home,

a familys dwelling (as opposed to a collectives generic castle); in this day and age, grown and sculpted out of its owners' arf tissue, and fully mobile: aeroactive, housing a lazyball with its swarm of control feeleries, it can quietly float, hang stone-still in any weather, or space-jump to reach any Earth destination in minutes. ■    Modern home is a descendant of the closed-cycle dwellings that survivalists and sustainability geeks built around the early compilers. Arf didnt make its entry until much later; the idea of fashioning household items, furniture, complete buildings out of a quasi-biological storage medium seemed strange at first (“a cabin made of empty bottles? automobile tires?”) but arfs uses shaped its evolution: “as free as time,” self-healing and weather-proof, it needs no maintenance, cleans indoor air and breathes out oxygen. Many feel “stuffy, squarish” in a non-arf enclosure; old buildings have been routinely arfed — from small fixup patches to, years later, an all-arf construction preserving the original outline and some propellers but remelted throughout. Abandoned, a house-size piece of arf needs centuries to completely evaporate; slowly dissolving wrecks from the early arf era are still findable in Earths woods. ■    The boom of arf met the dawn of flight: a flying ship of a home is an old dream but a built house — or any heterogeneous craft — felt squeaky, crumbly, fragile when hung on a lazyball; the livable yet solidly grown arf home, by contrast, was a natural flyer. Socially, home mobility grew with the family-centric open childhood in the productive midlife: road-happy youth shuns homely comforts, and the homes of “lucid laters” tend to settle down with but occasional chases or memory tours.  ■    As the Crusoe index climbed, the ungrounded home evolved towards openness, translucency, naturesomeness — “from a walled confinement into a patch of woods.” The upper crown may be austerely geometric or traditionally architectural (“a growth of towers”) but more often tree-like — a labyrinthine tangle of trunks; the basal intergrowth tends to look more tectonic: a lumpy bulk, an uprooted hill, a weathered island carrying its windproof garden. A human home is constantly resculpted and reperforated, bulged and deflated by its “new cavemen” dwellers; in old family nests, layers of patches of all scopes and intents, under continuously retrained lighting, produce an inimitably lived effect. ■    A mobile arf home — the archetypal ship — “visualizes sociology”: migrant flocks of homes highlight the evolving mappings of culture to geography. Homes dock together forming more or less permanent associations (fairs, castles), some grounded; a new family is inaugurated by a home join, and a newborn gets her arf seed planted in a wall. Arf lineages of a home coexist in a dynamic equilibrium — so long as their owners live in it; parts diffuse into each other but the seams remain detectable for decades. Eventually, however, those who leave find it easier to start a new arf plant than disentangle whatever remains of their old growth in the walls; the leavers tissue would then slowly evaporate as the surrounding arf fills in. ■    In flight, the cushion of laminarized air around a home-sized body of aeroactive arf is many meters deep: even at high airspeeds, its but a tolerable breeze for the exterior grass. You can swim alongside a cruising home almost effortlessly — just dont stray too far away; even if you do, the air cushion as well as the “roadside sweep” on your lazyball will help you catch up gently. Apart from infrequent groundings for a serious overhaul, homes may never fully land (hard to find a clearing where you wont disturb the wildlife) but park ahover — at one the familys customary spots or gardening domains necklaced around the planet; and some, ship-like, only ever land on water. ■    A Knowledge-brewing arf wall may be a distant descendant of a library bookshelf — but real bookshelves with weighty thumbable books (not just unkempt arfgrass) still bloom in arf homes. Transcending their disuses and limitations, material books “easily outlived the [now extinct] flat floors,” remain a favored inner lining of home cavities (“bookworm takes on a new meaning”); “like pets or houseplants,” tomes on densely grown shelves homeify space, “radiate quiet soothingness” — smooth the cliff between the physical world of Humans and the universe of Minds in the Arf.  ■    “Its alive,” “knows me innerly,” “an extension of myself” — “its geometry is my bloodstream”: arfs link to its humans goes both ways; hence the (real or arted) reluctance to leave, however briefly, ones nest — the “agoraphobic dizziness” when out of your total-recording body-shaped cavities.

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