jamieproctor.ca

It’s too damned hot. Should’ve worn a t-shirt. Oh well, let’s get to work.

There’s a lot of early flowering plants here, and we have absolutely no idea about the potential pharmaceutical benefits. Get the pollen, get the nectar – hell, get the smaller ones entirely intact and we can talk limited-scale experimental farming back home. Very limited. Don’t want the prices to drop. Shit, look at the water run off those ferns – we’ve got ferns for days, cycads for weeks, conifers for decades. The flowers yeah yeah yeah they’re photogenic but we can’t forget this stuff. Even if any or all of this is no good for medicine we can make them prestige ornaments, especially if they’re fragile enough. Maybe they’ll need specific soil nutrients, maybe they’ll die without good clean air.

Smell that air. That’s good, fresh air -no pollution, no smokestacks, no exhaust. We can bottle that, sell it as a cure-all. Prehistoric Pure? PureHistoric? We can let marketing figure out the brand name later. What do you mean, ‘historically high levels of volcanism?’ We can put that in the fine print c’mon what did I just say, leave that shit to marketing. We’re here for the big picture.

Like that skyline – yeah, that’s a big picture. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. You read those articles about how the sky used to be a different colour? We can sell prints of this shit. ‘The sky you used to have.’ Nice, real nice. Hey maybe we can get special editions using pigment from real Mesozoic organisms, get some premium product out there. Sunsets are different colours too nowadays, right? Chemical composition of the atmoblah blah, we can do a sunrise and sunset run too. That’s money. Pocket money, but it builds the brand.

Listen to the sounds – hear that? Those are animals nobody’s ever heard before, making noises in ways we’ve never been able to know. That’s entire fields of ASMR audio never before imagined, let alone explored. Fuck making a niche, we can make a whole genre. And sound effects – decades, for DECADES we can kill off the very notion of paying someone to make a fake monster noise or an imaginary bird call. Almost everything on this planet doesn’t just have a value attached to it, it produces value simply by moving around and being listenable. Now THAT’S a freebie.

There’s another smell in the air. That’s salt. We’re near the sea, aren’t we? You know what sucks? Fishing. Fishing sucks. There’s no more goddamned fish and we can’t fish any more of them or we run out entirely. I bet we can get some good work in here with that. Bring in some trawlers – hell, build a port – and the expense’ll pay for itself so fast we’ll have people bankrupting themselves to get in line for a construction bid. And that’s to say nothing of the prestige meats. People pay good money for tuna steak, what do you think they’ll fork over for a filet of mosasaur? Everyone loves sea serpents!

And of course, we can’t forget the landbound economy. Look at that triceratops family there – we’re talking animals the size of HOW many cows? All over the place? And the environment already suits them pretty well? Fuck, it’s a planet that’s an open-range farm. All we need to do is find out which ones taste better and try to encourage them along. And you know what, if the most readily-available stuff tastes like shit we can always turn it into hot dogs – sufficient sodium solves all flavours. ‘Dino dogs,’ c’mon, look, we don’t even NEED marketing for some of this stuff.

Beyond the meat, there’s the hide. Let’s bring back hats. Remember beaver fur hats? Remember how that single item of clothing coming from one specific animal drove a corporation to exploit half of north American for massive profits for two hundred years? Imagine that but every animal in our eyesight and beyond is a beaver-in-waiting. Fuck hats, we can make anything from these motherfuckers and we can and we will and there’ll be an entire new GENRE of substances you make leather out of. ‘Cow’ will be for very old and very poor people.

Can’t forget the soil, of course (all those farms that have tired earth and need to chug fertilizer by the bucketful to grow one more field of corn). And the rock (quarries sitting right at the surface, unharvested). And the stuff underneath (do I need to spell it out?). All we have to do is find out where the deposits we already HAVE grabbed are and we can take open season on the rest. Oil. Coal. Ore. Anything that’s eroded away or subducted into the mantle or buried under a craton or just plain GONE by the present? In this here and now, that’s free real estate. Nobody has more money than fossil fuel companies, nobody. And we’re holding the keys to making their wildest dreams come true.

Speaking of free real estate, since we’re going to be spending some time here setting up operations, we’re also going to be setting up some housing. And once we’ve done that for the workers, why not also do it for the people with actual money? Find a nice little isolated lagoon on an island in Europe or along the coast of the American interior seaway and put up some fences and maybe a SAM battery and hey, the world’s most prestigious mansion – and one generously outside of most legal jurisdictions. Can you even BEGIN to imagine how many billionaires would happily feed people to sea monsters right this second if they could film it and tell everyone without getting arrested? What about if the sea monsters were fifty feet long?

Or shit, what if they weren’t even sea monsters? The biggest thing you can kill someone with these days is a grizzly or some shit, maybe an elephant if you want to train it to. What about having a pet t-rex? Bet that’d make all those fuckos who brag about their tigers or horses or yachts shut up, huh? And it’s not like that’s the only available option here; we’ve got worldwide megafaunal ecosystems, untouched. So many choices, so many options. You could have pit fights that make dogfights look like ant wrestling.

And of course there’s the benefits to spectacle in general. Film crew needs a pristine wilderness? A fantasy forest? A reef that ISN’T dying of climate change and may or may not be made largely of weird prehistoric clams? Why spend money on burning a CGI studio or three to the ground when you can just pay some meatheads ten bucks a day to lug the cameras over here? Why ask an artist to imagine an exotic bird when you can pull four of them out of that bush over there? Why ask an artist to imagine a BUSH when you’ve got that bush over there? Imagination costs money, and we’ve got a fresh new world to use instead of working that particular mental muscle.

The clouds are getting heavier. That’s water, that’s good clean fresh water. No microplastics, no heavy metals, no acid rain, no ‘toxins,’ no phosphates no lead all-natural organic AND fresh. Every single word I just said in that sentence was an extra 10% price hike per bottle. Multiplicative.

Now let’s go back before that cloud breaks. I don’t care how much the water costs, I’m not squeezing it out of these pants.


***

Charge paleontologists for trips? I thought we were looking for ways to make money.

Gary was so little he could barely walk and he hated being wet and cold and he hated being dry and hot and he hated being on the beach and he was expressing all of this very loudly when his feet encountered the worst thing yet, so horrible that he swallowed his screaming with a sharp HUHP, like a stray bug.

“What’s that?” asked his father, a tiny bit of relief seeping in when he didn’t see blood. He was holding Gary upright in the water with his giant hairy hands, and his head must have been ringing by then. “Oh I see – no, that’s okay little guy. That’s just seaweed. It’s harmless.”
Gary shrank backwards from the harmlessness. The squishy soft wet sand of the lakebed was the one soothing texture he had, but now it was gone and being replaced by plants that looked like spiders. A floating strand – snapped free by his father’s giant stomping feet – drifted by in front of his stomach and almost touched him, making him hiccup in horror.

“It’s not gonna hurt you,” said his father, and to Gary’s horror he proved it, he picked him up and proved it by moving him forwards into the deeper water, up to Gary’s armpits and with the seaweed around him and underfoot and everywhere.

“See?” his father said, as he stood there in the water, scratchy scrapy slimy weedy tendrils brushing against his feet. “It’s not so bad, not so bad, not so bad at all.”

“Okay,” said Gary. He tried to wiggle his toes, then tried to never do that again. “Okay.”

***

Gary had too many pimples and not enough money and no clue whatsoever, and the deep fryer had taken offense at his deep frying fries and had spat upon him very vigorously. He swore and wailed all at once and dropped things and waved his arms around and didn’t know where to put his face.

“What was that?” asked the manager, who’d been doing something involving an unpleasant device and the plumbing, and then “oh fuck me, that’s a bad one. Christ kid, what’d you DO never mind, never mind, come with me right now.” She grabbed Gary in one hand and the kitchen sink’s taps in the other and pulled them together despite everything he could do and she turned them both into position.

“There, see?” the manager said as the cold, cold water poured over his crispy arm hair and turned to liquid nitrogen over the burn welts. “That’s not so bad. Probably won’t even scar.”
“Okay,” said Gary. He watched skin turn red and white and white and red and blotch in and out, like a heartbeat. “Okay.”

***

Gary had no time left and an endless amount of questions and he was sitting at a table in his parent’s old house looking at the schools, at the brochures and the websites and the brochures and the websites and the brochures and the websites and inside his head was nothing and he was screaming at the nothing but invisibly, because if he made a real noise it would come out very horribly.

“Just pick something,” someone had told him – everyone was awfully smeared together right now, it was difficult to sort out which someone this had been or who it was or if it had been himself. “It’s okay as long as you pick something.”

He’d been picking something for years. And now it was finishing.

So Gary picked one and felt terrible, and then put it back. And then he picked one and felt terrible, and he put it back. And he did that for two hours until he picked one up and felt a sort of exhausted relief and he didn’t put it back.

“Okay,” said Gary. And he meant it, maybe? It felt alright. “Okay.”

***

Gary was finished.

He hadn’t failed. He’d taken too long and hadn’t felt the passion, but he’d had a little fun and he hadn’t failed and his teachers had encouraged him and told him he had a future and he’d worn a stupid hat and gotten a stupid paper and he’d said something stupid to the person who shook his hand and now he was going to a restaurant with the pieces of his family that lived near him and they were happy, and he was happy, and he started the right turn off the overpass just as there was a ten-year-old in front of him and he slammed on the brakes like they were red-hot-scorpions underneath steeltoed shoes.

The kid stared and then scampered, frightened.

Gary waited a long half-moment before he finished the turn, too filled with icy terror to even be nervous about making the people behind him wait.

“Okay,” he said to himself, dry and squeaky through his throat. He swallowed and tasted everything. He hadn’t hit anyone. He had NEARLY hit someone, but he hadn’t. And that wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad. Everything was fine. Nothing had been ruined.

“Okay.”

***

Gary was still moving, but he was standing still. Maybe everything else was moving.

He wasn’t sure how he’d gotten his job, but he worked at it. He wasn’t sure if his schooling helped with it, but he didn’t think about it. He wasn’t sure if he knew how to do it, but he did it. He wasn’t sure if it was enough, but he didn’t look because the idea of an answer was frightening. He wasn’t sure if there was something else he’d missed and it was too late or if he was being nervous. He didn’t like being nervous or unsure, and that meant he didn’t like a lot of things and mostly those things were pieces of himself which he was suspecting might actually be the foundations of his entire being.

So he worked, and then he went home and didn’t move. He put words in front of himself on screens and papers and when those ran out he used videos and when those ran out he looked for more and then he went to bed and did them all over again and it was fine. It was acceptable and sustainable.

The days off were harder because he wasn’t still moving on those days and he spent more of it painstakingly aware of his immobility. He should try things, probably. He should’ve tried things already, maybe. He knew he’d regret it if he didn’t. But he regretted the things he’d done as much as the things he hadn’t done, and if he was very very careful not to do anything in the correct way maybe he wouldn’t think about any of that and would simply feel fine instead. Which would be alright.

“Okay,” he said to himself. A lot of the things he said he had to say to himself. “Okay.”

***

Gary was much older than he thought he’d be, and not nearly as old as he’d hoped he’d be, and exactly as old as he’d always feared. Everything surrounding him was years out of date but still terribly, terribly, terribly expensive and delicate, and he had no idea how he’d replace any of it if he sneezed or coughed or curled up in a tiny ball the wrong way, so he lay recumbent not just because he couldn’t do anything else but because he was very frightened of making something happen.

His cousin, who was somewhat younger than Gary (the last person Gary knew, but not all that well), was there with him. This was a relief.

“It’s okay, Gary,” said his cousin. “It’s okay.”
At this, Gary’s brain and eyes blinked three times very quickly. He opened his mouth.

He was sure there was something he’d just realized, something else that he was sure he should’ve been doing, something that wasn’t quite what he’d always had, but he was just a little bit la

Hey there!

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

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

See, it works like that.

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

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

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

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

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

Triple shot. Deserved, but jeez.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll get cheese and onion.

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

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

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

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

JESUS.

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

And we’re done!

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

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

***

fuck i forgot the cereal

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

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

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

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

“Gross,” said her mother.

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

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

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

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

“Pardon?” said Lemm.

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

***

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

“This SUCKS,” she said aloud.

You are being watched, warned the hoe.

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

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

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

This time she threw it. Very successfully.

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

“Augh fuck,” articulated Lemm.

“Shit, sorry,” said Hazi.

Avenge this slight immediately, said the hoe.

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

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

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

Destroy all that she holds dear, said the hoe.

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

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

Vengeance is ours, cried the hoe.

“Oh COME ON,” said Lemm.

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death to the foe, said the hoe.

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

But they weren’t happy.

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the bear stomped off.

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

For at least that one night.

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

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

Questions? No? Yes? Maybe? You!

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

So let’s get into it!

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Sheesh.

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

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

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

Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay.

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

One last thing

***

Gift shop time!

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

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

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

No, we aren’t going fishing.

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

But no.  We aren’t going fishing.

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Timothy couldn’t move.

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

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

***

When Timothy was seventy, it woke.

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Dream clean thoughts. 

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

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

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

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

But nobody listened.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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