Posthuman Blues

And while I'm waxing dystopian, here's a fragment from "Turing Beach," an unfinished short-story that takes place after the ocean, via malignant nanotech, becomes sentient and exacts revenge on humankind:

"At least the building was a hotel. Or might have been. The lobby reeked of burnt metal. Simone navigated the mounds of sodden furniture by the glow of her hair. Insects with extra heads and long, trailing legs scuttled at her approach; she made out the pocked, leathery oblate of some sort of hive blocking the entrance to the gift shop. Dormant neon tubes like emptied veins.

"She passed the elevators and the marble registration desk with its inset touch-screens. She wondered how quickly the building had succumbed to the Plagues. Considering the Plagues was little more than speculative arithmetic for Simone. A clonal fashionform, she had been spared the brutality of childhood in exchange for a distinctly different milieu.

"She climbed the stairwell to the tenth floor and dropped to a weary crouch, breathing mildew. The walls were cushioned with phosphorescent moss and stubbled with insect eggs. She felt herself sinking gently, the dark green agar sucking against the sides of her boots as she quieted her breathing and listened to the atypical stammer of her heart. She wanted to sleep. She allowed herself to succumb, eyes slitted with dreamy suspicion. She dreamt of the Ocean, forbidden shores cloaked in night."