fame or recognition. The goal, always, was to create something beautiful, honest, and entertaining. To build something from nothing. To make the dream real.
The artistic life often looks glamorous from the outside: book launches, panels, Instagrammable writing retreats. But inside, it’s a practice. A discipline. A relationship with the page that no amount of outside silence should be allowed to erode. And in that practice—in that daily return to the craft—there is a quiet kind of heroism.
I don’t write because someone asked me to (in fact, it’s often the opposite). I write because I love it. And if I can make peace with that—if I can find joy in the making—I’ll always have what matters most.
Everything else is just noise.
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There are hundreds of us, all confined to white plastic tents erected an anonymous warehouse. Nine square metres of boredom. We’ve come from everywhere. We all talk about what we’ve left behind, but the spirits of those places, the essences of our lives no longer exist.
My neighbour was originally from Qatar. She’s a lawyer and speaks five languages. Even she has trouble being understood – what chance do I have?
I had been… am a software engineer. I have a first class honours degree from one of the most prestigious universities in the world and I’ve always been ready to prove I belong on the bleeding edge of technology. No one here has bothered to try and find out what I can do. I can tell, from the way they examine their indecipherable screens, they’ve decided I’m just another burden.
And it had not been cheap: More than my life savings and an unscrupulous contract with hustlers who knew they were selling snake oil and didn’t care. But I’d been desperate and it had seemed to be my only hope.
Now it feels selfish and pointless. My parents had encouraged me to do it. My mother had offered to sell the family home. My father had let her.
I wish I’d let the cancer consume me. I would have died of course, but the cryogenics and future science have given me years to live – trapped as a chronological refugee who will never live the life I should have.
The Final New Dawn… until the next one.
Believe it or not, I’m working too hard. Anyone who knows me would find this laughable as I have made an art form of finding an ingenious solution to a problem at the last minute, which makes everyone think I’m much cleverer than I am.
Recently I seem to have taken on more responsibilities, and now find myself slaving away at all hours trying to find answers to problems that are very much not novel related or, in fact, writerly in any way. The cold, hard logic problems of software engineering.
And I think it’s affecting me. I’ve always bemoaned my lack of ability to focus on one project or topic – often blaming it for my failures. It’s extremely easy to say that the reason I haven’t had a novel published is because I’m too much of a polymath, my mind is too vast to be constrained by a single goal and therefore I need to unfetter it and let it wander its own path.
It’s much harder to admit that I just lack discipline and am genuinely an Olympic level procrastinator.
However, my recent attention to one subject (my actual job) has proven to me that I can concentrate. I can bring my (probably not as great as I think it is) intellect to bear entirely onto one subject. I do know what it takes to get things done. And I am perfectly capable of sitting down and doing the thing I’m supposed to be doing.
I just need to do it.
So, obviously, I have now decided, once more, that my dearest desire, my one true calling, the gold at the end of the rainbow is writing. If I want to remain fed, clothed and housed, I cannot stop doing my job, but outside of working hours I am going to concentrate entirely on one thing.
I realise that a healthy mind requires a healthy body which means I should still do a bit of cycling and squash. Maybe a couple of workouts to keep my body and mind supple and capable. And I do want to utilise my games programming muscles.
So, I am now going to focus entirely on this list:
- Finishing “The Motley Life of Edison Swift” before end of June 2022
- Writing two blog posts every week
- Getting The Literarium up and running
- Write a fantastic author helping tool
- Distribute my multidimensional thesaurus to the world
- Create a fabulous Patreon presence
- Ride my bike more
- Get 2,500 SquashLevel points
- Write a working version of Chesster
I think I’ll be much happier now that I’ve only got one thing to do.
Suffering the arrows of outrageous fortune
It seems obvious to me now, that writing Charlie’s Worries was akin to making the dread journey through the Mines of Moria – battling the goblins of procrastination, the cave-troll of doubt and then the ultimate enemy, the Balrog of pernickety editing. It’s almost as if JRR Tolkien wrote that section specifically to highlight the perils and torments of writing a novel.
So, after two years of scribbling and typing, I emerged from the fusty tunnels of imagination into the bright light of hope and Lothlórien. Galadriel took me to a clearing and showed me some things that have not yet come to pass. I expected to see money raining from the sky and awards and publishers prostrating themselves before me, yet strangely all I saw was fire and ruin.
“I know what it is you saw, for it is also in my mind.” Galadriel’s voice echoed in my head, somewhat smugly.
“I cannot do this alone.” I replied.
“You are a writer, Simon. To be a writer is to be alone.”
So I screwed up my courage and sent out missives to the Gatekeepers of Amon Hen (I think this is what most people call Literary Agents). Then I set out onto the river of rejection with only some biscuits for sustenance.
I could sense the Gatekeepers chasing me down the banks of the river. Somehow I knew they were there, just out of sight, but always in my thoughts. I imagined them reading my work, gasping at its audacious originality, crying at the pathos, laughing hysterically at the funny bits and then falling over themselves to send me an Email of Acceptance.
But this utterly failed to happen. Instead gnarly, black arrows of rejection thumped into my heart. Each one chipping away at my self belief, until now, two weeks after I sent the first email, I lie breathless against a tree with eleven slivers of despair protruding from my soul.
Then, once again, I hear Galadriel’s voice in my head. It says: “The quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail to the ruin of all.”
So, slightly heartened by these somewhat ambiguous words of encouragement, I determine not only to stagger to my feet and suffer the inevitable sting of bad news, but to write more. I’ve already written nearly 15,000 words of The Book of Lies and I shall use this as a shield against the depressing times ahead.
So bring on Sauron, what’s the worst that can happen?
Walking and Talking
I’m a natural at walking. I can stride, stroll and saunter or tramp, tread and traipse without even thinking about it. My agile mind detects upcoming obstacles and adjusts my gait to stop me from tripping over kerbs or falling down wells.
Sometimes though, when I’m out perambulating it occurs to me how complex the act of walking is. I’ve seen videos of sophisticated robots utterly confounded by a rudimentry set of steps, confused to the extent where one of them smashes its face into the floor.
And once I start thinking about what I’m doing, it becomes much more difficult. It usually starts with my arms. They start swinging too much. A moment before, when my subconscious was controlling everything, they were swinging just enough to provide me with perfect balance. Now, I have no idea how much to swing them to keep me upright so, just to be sure, I overcompensate.
This, I suddenly realise, looks ridiculous, so I stop swinging them completely and walk with my arms rigid at my sides. But this can’t be right… How do I do this normally? I have no idea.
Then working my legs becomes a problem. Should I lift my knees this high? Or kick out more with my foot? Should I be leaning further forwards? Or back?
And before I know it I’ve almost completely forgotten how to walk. Obviously I can still get to where I’m going, but now I might be walking like a gorilla or a scuba diver still wearing his flippers.
I can also speak quite fluently. In almost any conversation I find myself involved with, words flow from me in the correct sequence and my avid listener is enriched with the knowledge of almost exactly what I mean. I don’t have to think about it.
So, why, why in the name of all that is literally holy, is it so hard to write anything sensible?
I believe that it’s the walking problem. As soon as I analyse what I’m doing, as soon as I worry that my meaning might be misunderstood, I’m doomed. An easy sentence to say becomes an impossible one to write. There are too many choices, too many wrong ways of expressing myself.
A brilliant writer is like an amazing one-man-band strolling down the street, drum beating, cymbals crashing, ukelele strumming and mouth organ humming, all in perfect harmony. It looks easy and part of the audience’s delight comes from the fact that the music produced is not forced, it’s a natural product of the lithe skill of the artist.
Oh how I wish I could write like that.
A Man’s Best Friend
So Faber Academy run a #quickfic competition every Friday. They’ve been doing it for a few weeks now, but I’ve only just found out about it.
This week, the challenge was to write a story in 250 words or less inspired by the canine idiot in the picture.
I called mine “A Man’s Best Friend” and it’s an ironic insight into the human male’s disregard for relationships in the face of his single minded pursuit of more pointless projects.
I thought it was quite clever in its meta qualities as I was obviously procrastinating by writing it.
It didn’t win, but here it is…
A Man’s Best Friend
It took many, many hours spread over years to train him, but I finally did it.
Jasper could smell an item of clothing inside his little, blue suitcase and determine who it belonged to in a room full of strangers.
It was our party trick. He’d hold the suitcase in his mouth, sit on his haunches and take a few moments to stare at everyone before him, considering. Then, with a confident flick of his tail he would take the suitcase to the owner of the item.
He was always right. It was like magic.
I loved showing him off at parties. I’d get him to do it ten times over the course of the night, and all our guests would be delighted.
Yesterday I was surprised to see Jasper sitting on the cobbles opposite the cafe I’d stopped at for lunch. He was staring at me, with his suitcase hanging daintily from his mouth.
As if triggered by my attention, he jumped up, trotted towards me and dropped the suitcase at my feet.
I looked around to see if I could spot my wife grinning from some hidden vantage point, but there didn’t seem to be anywhere to hide.
I lifted the suitcase onto my table and opened it.
Inside there was a pair my socks with a note pinned to them.
“I’m leaving you.” The note said. “You can keep the dog.”
I scratched Jasper’s head and wondered how he’d managed to find me.
The winners are here: QuickFic Winners 17th April 2015