Previously on Delfina: Pierrot and Delfina are stuck in Dapto, and to make matters slightly worse, Deija, the Martian Princess of Glass, has arrived with her battle fleet, armed with infrared energy weapons. They’re burning Dapto to the ground. Meanwhile, Delfina is chatting on the phone in a foreign language. The previous episode is here.

“Caio.”

She turned to me.

“That was Deija. She’s apologised
and invited us to her Dapto castle-warming
next week.

“Her chef is a Sauron,
he’s great with canapés.
Eats most of them himself,
says he’s checking the flavor.”

The battlecruiser approaching us
had powered down its energy beams.
It crossed overhead, so close
I could see scratches
in the crimson paintwork.

The imminent danger had passed,
and I changed my mind about sharing
my shallow secrets with Delfina.

I opted for a businesslike tone instead.

“Thanks for saving our lives.
I appreciate it.”

~/~

Delfina was under the dashboard
of the Plymouth.

“Let’s go somewhere cooler.
I’m thinking New Zealand,
the South Island.”

I pictured the Plymouth at the bottom
of the Tasman Sea, with small fish darting
in and out of the eye sockets
of two skeletons inside.

She pulled out a citrine crystal brick.

“The Von Bingen Drive. We won’t be taking
the Plymouth. We’ll have a look around
for faster transportation.”

~/~

I wondered what we were looking for.
What were our chances of finding
a blue-water cruiser in suburban Dapto?

She stopped at a pile of discarded packaging,
with the flattened remnants
of a large cardboard box
that might have contained a fridge
or a washing machine.

“This will do,” she said.

“It doesn’t look very waterproof.
And what about the oars?”

to continue

artwork

Timelines in Counterpoint is a study for my story “Danta in Black,” to appear in The Purpose of Reality (Meerkat Press, 2022). The story deals with the end of the planet, and it’s set in Brazil, so it’s always possible that Dapto somehow escapes the apocalypse in that universe. Stranger things have happened.

The artwork was evolved with the visual evolution engine (VEE), my software that seeks unexpected realms, rather than using standard AI techniques to mimic existing art. ALISA, Adaptive Layered Image Synthesis, was used for the figures, and Cyclic Nonlinear Desaturation (CYNDE) was applied in the evolution. General info here.