Scout’s Honor

Scout was standing at the table, lecturing, the cadets in his audience rapt. He wondered why he was even speaking – he had come to doubt that anyone could teach anything – nevertheless, he swayed in his boots, holding onto the table, talking about time.

"Why talk about time?" he said. "I mean, time doesn't exist.  I mean, it exists, in our way of thinking, but apart from our minds, no. Time is merely a way to arrange data so it can become a shared experience. Time is a program hardwired in our brains, running in all directions at once.

"But it's worse than that! Oh yes! Every tribe, little or big, a schoolroom clique or a whole planet, has its way of arranging time. There are larger and smaller spans, faster and slower flows. It goes bone-deep. It's learned at the nipple before we know anything else.

"Got it, younglings? We can’t capture in our own webs that which we can only know in the Web Itself. We can’t spin until we’re spun!”

He teetered at the edge of the table and steadied himself, then slid into his chair. Their anxious eyes followed his slow descent.

"Why, then, you may ask, am I willing to crawl into the Cheese and risk disappearing, just to try to find a life that might differ little from this one?  Because whenever I come out, I will still be inside my own mind? 

"Besides,” he rose again, tried to take a step, then held onto the table and leaned unsteadily toward the crowd,  “I've seen it all!  I've worked the mines of Phobos. I was there when the Pendium went ballistic. I nearly died in the Scylla Rift, locked in an exoskel under the grid lights, digging rock for the Earth-bound owners. I froze my bones on the plains of Mars, waiting for the arrival of a rescue ship which, when it finally arrived, was a pimple of what they had promised, making me stow home like cargo in the hold, crazier than a slave in a stinking galley. No," he snorted, rising to his full height, "don't tell me about the romance of deep space and the siren songs of the stars. Don't tell me about adventure waiting like a flytrap for you easy marks with the so-called courage to sign up for twenty years. All that does is bring profit to the Legendary Chesters and the Elwood City Seven.

"No, my friends, I have been hither and yon in this system and I am reeling with despair. I am trying to save you from your illusions but to no avail, I know, I know! Your dreams flicker like fireflies in the darkness. I can feel their white heat, I can see them from here. My dreams burned out long ago, smoking like wicks in a chilly winter chapel. Now my money is gone too. My body is shot. My day is done. I know better now.

“So why am I still seduced by the notion of going into the Cheese - excuse me, into the tangled matrix of space/time - and popping out, like a puff of smoke coughed out by a dragon, in some strange domain?  Where will I come out or when?  No one can say. Our language does not have the words to tell us where or when.

"But I’m going and I’ll tell you why. It’s the only adventure left. Risking break-up on the reefs of inner space is the only adventure left. This is my last chance to learn something. I am going into the Tangle in search of the mermaid I saw once in my youth on a rocky shore, her yellow hair blowing in the green seawind. Oh God!" he cried suddenly, yearning to be young again, feeling their energy arc in the cave of night.  "I have to go! Can you understand that? I have to go!”"

He stood there and drank the remains of his bitter beer, then backhanded his mouth and slammed the mug down. Cadets ringed dime-sized tables in the dim light, their eyes wide, jamming the space from the stage to the distant horizon. They listened to his words but were unable to distinguish a role written in a script from real life; they thought despair was a game, weariness a subtle scent or perfume, ennui a seasoning, coriander perhaps or nutmeg. They wagered their youth against the yawning maw of the dark mother and did not know they had already lost. They romanticized Scout's need to drink away his pain and thought that going on the first Transit was a great honor. Scout knew it was God's little joke. Scout had been chewed up by the scaly dragon and spat out time and time again. We only win, he was trying to tell them, when we no longer want the prize.  In the cavernous hall, they nodded, taking notes, thinking they understood.

They always do. They always do.

Scout smiled, cried, then smiled again through his tears. The cadets clapped and clapped, rose to their feet, gave him more applause than he deserved.

Irony frets our lives like blues abrading the night in the Sidewinder Bar.

Scout looked down at their worshipful faces.

"That’s it. I'm going to bed."

He climbed off the platform and made his way through the tables to the door.

A design flaw determined that he had to exit the Sidewinder Bar in order to come in again at the next door east, then climb the steep stairs to the top of the ancient wooden building and double back in the dim hallway under a single glaring light bulb toward a room above the bar he had just left.  He stood outside for a moment in the damp wind, inhaling the odor of brine and rotting kelp. Fog shrouded the clamorous sea. The mermaid was out in the harbor under the black waves. Through tattered clouds, he could see a few stars, and when waves hit the breakwater, Scout heard it boom before the spray fell.

Boom. and, Boom.

He remembered bodies bursting when the airlock failed on the Orion Rising and how his mind made a boom, a sound like sudden thunder in the silence of space. It did not seem real for pieces of flesh to explode in slow motion all over the hold without a sound. So his mind made a boom. Limbs twisted in freefall, faces looked vaguely playful without their bodies. Boom. and, Boom.

In the same way, he thought, time links chains of events when nothing is there. The mind adds time and space and links the way it made that boom. 

He was lecturing himself now, listening no more closely than had the cadets.

He walked through the doorway and up the creaking stairs one slow heavy step at a time. The hallway was empty. The light bulb glared, the hallway stank. His opened the door and the room was empty of hope. He closed the door and stood in the silence of his anguish. O God! his heart cried. Where was an end to grief? Where were the cargo-cruisers now, where was the consolation of the painted faces of dustmops and mollies?

"Sit down," said someone in shadow where Scout couldn't see. Scout jumped and stared into the darkness.

“Jeezus,” he said. “You scared me to death. Who the hell are you?"

"Sit down," said his host or guest. "Shut up and listen for a change."

Scout lowered his body into a wooden chair and sat there. "Go ahead," he said. "Talk your fool head off. I don't care."

Whoever it was waited, then said with an announcer’s deep voice, "I am here, Scout,  to discuss your destiny."

"My destiny!" Scout laughed. "My destiny died in the Outer Rings where everyone I knew and loved was betrayed by Grayling, Limited. Everyone died or disappeared. Don't you know the details?"

"I know the details." The voice sounded like a wry smile. "Better than you."

"I'll bet."

The other sighed. "You can't just listen, can you?” 

Scout made an incredible effort to just sit there and say nothing. It took all his energy and will, but he did it.

"That‘s better. Now listen. Tomorrow they're going to put you into the Cheese. You’ll go in one hole and pop out another. No-one has the foggiest where you'll emerge or when or how they'll get you back."

"But –“

"Shut up. I know they said that you're bait on a hook and all they have to do is reel in the line and you'll come home. That’s bullshit! You guessed as much, didn't you? Scout, your capacity for self-deception is heroic. They broke your body in the mines but said you were a Riser, so you took it. They shot you full of fire and ice in the Rings, making you crazy, and what did you do? You climbed back in the saddle and went on tour for the Elwood City Seven, singing their praises. They lowered you like a pygmy mole into the bowels of the Scylla Rift with nothing but drones and robos for companions and you brought out the drowl and gossum – for them, Scout, all for them.

“Look around you, Scout. You're alone in a ten-dollar room on the dark side of Basal Spaceport, drinking your liver to bits. But you’ll crawl into the Cheese like a good little Scout. Won't you?"

Scout said nothing.

"You can talk now. This is your chance."

"What's this about?  What's your game?"

The voice smiled. "I want you to know that I'll be in the Cheese with you. I’ll be there when you lose it. Making sure it comes back together."

"Lose what?"

"Your mind, Scout. You have to go nuts to come through the Cheese. The transit demands it. Your mind has to get lost before it can get found.”

"Why?"

"It can't grasp what it can't hold. Think of your mind as an old man’s hand with bent fingers trying to catch an elephant.  The mind's a time machine, Scout. Like you told the unknowers in the bar below. It's woven into the brain. So to be rearranged in the skein, the mind has to come apart so the pieces can squeeze into and through the Cheese. Then they have to come together. Meanwhile in that moment of dissolution there's no web of anything knitting together the raw data of your life. Isolated bits of chemical memory, shreds of former identities, what you call thoughts float in freefall toward the Small Dark Point at the End of Everything. In that non-space or pseudo-moment there is nothing, Scout. No you, no nothing. Nothing until you show up on the other side like a center-fielder backing up for a high fly. Except it’s you catching yourself. You raise your glove and smile and catch your self.

“So don’t worry, Scout.  Meta-me will be there.”

Scout rose and staggered toward the voice, waving his hands like a blind man. He danced all through the room, a martial artist, a Jedi knight,  waving his arms wildly, but no one was there. He reached for a switch and shattered the darkness with scalding light. No one else was in the room.            

Scout turned slowly in a circle, looking at every corner and wall and corner and wall. An eye of a lighthouse beacon sweeping but blind, all unseeing 

What in hell, thought Scout, not for the first time. What in hell?

"Yes indeed!" said General Marx, his eyes flashing.  "This is the great day!"

The General stood beside Scout, his arm draped around the smaller man’s shoulders. He held him close, as much to prevent his running away as bolster his morale. The General was bedecked with medals and gold braid. He was a huge man and, thought Scout, stupid. But he had been brave at the right time and silent at the right time so he made the grade. He was a team player and now he headed the team. 

They faced a roomful of reporters.  Behind them a wall of video monitors showed holes in the Cheese – a simulation, of course.

"Tell us again, General," said Woodruff from the Beacon. “How will you get him back?"

"We’ll reel him in like a fish," the General laughed, “and hope the hook doesn’t slip from his mouth.”

Everyone laughed, except Scout, who frowned and suggested the general might want to be a little more specific. Say it without metaphors, please.

"We'll reverse the flow," the General explained. "There's only one original in the whole universe, one Scout. That’s the gestalt or form that we bleed into the cheese. The pattern left behind in our skein of spacetime will be like a vacuum and suck him back into the matrix. That’s the only pattern that can. He wouldn’t fit into anything else. It’ll make for a tight fit, a seamless weld. What got sucked out will be sucked home, like running an old movie backwards,” he made whirling motions with his hands. “Think of a pancake flipping from the floor back into the skillet. That’s how Scout will come home."

"I'm the pancake," Scout said, and everybody laughed, except Scout.

"But enough questions,” said the Five Star. “Time to make history!"

The reporters applauded and they led Scout out of the room and into a huge cage. They raised the cage by a hoist and until it swung in the air twenty feet above the floor. The reporters watched the proceedings on screens.  Scout held onto the mesh as the cage swayed, looking through wire toward technicians below. They swung him out over a partition and lowered him as four handlers settled the cage into a metal sleeve. The cage meshed with the sleeve, snug. They increased the field and the cage vibrated as it became part of the wall and floor in a single field. Then the vibrations ceased and it was still. Scout was now in the eye of the storm. He let go of the mesh, the cage flush in its cage-sized hole, himself in the cage.

Technicians in white coats posed for photos. Coils sparked, electricity arced.  Lights dimmed except for a blue haze around the cage and now around Scout. Scout and the cage were one field, glowing, candescent. He felt himself ephemeral, he could barely see, he could hear nothing. He was ingathering toward that point, both origin and destination.

A reporter wrote later that Scout looked as forlorn as a dolphin culled from its pod prematurely. Another thought he looked like a lost child. They were both trying to say that Scout had nothing to lose and looked it.

The electromagnetic field lifted everything. Scout became a temponaut,  a pinball that might careen into any of a dozen holes. The cage shook and flashed and exploded and when the smoke cleared, it was empty.

“Where,” asked Woodruff, “is Scout?”

"Here are the answers to all your questions!” said a Major, handing them to reporters. Green sheets, yellow sheets, blue sheets, pink sheets, coded for the questions reporters were scripted to ask.

“No questions except those in the script!” said  the General. Then, when that announcement was greeted with silence, he said: “Anybody else?” 

There were no more questions. No answers, anyway. The only one who knew the answers and the questions was Scout, and Scout wasn’t talking.

Scout wasn’t talking because his mind came apart at the seams. It was like a baseball hit so hard the cover was torn off. A memory flashed of a rabbit he had stepped on accidentally, its intestines shooting out its anus and lying on the green grass in a neat pile, steaming.

Luckily, Scout was nowhere near his mind when it came apart. Just as his companion promised, he was somewhere else, watching. He could see clearly that time and space were in his mind and he was not. He was out of his mind. He saw the links and how he had built them from the time he was born, link by link. He saw that he had mistaken himself for his mind and he wasn’t. He was whatever watched it hanging there suspended.

He reached out with his arms to try to get his bearings but there was nothing to touch. He turned his head to see where he was headed but nothing was there. He looked back to see where he had come from and couldn't tell. He closed his eyes and counted to ten twice. No matter how many times he counted, it was always one. Once when he said "Ten!" he said "One!" at the same time.

That’s how it went for as long as it happened. Except it was over in an instant. He arrived with a whoosh on his feet and staggered with the momentum like dropping from the sky on a parachute. His mind coalesced around a point. It was a Dot. When he reached out this time, he touched something, and under his feet he could feel what felt like earth.

He looked up at a bright sky. It was white and shot through with drifting blue clouds. Large spheres floated in and out among the clouds like hot-air balloons. There were hundreds of them filling the sky from horizon to horizon. Most were purple. Some were yellow or white.

The landscape was blank. He tried to walk but the wind was too strong. He stepped back into a shelter which he thought of as a tree except he couldn’t see it.

No one here to help, he thought. Fitting. No-where known and all alone. 

"There's me," said his companion. "I'm here."

"You're a figment of my imagination," Scout said. "I've got it all figured out."

"Wrong. And even if I were a figment, I wouldn't be so cavalier. I’m the only English-speaking entity in the neighborhood. Try to be nicer, can't you?"

Scout sighed. "Where are we, anyway?"

"Scout, part of the lark is for you to figure it out. You already came through the Swiss, Scout. Your mind turned inside-out but here it is again, intact. No rainbow-end, no fringe of a system to explore. What does it mean to ask, where am I, anyway? Where is where?"

"I see," said Scout. He was at the center,  at a point of reference, his mind or some other Mind peeking through a window.

Scout sank down by the trunk of the might-be-a-tree and closed his eyes. He breathed deeply and relaxed. He felt the form or flow of energy he called Scout and saw its pattern. He saw that he had interpreted everything always and linked scenes in a sad coherent story. Scout saw that editing was everything. Editing, and rewriting. Rewriting and editing.

He saw fragments of bodies moving slowly through the hold. He saw his companions spatter. He was behind pyroglass, protected. Scout saw himself behind glass seeing himself see. He saw how his mind had mapped the causes incorrectly. He saw he had missed key ingredients, then saw in a flash how often that had happened.

He saw himself in the hole in the Scylla Rift. The temperature was dropping. The woman he loved died in his arms. Then or another time, he understood. When was not the enemy.

The Thirteenth Martian expedition ended in death and madness. Scout saw himself curl into a fetal until he was home. No wonder he had stowed, he was so small, so diminished. Anything more would have been unbearable.

He saw how he had layered traces of experience into memories that he knitted into a tight weave. He saw how like Penelope he could unravel and reweave the tapestry each night and had in fact, every night. Every night.

He opened his eyes, much less stressed.            He sank down in the wind shadow of the shelter and closed his eyes and remained still, watching memories drift in palettes of thousands of colors. He identified the chemicals in which they were etched. He saw assembly language under the machine he had thought was the ultimate code. Assembly expressed a code but the code had a code and that code too and suddenly the floor gave way and he was in free-fall falling through fractal-like codes of codes nested until he dropped out of the bottom and disappeared.

Yet here he was, watching with an open inner eye everything he had thought he was. He saw silence and a vast emptiness. He wanted to cry. Tears formed and he cried himself a river, wistful but without regret. But he stayed steady. He was not his grief, either. Good old Scout. Stay still, now. It is quieter here inside. Outside the fists of the wind beat at his brain,  but they were faraway as if sensors transmitted signals to a warm dry Scout inside.

I would like to stay here, he thought. But then what would have been the point of coming through the Cheese?

He opened his eyes and blinked. 

A sandstorm dimmed the landscape. Hard particles scoured his skin and gradually diminished. The wind roared then died down. He was back inside his mind looking out at things as they had seemed. Only now he knew the difference.

He rose to his feet and felt himself drawn through an open door. The storm was left behind and it was quiet, so he lay down and would have fallen asleep had his mind not kept turning like a kaleidoscope. He watched the wheel turn with rapt disinterest. Then there was a bright white light and he was awake. He stood up, stretched, and opened his eyes.

"Fantastic!” cried the General. "Scout is home!"

The reporters raced to jack in and zip the news to the waiting world. Morley Scout had gone and come. The first Transit through the Cheese was history.

The next morning he found himself propped up on a deep soft chair, his limp legs hanging high over the floor like a little kid's. Blue fluid moved in a drip from a bottle to his arm. He watched his arm become bluer.

"Won't hurt," said the physician. "It's a memory-enhancer. Freshens the images. Makes them crisp and bright against the white backdrop of forget-me-land."

"Don't want to remember," said Scout. "I try to forget as much as I can."

"Yes, we know," said the doc. "That was before. Hence the enhancer. Bring-em-back-alive and brew their brains with Blue."

Scout scowled.

“So what do you remember?”

"Just the companion. He's invisible."

“What else?”

Scout looked closely. “I can’t say.”

“Can you see?”

“I can see all right, but I can’t say. Stop the Blue."

The doctor scanned the screen attached to the grip on Scout's clean-shaven head. The blank scene repeated tediously. Same old same old. "Okay. Whatever you say."

He reached for the switch and – Scout would remember the physician’s hand reaching forever for a switch it would never touch. A synapse forever unbridged.

"Have you out in no time," said his companion, removing the grip from his bare head. Then he unbuckled the straps and laughed as Scout flexed hands and arms and waggled his head.

"The Blue will disappear. It's fast-acting and equally fast-exiting. An excellent enhancer. Doesn't leave a trace."

"Except in the brain. The curl can never be straightened, right? A good man can tell how many times you've been enhanced."

"Scout knows his chemicals," his companion said, "not wisely but too well."

"I never contest a rescuer," Scout stood up now and rubbed his hands up and down his arms. "Who are you, now? Isn't it time to tell?"

His companion drew himself up to his full four feet, if a mist or a pale shade has height, and settled into a story-telling stance he had learned from NetherBernts on their dark icy world where they often stood for days like penguins holding eggs on their webbed feet, telling stories against the gloom.

This is what his companion said:

"I wasn't home long enough to know who gave me birth. They must have dropped me at the dock for someone to take. No one did. I lived under the streets, scavenging. Somehow I survived. I hitched a ride when I was a teen on a cargo-liner out of Downside. I never regretted my early departure. I rode with Skags and Baldies all the way to the Pluto Deep. The trip took six months then, not like now. Using primitive propulsion, we took weeks just to get to the Jupiter boost.  We made a few stops, too, of course, along the way.

"Have you ever seen the Pluto Deep in the velvet light of a solar flare, ionized in a purplish haze? That was our breakfast lamp. Beyond our system’s edge the stars did not grow larger for years and years. Past Pluto it felt like falling into a deep well. We read memos and scannies when the haze heated up, but when it settled down again, it was always only a cool blue twilight. The sun a distant candle dimmed by the long winter. The Deep was too dark, too cold, too far. Humans need more. We needed to touch one another so we evolved toward Mind-to-Mind of necessity, Scout. It was not a parlor game: It was a necessity. We learned to tune in and out of each other like short-wave coming and going in static. Brothers and sisters linked in electric arcs. To the untrained eye we must have looked like solar flares but we knew what we were doing.

"We were the last Expedition sent to the Deep without Holders and Soothers. Those wild-eyed cadets who adore your distorted story will have Soothers, Holders, and Strokers. We were isolated, Scout, and that took its toll. Now they know. We were the white mice that taught them.        

"Have you ever eaten with a Baldy? The Skags at least sucked it all in without slurping, bad as it looked. Not the Baldies. Baldies eat it all up, lick by dripping lick. Damn! And they thought Baldies were well-adapted to the Deep because they were loners. Living as they did, it was no wonder. They were the worst. One of them, Quarg the Porker, was incapable of tuning or scanning and went crazy pretty quickly. He thought he was still himself when he was long gone. It scared the rest of us, watching Quarg distort in the dark cell they called a starship then. That enhanced our intentions and energized our wills. That's when we learned to listen in.

"I watched Quarg waver and wink out. It was a sad fate. Not for us, we all swore. We learned to attend to the presence of others. Some say it was a waste to give it all away like that but we had no choice. There was no other way to survive the lonely life on that cold dark distant ship.

"When we had to get outside ourselves, our inner antennae extended as it were and beat in the air like ants’. I learned to catch feelings, thoughts, moods and points-of-view, sometimes days before they happened. I knew who was getting ready to erupt. I knew who was ripe for love. I loved it, lost myself utterly in others. That’s the danger of learning to listen not wisely but too well. I forgot myself." He sighed. "Well, so it goes. Now I'm here. I remained intact when my body combusted when the thermal shield failed. Somehow I survived. Perhaps all do. I don’t know. Now I respond to cries for help. That was how I trained myself. I can’t help it, Scout, it’s what I do. It’s who I am.”

Scout said, "I see."

"When I disembodied, having no more use for senses that distracted me, I found I could follow tracks not at lightspeed but immediately. I learned that time and space and spacetime were constructions I no longer needed. My pale shade of a self could follow lines of energy like force fields. I must look like iron filings on an electromagnetic field. Distress travels faster than light. Your signals, Scout, were the worst I heard in years."

"Why?"

"The despair was deeper, darker, the pain was life-deep, scarred and pitted like icy Ceres. The space inside was like The Hole at the Heart of the Coal Sack, vast and empty. How much liquor can a man drink? How much Limbic Baseline can you push into your veins? I was shocked by the waves of grief in the depths of your lonely soul. That triggered my need to hunt you down and shore you up."

"So you showed up before I went into the Swiss.”

“Yes. In the Cheese, I provided balance when you might have forgotten how to come back. I was the weight at the other end of the dumbbell.”

“I see,” said Scout, and this time he meant it.  “Thank you. Now what?"

"Now, dear Scout," he softened into the pose of a come-to-me Soother from the Wetherby Moonship, "now we teach you how to love."

Scout learned that the people who touched his heart and made him weep were friends. He would not believe it, at first, tried not to remember, wouldn't listen. Night after night he went to the Sidewinder Bar and drank himself silly. He could run, he discovered, but couldn't hide. Cadets had grown fond of the old man. Their concern and admiration touched him. Their kindness broke him down like lichen on a rock.

One day the General held a conference and apologized to everyone. He admitted the whole show had been a scam. Scout might have died, tumbling off into hyperspace like that. He begged their understanding and forgiveness. They forgave him, but arrested him anyway and sent him away. Stripped of his epaulets, he was seen, a thin old man who had gone too far. If anything, Scout was more of a hero after that. He had risked his life for a noxious fume like the jailbird General and once again survived. He alone knew that despite the enterprise being a scam he had made the Transit. Better, he decided, to say nothing for once and let the galaxy think it a scandal.

Scout sobered up. He ate fresh fruit and green and yellow vegetables. He began to exercise again. He yuppied along the sea-wall in the morning light, building his wind. He stopped smoking, stopped using Dragonweed, and stopped screaming in his sleep. Anxiety dried like stale sweat in the dawn-wind wrinkling in from the sea. His dreams became blue and white like water on a warm summer morning.

Then the lovely young thing showed up. She appreciated his history, she saw the weave before and after and understood but loved his presence here-and-now best. It took three years but at last he got it. He became capable of being loved by the little ninny and allowed her to touch him, inside and out. She allowed him to touch her too. He awoke one morning all cleaned and told her everything. She listened and rocked him in her arms. Then she told him everything too. He shrugged and said well, no-one is perfect. She crushed into his arms and he held her as if she were life itself. Two anchors tethering a single ship in their thrilling hearts.

They were married one warm morning on the waterfront by the Captain of the Brash Embrace, Eben Weezer, who knew Scout in the Rift and couldn’t believe it was the same Scout. Scout loved the ritual and its happy aftermath. Three starships shattered the sky with galactic homage. Boatloads of old groaners rolled and cheered. Hundreds of cadets threw petals and crispers all over them both. The Wallaby Chorale zithered and warbled all the old spacesongs. That night the companion disappeared and Scout and Lily Louise lived happily ever after in a big boat painted yellow and orange with purple smokestacks that bobbed gently in nearshore water that was always calm.

Time was woven in his mind like a spider's web wet with morning dew. Memories glowed like iridescent pearls. The web was transitory and fragile, as everything is, but it was also quite beautiful, and when he awoke to the web with wonder in the soft morninglight, basking in the glow of her still-fresh love, he had no words with which to describe his delight. He could even endure being all alone with life-and-death and not cry. The muted pain was bittersweet, but so was the strumming music of life on the strings of his heart.

He never heard from the companion again, but never forgot him either, nor needed the enhancer to recall his gift or spirit and its spell.

Richard Thieme is an author, consultant, and speaker focused on effective responses to technology-driven change. Thiemes work has been translated into many languages and his articles are taught at universities around the world. Richard Thiemes Islands in the Clickstream,a collection of work from the past eight years, was published in July 2004 by Syngress Publishing. Entering Sacred Digital Spacewas published in New Paradigms for Bible Study: The Bible in the Third Millennium from T. & T. Clark, Ltd., June 2004. Identity/Destiny was published in "Prophecy Anthology, Volume 1," a full-color book featuring sequential art by artists such as Shannon Wheeler, Scott McCloud, Sho Murase, Yuko Shimizu, Nathan Fox and Bernie Mireault by Sequent Media (2004). stories in Analog Science Fiction, Ascent, The Puckerbrush Review, Timber Creek Review, Porcupine, Zahir, anotherealm.com, Erotic Fiction Quarterly, Electronic Writers Group, Phrack, Golf, Rogue ... articles in: Forbes, Salon, Information Security, Secure Business Quarterly; LAN Magazine, Village Voice, LA Weekly, South Africa Computer Magazine, Wired, Counter Punch, Common Dreams, alternet, Internet Underground, National Catholic Reporter, Asia Times Online, .net, Internet Today, Computing Japan, Business Times of Singapore, Convergence (Toronto), Computer Underground Digest, CTHEORY, DoubleClick, Ethical Spectacle, Small Business Times, Computer Mediated Communication, Skeptica (Denmark), Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Informatiebeveiliging (Netherlands). Now Magazine (Toronto), Future Briefs, Access Control & Security Systems, Phrack articles anthologized in: Digital Delirium, Cyber Reader II, Cyberculture (UK).

Email: Richard Thieme

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