[This version contains suggested background music notes from a 
possible video project.  Several options are given.  Format 
is:  "Song", Band (Album).
Grammar has not been cleaned up yet.
Note not all italics have been _sidelined_ yet]




In The Kingdom Of The Blind


  (Jonathan Swords-Holdsworth)



	I remember that as a child, we had an invisible man in our 
neighbourhood. Sometimes, usually in late day sun, I could 
actually see him.  A liquid silhouette of thicker air.
	He was always running.  Only once did I ever see him stop 
and stand still -  that's how I was able to tell he was a He - 
before he ran on.  I had seen that he was very tall, an 
impossibly broad-shouldered Marvel Comics figure, and I could 
see through him, just right through him.  In all I must have 
seen him five times or more.
	Years later I heard my friends talk, more and more, about 
"cloaking devices".  General speculation about, dollar wise, 
just how much the military was moving into Stealth.
	But it wasn't until my late teens, that with a jolt I woke 
up one night and remembered the invisible man.
	Of course, no one believed me.


["A Forest", The Cure (Seventeen Seconds album version)]


	Gath loved his jacket.  Its base was black fashion leather, 
which of course could do no wrong, but much had been worked on 
top of that.  Threads and thongs, laced in knotwork patterns 
all across the arms and back, and rows of stylish black-mirror 
which were bordered like long broaches to incorporate them.
	It had been partly a gift, but still it had cost Gath three 
months of hard dealing, _and_ other work on top of that, to pay 
off.  It was the love-labour of three people:  a fashion 
designer, a jeweller, and an electronic engineer.
	The jacket was alive.  The mirrors were its holographic 
eyes.
	Gath could see three other jackets, just from where he sat 
looking around Blood And Honey's "dark dingy and smoke filled" 
basement.
	Blood And Honey was a nightclub being destroyed.  Its 
atmosphere had remained unsullied, for a glorious two years, 
before the owners had succumbed to Renovation Disease.  Now the 
straights were slowly invading, diluting, wrecking.  But truth 
to tell, Gath liked this.  It mixed some money into his 
clientele.
	Jocasta slunk into view and sat down close to one of the 
young jacket wearers.  He jumped visibly, his space suddenly 
invaded by her black leather and lace, by her sharp hair and 
dramatically painted face.  He was thin and "dweeby" looking, 
but for some reason she genuinely liked them like that.  Gath 
was mystified.  They weren't to his taste at all, oh no.
	Gath watched, fascinated, as a short vignette took place:  
Jocasta attempting to warm up a conversation;  Jocasta 
attempting to drag her dweeb onto the dance floor;  Jocasta 
sitting boredly, watching his departing back.  
	Scared off another one, thought Gath.
	She walked over to his corner and sat down.
	"He got you, by the way," Gath told her.
	She looked annoyed.
	"Yeah, yeah, I know.  And may he stain his sheets with the 
joy of me."
	She looked straight at Gath.
	"Fucking idiot could have had the real thing. So why 
_bother_?"
	They were both sure they knew what the boy would do when he 
got his jacket home, and they both wondered just how much of 
her he had taken with him.  Gath was a few months behind on the 
current state of the art of holo-to-virtual.  He guessed it all 
depended on how rich the kid had been.  What kind of Jocasta 
would he enjoy tonight?  Would he be fascinated?  Dissatisfied 
enough to come back for more?  And how easy would he be to ...
	Someone was standing in front of Gath.  Gath looked up over 
his spectacles at a smiling dickhead.  Thin, pale and trembling 
(and definitely a dickhead), this guy was one Gath knew as a 
regular.  So did Gath's jacket, it remembered the 
characteristic shake only too well.  The symbols flashing 
before Gath's eyes almost screamed _Customer_.
	Gath offered him a chair, that alone meaning "I am currently 
open for trade".  They chatted and gesticulated animatedly and 
normally, then the guy left with a heavier breast pocket made 
that way by a practiced gesture.  Nearly half a gram, quite a 
purchase.
	"What about that crowd?"   Jocasta pointed.
	Gath adjusted his glasses, concentrating on a small group.
	"Need to get a little closer," he murmured.
	He stood and made his way through the noise and lights, 
stopping to check out a well constructed male body here and 
there.  He was suddenly glad he had allowed himself the 
diversion, for the two males ahead of him were cops.
	They were _very_ well disguised.   They both had 
lawyer/stockbroker haircuts, and they had astonishingly 
accurate clothes.  But they were betrayed, as always.
	Gath looked into infinity, watching red and white crosshairs 
dancing over the people ahead: now joining eyes, now lancing 
from hip to shoulder, now framing body parts in clusters of 
gliding rectangles.
	He watched them for a whole two minutes, just to be 
_absolutely_ sure, but every five seconds the same word and 
same high probability was written across the scene.
	Jocasta queried him when he sat down.
	"Pigs?"
	He glanced at her nervously.
	"Brilliantly done up.  But _brilliantly_.  No doubts, 
though."
	 As the night progressed, they amused themselves watching 
the two cops slowly circuit the basement.  They saw some of the 
more experienced clubbers catch on and avoid them, but they 
didn't have Gath's jacket and it took them longer.
	By the time the cops had left, the jacket had found him six 
more customers, marking them by their walks.  They were happy 
now and so was he - four grand in one night was hard to beat.
	He watched his clients leave, with his jacket following the 
slight but peculiar quivering that identified them as addicts.  
Gath watched through his glasses as the jacket tracked them 
well into the crowd, then it gave up and began searching for 
easier targets.
	Gath hoped this could all just go on for another year.  Just 
one more year, please.  Never busted, never losing ground.
	Gath really _loved_ his jacket.


	The problems happened much too fast.
	The fence alarm buzzed once then stopped.  That was _not_ 
was it was supposed to do.  Then the dogs inside barked loudly 
for a few seconds, then they went silent too.  
	A guard came running toward the courtyard.
	He had the sense to stop before he ran headlong into it, and 
started pressing all the emergency buttons on his mobile 
instead.  He noticed that he was trembling, and starting to 
sweat coldly.
	The perimeter fence was high tech: "God" tech his masters 
called it, like everything they payed him to guard here.  The 
dogs were in separate armoured enclosures, so they weren't all 
killable at once, not at long range.  Ergo - a _very_ 
sophisticated, fast attack was in progress, and the intruders 
(or intruder) were well inside the compound by now.
	The guard flattened himself against the wall and waited.  He 
should be hearing the chopper any minute, he thought, with its 
load of heavy weapons and swarm of trained army types.  They'd-
	Metal was ripping and screaming.  The sound was so loud and 
discordant it hurt his ears.  He couldn't stop himself anymore.  
He sprang across to the corner and peered along the courtyard.  
The sound stopped.
	The wall was open already, with a great dark wound and the 
steel folded back.  A mechanistic lump of a silhouette that 
could have been an angle-grinder lay on the concrete.
	He turned up the intensification on his goggles, dialling in 
infra red false-colour as well, and waited some more.
	The edge of the great wound was colour-coded a deep orange, 
and beyond...
	_Shit_.  There he was! 	
	A figure was backing awkwardly into the courtyard, dragging 
a long object.  It suddenly noticed him, spinning around and 
grabbing for something at its belt.
	He didn't hesitate, his training and fear prevented that.  
His sidearm spat a blue tongue of fire and the intruder 
crumpled.  He rushed to the opening and stopped to one side so 
that any others couldn't get a clear shot from inside.  He 
waited, again.
	Then with a jolt he realised - it was now over two minutes 
since he had sounded the alarm.  So where in hell was the 
chopper, or even ground support?
	The lights all came on.  Just like that.  Through the hole 
the guard now had an unnaturally bright view inside the 
warehouse.  He could see that on the ground inside was a long 
military carrying box, and it was open.
	Acting on a pulse of adrenalin that he didn't stop to 
question, he charged through the gap.  He looked in every 
direction, then slowed down and began to creep around the first 
stack of containers.  He peered past the edge and down the long 
aisle.
	He got just a long glimpse before it all began.  
	A suit of armour stood at the far end of the aisle, 
glittering in the mysterious, ugly beauty of extremely high 
technology.  The opaque face plate was shut but the body was 
still not fully closed, and the intruder stood there with his 
hands on the last fastening.  There was no doubt that he could 
see the guard.  It was almost comical, like catching a man 
urinating in public.
	The suit of armour vanished.
	The guard fired once, knowing he had missed even before the 
echoes had stopped.   When they did stop it took him a little 
while to realise that he wasn't dead - he was now merely alone.


	Anna squinted out over the roof.  The day was still too 
bright, but they had to do it now.  She looked down at the 
violence in her palm.  The speaker below the tiny display 
screamed a terrified woman's scream.
	"OK its now," she said, and the three of them sprinted out 
into the light.  Helen slapped down the boxes and almost threw 
the projector into Anna's hands.  Rory backed off ten feet, 
trailing a coiled black optical pipe, and dropped his backpack.  
The backpack had to be exiled that distance because it was 
expendable.  He darted away to do his part, pulling his mobile 
from his pocket as he ran.
	The roof was perimetered by a three foot high wall, and the 
ventilator hut they had just vacated was the only protrusion.  
They had an uninterrupted view of three skyscrapers.  They 
chose the biggest and whitest.
	Anna shouldered the projector, while Helen plugged the 
equipment together and threw the aerial cable sprawling.  She 
grabbed her PDA which doubled as the remote control for the 
whole system.
	"You're on, Peter, don't lose it!" she said into the device, 
then she grabbed the other side of the projector, helping to 
steady it.
	Rory's voice was vibrating in Helen's ears.
	"All clear, go for it! Do it!"
	The projector came alive, activated by a trigger squeeze 
forty kilometres away.
	The whole of the skyscraper's side lit up with a scene from 
Hell.  In the middle of the shot, a soldier ten storeys high 
was bringing his rifle butt down on a woman's neck.  It was in 
silence, but that was taken care of by a separate broadcast.  
The public, and their scanners, already knew all the right 
channels.
	The protesters were being crushed.   This time the militia 
was without mercy.  The scenes were too urgent, too real to fit 
into Australia.  But there they were, in moving pictures the 
size of buildings, layed out for all Melbourne to see.
	"Eric's a bit worried," said Rory in their ears.  Eric was 
on another roof nearby.  He could see a long way, so that most 
probably meant choppers on the horizon.
	The camera kept getting disturbingly close to the action, 
then pulling back.  It came to Anna that Peter was not 
telefotoing this footage - he was right there in the middle of 
it.
	Without warning a guard was bearing down on the camera, his 
block-wide face red and full of mayhem.  Suddenly he stopped, 
cupping his hand to his ear.  Then he broke into a broad, 
genial smile and started to walk away.
	Anna was dropping the projector even before Helen yelled 
"_Let's_get_out've_here!_"  As the beam of the projector fell, 
for an instant something caught it and refracted it wildly 
around the roof.  It was gone so fast only Anna saw it.  She 
had no time right then to think about it.
	Then the Reflex cut in.  A honed, practiced ordeal that was 
second nature to the three of them, by now it was as easy and 
as fluid as a gesture.  Assigned tasks were completed faster 
than they could have been tracked: the projector's caps closed;  
the backpack and aerial ripped loose and dumped;  the box 
strapped to a shoulder.
	Run.

	A voice crackled in their ears, Eric's this time.
	"_Forget_the_stairs,_I_can_see_cars!_ _Go_over_the_side!_ 
_NOW!_"
	Being afraid wasn't an assigned task and it wasn't 
encouraged in PANOPTICON's members at this stage of the game.  
It took too much valuable time to shiver and worry.  Besides, 
it made others around you nervous.
	The three knew that what the cops would mete out far 
exceeded any slight inconvenience presented by their height 
above the ground.
	Anna and Helen reached where Rory stood as a human marker, 
then all three of them jumped over the wall together and fell.   
Rory's net stopped them two stories over the carpark, then he 
cut them loose and rappelled them down onto the roofs of parked 
BMW's and delivery van's.  A few alarms went off.
	The ran in three opposite directions, cycling their clothes 
as they went.  Rory had the easiest job of escape, he was 
carrying nothing unusual to discard - his mastery of nets and 
ropes gave him that privileged status within the PANOPTICON 
crowd.
	Anna threw the projector into bushes near the museum.  
Something went crunch, but it would just be fixed later.
	Helen met Eric near the station and bestowed him with her 
backpack.  Then she ran onto the nearest train.
	Eric looked up and grinned as he heard the choppers close in 
two blocks away.
	"So long as we keep fit," he thought, and he grinned, "You 
arseholes just _cannot_ do us."
	His left tear duct dripped slightly.  He rubbed the eye, 
irritated at the blurring.  Then he froze, startled, as the 
blur darted round a corner.
	The day was dying.


	As if Melbourne did not yet have enough Hell within its 
confines, as if it had not yet lost all the worth it had once 
owned, something yet more wicked entered into it.  It was 
something worse than any civil strife, worse than oppression.
	It was insane, it was competent, and it was - for the moment 
anyway - human.
	Only one redeeming feature did it have:  In its hunger and 
its greed, it cared not who it claimed.
	Its atrocities were fairly cast, favouring and sparing none.


	Jocasta left Gath at Blood And Honey.
	She passed the bouncers, stopping at the end of the alley 
and keeping them in view as she lit her cigarette.  The were 
old acquaintances, and would look out for her.  No one would 
follow her unchallenged around the corner, she decided, and 
went seeking peace in the culdesac.
	She leaned against the wall and wished she were drugged.  It 
would have kept modern life in Melbourne farther from her 
thoughts.  Nearly all the people she had liked had long since 
left Victoria, many of them had left Australia altogether.  
They admired her, it took strength to stay behind.
	A section of wall detached itself and wrapped arms of 
swimming brick around her.  In an instant she was a struggling 
prisoner in the embrace of a glass statue.  It was huge and 
grotesque.  Something gagged her mouth, but she didn't stop 
trying to scream.
	It seemed to take forever, (minutes perhaps?), and then as 
suddenly as it began it was over.  She lay bruised on the alley 
floor among dirty paper, alone, dazed and violated.
	Finally the bouncers heard her cries and came running.  One 
looked down and saw Jocasta's raped figure crumpled on the 
tarmac, the other looked up and saw the rapist.  For his 
trouble his head was split open by something that hissed down 
from above.   The body was still falling as the other bouncer 
looked up and saw a faint outline scuttle over the roof and 
disappear, then he started screaming too.


	The police talked to Gath for far too long.  Even beside 
Jocasta's hospital bed they still snarled at him and heaped 
their suspicion upon him.  And the militia guys.  Gath and the 
Matron together had finally persuaded the cops that Jocasta 
didn't _need_ their "protection" _here_, what she really needed 
was not to see dickheads walking around with big _guns_.
	The militia left, and finally the cops did too.  They had 
told Gath absolutely _nothing_ he didn't already know.
	Jo's bravery had shocked him.  She had quite calmly talked 
of the feel of cold steel, a faint whine of hydraulics, and 
then the thing's groin had become visible in the streetlight, 
revealing a very human, erect penis covered in transparent 
plastic.  She had described the impossible, unrestrainable 
strength that the attacker had.  And she described how, when it 
was done and had thrown her down, how it had sort of "run" up 
the wall and out of her view.
	The forensics had crawled all over her, and two militia guys 
had practically dragged Frank, the other bouncer, away.  No one 
knew where he was now.
	"I saw it..." Jocasta was saying.
	Gath was taken aback.
	"_Him?_" he asked.
	She shook her head.  "No.  The thing that killed Pierre."
	Gath straightened.  She hadn't told the cops this.  Not when 
he was with her anyway.
	"It was about this long," her fingers were about twenty 
centimetres apart, "Moving quite slowly really,  brass colour.   
Thick too, like a walking stick almost."
	A bolt.  A crossbow bolt.


	Rush.  Pure rush.
	This was like uniform all over again.  The feeling of purity 
and untouchability.  This time he was not symbolic, this time 
he _was_ power.  Incarnate power.
	God, but the suit felt good.
	Its designers were truly geniuses.  Their child would live 
on long into new generations of war, in just the way the 
Blackbird aircraft had been a good twenty three years ahead of 
its time.
	It breathed, like it was pleased to hold him.  It told him 
everything, things about the world he had never realised.  
Sight chosen from the entire spectrum, even heat and ultra-
violet, sound gathered in from kilometres around.  Hands that 
could grip smooth walls, and magic ropes to help where they 
failed.  
	It kept him clean and warm, and it opened for him when he 
wanted it to.  There had been many _special_ reasons to open it 
over the last weeks.   The suit had a shell that _gave_ when it 
was hit, yet would not let a sharp blade or close bullet 
through.   It had magic weapons, ones that he could recover if 
he was quick enough.   And _strength_, unimaginable strength, 
powered derived from new mysteries of battlefield electronics.
	But best of all, it hid him.  He was not an engineer, 
something to do with liquid crystals and "Wavefront Control" 
and fibres that exhibited "Voltage Spectrum Absorbency", they 
were only catch phrases to him.  All he knew and cared about 
was that it could turn him to glass, then to air.
	The suit gave him Life.  Ah Life, more now than he knew what 
to do with.  He sat looking down into a river of city light, 
randomly painting crosshairs on people below.


	Anna heard the rumours spread around PANOPTICON.  Some of 
the crowd were getting scared of rooftops.  For all the science 
of escape, that on which they and the other groups like ROOF 
all prided themselves, this _just_might_ be outside their 
capabilities.
	Against the rules many of them, particularly the women, were 
acquiring and carrying handguns now.  What the cops would do 
didn't matter.  This thing was too simple for all that:  It 
raped women and killed men, and it was very good at it.
	But Anna was beginning to feel something deeper, more 
galvanising than fear.  She was feeling a deep, primordial 
rage.  A rage from the genes.
A _vast_ rage.


	Gath saw it one night and decided right then that he was 
dead.  The media still hadn't admitted anything, still!  And 
here he was, he had nearly walked into it, in fact he had 
touched it!
	He had stepped onto the roof to look at the building next 
door, to try and figure out if there really was a bust 
happening in there, and it had brushed him as flew past.
	Now he stood frozen, watching it stop and turn.  The outline 
was clear to his jacket, the ripples in the air could not 
escape the device's notice.  Even without the red rectangles 
painted by his jacket, he could faintly see it against the rosy 
night clouds.  It was a giant Captain America, without the 
cape, made entirely of glass.
	Gath was sure that the creature was just targeting him more 
accurately, that it could see him as plain as if it were 
daylight.  He ran like a lion's breath was on his neck.  He 
charged headlong down the fire escape, hearing rapid clangs 
behind him.  Something hissed, followed by a hammer blow on the 
rail near Gath's head.
	He cleared open ground, and corpse faces looked out at him 
from the shadows.   The Wailing Wall, Melbourne's premier piece 
of junkie art.  He went sprinting through the shadow below the 
wall but remembered the out-jut too late.  He slammed into it 
at full speed and slumped against the wall.
	He watched the creature leave the base of the fire escape, 
and move towards him.  Huge, it was huge.  He could make out 
black bands on the arms and legs where the scenery was blotted 
out.   Not completely invisible then, Gath thought defeatedly.
	It swayed back and forth.  It turned around, then around 
again.
	Then it simply ran away.
	Gath waited whole minutes before he stood up.  He was 
baffled.  He turned and looked at the Wailing Wall.  Suddenly 
it became clear to him.  He was almost an exact match with the 
figures that cowered and crouched in the painting's lower half, 
and he was dwarfed by the standing ones.  He too had been 
hidden in the background.
	There was a flash above him.  He looked up to see the 
building illuminated with an image of police choking a man.  It 
was drastically foreshortened from down here, but he got the 
drift.   ROOF, or maybe PANOPTICON.   One of the groups with 
big projectors.
		"Shit," Gath thought, "They must have been coming up the 
other side when I was on this side."
	Gath decided to get out of there, and nearly ran into the 
half dozen police cars pulling up and silently disgorging 
militia onto the footpath.
	There was no time for introductions, he had to warn the 
projectionists.  He retraced his flight, back up the escape, 
and ran onto the roof seeing the wide cone of the beam ahead of 
him.
	He ran straight toward its apex and found himself looking 
down Helen's gun.
	"How the fuck did you get past our people?" she snarled.
	"I'll put it bluntly," he gasped between breaths, "That 
invisible fucker just nearly killed me on this roof, and this 
basement is swarming with cops and arseholes."


["Hit", The Jesus And Mary Chain (Barbed Wire Kisses)]


	Helen's thoughts moved rapidly behind her face.  She didn't 
say anything.  Anna shut the projector off.
	"Run!" Anna yelled, and she and Helen moved suddenly, the 
Reflex spiriting them back into the darkness.
	The roof lit up.  An amplified voice boomed, echoing around 
the concrete faces of the buildings.
	"FREEZE.  YOU WILL BE SHOT IF YOU MOVE.  I REPEAT.  YOU WILL 
BE SHOT IF YOU MOVE.  YOU WITH THE GUN, DROP IT NOW."
	Helen disarmed herself.
	Anna was crouching by the projector, eyes on the figures 
pouring out of the exits.
	Something hissed over her head, and the light went out with 
a deafening crack and in a waterfall of sparks.
	A man gave out a high pitched scream and something metallic 
was sent clattering across the roof.   Anna fell to the 
concrete, making herself as flat as she possibly could.  Gath 
and Helen instantly did the same.
	Firing opened up across the roof.  Gath peered up over the 
ventilator next to him, making out militia soldiers by the 
light of muzzle flashes.   A blur muddied the scene above him, 
and he glanced up.
	It was with them, crouching beside him.
	It stopped moving altogether for an instant, and after a 
brief moment Gath realised he simply couldn't see it anymore.  
His glasses were at the wrong angle for him to use his jacket.  
They probably wouldn't work on this angle anyway, he mused, and 
he wasn't about to lean up to adjust them.  It was obvious to 
him now how this thing managed to remain so dangerously 
_unpresent_.
	A bullet _splashed_ against its shoulder, orange sparks 
dripping into the air.  The creature whipped around, 
whirlpooling out of the background, and then there were two 
quiet clicks that trailed off into overlapping hisses.   A 
scream and a choked off gasp told Gath that the bolts had found 
their marks.
	The cops and the militia were suddenly losing fast.  The 
bursts of fire were becoming more sporadic, and taking on a 
panic-stricken randomness.  Between automatic fire, Gath could 
hear faint hisses.  Every time someone screamed, the gunfire 
became quieter.  
	In maybe two minutes, it was over.
	Gath's ears were ringing, but he was reasonably sure he 
could hear distant voices down the nearest stairwell.
	For all he knew, he was now the only thing left alive on the 
roof.  Apart from one other occupant, that was.


	Anna had her arm under the projector.  It never seemed so 
heavy when you were using it.   She could just make out Helen, 
laying near the guy that had run in on them.  Probably pretty 
safe to conclude he wasn't a cop or anything, she thought.   
They all might be friends, except they were all about to die 
right here. Was Rory dead already?
	As she wondered whether to move, a silhouette straddled 
Helen.  It appeared to Anna as a space-opera outline, the vast 
black shadow of an absurd robot.
	Anna screamed and it disappeared.  She heard heavy steps 
coming rapidly towards her.  Helen and Gath heard her scream 
and they both sat bolt upright and looked around.   They caught 
a glimpse of Anna flickering behind muddy glass, staring up at 
a face she couldn't see.
	Anna switched the projector on.
	The beam caught the creature and threw bizarre effects over 
the whole world, great psychedelic swirls washed across the 
faces of the buildings.  They could see the guy now.  It was 
like someone standing in front of the screen at an old style 
cinema.  Colours were wrapped around him like a blanket, 
revealing the suit's bulging mechanical shape.   He was 
thrashing around, arms windmilling in the air.  They heard a 
popping noise, then he turned and ran from them.
	Helen fired.
	In her sixteen year old hands she held one of the militia's 
rifles.  She triggered two short bursts, four shots each, into 
its face.  The force of the blast rocked her back on her heels 
and she stumbled.
	The creature reeled back clutching its face.  It fell to its 
knees, then pitched forward at Helen's feet and lay still.
	Slowly, the three of them gathered around it and Anna 
clicked her torch on.  As they watched, to their fascination, 
the glittering suit began climbing off the driver's body.  
Seals clicked and clunked, and again they heard the popping 
noise.  Servos and hydraulics whined dully beneath the layers 
that covered them.  The suit split open and lay like a cicada's 
shell over the body of its former occupant.
	They bent down and looked more closely at it.  It was 
covered in panels, just like Gath's jacket.  A bulky backpack 
was strapped to its shoulders, and there were many tool bags 
adorning a belt around its middle.  The backpack and toolbags 
were also covered in the mirror panels.
	Tentatively they reached out and began to try and pull the 
suit free of the body.  Beneath the panels they could feel 
cords of machinery, giving them an impression of industrial 
strength.  The suit was startlingly lightweight.
	Next to its hand lay the weapon that they realised must have 
killed the militia people; and Pierre, thought Gath.  Gath 
gingerly picked it up.  It was a heavy pod, a single football 
shaped and sized plastic ovoid with a trigger grip underneath.  
It had a fat mouth, which obviously played little part in 
directing the missiles the gun fired.
	"Don't just stand there, help flip it over!" Helen barked at 
Gath.  He put down the gun and the three of them dragged the 
suit over onto its back, at the same time uncovering the 
driver.
	The man was naked, and there was a lot of blood.  His 
identity would remain a mystery for the moment, for Helen's 
shots had destroyed his head.  For an unknown reason, the face 
plate had been open when she fired.  That popping sound, 
thought Gath.
	They dragged their eyes off the body and began exploring the 
suit properly.  A face plate that swung down and sealed.  Seams 
along the limbs and down the front, sealed with some kind of 
smooth zip lock.  The interior was some kind of incredibly soft 
mesh material, like thermal underwear or space suit 
undergarment.  They could make out coloured glows from inside 
the helmet that must have been still-operating readouts.
	The suit didn't appear damaged at all.
	"Who the fuck was..." began Gath, but Anna was ignoring him 
and already bent over, straightening the suit for carrying.  In 
the background they could definitely hear voices now, 
officially toned and interspersed with shouted orders.
	They left the equipment and dragged the suit along the path 
Rory (presumed dead) had laid before the firefight.  They were 
long gone when the militia dared onto the roof and the choppers 
came.
	All the police got was the projector.  On its side was 
stencilled "Property of the Human Race".


	It breathed, like it was pleased to contain her.  
	It told her everything.  It told her things about the world, 
things she had never realised.  Sight chosen from the entire 
spectrum, sound gathered in from kilometres around.
	Anna looked down into a busy riot scene, randomly painting 
crosshairs on police and militia.
	Life, ah Life.  More now than she knew what to do with.


["Self Esteem", The Offspring (album ?)]


THE END