A wireless operator sought respite from the wider machine. He dwelt on the static between unfriendly voices to loose his thought on un-glimpsed moments far above earth, where white hot shells decelerated towards apogees of inaction, and by quirk of angle and rate flew briefly beside Vs of geese. Or maybe punctured the cloud line, recalling the twitch of surfacing fish to the pilot passing above. Things of programmed intent appearing briefly as things of volition, wild and free.
He couldn't cope outside the war room. He was so use to eavesdropping on enemies that amity elsewhere overwhelmed him. Off shift, outside work, his underused senses struggled to assimilate the sudden mass of benign information that sought him as a target: Those customary loners that mistook him for the evening's listening ear, and read into his uniform whatever missing piece they'd lost. Those young women of departed men, those last living witnesses of another war's woes: Ready confessionals his secrets could never grace. Different types of wounded, wrecking his evening off.
With only the freedom of a town far enough from foe to evade also civilization, he unfailingly found his way to this same pub.
Here the rattle of the gambler, the chinking glasses.
Sometimes the shell would hurtle through a flock at terrific speed, knocking many to earth, so that its parabola could be marked by the dead birds beneath, he imagined.
The passing zip of the school cane, then twisted and deafened they'd be, in the ringing wreckage of the breached target. His role was to serve a purpose only as it was the dead's to warrant copulation.
His university days were spent conducting budget science experiments, using the few suitable apparatus he could scavenge amid the dank bedsit of her: The Uncommunicative Kabbalist.
She was ever hunched in study over some sacred text, keying equations for God's love. Calculator in one hand, post-its in the other. An impregnable curtain of silk hair parting long enough to reveal a face hinting at Creation, but not so long as to reciprocate Arthur's gaze and consent to gaining some primary evidence over on the soggy couch.
Swearing not to pester, Arthur's presence was tolerated - she confined to the divine; he to the divan, which he left now and then to roam the flat in search of ersatz lab equipment to add to his gas hob bunsen burner and steak knife scalpel.
While she, sleepless and thinning, studied the numbers for origins, Arthur cooked and consumed the share she always declined to eat, and generally went about living - as the eight other students in the house did - without thought of hygiene or the future.
He watched as the sieve, bowls, can opener, spatula, tongues, peeler and various other utensils, piled atop a seldom-glimpsed draining board, forsook their independence to form some sort of super gadget - an all-in-one bound by the chance angles of their various prongs, lattices, hinges and teeth, or at least the binding culture of the many and varied molds and fungi that emerged tentacle-like from the festering sink, anchoring the structure in place.
The mathematical quirk of its being was fashioned and maintained by such a huge degree of chance, that it was hard not to believe it owed its existence to some intelligent design, and wasn't just the result of a procession of people unwilling to take responsibility for the mess of it all.
The RAF - acclaimed rhythm section and set designer for one Helga Gerting - initiated their creative partnership during the evening of 23 July 1943; the 11-year-old soprano premiering Lili Marlene to an audience of cowering neighbours during the blockbuster and incendiary bombings of Hamburg - both words latterly used to acclaim her three night stand.
Strictly deconstructionist in form, the RAF's chaotic sorties lent themselves to her brand of interpretive jazz, introduced around midnight when, stirred from sleep, Helga call and responded with St Pauli's intermittent air raid siren, reaching her thick spectacles from the bedside before, seconds later, she was out on the street, her free hand swinging with the beat of falling bombs while the other held tight to her father's.
Tall, strong Georg, head above the crowd, would be ignorant of the ballast his daughter was acquiring below, battling against the drag of each fresh anchor, unthreading the perished to safety like stitches from a wound as Helga stretched out down there among the black trampling chaos. The throng of flailing legs and suitcases of knee level. She would latch onto wrist, collar, scruffs of necks; encouraging those she rescued to do the same and reach in sympathy to save another and another, so that Georg could only chastise a mercy that might have cost them both dear once the lengthening party finally poured - one long train of held hands - through the narrow doorway of the castle-like Heiligengeistfeld Flakturm IV, an unstiched thread of nearly-trampled souls spilling, gasping for breath, onto the floor of the air raid shelter as the way swung shut behind.
Animals resumed their respective food chains as if by common agreement, settling among the civic features most accommodating their native behaviour.
Walruses heaved their huge mounds of flesh over the jagged remains of bombed out buildings, taking over whole streets and barking their boundaries to those homeowners that dared return and sift these makeshift harems for former possessions.
The pavements were unsafe. Wolf packs gained pace along the city's boulevards, giving chase to elk, whose lumbering understeer propelling the gang's fringes into corner buildings at every t junction and crossroad. Panicked escapes that obliterated unsuspecting news vendors, street artists and shoeshine men, who - safe inside its sound - had mistook their distant rumble for incoming doodlebugs.
Often the elks' wrecking wave met its match: pulverised carcasses wrapped around the immovable, blood dripping down and finding its course in white stone pavements so that letter boxes looked like melting candles, and ram-raided phone booths - animal extremities half jutting out either end - like the modern art of war.
Aquariums weren't ok because, honestly, he should like to watch the torment of panting big cats and polar bears prowling back and forth all day, than have to regard a species unaware of - or at least unable to convey - the knowledge that it was trapped. For, said Austerlitz, a great fear nagged at him, for whatever it might imply, that beside Plank's or Newton's constants it might be as easy to determine - via summation of a species' mean intelligence - the safe distance at which a hand is able to place its pet from the borders of what it otherwise recognises as freedom.
The Great Ascetics were a social elite devoted to extravagant modes of self-preservation. Their Golden Age, of sorts, has found its place among most accounts of mid 21st century history. Spanning barely 300 years (or three Ascetic Generations), that age is commonly agreed to be the period between the end of the Cold War and commencement of the Second Space Race.
The massive surplus of military hardware - particularly aircraft - on either side of ideology between these two periods, allowed pharmaceutical experimentation on a scale unlikely to be repeated.
Even as Soviet troops crushed the Popular Front in Baku, the safe money was being spent in the factories of Tupolev, Sukhoi and Boeing.
But barely 50 years later it would all be over; beauty's place taken by a return to curiosity.
To the mirror born, it was not uncommon for the offspring of two equally devout Ascetics to live to around 150 (and never looking much worse for all those years, if they could afford the latest treatments).
Perla Fortuita - regarded as the first of their strange clan - fended death with a revolving diet of detoxifiers, and the dermatological soup she massaged into her still perfect skin, every hour of every day. Every minute if she could.
Millions of pounds went into these lab masterpieces: cutting edge compounds, polymers and silicates, handily explained to the likes of Perla (by Perla) as Elastic Scaffold, Micro Bead Suspension, Pro Tensile Formula, and the like.
Her makeup bag full of small pouches, boxes topped with gimmicky nozzles; detachable applicators, was one part of an arsenal including hair dye, teeth whitener, botox and bulimia that lead the last stand against the hitherto unnamed threat (pseudonym: Age), which had recently been identified by her sponsors as a cost effective entity to pick a fight with.
Earth, for years never implicated in the crime, had long been the enemy to wrinkle-free living, for as sure as it encouraged the apple from the branch did its displacement of space induce one's sag.
So would run today's advert at any rate, and from the little she now knew of such things, Perla wandered for a second into abstraction and whether, perhaps on other smaller worlds out there beyond today's bright blue sky, there existed a race of lucky, eternally beautiful beings, without need for...Oh shut up you silly thing!
Perla shook her head and reached a product from her makeup bag. It bore the same insignia as all therein: A black dot tracing an eliptical orbit around a central nucleus. A suitable statement of intent, reasoned Pharmo Corp's graphics department. The building blocks of life being as good a first blow as any against their impending war on Mother Nature. It was the next natural step.
Across the airfield the crew would be setting up in the back of the Vomit Comit: one of several frontline military aircraft set aside for PC to ensure they didn't take this lucrative deal abroad.
Perla practised her lines in front of her mirror.
Above the gust of idling jet engines outside, she raised her voice: clear as a bell thanks to Pharmo Corps' vocal chord therapy programme, which she'd enrolled upon to eliminate the croak of 70 appetite-fending cigarettes a day. She'd had her stomach stapled since.
'Look, see how gravity rolls right off with just one course of five pre-paid flights from Pharmo Corp zero G procedure. Give it to a loved one for just...' Here there was a [Brief Pause] where they'd dub the price in later - company directors still awaiting the outcome of peace negotiations between two two-bit nations, betting the MOD would raise its price if talks turned to civil war and the aircraft ring-fenced to make aid drops: An unfortunate colonial responsibility that would raise the treatment's price to cover today's ad campaign.
It left PC CEOs in the rare position of desiring resolution and harmony. They sat, huddled beneath a marquee next to the runway, watching a live feed from the UN; friends in palm oil producing nations casting their votes accordingly. The camera crew boarded the plane. The plan was simple.
Climb to thirty-two thousand feet, then pitch the aircraft into nosedive until it matched earth's trajectory through space - thereby attaining zero gravity. Enough treatments a year could solve sagging, didn't you know?
Perla, already perfect, just hoped she wouldn't throw up again.
Little could she have predicted her fate that day, but this was just the start for PC. The company were already concocting a plan to convince frequent fliers that the Coriolis effect was having an affect on their facial symmetry, and that a course of anti gravity treatment in both Britain - and the Corp's new southern hemisphere base in Belize - was needed to correct any feature disharmony experienced while crossing the equator.
So long as the earth kept spinning then these two phenomenal pieces of marketing were set to jolt share prices favourably.
As the years went on her looks - despite even these multimillion pound treatments - faded, and Perla (aged 156) graduated from being face of the company, to guinea pig.
Even by the end of clinical trials she had spent more time in zero gravity than every member of the Apollo missions combined. It is now estimated she spent more hours in flight that any other human being in history.
Forced into retirement by chronic muscle atrophy, her later life is a sad story.
Her children - who went on to found the great Ascetic dynasties of the day - disowned her.
Like the Great Ascetics that followed, her age increased in line with resentment towards youth, so that a strange bitterness typified parental relationships, though it was really just the common abandonment issue: time having run off without her.
