# summers out of reach i don't believe in you by talk talk now plays in the lab background today you chew packet muesli with surprisingly non-cardboard tasting almond milk organic raisins and mindfulness are looking forward to an early data dump while going over last night's scene reports now shortly after finding oneself alone again in the cold collective kitchen of morning you consider it a miracle one has managed to get to university at all not that university could ever be considered the ultimate pineal of personal development and achievement - academic or otherwise merely another giant uk meat-processing factory split into different sections what gets dumped out at other end after multiple long and useless wasted years is generic grade capital-p product; obedient worker drones only reason one wanted to get here was to escape from the small no horse town of one's too-often tragically mediocre ongoing youth populated with desiccated undead shufflers credible - a fantastic feat of hyper modem science the researchers in our hometown arena derive so much pleasure from waxing ir cars each overcast sunday afternoon-mesh this horribly waxy static image of dire endlandian suburban life burned into false implanted experiences of earth-based existence as yet only half lived even at this late stage of 'project' there are still many more adventures to be had down the pulsing liquid black snake desert highway staring out the window of one's room-cube / lab at the chinese internal martial arts courtyard of the next door neighbour the topmost edge of ir garage has fancy tiles with a delicate network of trellised vines running down the wall soon it starts looking like the wall in a secrete temple mountain monastery in ancient china where needlessly esoteric martial arts are figured out by tired bruised but ideologically eager students revises reissues amendments new covers cheerless dwellings slackers sticky adolescent time pseudocode street markings it didn't take long only a few years before one started noticing some deep essential nonthing about life here about island researchers and how it's all filler no meaningful meat but plenty of greasy bone dry gristle years of half-remembered conversations in idle dead end seaside cafes - steamy sweat and jazz blue hex cigarette smoke rolling across smeary unwashed windows and everything bland in between marginalia of obscure sociological publications long dead and abandoned on time dusty shelves of local countryside town libraries where the permanently old wander in out for the change of a chat with the staff 'hello misses tempest nice to see you again lovely awful weather we're having can we interest you in another couple of saucy post-cyberpunk sci fi survival-error triagicomedy romance novellas' 'not this time thank you' they reply 'bung us an old huge mumford sociology textbook with those natty photographs of 1950's control amerika instead' we love to read the tiny spew texts student researchers of quote 'big science' scrawl in between the lines - tiny tawdry thrift store tales of unrequited will to life in small town south endland regular rounds of nets curtain ruffling while the holo-tv flickers forever in nameless backgrounds in hollow minds silent weeping rivers of blind fish eyes multitudes racing down electronic highways making it up as they go along along neverquite stopping to make the briefest of checks on batteries and hydrogen for the chainslaw ignition key for the stealth shinobi microlight the thinnest most transparent of silver jungle insects to take one high above the red brick canopy in dreams where one neverquite seems to rise up far enough above the shambling blue-grey crusty faced people eating suburban undead away from the middle of the road; anywhere out to fuzzy midnight margins to far out post-modem milton keynes industrial estates cool researchers talk about online where they use slick post-modem typefaces in bold displays of modem post-industrial design of recently paved over mindsets where one might get into serious post situationist ramblings and drink sweet herb tea from smart titanium-ceramic spun backpack flasks here have another taste-free vegan choccy biscuit / no we shouldn't oh go on then in which fragmented narrative snapshots from deep suburban archives are proved without doubt to be in no way a positive long term substitute for existence grey faced sickness of words paragraphs sentences snappy dialog well defined and emotionally rounded characters with nice hair white even pearly teeth sensually active with outgoing friends in the professional sector cute little cross sections of endland liff pre-packaged safe and easy to maintain - radial reassertions of the new clear family unit slow dead leaves in a box in a forgotten drawer in a haunted house in a frozen and maddeningly harsh copse of sad fossilised trees when researchers attempt to encompass to manage to classify to capture the half-imagined essence of whatever they think it means to live (or rather die yet continue to live) in such a nonplace nothing on telly tonight and nothing on tomorrow so why the heck not see how far this silent pathway goes forever deeper without end or rhyme without pause for specific special effects; expensive cheap neon sci fi flickering all way down dear researcher moths brushing up against electrical wires of a monolithic device now sparking spinning down burnt winged and lonely to the dirty floor of the biosynth butcher's shop destined to dance to deff by the endlessness of blue while unforgiving centuries are spent in nameless bedsit flats around old londonium town listening to the same warped dire tape memories sailing away in patient frozen darkness meanwhile the rent's due again and mental health fades to one's default implanted brain cell responses running blind through local woods on heavy autumn nights while wild things grow in the sweet dry hush of near dead dusk from here on in that is right from the outset it gets kinda sketchy a public dictionary of odd events there aren't any words for though this is often for good reason records fainter the gaps between longer more void aching hang on the current lab pseudocode key to 'the basement archives' is missing wandering undead now taking an interest in the faint grey smell of idle and often apathetic student brains shouts and stamps from the internal chinese martial arts courtyard have all but stopped the new owners are turning the whole inverted mountain superfortress into a virtual tourist information centre fellow researcher henry swanson: we used to have this thing for fiddly little black hi tech gadgets - that by owning / being owned by one we'd be able to get out of trouble by using them to escape to a better tomorrow - some vague sci action jive like that dens; sure dens were important too cardboard boxes are inherently fun we once asked snake and they agreed get a load of cardboard boxes and arrange them on one's driveway tape them all together into a secrete summer warren cut out little holes in the sides to peer out from stick a few blankets down in the far end stay there for hours with one's mates reading batman comics eating giant classic 'meltons' or the nearest fresh organic vegan equivalent talking about various lofi action adventure scenarios how they might play out within the expansive imaginative boundaries of one's secrete club based around unusual micro 'rnd projects' the best den built was one way up in a tree in the forest next to one's old house smell of the dark moist forest enfolds the senses bird sound and cold early summer tree-filtered sunlight it's what's needed right now - a profounder more expansive senses of mystery and plain naive heartfelt joy back in / as life well researcher sign here we'll hook you up to this machine which can reactivate every single false memory image you've never truly had right up to the time of your local manifestation inside a heavily augmented biosynth data ninja growth vat deep within a vast hyper dense hypercorporate neo-mayan data temple researcher x: wow can you really do that lab technican: we sure can now sign here press harder please thank you - here's your receipt and here's our receipt for your receipt have a real / productive day researcher x: gee loftleader industries staff sure are friendly efficient and polite the lab technician gives a cheesy thumbs up at the floating holographic selfie camera so what began as an attempt to escape the terminal boredom of so-called everyday life has turned into a new old type of darkstrange trip our new friend left the cold room of our ongoing student accommodation at 07:04sbt for ir job in town shuffling paper for a large faceless company winter winds and freezing rain lash local slate rooftops all over town while we sit here in the main library waiting for our inside contact to tell us where it's all happening where we can get cheap kicks or at least the vague fleeting sense of timeless hyper organic beyond been here hour or so flicking over a vast post-industrial sociomedia grimoire all it's making us feel is like a single malformed rivet on the grimy underside of a megastructural black iron bridge between the fathomless past and an unknowable near-future present telekenetic auto-construction multiple interacting time layers of flaking toxic grey paint textures of once fashionable post-apocalyptic first person sci fi shooters no travellers come this way they're content with preying to holotelevision and no you can't borrow our ideal monday mourning mix tape to overlay and enhance overly complicated blandscapes of collective mis-imagination researcher henry notices ancient data vines have sunk ir clinging roots into the nu-media underground henry leaves the library to stroll in deep forest rains of organic being which surround campus on three sides soon blissfully lost again walking in silence with ir secrete brothers the fox and the crow after a while they even imagine 'our lady of the mazes' kate bush hiding among the cloud stretched trees embodying an ethereal otherworldly aura presence some scantily clad pop chanteuse under ivy freshly spring-wrapped in endlessly new trellises of waving forever green most profound gee real original henry kate beckons henry forever deeper into the quiet wood of morning where after skipping lightly among the trees takes ir hand together like a pair of upper class twits in some bad merchant-ivory chase scene full of barely repressed sensual potency ir delicate upper middling class costume drama continues until they can be spotted no longer oblique messages about the chest-swelling joys of cultured refinement - romantic colonialist notions spread large right across this scenic painting a soft impressionistic quality a falling spectrum of leaves around them melts together in a dirty pastel blur akin to a cheap 70's skin flick poster public school researchers spasm to in private some skinny being posing semi-naked on a high backed wicker chair and barely draped with a finely crocheted blanket (whose pattern derived from those found in those ridiculous magazines mother used to get featuring male models sporting the world's worst jumpers and widest starched collars and flares possible) in which much like kate ancient beloved summer was forever out of reach ongoing environmental a-calypso note: back in the day summers in endland weren't so darn hot; they were however still terminally boring and existential-ache inducing // republic of bob