Never the love story, as you might have guessed. Why might you have guessed this? Search me. But you are there, Mother Earth, top of the league tables, the best there is for light-years. You don't have anyone coming to visit, we tend to visit them. You're still, it always seems, the friend finder.

No, this will be your war chronicle, your prison break, your heady revolution. Cold snow falling on split steel, for a fistful of forgotten heart. We love them, you see, nostalgias. Down there, we're new enough to love old ways. We try very hard to frame those emotions but it all seems too foreign to us, like a menu for obsolete cuisines, waiting in a museum vitrine. It gives us a softly illicit thrill, where nothing is banned, all is trusted, nothing owned, nothing taken. I'd better get going, though - you wouldn't believe how quickly the modification tier occurs. It sweeps like the wind and seas, it is almost imperceptible.

Mother, I'm a weathergirl and I do more than report. We do the flowers (how's that for romance?) and harvests, we turn your offshore turbines, open the gates for the emissions garbage men, side-steer and disperse hurricanes on everyone's behalf. I am, as yet, the only Russian-speaking broadcaster, and they tend to see me as a little cold. (We still have emotions, they're just different. They are, from what I have read in the nostalgias, a little broader, communal rather than personal. You'll see.)

And why? Why the war chronicle? If I knew.. I suppose it's discovery. There is no loneliness any more. The shifts out here are more than bearable but I often.. I sometimes.. guess I like nostalgia too and I want to be a part of it. I got promoted recently and that's another odd feeling. Suddenly and somehow I'm at a distance from the other broadcasters. It's all in their heads, all in mine, it won't last - but I know I do need my war chronicle, just for a bit. Need is all I can offer you, for 'why?'

From my desk, I look beyond you, into your friend-finder velvet, where everyone is always hopeful. I try this for inspiration, like giving myself the blankest canvas. But there is a certain expectation in the frame, on canvas, while the holy level lies beyond that even. Right.. I'm not a fool, this is a story about the emancipation of slaves (hot at the moment and I'm sure I can find a spin. My name is already a name.) Fingers. Always fingers. Right to left and back again. Pummel the legs lightly (somebody missed the gym). "A-"

"Valentina! Need any help?" Someone forgot to shush The'taurus.

"No. Thank you." He pauses for a moment. His persona, let me explain, is much less the cliché in Russian, a language not built for camp, picky or persuasive. Someone had fun with those intonations.

"Sure?" All knowledge, every answer, he is your solution. Things that aren't questions, things that don't require solving, they have almost become so precious, so quietly revolutionary, that they have even been given a name.

"Valentina!" I chide him.

"Well, the pause after 'A'. I smelt a pencil-chewer." He sniffs.

"No, it's not a production, or a test, or a report. Actually, yes, could you find me any testimonies of slaves? Testimonies or.. something first-hand. Something real. I don't know."

"If you don't know, how can-" I mute him. He is a little too nostalgic for comfort. He'll probably congratulate me for rejecting knowledge capital, an important part of any creative process. I need to version this thing. Dum-de-dum. They let the butterflies out on Friday. Skippers in my hair, Admirals at my shoulder and a Queen of Spain Fritillary dancing patterns on my hand. Standing in a yellow sowester doesn't make sense at all. Brollies, through bikinis, befuddle. I cover too much ground. Even a business suit turns the regions off. So I pace the hothouse dressed down, pretty much as any gardener would do, undulating my index finger across to Siberia, then a viciously swift cupped hand that takes in the Black Sea and appears to move it northwest. I also explain why we're doing what we are doing. Sunshine and showers become political, and require a skillful form of earnestness. Perhaps people feel more a part of the landscape these days. I turn him back up. "..what I can." And he is gone.

Somewhere, down there, Mother, he'll be sleeping. The sun is in my eyes, my blinds lowered. Really, this thing can't be a love story, not while he is around. He enjoys hurting. He still enjoys hurting.. I can't believe that I'm giving him such a restless night. I can't believe that I'm helping to create an innovative condition of global equilibrium, just for him.

"Hey, V. In there on your ownsome? Watchya doin', darling? They got Double Your Trouble at Dumpling Hut."

"Hello, Arlene."

"Get your face on, girl. Get your eyes in. Get your legs on, goddamn it. And get your ass down!"

"I.."

"Mister We-Know-Who is here. And if I know body talk, and I feel I do, one lil ole engineer from Nitrous Oxide won't be getting her fair-is-fair of the dipping selection."

"I.."

"Eyes everyplace, 'cept the two steamed buns that count. And if her arms cross any tighter she'll be choking the sommelier."

"I.."

"Between you and me, darlin', there's something I need to talk to somebody about. Somebody with a modicum of sense, you know?"

"I.. I’d love to. Of course."

"Somebody on my side, but can see the total picture for what it is. I'm in a bit of a.. thing."

"Of course, Arlene." War Chronicle, we can wait. Risen fists and rifles, cutting the warm sea breezes of Haiti, reversed and parked. Lynchers on divert, manacles on ice.

Before she goes, she adds - "Do you think we're destined to repeat the same mistakes? You know, over and again, darlin'?" I don't think this is true at all. Just look out the windows. Look down there. I ask her to do the same. That is why we are here! Goddamn it!

The whole station smells of science, to be honest. Man, can it hoot. Of coding warp, tiered weft, and the fumigating backstitch of a visiting conference, students and multigovernment, intent on terraforming Venus. The language doesn't change any more (the terms I always wrestled with) but the people. Can they be.. lost. Found? I don't know what the word is. They know what they're doing but it can be somewhere else entirely. The meteorological suite I get, the railnet I fathom, but the stability crew walk around like they are some kind of untouchables, modifying by the second. What do they actually do in there? It's the science of feeling, V. Uncontaminated reaction. We become pure flow. Maybe that's what we've all been working on.

The end of one woman's becoming, however, solidified and cooled in the sum of never-will-be's. Nevertheless, behold! (A pity I can't have it myself. The bosom is..) Anon.

"Valentina, Valentina. If ever there was a shit-wrong name. What were your parents playin' at, lady?"

Arlene is alone in a window booth, where the sunlight mixes through diamond fluorescence, rising and skewering like searchlights as the station turns. In such radiance, her hair finds accord with her skin tone, and she kindly removes her mirrored shades. We tend to be the stars of the station (though as I've said, this means little to Stability, the flowing folk see nothing and feel less) and I like to think we're speaking for the planet as much as to it.

"Nothing goes to anybody's head any more!" She sobers off and signals for both of us. "Except the modifs. Are they a busload of monthlies or a Slow Comfortable Screw?"

"Speak to the code surgeon?"

"I'm milking it. You know me. A grievance keeps me warm, darlin'. It just isn't me unless something is fiddle-de-dee." She scans the menu. I order hot and sour soup. I can’t make up my mind what else I want.

"Amos can put you back on the road, pump a busted tyre, but sometimes the trouble can be deep in the engine." She turns the page.

"What engine would that be?"

She looks up, sets down the menu and reaches out to touch my hand.

"We're kind of worried about you, darlin'. We've hardly seen you since promotion. Are you too good for us now, or.." She squeezes my fingers. "Kinda shy?"

"Neither. I have work to do."

"Work? On your ownsome? Building walls to climb over, I say." She turns her head and finds a tress of hair to twist, as she looks along the table. "I lost my old daddy in the Capital Wars. Sitting behind the walls of his own legacy. There's no more scarcity, dad, we warned him. Look around, square. Let value rust in peace. But he fought and cussed like a trooper. I think he just mistrusted the planet. A hoarder at heart. A control freak. We don't want to see you go that way, now do we? Nobody is gonna love Valentina the control freak."

I nod my head, slowly, but she goes on. "If you could give a child a kiss, right there on the dreamless field of his little forehead, sos he wouldn't turn out a freak, creaming his pants and screaming for Jesus? We’d do it, wouldn't we?"

I nod again, looking out the window. She seems pleased. "They're talking about you, V. So, consider this chow down your little kiss. From Arlene over to you. She's been there, girl. She's bigger than you, older than you and wiser than you. And she bucks like a scratched mule when she has to. And she can buck on your behalf! Just don't hide from Arlene. And don't hide from the rest of us."

She reaches over to touch my cheek, still reading. "Sweetness.. Look! Crocodile satay. Is that surf or turf or can't the boy decide?" The starters arrive and I decide that I won't be following it with anything else. I feel comfortable exuding that working history of missed mountaineering; the hyper-banquet can have it. Booze is what I want. Moonshine, the proper kind. A nice Vallis Capella that spins with real sparkle from the aluminium mines. But she is wrong, and proves to me why I am right. Since promotion I grow more and more disinterested in people and the disparity of their talk, and get more committed to the work. I'm spending more time in meteorological, and when I’m not I just relax.

"You look amazing, darlin'." She adds, prodding a spring roll around in something. "It's not right. Truly unfair."

He'll be turning, down there. His red alarm clock will be waiting for him. He'll be dreaming every shade of unscaled peak, hyper-formed by his own apprehension.

"So what are you working on, V?" She seems to have caught my drift.

"Life, Arlene. Just life. It isn't adapting quickly enough. NOAH relocates but some species.. just don't fit into paradise. They have everything they require but.. seem warmer with a grievance. Why?"

She wipes her lip. "Strugglers, Valentina. Some critters are born to struggle. Take away the struggle and they.." Her eyes widen. "..wither on the vine."

Down there, he'll be turning. The voltage in his alarm clock doesn't even know that it is about to surge. It will come as a surprise, even to him. Intrusion will march on his dream like the opening of a door, where every day the first burst of the first second hits him like boot camp slop. He'll be up, and straight into his driving seat. Straight for that little black driving seat of his. Sorting it, sorting it now! Crowned with dry cornflakes, pouring through a whirl of coffee ermine, punching every square peg into every triangular hole. So long as the neighbours don't see, baby. Kick back and enjoy! So long as it's between you and me. But I could see everything, allegedly. Every cell of his heart.

"Devour is all. Devour to survive." Arlene wrinkles her nose, shaking open a napkin.

A shadow falls across our table. From the gentleman at the bar. One rose and an elegantly handwritten note. "If I could rearrange the alphabet, U and I would be together."

I look quickly at the drinks area where a trim man in a neat white suit smiles to one side, then raises a glass of champagne.

He completely ignores the woman beside him, looking directly into my eyes as he speaks. "Pulver, I said, this is going to be the journey of a lifetime. And I was not wrong. Quite political in its own way. I thought it would make me feel very small. But I feel very.. I don't know exactly. All my life, I'm chiselling into borrowed knowledge, but now I feel closer to the source. My eyes have been opened. I've been told they never close again. Down there, you turn to a neighbour and ask - isn't it immense, simply being alive? Doesn't it fill your heart with song? They might look at you in dismay. But up here, it seems like the only fitting thing to say, at any time of day. And you are?"

He watches as I introduce myself. "Meteorologist? I rarely have time for news-politic. But I guess we're in the same boat. Heck, we're the same wavefunctions. Same massless fermions and condensation ratios." He chuckles and takes a drink. "Liquid string-net theory does the talking for me at times."

Actually, he is speaking very out-of-body, a common mistake in the first week, and staring at me like I am terra firma. "I don't hold with supersludge. Meaninglessness is where things start from, not where they end. We have to be a bit fascist. Stamp interpretation onto the cosmos." I go on to tell him what I am working on, and he ponders into his glass.

Without looking up he rolls it over. "So these species are given a perfect simulacrum of a perfect habitat, and they still don't bite? Sounds ungrateful to me. Maybe there simply is a thing called home." He looks at Arlene, eventually. "Home in the quasi-particles. A microarray in the DNA , where the deer and the antelope play." He chuckles again.

"Mister Pulver." Arlene coughs, beginning to embrace the occasion. "Do you think we're destined to repeat the same mistakes? Revisit the scene of a crime? I have invited my friend to speak with me on the matter, and I'd be curious as to the massless string-net position." Pulver enters deep thought. "Crying in the toilets, for example. Barking when a whisper would do?"

I could see everything. Three sixty, allegedly. He was glass, and I was having him on. He was trying his best but I was stopping him. I didn't ask for anything, but, to him, I demanded the world. Now I have it. In a way, love sent me here.

Mister Pulver returns the cough and shifts in his seat. "Well, the massless string-net position, or indeed the massless string-net bit-fascist position, would certainly look for a helix or spiral-type functionality to practically everything. Tears, I guess, are a kind of self comfort.. reopening wounds. Self-harm not unsimilar. Translating intensities into its image. Flattening.. flattening energy into place and matter.. emulating the Big Rip as it condenses Dark Matter." He looks to the ceiling. "The causal patch contains no quarks or leptons to avoid violation of the second law of thermodynamics. Heat cannot pass from a colder to a hotter body."

"Heat cannot pass from a colder to a hotter body, chicken." Arlene seems convinced. "The Big Rip."

Mister Pulver raises a hand. "Is the problem. Lemme go.. second law. Second law. Scale it up. Basically, the entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium."

"You need a fuck." Arlene explains.

"Is possible." Mister Pulver knits his brow. "Isolated system. Equilibrium. Indeed. Although entropy is the central figure.. the loss of irretrievable heat.. in the massless string-net hypothesis? Well lemme go.. quantum relative entropy is a measure of our ability to distinguish two quantum states.. but orthogonal quantum states can always be distinguished, via projective measurement." He looks at me.

I am starting to feel intrigued. "And.. how do I.. get into.. projective measurement?"

"You already are." He answers. Arlene tuts. "Creating a measured observable is designed to make a wavefunction collapse. You are getting consistent and repeatable results. You are turning a quantum state into an eigenstate." Arlene raises her glass.

"So everything is good?"

"Everything is good. All the time. That said, in making a wavefunction collapse you either accept collapse as a property of nature or relate to it as an illusion, claim that consciousness causes collapse. Which is where science ends. We'll never find an answer while we're looking. A third option is quantum leap. Emitting photons."

"How do I do that?"

"Well, the wavefunction represents a field of found and not-found probabilities. You are, in effect, testing a TIM, a theory of incomplete measurements."

"Fine. But how do I emit photons?"

"Stimulated or spontaneous emission?"

This has me stumped. Do I want stimulated or spontaneous photons? Suddenly he gets a call, smiles and stands to excuse himself. "You have a think. Ladies." I am left looking down at the table. Mother Velvet, I look at Arlene.

"I want stimulated photons. I really do. I just know that I'm a stimulated photons person."

Arlene starts into her noodles. "I wouldn't rule anything out at this stage. Sometimes I think we're better off with spontaneous photons."

"I am, darlin'. I am. Heat transfers from a hotter object. Straight up yours truly. Emitting plenty. Ain't photons. Mister Pulver might be able to assist us both."

"Care to illuminate?" Stuff like this gets under your skin (possibly why people read slave chronicles).

"You're not yourself, darlin'. I shouldn't trouble you."

"I'm fine. What's up?"

"More rumour." She scratches her chin with the thick end of a chopstick. "Who taught you presentation? Who taught you air transport and defence, shipping, events?"

"You did."

"Who taught you airborne dispersion and disease?"

"See above."

"Voila. Big Sister has something in mind. She's in with Stability almost every day. Something is bubbling. Rumour is they want a meteorologist located inside Stability."

"Congratulations."

"Oh, it won't be me, darlin'. I was just wondering if the rising star had caught anything?"

"Nothing. Why the hell do they want that?"

She shrugs. "All I know is, I'm not just worried for me. Those ghosts have taken over the whole station. Meanwhile, nothing I do is right. And it's a bit-fascist position when you go from golden girl to whipping boy."

Dumpling Hut is moderately busy. The music, I have noticed, is sad and lilting, plucked strings and zithers, slow bells. Mr We-Know-Who is drumming two fingers, waiting for his friend to finish. We joke about him, but an innocent joke. There was a boy in my block in Kiev, when I was a kid, whom my mother used to refer to as 'your boyfriend', simply for the embarrassment. We-Know-Who seems to fulfill the same function. I watch him in the same way, lightly amused, curious but preferring pure innocence. Why him? Why pick him? Happenstance or suggesting something monumental? Every sighting is now a refresher, each passing or playing at date moles raises a smile. Because, in all honesty, twosomes are curiously terrestrial. Many people in the station become poly, orgiastic. No-one knows why, but twosomes don't seem to make a great deal of sense here.

Nevertheless, straightening his suit, Mister Pulver returns to the table. "My apologies. What's the verdict?" He takes a seat, this time beside me. Smiling, I feel his hip against mine, as his arm settles along the back of the chair.

"Dearest Mister Pulver. Your photons are therapy with cascade laser knobs on. I guess I am more - deer and antelope play."

He seems dismayed. A wisp of breath falls between us. "Story of Pulver's life. Too soft. Women want a man who just.. sticks it in and.. twists it like a.. goddamn knife."

I look at Arlene, raising my eyebrows. "This is not true, Mister Pulver. So untrue."

But he seems on a roll. "A goddamn lunatic is what they want." He picks up the gift and appears to speak to it. "You say 'I'll show them'. Yes, I'll show them, alright. I'll bring heaven to earth and make the seas turn. I'll put poetry at their door and cure a neighbours' ills. But everything we do, everything we.. say is.. just a pansy's glint in the blade." As he looks over the tip of the flower, one eye appearing to focus with a somewhat perilous twinkle.

Arlene's chopsticks have been poised in her mouth throughout. "Mister Pulver, the girl said deer, not a slap of rare venison. Sheath yourself this instant or I holler Jay Chow."

He wipes his face and smiles. "Forgive me. Zen, Pulver. Zen, boy. I am in You, You are in Me. No distance or distinction. Why separate for.. mere amour?"

At last! Time, please. Cut glass, transparent and having him on, the boy had no faith in himself at all, or felt that he was merely a product of outside forces. Everything was fashioning him. When I resembled that something, he resented it, for I ceased to be an insider, on his side. Be yourself, I said. We'll set aside some time, time when you can be you - one hundred percent. And all he could really become was something akin to Mister Pulver's bayonet. "I'm going into teacher training." He blurted, looking at me a little haughtily, as if my science degree was too removed from the real world.

"You're good with kids." I agreed. For once, he looked like he didn't gave a fuck what I thought. Why did he save that sexy look until the farewell drink? It was a civilized business. We need to talk. Talking is all we do. We're word-heavy. Talking, texting, mailing, thought-call. The whole thing drowned in bloody words. Bloody words. And so we sat, in a mixed-look hush, him glancing from my two folded hands to my face, thinking - why did she save this until the farewell drink? We learn more at points of failure than success, I guess. But, when the learning is done and all is decided, it is done. Laughter can raise its head again. I say this wishfully, for I haven't spoken to him since. In a way, he got what he wanted, and he was the nearest I got to.. source. Places where photons stay put and wavefunctions integrate. Places where magnets coil. You might think that I miss him, but you'd be surprised how much I need this stuff for my work.

As we treat Mister Pulver to moonshine, we lean forward to watch the shadow of the station bite into the rim of Mother Earth. Time, please. Time. Sometimes we forget we're all doing it now.