My Secret Tunnels, my Secret Bases

I have many fantasies, a secret agent alt-persona, who is always needing to get away in a hurry from the scene of my assassinations and bomb based sabotagings.

Alternatively, I accidentally ran over an oldster on my bicycle, and need to get away in a hurry.

I have various imaginings on how this would work. On one hand I have secret dens in nearby woods, or even little stands of trees in town, amidst unsuspecting houses. After doing my mischiefs, I find my nearest hideout, and my individual heat signature pattern opens it up to me and only me…the doors slide back like a mini Tracey Island, brambles and nettles moving with it.

And then I jump in, and the door slides back as if nothing had happened. IR cameras and ground penetrating radar are scrambled. I am totally safe. I have media, books, and a huge supply of rum. I keep changes of clothing inside, and disguises; a machine can bleach my hair straw blond in 5 seconds – envious ladies? – and change my eyes.

I always pick black-brown and bright blue eyes.

All this in a room the size of a living room. Ultrasonic showers. Body waste teleported out of you to the nearest treatment works.

(Reflecting on this, I realise the sci fi novella “A Plague of Demons” has something similar)

The cycle escape routes are a network of tunnels that just open up in the road, and slide me down into 2 metre wide underground Sustrans routes that link up my secret bases.

One minute I’m being chased by helicopters, the next minute I am gone, cycling deep underground with nightvision goggles on, planning my next daring act of subversion.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 30.05.14

Gamma Ray Burst Creatures

At the time of writing, it seems the Gamma Ray Burst “observed” in the Andromeda Galaxy may be some kind of instrumentation artefact, but no matter.

It doesn’t change a thing.

There are creatures that live near black holes, neutron stars and other potential sources of super high energy gamma rays. They are intelligent yet tenuous, a loose collection of exotic particles with nervous systems based on the scintillations produced by hydrogen atoms emitting energy in transitions high above the Paschen and the Pfund. Their brains exist in the Plank fluctuations, and they “see” by registering energy transitions caused by these energy transitions I describe.

They enjoy nothing more than to observe the beauty of the hyper high energy universe, to us, I suppose it would seem as if existence was coloured in brilliant silver and glittering purple-violet.

Every time there is a cataclysmic event like a gamma ray burst, the tremendously energies cause these contemplative creatures to begin to sail the gamma breezes out into intergalactic space, communicating their happiness at motion to all their kind.

Each of these creatures, a hundred kilometres across or more, is encoded to breed by budding off in the 7^th dimension and so we don’t encounter their off spring for a thousand years or more, as they gradually drop back through the dimensions into our space.

This is just as well, because sadly, though these beautiful creatures mean us no harm, and would be highly distressed to think that they were, every time they encounter a planet of sentient life forms, as aetherially as ghosts, their Plank energies cause terrible damage to living beings. It causes the nervous system to spasm, causing Tourette’s and other worldly analogues in some creatures, but death in others.

Who it happens to is a matter of pure chance, as by a lucky quirk their Plank fluctuations are only in phase with living matter on rare occasions. But when it happens, it can be devastating.

 

And every time we observe a gamma ray burst, they are passing through something. And someone. On our world.

Copyright Simon Hodgson / Bloody Mulberry 28.05.14

The Broken Poet Repair Shop

Your poet is stuck on a stanza. Locked in a hexameter. Beaten by a beat, fingers blistered on a pencil. Stuck in a loop, endlessly repeating the words “Desolate...Desolation...” over and over again.

Think your poet is fit only for lyrical landfill? Thing again!

The all new custom “Wordy-smith Poet Poet Chop Shop” can get your poet rhapsodising again in less than a day with our new express service. We can remove writers block, stammering, excessive posing and a tendency to poet-ise to impress women while-u-wait, using parts ethically sourced from renewable sources.

No longer will your poet falter during your fancy dinner party recital of TS Eliot, and ever more will your curator of similical beauty trip up over his tongue in a Wordsworth. And your friends will love you too, as the hardrive on your newly upgraded poet can have many extra gigabytes of poetry installed, so no more will there be awkward pauses during your crucial literary dinner party with an English Literature student you would like to get to know better.

In case your poet turns out to be beyond economical repair, we can dispose of it humanely for you, and discuss some great deals we have on brand new dada-ist and avant garde models custom made just for you!

Only at “Wordy-smith Poet Poet Chop Shop”! Your bard, is our business.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 23.05.14

A Bed of Butterflies

You can make a bed of butterflies you know, I've done it. And it requires no cruelty whatsoever.

You need butteflies, obviously, as many as you can get, big ones, little ones, bright and dark. I attract them into a room by leaving a window open on a sunny day, in a room with felt walls soaked in nectar. The butterflies drift gently in on flittering wings, and settle on the felt to drink the sweet nectar.

As they move up and down on the felt, the butterflies begin to get statically electrically charged, and thus they start to attract each other as a jumper rubbed balloon does a wall. Their delicate wings begin to align like molecules in a crystal...to align...to stick together softly.

Eventually, after a day or three, each wall should be turned into a veritable sheet of butterflies. Gently detatch them, as gently as stillness, and place them atop your base sheet. Add other sheets as required, depending on ambient temperature. The butterflies will flap their wings in resonance, keeping them from settling on top of each other.

As night closes in, settle under your butterfly sheets, and sleep the stillest sleep of all, warmed by gentle downdrafts of air. As dawn breaks, lift delicately your butterfly sheets up, and place them back on the nectar walls to recharge, ready for another nights peaceful sleep.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 22.05.14

Helloooooo Mr Dalek

You are Katy Manning, a very attractive woman who played John Pertwee's assistant Jo Yates in Doctor Who for a few years. How best to advance your career afterwards?

The answer is, of course, to do a really unsubtle Doctor Who themed photo shoot!

They Make You Communist – The Invaders from Mars

One of the things I like to do when I get the chance, when I'm not studying planetary sciences, journalism or the history of the ancient Roman sewer, is to settle with a huge cup of tea in Starbucks or wherever, and watch a classic film over wi-fi.

It takes two or three visits, but the movie gets watched eventually, as the tea gets colder and the pigeons stare in through the window at me. The latest one I watched was “Invaders from Mars”, a 1953 piece of classic atomic age paranoia with a cast no-one's ever heard of, and an irritating boy as the chief protagonist.

The film is slightly different from the usual “Kid sees something, no-one believes him” plot you get in movies of this type, right up through Jaws in the 70s, in that it takes that standard trope and spins it into “Kid sees something, no-one believes him until a lot earlier in the film than is normally the case.” Late at night, the boy David sees a bright green flying saucer land in the sand pits behind his house – how Horsell Common like! - and in the morning his father, a worker at a secret rocket research plant, goes out to investigate.

He comes back eventually as the family begin to panic...but he isn't quite the same. In fact, his voice is flat, he is agressive, and he hits his son! But far worse than child abuse IS THE FACT HE HAS BEEN TURNED INTO A COMMUNIST! We know this because in 1950s American carport suburbia, only communists would shout at their wives and beat their kids up.

As further confirmation that he is now evil, he is lit predominantly from underneath so his pinko face is now covered in sinister shadows, and he stops shaving, instantaneously going stubbly in the space of 15 minutes.

The wife is of course properly submissive to even her spousal Stalin, but at some point she goes out to the sand pit and comes back acting the same way. David's friend, a neighbourhood Bonnie Langford and daughter of another rocket scientist, goes out to the pit and returns to set fire to her house before dropping dead of a mysterious brain haemmorhage.

Luckily the boy is rescued from his now evil parents by a woman doctor, and a distinctly unsceptical astronomer who belies in UFOs – The Lubbock Lights and George Mantell's death get a mention – and has a magical telescope that can see David's house even when pointing at the sky. And through this scope, they see various soldiers and local people being sucked down into the sand, including a General.

That same General is then caught trying to sabotage the Rocket factory, before he too dies of a Stroke. The army are all too ready now to believe there is something down there, as it transpires the dead have had crystals implanted into their brains, controlling their very actions. COMMUNIST DREAMS OF MIND CONTROL HAVE BEEN MADE REAL.

So everyone troops off to the sand pit, stock footage of tanks shoot at it, and eventually everyone gets sucked down into the sand to meet giant “Mu-tants” - supposedly 8 feet tall Martians with silly masks on and very obvious zippers up the back of their genital free bodysuits. They have turned the tunnels below the sand into explosive condoms (TRUE) that turn into explosive oatmeal (ALSO TRUE) when fired on by a hokey looking laser.

The child and his scientist mentors are eventually led before a head in a goldfish bowl that does sod all apart from fiddle with its pincers and is apparently “Mankind, distilled into its ultimate form”. The woman, of course, is selected for crystal implantation by the disembodied head, before of course rescue happens and the boy blows the aliens up with their own exploding oatmeal contraceptives, before he wakes in his own bed and finds IT WAS ALL A DREAM.

But then he sees the saucer land again...

The film is collosally stupid, and colosally entertaining, particularly the stuff legged lumbering Martians and their all too obvious outfits, but it also stands out as one of the paradigm movies of American “Reds Under the Bed” paranoia. After visiting the pit, the adults come back cold, evil, and with all their individualism erased. They engage in covert attacks on American military might, are clearly godless, and their leader is essentially the embodiment of the US perception of communism – a human with all the humanity distilled out of them, leading a bunch of collectivised drones.

You still have to love it though!

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 12.05.14