My mother's pool is, was, and always will be –– all skaters agree –– absurd. The pale blue surface is very hard, durable, very fast, and sentient. The coping is a great grindable bullnose. The shape is a perfect kidney, just under nine-feet deep. To ride the pool from one lip to the other across the deep end, a skater must roll no more than four seconds (I know, I've timed it) but to measure this distance in time is folly. It should be measured in neurochemicals released, synapses fired, genes unwinding from histones and proteins synthesized while calculating your next move, the one you'll make when you hit that coping. Its name is YinYangles, not because of the Chinese philosophy of yin-yang or yin and yang which describes the interconnectedness and interdependence of the natural world.(Truthbetold, we're not so keen on cheap Chinese knockoff paper decks and those living wheels that die too soon. And barely are we fans of their red paper currency.) No, YinYangles is some HighIQ's joke about the mathematical reduction of the perfect transitions into evolving y-angles and it stuck much to the amusement of dumbshits who don't understand math and nostalgize the days of lifeless petroleum-based wheels and static, concrete bowls. Our bowl is the best in the region, every skater rips – a not-so-secret interaction of YinYangle's intelligence with your own. At this pool every skater's an Alva, a Burnquist, a Hawk, a Sheckler, a Way, every fan's a teaching critic, every biohacker's an angel investor and every punkDJ's Kanye himself. To assure the sentient being understood the subtle energies of the sexes and the problem-solving skills of today’s vertical gene-rippers, my father’s genius was to feed the bowl the fearlessness of the male and female skaters who first skated it and the collective intelligence of the bio-engineers and genome hackers who worked in the deep end ceaselessly. Those who do not ride can bask in the glow of the bowl's subtle energies. I was the only one who thought himself crippled.
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Originally, this was the first the series, but as I wrote more, I felt like it made more sense to put this one toward the end. It's based on a fragment of a Donald Barthleme story. What do you think? Drop me a comment and let me know.
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Three Pool Rhumba
Science FictionFor some, the technology to bioengineer skateboards exists now. So, what happens when novel genetic engineering technologies hit the empty pool and new issues arise: What does it mean to ride a biohacked board? How do you keep it alive? And, what if...
