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quite happy to publish this one from Jacques Barcia.
    " The Greenman Watches the Black Bar Go Up, Up, Up" is very close to what I would consider an 'ideal' (if such a thing exists) story for Shine : it is complex yet recognisable, it is exotic yet familiar, it exhumes mystery while shedding new light on old tropes, and its progress is very hard fought, at every level.
    Yes, the world is--or may be--a better place, but not before we have worked and thought very hard to get there. And we need to keep thinking and working very hard to stay there, or take the next step.
    Yet we can, even in the gritty, dark and strange streets and cyber-alleys of Jacques Barcia's future Recife that's as intriguing as any Brasyl depicted in SF.
    H e loved the wall barring the sea. It was his best kept secret, or else he believed it was. Inácio never told it to anyone. Not to his father, neither to his old comrades from the days and nights of war, and most certainly he would never tell it now to his clients. Though he knew Lúcio was aware of it, his partner never used that little contradiction to break his spirit and deliberately hurt him, as lovers do when a fight erupts on late Saturday nights fueled by jealousy, overdue bills and the fear of death.
    No, nobody knew, despite the fact that he had to stop by a cart on the top of the dam, about four stories above street level, and have some fresh coconut water before going home. Every night he'd stay an hour or so leaning over the parapet watching the waves pass the tidal farm and break against the outer side of the colossal shield. He'd feel the wind, moist and salty, wash his face and carry his breath into the air of Recife.
    And every night he'd think people had took action too late and he'd ask why it took so long to make people care. It certainly helped stop the guns and the bombs and made people pay some respect to the air and the sea, but it was almost as big a crime to raise the barrage. But he loved the wall. Especially because it had an awesome view of the green farms sprawled over the terraces and rooftops. It gave him some peace and good memories.
    Inácio was way past the normal time of his nightly ritual, waiting for some last-minute contractor to call him. He felt drowsy, but the feed from the blabbers he followed and the data flooding from the passersby wouldn't let him doze. Meet me, share with me and the outdated, but inevitable, buy from me danced on his contacts like animated billboards and fought with his own eydgets for the faintest attention. You should be home by now, his carbon tracker also insisted. You should be home to reset your footprint or else I'll shut down your systems. But the contractor had convinced Inácio to moIP him--communicate with him via an internet protocol while he was on the move--for a conference in the after-hours of the emissions market. So he waited, nervously watching the tracker's black bar go up, up, up with every breath and every gigabyte generated flying to the datacenter in his living room.
    He and Lúcio used to live on the northern side of the city, just five minutes away by train. Now he counted the ninth or tenth metro slide amidst the old concrete buildings and into the much newer modular habitations, their reusable materials in constant flux, easily transferrable as the whims of the urban pulse saw fit. It would normally be a zen-like experience, to cross the city sliding at high speed, seeing the deep green crown of the trees dot the asphalt and the silver lakes and rivers, natural and artificial, free to run their courses but also tightly controlled not to rebel against their margins. But now, he knew, there'd be only the humming of the solar batteries pushing forward the monorail, causing that corrosive, maddening itch in his eardrums which reminded him of forests, bugs and bullets. And, what's worse, at the end of the line there'd be no one to talk to.
    It took less than a minute after the market's close down for the would-be client