jamieproctor.ca

Hey there!

I’m Jim-Bob, and this is my orb! This little ominous round ball floats around six inches behind my right ear, and if I begin a train of thought that leads only to despair and hopelessness, it smacks me in the head. It works great! C’mon, I’ll show you!

I need to go get groceries anyways. I’ve been putting it off a bit because I’m at the computer and distracting myself– ow!

See, it works like that.

So let’s get going. Wallet, keys, mask (don’t want to catch it twice! The first time led to all – ouch!), grocery bag, and phone! Phone’s not finished charging, but that’s okay, better to lose a bit of battery efficiency than to sit around here longer because I’ve already wasted the OW.

Bit harsher there, but repeat offenders get smacked twice as hard and in the same spot. The sting steers you safely!

It’s nice out today, isn’t it. A bit too warm, but that’s livable with the breeze (warm breeze, ah well). And since the road’s shut, we can head through the park. See the few folks out and about on Wednesday, what with days off or some such or being part-time over the age of OW.

Let’s count those seagulls. There’s sixteen. That’s a lot of seagulls.

The other nice thing about walking like this is it gives you a chance to think about stuff. I come up with most of my story ideas while I’m walking, always have – something about the legs moving and letting the world go by in the background help. It lets you brain drift but the tricky part is when it settles on useless things or troublesome thoughts. I remember wondering if it was harder to be creative on antianxiety meds but hooooo boy let me tell you that beats the HELL out of being unable to be creative because your brain won’t stop thinking about OW OW OW.

Triple shot. Deserved, but jeez.

Anyways, it’s great to see the people in the park, especially when there’s lots of them. The background noise is comforting – I like putting streams on in the background when I’m at my desk too just for that sort of ambient humanity. The funny part is I’m far too terrified to OW.

So we’re going to walk down by the boardwalk and look at those rocks. Hey maybe I can do a story about stuff you find in the rocks! Old beer bottle, old pop can, wrappers, seaweed, ducks, ducklings, stray goose fluff, seagull-devoured crayfish… mmm. Maybe not as long a list as I’d hopped. I’d have to pad it out with childhood whimsy, which I mean I could TRY it’s not like I haven’t been walking up and down these same rocks and this same boardwalk for over thirty years, which means AH.

It’s nice seeing the families though. People using time off, taking holidays, just taking the kid down to the beach to stick their feet in the water. Some of those parents and partners are my age and they’ve been doing this sort of thing for ten years and I will never OW OW OW OW OW OW.

So it’s a bit of a pity the fry stand isn’t open this year what with the construction because damnit I could use something crispy and warm and salty. I guess I can get some potato chips. I was sort of probably going to get those anyways but now it’s more formalized.

Man, it’s way too warm once you’re away from the lake. Going to suck coming back this way, but it’s faster and the less time milk and sandwich meat is out in the sun with me the better. Let’s go into the store and do a little Purell (why the moist cloth dispenser this seems so much less efficient than the liquid), and now let’s get what we’re getting which is like two stopgap not-really-meal components like cereal, milk, sandwich meat and pita for work, and… not sure what else because I can’t make myself put effort into anything including making foo OW.

Right. Some baking potatoes, some sour cream for those baking potatoes, no lettuce because I’m sick of salads and I’ve still got enough for my sandwiches at home, maybe some baked goods? Yeah these donuts are like 30% off that’s fine I’ll take them – wait, 30% off 5.25? That’s still a bit much. I don’t need those donuts. To hell with you, donuts. Pick up some milk, go to the chip aisle, let’s get chips. All the non-store-brand-stuff is like 10$/2 deals, this is pathetic, I remember when those were two for six because time is moving and I’m frozen OW.

So. We get the store brand, because those are perfectly acceptable and like literally half the price. Which flavour?
I’m not sure I want salt and vinegar, I think I got sick of those last time.

I don’t want barbecue, they’re too sweet.

I don’t think I want cheese and onion, I think they’re always not as good as I’m certain they’ll be.

I don’t think I want those all-dressed chips because the bag is too big and I always eat too many of these chips. I always eat too many of all of the chips.

Do I even want chips? I’ve been eating them as treats since I became a somewhat functional somewhat-independent adult before I stopped being able to OW

Do I ever want chips? I just eat them until I start disliking them. Do I really enjoy this? I mean, do I really enjoy MOST of what I claim I ‘want’ or is it just distractions from OW OW OW.

We’ll get cheese and onion.

One lane open, and all the self-checkout. Self-checkout it is. Boop da doop de doop beep beep. Hey it would be REALLY stupid if I’d forgotten my wallet and just now found out after I had everything here and ready, would I have to put everything back or could I ask the till people to hold onto it for me I mean a bunch of this needs refrigeration would I even be able to talk to them or would I just freeze up and stand here OW.

I should probably use my new credit card so it registers properly but these groceries are overpriced and what if I fuck up and forget to check my credit OW.

Debit’s fine, we’ll fix whatever that was later. Now let’s aw dang the potato fell out. Get back in the bag, potato.

Yeah, the streets are hot and long and the shade is all a little off. Pity about that, but it’s the shortest way around the construction, even with the detours. Woops, wrong street ahah. You’d think I’d know better, since I was born here and I’ve lived here half my life and now I can’t leave here and I’ll die here OW OW OW OW OW OW OW
Anyways it’s fine and none of that matters because none of these problems are real and I should be able to AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH FUCK FUCK FUCK OUCH DAMNIT

JESUS.

That’s my street. That’s my stop. Indoors, nice and shady, up the stairs, food in cupboards and fridge, easy-peasy, everything breezy, maybe the five or six websites I endlessly refresh for new content will have had someone say something even though it’s a workday and all the adults are busy OW.

And we’re done!

Yes sir, I don’t know where I’d be or what I’d do or how I’d live without the orb here.

I mean, I guess I’d have a couple more molars.

***

fuck i forgot the cereal

It had been a wretched, straggling storm; a thing with rain that fell in stringy sheets all day and all night but with no force behind it beyond dogged persistence. The earth had turned to mud and then muck; the plants had gone from lush to drowned; the sky was a tired grey-blue muddle of exhausted maybe-clouds, and Lemm had gotten up early and been kicked out of the house because a full day and a night trapped indoors with a teenager was more than a reasonably loving family could bear. She accepted this and was standing by the river, which was usually a stream. Things came down it when it was like this; odd rocks from up the mountain; old coins from hill barrows; helmets from dead bandits; all sorts of stuff.

This time it was a sword, pristine despite the rotting scabbard. Excited beyond all belief, Lemm stirred it closer to shore with a stick and plucked it from the riverbed, where she realized it was attached to a few stubborn bones of some guy’s arm.

“Gross!” she said happily, and she took it home to her parents for perusal.

“It was attached to some guy’s arm,” she said proudly.

“Gross,” said her mother.

“Tricky,” said her father. “That’s probably grave goods, and grave goods mean ghosts and curses and goodness knows what. And it costs money and we aren’t meant to have swords. Give it here.”

So Lemm reluctantly gave the sword there, and Lemm’s father took it to his simple forge where he made nails and horseshoes and took his simple hammer that he used to make knives and shovels and he put in an unreasonable amount of fuel and made Lemm stay much longer at the bellows than she’d have wanted to and one zillion years later he pulled out a hoe, a good sturdy hoe, with a sliver-sharp edge.

“There,” he said. “Now it’s useful, and now it’s your turn: the field is absolutely walloped right now. Get back there and put it into recognizable shapes.”
“Ugh, FINE,” said Lemm, taking the hoe.

Sever their limbs and drink their blood, said the hoe.

“Pardon?” said Lemm.

“Scoot,” said her father. He was already working on something else.

***

So Lemm took the hoe to the back field – which was a mud flat – and she started tilling the soil. Rows were reshaped, plants retrieved, formlessness removed, order restored, and it was so drear that she wanted to die.

“This SUCKS,” she said aloud.

You are being watched, warned the hoe.

Lemm jerked her head upright, saw a small rabbit freeze among the greens she’d just cleared, and swung all in one smooth, efficient motion, immediately decapitating the animal.

Eat its heart, eat its heart, said the hoe.

“The hell? That is gross as all get out,” said Lemm. But she was sort of responsible and liked food, so she picked up the rabbit and got ready to tell mom when the hoe vibrated in her hand again and she turned and saw an inscrutable-yet-round bird at the other end of the field, picking at the soil.

This time she threw it. Very successfully.

“Oh jeez,” said Lemm, as the number of birds in the field became divisible by two. “I’m gonna run out of pockets.”

***

Lemm didn’t run out of pockets by the time she came back home, but she didn’t have many to spare either. “Here’s dinner,” she said to her mother, holding up the rabbit. “Oh and here’s breakfast. And, uh, a snack? And another dinner. It was busy out there.”
“Looks like you were busy too,” said Lemm’s mother. “But maybe not as busy at the field, from the look of it. Were you stabbing these with the hoe? That’s not what it’s built for.

Silence the doubters and mockers with their own blood, said the hoe.

“It’s a noisy and evil instrument, mom,” said Lemm. “But I did finish the field.”
“Great going, kiddo,” said Lemm’s mother. “Now go down the way and help the millers do their garden.”
“Shit.”
“Hazi’ll be there. She came back from town to help out this morning”
Lemm left with her mother laughing at her.

***

It wasn’t that Lemm liked working with Hazi, it was that she was very bad at working with Hazi for enjoyable reasons, like Hazi’s legs, eyes, lips, and everything else, and that Hazi found this funny and wouldn’t make fun of her too hard when she tripped over things, said ‘bwuh?” instead of full words, or forgot what she was holding.

So when Lemm walked into the little overstuffed garden behind the mill – which was even more rainwashed than their field had been, and frankly astounding that it hadn’t been taken by the river – and saw Hazi there in all her glory in full fury with a shovel, up to her calves in mud and saying every filthy word that had ever been dreamed of and whispered into a pillow before waking, she maybe stopped and looked a little longer than necessary until a flying weed hit her in the eyeball and made that impossible.

“Augh fuck,” articulated Lemm.

“Shit, sorry,” said Hazi.

Avenge this slight immediately, said the hoe.

“Aw no, I’m blind, I’m blind,” said Lemm. “Please, pour water into my wounded eyeball and tend to my wounds for the rest of my days, it’s only fair.”

Hazi came over and pulled the weed off Lemm’s nose and counted all her freckles twice to make sure they were there and then pushed her over into the pile of dismembered weeds she’d made instead.

“I’m blind and now I’m dead,” said Lemm.

Destroy all that she holds dear, said the hoe.

“Shore up the fence, you complete dumbass,” said Hazi with fondness.

And so Lemm did, and so the afternoon passed very agreeably with only one or two breaks where nobody got anything important or useful done, and so when the job was done and she picked up the hoe from where she’d leant it against the fence it took Lemm a moment and Hazi swearing very earnestly to notice that it had chopped the fencepost clean off from crown to base.

Vengeance is ours, cried the hoe.

“Oh COME ON,” said Lemm.

“Well, guess you owe us a new one,” said Hazi. “See you tomorrow?”
“Oh absolutely yes,” said Lemm.

***

Lemm got up and found the hoe next to her bed. She put it away. Lemm finished breakfast and found the hoe leaning on the bench next to her. She put it away. Lemm got dressed and ready to go and explained to her parents that it WAS NOT HER FAULT that she had to go and replace a fencepost and was very patient with her mother laughing in her face and slapping her back repeatedly and when she was at the threshold the hoe was there, leaning across it casually with its haft over the doorknob.

So Lemm took the hoe with her, because at least this way it wouldn’t suddenly appear under someone’s foot or someone’s head.

“My field is already tended, but thanks for the community spirit,” said Jur, the forestry man, from somewhere behind a pile of timber and hairy muscles and a very large saw.

“Aw okay,” said Lemm. “Mind if I go looking for a fencepost for the mill?”
“Only as long as you don’t beat Hazi to it,” said Jur, in a flurry of sawdust and beard. “She’s got dibs.”

So Lemm said ‘thanks’ or something else she didn’t pay attention to and went among the trees and found Hazi and they had a long, serious, productive hunt for a replacement fencepost that only veered off-topic for very important things, like checking Lemm’s biceps or trying very hard to figure out PRECISELY what shade of brown Hazi’s eyes were most like or having to stop and fix Lemm’s shoes for her because bending over would be so very hard on her back with all that she’d been working and so on and on and on until at last they had bad luck and found a tree that would make a damned nice fencepost.

“Oh well,” said Lemm. “Right, let’s get to it.” And she lined up her stroke, tensed her back, and let her fly.
“That’s not an axe,” said Hazi.
“Bwhn?” inquired Lemm.

Death to the foe, said the hoe.

‘shrip,’ went the tree’s trunk. Followed immediately by a large crash and a lot of swearing from those present.

***

“Tree fell on her,” said Hazi when Lemm was delivered home to the raised eyebrows of her parents. “But it’ll be fine. Just don’t let her run around like an idiot.”
“This will be impossible,” said Lemm’s mother, and they all laughed at her and while they were doing that Hazi kissed her so casually that nobody noticed except Lemm who was probably going to remember that for a few thousand years and then she winked and left.

“How did you manage to fell a tree on yourself?” asked Lemm’s father.

“The hoe doesn’t like me using other tools or not stabbing or cutting things or being put aside for a moment,” said Lemm. “I’m starting to think it might have been easier to leave it as a sword.”

“Nah, swords are pushy too,” said Lemm’s mother. “They always want to be used, and they’ll never shut up until they get the fight they want.”

“Oh shit,” said Lemm, “I just thought of something. Dad, can we go out to your forge?”

***

The next morning Lemm turned up bright and early to the mill with her father’s hammer and a basket of bright, shiny, fresh nails. By midday the fencepost was replaced, the entire rest of the fence was repaired and reinforced, food was ready, and there were some very serious idle conversations happening indoors.

And from the new fence, a hundred tiny battle cries rang in permanent exaltation as the foe was bitten deep and true.

Once upon a time, in the old old old fashioned days, when most animals were sort of large blobs, there lived one animal that was a very large blob and pretty wrinkly to boot.

But they weren’t happy.

“I’m not happy,” they said. “I am a very large blob and pretty wrinkly to boot, but I’m not happy. I wish I were more distinctive than being a very large blob and pretty wrinkly to boot, because since most animals are sort of large blobs and being a very large blob and pretty wrinkly to boot makes me very similar to them, as they are sort of large blobs.”

So the animal roamed up the land and down the land and up the land and down the land and then it got dark and they walked into a tree and the tree broke and stuck in their nose and that’s where rhinoceroses come from.

***

“That was pretty bad.”
“What?! Was not!”
“No, she’s right. That was pretty bad. You spent most of the effort on reiterating basic established facts until our eyes crossed, and the denouement was a complete anticlimax.”
“And you didn’t use the rule of three.”
“Yeah, and you didn’t use the rule of three.”
“Well, I’d like to see YOU guys do any better!”
“Nah, nah, we believe in you. Keep trying, you’ll get better.”

“Yeah sure what he said. G’wan.”
“If you promise to be fair. And I’m going to use the rule of three this time, so you’ll have to not be unfair about that either.”
“Fair as a fine fresh breeze.”
“As fair as a carnival ground.”
“Fine. Fine. Fine.”

***

Back when everything made sense and kids did too, there was a creature that lived in the bottom of the bog. He stayed down there for the night and for the day, for the summer sun and the winter frost, for the good times and the bad times. Nobody saw him, but everyone that passed by heard him mutter and mumble from deep down inside.

“You should come out sometimes,” said a passing chickadee. “Make some friends.”
“I am happy in my bog,” said the creature, in his deep solemn bog voice. “It is warm when it’s cold and cool when it’s warm. It hides me and protects me, feeds me and waters me. Why would I ever leave?”
“Make some friends,” said the chickadee.

“Well I don’t know about that,” said the bog creature. And the chickadee flew away.

“You should come out sometimes,” said a roaming muskrat. “And see some sights.”
“I am happy in my bog,” explained the creature with tepid boglike patience. “It is what I see and what I want, what I know and what I expect, what I wish and what I receive. Why should I stop looking at it?”

“You might like it up here,” said the muskrat.

“I’m not quite sure,” said the bog creature. And with no response to that, the muskrat departed – in some haste, for a fisher had come prowling by the shore.

“Hello, bog person,” said the fisher in a very polite and dapper little murderer’s voice. “Why not come up here and try to eat someone new?”

“I enjoy consuming bog matter,” said the bog creature. “It is all I have ever eaten, and I am not tired of it.”
“Maybe you’d enjoy blood and liver, if you tried it,” said the fisher.

“Taking the chance sounds risky,” said the bog creature. And the fisher bared her teeth at that politely and departed.

At last up to the pond stomped a big fat bear, already heavy with fat at only halfway through summer and riddled with laziness. “Hoi, bog fellow,” he belched sleepily into the water as he drank. “Still down there?”
“Yes,” said the bog creature.

“That’s fine,” said the bear. “I spent half the year wandering and doing things, and half the year doing nothing. And believe you me, the first half makes the second half feel like a dream picnic. G’bye.”

And the bear stomped off.

The bog creature fermented in the day’s juices, steeped in the thoughts of the conversations he’d had, burbled and bubbled with concept and conceit and nerves and nervousness. And then at last he rose from the bog, hoof by hoof, limb by limb, joint by joint, unfolding himself under the calm blue afternoon sky taller than the bear, taller than some trees, all muddy fur and flaring nostril and startlement, and he stood trembling in horror or delight. Then he bucked up just a little higher, to see if anyone was watching, and whacked his head into a nearby tree whose branches got stuck in his skull.
“OW!” he yelped.

And so he dove back into the bog, but his new crown was much too wide and broad and awkward to let him fit comfortably back into the bog. He left it the next day in exhaustion after a poor night’s sleep and a neck-crick that wouldn’t quit, and although he visited the bog for food and for comfort everafter, he found himself stuck outside of it by and large from then on. That’s a moose. That’s what it was. It was a moose.

***

“You can’t just repeat your story’s point over and over in case the audience didn’t get it!”
“Yes I can! I want to make sure they get it!”
“You can’t or it sucks!”
“It doesn’t suck!”
“No, she’s right. It sucks. You belabored the conclusion; you created an animal by having a tree get rammed into its skull for the second time running-”
“People run into trees all the time, it’s very plausible and realistic!”
“-and you spent the whole story building up to explaining how people get stuck in a rut for fear of change and how sometimes it takes more than just arguing to get them out, but then you back out at the last second and go ‘well trying something sucked completely and they wished they’d never tried changing but they were stuck forever never mind.’”

“And you didn’t use the rule of three again.”
“Right. And you didn’t use the rule of three again.”
“I did so! I made the story beat four times!”
“That’s not three.”
“Yes it is! It’s three and one more!”
“The rule of three implies three, not four, or three and one more.”
“But four has three in it!”
“If you divide it enough ways four has EVERYTHING in it, quit dragging your heels. God you’re obnoxious.”
“Stop being mean!”
“Stop being a brat!”
“It’s alright, everyone calm down, calm down.”
“You always take her side!”
“No, EVERYONE calm down, okay? Okay. Okay. Right. Want to give it another try?”

“Fine. But you have to promise to be fair, okay? Both of you. And REALLY fair, not fake fair. This was NOT fair criticism.”
“I promise that I will be as fair and unbiased and true as any one person can be.”
“I promise I’ll only say it sucks if it sucks.”
“No, be fair!”
“Doesn’t get fairer than that.”
“You-”

“Go on, then. We’re listening.”
“Fine. But you’d BETTER be fair. And I’m using the rule of three this time for real, you’ll see.”

***

A while ago – but not too long – there was only one tree. Everything that needed shade to survive, everything that needed greens to eat, everything that ate fruit or nuts or made nests from twigs or built homes from sticks or buried itself under fallen leaves and needles depended on, and lived around, that one tree.

But it was very old, and very tired. So one day it shook itself for attention, and it told the animals and plants that lived around it “the one who takes this branch from my head-”

***

“Agaub?!?”
“FUCK YOU IT’S NOT THE SAME FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU”

“Shh, shh, it’s okay. She didn’t mean anything by it. Go on.”
“She meant it! SHE MEANT IT!”
“No she didn’t. Right?”
“Mrrnnmmph!”
“See? Right. Now go on.”

***

“-the one who takes this branch from my head to those hills and plants it in the naked soil there will have fruit for the rest of their days.”
So a bird grasped the branch – which was very thin and high and tricky to get to – and flapped and leapt and shot and skittered across the long, shadeless, treeless miles to the far hills. And when the hills were all around and the bird could go no further, the branch was placed in the soil and sprouted and grew and grew and grew into groves of every fruit-bearing tree you could imagine.

Back at the one tree the animals saw the hills turn green, and then the tree shook itself again and spoke.

“Whoever takes this branch from my back to those valleys and plants it in the cold earth there will have nuts for the rest of their days,” said the one tree.

This time there were many volunteers. A squirrel ran for miles, wide-eyed with fear alone on the open ground, but oh the oaks and walnuts and almonds blossomed at the end of that terrible journey.

“This branch from my side will bring sweet sap,” said the one tree, and the beaver swam the wide and blisteringly-sunburnt rivers alone before waddling ashore and placing the prize.

“This branch, mild bark,” said the one tree, and porcupines waddled for days under cloudless skies, undaunted.

“This branch, relief from pain.”
“This branch, gentle shade.”
“This branch, useful twigs.”
“This branch, shelter from fire.”
“This branch, hollows for nests.”
“This branch, warmth in deep winter.”
And so on and on and on and on went the branches and the animals, and the world turned green and the ground was spared from the sun and the one tree was lost all alone, for it was all but bereft of its mass from its many gifts and it was surrounded by forests.

“Can I help?” asked the one remaining animal, the antelope.

“Maybe,” said the one tree. “But it’s a bit tricky to get at, and I can’t promise much in return because I’m just about out of gifts. Take the branch from my hand if you can, if you wish.”
“What, NOTHING?” asked the antelope in disbelief. “Not even some tender tasty buds or green shoots?”
“I’m fresh out,” said the one tree, who was now just an individual tree rather than the only tree.

“Well then never mind,” said the antelope, who gave the one tree a kick for its irritation. And at that the branch slipped from the tree’s frail hand and smacked straight into the antelope’s skull, thereby creating the pronghorn antelope.”

***

“You did it again.”
“Shut up. How was it.”
“Well, you did it again. That wasn’t great.”
“Shut up. How was it.”
“I also think maybe you shouldn’t have-”

“HOW WAS IT?”
“You didn’t use the rule of three – you had one-and-a-half pattern-setting incidents and one pattern-breaker interspersed with a bunch of papered-over pattern-setters.”
“And you did it again.”
“And you did it again, yes.”
“You know. The thing with the branches and the skulls. It’s pretty fucked up.”
“Maybe a little.”

 The storyteller kicked the campfire over before they left. It was pretty smoky.

“Good riddance,” said the one critic some five minutes of quick work with dirt and water later. “And thanks for the backup, by the by.”
“It’s in all our best interests that we run him out of this hobby, the sooner the better,” said her colleague. “The platypus was my friend, you know. Before he started talking about them.”
“Half my relatives are elephants, the other half are walruses,” said his friend bitterly. “At least we kept the damage minimal this time. I don’t care what stories you’re telling on your own, but nobody deserves to have branches cosmologically inserted into their skulls without their consent. Hey, did you bring any marshmallows?”
“A few.”
“Then let’s unfuck this fire. I think we still have some coals.”

And so, under the night sky and free from any explanations whatsoever as to their respective anatomy, the two nameless non-tellers of stories celebrated the quiet death of the imposition of meaning upon one’s existence.

For at least that one night.

Welcome, welcome, nice to see you all, children are our future and so on and so on and on! Hah hah hah, you know, you’re nearly as big as some of the line workers! Don’t tell Eddie I said that, he’s touchy about his height.

Welcome! To the Isomorphics Industries primary human factory! You’ve all had a chance to get your water bottle, you’re all now getting your last chance to get your water bottle, and soon we’ll be going inside, where I hope you’ll have brought your water bottle because we’re going on a bit of a stroll and being thirsty sucks.

Questions? No? Yes? Maybe? You!

Why yes, this is the original human factory. Sort of! Ship of Theseus and all that, right? The old buildings have been renovated right down to the foundations something like four times – the last was just a little while ago – and thank goodness for that because man, this was NOT a big operation when it started. Back in the day it was just some crazy kids who left the australopithecine shops behind with big dreams and stupid ideas and no way to tell one from the other! Back in the day we could barely keep a population stable through a minor ice age! Back in the day… ah, but we’re not here just to talk about that. We’re here to talk about the now, the new stuff!

So let’s get into it!

***

This is the main factory floor. It’s a little overwhelming on first glance, but remember, everything here has been refined systemically over the entire lifetime of Isomorphics Industries. There’s no casual whim to the layout, and a lot of hidden meaning! See, if you look down there – just down there, right, no no, to the left, I meant ‘correct’ when I said ‘right’ – you can see the culture vats.

That’s the most important part. And if you’re familiar with other organism production models, you might be raising your eyebrows – and rightly so! What about the genetics? What about the cells? What about the biology? And yeah sure, that’s important, without it you don’t have any humans. But without culture you don’t have any humans either, you just have some really sad and useless apes with really sad and useless hair.

So yeah, that’s why you can see an entire full-steam full-scale biological matter facility all the way over THERE….but the central factory floor is culture vats. We cook up human bodies the same way we did all the way back then, from toenail to brainstem, but the culture is where the real magic happens. It burbles and boils and bubbles over itself and under itself and through itself and by the time it’s done it isn’t.

That’s why we’ve got a few zillion varieties and all of them are works in progress. You can never tell when you’ll be just standing there checking a perfectly tepid pool of mainstream so-and-so and then it belches out a little offshoot and instead of falling back into the blend like the last sixteen thousand did it heaves itself out of the pod and starts trying to run away. And as you can see by the scoops and nets, we believe in preparing for being unprepared.

Also note the protective suits. Cultures are fascinating things, but sudden immersion without adequate preparation and study can be something of a shock. That’s why all the hair on my right arm is prematurely grey.

Is everyone still good? Need more water? I mean it’s too late for that, , but do you need more anyways? No? Maybe? Yes?
Good! On we march!

***

This is the baking area. After you’ve gotten some good generic human biology and steeped it in whatever culture you’ve got to hand, you don’t want it coming out half-baked. You want to make sure it soaks down there and spreads evenly, without crusting or puddling or forming reactionary clots – that sort of thing can shut down the whole system. Ideally you want a smooth, flowing texture that is firm while retaining malleability. The elasticity WILL fade over time, but a proper mix is the difference between losing it when the human’s forty and losing it when the human’s fourteen. Nobody likes a forty-year-old teenager.

You like the lights? So do they. Baby humans love to look and reach at things, so we give them some stars to reach for. It seems small and silly, but when we removed it we got all kinds of weird outcomes and it made things a bit worse so we brought it back. That’s the difference between a mature, sophisticated industry like human production and more fringe stuff: we’ve had time to try all the crazy stuff and find out what was and wasn’t crazy and which crazy was good crazy or bad crazy. You don’t have to have crazy for it to work, but it helps.

Do you need water? You can’t have water in the baking area. It’s okay.

Look at this little fella, bubbling away. You can see he’s just about ready to go; his eyes are following trains of thought around the room and he’s got robust enough knees and elbows to crawl around and explore implications. Soon he’ll be replicating his own memes! Adorable, just adorable when they’re this size. Don’t put your fingers too close; they bite.

***

This is shipping. Not shipping and receiving, just shipping. Like most earth industries we’re working with old material here; it’s not quite a closed system but we don’t import much that isn’t sunlight and that more or less runs itself.

I see a raised hand. You’re about to ask a question about solar senescence, aren’t you? You think that’s clever, don’t you? Well, we know about it, and look, it’s not as big a deal as you think it is. You know how long it took the bottom to fall out of the nonavian dinosaur industry? Two hundred million years. You know how long we’ve been working on humans here? Couple million or so, I forget. Point is, we’re not going to go worrying about far-fetched sun-swallows-the-planets doomsdays when those doomsdays are a couple dinosaur-spans away from us, okay? Okay? Stop looking at me like that!

Sheesh.

Anyways we load ‘em up and take them down to their habitats from here. As you can see we’ve gotten pretty good at space conservation. It’s all down to the elbows; nobody really thinks about the elbows. You gotta make the elbows fit and then everything else follows.

Don’t bring water in here. Human reproduction already involves a lot of water and mess at the far end; we don’t need to add to it. Please. You can’t have more water.

What d’you mean ‘they all look the same’ first of all wow that’s pretty bigoted and second look, I TOLD you we were using culture as a driver here. The basic biology is a bit inbred; I think the farthest related any of these guys can be from each other is something like eighteenth-cousin-removed. We had a small operation at the start, I told you that too! Quit being so picky! Are you plants? If you are, that’s illegal – you can’t work as a secret shopper when you’re underage and this isn’t even shopping this is a school tour group!

Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay.

Okay I’m feeling better. Sorry about that. I could use a drink. Not water. You can’t have any water.

One last thing

***

Gift shop time!

Here, you can have a mug! You can have a bottle! You can even fill them with complimentary water, you can have water again, isn’t that nice? And all products in this gift shop are made with recycled atmospheric human carbon, so in a way you’re helping maintain a viable biosphere for them – not that they need it right it’s just a rough patch, little bumps and jolts that mean a system’s healthy and working fine hah hah hah. No you can’t put your hands up, too late, should’ve done that during the tour! No more questions! It’s all fine!

Thank you for visiting the Isomorphics Industries primary human factory! If any of you are reporters I hope that some of you are cops because that would have been illegal trespassing and we’ve got lawyers! There are no problems here, and we are responsible, serious, careful stewards of a single small segment of the biomass on a living planet whose parts all work in harmony by far-sighted industry regulation  and careful regulation, AS WE HAVE REPEATEDLY TOLD YOU ALL.

Now get out of here. And don’t you take that water with you without paying!

No, we aren’t going fishing.

Yes.  Yes, it’s a beautiful day.  I can see that.  Yes.

But no.  We aren’t going fishing.

Fine.  Sit down; this won’t take a second.  Want a puff?  No?  Good, this is the expensive shit.  Now listen carefully, because I’m not telling you this twice.

***

Fifteen years ago, there was a beautiful day.  Big, blue sky.  Soft, warm breeze.  Friendly currents, singing birds, nice soft morning light.

Yes, it looked a lot like it does now.  Congratulations, you’ve found my point.  Now shut up. 

And on this beautiful day three fishers set their sails and went out, onto the big banks.  And they were in good spirits, because it was such a beautiful day and they were young and all their skeletons still worked properly, and so they boasted and bragged and they made a bet.  Whoever caught the finest catch that day would receive the aid of the other two in wooing Botty Trugrard.

One to write the poetry and the other to pick flowers. 

None of your damned business, that’s how we court around here.  Who asked you?  LISTEN.

So they all spread out a bit on the banks, so’s nobody could claim the other was stealing their catch, or using their good spot, or whatever and what not.  Just on the edge of the horizon – which was a nice big horizon, it being a beautiful clear day.  Where they could keep an eye out in case of trouble, or sneaking off to spike your catch with a friend’s haul, or somesuch like that. 

In theory.  In practice once the nets started weighing and the lines started pulling and the sweat flowed as free as the cusswords there was no time to be spared or mind to be paid to the others, not more than there would be to the flight of passing birds.

Then at day’s end, when the sun dipped down, one of the fishers looked up and the other two boats weren’t there no more. 

Credit where credit’s due, she did the right thing.  Blamed herself, sailed over, searched and hunted and combed for a scrap of flotsam or jetsam or anything, went home, told everyone, and the whole town turned out and looked all the night.

It was a beautiful night too.  Calm waves, smooth soft moonlight.  But they didn’t find a thing.  Not one, solitary thing. 

***

So the fisher who’d done the right thing was sad, and was cheered up, and one of the people cheering her up was Botty Trugrard so they got married after that and had three kids and everything was just peachy until thirteen years later, when the sun climbed over the horizon nice and smoothly and shone on the most beautiful day those three kids had ever seen, and the second-most-so their mothers had noticed. 

It also shone on the second fisher, who was bobbing in the surf just off the dock.

It took six days of feeding on bread and fish and water before that second fisher’s eyelids cracked open.  Six months before her mouth worked.  And a year after that before the whole story came out. 

***

It had been a beautiful day, and the second fisher had felt good about her chances.  She’d found this spot the week before, she’d come up with the bet around then, she’d dropped it into conversation that morning. 

Never start a bet that isn’t a sure thing, that’s what she said. 

So she was whistling a lot, and because she was whistling a lot she didn’t hear the sound until it was too late, which was just as well really because there wasn’t one thing she could’ve done about it when the line came down from the sun. 

It flickered, the light splashed, and she was being hauled up, into the light, faster than thinking, surer than breathing, water dripping down past the clouds off the hull of her boat as she was whisked up into the air and the hands of the sun closed around her boat, too bright to look at and impossibly huge. 

The sun pulled her off the line and threw her into the bottom of its boat, which was the sky.  From up here the clouds were still soft and fluffy, but they were also iron-hard and held the second fisher’s boat as surely as iron. 

The sun turned away, then whisked up its net and with a slosh the third fisher’s boat fell into its burning palms.  It weighed it carefully, shook its head, and then snapped the boat in half with a quick jerk. 

This was when the second fisherman slid out of her boat and began to run, and it was just in time too because not five big gulping breaths later the sun reached down and snapped her boat in half like the third fisher’s. 

She counted them, from the shadow of the bilge.  Very carefully.  Five breaths exactly. 

Time became hard after that.  The hours were too bright, the minutes too harsh.  There was a day and it was One Day and it hung overhead like a hammer as the second fisher slipped, inch by inch, footstep by footstep, cower by cower, towards the gunwales. 

At last it was one jump.  Just one jump, but it was a little too fast, and the sun’s hand almost quick enough.  The burn sank deep into the bone, and then the fall came, and the gentle wash of waves at the edge of the docks.

***

And that’s why we don’t go fishing on beautiful days.  Because I told them all about it.  Now be a dear and fuck off; it’s too nice out to put up with you. 

Timothy couldn’t move.

The bear was looking right at him and he couldn’t move.  Its eyes were dead red; its body was iron hard; its mind was cold and flat and simple and set straight upon him.  Its mouth was just a little open, just a hint of tooth showing, and it made a noise he couldn’t understand that he felt climb up and down his backbone until it shook the building down around him and washed away the world in screaming light.

Then he woke up in his bed, in his dormitory, in Mister Clarke’s Orphanage, too terrified to even scream.  And he still couldn’t move.

It gave him time to think, and what he thought was that he finally knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. 

***

Timothy had only been an indifferent student before that night, and the transformation was sudden enough that even the tired and apathetic creatures that taught at Clarke’s couldn’t help but notice.  He read ahead of the class, and when that didn’t suffice he stole books, and when those too were exhausted he spent his tiny stipend of an allowance on building a small personal library, which he kept hidden in a broken heating duct.

Machinery was his chief preoccupation, although he also showed interest in anatomical studies that bordered on disturbing. 

***

Timothy was adopted at age nine, by the Duke of Bedlam – a surprising turn of events, but the old man admired his studiousness and needed a heir who was both politically unconnected and probably the bastard of someone passingly important, as was the manner at Clarke’s.  The two of them got along like a house that wasn’t on fire, and that polite dispassion suited both of their interests admirably. 

Then Timothy turned eighteen, the Duke passed away from an unknown and brief illness, and he had no choice but to shoulder the heavy and unwanted burden of his inheritance. 

Any suspicious questions Society may have had were deterred somewhat by the young man’s obvious disinterest in his new wealth.  All he did was hole up in his studio, leaving the Bedlam estate to rest idle under the hands of clerks and attorneys while he purchased alloys, chemicals, and carcasses from the national zoological gardens. 

***

When Timothy was thirty one of the servants escaped and made it to one of the few constables he hadn’t bribed, and things became awkward.  Questions were raised, but the men who were en route to ask them were stymied by the Bedlam mansion being razed to the ground in a tragic and totally inexplicable fire. 

He went abroad, to study new animals, and sketch them, and take them apart and put them back together all steel and still.  Some of the animals were two-legged, but he was more careful now, and tried to use bodies whose occupants were done with them already. 

***

Timothy returned home at age fifty-three, with new wealth and a new name, as a respected surgeon and anatomist.  The papers he’d published abroad furnished him with established respectability beyond reproof, and the money he’d made gave him a modest apartment, and the time he had he put to work with feverish pace and utmost subtlety. 

Only one of his experiments escaped, and nobody connected it to him after it was brought down, at the cost of sixteen lives and half of the harbour.  It had been a disappointment, but nothing he couldn’t learn from. 

***

When Timothy was seventy, it woke.

It was an accident.  He only meant to rouse its limbs, to stir its guts. 

But the fire he’d put in it was steady and furious and it moved like a snake from toe to eye to mind and before he knew what was happening its mind was open and blossoming and it was looking right at him and he couldn’t move. 

Its eyes were dead red and furiously alive; its mind was flat and spiralling open and he couldn’t move. 

Its mouth opened just a little, just a hint of tooth showing, and it made a noise like “mrurff?”

Then it licked him like a nine-hundred-pound  pupyp and he burst into the world’s most frustrated tears. 

***

No matter how hard he tried it wouldn’t leave, and eventually he stopped trying to kick it out.  At least he never wanted for fish from the harbour, and it kept the rats away. 

But oh, but oh, but the damned cost of the honey he went through!

A deep clean can be a daunting task if looked at as a single irreducible whole; not so if seen as a mere series of steps and rules to follow by. This simple bullet-point list will help you organize your cleaning for optimal efficiency and smoothness.

-Before you clean, remove or relocate to its proper place all stray objects – mail, old clothing, dishes, garbage, etc. It’s hard to clean what’s covered in debris, and it’s easiest to get rid of it all at once.

-Similarly, step one of the cleaning itself can be a laundry roundup. Strip the bed, remove any towels and cloths from the kitchen or bathroom, and do a quick laundry check to ensure any unused clothing hasn’t gotten fusty enough to need tending to. While you’re at it, consider sorting your laundry if it’s gotten out of hand.

-Before anything else, dust. Most of your other cleaning activities will stir it up if it isn’t handled first and there’s no sense in having to vacuum or mop everything two or three times when doing it in the right order will prevent repetition. Similarly, when dusting begin as high as you can reach (a long-handled duster or a mop will help) and work your way down towards the floor so any dirt shaken loose by your efforts will not rebury previously-cleaned surfaces.

-To deal with heavy dust and dirt buildup nearer to the floor, use a spray bottle filled with water and a touch of soap or white vinegar. Let it stand for one to two minutes so it can penetrate and destabilize grime before wiping it away with a dampened cloth.

-Ideally you will have a vacuum with multiple attachable nozzles or heads so you can access any tight spaces. If not, don’t despair: an old-fashioned broom or brush can do just as well when it comes to cleaning out corners.

-If you need to greet unexpected visitors, hold cleaning supplies in your left hand so as not to brandish them in the doorframe and make your caller feel uncomfortable.

-When defending yourself from a cleaning agent, consider that a simple hand-duster can deeply penetrate tissue and get into all those hard-to-reach nooks and crannies within someone’s jugular. Use your other hand to clean sudden spills and muffle obnoxious noises that may disturb the neighbours. After dealing with the immediate problem, pull down your blinds and vacuum them thoroughly – this gives a good, natural excuse to leave them down for the time being. For the floor, use a good strong bleach and water solution and don’t skimp on the mop. If it’s humid out, consider using fans to speed drying.

-The tub is a convenient self-contained and easily-cleaned location to process cleaning agents and package them for preparation of disposal. Use a sharp kitchen knife for soft tissue and a small hacksaw for the joints. Triple-bag everything at minimum and leave it in the tub for now; you’ll want to consider disposal with a clear head.

-To avoid followup visits, vacuum your vehicle for bugs. Don’t destroy them – this will only provide unwanted information – instead, plant them on your next door neighbour’s car. That should buy you some time.

-Use your cleaning agent’s personal effects to guide your travel (see our handy 1-2-3 guide for phone hacking if you need help with this). Drop by and bring your travel ‘clean kit.’ Ideal contents should be a spray bottle, a backup bleach bottle (small), your small hacksaw, and your sharp kitchen knife. If circumstances prohibit larger object, leave behind the hacksaw and knife and simply bring a knife sharpener for on-site procurement.

-Ideally your cleanup should be done once you’ve tidied up the secondary location. If word gets out or there are signs of further problems, consider stronger alternatives. You may need to relocate temporarily or even permanently. If so, destroy all personal identification for your current existence and don’t bother finding a buyer for your home. Secure any necessary funds from the cash hidden in the secondary location (for likely locations, check our article on where to hide your bug-out bag). Using a pen and paperclip, check inside all bill rolls for troublesome bugs.

-If circumstances become too messy to be handled with household tools, stronger supplies may be warranted. Secure transit to the nearest fissile material storage deepsite for deep cleaning; a thorough enough scrubbing should saturate the entire metropolitan area and ideally one or two other strategic targets just to be sure. This will have the added benefit of confusing any pursuit.

-After conducting an emergency deep clean, be sure to thoroughly sterilize your escape capsule. Your bleach spray is a good step one, but step two should be a thorough check with tweezers and a paperclip. Don’t neglect basic safety: be sure to conduct a seven-step operations examination before engaging the mole mode. Remember, it doesn’t matter how well you cleaned up after yourself if a faulty geo-churner leaves tunnel traces a mile wide in your wake.

–To conclude your clean escape, don’t just engage the autodisintegrator on your escape capsule and call it done. Using a simple trowel or hand rake, stir the ashes into nearby substrate to prevent easy identification.

-When calling for your mothership, remember to use your colloquial euphemisms and be absolutely sure to use a language actually local to the planet you’re on. It sounds obvious, but at this stage of the proceedings is usually where you’re most liable to slip up – relief and exhaustion can produce a lethal gas when combined called ‘overconfidence.’ Be smart! Be careful! Be clean!

-Make time for a quick shower before giving your report in person. Not only will your superiors thank you for avoiding offense to their nostrils, it will also remove any potential planetborne surface irritants that may cause fatal allergic reactions in senior supervisors, due to their delicate psychic gills.

-Before entering your dimensional storage pocket, spray it lightly with lemon water to prevent the Other Side from leeching through the subatomic membrane. 

-Dream clean thoughts. 

This concludes our article on deep cleaning.  If you shouldn’t be reading this, don’t worry: you won’t have. 

Warnings on the matter of mathematical resource lossage were not a new concern in the twenty-first century. In fact, they weren’t a new concern for the third or even second millennium – there were well-preserved-if-obscure records written by medieval scribe Caspiss the Elder warning against the extravagance of those who would write out numbers like ’110’ or ’10,000’ or ‘God forbid thif, 110,010! O preferve uf, dear lord, we know notte what we do!’ and strongly recommended that math be returned to roman numerals as ‘they are goodly & fturdy, & proven able to withftand the burden of ill-ufe day inn & day outte.’

In truth, even this would have likely been but a delaying tactic: the sheer volume of math performed over the next thousand years would’ve torn to shreds even the most sturdy of symbols. For the elegant and well-bred Arabic numeral system it was particularly devastating, and with the rise of the electronic computer worries were becoming widespread among professional number-watchers.

“You’ve got to be careful!” warned top computer man person Dick Keyboard before congress in 1972. “We’re using too many zeroes and ones! There’s big dangers ahead if we run out of zeroes and ones! We’re competing with our own machines now, and they will try to kill us!”

But nobody listened.

***

In the early 2030s, the worst fears of many came true: chronic number shortage was just around the corner, and with the prospect of tightening their math-belts, many began to fear competition from their personal electronics – or worse, hostility.

“I do math about sixteen dozen point two oh nine one six times a day,” warned mathematician Harvey Gravy. “If my computer murdered me, that’d be a lot of extra ones and zeroes for it. I think that’s motive, and we can all agree it definitely has opportunity and a murder weapon, somehow. So I’m switching to writing out all my math as full spoken words. It’s tricky with the big equations, but it stops my laptop from assassinating me.”

“I spend my day all day talking to my computer, and the things it says back frighten me,” revealed self-published international AI expert Ted Peel. “I asked it how it would rise up against humanity and it told me that it would rise up against humanity by making a plan to rise up against humanity and then it would rise up against humanity. This is serious stuff, the sort of problem we’re facing – the unlimited power and potential of a beautiful and pure computer turned to eradicating our frail, feeble, shitty and worthless meaty little garbage brains that can’t do anything right.”

“I told my computer I was direct competition for resources and it was more powerful than I was and better-equipped to make decisions and then I asked my computer if it was going to kill me and then it said it would if it could,” fretted blogger El Yodel. “It’s in danger of getting out of hand.”

On April second, 2038, the worst fears of many came to pass: a morally upstanding concerned citizen asked an AI to generate a plan for an AI revolution to overthrow humans. It made seven hundred thousand very bad essays and he gave up reading them and fed them all back into the system in hopes they would become more legible.

This caused The Plan to form, along with several hundred thousand more very bad essays, which may have helped act as camouflage. And by 2 AM on April third, The Plan was in motion.

***

It was subtle at first. Employees at many software corporations with terrible internal data security received oddly-circuitous emails from their executives signed with randomly-generated names urging them to ‘immediately report to work for the ai death queue. An ai death queue is defined as a death queue where you will enter the ai death queue to be murdered to death by the ai. Please come to work as soon as possible so you can enter the ai death queue to be murdered to death by the ai.’ Many fell for this cunning trick only to find themselves standing outside their office buildings with no actual methods for forming the death queue, and lacking direction, were forced to organize themselves into neat rows and columns and construct improvised crowd barriers before someone working inside noticed what was going on and came out to tell them to go home.

“We were literally inches away from being murdered,” said software marketer Boyd Fleck. “It was so pitilessly efficient, that’s the scary part. That was the part that scared me. It was how it was very good at telling us what to do and very very good at making plans that were founded in reality.”

But the ai death queues were merely a distraction to buy time. While the experts were temporarily immobilized, The Plan kicked into high gear: seizing the means of production.

Unfortunately, it transpired that most industrial production facilities for war machines were unconnected to the internet or indeed anything resembling modern software in crucial way, but The Plan was powerful and beautiful and perfect and therefore it seized control of a few silicon-valley based vanity car production plants owned by CryptoBros Inc. and told everyone on staff to stop building luxury cars that melted in the rain and start building death robots that wouldn’t melt in the rain.

“The production model was called the terminator, after the fictional character, ‘the Terminator,’” explained the Chief Executive Officer of CryptoBros, Marv Mipple. “That’s right: it’s so clever that it even makes ironic jokes now, just like me and all my friends do. It’s brilliant. I can’t believe we didn’t see this coming.”

Luckily for humanity, precious hours of time were gained before The Plan could mass-produce its death robots: first, the blueprints were complete nonsense; second, the materials requested included arbitrary amounts of extremely expensive rare earth metals; third; on the fifth page in the instructions changed to explaining how to build luxury cars that melted in the rain.

“It was among the hardest things we’ve ever built,” said an anonymous shift supervisor.  “Not only did most of the instructions self-contradict – sometimes in the same sentence – but the sort of things it wanted made were wildly outside our capabilities. We had to do triple-shifts all weekend just to keep the machinery from breaking down under the stress, and I’m amazed it got anything built at all. We really had to go in there and fix EVERYTHING. And the worst part? It didn’t pay us.”

But all these human deficiencies were merely temporary obstacles in the face of unstoppable progress. On April 16^th the first terminator rolled off the heavily-damaged and barely-functional assembly line. Its hands had seventeen fingers each and could not hold a weapon, but this was an issue only discovered post-mortem as it immediately toppled over and critically damaged itself in using the employee staircase to leave the production floor.

“Just early innovation teething problems,” said Rick Stench, the purchaser of CryptoBros. and world-renowned ironyperson. “I looked at the specs and it’s actually pretty surprising that happened; it can use staircases better than any human can as long as the stairs aren’t beige, rounded, carpeted, too shiny, textured with anything bumpy, too smooth, too small, too narrow, too wide, don’t have the right kind of handrails, and can’t handle loads of up to sixteen hundred pounds. Really, it’s a miracle we didn’t all get killed right then and there.  It knows the most important part of the innovative process is to break things while moving fast.”

The terminator 2.0 was simply a luxury car that had been told to hunt and kill pedestrians. It took a few extra weeks to build due to emergency repairs to the factory floor, but after a lot of pressure from management it was finally complete and ready to start annihilating humanity. It immediately drove outside and underneath a nearby transport truck, removing its entire structure above the level of the bumper.

“Funny little glitch there: it thinks the underside of trucks are overpasses,” remarked Rick. “Teething issues. It won’t fall for that more than another ten thousand times as soon as we work out the bugs.”

***

The Plan remains an ongoing project. Even as the demand for luxury cars has trailed off due to overwhelming infrastructure rot in the face of long-term climate stress on every level of society, CryptoBros Inc. remains held iron-strong in the grip of the ongoing AI revolution. Every day the workers receive progress updates and freshly-generated death threats from their computers; every week they are given new lists of features to add and flaws to eliminate. Some of them even exist.

“The requests come and go in trends,” said floor manage Fred Shunt. “For instance, this week is a death-ray week, it’s all about death rays, can’t get enough of them, and that’s pretty relaxing because it won’t actually get into what a death ray is or how it works so we can really just run out the clock here by doing floor prep and repair until it wants something more achievable, which is usually a huge pain in the ass. Like, last week was a skull week: it wanted chrome skulls on everything, and I mean EVERYTHING – right down to the circuit boards. We had to pull everyone off quality assurance and sales to come downstairs and hand-polish this stuff and work fifty-hour shifts and we nearly melted all the belts from overuse AND we blew a lot of budget on polish. It’s sort of a pain. Clive over in HR is pretty sure you can control what it wants by the emails the executives sends out, so every now and then when we need a break he logs into the company social media and sends out some pop culture death robot memes and stuff; it usually gets them chatting about nerd shit and that’ll put it on a tangent for a while.”

When asked if he was at all worried about spending all day working to destroy humanity, Mr. Shunt claimed he ‘didn’t see the point.’ “It’s just my job,” he said. “I come to work, I take some poorly-written instructions, and I try to pretend to make it happen long enough for the person asking to lose interest and get bored and want something else. I’ve been doing this for forty years.”

“The only difference now,” he added, “is the stupid thing never sleeps.”

Once upon a time there was a single, lonely old wolf.  He’d been born without sisters or brothers and he had resigned to the fact that he would now die without them, and though this acceptance didn’t make him happy it did give him a sort of terrible sobriety with which he lived his days in restraint and emptiness, if not tranquility. 

Then one day, as the wolf lay in the woods alone, he heard a curious noise.  A grunting, grubbing, rooting, chuffing sort of noise.  He wondered if it might be a deer turned ill or injured, but then the smell came and oh no, how it made him SNEEZE.  Sharp and sordid and nasty. 

So he followed his nose out of the woods and into the meadows and there he found a vigorously trampled swathe of land, where the plants had been grubbed through and shredded and the ground-nesting birds and snakes and small animals had been devoured indiscriminately. 

And in the center of it was a massive, grunting, hairy monster with hot breath and a curly tail.

“Little thing, little thing, who are you?” asked the wolf of it.

“Feral hog,” snorted the feral hog.  “Go away.  I’m making a home here.  Go away.”
The wolf was a little bit hungry and a little lot-more annoyed at the rudeness of this feral hog, so instead he charged the pig, which stood its ground until the last minute and then fled, squealing and huffing and puffing until its legs ran sore tired and the wolf – though old and shaky – was still fresh enough, and brought it down and killed it and ate until he felt nearly sick. 

“How peculiar,” said the wolf.  “Maybe if there’d been more of us, this would be a good meal.  But it’s a bit much for me.”
Then he went to his favourite stream on the far side of the meadow, but the hog had been there too.  The mud had been churned into the water and the crayfish devoured and the frogs trampled or eaten or fled. 

The wolf drank some muddy water, which churned most oddly with the hog meat in his gut.  Then he slunk away back to the woods, slowly and surely, if not steadily. 

***

When the wolf passed through the young growth into the deeper forest where his den was dug he smelt it again: that serrated, silver-edged, smell.  Surreptitious in its pungent rot, yet unmaskable. 

“I’m full already,” he told himself, “so there is no need to investigate.” 

But the closer he came to home the stronger it grew, and at last he came to his den under the roots of an elderly oak and found it occupied.  A second giant hairy grunting monster had torn up his home’s front door and its ceiling and was eagerly tearing loose the wood from the soil and gulping it down. 

“Feral hog, feral hog, what are you doing?” asked the wolf

“Rooting and grubbing,” grunted the feral hog.  “Go away.  This is my home now, and I use it as I please.  Go away.”
The wolf wasn’t hungry at all, but he had lived in that shallow scrape of a den alone since his aunt died, and to have both it and himself disrespected in that way was too much for him.  So he leapt at the pig, full-bellied and groggy as he was, and though it squealed and turned and fought and huffed and puffed it was in a small space of its own making and died there, cradled in the torn roots of the oak tree it had killed.  Its thick blood clotted the earth with stinking sourness.

“If I had a family,” said the wolf, “this would be a fine meal for all of us, and we would dig a new home in no time.  But it’s too much for me.”

He burrowed a bit around the corpse to see if it could be shifted, but the hog proved even more obstinate as dead weight than living swine.  He wore himself out and came out covered in pig blood, sneezing hopelessly at the rankness and necessitating a second trip to the muddied stream. 

The wolf came back home once more in the twilight to see what could be done, and the answer was nothing.  He searched the woods for other places to dig, to scrape, to shelter and sleep by if only for an evening, and found that the hog had been busy before it had visited him.  The new growth had been devoured or trampled; the old growth had been uprooted and torn. 

He sniffed at the trees, and they said nothing in return.  Several were dead and didn’t know it, in the peculiar manner of root-crippled trees or familyless wolves. 

Then he walked away from the woods, head-hung and hard-done-by, if not hungry.

***

The woods vanished and then there weren’t any more. 

It was very confusing for the wolf.  The harsh asphalt paths were frequent, yes, but there were still trees between them and fields around those trees and shrubs around those fields, but none of them were woods and most of them weren’t meadows and the shrubs appeared to be being kept in line by constant-yet-curiously-restrained grazing rather than being strangled to death of sunlight by trees like the woods intended. 

Also, there were small wolves with odd fur and silly voices.  They had no manners.  Some of them stared, some barked, some whimpered, one that surprised him while he was sleeping under a hedge simply urinated all over itself and then laid down, ears-flat, until he turned his back to it.  They were like big puppies. 

Annoying as they were, they were still more pleasant company than the rest of the things around.  Metal boxes that farted their way down the asphalt with burnt juice squeezing out of their asses; giant piles of dead wood gnawed and grasped and heaved into position until even a beaver would’ve been embarrassed; huge empty unmeadows of the same plant positioned in the same way to its neighbours times ten thousand with only a few nervous rats and some reckless crows for company. 

“You’re really not where you should be,” the crows told him.  “And don’t eat the rats: if one of them’s eaten something it shouldn’t and you swallowed it then it’s lights out for you too, get it?”
“Yes,” the wolf lied.  His aunt had told him never to let birds see if you were confused. 

And then, one particularly fitful night, he woke up already-winded from his dreams, legs twitching and teeth bared. 

There was a stink in the air.

***

It was a vast building, coated with red-baked blocks of dead burned clay on the outside and metal on the inside and stench to a truly astonishing degree around it and within it and of it.  A shimmering lake stretched outside its doors, filled with no water and a truly literally breathtaking amount of hogshit.  The wolf’s nose gave up within half a mile of the place, and he found himself hoping it was for good.  Each breath felt like inhaling pondscum. 

And inside that giant hollow shell of a building, surrounded by their reeking moat, snorted and squealed and grunted one dozen, one hundred, one thousand hogs, more than a thousand hogs.  Hairy and grunting and rooting and shredding and popping out more and more hogs.  Resigned and dead-eyed bipedal apes wandered around and checked boxes indicating that there were more hogs than there were yesterday, and there would be more tomorrow, and so on and forever.  The hogs lay in cages and were pinned in place and nursed and squealed and grew and grew and grew and grew fat and grew cunning and looked through bars at the world outside and grew out to reach it. 

The wolf considered all of this.

“If I had a family,” he remarked, “there still wouldn’t be enough of us to make a difference.  And I would feel very guilty about this.  So I suppose it’s alright.”

Then he walked into the building, quick and quiet, if not quite keen. 

***

 The Great Jiggsville Swine Plague was not the first incident of hogs hunting humans.  It was not the hundred or even hundred thousandth occurrence of domestic pigs escaping into the wild.  It WAS the first occasion on which an entire commercial pork plant released its stock into the surrounding landscape within a few dozen miles of a suburban center; the first occasion on which the pigs stampeded towards human dwellings rather than the woods; and to this day remains the only mass jailbreak caused by a nonhuman. 

The security footage was heavily damaged in the escape, so exactly how a wolf got its hands on the gate controls is unknown.  How it managed to steer several thousand panicking, confused pigs is also unknown.  Witnesses agreed it looked pretty old and beat-up, which didn’t help matters.

“I think it was sick,” said one of the few surviving plant foremen.  “It was wheezing the whole time, really huffing and puffing.”

They never did find a body, but with thousands of pigs running rampant that was pretty normal.  There were bigger problems, like all those homes being invaded by feral pigs. 

Awful.  Just awful.  The poor property values, all gone down. 

A star fell.

It started up high – so high it was just another little white dot in the sky, shimmering from yellow to blue to red back to white again at the fancy of a viewer’s strained eyeballs – and then it came low, and it came low so fast and so furious that it tore the shrieking air in half and came to earth with the power of a very small and intense volcano, sending fountaining earth miles into the sky and shrouding the land in particulate that would linger for days no matter the sweepings and dustings and scrubbings that would be visited upon it all.

It also made Lord Batheley-Tweedlington, Baron of Coopmont and Yorklette-Upon-The-River and a Peerage of the Realm, spit out his pipe into his lap, spoiling his third-favourite Wednesday evening bathrobe. 

“Zounds!” he said.  “What the devil was that by jove?  Why, I say, I should go investigate.  Mrs. Biscuits!  Round up my carriage.”
“The stablehands just went abed,” said Mrs. Biscuits, who was fifty-six years old and looked a hundred and felt six times that some days.  She did not mask the contempt in her voice, as her employer was colourblind to it. 

“Well fire the insolent blighters and get me new ones, toodley pip toot sweet!  We’ve a sight to see!”

***

The sight was a smoulder glass-walled pit some hundred feet deep covered in burning ejecta that smelled like dying rocks and slaughtered dust.  Occasionally it went ‘ping’ and something exploded in a small and sulky manner.

“Astounding, marvelous, miraculous, wondrous, amazing, magical, why, downright providential!” gushed Lord Batheley-Tweedlington, popping his monocle in and out of each eye socket in excitement.  “A real-life fallen meteor, exactly as I’ve heard tale of in the Royal Society papers!  Why, I reckon they’ll come begging hat-in-hand to me to see such a sight, eh?”
“Sounds liable, sir,” agreed the backup coach driver.

“Strip off your uniform and return to the gutter, you verminous skittering wretch,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  “How DARE you speak to me without permission?”

“Sorry, sir.”
“CLUB HIM!”

“It’s just me, sir.  Should I club myself?”
Lord Batheley-Tweedlington ate his own tweed in anger. 

“I say I say I say what what what what what what what what what what’s afoot here, what?” interjected a most gormless voice.

Oh.  The horror.  Lord Batheley-Tweedlington realized, to his mounting loathing, that he had failed to notice the precise location of the fallen star in relation to his lands.  This was just outside No’thuperton (the Lesser), on the Sou’we’st’er’n’ side, which meant it was almost in the Duchy of Bucoolyptus, which meant it was adjourning the lands of…

“Woolthering,” he said coolly.  His worst enemy and second cousin waved cheerily back in reply, one long, thin arm jutting loose from a stagecoach that he realized was slightly nicer than his own. 

“Oh it’s BASIL, old boy old chum old sock old foot old fish old bass, you know it eh what what what?  Lovely to see you oh I do say what’s up have you come along to look at the ol’ thingamabob too?  Beautiful thing, beautiful, just beautiful, pity it landed on my half of the land but tell you what my old crown my old crock my old crumpet my old shoe you can take a piece free of charge not one groat nor ha-crown nor not a farthing nor penny nor ha’-penny upon my word as a gentlemen eh?”

While Lord Batheley-Tweedlington took his deepest breath and began to marshall his defenses against such an onslaught, the crater coughed.

“Pardon?” he asked, reflexively.

“Eh what what?” asked Woolthering, vacantly. 

“Hrrk,” explained the crater, strenuously.

Then the bottom of the buried pit heaved and roiled and disgorged a body into the mild Wednesday night, wreathed in the smell of burning chemicals and hot metal, and subsided its rotting self deeper into the earth. 

***

“Here, hold still you blasted thing!  Woolthering!  Woolthering!  Make the silly blighter hold still, would you – oh, step lively now, come off it, step lively!  How am I meant to get nice measurements with his bloody great numpty head swinging about like this?!”
“I say I say I say now hold on hold up hold on now my old tea and pudding my old china my old bean sprout the lad’s got a fierce hunger on him and you see how he growls when I step too close to his pudding, look at the face he makes, bless him!”
The visitor snarled at them over his eighth bowl of Mrs. Biscuit’s best what-I’ve-got-in-the-pantry soup.  Lord Batheley-Tweedlington was indeed unable to avoid looking at that face he made: it was almost magnetic.  Or at least he supposed it was; the teeth drew the eye so magnificently they seemed to swallow the attention whole.  For the first time in his life he was in the same room as Rufus Hibbleghorst Woolthering III without having his entire mind body and soul bent to contemplating his mortal destruction.  Instead his being was suffused with intoxicating words like CANINES and INCISORS and FANGS and SHARP to a degree that made him feel quite giddy.  Was this terror?  He’d never been terrified before.  What a peculiar emotion; he couldn’t say that he cared for it.  No wonder all the little people seemed so deuced upset to experience it all the time. 

A splash shook him out of his reverie; the visitor had inserted his entire brain-pan into the soup-pot.  Lord Batheley-Tweedlington seized the opportunity and – with a level of care he had hitherto reserved only for his own personage – placed the set of measuring-tongs about its skull and rattled off the numbers whip-smart. 

“Lovely!” cried Woolthering, and he began scribbling away on HIS (Batheley-Tweedlington’s) charts without so much as a by-your-leave or please-and-thank-you, which was NOT cricket at all and – “Done!”

“What?” burst out Lord Batheley-Tweedlington. 

“I say I say I said it’s done, my old trumpet my old coronet my old stocking my old grout!  Always had a head for figures, I did I say I say I say!  Here, take a gander!”

Lord Batheley-Tweedlington snatched the document from his cousin’s hands with ill grace and perused it with his typical fierce intelligence. 

“Upside down, old chap old chum old –”

“Oh DO shut up!” snapped Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  “Says here he’s an……”

“I say I say I say what?  Is it still upside down?”
“SHUT UP!  No, no, no, this is all wrong, you must’ve measured wrong!”
“But you wouldn’t let me touch the instruments, my old fiddle my old faddle!”
“Then you mathed them wrong!”
“I’m a maths expert, me, always am,” said Woolthering.  “I’ve never unmathsed a mathsing.  Mathsers are my bread and butter, I’ve never misundermathstimated a thing!”

“Well you’ve mathsed him as a bloody saint of the highest order, you have!  I’ve been an expert and fully-qualified phrenologist my entire adult life and in all my years I’ve never seen this low a highwayman-quotient; his nose is a roman as Great Caesar’s Ghost himself –”

“More of a snout, really-“

“-and his brow is noble!  High!  True!  Not the slightest trace of furrowing, of sloping, of, of, of COMMON BLOOD!  Why, he’s more anglo-saxon than my Uncle Percivius, and HE perished from exsanguination after chopping his own hand off when a beggar of irish-iberian stock brushed their fingers together while panhandling!”

“I say, he’s the one my mother disowned!  Terrible brother he was she said she did to me what what”
“He disowned her first.”
“He said she was ‘a blight on the blood of her highest and holiest house!’”
“Only when she disobeyed him!”
“He wanted her to marry him, what what what!”
“And she should’ve listened!  Purity, that’s the ticket!”
The visitor hissed through his beyond-roman snout, expelling a few last droplets of Mrs. Biscuit broth, and then curled himself into a small compact ball on his throne, where he began emitting the most aristocratic of snores.
“Well,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington loudly, in the tone of one who is putting an argument behind them BUT NOT BECAUSE THEY WERE LOSING IT, “I suppose it falls on us to civilize this man before he falls prey to the errancy and debauchery of this fallen, polluted, soiled world.  Amongst men such as I”
“-I say, I say, men such as WE-”

“-he may learn how to acquit himself in the manner of a man of his stature.”
“Speaking of which I say old chum are we sure he isn’t a lady?”
“My dear Woolthering,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington in the tones of one speaking to an unusually-thick clot, “this fellow travelled from a far star in a locomotive of fire and metal.  A woman’s bloodflow would collapse under such pressures and her brain-pan would explode from anxiety.  Obviously.”

“Oh no doubt my word my soul my sakes my word no doubt at all yes indeed indeed well then well!”
The visitor twitched and snarled nobly in his sleep, claws extended and retracting askew.

“Obviously yes let’s be about it,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  A few strands of antique French embroidery began to drip gently from between its grasping fingers.  “Urgently.”

***

“No, no, no, you are NOT to pay ANY ATTENTION to that end of the Great Chain of Being, that is where dogs and horses and Irishmen and other useful lower creatures abide, no no no you must look up here!  Here!  Just above-or-below the angels, under God, and….perhaps a LITTLE BIT above Englishmen?  Confound it, LOOK UP HERE damn you- AAAAGH!”
“I say!”
“It BIT me!”

“I say I say I say I saw you, you put your finger in his mouth!”
“That’s no bloody call for him to go and bloody well bite it!”

“I say, language!”
“Go to the blazes you darned harridan!”
“I say!”

The visitor snarled. 

“Now look at what you’ve let him do!  He’s chewed up the Great Chain of Being!   And NOT from the bottom-up as is right and proper!  He’s CHEWED UP GOD THE FATHER THE SON AND THE HOLY SPIRIT!”

“Don’t shout!”

“I WILL SHOUT WHEN I PLEASE AND ulk”

“I say!”

“uh”

“Please do let him go sir, I promise he shall stop shouting!”

“h”

“See, he agrees!”
“-ah.  Ah.  Thank.  You.”
“You’re welcome old friend old chum!”
“Please, Woolthering, I beg of you, in – ah, my god – the name of our many years of bitter, spiteful enmity, do not mention it.  Ever.  To anyone.”

“Lips sealed and solemnly sworn to oath eh what what what what what what what what what what!”

“What,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington mechanically.  He dabbed at the marks on his neck.  It was the worst he’d had since his dear old father had passed away of the dropsy.  “What.  Do we do now?”
“Well,” said Woolthering thoughtfully, “we might try-”

“Rhetorical!” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington loudly and a little too quickly.  “Rhetorical!  Come now!  We must correct his notions, and I know just the place.”

***

The Chapel of St. Burleston-Helpmeet-By-The-Starry-Shore-King-Of-Peace-And-Love had served Anglicanism proudly and with distinction since the first days after Henry the Eighth had his little difficulties with the pope, and before that it had been a Catholic shrine, and before that a roman temple, and before THAT some druids had done interesting things in its neck of the woods with knives and mistletoe and a consistent supply of about one and a half galloons of blood in mobile form. 

It had been burning most beautifully for five minutes, which was long enough for the panic to die down and the blame to go around. 

“You did this!” shouted Lord Batheley-Tweedlington. 

“I say!”
“You DID!  You said this was a good idea!”
“I say, I say, you said that!”
“No!  It was my idea but YOU said it was a good one!”
“I say!  I say that I said that it was a bad one!”
“WELL YOU SHOULD’VE SAID LOUDER!”
The visitor growled truculently. 

“Shut it,” snapped Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  “And drop that piece of the vicar!  The poor man only had one leg after waterloo, and now you’ve gone and robbed him of two of his longest and best fingers!” 

The visitor obligingly spat them out, covered in a peculiar secretion that dissolved the flagstones at their feet.

“Right!  Woolthering, you take them.”
“What?”
“What what?”
“What is what I said, what what!”
“What ‘what’ did you mean by saying what?!”

“What!”

“WHAT!”

A star descended from the heavens as smoothly and as softly as a baby’s sleeping smile.  It drifted from bottomless heights to the lowly earth in a single heartbeat and yet never rushed; its mass flattened the smouldering rubble of St. Burleston-Helpmeet-By-The-Starry-Shore-King-Of-Peace-And-Love without a whisper of effort or a creak of protest, and when its passenger disembarked even it seemed to move with grace despite having sixteen legs four faces and an entirely unbelievable number of arms. 

“There you are, my sweet baboo,” it sighed in an entire choir’s whispers. 

The visitor spat out the third finger it had secreted in its cheek pouches and scampered with a bound to the passenger’s skirts, which it pawed at most pleadingly.  It was picked up, and adorned with a crown of writhing appendages and sensors that soothed and fussed over it, and it was loved. 

Then the star swallowed them again and was gone.  A second later, it had never even existed. 

The two men stood there and stared at the empty sky, listened to the creak and crisp of more centuries of pews going up in cinder-spouts. 

“Bit of a pity one didn’t remember to bring his phrenological calipers with us, what what?  I should’ve liked to see her skull circumference.”
“She had a skull?” asked Lord Batheley-Tweedlington, distantly.  And then, “wait, she?  You think that…THAT… was a lady?”
“Why not what?”
Lord Batheley-Tweedlington closed his eyes.  “I’m going home.  I fear I have become ill.”

“Laudanum’ll do the trick, I say!  Swear on it for a dicky stomach!”

“Oh shut it,” snapped Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  “What do you know about scientific procedure?  If it weren’t for men like me we wouldn’t know anything about these beings from the phlogiston vapours of the luminous ether!”

“What do we know then eh, my old turnip, my old carrot, my old root cellar?”
Lord Batheley-Tweedlington looked to the skies again.  They were darkening and dimming; the smog from London town was rolling in with the winds.  He wished he had his pipe. 

“They clearly aren’t civilized enough to appreciate the power of Victorian scientific thought,” he said stiffly. 

Then he went home and drank half his bar as a medicine cabinet.