23: Cold Weather, Warm Data – a speculative fiction short story
How to say what you don’t know is a different skill from saying what you DO know
I wrote this, my first published fiction, for the Warm Data special issue #8 of Unpsychology magazine in 2022. This wonderful publication is available as a free download as well as a print version, and contains all kinds of view of Nora Bateson’s concept of Warm Data. Broadly, we are used to thinking of ‘data’ as cold, objective, detached from experience (and indeed there is a certain sort of power to that). Warm Data, on the other hand, is about keeping the connection with living things – people, places, plants and animals – which keeps an intact ‘nest of relations’ with the data in its context.
I have written non-fiction all my life and was interested to try my hand writing fiction, and speculative fiction in particular. Also called SF (like science fiction, Solution Focus and other things), speculative fiction is about other possible worlds. It also tells us more about our own world. I was thrilled when this piece was accepted. I have written another short story for the next issue which is currently in preparation. Unpsychology magazine is now also on Substack – do give them a follow.
cold weather, warm data
Mark McKergow
I LOVE WALKING IN THE HILLS — that’s why my friends call me Ben. Last week I was out in the English Limestone Country in Yorkshire, heading up towards Ingleborough Hill (723m, or 2372 feet in proper units). What a magnificent skyline it makes, sheer on the left and gently sloping towards the little village of Clapham on the right. The limestone in this area — basically calcium carbonate — gets weathered away so there are many caves and potholes, popular with the spelunking fraternity. Why they want to grovel around underground defeats me. Dangerous lunatics, needing rescuing all the time by other more public-minded lunatics.
There’s a long path upwards, a green lane lined with beautiful drystone walls. It’s said that many of these were originally built by French prisoners from the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century. I love that sense of history, enjoy getting to know a place. That’s a Rock-rose, and down there in the dark recesses of the limestone grike under my boots is a Dog’s Mercury. That’s poisonous so best left alone. Sheep all over the place of course — mostly Swaledale in these parts, curly horns and black faces. Some farmers get a Leicester Blueface ram to cross breed, but these looked pretty pure to me.
At the top of the green lane there’s a gate which leads out onto open moorland, as the ground rises towards Ingleborough’s summit. It’s normally very quiet but this time I saw a farmer fiddling with the gate, seemingly in a mood about something. He paced to and fro like he was looking for something lost, eyes to the ground, tweed flat cap bobbing up and down. He stopped occasionally to look at the gate catch, which seemed to be stuck — grumbling away to himself, looking at the catch, then at the ground around it, and occasionally up to the skies.
“Just you wait there!” he shouted as I approached.
“Can I help?” I asked, trying to look like this wasn’t interrupting my walk.
“Just you WAIT THERE!” he repeated. I waited. He paced up and down, muttering about the hinges gone dropped and the portal closing. Portal closing?
“What’s the trouble?”
“Never you mind!” came the reply. “Canna come through ‘ere now. Wait there.”
“Will you be long?” I asked. “I’m walking to the tops and then down to Clapham and Austwick… there’s a great cheese shop where they do nice scones— “
“Bugger the scones! Wait there. No coming through till the portal’s cycled and reset.”
The portal again.
“What portal is that?” I asked, trying not to sound like nanny talking about the non-existent dragon hiding under the wardrobe. The farmer kept focus on the gate catch and sighed impatiently. A moment passed.
“If I can just….” I said. The farmer looked up, bewildered rage in his eyes.
“WAIT THERE! Bloody idiots wandering around sticking their noses in… It’s Candlemas. Can’t you see?”
I looked around. The sun in the sky, low like it is in early February. And a stillness. I checked my phone. I’m not religious but there it was – Candlemas. The second day of February, the final end of the Christmas period. The celebration of Jesus entering the Temple in Jerusalem (and somehow not being a child any more). The year starting in earnest.
“Candlemas?” I gently inquired. The farmer let out an impatient snort.
“Yes, Candlemas! Annual reset. And now the portal’s gone down and I’m waiting for it to come back up. So just wait there. Please.” Seizing the moment, he pulled away a stone from the wall above the gate catch and revealed a panel of flickering lights and tiny switches. The lights were all flashing on and off together.
“Buggrit. It went down all right, but now it’s stuck. Trouble is, while it’s stuck then there nowt’s happening and nobbut me and thee knows about it.”
I looked around. It was very quiet. Nothing moved. The sheep stood frozen. No birds. No wind. Eerie. Very spooky. And odd.
“You just arrived at the wrong moment.” said the farmer. “You’re wondering how come you can still move and look around… you stepped up just as the reset was going through. Every year I worry about this, and every year so far it’s been fine — I’ve managed to get the reset in before anyone arrives. Like to start early, do you?”
I did like to start early. By the look of it, too early.
“Look, maybe there IS something you can do…” said the farmer. “I need to restart the portal, but that takes something a bit… unusual. I don’t know if you can do it. Many city folk are stumped with this…”
“Well, I want to help if I can.”
“That’s the trouble”, said the farmer. “You WANT to help, and that’s both nice and also quite useless. I don’t need your help exactly. I need your openness. I need you to tell me something you don’t know.”
“But how can I possibly do that? I know a lot. Particularly about this area. I didn’t know till just now about the portal, Candlemas, the reset, the panel of lights by the gate… but now I do know. It’s too late.”
“We need to open a new path. That means starting with something new. Something fresh. I need you to have an educated guess. You look educated to me.” He glanced at my Gore-Tex boots, rather different to his own muddy worn leather footwear.
“But I hate guessing. I like to KNOW things. Swaledale sheep. Dog’s Mercury. Napoleon Bonaparte 1769- 1831. We’re standing at (I glanced at my phone) GPS point 54.164211371297235, -2.4024250936770954. My name is Ben Nevis. Actually it’s Alexander, but people call me Ben. After the mountain. In Scotland. Height 1345 metres, or 4,413…”
“Yes! I get it. But that’s no use to us now. I need you to tell me something you DON’T know.”
I looked around and shrugged.
“Let me try something…” said the farmer. “What is being revealed to you right now?”
I paused. Stopped. Breathed. Stumped. Silent. Breathed again.
“I… Umm… It’s… Look… I mean… I had no idea that there was a reset, or that it happened, or that someone kind of made it happen… or what that might mean for us, for all of us. Maybe… things are less… permanent… that it’s not just evolution but there is also… a… way to open… or restart… reboot… reset.. awareness… umm… thing.”
“That’s the way.” says the farmer. “Feel your way in. Gently. One thought leads to another. Revealed TO YOU. I can’t know that. You didn’t know that. You still don’t really know it.”
Dimly I start to look around.
“I… that fellside over there… the colour of it… it’s not just brown. When I look closely I see little specks of greens, blues, a snib of yellow, and black… all that variety… just there right in front of us. There’s a little house over there on the hillside — I never noticed it before… I wonder who lives there, what they do… and now I come to look there is a small vegetable patch next to it, looks quite well tended. I wonder if they’ve lived there long…”
The farmer nods and replaces the stone in the wall. The birds are twittering again, the sheep chewing away, the wind blowing softly on my face. I hear the farmer again, some way away.
“That’ll do”, he said. And he was gone.
I go over to the gate catch and pull away the stone. Just more stone, a small green shoot struggling up in a crack. No lights, no switches or control panel. I put my hand inside to make sure, a real doubting Thomas. Nothing unusual. And yet… the colours of the moorland and the little house are still there. The vegetable patch still well tended. Looks like some good carrots are in the offing. Soup? Or cake? Wonderful things, carrots.
I never saw the farmer again. Every Candlemas I wake up slightly nervously in case there has been a problem with the portal. But there hasn’t been one yet. Or would I even know if there was? But I also know how to ask myself what is being revealed right now. I do it sometimes when things seem stuck. There is always something that I don’t know that floats into being. Amazing really. However much we know, there is always more to be noticed.
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Dates and mates
Unpsychology is edited by Steve Thorp and Julia Mackintosh, and a very fine job they do too. Julia is also a coach interested in writing and journalling (among other things). She also has a Substack presence, mad reality, writing about mad studies and her experience of working with this ‘dangerous’ topic.
A heads-up for readers of Steps To A Humanity Of Organisation. I will not be publishing here in July and August 2023 - I have a big writing project in July and August here in Edinburgh has all kinds of attractions including the famous Festival and Fringe. Back on Wednesday 6th September 2023. But don’t fret - there are two more pieces to come before the summer holidays.
Alice and I were married in Kirkby Malham - and I spent my last night as a bachelor in Clapham, or was it Austwick? It certainly was the start of a reset for me .....
I liked the story. Many elements of it resonated with me as I spent most of my childhood in Clapham !