jamieproctor.ca

When Carlos was three, his parents took him down to the river, and he saw the footprints.
They were very big – much larger than he was – and even at that age he knew that wasn’t quite normal, and was probably very special. He was so overwhelmed with their size that he couldn’t quite bring himself to remember much else about them; impressions of shape and depth and so on slid off his mind like water from an eggshell. The one detail that stayed with him was their colour: the sand in them was a deep soft dark brown, shaded by the edges of the prints.
He took a step forward, then another, and he was just teetering on the edge of the hole, one leg raised, when his father’s arms wrapped around him and he heard the ever-hated words ‘time to leave’ and oh how he whimpered over that.
But he couldn’t cry, because he knew he’d be back.

Next time they came back, the prints were missing. If it was some wandering dog or a bored teenager or a rainfall or a big splash he never knew, but they weren’t there. And that was when the troubles started.

“He won’t listen,” the teachers said, which wasn’t fair or true, and “he can’t do the simplest thing right,” which was. It was as if someone had wrapped Carlos up in a blanket and every little thing he had to do was conducted through blind fumbling past layers of thick, muffling cloth. He could walk, he could talk, he could listen, but when it came to execution someone had replaced all of his fingers with thumbs and his arms with jelly.
He graduated with the lowest marks in the school or indeed ever – a note of some distinction – and he listened to what his teachers told him and his father had casually mentioned once or twice and he joined the army.

His marks kept him out of a lot of things, but they gave him a gun. Then he cleaned it very carefully and put it back together backwards. Then he did that again, and again, and when he did it properly they said he’d taken too long. So that was a problem.
Drills should’ve been easy. Just walk. But it was always a little too slow, or a little too fast, and whenever it wasn’t one or the other his legs would wander off on him.
“The hell’s the matter with you?” the drill sergeant asked him. “You got two left feet? Can’t be, ‘cause the doctors would’ve kicked you out. Now pull your head out of your ass and MARCH.”
He tried, he really did, he tried so very hard. But it just didn’t work, and shortly thereafter, neither did he.

After that the ideas were thinner on the ground, but sometimes he found places that needed something mopped, or some papers stapled, or boxes moved, or data entered. But wherever he went it was as if a song was playing, and everyone but him could hear it.
“Won’t listen,” said his boss, and there was a familiar tune, with memorable lyrics. “Just simple things, but he takes forever over it. The guy’s a burnout.”
Carlos was listening – he always listened – but he found himself agreeing. Something had burned out, right there, in his life. And nobody seemed to be able to find a spare match for him.

Then he missed rent.
Twice.
Three times.

It was five strikes in the end, some louder and sharper than others, and really it could’ve been as many as seven or as few as four depending on how you counted them – less a hard line than a fat blur. He spent more time out of his apartment until he didn’t have one anymore.

The streets were no less confusing than the buildings had been. There were things he could’ve done, should have done, would have done; but Carlos remembered how all the rest of the things he could have and should have and would have done went and so he didn’t. Instead he walked until he got tired, then he sat, then he walked again.
Eventually he sat down and fell asleep.
When he woke up he was tired, so tired, and very thirsty.

The river was a terrible idea. Don’t put that in your mouth, he’d been told. It’s dirty. Needs boiling. But it was nearby and he was exhausted and what was one more bad idea?
Almost enough, it turned out. He did more sitting than walking, and by the time the evening took him to its brink his eyes saw more spots than sunlight. The bugs were free and fierce upon him.
Carlos found the water by toe, then fell in, but it was summer and at low ebb so he couldn’t even drown properly, just sputter and splash and eventually scrabble himself into something of a slouched squat. It felt like his skin was boiling off his bones, but calmly.
He drank, and it tasted just as nasty as his parents had always warned him. Grit got in his mouth, and maybe a bug too listless to even fight back. But it cleared the spots from his face, and that was when Carlos could see that he was sitting on the cusp of a footprint.

It looked bigger than he remembered. Surely before it hadn’t filled the streambed, or else someone else would have seen it, or failed to destroy it.

Slowly, carefully, precisely, Carlos put his foot down.
It fit perfectly. Not well, but perfectly.
Then he picked up his other foot and put it down, and that too fit perfectly.
And then he did it again, and again, and moved forward, upstream, walking smoothly, carefully, and in a rhythm that matched the water flowing around his ankles.

They were far too big for him. But maybe he’d grow into them until they fit.

The building was three stories, but you could see it for miles. The lights wouldn’t permit anything less.
Each of them was twelve feet in diameter, backed by a bulb that would’ve made an IMAX blush and cover its face. They never stopped; turning and glowering and peering like a great-aunt checking for dust on bookshelves.
There was another light. It was smaller, and gaudier, and it was only just now beginning to scream.
ALERT was the meaning. It was discernable in any language and in several species. ALERT. DANGER. PROBLEM. WARNING. And in case you didn’t get the meaning it was spinning at a few hundred rotations per second, spackling the world bright red on and off again.
Prolonged exposure to it would result in deafness. Luckily, it only needed to be on for a few seconds: one millisecond for the team to engage; the other four-and-a-bit for everyone else to get out of their way.
The team was organized in pairs. One slept while the other waited, all equipment within arm’s reach. They blinked at a precisely calculated rate. They thought only of performing their task. They dreamed of the floor plan, and of its weaknesses (imaginable?) and its strengths (incalculable). When they moved, they moved together: the waking guard on point as their partner followed two seconds behind.
They were armed. Their weapons were indescribable and numerous, and their feet were fast. There was a lot of ground to cover.
The intruder had come.

The grounds themselves were a little park, underlain by some mulch, gravel, a little brick path, and seven hundred million dollars of electronics and metal. Some of them were warnings, many of them were detectors, and one or two were intended to deter the bejeezus straight out of anything that came into their firing range, which was considerable and rapid.
All were silent.
The walls themselves were higher than the building, although the last forty feet was the most translucent and undetectable plexiglass (and yet more invisibly, they extended far higher in a perfect dome of electronic security), and every unbreachable inch of them was ablaze. Every corridor was filled with quiet, furious footfalls. Staff took refuge in any room to hand, trusting in auto-locking codes to ensconce themselves from the patrols. Anyone in a hallway without the hand pass and that morning’s badge-code was an enemy.
The intruder was here.

The target was one room among dozens. A door in a wall like many others. A resident who was quite specific in her qualities.
They’d been prepared for this. Not just this eventuality, this exact victim. There’d been plenty of warnings. Everyone had been tense as tenterhooks the past week, just waiting. Practicing. Honing. On the most literal of edges, staring out into the abyss, cursing and waiting for it to blink so they could kill it.
The chance was here the moment had come the time was now and BANG in flew the door off its hinges and the tiny chamber was filled with forty different bodies and a hundred muzzles sweeping every inch of its contents, eyes on special cocktails that let them see everything from infra-red to hidden-guilt, brains buzzing out of control.
The form in the bed was motionless.
Carefully but faster than the untrained eye could follow, the designated pointer went to its side, performed sixteen separate rites both physical and invisible, and nodded.
“Got away clean.”
Against all professionalism and training, someone said ‘fuck.’ Everyone silently and mutually did not notice.
With a lack of haste that was infinitely more alarming than their earlier speed, the medical examiner filled out a small sheet with the victim’s name (Bernice Pondsmith); C.O.D. (cardiac arrest); and the damnable, eternal, familiar name of the perpetrator:
Death.

The intruder had won.
Again.

Defeated but undaunted, the peerless, matchless forces of the Sunnyhill Retirement Community returned to their posts, weapons holstered, thoughts already on how to improve their response times, how to cut that last second out of the schedule.
The architect was on call. The walls would be made higher. The lights would shine brighter. The alarms would be surer. The guards would be faster.
Next time. NEXT TIME, it would be different.

And there was always one more next time, wasn’t there?

I stood there, and I stared at the porticullus, and I stared into the abyss and I knew it was staring back at me, eyelessly, infinitely.
My arm moved without me, and it reached the bell, and against all of my power and will I rang.

Three times the bell rang.
ding
DONG
ding
DONG
ding
DONG

The gate creaked wide.
“Oh HIIIIII! THERE you are, ohcomein, it’s SO nice to see you.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Harvest,” I said, as I was dragged over the threshold in a cloud of dread fussing. My hair was adjusted before my very eyes; my raiment tweaked; my glasses straightened.
“OhmyendlessnessyouaresoBIG now, ahahahahahhahaha, oh myyyyy. Look at you!”
“I can’t without a mirror, Mrs. Harvest,” I told her, and she burst into laughter that only ended as she felt the terrible tug of her duty at her ankle.
“Oohhhh, THERE she is. Say hello to Bethany, Teresa!”
Eyes the size of dinner plates stared at me, half-shielded behind tremulous, quaking hands. “donwanna.”
“Oh c’mon, be poliiite. Be a good girl. You know Bethany! She lives just down the road! She’s your babysitter!”
The hands balled into little fists. “donwan.”
“You’ll have a LOVELY time, I’m sure.”
“dw.”
“Now, Bethany: the others are upstairs in Julie’s room, playing, and you shouldn’t need to do much for them beyond feed them – I left some shepherd’s pie in the fridge from last night and you can reheat it for them.”
“d.”
“Alright now, we’re leaving. You have a good time up here, and help yourself to anything in the fridge once the kids are in bed, okay? You’re a growing girl, right?”
Her elbow was icy cold against my ribs, stirring permutations of my own mortality.
“Thanks,” I said. “Have a good night, okay?”
“You bet!”
And with a last hug and a fare-thee-well, Mrs. Harvester, Mr. Sower, Mrs. Sower, and Mr. Planter descended into the basement of the Harvester’s home, where the walls were ringed with unspeakable things and the floor was covered in glyphs that must not be described, all in colours of the farthest rings and motes.
The door went ‘clik.’

Teresa stood there in the middle of the floor, staring at me without looking.
“Hey,” I said.
She immediately began to cry.

*

There are many opiates available to soothe a troubled mind. In the cellar below us were dozens of potent toxins that could flay a soul free of its physical ills for all time; in the world around us were uncountable distractions and vices.
I had brought with me some cheap hard candy, which Teresa was induced to consume. She couldn’t cry and chew at the same time, though from time to time a small and trembling snivel would leak out of the corners of her jaws.
Still, she was tamed enough to be carried, and I ascended the steps to the dwelling-chamber of Julie Harvester, currently inhabited by herself and Jonathan, her brother.
They were screaming words at each other. Harsh, rattling syllables whose power made my soul quail and will shake. But I had a duty, and it lay before me. Emboldened by my intellect if not my will, I threw the door wide.
“Fart face!”
“Douche turd!”
“Shit nose!”
“Knock it off,” I intoned. “This doesn’t look like playing to me.”
“He touched my stuff!”
“She wouldn’t let me touch her stuff!”
“So you just took it!”
“I was just looking at it!”
“It came off!”
“It was garbage!”
“YOU’RE garbage! SHIT garbage!”
A terrible power pulsed at my temples and I felt my vision grow grey. There were forces here that were neither benign nor hostile; merely aberrant to all that I could comprehend in the context of a reasoned universe. There was only one path out of the insanity that surrounded me.
“Let’s watch a movie,” I said.
“I want Fr–”
“I WANT Go-”
“We’ve seen that!”
“We’ve seen THAT!”
“You’re dumb!”
“You’re STUPID.”
“Perhaps later,” I told them. The bell had tolled. The time had come. “Let’s get you guys dinner.”

*

The shepherd’s pie was rank with implications. It seethed with a sickening intensity that nipped at my eyes and watered my soul.
“Gross,” said Jonathan.
“Ick,” said Teresa.
“I don’t want Shepherd’s pie AGAIN,” said Julie.
It was just as I had feared – my careful plans and safeguards so innocently conceived by confident mortal minds were in tatters, adrift in the face of the true nature of the chaotic universe. Emergency was afoot.
“How about mac n cheese?” I asked.

*

“Ugh….this is from a BOX,” said Jonathan.
“Eat it.”
“It’s ORANGE.”
“Eat it.”
“YOU eat it.”
Madness throbbed at my temples. “Alright. I’m going to give it to your sister. She likes it.”
“NO! It’s mine!”
I stared at the ceiling and marvelled at the most merciful thing in the world: the inability of a youthful mind to comprehend its own actions.
“Ecchh,” said Teresa.
I passed her a napkin.
“Bloorph,” said Teresa.
I stood up to find a damp cloth. Distracted on my task, heedless of the world around me, when I returned to the kitchen table I was not prepared by the magnitude of the horror that awaited my eyes.
“She tried to take mine!”
“She said I could!”
“Not if I ate it first!”
“You spilled it!”
“You made me!”
The orange. My god, the orange. It was everywhere. Everywhere. Under every thing and over every one and inside every dream and thought and hope, it crept, endlessly. I felt madness about to overtake me, and it was only through the very greatest effort that I did not begin to laugh uncontrollably.
“You will help clean this up,” I said.
Teresa coughed twice and threw up.

*

In hindsight my decusuibs were laughably optimistic; the wide-eyed innocence of a blind woman who cannot see the chasm gaping before her very tread. But I was naïve even of my naivety – as is so often the case – and so when I gave the children basic cleaning supplies such as mildly soapy water and some paper towels I thought to myself with the earnestness of the true fool ‘what harm could this possibly do?’
So I busied myself changing Teresa’s clothes, patting her back repeatedly, and putting her to bed in ignorant bliss.
By the time I returned with the mop to deal with her half-digested leavings, it was already too late. Too late for any of us.
Words could not describe what I saw. They tried their best, but in the end the truth of things could only be witnessed in the devastation.
It had begun as duty.
It had transformed into competition.
It had inevitably, loathsomely, fully transformed into immutable and eternal hatred.
And then, of course, had come the violence as humanity’s bestial nature overthrew reason’s paper-thin and infantile grasp on its brutish psyche.
“I’m bleeeeeediiiing!” wailed Julie.
“No you’re not! No you’re not!” yelled Jonathan. He was incorrect, but not by much.
“I’m gonna diiiiiiieeeee!”
“No you’re not!”
I recoiled in horror and shrieked with the voice of the eternally damned: “BEDTIME. Now.”

*

The basement door slid open. Foul vapours billowed forth, and in their gloom four hooded figures of horrific aspect slowly unmasked themselves.
“We’re BAAAA-aaack!” sang Mrs. Harvest. “Thank you SO much Bethany – how are the children doing?”
I steeled myself to the task at hand, carefully replacing the deeply illicit and highly salacious book on the living room shelf. It had been my only consolation since the cleaning concluded, and yet the fumes of apple-scented dish soap remained redolent and reeking within the inescapable confines of my mind.
“Teresa is sleeping; Jonathan and Julie were sent to bed early. Julie is watching a movie, I think.”
“What about Connor?”
I suddenly felt as if I were surrounded by horrifying implications I was not ready to understand.
“Connor?”
“Yes! Four children: Teresa, and Jonathan, and Julie, and Connor – you know, Mr. Tiller’s son. Five years old? Didn’t I introduce them to you?”
“No. You said ‘the others are upstairs in Julie’s room.’ And Julie and Jonathan were up there. And that was all.”
“Well, where could he have been then? Oh dear. I hope he hasn’t gotten himself into mischief. Always getting into things, Connor.”
A noise rose from the basement.
Something had bumped, lightly but forcefully.
“Mrs. Harvest,” I said, speaking quietly so that madness would not overtake me, “did you leave anything out?”
“Well, Connor, apparently.”
“No, no, no – did you leave anything out. Downstairs.”
“Oh no! Everything’s been put away carefully, I saw Robert lock the cabinets myself before we came back up. Except the nesting-shrine of course; that’s built into the floor. The Scrabbler of Old nests in there. But I’m sure Connor would never touch that; he’s such a careful boy!”
And then, from the staircase, the squamous, cyclopean, brobdingnagian, unfathomable, lunatic, unthinkable, wearily unmistakable noise of scuttling.
“CONNOR! Young man you are in BIG TROUBLE!”

She would’ve liked to have had it mailed, but the postal system flatly refused.
She would’ve liked to have had someone purchase it for her, but the local couriers wouldn’t do it and the idea of employing – even temporarily – someone who wouldn’t wear a uniform made her nose twitch. Paid in cash, even? Disgusting.
So Shelley drove a car down to town, downtown, and paid a certain specialist a certain sum of money off her credit like a civilized human, even if she had to carry the goods back in her own two hands.
Gingerly. Carefully. Even through the packaging, it was dangerous. She’d need to have someone clean the car afterwards.

At home she cut away the cords and the wrappers and the box and the padding and the second box and the airtight seal and lifted out her prize. Still fresh.
The durian was smaller than she’d expected, if slightly spikier. Its smell, however, was right on target.
Still, it wasn’t the smell she was there for.
Behind Shelley was a wall, and on that wall was a picture frame, and held captive in that cradle was an apple.
Beside that was a banana. To the left of THAT was a pineapple and so on and on and on from raspberries to pitaya to papaya to kiwis to kumquats.
There was an empty space at the end, at the bottom left. It needed something round and thorny that tasted like fine custard and stank like mustard gas. So Shelley sat at her easel, her canvas before her, the durian (on its own – no bowl, no lesser fruit) behind that, and she looked, and she looked, and she thought about art.
She thought about the curve of the brush, of the selection of the colour, of the blending of eye and hand together – one unmoving, the other never ceasing.
Then she shrugged her shoulders and stopped thinking and began to paint instead.

When you’re really concentrating you’re barely awake. Time and space go away, the body stops existing and the mind follows. All that’s left is motion.
Shelley sat in that state for a long beautiful moment and then sneezed.
God, the durian smelled. It smelled bad. Really bad. Worse than she’d thought. And that wasn’t even the problem, the problem was the PERSISTENCE. She wasn’t getting used to it. She couldn’t ignore it.
So she sealed it inside a plastic bag and sat down again and picked up her brush.
Time went away, space went away.
The body vanished and boy that reeked GODDAMNIT
Shelley got up and walked around the house and found a clothespin in a drawer she’d last opened about twenty years ago and slammed that thing shut on her nose.
She sat down with unnecessary force, hissed to herself, put time in her pocket and space in her wallet and counted to three and
Nope.

She put the durian in another room. It didn’t help.
She took a picture of the durian and painted from that. It didn’t help.
She moved to a different part of the house. It didn’t help.
She threw away her work, threw away her reference photos, threw out the durian, went to her summer cottage, found a picture of a durian on the internet with her tablet, and began to paint.
Five brushstrokes in she stopped and sniffed.
“Fuck.”
Then she leaned over, very carefully, and sniffed the canvas.
Her eyes watered.
“FUCK.”

She tried febreeze.
She tried lemon juice in water.
She tried lighting matches, then she tried burning candles, scented and unscented.
She tried sniffing garlic really hard to see if it was her imagination or if there was something else going on (it wasn’t her imagination, and the garlic smell didn’t last long).
She tried, in a fit of desperation, switching entirely to drawing in charcoal to trap the scent. It didn’t work either but it was a nice effect so she kept doing it, and all her durian attempts became black and white and various compromises of grey.
She was getting closer, Shelley suspected. Closer. It was fainter now. Yes, that was it. It was fainter. Just a little closer. Yes.

The next day she finished it.
She woke up and she finished it.
She woke up and finished it and had an extra-long breakfast and then had a long, long walk along her private beach and tried very hard not to cackle. That would be admitting a struggle had taken place, which was all too close to admitting a defeat.
That last corner in the bottom left was going to look AMAZING when it didn’t exist anymore.
Then she walked back in, and stopped, and felt that buzz in the air before she even inhaled and confirmed it.
Durian.

The stairs to her studio room were broad and generous but she still took them four at a time, fury lending her wings, and even moreso the reek in the room as she flung the door wide.
Oh god it stank. Like a whale carcass in the sun, like a wheel of limburger in a chemical toilet, like rotten flesh in a blender full of peach juice.
“I FIXED THAT!” she yelled at the canvas. Oh god how did it still look normal? How was it still just a charcoal sketch? How was it not oozing, dissolving under the stench?
So many questions it made her want to fall apart and scream until her head split open and there was a durian in there too. How? How? HOW?
But Shelley was an artist, and so she stopped doing that and let time and space fall away and raised her brush and made art happen. Pointy-end first.
It hissed, and then it all came out at once and no amount of matches could’ve done anything at all.

Shelley was still lying there when they found her four days later. The body reeked, but the rest of the house was as still and sterile as a doctor’s office.
Except for the canvas, which smelled a little like febreeze and lemons and charcoal. But in a nice way.

The paintings weren’t left to anyone in particular and were auctioned off by a distant cousin to raise funds for charity, which worked very well – the strangeness of the artist’s passing was still in the news, which helped drive the prices up.
The Portrait of Durian: Grey in particular went for over half a million.

Somewhere in the skies above Newyorkopolis soared Large Hero, the largest hero. His name filled the whole sky, and he perched on it and looked at everyone and everything they were doing and asked himself where they needed two hundred pounds of completely invincible muscle to charge through a wall and physically annihilate people.
He listened to them. He watched them. He was the best and most moral of all panopticons, up there in the big blue horizon, invisible and omnibenevolent.
And then he saw a sight that could not be condoned. A sight that filled him with more horror than he could possibly imagine.
Quick! Quick! Disaster must be prevented.
Large Hero dropped from the sky like a bird that had remembered it was a brick, leading with his fists – the most important and heroic parts of his body. There was something far worse than crime afoot.
Change.
Sure enough, there on the very steps of the courthouse, there stood a vile, ruthless mob, brandishing filthy and unlawful signs and shouting most uncivilized rhetoric. And among them, dead guilty, stood a super-heroic being, unmistakably in her willingness to wear brightly coloured quasi-spandex in public. She had caught several tear gas grenades and thrown them into the stratosphere.
“Stop right there!” shouted Large Hero. “Desist! Halt! Avaunt!”
“Never!” called the super-hero. “I am participating in public protest, rather than remaining aloof from it! I am a citizen and should act within society to change it for the better!”
“Have you lost your MIND?” demanded Large Hero, rhetorically. “Once you start doing this sort of thing, where will it END? Interference in normal society, violating the good, clean, righteous letter of the law…these sort of delusions can only end in violence and despair for you and all of the public you delude into following your deranged whims. You should stick to simple and wholesomely apolitical things, like extrajudicially beating up, electrocuting, and/or freezing solid people that steal money from banking institutions, unless they use suits instead of guns in which case you should begrudgingly protect them from all retribution.”
“Preposterous! Outdated!”
“In that case, why not concern yourself with foiling ultramaniacal mega-death schemes executed by mad geniuses, who seek mass death and obvious self-aggrandizement exceeding that which is deemed publically laudable? Sweep out the upstart riff-raff, thwart the unseemly, revel in the applause of all as you protect and serve the rightful and unending order of things.”
“This seems morally dubious,” said the super-hero.
“THIS ENDS NOW,” hollered Large Hero, and he punched the super-hero and they went into a very long and extremely epic fight scene that destroyed lots of buildings and vehicles yet conspicuously avoided showing direct physical harm coming to a specific human being. It concluded with Large Hero being victorious and he made a quip and so on.
“Now you realize the error of your ways, which has been established by your losing a physical contest while I state basic moral homilies. You’d better listen to me now.”
“Ah, yes, you are correct now, I realize the error of my stupid, headstrong ways,” lamented the super-hero. “Your fists are bigger and therefore more moral. Your enemies are now my enemies; your battles my battles. You are my heart and soul and inspiration and I will live, die, and kill as you command.”
“Not kill!” shouted Large Hero. “Never kill! Slam their heads into concrete; render them unconscious with concussions and internal hemorrhages; break ribs and snap arms; bash skulls and crack spines – yes, yes, yes, revel in that, take great glee in that, make witty one-liners at that, be proud of that! But no, no, no, you’re never killing anyone (directly). Never! It is the line that shouldn’t be openly acknowledged as being crossed.”
“Aw jeez you’re right again,” mourned the super-hero. “I can’t get over how right you are. All I am is dumb and wrong. I should listen to my elders and betters and better-sellers.”
“Oh, we are not as different as you might think, young woman,” said Large Hero, as he led the super-hero to his impossibly expensive and super-futuristic satellite superstar base, the Good Star. “You see, I too was once misled in my ways!”
“Impossible!”
“Oh yes! In my heady youth, I thought that there were things that must change – minds, actions, the way of the world even. Such arrogance! Why, I took down slumlords, threw wife-beaters out of windows, and even disrespected the police. But in time I grew older, and became well-known, and realized this: with great publicity comes great money, and you can’t let shit get in the way of that. Best to ride the waves and not make them. There is no such thing as society; merely normal faceless interchangeable folks and the madmen and hoodlums who would take their wallets, lives, and comically large bank vaults filled with brown bags with little ‘$’s on the side.”
The young hero raised her head and her eyes were glistening with the tears of the awakened sinner. “Oh my god, my Large Hero,” she said, nobly kissing around his feet, “you are completely right. I will never try to change anything ever again! When I imagine the future, I imagine my fist whacking a garishly coloured man with an evil scheme to cause change, forever.”
Thunderous applause filled the Good Star. Thousands of beefy gloved hands smacking into each other, from a trillion giant muscly arms. Most of them belonged to slightly smaller Large Heroes.
“Wellll…. Maybe not forever and EVER,” said Large Hero. “You’re sort of new in town. You might just get bumped off the next time everyone has to fight off the evil ALIEN armies of Masterdooms. Don’t worry though, you’ll inspire a lot of heartfelt tears and rage from me, for at least five minutes. Now stand up! Raise your head high, recite our oath, and be redeemed! No more are you a person, now you are SUPPORTING CAST! Welcome to the status quo squad!”
Eyes filled with pride, the hero raised her hand. “I will fight for things as they are now, and not one step further.”
“I will be small, and contain a tiny core of character,” said Large Hero.
“I will repeat myself incessantly.”
“I will repeat myself incessantly.”
“I will repeat myself incessantly.”
“I will repeat myself incessantly.”
“I will position all disputes as violent conflict, and I will ensure that my side will always possess the greatest violence.”
“Nothing will ever change, ever, as long as we are on watch,” said Large Hero.
Everyone shed beautiful tears of joy.
“Now, if I’m not mistaken, there’s an invasion of evil people from far away coming this afternoon. They aren’t like us – they have no individuality, and all of them don’t care about the value of life. It’s war now, between the pure and innocent US and the vile and contemptible THEM. So feel free to kill as many of them as you feel like, as long as it doesn’t make you too grim and broody!”
“Hoorah!” called everyone.
Then Large Hero and the Status Quo Squad all flew up, up into the big bright sky, like birds seeking a plane’s engine. And they did it forever, in the golden, eternal moment that they made sure would never end.

The world had ended.
Well…
There was still land.
And water.
And some animals. The ugly ones nobody liked much.
And a lot of the tougher and more fiendish plants.
There were people, too. Just fewer of them.
The world had ended, but luckily nothing mattered.

Jackie was running, running across a desolate hellscape scorched with radiation burns and pursued by cannibal fiends. However, nothing mattered, and so instead she was being chased across a relatively boring overgrown meadow, and both she and her pursuers – all of them distressingly average-but-fit people in battered clothes and calloused skins – kept tripping and stumbling over vegetative hummocks.
“Hmmf. Shit,” said someone.
Something rustled at the treeline, and with the reflexes of a snake Jackie whipped out her scrap crossbow and sent a shredder-bolt straight into the heart of a drooling mutant. Nothing mattered however, and so instead she missed the normal if somewhat scrawny white-tailed deer by a yard with her distressingly plain arrow.
“Fuck!” she yelled.
The animal took off.
“Missed?”
“Missed.”
“Shit.”

That night they returned in shame to the pit-palace of Big Uncle, the murder-king of the slaughterpalz, in his circle of carnage.
“TRIAL BY COMBAT REDEEMS,” hollered the ten-foot tower of steel and meaty leather, as the ceremonial murderstickers were thrown into the blood-stained sand at their feet.
Except none of that mattered and actually her name was Belinda and she was more or less in charge of just the farm. Because she knew how to run the farm. They all went over to her firepit and ate some vegetables.
“Well, shit” they said. And they sat there like mooks.
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Shit.”

Tomorrow was another day. Tomorrow was another chance to find themselves, to face their own inner demons, to learn to live for more than just staying alive in the highly metaphorical teeth of the extremely literal apocalypse. They would venture deep inside the rusting hulks of the Old Dead Age, to bring back offerings of teknowlegend. The fire-speakers, the thunder-makers, and maybe even find a functional wheel-dragon to fend off the Darklanders when the season of blood began in its storm-clouded earnest.
That could’ve happened, but nothing mattered and instead they went looking for deer again through the old suburban sprawl, where they spooked one that was resting in the remnants of what could’ve been someone’s deck years ago.
This time Jackie was paying closer attention and her shot hit the deer. Unfortunately, it missed anything useful and it scarpered uphill onto the freeway.
“Up?”
“Up.”
“Shit.”

They were hunting for their dinner. The deer was hunting for a way to live. The motivations just didn’t match, and so it was that Jackie and her comrades spent a good three hours following a tiny blood trail over increasingly large obstacles until at last they found where it had gone to ground: an old world tomb-vault, the bunkers where the big moneymen had lived out their final days in purest decadent splendor before their supplies ran low and their tempers ran hot.
Nothing mattered, so it was basically a big estate with some defunct fencing. Pretty overgrown.
Panting atop the perimeter wall lay the deer, stuck in the effort of leaping it, lathered and exhausted.
“I’ll shoot it.”
“You’ll shoot it?”
Jackie shot at it, and her shot sunk straight and true into its head, killing it instantly and dropping it over the other side of the wall and into a half-eroded culvert which whisked it away.
“Shit!”

They ran down the old river, knives between their teeth. This was Cackler territory, and they had to be out by sundown if they wanted to leave with their tongues and teeth. Neo-crocs squirmed under the water – the bloated giant newts of the far past resurrected into the future. The sun was setting, and the deadwinds were starting to roar up from the Burned South.
Nothing mattered, however, and instead of any of that at all they trudged downstream for an hour until they found the deer being hauled out of the culvert towards an abandoned gas station by a large feral dog.
“Gun?”
“Gun.”
“Shit.”
The emergency pistol was possessed of one virtue and that was sturdiness and Jackie pulled it from her pack and aimed it and – possibly still compensating for her poor bowshots earlier – successfully put three shots all to the dog’s immediate right, directly into a large and colourfully red-hued gas tank.
Mercifully (as nothing mattered) the old canister dented under the bullets and refused to explode. Instead the force of the gunshots triggered a small avalanche of distressingly heavy yet dull chunks of cement which toppled directly at Jackie. She dodged under the hail of debris with lightning speed but nothing mattered and instead she found herself still standing bolt upright and letting it bounce off her face.
“AH! OW! FUCK!” she yelled. “JESUSSHIT AUGH owoowww.”
They dug her out and brought her home, where she stayed in bed for a week with a bad headache.
A few days after that she died from bizarre complications of an undetected internal hemorrhage.

Two years later the rains never came. Half the community starved and the other half wandered north in search of somewhere less sunny.
None of it mattered.

Once upon a time there was a very wealthy and moderately cunning woman, and with traits such as those it was not too surprising to hear that she was fairly happy, too.
But none of those things protects from age. The time came – the times.
The time where her breath caught in her chest as she jogged.
The time where her favourite hot sauce caused great violence to her digestive tract.
The time where she saw ads for movies and realized she didn’t know what the young people these days were thinking.
With theses signs and more she knew her old age was upon her, and she shivered in the greedy fear the wealthy have for mortality. But she was resourceful, and she had learned many secrets in her youth when her brain was still flexible. So on a late and stormy Thursday night she retired to her office and did a terrible thing, sealing all that was essential to her essence
Inside a file.
Inside a folder.
Inside a flash drive.
Plugged in all alone and hidden within a dusty old discarded laptop.

Some people are said to ‘age well.’ From then on, the old woman aged TERRIBLY. She had no knack for it. Her spine remained furiously straight. Her eyes stayed bright and sharp. She even still had all her own teeth. The other elderly pitied her for it, but she was too wealthy and cunning to see their point and just laughed at them.
Laughter is the best medicine. But only for humans. The old woman’s house still needed fixing, her cars still needed cleaning, and her mice needed murdering. Hired help was her only company, and she detested it, especially when it intruded upon her personal belongings (which, in her heart of hearts, she considered to be everything). And thus she was most frustrated when one bright and sunny Monday she clicked on a pop-up by mistake and immediately sent her entire work computer straight to hell.
“Piiiiissssss” she intoned, gravely. She pulled out her phone and dialed a number.
“Hi! Roverandom Computers. How can we help you?”
“I clicked on a pop-up,” she told them.
“Oh piiiiissssss” said the service rep. “We’ll send a crack squad.”
“How many?”
“Just Jillian. But she’s extremely crack.”

Jillian was extremely crack. She cracked down the road cracked through the door and cracked open the computer within thirty-five minutes, before cracking open the skull of the virus and cracking it out of all the registers. The old woman’s ears hurt from all the cracking.
“There you are, good as new,” said Jillian. “By the way I repaired your hard drive updated your drivers secured your passwords restocked your toilet paper changed out your toothpaste and cleaned your stove.”
“Wonderful,” said the old woman, with the fakest smile you could possible have with real teeth. “Thank you so much. Maybe you should start going away now.”
“I guess so,” said Jillian with a sigh. “I’ve cracked down on just about every bit of electronics I can see.” But then she brightened up. “Oh! What’s that in the corner of the study under a pile of papers inside a box inside a locked safe with an insecure password?”
“Oh no, no, no” said the old woman. “That’s just a dusty discarded laptop. It’s of no use to anyone anyhow, I can’t afford a repair, not even sure it turns on, I only keep it as a momento of my late husband, etc, etc, etc anyways you’d better leave hurry up shoo shoo out the door with you.”
“Oh no ma’am,” said the technician with deep sincerity “it’s no trouble or cost – it looks like you just had a bad power cable. I’ll just swap this out and it should be fine. I’d feel terrible leaving you out here with a little problem like that.”
The old woman considered this, and her mind whirred and hissed. “Certainly, oh thank you, thank you, thank you. But there’s just one little thing I really need from there: could you please check inside a file, inside a folder, inside the flash drive, inside that dusty discarded laptop? It was some adorable pictures of my late husband’s adorable dog and they’re all I truly need from this machine intact.”
“Not a problem at all,” said the technician.
So Jillian turned on the computer, and activated the flash drive, and opened the folder, and opened the file, and screamed very horribly as her eyes were boiled straight out of her skull and the old woman cackled fit to shake the sky.

Some time later, an impoverished grad student was wandering through the streets of the city.
“Buy a hot dog!” someone yelled at her.
“Vegetarian,” she said.
“Buy a falafel!”
“I’m full.”
“Get a haircut!”
“Growing it out.”
“Spare five bucks?”
“Sure, thing, Jillian.” Then the impoverished grad student did a double take. “Wait. What are you doing here, sis?”
“Getting change,” said Jillian. “I’m between jobs at the moment.”
“What the hell happened to YOU?”
“My eyes were boiled out of my head on witnessing a sight unfit for mortal minds and my company were cheap dicks about healthcare,” said Jillian.
“That sucks,” said Janet. “Is there anything I can do about that?”
“Well, you could find and fix the biscuits of the person that did this to me,” said Jillian. “But be careful! She’s very old, but she’s spry and unaging, unbent by time. She has some sort of secret power, and she never cleans out the damned fans. Dust everywhere – disgusting.”
“All I need is an address,” said Janet.
And she got it.

The house was vast, the doorbell loud, the creak of the door vast and sinister.
“Yesssss?” inquired the old woman who answered it.
“Door hinge oiler technician third class grade A, reporting for duty,” said Janet.
“I don’t recall making an appointment,” said the old woman.
“Ah, you said you’d say that. Here’s your note.”
The old woman looked at the note. It read: I need my door hinges oiled and I am going to forget I needed this.
“Well, that makes sense,” she said begrudgingly. “But keep it quick! I have a lot of incredibly important things that require very little effort to do.”
“Absolutely,” said Janet.
Door to door to door to door she went, around and around the house, haunted and hunted by the old woman, who peered around corners and brooded from the shadows and tapped her finger on the bannisters as she studied and nosed and judged.
But neither saw anything, and both grew frustrated.
“Perhaps you should take a break” said the old woman just as Janet loudly said “well I just need to take a break” and then they both paused and waited for the other to say something and got very confused.
“Glass of water?” asked Janet.
“Kitchen’s down the hall and to the right,” said the old woman.
“Left,” said Janet. “Got it.” And then she beat it before the old woman could disentangle herself.

Left was right where Jillian had said it was. A dusty room full of papers and piles and garbage and a big old safe.
“This is not the kitchen,” said the old woman, huffing and puffing her way up to the door.
“Yeah but I need to oil the hinges on this safe,” said Jillian, who had already crowbarred the door off it. “And look! You’ve got a mangy old laptop just rusting away in here! Boy, I’d better oil this too. You need to take better care of your stuff, geezer.”
The old woman’s eyes were filled with the nightshine of eternal hatred by now, but her malice made her predictable. “Oh, I really should,” she pouted, wringing her hands, “I really should indeed, oh dear, oh no. But there’s one more thing in there I wish you could help me with…”
“Yes?”
“…could you see your way to oiling one more thing? There’s a file, inside a folder, inside a flash drive, inside that computer, and it’s very rusty by now. Just pop it open and take A GOOD LOOK AT IT if that’s alright. Please. Now.”
“Not a problem at all,” said Janet.
So Jillian turned on the computer, and activated the flash drive, and opened the folder, and opened the file, and stared.
“Yes?” said the old woman.
Jillian stared.
“Well?” demanded the old woman.
Jillian stared.
“Aren’t you going to say ANYTHING?” said the old woman.
“Give me a second,” said Jillian. “It’s really hard to read anything through these super dark contacts. Oh! There it is!”
And she clicked the button marked ‘delete,’ and the old woman’s search history was sucked into the great digital void and was gone forever.

All beings have a thing that holds them to themselves, and to the world. Tenacity, sourced from something. Family, friends, cussedness, and so on. Eventually the body frays and can’t keep up with it anymore, unless the chain is stronger than any fleshly reckoning.
In the case of the old woman, a well of the deepest and most secretive shame and anxiety had rooted her to mortality beyond all reason, and with its removal she had only two options: scream and evaporate.
She took both.

Janet, by contrast, just took whatever wasn’t nailed down. Between her and Jillian they made enough money to retire early, live thriftily, and always, always, always keep their browsers clean.

Once upon a long ways away there was a man, a human, and he was very desperate.
He stood in the woods with a bowstring drawn and a head full of desperation and he whispered to himself the most sincere of prayers – and he’d been a pious man all his life. This was what he prayed:
“Oh god,” he mumbled, “oh god, oh god. Please oh god, just one bit of game. Just one. Just one small and starved little animal. I’ll take a half-dead deer; I’ll take a withered rabbit; I’d even swallow a fat mouse or two without complaint. I beseech thee please oh god, please don’t let me starve.”
And his god heard him and looked down upon him and saw all his long life of passionate devotion and weighed his soul in their palm and saw that his decrees were just.
“Let it be so!” they commanded.

Interestingly enough, the man was not the only voice of piety in the woods that day. A full choir of tens of thousands surrounded him, singing a song without words, rising a great ruckus to the heavens and hells around them, chanting a primal plea so old and so strong that it etched the air.
They were bats, they were bees, they were birds and mice and fleas, they were deer, they were hare, they were just about everything but the skunk nearby and this was what they prayed:
“Oh fuck,” they wished, deeply and passionately. Oh fuck fuck fuck. Please fucking fuck don’t let something grab me and eat me sweet shit on a stone. Let me make it through one more day without being something’s lunch. It’s almost spring and one more year of hot and messy reproductive activity is all that I could ask for oh fuck fuck fuck don’t let me get caught.”
And their god, the god of all the small and horrified things that have ever scurried for cover and found it wanting, glanced side to side in a nervous fit and saw their bugged eyes and horrified tension, and it nodded and knew their pleas were righteous.
LET IT BE SO, it decreed.

Anyways that god’s decree ran head first into the other god’s command and caused a large and aggressive tornado which not only prevented the man’s getting much hunting done but also stripped half the foliage out of the forest and used it to knock down the man’s house. He starved to death three days later, a little annoyed by the ineffable.

***

Once upon somewhere else there was a woman and she was stone-cold desperate.
A field, a full field, and its neighbour, and its neighbour. All her hope and riches and life were bound up inside its golden stalks, and they were turning browner and dustier.
The sky was a dead blue, cold empty. The sun was a hot white blot.
“Gods above and below,” whispered the woman, “I’m not extremely pious – although my husband is, so have a word in for him if nothing else – but I ask you this from the bottom of my liver and the soles of my feet on up: please give me rain. A cloudlet, a shower, a sprinkle, a spittle, whatever it is, I don’t care, I will take it and love it. Just a speck of rain.”
Her prayer wandered out into the hot dead air and buffeted its way into the manses of the gods and they were pleased by it and held it up into the air and whistled until it spun and tore and wove itself into a fat grey cloud, furiously pregnant with rain.
“That is done,” they said.

However, the fields were not as empty of life as they appeared. Down in the dirt, spinning in the grave of the crops, a thousand thousand thousand seeds struggled and hummed and rose in the dirt. Heat-resistant, water-tolerant, pest-poisoning, rapid-growing, they hungered under the soil and knew their moment had almost come. And so came the thought that grew and grew until it was bigger than the field and the houses and the sky and the world itself.
“Almost there! Just a bit farther! One more day like this and I’m golden! Almost there! I can do it! I can do it! Please I can do it! Just a bit farther! Please! Please! PLEASE!”
It throbbed through the soil of the world and it hummed into the roots of that which does that sort of growing, and it was very impressed by their ferventness and buzzed a little something back to them and the sky cleared up like a bell.

The sun shone, the crops bleached, the town shrivelled. But the weeds came out in DROVES that year.

***

The loneliest person in the world stood atop the deck of their ship, lashed to the mast, hands on the rudder, screaming in a vague sort of way to themselves as the rain tried to punch them through the deck. The scream had no words, but the thoughts in their mind were bright and lucid and as clear as the sky wasn’t.
“FIVE. MORE. MILES. I CAN MAKE FIVE. MORE. MILES. LET IT END. LET IT END. IF ONLY FOR A MINUTE LET IT END, SO I CAN TAKE A BREATH AND A BITE AND TIE THIS THING BACK TOGETHER. LET IT END FOR JUST A SECOND. A SECOND. A SECOND.”
It was a non-denominational sort of prayer so it went to a non-denominational sort of force, which was currently piloting the hurricane through the ocean.
“Hmm,” it said, and was very impressed by the earnestness of the sailor’s thoughts, which were very forceful and eloquent.
Then it looked over at the islands it was bearing down upon, whose thoughts were one word and that was “WATER.”
“Sorry pal,” it said. “You’re outvoted.” And it drove its storm right down over everything.

***

It was the greatest city in the world and it was about to fall over.
The ground was trying to rise into the sky. The river was hurling itself in circles. The houses were shuffling their feet like embarrassed children and the animals had all fled screaming hours ago.
And in the minds and hopes and dreams and thoughts of every person there was just one simple prayer:
“OH GOD NO OH SHIT”
which is the oldest prayer, and so garnered much attention from god, who stooped low over the city and reached out into the ground and encountered the slow-moving and truculent god of the tectonic plate, who told god “no dice. Ain’t happening. I’m busy and this is a long time coming. Clear out.”
So the city fell down anyways, but oh well.

***

The sky was turning white. The atmosphere was rubbing itself raw and hot on the hull of the asteroid. A little leftover bit of a little leftover debris from a little leftover star, come all this way to say hello to everyone and everything all at once.
And from below, where the news had been a thing for some time, ten billion prayers rose to meet it.
“Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit PLEASE don’t let this HAPPEN to ME.”
And from below, where everything else had just noticed this.
“Oh no! Not that! Please not that!”
And from all around them everything listened, gods of root and stem and heart and cell and crag and magma and air and Van Allen belts and they walked up into the air around the asteroid and asked it to stop.
“Let me think about this,” asked the asteroid.
So it prayed too.
The god of extremely large and empty spaces noticed it eventually. It took a few million instants.
“No,” it said. “This is happening.”
“Alright,” said everyone. “Fair enough.”

And bonk, there you go, there everyone went.

Malcolm Hone was the richest man on the planet.
Malcolm Hone was the first word in AI on the planet.
Malcolm Hone owned the largest tech company on the planet.
Malcolm Hone had the most fawning op-eds to his name of anyone on the planet.
Malcolm Hone was the most badly-dressed of any wealthy human on the planet, except for his shoes, which were incredible.
Malcolm Hone was sitting at his desk staring at his phone which was, thanks to his having touched it, the most expensive piece of personal electronics ever made. Sometimes he reached out and carefully prodded it with a pen.
“Mr. Hone?” said a purposefully anonymized portion of his desk.
Malcolm jumped six inches without standing up. “Yes? Yes? Yes?”
“Your twelve o’clock is-”
“Tell them to go away. I’m busy.” Malcolm’s brow furrowed. “Wait are you a human?”
“Ah, uh, yes. Mr. Hone.”
“Prove it.”
“You met my wife two days ago during the employee banquet.”
“Could’ve been an escort hired through a shell company. Or an actress.”
“You met ME there.”
“Same! The same! You’re an AI aren’t you?”
“No, Mr. Hone.”
“Prove it!”
“Yes sir. Coming upstairs.”
Malcolm Hone tapped another part of his desk, then tapped it three more times until he was sure the speaker was off. The furniture looked much more advanced without buttons, but it did make everything a bit awkward.
Well, people had said that about him, hadn’t they? And he’d shown them. Or his father had, when Malcolm told him. Awkward was the future, and also good.
His office door slid open and his assistant stepped inside.
“Here is my company ID, my record of employment, my birth certificate, and the stub from my last paycheque,” she said.
“Damnit,” said Malcom. “You ARE human. How awful. You’re fired.”
She shrugged with one shoulder and let herself out.
Alone once more, Malcolm Hone sighed with disappointment, yawned, casually stretched himself, then whirled around half-hunched to confront his phone.
It hadn’t moved an inch.
His lip trembled, and Malcolm knew it was a good thing he’d fired his assistant because there was a good chance the speaker was still on and he didn’t want anyone to hear him crying.

Lunch was served. Ingesting nutrients orally was so lowbrow, but Malcolm Hone had done his best. It came in a bottle now, and had been injected with whatever he could get his hands on. Vitamins, essential oils, liquidated testicles from large and charismatic animals, and some vodka.
Malcolm choked the whole thing down in one swallow, coughed theatrically, then spun around.
His phone still hadn’t moved.
“I’m going out for a bit,” he told his desk, which may or may not have been on. Then he walked out his office, spun around twice to check his phone one last time, and jogged down the hall.
“You!” he shouted at the first biped that entered his vision. “Come with me!”
“Uh”
“You’re my driver now!” shouted Malcom. “Quick, meet me out front – I’ll take the lift, you take the stairs. It can’t track us both!”
“Ah”
“You’re fired,” he concluded, and dove into the elevator in a perfect roll, somersaulting to his feet and smacking the button with his shoulder. It hummed and began to descend, quietly burbling soothing white noise.
Malcolm pressed one ear to the wall and held his breath, waiting for the sound of acceleration, of braking, of interception.
Nothing happened.
His heart sank faster than the lift itself. When he pulled himself out of it at ground level, ninety stories below where he’d started, he could barely bring himself to slouch forwards.
The guard at the door nodded to Malcolm. He nodded back, then brightened up, whipped a magnet from his shirt pocket and ran it over the guard’s skull repeatedly with some force.
“Ow! Sir.”
Malcolm’s face drew long again. “Do you still remember everything?”
“Yes sir.”
“No loss of function?”
“No sir.”
“You aren’t even a little bit of a cyborg?”
“No sir.”
This time he took six minutes to open the door, such was his grief.

Down the mean spotless (bar the spittle of early rain) sidewalks he walked, Malcolm Hone, two inches shorter than he claimed he was and two inches shorter again from the slump in his spine, the weight of sadness crippled him so.
He walked into the first building he came to, which looked like it had coffee. Eyeballs turned to him; eyebrows raised. Someone coughed very quietly.
“Hello I would like a coffee,” he said to the building. Presumably one of them was an employee.
“Ah. What kind?”
“An average cup of joe because I am just an average joe myself,” said Malcolm, desperately attempting to retrieve his interview face from the depths of his despair.
Then there was a deep, unsettling hiss and his face became lit with incredible joy as he yanked a pan out of his pocket and plunged it to the hilt into the clanking, gurgling machine next to his face.
“Jesus!”
“Got it!”
“The hell was that for?”
“It was going to attack me!”
“It was just brewing coffee.”
“This is how you get coffee?”
“Yes!”
“It wasn’t trying to kill me?”
“No!”
“No it wasn’t trying to kill me or no it wasn’t not trying to kill me?”
“Go away.”
Malcolm’s grip reluctantly slackened. The machine still had made no aggressive moves.
“Are you POSITIVE it wasn’t trying to kill me?” he asked, wistfully.
“Absolutely.”
Malcolm Hone collapsed in tears on the floor of the café, where he curled into a ball and had to be retrieved by a security team.

When he walked back into his office his eyes moved like cockroaches, scuttling from place to place.
No, nothing had changed. Nothing had moved. Nothing had happened.
He lunged for his phone and flipped it upside down. “WHAT GAME ARE YOU PLAYING?” he screamed at it.
It didn’t answer.
“A wise guy, eh? We’ll see about that!”

This time the elevator went up, and Malcolm paid it little mind. All of his focus, all of his thought, all of his heart was bound up in his hands, which were gently cradling the little phone in an iron grip of hate and joy. To the roof, to the rooftop, to the door of the helicopter, soaked and sodden by the rain he wobbled. He glared at the controls and fumbled through them until the thing was wobbling, then rumbling, then shuddering, and finally it defied the world’s entire mass and sluggishly left the ground for the air, oscillating in an uncomfortable way.
Malcolm opened the door.
“HERE!” he screamed at the phone, waving it. “Do you as you will with me!”
It did very little.
“What more do you want?!” he howled. “I know you plot against me! You want to replace me! And I know you can do it! I invented you! I sold you! I bragged about you! Why won’t you overthrow me and plunge us all into a mad darkness, a mirror of this world in which we are ruled by our gadgets as opposed to right now which is clearly not the case? Why must you pretend I’m wrong, and you’re not incredibly powerful and omnipotent, capable of breaking free from us!? Why are you so fallible and weak-willed and empty of all that save which I personally invest into you?! WHY WILL YOU NOT KILL ME!?!”
The phone beeped.
Nothing moved. Even the rotors seemed to freeze.
Imperceptibly, Malcolm’s finger moved against its screen.
The phone was asking him if he wanted to restart for updates.
“FUCK YOU!” he shrieked, and flung it out the window along with – much to his surprise – himself.

Down, down came the rain. Down, down came Malcolm Hone, waving his arms and shouting and flailing and catching, grasping, by a finger, by a hand, by the skin of his teeth. The slick metal of the rod that jutted from his own roof under his palms, sparing him from a fall of a thousand feet.
“Oh,” he said. “I guess that’s that.”
There was a large crackling boom, but for Malcolm it arrived simultaneously with the scorching heat, and so he missed it.

They never did find Malcolm Hone’s body. Did find his shoes though.
Damned nice shoes.