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The party could be seen from over the horizon: shining lights on rippling water on evening skies.

The party could be heard from kilometers away: crystal wine glasses clinking, drunken voices laughing, limousines launching.

The party could be smelled within eyesight: the rich, greasy musk of wealth, cut with the sharp and acrid reek of envy and spite.

It had no name. It had no posted address. It had no guest list. You either knew it was happening or you didn’t, and if you didn’t you’d never see it and if you did you’d never miss it.

Tempting as it would be otherwise, sometimes.

“So, I’ve got this new yacht-”

“Mine’s bigger.”

“-and it’s bigger than yours, and-”

“Mine’s only three feet shorter and it’s sixteen feet higher.”
“You put a flagpole on it! Doesn’t count!”

“Only the last ten feet. Does too.”

The bickering paused briefly as John-Baptiste Chappelle-Marmalade and Jiff Brudd simultaneously went for a sip (chug). Their (friends? No, the wealthy are beyond such things) associates watched with that special interest associated with people who are usually bored and are ready to be bored again.

“You know,” said Clarissa Hauptmoxweal, timing an offhand statement precisely at the moment John-Baptiste was opening his mouth again, “the food is really awful this time. The caviar is half a degree too cold. It’s going to offset my proteinmaxxing and neuscope my allergy ecology. I wouldn’t feed that stuff to my cat.”
“You have a cat now?” asked Jeremy Dollars, hair wetly sticking to his scalp and shirt. “Jeez Louise, that was fast. We only got divorced last year. Turning cat lady? Pretty peasant move, Claire-Bear.”
Clarissa smiled with all the warmth of the sun, that being an inescapable ball of nuclear fusion. “She’s not a peasant cat, Jimmy-Duckles. She’s a Savannah. Part serval.”
“Servo what?”
“Serval. A wildcat.”
“Oh, part wildcat. So she’s a regular cat that’s a bit spotty?”
“She’s a BC1-gen, seventy-five-percent serval. Seventeen kilograms. She could snip your piggy little fingers off at the root before you could even squeal about it.” Clarissa’s own fingers moved thoughtlessly around the edge of her wineglass, filling the air with a mournful hum. “I’m thinking of having her trained to do that. It would be neat.”

“Just get a dog, loser,” butted in Bowen Bogan-Morgan, resplendent in diamond gym shorts and a necklace. “Cats are cucked. My pitbull could eat your fingers AND your cat AND you – totally alphamaxxed.”

“I own a horse,” said John-Baptiste, thoughtfully.

“Horses eat grass bro. That’s beta af.”
“He killed my least-favorite riding instructor. I’m real fond of him. Hoof through the skull. It made a noise like crushing ice cubes.”
Jiff Brudd, resplendent in his white jorts, thoughtfully swished the last of his wine from cheek to cheek, opened his mouth, and slowly poured it back into his glass.

“I am the owner of an entire sled team of wolfdogs,” he said calmly. Then he upended his glass over Jean-Baptiste’s head.
The evening proceeded apace from then on – the cries, the recriminations, the worried intervention of The Help, the gossip pictures – but something about the particulars of that moment of dick-measuring struck a chord deep within the small, sordid souls of all present. Something human even they had not managed to excise: the urge to show a peer another living being and say: aren’t they neat?

This disgusted them. And nothing fascinates like disgust.

***

A casino was always a world apart. Time should be something for the outside, indoors it should always be the same, a comfortable blur of gentle robbery. But now, fenced off from the public and filled with billionaires, vodka baths, and clouds of million-dollar vape haze, the Ultramoolah had taken on a very different level of surreality.

“I got a new pet,” said Jeremy Dollars.

It was blurted out, which was normal. It was challenging to the point of anxiety, which wasn’t. I dare you. I dare you to say what I said was dumb.

“That’s dumb,” said Bowen Bogan-Morgan. “The chad move is to get someone else to give you one for free. Brainlet of you, ngl.”

“It’s a leopard,” said Jeremy. The paw not clutching his current hand drummed nervously, fingers not in any rhythm even recorded by humanity, making the staff members acting as the table’s legs (several of whom were classically trained musicians) wince in pain. “They can eat people. I’m gonna put him in a tree in my courtyard, and I’m gonna let him guard my house. And if the staff disrespect me I’ll make them feed him and if they flinch I’ll fire them and make him chase them out. AND if he catches one I’ll let him keep it for a day before I call the coroners. That’ll show the rest of them who’s boss.”

“Cool,” said Clarissa Hauptmoxweal. “I’m still calling. Put the cards down, leopardboy. Whatcha got, two pair? Wow, one pair. Four-high? That’s even worse than what’s in your pants.”
“Friggin’ jerkwad!”
“You know, you could’ve fixed that problem if you took those percolyines that I was selling. Only five million a shot and after ten shots you could’ve gotten up to six-high someday. Maybe.”
“You’re just mad my cat could eat your cat!”

Clarissa’s smile rolled up at the edges like cheap carpet. “One: you owe me. Truth or millions.”
“Truth!”
“Is that a wig?”
“NO!!!!”
She nodded in satisfaction. “Really? Wow, that’s somehow even more pathetic. Anyhoo, two: your cat can’t even handle my bird. As of last week, I own an ostrich. He’s nine feet tall and probably twice your cat’s weight and he can kick people’s insides out through their backsides. Want to meet him?”
“…my cat could totally eat him,” sulked Jeremy. He picked at his cards as the next hand slid out. “Renting a casino is a waste of money; this game’s dumb. Why are my cards all bad?”
“Birds are effeminate and soypilled because they don’t have dicks,” said Bowen Bogan-Morgan, throwing down three-of-a-kind tens, and mopping the steroids from his brow. “I got a wolf. A real wolf, none of that wolfdog degen trash that Jiffy-o here runs his sucker about. His name’s Alpex which is like Alpha combined with Apex. It’s completely fuckin’ based. He could bite a moose’s leg off. I got him a spiked collar because I’m not a little girl.”

“I own a reconstructed aurochs,” chimed in John-Baptiste Chappelle-Marmalade, slapping down four-of-a-kind, five-high. “The larger, angrier, more powerful relative of the largest, angriest, most powerful bulls alive today. I’d like to see him bite THAT leg off. I’ve had it go through three matadors and six rodeo clowns already. I’m starting a graveyard behind his pasture.”

“He can get in the ring with my Kodiak bear,” said Jiff Brudd. Diamonds glinted from his lapel as he laid down four-of-a-kind, six-high. “It’s killed four matadors and seventeen bulls this season and ate the leg of the man I sent to capture it. I’m thinking of giving him cocaine, seeing what happens. Truth or millions?”

“Truth,” said Bowen.

“Millions,” said John-Baptiste.

“Pussy.”
Jiff Brudd nodded regally. John-Baptiste picked up his solid gold cane in a double-fisted grip. The staff flocked between them like startled pigeons.

***

Mount Morble had been a natural wonder: a triple spire so perfect that a thousand pictures and paintings had not done it justice. This also had made it difficult to fit the ice palace atop it, and so it had been shaved smooth at the expense of some trillion dollars in airlifting and earthmoving. Putting the money in for an atmospheric seal to keep everyone for asphyxiating and filling an artificial ‘caldera’ with gems and champagne had been mere rounding errors.

In the midst of the pool, atop rafts of inflated suede, paddled by loinclothed manservants, a discussion was taking place.

“So right if MAN is the deadliest animal – which I am – and chimpanzees are basically men but hairier – which they ALMOST FACTUALLY are – then all I have to do is teach my chimp to use a gun and he’s unbeatable.” Bowen threw up his hands, spraying a thousand-dollar haze of alcoholic droplets across a million-dollars-worth of leather. “Boom, fate acompleeshed. Ipso fuckin’ facter, bitches!”

“Do YOU know how to fire a gun?” asked Clarissa. “You fired your instructor and called him a homosexual.”
“He was trying to tell me what to do. I don’t let that happen – what do I look like, pronouns? I can learn by myself. Trigger, grippy thingy, bullet, shooty. Easy!”
“You can’t read,” said Jeremy, who was sulking in his silvered beach chair under a mink blanket, pretending he wasn’t bothered by his inability to swim. A fishing rod protruded from his hamhands – silken line, gold hook, and platinum-handled.

“Books are gay and you can’t read either.”
“I can! A. B. C. D.”
“SHUT UP!”

“Okay,” said Jeremy smugly. “And your monkey’d lose the fight anyways.” He cast his line again and a helpful scuba-clad attendant strung a vacuum-packed sou vede fillet to its tip as he reeled it in. “Ew. Maple and whiskey?” He flung it back into the woman’s face in disgust. “Gimme ketchup and mustard.”

“My monkey’d lose to what? Your mom?”
“No? My crocodile. I’ve got a big crocodile. A saltwater crocodile. It’s over twenty feet long and it’s got so many teeth I can’t count them. And I had a dentist put in extra teeth so he can chew while he swallows. He’d swallow your monkey and spit out the bullets.”

Clarissa kicked her feet idly in the surf over her raft’s side, putting a toe through the eyesocket of a trained submersible-masseuse. “Please. You want to talk big aquatic predators? I picked up a great white shark last week. First in captivity in the world, I had to buy a few dozen PhDs to figure out how to do it. Twenty-five footer, can swallow a man whole, can swim circles around your dumb ol’ lizard and doesn’t need to breathe. And that was before I permacrossfaded it on adrenovantablack and king peptides. It thinks it’s god now. I paid for everything with a little bit of the money from the antiantiantioxideodorant deal, the one you said wouldn’t even earn anything. Up to about fifteen-B from that alone, dollarydoo.”

“Women shouldn’t own sharks,” said Bowen. “That’s a hyperphallic animal. He’s king of the seas and he has two dicks and you want to claim you can control him. You’re trying to uncuck your chromosomes by proxy, which is just goonworthy behaviour.”
“’She.’ Female sharks are bigger than males.”

Behind his sunglasses, Bowen’s face did something complicated and then collapsed in on itself. Everyone watched very intently, because the alternative was looking at Jean-Baptiste or Jiff Brudd.

Nobody wanted to look too closely at Jean-Baptiste or Jiff Brudd. Something was wrong there. Curdled out of shape.

“I have,” said John-Baptiste at last (he always ran out of patience first), “purchased an African bush elephant. A male. A rogue male.”
Everyone else looked farther away – at the gems, the ice walls, the distant screams of a servant being whipped raw and hurled into the deep end.

Jiff Brudd nodded.

“They are untameable,” said John-Baptiste. “I spent one billion dollars on behaviourists, drugs, and neurosurgeons, and I have tamed him, and I have had him trained. I have had this elephant trained to kill for me, in my name, at my pleasure. He executed a senator for me last night. A microchip in his brain stimulated the release of dopamine when he did this. He will do it again when I demand.”

Jeremy Dollars tried to cough politely. It got out of hand and turned wet.

Jiff Brudd nodded. “I have a hippo with armour plates sewn into its epidermis,” he said bluntly. “Replaced the teeth with titanium alloy and ran current through them. Did you know they electrocuted an elephant on Coney Island at the closing turn of the nineteenth century? They filmed it.”

John-Baptiste sneezed twice in a row while scratching his nose and one of the scuba-clad workers pulled out a harpoon gun.

Two snipers opened fire from the mirror-ceiling.  

“Take a pill, guys,” said Clarissa. “I’ll give you a free trial.”

***

On that certain day of that certain year, the Hawaiian Islands numbered nine: the eight traditional major islands, plus the privately-constructed, privately-owned, and manually-towed floating ultimate landmass that was the ultimate yacht: Le Pénis d’Alexandre. In its bilges, humans toiled under armed guard; on its decks, the wealthy frolicked; atop its private viewing platforms, the billionaires mingled, smiled emptily, hated pettily, coveted fiercely. Fountains poured liquid gold; thousand-dollar-a-plate food was served as decoration to be thrown away; wherever you went, someone poor was wailing in agony just out of sight.

Which was all well and good and normal.

But. Well.

“So. I bought a bison herd last week,” said Clarissa. She pulled an olive free from the edge of her drink’s basin – her hands shook, it fell. “After I won the Botoxxx vs Botox lawsuit. As a gift for myself.”
“Meat-eating bison?” asked Bowen. He pulled a syringe loose from his pants and stabbed it into an arm vein already studded with three prior injections.

“Cyber-bison?” asked Jeremy. He hadn’t stopped stroking his hair since he’d sat down. His index finger swirled it, like spaghetti; his ring finger soothed it, like the fur of an irritable cat.

“No! They’re bison. Normal bison. Big, healthy, normal bison. It’s like… sometimes that’s en-“

She burst into a sudden cough. Bowen and Jeremy almost jumped out of their seats.

“-ALMOST like, nearly, close to….enough?” she amended.

“Don’t you fuckin’ dare!” snarled Bowen.

“Look,” said Clarissa, trying for a second olive. It slid loose from her diamond-bladed extensions. “Fuck – I know the E Word is a big deal, but like. We can all dial it back a bit, right? If we want to? About anything we want? Like, including? Pets.”

Jeremy slowly nodded his head. “I mean. I own a national park now – well, it’s not national anymore, it’s Mytional, for me. Nobody else can have it. That means I win, I think. But it’s okay? That’s fine?”
“I bought a whale,” blurted out Bowen. He swore and slapped at a sudden spurt of blood on his nose. “Fuckin’ PRESSURE SURGES! Guh! But yeah whales are big I got the biggest I win game’s over right we’re all cool if you still care you’re caremad and going through it so we can stop now ri-”

“I have commissioned,” said John-Baptiste Chappelle-Marmalade (Earl of Montgomery, Duke of Basil, and Lord of Lamblort) “an organism.”

Sound died around their table. The lights of the party beneath them seemed as distant as the stars above.

“It is a most terrible thing,” said John-Baptiste. “It has no progenitor except calculation. Math told us what genes to take from whale, from cassowary, from eagle and ape and crocodile. Cold machinery made a womb, and a thousand scientists spun its caul. It was bred to grow. And it did. And it did. And it has. By god it has.”
“Uh,” said Clarissa.

“Half my fortune was spent on that,” said John-Baptiste, whose voice was becoming slightly louder with each sentence. “The other half went into its education. It was taught which parts of it were sufficient and which were insufficient and how they might be amended and admonished with metal and grafts. More hearts to grow larger still. A skeleton of carbon nanotube and titanium. A furnace to turn its own mass endothermy into a power sink for the world’s first practical field-usable light-amplification weapon. A second set of jaws. Radar defiance sewn in sheets into skin. And the most delicate and perfect sense of smell, able to pick a single human out from all the noisome froth and foam of the world, across the world itself, from a single hair. A hair I plucked from the arm of a chair with my own two hands.”
“Nnh,” interjected Bowen.

“All of this, for you,” said John-Baptiste, eyes hollow windows to something else but moreso than usual for an average billionaire. He was standing, clutching at the platinum-engraved rim of their table, seated above the greatest view in the world. “All of it, all for you,” he said to Jiff Brudd. He was tilting forwards, listing like a ship after an iceberg.

“Don’t!” blurted Jeremy.

“It was released at the chime of midnight,” said John-Baptiste, who did not otherwise acknowledge a universe outside his present focus. “It rises now, from the depths. It is too late. Do you have an apology?”
Jiff Brudd, now leaned near-horizontal in his seat, smiled and shrugged. “I crossed Variola major with Yersina pestis and some other stuff. Dusted it across the table half an hour ago  Sorry it sucks to suck.”

And then he died, smugly, leaking blood from every orifice including all the new ones.

***

When the animal surfaced it found nothing of interest. Fixed and unmoving lights; the quiet lap of waves, and the monotonous, empty smell of drying dirty blood and cooling pus.

So it turned beneath the salt again, and sank, and swam. Nameless, penniless, aimless, content.

If you didn’t know it existed, you’d never see it.

Dictionary Dick and the Missing Money

It was another exciting day in Decklestone, Pennsylvania, home to twelve and a half thousand humans.  One of them was little Richard Button, but even his own family didn’t call him that.  They called him Dictionary Dick, because even though he was just in the fourth grade he’d already read the entirety of Frank & Wagner’s 1952 Standard Encyclopedia.  This made him just the person to be consulted when people were puzzled, and he’d already helped his father, a police detective, solve over four and a half cases.

Today wasn’t a day for detective work though.  It was a day for schoolwork.  Dictionary Dick sat in class with his fellow schoolmates and wondered what the weird little glowing rectangles they were holding were.

“Phones,” explained his best friend, Katie Greene.  She wasn’t holding one herself, instead doing bicep curls at her desk with a barbell. 

Dictionary Dick’s brow furrowed.  “But where are the rotary dials?” he asked, bewildered.

“Oh NO!” came a sudden wail, sharp and piercing.  It was their teacher, Mr. Morguns, who stood stricken at his desk over a cartoonishly empty cardboard box, its padlock dangling wide open.  “Our class’s donations to the Decklestone Orphans and Dolphins Fund have been taken – stolen!  One of the three people in this class I entrusted the lock’s combination to must have done this over the weekend….but who?”

“Not me,” said little nerdy Nedd, straightening his bowtie.  “I was in the big city all weekend, visiting the museum’s temporary exhibition of feathered dinosaurs from the Jehol Biota.”

“It can’t have been me,” argued the principal’s daughter, Petunia, who was applying her morning antibacterial soap.  “I hate touching money.  It’s all germ-y. You can catch poor people from it.”
“I would never ever steal,” said Sam ‘Slick Sicko” Swanson, leader of the local gang of tough kids (the ‘Serpents’), and the directly proven culprit of half of Dictionary Dick’s schoolyard casework so far, “but of all the stealing I haven’t done, I wouldn’t have stolen the hardest from this cause.  I love dolphins!  They’re some of my favourite fish.  I’d never do anything to take money away from them…a lake without dolphins would be like a lake without sunshine!”  He wiped a tear from his eye and sniffled dramatically, which turned into a slight squeal as Katie Greene turned her menacing frown upon him. 

“Oh no, this is impossible to figure out!” sobbed Mr. Morguns.  “Who will provide for the Orphans and Dolphins now?”
“Not to worry,” said Dictionary Dick, pushing back his chair and putting away his slide rule.  “After what we’ve just heard, I can safely say that the thief’s excuse doesn’t hold water!”

Who’s the culprit?  Do you think you know the answer?  READ BELOW TO FIND OUT!!!

Answer: Nerdy Nedd can’t have seen any feathered dinosaurs at the museum because Dictionary Dick knows for an absolute fact that dinosaurs are basically big dumb dead lizards, which could never have grown feathers!  Nedd was put on academic probation, his parents were ordered to replace the missing money, and Slick Sicko started the fund anew with a single shiny nickel before leaving class early to buy all the Serpents triple-decker-deluxe fudge sundaes down at the ice cream shack.

***

Dictionary Dick and the Absent Dinner

After a long day of hard work at school – the first day back after the Long Weekend –  Dictionary Dick – the amazing fourth grader who had memorized all the facts from Frank & Wagner’s 1952 Standard Encyclopedia – took the bus home with his friend, Katie Greene.

“I’m bushed,” said Katie, doing one-handed pushups in the aisle.  The bus driver had given up on warning on her.  “Are you sure your parents are going to be okay with my staying over?”
“Absolutely,” said Dictionary Dick.  “I asked last week and they said it was fine.”

But when the two of them walked into the Button home, the air was not full of savory smells – rather, it was full of confusion and argument. 

“I could’ve sworn it was your turn to make dinner,” said Dictionary Dick’s father.  “Besides, I was late at work. I got called in to interview the Nortons after their kid got caught stealing from school.”

“And I could’ve sworn it was your turn to make dinner,” countered Dictionary Dick’s mother.  “Besides, I had to work overtime at the nuclear power plant. The number three cooling tower was an absolute wreck.”

“If only there were some sort of simple solution that entails neither of us making dinner!” bemoaned Dictionary Dick’s father.  “Or at least a way to know who should be making it right now tonight!”

“Not to worry!” said Dictionary Dick, pulling out a chair.  “I know exactly what’s confusing the matter here!”

What do you think has thrown Dictionary Dick’s Parents off their schedule?  After you make your guess, READ BELOW FOR THE ANSWER!!!

Answer: Dictionary Dick’s mother has clearly been telling fibs about her schedule to avoid chores – there’s no such thing as a nuclear power plant, let alone one under civilian administration!  After a long conversation for the rest of the evening, Dictionary Dick’s mother moved out of the house, leaving Dictionary Dick’s Father, Dictionary Dick, and Katie to order late-night pizza. 

***

Dictionary Dick and the AWOL Mayor

On the weekend, Dictionary Dick went with his father to city hall.  His father was going because there was a special meeting happening that the deputy mayor had requested police presence for, and Dictionary Dick was going because fourth-graders – even amazing ones that had memorized Frank & Wagner’s 1952 Standard Encyclopedia – shouldn’t be left home alone for too long.

“I worry what you’ll get up to with that Greene kid,” Dictionary Dick’s father confided in him as they walked up the steps into city hall.  “The two of you solve so many crimes, you’ll put me out of a job.”

“Katie’s busy today though,” said Dictionary Dick.  “She’s out deadlifting all the benches in the park.”

“Well,” said Dictionary Dick’s father, “so long as she puts them back where she found them.”

The council chamber of city hall was in an uproar: a cluster of three prominent local businessmen had perched themselves around the deputy mayor, whispering strange and surreptitious things into his ears. 

“Fellas, I keep telling you, the mayor’s on vacation in Estonia,” whined the deputy mayor, twiddling his thin little thumbs together. 

“And that makes you the man in charge, doesn’t it?” hissed Carolyn Peats, chair and CEO of Peats’ Meats.  “Just initial here and your town can have the world’s first jackalope slaughterhouse at the low, low, low, low price of a few billion dollars.”

“Don’t go throwing your money at just any old money-for-meat scheme,” snarled Devin Boggs head of Bogg’s Birds, “not when you could invest your nest egg in eggs!  A pittance, a mere ten billion dollars, and I can make you the nation’s foremost provider of snipe eggs – no hunt required!”

“Lunatics!  Frauds!  Liars!” ejaculated Ed Urp, tech bruncle and safari-taker.  “Gimme all your bitcoin, the keys to this building, and your daughter’s hand in marriage and I’ll set you up with a bigfoot conversation park that’ll draw every tourist’s eye from here to Dubai!  Sure thing!”

“I’m not so good at big decisions…” fretted the deputy mayor, brushing his fingers back and forth through his wispy moustache.  “Detective?  What should I do?”
“I’ll tell you what you should do right now, Dad!” interrupted Dictionary Dick, “and don’t take no for an answer!”

What does Dictionary Dick detect is off about these offers? READ BELOW TO LEARN THE ANSWER!!!

Answer: Estonia is a member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – the deputy mayor is a spy who has kidnapped the mayor and sent him behind the Iron Curtain to Stalin!  Thanks to Dictionary Dick’s quick thinking the deputy mayor was arrested and interrogated until he confessed to committing not only the commie kidnapping, but also every unsolved crime in Decklestone in the past decade!  Well done, Dictionary Dick!  In the interim, it was agreed upon that the mayor’s office would be jointly filled by a team of concerned local investors and businessmen who were deceived by the traitor through no fault of their own.

***

Dictionary Dick and the Invalidated Deal

At half an hour past eleven PM, on a clear, cloudless night, the roof of Dictionary Dick, fourth-grade detective and the only boy his age to ever memorize all of Frank & Wagner’s 1952 Standard Encyclopedia, was yanked into the sky by means of science unknown to humanity.  Dictionary Dick’s father lurched off the living room couch only to find his gun fused to its holster and his shoes seared to the carpet; while Dictionary Dick himself only made it halfway down the stairs before being confronted by a tall, glowing biped composed entirely of what appeared to be fingers. 

“We are representatives of the Glorteezian Hyperpublic,” it seethed into the knowledgeable mind of the crime-solver, “and we are here to investigate a terrible breach of intragalactic property laws!  By all rightful legislation our pre-existing claim on the lunar regolith of your planet’s satellite for use in beach replenishment programs throughout the lesser widdershinsward core!  Your civilization’s unlawful and wilful orbiting of said satellite in and crudely manufactured manned vehicle constitutes interference in a sanctioned industrial, commercial, and recreational necessity of multisolar import!  We demand restitution, and repentance!”

“Don’t worry, dad,” said Dictionary Dick.  “This is the most obvious case I’ve ever handled!”

What does Dictionary Dick know?  What will he do about it?  IF YOU DON’T KNOW, READ BELOW!!!

Answer: No human being has ever orbited the EARTH before, let alone the moon!  These so-called ‘aliens!’ are clearly ordinary humans in costumes, playing an elaborate hoax!  Alas, while trying to prove this point by removing the Glorteezian’s ‘mask’ Dictionary Dick partially removed the skin from the entity’s face, for which he was punished by having his brain ‘Full Degloved’ from his entire body and placed within a Mind Amphorae to be shipped to Glorteeza. 

Decklestone was only lightly menaced following the spacecraft’s departure, as the single six-story sentry quadripod left behind was uprooted and hurled into the lake by local fourth-grader Katie Greene. 

***

Dictionary Dick and the Pontifex Precarious

This was by far Dictionary Dick’s most perilous case yet, in all the years he’d worked from first to fourth grade – even with his full and staggering command of all the knowledge contained within Frank & Wagner’s 1952 Standard Encyclopedia, his current position (Full Degloved and floating in a Mind Amphorae) and location (in the Cerebralplex of the Glorteezian Pontifex) were quite tricky. 

“Your MEAGER BRAIN is of MODERATE WORTH to my GLORIOUS PERSON,” bellowed Pontifex Precarious from atop its Self-Throne of glorious tentacular forces, from whence it commanded the life and death of a thousand thousand thousand thousand million worlds across the lesser widdershinsward core of the galaxy.  “REJOICE GREATLY as I PREPARE INGESTION of your SMALL SELFHOOD into my GREATER PERSONA.  Following this TRIFLING MATTER I shall ANNEX UTTERLY your TINY WORLD using your very own HIDDEN KNOWLEDGE of its PUNY DEFENSES.  Any LAST WORDS?”

What will Dictionary Dick say in reply to this chilling ultimatum?  ANSWER FOUND BELOW!!!

Answer: Trick question – Dictionary Dick has been Full Degloved, remember?  He can’t say anything anymore, because he has no mouth!  However, luck was on his side: after ingesting Dictionary Dick’s intellect, the strain of trying to parse hundreds of pages of tiny cramped font caused the Pontifex’s amygdala to implode, decerebrating it instantaneously and subsequently collapsing the Glorteezian Hyperpublic into feuding warlord star-states for generations of untold strife.  Another case solved by Dictionary Dick, fourth-grade detective!

Katie Greene went on to solve global inequity and poverty through a series of targeted suplexings. 

Three old ones sat together in the morning, watching the sun go up and putting off useful things.

“It’s the weekend,” said one.

“About time,” said two. “We should go fishing.”

“I know the perfect spot,” said one.

“I know a more perfect spot,” said two.

“Prove you wrong.”
“Prove YOU wrong.”
“I don’t really know where to go fishing,” said three.

“Shut up and stay out of this,” said one with long-held kindness.

“Yeah, button it,” agreed two generously.   “Loser owes the winner.”
“Sounds good to me, the winner,” said one.  And with such good grace they parted in three ways.

***

One slithered between the trees and ghosted through the light morning mist, breath hissing from the gills of their thorax.  They followed the smell of water.

“Aha!” one said, and wriggled through thicket and muck until they at last triumphantly reared up and beheld a deep bog; quiet, still and dead.

“Aha!” one said, and surged over hill and dale and across wide-scouring sands until they spiraled up into the air and gazed down upon a salt-encrusted sulphuric basin, thoroughly populated by gypsum deposits.

“Aha!” one said, and heaved their long segmented self across the stones and the lichen and the moss and the strange ancient trees until they were worn and tattered and they nearly slipped and fell right into their quarry: a narrow streamlet, trickling over mountain gravel and empty of anything but glaciermelt.

“Ahh, to hell with it,” one said, and spun their self up and around in a small and very rude dance culminating in the sharp-splitting snap of their snout at the sky, which cracked an orbit which diverged a descent which sent many hundreds of tonnes of metallic elements slamming directly into the local geography, venting many billions of years of momentum in a single instant with only the briefest, politest deference from the atmosphere.

“See,” one said, once the steam had cleared and the crater had begun to fill, “now THAT’S a fishing hole.”

***

Two strode long-legged and thick-armed, sky to sky, eyes peeled like bloodied grapes, like sparkling-cut gemstones, like dead black suns: primary, secondary, AND tertiary.  All focused all flickering all finding. 

“There!” two said, and lunged at the glittering prize on the horizon, closer and closer and closer until they loomed low and large over perfect wind-swept waves, palely white-capped and made of nothing but fine soft sand. 

“There!” two said, and lurched forwards, push-pull, push-pull, crashing limbs like tree trunks and feet like ancient stumps, elbowing past massifs and mesas, descending with eager haste to find themselves at the shores of a shallow salty sea, too dense to drink, let alone let something live.

“There!” two said, and hurried, shimmying toe to toe to toe to toe to target, stumbling from step to step, vaulting valleys, hurdling hills, stubbing digits and blunting nails and almost toppling, sinking to all sixteens before their discovery: a soft and blue-streaked wall of water, frozen, caught in the long process of slinking down the flank of a mountainside. 

“There’ll do,” two said, and raised their hands and their hooves and their claws and their talons and swept and paddled and poked in ways that weren’t appropriate, which so shocked the glacier that it slipped free from its home and fell pell-mell for thousands of miles and millions of tonnes, dragging itself home whimpering and pouting atop a wake of scraped stone and dredged bedrock basins.

“Finally,” two said, watching the meltwaters rise and lap at still-raw shorelines.  “Somewhere to fish.”

***

Three waited until they were absolutely sure the other old ones weren’t coming back.  Then they stretched themselves from tail to tail to flagellum and went for a long, long walk.  Their ears were open, and they heard birds (a thousand kinds) and insects (a million kinds) and moving earth and rushing wind and dripping water and breath and life and death and rot and birth and everything, almost everything that moved and some things that didn’t.

And three heard frogs.  So they walked to where the frogs were loudest, which was a soft and worn-down sort of oxbow lake (like all oxbow lakes), surrounded by trees like well-wishers at a hospital bedside.

Three brought some flowers, so not as to be rude.  The petals splashed gently on the water, attracting some bugs, which attracted something else.

Splash.

“Oh,” said three, as they sat down atop a bare, barkless, age-softened old stump, “so THAT’S where you go fishing.”

***

“Clearly,” said one, “this is where you go fishing.  Look at how deep and pristine its waters are!  Clean and cold and held aloft by the edges of its impact, mathematically perfect!”
“It’s a simple bowl,” said two.  “Behold – a thousand lakes, a thousand shapes!  Don’t like one?  Try another!  Beauty enough to make a fine fit for the eye of any beholder!”
“It’s shallow and weed-ridden and looks like you doodled on half the continent with your arms and legs all the wrong way around,” opined one.  “Weren’t you supposed to have good vision?”
“And you’re always bragging about your nose,” observed two, “yet you can’t see your fishing spot stinks. Bad.”

One roiled.

Two pointed.

Troubles came to pass.

***

The fire was just climbing to proper height when one and two returned to the camp, eager yellow looking forwards to a red-glowing future. 

“Hello,” said three. “How was the perfect fishing spot?”

“Insufficient,” said one, coiling as close to the firepit as possible as ice-cold water steamed free from bruised scales.  “Someone tripped over their own feet and fell in the water, scaring off all the fish.”
“Unsatisfying,” said two, all uncurled limbs disjointedly picking and plucking algae and waterweed from every crevice and every other crevice.  “Someone kicked up a big stink and fell in the water, scaring off all the fish.”

“Whoosh,” said three.  “So, no fishing today?”

“Yes,” agreed one.

“No,” agreed two.

“Ah well, that happens.  Always better luck tomorrow, right?”
“Luck had nothing to do with it,” said one. “The perfect fishing spot doesn’t exist.”

“Bad luck is the only kind that exists,” said two.  “And it’s just bad luck that the perfect fishing spot isn’t real.”
“Well, maybe you two can come with me tomorrow,” said three, “I know a spot that’ll help you feel better.”

“You found a perfect fishing spot?” asked one, before two.

“You found a perfect fishing spot?” asked two, before one.

“No,” said three.  “But I did find a nice place to listen to frogs.”

***

And it really was.

The sun is high as I approach, a boiling clot in the midday haze that makes the inside of my highway mask damp with sweat as I take the last turns down the old roads.  I’m three hours out of the core, three from the compaction when I finally spot it: a red smudge rising up to touch the sky.  From there it grew and grew until it ate the horizon, then the road; crawled in through the cracks in my windshield to smear over my goggles and itch my skin in the gap between my gloves and jacket; put the taste of blood and lighter fluid in the back of my throat.  And then, through the mist, its source: a house-tall tractor, armoured in rust and caked residue, dragging a billowing hive of belching pipes and chugging diesel.  Red liquid foundtained into the air, poured hissing down on the twisted and towering stalks of nuclear hogweed that filled the lawn and tore at the sidewalk with hungry roots, dripping sizzling poisonous sap as they cracked and crumpled at the seams under the acrid red weight of the pesticides.  The roar ended, the tractor stilled, a hulking, gas-suited figure leaned from its open cab and waved a paw in greeting.

The last of the suburbanites had invited me to lunch.  I’d just arrived a little early. 

***

My roadhopper has never lived so luxuriously: half of a six-car garage, all its own.  The tractor scrapes the ceiling a little, but otherwise even that monster couldn’t have a happier home.  An older way of parking. 

The lunch Kaylee Hawthorn serves me is just as antique: antibiotic Jello apertif; tuna salad and dreadelion sandwichettes lunch brushed gently with ground gigagarlic mustard; a dessert of whipped headache pills meringue on multigrain meal-loaf. A real microwave does the cooking; actual plastic is the surface the meal graces, dyed soft blue and worn with age. 

“It’s hard to get this far from the distribution centers,” Kaylee explains as I finish eating, “but really, what isn’t?  I’m not out here for convenience.”

Many people don’t know Kaylee’s out here at all.  To them, the suburban way of life has been gone for decades, a long-fallen victim of rising fuel prices, the civic tidal retreat, and the groundwater annihilations.  Even those stragglers that limped through the gauntlet of the 21^st century are assumed to have withered away with the final stake through the heart that was the complete and irreversible erasure of Facebook during the global electromagnetic pulses set off during the Third Limited Exchange. Unable to detect, communicate, or like and friend one another across the countryside, the isolation claimed those few remaining surbanites one by one, sending them home to relatives in corebound groundscraper apartments or into shallow graves scraped in the soil by passing waste-roamers.

Kaylee never used Facebook. “More of a Myspace girl,” she says.  “I liked to make playlists.  And when that went down, I just sort of kept doing my thing.  I noticed the downturn, of course – fewer neighbors, fewer holiday cookouts, less of a need to buy a full two-four for a party when a six-pack would do – but I think it was all so gradual that I didn’t realize I was alone until the super coyotes took Brendan Clarke, and I didn’t even notice THAT until I went by to ask him why he’d stopped spraying my lawn for the nukehoggies – now, as you can see, I have to do it.  We used to trade off: I’d uproot the dreadelion colonies for him because he hated getting his hands dirty.  I know it’s really awful of me to say this, but the first thing I thought when I found him lying there all tied to the roof of his garage with his liver in his mouth and EAT YOUR’RE SELF, APESES written on his chest with his small intestines was ‘well, maybe if you’d done more weeding you’d have had the muscles to put up more of a fight.’  I swear, that man had no work ethic.  But he DID know his way around the insides of a toxitractor mister setup; I sweat every five years I have to hike to Lonesville to get someone to come out here and fix that damn thing because I just do NOT understand machinery.  How’d you like your sandwichettes?”

I tell her I loved them.  It’s the truth.

“Good,” she says.  “That was my second-to-last tuna.  I haven’t been able to find any for the last while, do you know why that is?”
“The last tuna sighting was just before the Second Limited Exchange,” I explain. 

“Oh,” she says.  “I’d better save that one for Christmost.”  She looks at the can for a moment, wiped clean and put in the recycling compactor.  What year is it?”

I tell her.

“The tin wasn’t punctured,” she draws out, carefully.  “I’m sure it’s fine.  Besides, I put plenty of rootcohol in the dressing.”  

***

After lunch we walk the most important feature of the suburbs: the lawn.  The redmist has settled now and the nuclear hogweed lies subdued and sullen, shriveled down to nothing.  Kaylee gives me her backup scythe and together we lop off any surviving limbs, now bereft of their virulent inner fluids.  They’re piled in a heap out back atop a scorchmark, a lone barbecue standing sentinel among the scanty remaining bricks that once outlined a mighty patio. 

“It was so easy to have cookouts back in the day once they moved in,” she tells me.  “Can’t really do it without guests, but I do it every couple days anyways.  Got to do SOMETHING with the stuff, and if you pile it up sometimes it comes back.  That’s what happened to the Hendersons down on Third Avenue.”  She wrinkles her nose.  “Take a look on your way back.  But from a distance.”

Once the weeds have been limbed, the rest of the yard work comes quickly.  A wind generator powers a pump that brings up septiwater from the waste tank, sprays it over the field of sheltered brown blades that cling to existence beneath the weed-corpses – glowing them a healthy green, for now.  The dreadelion patch’s perimeter is inspected for holes or flaws, all eight feet of chainlink topped by a live wire.  And as the shadows grow long, the barbecue is loaded: three skewers, strung heavy with members of the local rodent clade and spare crapapples.  I carry the briquettes to fill its maw, stand well back as it steams and growls to itself, sit back in an ancient deck chair and stare up at the clouds and marvel how so much of this place is expressed in burnt offerings.  Charred oil, steamed gasoline, seared vegetation, and charbroiled flesh.  A sacrifice in an empty temple to a god long forgotten by humanity at large.  I pay the price of philosophy and nearly burn the skewers, scramble in haste to put the meal in order and my mind back on the ground. 

Kaylee stands up suddenly, plates my work, and gently motions me to stay put as she walks out to the far side of the bonfire-to-be.  She comes back without the food, strikes a match, starts the conflagration, and together we listen to it crackle and fume.  The gas masks keep out the smoke, the smoke keeps out the malarial swarmers of the evening that swarm in waves from the creaking eavestroughs, the bugs keep the unseeable, unavoidably audible flapping wings of the mushbats fed and fruiting, showers us in tiny wisp-winged batlings that glow in the dark and die in thousands so that dozens might one decades-hence day sporulate on their own.  I finish my mojoitoid and try not to make an analogy out of it. 

The fire dies quicker than you’d think, fueled by the pesticides and the dried weeds.  Behind it, the skewers are gone. 

“The HOA isn’t as bitchy anymore,” she admits.  “But it’s a lot stricter on the deadlines.”
“Super coyotes,” I guess. 

“Mostly,” she says.  Her smile is complicated.  “I think maybe Brendan Junior is out there sometimes.  Can never actually prove it, just never found the body, and he never did like his old man.”  The sigh that comes out rattles a little through a loose hinge on her mask.  “Too bad, either way.  He was the best paperboy our neighborhood ever had, back when we had a paper.”

The conversation wasn’t lively to begin with, but that kills it outright.  Kaylee’s had practice not saying much, and I’m feeling the strain of a more complex cocktail – drink, air enviroquality, take your pick and pick both – than I’ve inhaled in years.  She tells me to stop by again whenever I want to, and we both know I don’t, and we’re both relieved.  The lights go out before I’ve even left the driveway; the six-car garage gaping black as I back out of its maw.  Something that sounds like six somethings yips behind me as I shift gears, and I try not to accelerate.  I can’t outrun them, but I CAN provoke them.

***

On the way out of the suburbs, back to the compaction, back home, I stop and follow the old signs for a bit.  Just for a while. 

It’s not hard to find the Hendersons’ street, but it’s impossible to see their house.  The nukehoggies have it in their grip now, swaying tall and invincible, barbed rachises swaying in the breeze until they scrape the undersides of the smouldering night fog. 

I watch them, unsettled by the lack of city light reflected in the sky.  Then I drive home, back to the compaction, back to the core, back to all two hundred million remaining civicilians in North Amerigo, away from the last suburbanite.    

In a place too big for the human brain to realize how empty it was, there was an untidy heap of sorted scalded and assembled elements, moving from one of infinite unremarkable point As to one of a few very specific point Bs.

Inside, carbon things moved, surrounded by tens of thousands of times their weight in silicon, titanium, copper, lithium, and so much more that was meant to keep them alive. They turned in their sleep, they ingested organic molecules, they signaled each other in light, in the vibration of air molecules, in the emission of chemicals, in the smack of an appendage across the broadside of a central body mass. They idled.

The Patient, despite his name, despite his shared genetic code (give or take a few bespoke modifications), had not. He had planned. Then he had waited.

Now, sixteen light years out, he was about to act. It felt like stretching. It felt like exhaling. It felt like floating.

It felt like telling Canary on monitor duty ‘goodnight’ as he had done sixty times before (in a place where night and day were as carefully constructed as their shared atmosphere), walking past the terminal and trailing his fingers as he had done sixty times before, flicking a switch to act on an autoextract pack he’d placed there before the ship left, and taking one turn different halfway to the sleeper deck.

To the inner hold. Atmosphere-preserved. Not comfortable for life, but comfortable enough. Just enough. A seedling, a human, a vertiginous space cow (common names lied), or an unnamed hypercarnivorous organism as of yet undocumented by science whose only formally recorded information was its weight: a little less than six hundred kilograms.

The Patient drew up the inner hold’s manifest, spun it down to a container holding extremely innocuous dried foodstuffs.

Alright, a little more than a little less than six hundred kilograms. Rationing had not been kind to it. It would be ravenous.

Oh, ideal.

The Patient didn’t draw up the rest of the ship from his hand terminal. It was already in his head. All the gaping arteries and veins and venules of traffic that oozed humanity through the tight-packed-to-the-brim body of the ship, all at their smallest just big enough. All cut just the right way at just the wrong moment, turning into funnels, cutting off escape, cutting off weaponry, cutting off alarms.

A cut reversable and retractable. Hidden. Oh, the alien did it. Ah, how tragic, how unforeseeable. Who can say what was damaged, or lost, or spaced in the chaos. What a tragic accident – it seems a crewmember became careless. Thank goodness for the insurance. Thank goodness. Thank goodness.

Thank the foresight of the company in setting up a branch devoted to Patient solutions to expensive problems, like the cost of mothballing and retiring antique ships and the agitation of would-be-unionizing crews. A little cost up front (augmented assassins) saved a lot of cost in the end (paying other people money).

The Patient opened up the second cargo container, which also held innocuous dried foodstuffs, engaged all the locks and plugged into the clean-control-center. He breathed in and out one more time to savor their lungs, then turned over autonomic function to the command software. Other things would need as much of his attention as possible.

The ship inside his head became the ship inside his grasp. He stretched without matter, then squeezed.

The first cargo container clicked open and a little more than a little less than six hundred kilograms of liquid muscled death did not pour out.

The Patient waited.

After three minutes, the Patient maneuvered a freestanding hold drone into position to glimpse inside the first cargo container.

The unnamed hypercarnivorous organism as of yet undocumented by science was lurking at its far end, back to the wall, both its praying forelimbs and all four of its preying forelimbs held tense and at the ready, its antennae twitching, its eyes unsheathed and flickering. Its primary spinal column was a rigid pole; its secondary brace bulged in time with its deep, quick breaths.

The Patient waited.

And waited.

And waited.

After six hours, the Patient closed the first cargo container, unsealed his control center, and hurried back to the sleeper deck, where he told the shift lead he’d gotten distracted catching up on old second-screen dramas.

“They’ll rot your brain,” she said disapprovingly.

“Well, the job’ll do that anyways,” he said. And she didn’t laugh, but she sighed in a way that wasn’t entirely unfriendly, and so he skated by for the day, which he spent reconsidering his options.

***

The Patient minded their fingers as they told Canary ‘goodnight’ for the sixty-second time. The switch was already flicked. The pack was already in play. The sensors in the inner hold were already his. All he had to do was run the habit as if nothing had changed.

Funny how the little things got to you. Less funny when the big things did too.

Seal. Plug in. Patience. Unseal.

And this time, the hold wasn’t empty. A slab of fresh protein. Still warm. Waiting at the hall entrance.

There. Go on. It’s safe out here. There’s food, right? Have a bite. Have another. Look for more. Smell the sweat and blood and flesh all waiting for you. Go on. You’re starving, aren’t you? Don’t you want to hunt? To kill? They’re slower than you, they’re smaller than you, they’ve got no claws or teeth and I can take all their weapons away. Go. GO!

After an hour, the unnamed hypercarnivorous organism as of yet undocumented by science darted out between flickers of the eyelid, grabbed the protein slab, and scrambled back into its container as if the hold’s floor were lava.

The Patient closed the container and hissed until his teeth hurt.

Fine.

***

Seventy-five goodnights, now each delivered a little earlier – a dire sin, but the Patient needed the extra setup time. Protein delivered in its own fluids, served rarer and rawer and farther and farther each time. A trail of juices dribbling farther afield. A schedule set up.

The organism yet left its container with wary tread, but it moved with less panic now. Its steps were still careful, but sure… at least within the perimeter of the hold.

The halls were a different store. While its eyes followed the bloodtrail, its antennae remained high and alert.

Well, it was about to get an interesting surprise.

One little tweak, that’s all it had taken. One little tweak on a schedule sheet.

As it rounded the final corner, quiet as a mouse, its meal finally in sight, new footsteps echoed down the hall. In the distance a janitor was moving. Loud. Careless. Certain of her own safety. Directly towards its promised meal.

It stared out into the beyond. Its antennae swiveled. The edge of its mouth curled tighter, baring an inch of something that was too complex to be a tooth.

The Patient watched.

The organism shot back to the crate so quickly it skidded around the corners and clipped its fifth hindleg badly, limping the last stretch until it could take a flying leap into its container.

The Patient punched the control panel and swore so loudly he bit his own tongue.

***

“Three-quarters there!” said Canary in response to the ninety-first goodnight.

“Yes,” said the Patient, through a smile a less professional and excellent infiltrator, assassin, and corporate cost-saver wouldn’t have managed at all.

So what if it was a little glassy? It was plausible! Anyone would be frustrated in his position! Anyone would be cross in his position! Anyone would be upset and frustrated and maybe a little imp

            no not that never that ever

RUDENT, to discover that their job was being obstructed because a rank AMATEUR wouldn’t do the VERY SIMPLE JOB they were literally BORN TO DO.

So! Maybe it was time for something more drastic.

For the first time in weeks, the protein slab was left inside the boundaries of the inner hold – just barely inside – which meant that for the first time in weeks, the unnamed hypercarnivorous organism as of yet undocumented by science was actually going to retrieve it. The Patient had marched the juice trail backwards day by reluctant day, hallway by hallway.

Last night it had lain in plain sight five metres beyond the hallway entrance. A bodylength or two, maybe. The organism had regarded it with solemn contemplation, then slunk home.

Fine. Fine!

Two of them could be perverse.

The jaws shut. His immaterial hand moved.

Click.

It didn’t realize anything was wrong until it was face to face with the closed container door. Then…

The Patient waited.

The Patient waited through five minutes of anxious pawing, ten minutes of frantic clawing, thirty minutes of low-frequency rumbles, and an hour of sleepless pacing in front of the container.

Then the organism began to sleep. Fitfully.

The Patient seized direct and ostentatious control of half the subroutines of the ship and started to adjust inner hold life-compatibility systems.

***

Light. Drop to nothing – initial startlement? No, no response – increase to blinding, until it shuts every eye and begins to rely on ear and antennae alone.

It huddles at the container.

Temperature. Increase, then decrease, then wildly oscillate.

It pants through mouth and spiracles both. It shivers convulsively from head to toe. It does not move.

Chase it with the camera drone. Flash readouts in its face. Transmit his vocals in direct defiance of all operational security so he can finally say what he’s thinking.

“YOU-”

It spins on the spot, scurries away to claw at the container again, and a lashing hindclaw catches the drone and catapults it into uselessness.

Put yourself on full audio broadcast.

“STUPID, STUPID THING! IDIOT ANIMAL! YOU ARE MADE TO KILL! WHY WON’T YOU KILL!? KILL! KILL! GO!”

The emergency siren goes on – surely someone’s going to hear it somewhere. Someone who should’ve been dead THIRTY-ONE GOODNIGHTS AGO.

He engages the cargo hoists. Swings containers like children’s build-a-chipsets, chases it from corner to corner like a fly with a swatter.

It cowers. It expels noxious substances. It shrinks and dodges and begins to whine and whine in pitches audible even to the Patient’s biological ears.

It won’t go out the door. It won’t leave the room.

The Patient loses himself for a moment. When he finds himself again, he is standing outside his container, outside his control center, in front of the organism. He is screaming and shouting and kicking at it and it is huddled in a little more than a little less than six hundred kilogram-heap, waving its praying limbs helplessly at him. He can’t hear what he’s saying over the emergency siren, or over the red roar in his head.

Why? He’s pretty sure he’s asking why. He was built to be good at what he does. So was it. He loves doing what he does. Why won’t it?
What’s wrong with it?

He kicks again, watches as an apex predator shrinks back and makes inaudible noises. He screams again, walks back to his control center, kicks it, hits it, hears doors open and shut at random, precision-engineered hand-sculpted code created with a chemically-managed coolness executed with the precision and planning of his big toe snapping in half against a metal casing.

He kicks it again with his other foot, veers drunkenly out of the container, screams – oh he can hear that, the siren is off – runs up to the organism, screams again, runs away, kicks something else, back into the container.

It isn’t his. It stinks of alien urine and dead-meat predator sweat, and in the back is a cluttered mess of hairy fibres that appear to be fashioned of loose skin integument.

“That’s IT?” he asks. His throat is raw, he would be yelling if he still could but something feels scraped loose. “THIS is what’s been keeping you distracted? A SECURITY BLANKET?”

The security blanket shrinks back from him.

The Patient loses himself again for a moment. When he finds himself, he’s torn half the mass apart and is looking down at an unnamed hypercarnivorous organism as of yet undocumented by science.

No information has of yet been formally recorded from it. He estimates its weight at six kilos.

It warbles at him. Little praying limbs wave in a familiar motion.

The Patient was lost for words, physically and mentally. But if he had, he might have said “ah.” He could’ve said “uh.” He definitely would’ve said “oh.”

The light behind him vanished.

He would never, ever, not in a million years, have had the time to say “no.”

***

Working out why half the bulkheads had shut, then released, was a big job. So was figuring out why the emergency warning systems had refused to fire when it happened. High priority. Then after that the janitors had to ask why they’d received sixteen schedule change prompts, and then evidence came in that some sort of mass data-grip program had hijacked half the ship’s systems to do all of that, and well.

It was the sort of thing that took time to work out. So by the time Canary went and realized that they’d worked through three full emergency shifts without hearing a single new goodnight, it wasn’t much later than the moment everyone else realized the inner hold had been the focal point of half the hijacking.

It was calm down there. Silent. There was an unnamed hypercarnivorous organism as of yet undocumented by science sitting in one of two opened cargo containers, and it made threatening noises until someone triggered the door and left it in peace and quiet.

The manifest said there were two of them. Six hundred and six kilos. And apparently they were well-fed.

David Wurston Quarters – son of Gnorman Wurston Quarters, son of Baobab Wurston Quarters, heir to the ‘donut throne,’ multibillionaire, and master of ten thousand terrible little outlets – slouched in a chair that wasn’t as comfortable as it looked and listened to someone who’d paid real money for a real degree they had to do real work to really earn tried to explain how he could make more money.

“So you put a burger between the donuts, is that it?” he interrupted. Manners were a sign of respect. David had last said ‘please’ at age four, and the memory was not a fond one. “We don’t sell burgers. How the hell is this supposed to work? It’s stupid. You’re stupid.”
“The ‘burger,’” said the bedraggled dweeb standing at the far end of the table, lost and alone before a slideshow, “is comprised of the same sausage patties we sell inside breakfast wraps.” She took a deep breath, the way people who are repeating themselves must. “Putting it inside the donuts creates a unique variant on the so-called ‘Luther burger,’ and-”

“Wait, some guy called Luther already came up with this idea? God, I hate lawsuits. They’re boring. Make this bozo go away and ruin her career a little, I don’t care how.”
David sank further back into his chair and picked at his eyelid. He hated product pitch sessions as much as lawsuits, but there was no escaping this one. Holey Donuts was in big, big, big trouble: it was only making the same amount of money it had before, which was as good as losing all its money immediately. More gimmicks. More ads. More eyeballs. More to make more, that’s what made things safe. “Send in the next chump,” he mumbled to the large, unpleasant men in sunglasses he employed.

They sent in the next chump, who was slim and smiling and moved like a greased snake and walked right up to him – not the projector! To him! The hell! – and said, confident and unstressed: “donut holes.”
“Huh?” said David, who was still trying to figure out how this had happened. “We already do those.”
“Nah,” said the chump, flicking his fingers as if shedding water. “You sell little round lumps of dough. You need to sell the REAL donut holes. Sell the hole from a donut’s center. Its soul. Its essence. Fry them. Box them. Bag them. Bill them. ‘True Donut Holes.’ Never been imagined, never been done, never been dreamed. And only sold at Holey Donuts.” His smile slid a few degrees west. “’For A Limited Time.’”

David’s own mouth was open, he realized. Wide. Round. Holy.

“Damn,” he said. “Make it happen.”
“Absolutely.”

“Not you. Someone I can pay less. Thanks for your time see you later.”

The smile moved around a little farther. “I’ll leave my card at the door,” it said. And was gone.

***

David called the number on the back of the card at nine AM the next day.

“What can I do for you, mister David?”
“How do you sever the hole from the center of a donut?” he demanded.

“Why, that’s simple,” said the chump through the soft static of his smile. “Simply make a donut, pop out the center like usual, then immediately pop out everything else. Catch it off guard. Do it in a temperature around eh….one hundred fifty kelvin. That should keep it stable.”

“Good,” said David. And hung up.

He called back six hours later. “Hey, how do you fry these?”
“Something with a very high smoke point. Refined safflower, I’d say. Immediately after separation from the everything else.”
“Great.” Click.

Ten minutes after that: “how do you put them in a box?”
“Tongs, made from alloys resistant to thermal shock – tungsten, maybe. Ask your engineers. And it should be done blindfolded.”

“Bye.” Click.

At ten PM: “Hey. What did you call these?”
“True Donut Holes. Tagline – ‘Only Sold at Holey Donuts: For A Limited Time.’”

“Great. Hey. I’m not paying you.”
“Mister David,” smiled the phone, “I’m not in this for the money.”

David Wurston Quarters grimaced and dropped the phone. “Throw it in the trash,” he told a nearby large unpleasant man in sunglasses. “That stuff’s contagious.”

***

The factories had been built; the kitchens had been stocked, the math had been graphed, and – above all else – the ad copy was finally almost finished.

Now there sat before the chair of David Wurston Quarters a humble bag of lowest-possibly-bidder paper byproducts and resins, holding a logo-stamped box, holding six True Donut Holes. The first to be sampled in all the world. Cameras were pointed at the occasion, which made David irritated because they belonged to people he had to pay money to.

“You sure this’ll only take a minute?” he demanded of the nearest small unpleasant man in a suit. He looked like he could be a secretary or something.

“Just one bite for one photo for each of us,” he said. His smile was profound and warm and loving and David knew this guy had been working for him too long to give it. He should probably pin something on him later. “Fine,” he said. He tore open the bag, wrenched open the box, fumbled around inside until his fingers were in a shape that felt right, put it in his mouth, and shoved the box to the next suited man down the line.

He bit. Chewed. Swallowed.

“I can’t feel a damn thing,” he said. “Wow. People are going to pay us money for this. What a bunch of….”

“Sir?” asked the maybe-secretary. The nearest large unpleasant man in sunglasses unzipped the cardiac event bag.

“I remember the day I realized my mother would never love me for she could see both my father and herself in my face and she could never forgive either of them for what they had done,” said David. “I will never experience genuine love in my life and wouldn’t know what to do if it happened. It’s too late for me to change and too hard for me to bear not changing. I should’ve eaten one more time at the club down the road and it’s been out of business for thirty-seven years. I don’t like this chair and if I change it people’ll think I’m going crazy. I hate the pills I take but if I don’t take them I wake up at four AM to pee and I can’t fall back asleep without remembering my younger brother and what I did to him and so I take the pills and sleep through the night and I piss myself and I pretend it isn’t happening and when that doesn’t work I pretend I like it, I pretend I like to wake up stinking and chafed, and I hire people to change my laundry every day but I can still smell it as I go to bed and drift to sleep. I miss my dog.”

David reached up to his cheek and touched the wetness he felt there. “I regret all of it,” he said, with a little surprise.

Then he crumpled into a small vortex.

The large unpleasant men in sunglasses stood there, rendered smaller and more vulnerable absent their center of gravity. The one with the cardiac event bag looked at it, zipped it up again, then open, then up again.

“Who’s in charge now?” he asked.

The small man who wasn’t a secretary raised a slightly-shaking hand. “I remember my cat Mittens,” he mumbled.

In the ensuring series of events, the box went missing. It was probably empty by then.

***

Billiam Pat McKrubbler laid his head on the table on the thick lush piles of double-sided coloured graphs and groaned. “No, that’s dumb. You’re dumb! We already MADE an inside-out chicken burger. Go away! Doesn’t anyone have any new ideas?”

A slim, smiling hand was raised halfway down the table.

“Go ahead,” he grunted.

“Mister Billiam,” said the man through a smile that tweaked gently as he wore it, ”you ever thought of selling REAL Buffalo Wings?”

Well, it’s the busiest time of the year again! March was a little disappointing, but historically that’s meant a big April so let’s all hope for the best on this liveblog!

American kestrel

Direct sighting of a couple in a tree down by the edge of Oreweald Park. Quiet and wary but well-fed. Good for them!

American robin

So many of them out and about I lost count just on the way down to the lakefront; the flooding’s been lousy for worms but good for them.

Black-capped chickadee

Only saw twelve but heard a lot more, especially in the thickets by cooling tower three. If these are returning nesters rather than naïve newcomers, we could be looking at a significant shift in the local toxicology! Still, best not count our chickadees before they’ve hatched!

Blue Jay

Found a loose feather on the old trail by the exclusion fence, caught on the barbed wire. Hope they’re doing okay – we need more corvids! Not sure why they’re still so standoffish, if they’re smart enough to be wary, they should be smart enough to read the papers. It’s safer than it’s been in years!

Canada goose

Sixteen nesting on the old breakwater down by the outflow. Poor things.

Common raven

Old Toby still perched above the head manager’s office, clean as clockwork. Asked him my name and he said ‘Doom.’ Never change, Old Toby!

Great RE:gret

Performed my annual check-in on our nesting pair and can report that they are still resetting every sixteen minutes forty-nine seconds seventy-eight milliseconds on the dot, pushing back any hypothesized ‘half-life’ for the site 53-D chronodegeneration another century. A warm round of applause for Jackie and Dion – spending fifty years fetching sticks for a nest that will never be completed is a powerful metaphor for parenthood!

Herring gall

Saw four down by the old park boat launch, but there are definitely more around somewhere, because the ooze patches on the concrete have six distinct shades! We could be looking at a case of fresh mitosis here, and the new galls are hiding somewhere out of sight until they decide on how many limbs they want.

Mallard

Three off the overgrown beach, enjoying all the high water from the late melt. More to come, hopefully – the duckling survival rate has really gone up since the gnarlpike went extinct three summers back (RIP Lousie McKenny, Dougie Jimson, Stewart Brinkles, and ‘Wedge’ O’Connor).

Megadee

‘Granny Greycap’ is back! After going MIA for almost a decade, the great lady of North-Oreweald has returned to her sentinel post atop the easternmost pylon – and lest anyone doubt her identity, she still bears control rod #59 clutched in the remains of her left talon! All hail the return of the Sceptre’d Queen – but please, disable your flashes when recording her (newcomers: look up the ‘daylight bombings of ’98’).

Militant nuthatch

As I peered cautiously over the ragged and rust-corroded lip of what had once been the central radar dome and beheld the gnarled and twisted form of that infamous spruce, my heart crawled up my throat by inches: the palisade had been breached, but from WITHIN – no squirrel’s work this. They had survived, and now they have made their opening play. The war will resume. Beware!

Mourning dove

Found three torn open in a little circle with their hearts missing – yikes! Pretty sure it’s not golden gorefinches (contents of the stomachs weren’t eaten, no sign of egg-shrapnel in chest cavities from the ejection of larval hatchlings) or bakerbirds (no evidence of ‘oven’ construction), but drawing a blank otherwise and gladly seeking input. Maybe a third case of dove psychomorphism?

Northern cardinal

No sign of the couple I saw in March up in the New Grove. The whole tree’s missing so it’s possible either the ground’s gotten unstable there or the quadrasloth is coming out of hibernation. Going to have to apply for permission to view the seismograph again to solve this one!

Prophetic loon

Heard a splash but no direct sighting. The scrawling on the beach looks like the Second Magus’s footwriting though – she’s a southpaw. If anyone wants to take a crack at decoding it, better you than me is all I’ll say! I don’t believe in that sort of thing (no offense).

Red-everything’d hawk

At least one has moved in judging by the state of the band stand’s rooftop and the pines on the hill. I know they’re not big fans of humans, but still, nobody put anything outside they don’t want dyed – no sense ‘painting the town red’!

Red-winged blackbird

Filling the trees by the old boardwalk and whistling their hearts out, bless them.

Sandputter

One’s already set up the green and the rough by the sandbox at the worker’s daycare, but only nine holes are planted so far, and just three (!) have actual fissile material in them. Quick construction and poor planning suggest a young male. You’ll get there buddy!

Tubist swan

No sighting but the filings in my teeth buzzed at just that right ultra-low frequency, you know? That and the sonically-liquified golden doodle I found are evidence enough for me! Best steer clear of the southern edge of the Point if you’re walking a dog or not in rigorous physical condition and wearing at least twenty+ kilos of extra flesh!

Venus flycatcher

Checked inside the old ‘hot labs’ and yep, ‘big snappy’ is still growing strong as ever! Their roots are well-nourished, their newest clutch of eggs (at least twelve!) is glossy, and the sap drooling out of their beaks to attract prey smells as sweet as maple syrup! They tried to bite my index finger off when I checked their reflexes, bless them.

Xenoraptor colossus aka ‘Barbara’s Dreadnought’

Almost fell into the nest while skirting around the exposed foundations of the central mess hall and by the curvature of the eggshell, violet edging of the featherings, and dismembered cow skeletons I am certain beyond a doubt it is BACK! No sign of the parents but it looks like there’s at least two hatchlings and they’re what you’ve really got to watf ghiuyuyuyuyuyuyuyuyuyuyuyuydsoaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Four months and three days before his thirteenth birthday, Thimas was appointed the Maker of Fish for the long long Lanky River and all its tributaries and streams and rills.

He was of unprecedented age, questionable tutelage, and unknown enthusiasm, but there were none more qualified, principally because four months and four days before his thirteenth birthday the previous Maker of Fish had gotten drunk, stayed out late, and fallen headfirst into the Lanky, where a crawfish-catcher had found most of him the next morning.

So Thimas was woken up early by his aunt and uncle, dressed in ceremonial robes intended for someone who’d suffered at least two more growth spurts, handshaken by the mayor and the priestess and the hermit, and feasted on all the available forage of the season before he was taken to the dwelling of the Maker of Fish and – with many blessings, and much cheering, and great and generous hope – thrown inside.

The door clicked.

It was just a little after noon and he was all alone inside a house inhabited by the same old man for fifty years running, surrounded by half labeled jars and jugs and barrels of things to make fish with, half-shucked-free of ceremonial robes, and overfed on (by word of his guts) half-ripened roozberries. And it sounded like he’d just been locked inside.

First, Thimas permitted himself some small swearing. Second, he found an empty barrel and liberated a sleeve from his discarded robes. Third, he began inventory.

Jars of ink, for squid to fill their ink sacs with.

Iron files, for sharks to sharpen their teeth upon.

Dog tongues, for cods to speak cod latin with.

Wiring, for electric eels to run electric current through.

And more, and more, and more, and more, stacked in the crates on the shelves dangling from the ceiling in jars wrapped up in paper and stashed under the bed lashed together with twine and leaned against the walls and sealed in the big metal safe that said DO NOT EVER OPEN UNLESS YOU HAVE TO that the old Maker of Fish had pinched Thimas’s ear until it was throbbing red for asking about.

It took a lot to make fish.

Thimas rattled at the big metal safe’s handle for a bit. It was locked, and when he gave up the rattling continued.

“It’s locked,” he called out.
“Oh, sorry,” said the visitor in the insincere and hesitant voice of one who’d said those words too often and too lightly. “I’ll come back later.”
“No, I mean it’s locked on your side.”

“Oh sorry oh no oh dear,” click click, and in stooped Windy, six and a half foot of Windy, fisherman Windy, always first to the weirs and last to come home with a bag half full, with a bear’s face and a bear’s hair and the fishing ability of a limbless chicken.

He tried, Windy. He really did. But sometimes, the old Maker of Fish had muttered, trying meant trying something else.

“I’m very sorry, but I heard you are the Maker of Fish now, if that’s okay,” said Windy, shoulders visibly cringing inwards at the audacity of this statement.

“Yes,” said Thimas, who was hoping he’d tucked the (not quite empty anymore) barrel far enough into the corner that nothing would be said of it.

“Oh well, if it’s no trouble, I was wondering if it wouldn’t be too rude if I asked – no pressure – if it’d be alright if you could maybe consider possibly, if you feel like it, and not just for politeness’s sake, potentially… making some fish for me? I’m sorry it’s stupid I’ll go away sorry for bothering you never mind don’t worry about i-”

“What kind of fish?” asked Thimas, and caught by surprise mid-apology Windy said “trout” and became mortified.

“Trout,” said Thimas to himself. And he hunted through the creaking bookcase by the door where the handiest fish were kept close to hand, and in a truly huge tub that was unlabeled because its contents were so omnipresent and obvious he pulled out four handfuls

(the old Maker of Fish had used two, but his hands had been bigger)

of many-hued little painted clay-fired pellets, which he jammed into the pockets of his (slightly depleted) ceremonial robes and slung over his shoulder like a backpack because he already had perfectly good shorts on and thought it would be silly for the Lanky’s Maker of Fish to fall over and drown twice in two days.

Nobody paid any attention as Thimas walked down to the weirs. Everybody very definitely paid no attention. Nobody looked with their eyes one little bit.

Four handfuls, one after another at the edge of the pier. A deep breath before the first, a terrible urge to scratch your nose shoved away, and WHOOSH, high into the air, a spray, a swirl, an arc of glittering colours in the sun.

A rainbow plunged into the water, and it churned and lashed with the onset of many curious fins and Thimas could breath again, which he did. Wheezily.

“The trout are provisioned,” he said.

“Sorry,” said Windy, which was almost like thanks.

So Thimas went back to the dwelling of the Maker of Fish and found some chalk and a slate, which he used to make a diagram, which said:

TROUT I

with plenty of space for more.

***

Three months and nine days before Thimas’s thirteenth birthday, he sat up in bed and looked at the slate, which he had placed on the wall, and it read:

TROUT IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
SALMON IIIIIII

There was still plenty of space for more. Honestly, it seemed roomier ever time he looked at it. He wished he could stop looking at it.

The Lanky’s waters ran clear and wild. The fishermen’s baskets were heaped high. Everyone was pleased. Everyone said he was doing a wonderful job.

Rap rap rap, came the door.

“Come in,” said Thimas, who was starting to suspect why the old Maker of Fish had grown a beard large enough to hide his face and everything it could possibly indicate.

He was already up and walking to the trout tub before the door opened.

“Hello, Maker of Fish, it’s my wedding tomorrow and-”

“Trout,” agreed Thimas.

“What? No, I-”

“Salmon,” concluded Thimas.

“I’m sorry, but no, Maker of Fish” – and this was so outlandish that Thimas found himself paying attention to his visitor for the first time in days: it was Ottough, a friend of his oldest sister’s, spindly and embarrassed to be speaking to him in a very different way than he’d ever seen before – “it’s my wife. She has a very specific favorite, you see, and I VERY much want her to be happy, and-”

“What?” asked Thimas. No, that sounded too unenthusiastic. “What?!” No, that sounded too angry. “What? What? What? WHAT?”
“Shark, if it would be acceptable, Maker of Fish,” said Ottough.

Thimas hugged him. But only briefly. There were so many shelves to dig through.

“What kind of shark?” he asked. Hammerhead, mako, bonnethead, lemon, scoophead, blacktip reef, shovelbill, sleeper…

“Oh. Err. I didn’t ask? Maybe I could-”

“No,” said Thimas. No. No stopping to ask questions. No opening a chance to wait, and second-guess, and return to the trout tub. “We can do a bit of everything. Here, hold this bag open.”

And into the wide-mouth triple-stitched remains of ceremonial robes went iron files to sharpen teeth, and sandpaper to burnish and smoothen tough shagreen, and toothpaste to shine an eternally-regrowing maw, and all the essentials of every kind of shark from great white (white polish for their white bellies) to dwarf lanternshark (matches for their lanterns) to blue (books of sad poems). All of it went into the water, a thick slosh that less churned than seethed, and already as Thimas watched the ripples spread up and down stream he saw the fins begin to circle.

“There,” he said. “Good luck.”
And he went home and added line after line after line to his slate until his hand cramped from the tiny letters he was forced to use, and he was filled with great and endless joy until his brain turned off.

***

Thimas woke and the sun was already setting. He had slept the sleep of the deeply, profoundly peaceful, slumped drooling over his slate, and this stayed with him for five perfect, deep, slow breaths until he realized that not only had no one woken him yet, but the village was quiet outside his window. No songs. No laughter. No arguments. Even the chickens were keeping it to a bare chuckle.

Thimas got out of bed. Thimas put on a new shirt. And Thimas, for the first time in almost a month, left the dwelling of the Maker of Fish of his own accord.

Everyone was easy to find. They were down at the weir. Watching.

Once again, nobody was looking at Thimas. But they didn’t have to try that hard this time. The Lanky was a sea of fins, the water seethed with long, hungry bodies, muscled jaws, and a million-million teeth of a thousand kinds.

“It would seem,” said a very calm and polite and considered voice from somewhere in the crowd, “that we are somewhat overblessed with fish.” It might have been his aunt.

Thimas nodded. Not too quickly, he hoped.

“This will not be a problem,” said an even calmer and more polite and over-considered voice from within the crowd. “Because we are blessed to have the assistance of the Maker of Fish. If fish caused this, fish can fix this.”
“Yes,” said the first voice.

“Yes,” said the second voice right back. It could have been his uncle.

“Yes,” said someone else.

“Yes,” said everyone else, not all at once, not all the same way, not all as polite and calm and considered and one or two really close to being muttered.

So Thimas walked home until he was out of sight, then he ran home, and he hunted from top to bottom until he found the chest buried in the dolphin bin that was filled with black-and-white beachballs and blood, which he combined, lugged down to the weir, and poured into the Lanky.

Then he added a little more, just to be sure.

And a little extra, just in case. It was just ONE kind of fish he was using, after all, so they’d be very outnumbered. Best to give them plenty to work with.

The water roared and surged. The many dorsal fins that darted up and down the Lanky wobbled in a hundred hundred different salutes, flags of undersea nations.

The crowd watched. And when the water began to settle, they went home, in dribs and drabs.

Thimas didn’t. He waited, and watched, and waited, and worried, and waited, and worked his way bit by bit into the fretful and unpleasantly stretched dreams of the deeply, profoundly guilty.

***

He woke up in the dark before dawn to something wet and flapping slapping him in the face, which he yelled about, which got it in his mouth, which cut his tongue – sharp rough skin. Denticles.

Thimas spat out his mouthful of shark meat and rolled out of bed, which was the weir, and out from under his covers, which was the severed and disemboweled corpse of a four-meter great white shark, and landed on the floor, which was the face of a watching orca.

“Hleef,” he explained.

It grinned at him. It was probably a grin. The teeth were showing, and it seemed to be happy. Then there was a flip and a twist and a nudge and Thimas was upside down and backwards and on the weir’s edge again, nose to nose with the carcass he had been gifted.

The black eyes were unreadable. The angle of the slackened mouth was reproachful.

The river looked full, and at least half red, and the flags that marched within its borders were tall-ships now, great towering black fins that bobbed cheerily as their owners flipped their prey onto the backs, tore their fins off, pummeled their organs into jelly, chattered enthusiastically among themselves and played catch and keep-away with the bodies once they had eaten their fill.

Thimas threw up. This did not Make any Fish, but it DID attract a curious snapping turtle from beneath a rock, which was immediately whisked away and swallowed by a titanic black-and-white set of jaws.

This was not an improvement. There was still an overblessing of fish. He still had to fix this.

If fish had caused this, fish could fix this. Yes. Yes. Yes.

So Thimas went home, opened every container he could – which was all of them, save for the big metal safe – and when he found the one that was full of gigantic steak knives and a big bottle of whale oil he took it down to the weir – using the ceremonial robe-sack as a sling – and tipped in with its entirety.

The dorsal fins circled, curious.

Then there was a cacophony – almost like gunshots. CLICK CLICK CLICK and splash, splash, splash, the beating of flukes on the water. The river churned and reeled.

The waterline slid upwards. Little wavelets slid over Thimas’s toes.

Then it surged, and splashed, and an orca came free of the waves, clutched in a mouthful of serrated triangles at the far end of a twenty-meter lawn dart.

The water closed up.

Thimas was on the shore. He had no memory of getting there.

Farther downstream, there was another splash. And another.

And a crash, as a shark larger than most of the buildings in the village misaimed a lunge and landed in the middle of cousin Burct’s unoccupied chip stand. It squirmed back towards the water, slowed by the six terrified whales clinging to its flanks and removing pieces of meat bigger than Thimas with every bite. One of the last rowboats in the village that hadn’t become a plaything got between two of the combatants, briefly.

There was a grinding noise as an entire pod escaped over the top of the weir, taking half of it with them. The remainder scraped the pursuing megalodon’s belly clean of remoras.

Thimas went back to the dwelling of the Maker of Fish. He wasn’t looking at anything, but he was listening, and it was very hard to think with all that noise. Even after he shut and barred the door it was very hard to think with the memory of all that noise. Even after he shouted and threw the ceremonial robe-sack-sling to the ground and stamped as hard as he could it was hard to think through the memory of all that noise, until he stamped a little too hard and fell over with his foot in his hands and a squeal in his throat and a drab, pointy little metal key skittering loose over the floorboards, torn free at last from some hidden pocket.

Thimas looked at the key, which was much better than listening or thinking. Then he held the key.

Then he dragged out the big metal safe that said DO NOT EVER OPEN UNLESS YOU HAVE TO and put the key in and opened it.

There was a garbage bag in there, double-knotted and surprisingly light. On the basis of speed and desperation, Thimas did not open it.

Instead, he walked down to the shores where the weir had been – now thinly populated by early risers, who were hollering and encouraging others to come stand there and help holler over the ongoing mutual-massacre – and poured out a seemingly endless flood of…meat scraps? They reeked of the pub, of too-high prices and high-capsaicin hot sauce that was all heat and no flavour. They plunged into the water and the grease and the peppery spice cut through the smell of blood that Thimas hadn’t realized was drowning him nose-first until it was broken.

He held the garbage bag in his shaking hands, and something was jabbing his palm – splintery, not like the key. He unfurled it, uncreased it, took one million years to pull it loose.

A stripped-clean chicken wing.

The water broke without boiling, the banks overflowed, and into the sky they rose, one chasing another. The orca breached, fins spread wide, body corkscrewing frantically for height, and behind it the shark, tail beating side to side with enough force to generate power for all of main street, jaws just a little open, eyes twitching and ready to roll back at the first chance to strike, both of them up, and up, and up, and away into the sky, their little fluffy white wings beating with the fury of an ascending grouse from beneath the hunter’s foot.

Everyone stopped hollering at that.

They started again right quick though, when the second-through-five-hundredth followed.

“He never liked eating fish much,” said Thimas as his aunt and uncle picked him up, torn between every emotion at once, watching the flock whirl away over the treeline and into the sun. A straggling carp – survivor of endless warfare – fluttered by them, loop-de-looping for the sheer thrill of it as it headed inland. “Never said why. I thought it was ritual bullshit.”

***

There are fewer fish these days in the great Lanky. But the fishing villages don’t complain, and they take only what they need, and they wish for nothing more than what’s already there. Only what’s already there.

Focus on what’s in front of you, they say. Don’t get carried away with wishing for what could be. You hear the folk from the Runny? Overland? Six leagues away? They believe in flying fish these days.

Honestly.

MEGA MARVIN LIFE FULL WALKTHROUGH

A guide by xxxSparrowAxexxx

COPYRIGHT 2003 DO NOT REUSE WITHOUT PERMISSION!

****TABLE OF CONTENTS****

• Introduction

1.0 Hospital

2.0 Playground

3.0 Middle School

4.0 Retail

5.0 Night School

6.0 Mega Marvin

7.0 Management

8.0 The Snap

9.0 Drifting

10.0 Patience

11.0 Reckoning

• INTRODUCTION

Mega Marvin Life is my favourite game in the series and has been unfairly overlooked for years.  In this guide I will show you how to beat it fairly and have a good time.

1. HOSPITAL

After the introduction cutscene with God you have to escape the baby ward.  Easy to do: this is just the game introducing you to keycards and locked doors.  Take the janitor’s keycard and get through the halls to the elevator, bounce down the shaft, and find your way to the parking lot – just follow the signs.  There’s a time limit until your parents’ car leaves but it’ll basically never matter unless you get way too into exploring the level, and there’s nothing much to see.  The janitors are too slow to catch you and the nurses just ignore you.  Hop into your parent’s car and the level’s over.

1.1 SECRETS: there’s only one secret in this level, and it’s only useful if you’re trying to speedrun the game: if you crawl into the crib with the golden spoon on it push the other baby out of it and wait five minutes Marvin becomes Wealthy Marvin and you go to the credits.  Boring.

2.0 PLAYGROUND

This is the first proper level, and it’s a real open-ended sandbox. You have thirty minutes to do whatever you want, and it’s the tutorial to another big mechanic which is the Boredom meter. Do whatever you can to keep it up – throw pebbles at squirrels, build sand castles, bonk the other kids on the heads, whatever. Don’t overdo the last one though because every kid you take out makes the boss harder.

2.1 BOSS – AUNT MANDY: Aunt Mandy shows up at the end of the timer and again she’s basically a tutorial. Dodge the bottles she throws and use the Ignore function when she starts talking.  If you’ve ko’d at least three other kids she gets REALLY hard and basically never shuts up so watch out!  Kick the bottles back at her until she falls over and you win the level.

2.2 SECRETS: The bird in the skybox is an actual model, not just background art, and if you hit it with a pebble (I was aiming at a squirrel) it’ll poop on Marvin’s head and your controls are scrambled for the rest of the level because he won’t stop crying. 

3.0 MIDDLE SCHOOL

This is the last ‘tutorial’ level of the game, and it’s where the gloves come off. You need to keep your Boredom low AND not get the teachers to notice what you’re up to, AND collect enough points. If the teachers spot you, expect a tough chase – and all the desks and other kids make getting away difficult, AND they’re one-hit ko’s. 

3.1 BOSS: SCIENCE FAIR: Like the school itself this is a test of your multi-tasking. You need to keep the other kids from messing up your project AND show it off to the parents AND keep the judge distracted by messing up the other kid’s projects. All of these are easy – the other kids back off if you give ‘em one good thwack, the parents will nod and walk away if you pretty much do anything at all, and the other projects will fall apart if you give them one quick shove in the right place – but they’re all constantly right up in your face about it. You really can’t afford to sit still at all. 

3.2 SECRETS: You can beat the boss super fast if you let your project get knocked over and then just hold down the Scream command. You don’t get as many points, but it’s faster – especially if you knock your project over yourself. 

4.0 RETAIL

Probably the first really hard level. You can’t move at all, but the enemies just don’t stop coming at you. You need to perfectly avoid every single one of them, which is totally impossible but the good news is you don’t have to do it forever, just until your Bucks score gets high enough – it ticks up a little bit every minute.  Once you screw up and too many customers hit you, the boss fight starts.

4.1 BOSS: BOSS: You want to finish this as quick as possible because every time he hits you you lose Bucks.  If you grab his hair and yank it comes off and he can’t move for a minute, that helps a lot. 

4.2 SECRETS: If you attack the first customer he has a credit card in his wallet that maxxes out your Bucks but the boss gets a duplicate in a security guard outfit so the fight’s real hard.

5.0 NIGHT SCHOOL

This is like Middle School on steroids – your Bucks score is back from Retail and if it hits 0 before you finish the level you lose and your save file gets deleted, which sucks. 

5.1 BOSS: FRIDAY NIGHT: Dodge the cans, glasses, and bottles or lose your Bucks. REALLY avoid the whiskey, that’s a one-hit KO. 

5.2 SECRETS: If you hit the bartender the level ends without you losing any Bucks, but you start the next level at half health.

6.0 MEGA MARVIN

Here is where the game lost 50% of its playerbase and I think it’s weird because having the chance to customize your character from scratch is cool, even if it’s a little weird that it happens halfway through the game.  You can make Marvin look like anything so go as crazy as you want. Then you play through a sort of mashup highlight reel of levels from Mega Marvin, Mega Marvin 2: Marvin’s Domain, Mega Marvin Planet, and Mega Marvin Planet 2: Marvin’s Inferno.  The trick is you have to play through them backwards and upside down and the music is replaced with screaming which I think a lot of people were unable to appreciate.

6.1 SECRETS: If you try to name Marvin anything that isn’t Marvin your save file deletes itself.  I think a lot of people weren’t smart enough to know why that happened and really missed out on the rest of the game for no good reason. 

7.0 MANAGEMENT

Just like Night School was Middle School but harder, this is the Science Fair but way way tougher. Now you need to guard your Marvin projects from other managers, beat up your employees whenever they try to work on it, suck up to the CEO whenever he’s near, AND on top of that your relatives keep phoning you and draining your Bucks.  If you don’t answer the phone they show up in person and you have to dodge them while doing everything else, so unless you’re REALLY attached to your bucks don’t even bother.

7.1 BOSS: CFO: This one’s either really hard or really easy depending on how hard you think outside the boss.  If you try and counter his arguments you WILL eventually lose, if you try and beat him up he gets infinite Security and you lose. But you can move around while you talk and if you look in the bottom drawer of your desk you will find a gun. If you fire it at the boss you lose, but if you hold it while you make your arguments you win no matter which ones you pick. I like to pick the ones about Estonia because they’re interesting but if you’re in a hurry you can just yell “my COCK” over and over and it ends the fight really quickly. 

7.2 SECRETS: If you fire the gun at yourself instead the game goes to credits and tells you you won just like if you beat it normally. 

8.0 THE SNAP

This is sort of a breather level?  You don’t actually do anything – stuff happens around you.  None of the noises people make are words, they just sound like them. You can try and move, but it doesn’t change anything. Sometimes Marvin walks around the screen and yells at you.  It lasts anywhere between seven seconds and six hours; I checked like five times.

9.0 DRIFTING

This is a race: you have to make it to the far side of the bay with the money before the cops catch up to you.  It’s really hard until you figure out you can switch cars partway through by pointing your gun at them and screaming.

9.1 BOSS: META-MARVIN: This fight is hard the first time because you don’t expect him to jump out of the briefcase after you shoot him the first time. The whole fight’s like that: you need to have quick reflexes because it’s totally random where he’ll jump out of next and he’s super fast.  Under the car, out of the surf, up from behind a beached seal, beneath rocks, inside a discarded beer can, parachuting out of the sun…Marvin can be anywhere. If you run out of ammo you lose so you can’t just spray and pray either. Make every shot count.

9.2 SECRETS: If you make it to the checkpoint in the convertible you started in Meta-Marvin just spawns in the passenger’s seat every time and stares at you, covered in blood and holding a wedding ring up so you can see it.

10.0 PATIENCE

This is the last new mechanic in the game: your Sentence goes down a little bit every minute and goes back up if you hit any buttons. Just put the controller on the table and go to bed and you’re usually out of prison by the next morning.

10.1: BOSS: ??: Not sure if there is one, I never saw it just the clear screen.

11.0 RECKONING

So you have to get Marvin all the way from the top of the last will & testament to the bottom and it’s pretty hard if you try to take it one line at a time but pretty easy if you just blindly jump from paragraph to paragraph. You CAN jump on the ink smears, but the blood smears are INSTANT DEATH so don’t confuse them; some of the really dried rusty ones can be mistaken for each other.

11.1 BOSS: MEGA MARVIN LIFE: Jump over the logo when it appears at the end of the document and it’ll explode and then the credits start.

11.2 SECRETS: If you have more Bucks left at the end the last will & testament gets longer. If you finish the game with zero Bucks it just says ‘fuck you’ so if you want an easy level try and get rid of them in Management by letting your relatives phone you a lot or something.

Thank you for reading my guide I hope you enjoyed Mega Marvin Life as much as I do. It’s my favorite game and I hope I can make one as good as it someday.

The old apple tree was dead.

It was older than Ann, older than her mother, older than her grandmother, and it had almost died more times that she could count – ice storms, droughts, infestations, a fat raccoon on a thin branch – and now it was dead, truly dead and gone, and she had no time to think about it because Beatrice’s birthday was coming up and Arthur’s mother was sick and she had so many times and places she had to feel the right feeling that spending her time thinking of a dead old apple tree was unthinkable and she felt a little sick just imagining it.

Besides, the lawn was overrun with cogblins. She’d already spent all morning oiling them out, spraying down the screaming hordes with the thin mist that coated their eggs and robbed the friction from their gears that let them walk and fight and breath, leaving paralyzed hordes silent in their thousand homes and thousand knee-high skyscrapers, hapless as the ants and the cats and the birds swooped in. 

Ann polished the oiler until it gleamed and watched longer than an adult should have. It was acceptable for a child to be fascinated by mass death; in an adult it was some sort of bigger, stronger cousin of gauche that was unmentionable by the polite.

Her phone rang.  It was her sister, Clarice.  It was the first time she’d called in six years, since the thing with grandpa’s fish.  Ann answered it too fast for hesitation, a reflex operating without practice or instruction.

“Hey.”
“Hello.”

The world sat between them, its gravity drawing their conversation into faltering orbit.

“How have you been?” asked Ann, which wasn’t ‘I’m sorry.’
“I’m doing okay,” said Clarice, which wasn’t ‘I forgive you.’

“How’s Patrick?”
“Third grade.”
“They grow up so fast.  How’s Stacy?”
“The Cellar People got her.”
“Oh,” said Ann.

“I need to voyage into the Land Behind The Furnace for four days and four nights with a human-wax candle. Do you have one?”
“I could manage the house for you,” Ann didn’t say.

“I could watch Patrick for you,” Ann didn’t say.

“I’m sorry,” Ann didn’t say.

“Yeah, it’s in Arthur’s old school stuff,” Ann said.  “I can dig it out in a couple minutes and bring it over.”
“Thanks.  Just drop it in the mailbox.  I’m out late tonight and Patrick has karate after school.”

Ann didn’t say a lot of things.  She said “that’s okay” and “goodbye.”

Then she got in the car, drove twenty minutes to her sister’s house, did the no-odds double-evens skip-the-red-stones dance up the walk that kept the Cellar People from noticing you, left the candle in the mailbox, and told herself that she was a good person and a good sister.

Traffic was miserable on the way back.  Bumper to bumper and shot through with anger.  A cyberhinoceros screamed in agony at his career, his marriage, and his lost childhood and turned left on a right turn signal, totalling a semi and its cargo of twelve fresh-minted million-dollar uniceratosaurus juveniles.  Ann saw the uncreased and flattened brow on the mechanized lifter’s readout as he sat against the rubble of the traffic light and waited to be arrested and sent to the debt-mountain, just as she saw the glassy eyes of the crushed theropods waiting for virginal jockies that would go mountless, just as she saw the frozen cheeks and unsmiling mouth of the traffic copstable operating on an off-the-shelf job-app plugged into his official hat, and they were all different pieces of the same expression and she couldn’t recognize it because she was in it.

She stopped at the ice-walled superiormarket on the way home to get her mind off it.  Bought a Death Conger from the fish counter for a song two whistles and a secret. Took it home still-cursing, still-fighting inside its box of regrets, just like grandmother used to when she was little, twenty years retired from the Electricitsea but still living on it every night, gnarled hands twisting cables in the air, hoarse voice shouting to wake the neighbourhood with the call to man the lines and tend the insulation. 

Ann and Clarice had been fond of the eels but feared their grandmother, and that had gone both ways.  She flinched when she saw them, not just from the perpetual tic that had been shocked into her left hemisphere from a Humboldt Volctopus.  They were too small, not slimy enough, not trying to kill her, and that all hurt in places she didn’t like to explain or consider. 

The kitchen was quiet when she got home.  Beatrice took her time coming back, meeting with her friends in the places teenagers met with their friends. Park benches, parking lots, convenience stores, toadthrone circles, vantablack webrings, and the Last Bleacher where Cindy MacDougal’s skeleton still did her final cheerleading routine every Wednesday evening and the bats refused to roost.  Some of them Ann knew too well, others she knew too little, and she worried that she was mixing them up.

The eel was straightforward. She loved that fish, loved the way it snapped at her and fiercely offered her wishes three, loved the way its curses bounced off her grandmother’s shining silvered cleaver, loved the secrets that it whispered loose in the steam as its skull defleshed in the pressure cooker, loved it as fiercely and uncomplicatedly as she’d loved anything, loved it so she didn’t have to hear the thump and clunk of Arthur coming home or smell the traces of the outside world on his skin and sweat and clothing, loved it so much that she missed the soft scuttle of the ventipede as it swung down from the kitchen ceiling and wrapped itself six times around her throat, fangs bared to strike.

Ann snapped, but inside, where it mattered. She swung the cleaver wildly with her right hand, but it was with her left that she killed it, acrylics tearing through armour and fat and into deeper, more private flesh, turning insides out and popping open soft organs like party balloons, grinding with the heel and stabbing with the nails and ripping and gnashing with the thumb until she wore the whole of the beast on her arm like a puppet from a children’s show.

It screamed at her. She hissed in its face and bit its head off, swallowed its adrenaline and cortisol and dopamine like candy and spat out the mandibles, then sat down in a corner of the kitchen and did nothing but rock gently, so gently, without tears or thoughts or blinking, just a spreading numbness from toe to finger to scalp.

Then she scrubbed the ventipede innards away with her bare hands, vomited into the sink to purge the criotoxins, washed her hands with the red, white and infrared soaps, then exited the secret passage from her lair and walked down the hall to the dining room where her husband sat, waiting.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I wanted dinner to be special.”

“Let’s get divorced,” he told her.

Ann nodded.  Yes, that made sense. 

What a day.

What a typical goddamned day.