Ribofunk   ::   Филиппо Пол Ди

To make a long story short, we had to get rid of the spikes (but not before everyone in our cohort saw us with them), and Honeysuckle's parents had to pay for it all, and she had her estrogen shut off for a month, and Jinx, my darling Jinx, got sentback to Asgard.

But I really am not worried. Like Jinx said, a year is not such a long time to wait till we're franchised.

And after seeing me with a spike, there wasn't much resistance from the poohs a month later, when I pleaded one last time for tits.

And they're from a much classier vendor's line than hers!



Up the Lazy River



1. Muscle Fatigue



Flying northwest, parallel to the interface of the River Seven bankside forest and the manicured savannah, across which herds of null-sophont cultivars roamed peacefully, Norodom Dos Santos grieved for his hyperfluid charge.

Normally, River Seven appeared from the air as a thick two-toned viscous snake, subtly pulsing in controlled opposing flows. Constrained by its mostly baseline geophysical channel, two-thirds dirty quicksilver grey and one-third matte black, it resembled a stripe of gel like the squeezings from a tube of antique toothpaste.

Today, River Seven lacked its usual luster, seemed lifeless and dispirited, victim of the unexplained changes Dos Santos was speeding to investigate.

I'm personifying the River again, Dos Santos mildly chided himself. What would Master Trexler think of such imprecision in one of his students?

After all, even dead, Trexler still exhibited all those old personality traits which a Turing Level Eight platform

was capable of emulating, and one did not care to disappoint him.

Transferring his Synergen-grown craft to kibe autopilot (a simple TL4), Dos Santos resolved to abandon sentimentalism for work. Prompting his higher centers into microsleep, he freed up paraneurons to run deep plectic simulations of the River's failure.

Midway through the third evocation, disaster struck.

Propulsion myofibrils ripped away from the left COfiber-polysaccharide lattice wing with a sound like a cleaver through a slab of lapinovine.

The abnormal sound instantly reawakened the River Master's full awareness.

With a sinking feeling, Dos Santos realized his ladybug was going down.

The sudden threat to his life triggered a criticality flash that cascaded across his Sphinxco wetware mods: this mission was deeper than a simple repair call…

Dos Santos knew better than to try to wrest control away from the kibe unit under emergency conditions-although a gut response still jerked his hands toward the control ganglia. Instead, he quickly snugged the wrist-dangling gloves of his millipore survival suit on, effectively disabling his CamNeuro digiface.