Today we start into the saga of the Eleven islands. The blog icon I’m using, an image of a pair of feet in the sea, is of a surfer standing in the boil where waves meet the sand. They represent Tardi Malko’s feet. He’s the surfer in the banner pic.

He surfs for Virtual Surfing, a 22nd century Byron Bay outfit running a dryland surfing adventure. Tardi is the mug — these his own words — who is out there in the real waves. His wetsuit is beset with sensors transmitting his experience back to base, where tourists surf that same experience on hydraulically driven boards with sense-surround virtuals running all round them.

Casting about for a way to save himself from an alien disease, he remembers what it feels like to stand at the edge of the sea-boil with the swirling water pulling the sand out from under his feet. When every so often he’d need to lift his feet to free them from their imprisonment in the sand.

This action becomes the way that he saves his human life. It becomes so important to him that sometimes he need only think it. Slop-slop. Slop-slop.