ON THE WINGS OF A COCKROACH

        Then she closed her eyes and let drowned memory surface. A brightness of teeth, a laughing tongue, the wave washing away her goggles, the seed of a thistle drifting airily (freakily) on the lightest of winds, and fresh bread, that slight spot of blood on her underpants, butter more yellow, the whiteness of bread, and jam, a specific jam -

        Plum jelly. Butter.
        A panic of butterflies.
        And how did the wasp sing
        So deeply underwater?
        Red petals, red.
        The octopus groping.
        Dawn.

        Job done, Jozanna fed her poem to her symbolic analyser, which told her it was about separation anxiety and a fear of bats. (Isn't technology marvelous?)
        "You're running out of time," said the clock. "Don't screw around with it, log it now."
        So Jozanna logged her poem, abandoning it ("Ah, poor scrawling embryo, thou!") in return for (at a guess) three marks out of a possible five (Kusano was good that way, predictable, if you turned in the work she gave you the mark, and always pretty much the same mark, since Kusano was of the opinion that it took a good two centuries to judge quality, and nobody had that kind of time, not in this nanosecond society. In two centuries, anyway, they would all be dead).
        Then Jozanna Yu headed to the cafe for brunch, that meal which Sagamartha has described as "the bastardization of breakfast by lunch".
        The cafe. Where Markus was sitting playing upon his blue guitar (as always, as always), and Tebbit was chain smoking (apparently he was doing a lung cancer module), and Ploy (who had programmed herself fat, a political statement, apparently) was gorging on chocolate eclairs, and Vo-Vo was just sitting, admiring her own lacquered nails. Vo-Vo's hair was sprinkled with gold dust. (Total aesthete time, just too much, help, let me out of here!)
        Jozanna ordered up a bowl of icecream, two sugar plums, a can of Suki-Suki and a marzipan battleship (a girl needs a good, healthy, balanced diet) and sat back listening as Markus launched into one of his poems, accompanying himself on the blue guitar.

        My beloved, my beloved.
        Ambergris kissed us.
        I watched her legs
        Sizzle with the kidneys.
        My mother is an onion.
        In the season of circular rainbows,
        Monkeys prowl the wall.

        On Markus's blue guitar, perfectly good language was changed into gibberish. It was his special talent, and he was proud of it. He was already chairman and chief organizer of his own anarchist syndicate, and his stated ambition was to organize the total destruction of the semantic consensus, since he held that the categorizing principles of language were intrinsically oppressive, and only the hegemony of nonsense could liberate us into a realm of polymorphous interconnections. (Jozanna took this to mean that Markus wanted more sex, particularly of the orgiastic variety, but maybe that was just her dirty mind speaking).
        Poem done, Markus prowled the octaves, fingers twanging random notes from the strings of his long-suffering guitar. He was still at it when Gregor came in. Gregor took a seat next to Jozanna, making no mention of the fact that she had that morning smacked him into sugar lumps.
        "And how are we today?" said Markus. "Getting any?"
        "No," said Gregor, coughing discretely into his handkerchief. "I haven't been feeling up to it lately."
        He folded the handkerchief away, but not before everyone had had the chance to see that it was stained red with frank blood.
        "Tuberculosis?" said Vo-Vo loudly. "I had tuberculosis last year. How about you, Jozanna? I heard you went for something really nasty. Tertiary syphilis, wasn't it?"
        A low blow.
        "In point of fact," said Jozanna, "I haven't done a disease module, and I won't be doing one."
        "Oh no?" said Tebbit. "But it's compulsory."
        "Not if you take the algetic route," said Jozanna.
        "You never!" said Ploy.
        "I did, you know," said Jozanna, feeling immensely proud of herself. "I was a whale, I was harpooned, it took me half a day to die. How about that?"
        "Not exactly a fun experience," said Vo-Vo.
        "But was it inspirational?" said Markus.
        "Yes!" said Jozanna. "In fact, I've got the results here."
        Then she pulled out her kolamatura and paged through until she found the relevant poem, which she recited.

        Dandelions, dandelions, tien shan sang the wind,
        And her toenails were romancing with seals,
        And her icecubes sparked, they were varicose,
        They hadn't finished their homework.
        Oh - omphalos!

        The response was silence. Puzzled silence. Markus plucked at his guitar, his blue guitar, and Gregor coughed discretely yet one more time into his tubercular handkerchief. (Honestly - tuberculosis! Cliche cliche!)
        "I don't want to sound too, too ... down," said Ploy, "but what, pray tell, has that got to do with the death of a whale?"
        "Nothing," said Jozanna.
        "Nothing?" said Ploy.
        "Nothing will come of nothing," said Markus cryptically, fingers tapping out a brief flurry of codes on the sounding board of his blue guitar.
        "It's Reaction Mode poetry," explained Jozanna. "You take an experience, like, uh, open heart surgery or anal rape, and you go away and write something about bluebells or, you know, hairy dogs, closed circles of atoms, those petroleum thingies, quasars, crushed ice sherbet, whatever."
        "Explain, please," said Gregor.
        "Okay," said Ida. "If you're quite sure you've got both your brain cells switched on, I'll get it my best shot. Reaction Mode poetry - "
        But, even as she spoke, her own voice was getting fainter and fainter. On the word "poetry", it became inaudible. Colors faded from the cafe. Markus's blue guitar muted itself into shadow. The world became a suite of silent grays, then quavered. Then dissolved entirely, leaving Jozanna lost in a gray slush of chaos.
        She knew what had happened.
        A probability flare from the tarj had disrupted velvox transmissions - those instantaneous transmissions which were coded as subtle modulations of probability. Since she relied on velvox transmissions for her link to the consensual virtual reality of the Hax, the flare had disconnected her from the virtual campus of Lan-Lan Banzo.
        And now -
        Heat blared as Jozanna crashed into her corpse, her wretched flesh-and-blood body, the mortal animal which would one day kill her dead. She was sprawled in the gutter on the Ecological Boulevard, one of the major thoroughfares of the city of Maunch Delch, the ruling city of the planet Lopolith Mo.
        The same probability flare which had disconnected her from the Hax had also trashed the connections between her graft and her brain. Consequently, her echo - her personal emulation software - had lost control of her flesh-and-blood body. So she had gone sprawling. And how much damage had she done to herself? Grazed knees and a sore elbow. That was about it.
        "Oh, piss," said Jozanna.
        She picked up her fallen rubbish sack, lugged it down the pavement until she came to one of the big municipal rubbish bins, where she emptied the sack.
        Theoretically, she should now continue with the task that her echo had previously been taking care of. She should carry on patrolling the gutters of the Ecological Boulevard, picking up Suki-Suki cans, Franjo bottles, icecream papers, dead coconuts, discarded syringes and so on and so forth. Doing the junk job which helped pay for her tuition. But she was not in the mood.
        "And," said Jozanna, "besides, I have a headache."
        She did, too. Have to do something about that. Several times in the past, she had regained control of her flesh-and-blood body to find that same dehydration headache taking charge. She had meant to make the necessary adjustments to her echo to stop it happening - a little defensive drinking on a regular schedule, that was all it would take - but had never got round to it.
        "Fluids first," said Jozanna. "Work after."
        Peeling off her armored rubbish-collecting gloves, she wandered into a slummy streetside cafe dominated by a blaring television set. She ordered up a juice coconut then sat there drinking, feeling depressed.
        "Reality sucks," said Jozanna.
        If only you could live in the virtual realms forever. Become a permanent denizen of the Hax. But that was impossible. Absurdly, the aspiring intellect was still tied to this flesh-and-blood body, this walking corpse, this bag of bloody bones. A point which was hammered home every time there was a probability flare from the tarj. Worse, the technical people were saying another Disjunction would trash all velvox communications for generations - at minimum. Meaning: no more Hax. Even your graft wouldn't work any more. The end of civilization as we know it.
        Jozanna wiped sweat from her forehead. She hated this city. Its filthy air, its heat, its relentless humidity, its blaring traffic, its incessant crowds. And she hated her drudge job. Her flesh-and-blood body was as young, as blonde and as beautiful as her Hax persona, so what was she doing stuck in a job like this?
        Answer: in an Age of Universal Education, trained talent is cheap. Sure, you're a genius, Jozanna, but so is one person in every thousand. And there are so many thousands. So many thousands of millions of thousands. Hence your doom. Junk work. Slow grinding filthy ill-paid drudgery. Minimal wage stuff. Wage slave humiliation.
        "Hi, Jozanna."
        Gregor. And what the hell was Gregor Samsa doing, here in his flesh and his blood?
        "Gregor," said Jozanna, chidingly.
        "What is it?" said Gregor, seeing that something was wrong, but not knowing what.
        "You're humiliating me."
        "Humiliating ...?"
        "Seeing me like this."
        "Why?" said Gregor. "You look just like you do in the Hax."
        "I don't smell the same. Right here and now, I stink like the day before yesterday. Please leave."
        "But. Jozanna. I needed to tell you. Wanted to. Had to."
        "What?" said Jozanna, puzzled.
        "Do you really need me to say?"
        "Yes!"
        "I'm in love. With you."
        "What?" said Jozanna.
        "And you're in love with me, too, aren't you? That's what you meant, isn't it? That time when you slapped me, I mean."
        "Oh no," said Jozanna. "Oh no. That's not what I meant at all."
        And she got up to leave.
        "But you can't just leave me here," said Gregor.
        "Why not?" said Jozanna.
        "Because that way our story has no plot. No climax, no crisis, no closure."
        "Real life doesn't," said Jozanna shortly, and left.