Solaris Rising Read Online Free Page A

to us, a bloodless one – I think is a combination of unique factors: strong family ties, Teshie.org giving a shape and a structure to those family ties and turning them into a strong weapon of shame. There are guilt cultures and there are shame cultures, we are still a shame culture – when the Development Minister’s own dead grandmother says she is ashamed of him, then that is the pebble that starts the landslide. To be realistic, we would never have been more than a biting fly if the government hadn’t threatened to close us down. Whaaaat? You’re going to cut me off from my ancestors? You don’t mess with families. That started the strikes, and it was the strikes that brought down not just Raymond Kufuor but the entire Fourth Republic.
    Six months on, what we have now in Teshie is a built-in subversion network. When the Government went to the courts to get an order for us to disclose our subscribers, that led directly to somebody – not us, some kid in a neighbourhood data centre somewhere – writing a cheap, mobile compatible anonymizing app. Two hundred thousand downloads in forty-eight hours? I think that deserves some appreciation. Then when they tried to shut down the mobile networks, people built their own – and cheaper and better than the private ones. The micro-working companies are moving their servers off the big telecoms onto neighbourhood networks – they’re cheaper, better, and it means people can home-work now. Anonymizing, encryption and open wifi – we are now the world leaders in popular, secure communications networks. The dead will never be silenced.
    So, what for Teshie now? We’re expanding, we’re diversifying. We’re much more than a social network company that grew out of a website for Fantasy Coffins. Our investments in Mali have convinced us that solar is the future. Leave the oil under the sea. Solar – particular micro-solar – is cheap, dependable and democratic. Every district can be a micro-solar power station. Open, local, distributed wireless and power networks – that’s a strong economy and a strong society. But if there’s one thing I want to leave you with, it’s this: never underestimate a disgruntled ghost.
     
    Yes yes yes, so I am talking again, I am grumbling and complaining but do you expect me to go back to being quiet and well-behaved? Once we’ve been disturbed in our spirit houses, once we’ve been made uncomfortable on our stools, once we’ve remembered how good it is to talk and be listened to, do you think we’ll go back to the silence? No: the country is quiet, prices are stable, we have good government and our good name in the eyes of the world back, and I hear someone is filling in the potholes on Kanda Highway. No, what I am aggrieved about is that Ike Okai Mensah is still Manager of FC Maamobi! Something must be done!

THE INCREDIBLE EXPLODING MAN
     
    DAVE HUTCHINSON
     
    Dave Hutchinson is the author of one novel and five collections of short stories, and the editor of two anthologies. He’s also the author of the BSFA-Award-nominated novella ‘The Push’, of which he is maniacally proud. Before being made redundant during the recent recession, Dave spent twenty-five years working as a journalist. He was born in Sheffield but lives in North London with his wife and assorted cats. One of the trickiest elements of this story was settling on the right title… He wanted it to have that Marvel Comics feel.
     
    From a distance, the first thing you saw was the cloud.
    It rose five thousand feet or more, a perfect vertical helix turning slowly in the sky above Point Zero. Winds high in the atmosphere smeared its very top into ribbons, but no matter how hard the winds blew at lower levels the main body kept its shape. A year ago, a tornado had tracked northwest across this part of Iowa and not disturbed the cloud at all. It looked eerie and frightening, but it was just an edge effect, harmless water vapour in the atmosphere gathered by what