jamieproctor.ca

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.

“It won’t start.”
“It will start.”
“It won’t start.”
“It will start.”
“It will NOT start and you know it.”
BONG
“Hah! See?”
“A fluke. It will stop now.”
BING
“Told you it’d start.”
DOOOONG
“Pay up.”
The old old woman made a face like a snake that had swallowed a stuffed rat and dug into her purse. “Fudge,” she muttered, and out came a single penny consisting entirely of tarnish.
The old man took it in hands made entirely of gnarls and pocketed it with a snort. “That’s forty years running now,” he said, casting his gaze up the edifice of the church tower with a critical eye. “Forty years. That’s a long time to be wrong.”
“Do be quiet.”
“Forty years of complete failure.”
“Shush!”
“Forty years, at a penny a day, adds up to-”
“Oh fuck off.”
The old old woman glared up at the church as if it had pissed on her shoes, and perhaps in a deeper way it already had. For forty years.
“Midday tomorrow?”
“Oh yes. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

“Bell ringer?”
“Yes indeed.”
The secretary looked at the sheet of paper. “Ah. And you’re applying for…”
“Right now. Immediately. Today.”
“Ah. Okay, there’s a few problems here.”
“I can’t possibly imagine what you’re talking about, young man.”
“Well… we don’t need a bell ringer right now.”
“Yes you do, you just don’t know it.”
“And this resume doesn’t list any relevant experience.”
“Preposterous.”
“And it isn’t a resume. It’s a grocery list. From 1953.”
“Flip it over.”
“And we’ve had the bells automated for the last twenty years. There’s no ringer, just a little computer that does the job for us at noon.”
“Oh, stealing my job, eh? Heartless scum, that’s what you are. Heartless, liverless, bloodless scum, sitting there in your chain with your wicked skeleton soul and laughing at a poor old woman starving to death in the streets.”
“My sincere apologies, we’ll notify you when a position becomes available, so on and so forth, have a nice day, bye, going on lunch break now.”

The old old woman sat in her chair, simmering quietly but furiously.
Then she got up and hunted around the desk until she had two or three key-shaped things and went on the prowl.
“I’m just going to the lady’s room,” she muttered to herself. “Can’t stop someone from that, can we? Just got a little turned around, yes, yes indeed, didn’t I. Bah.”
She did bump into one or two people but most of them went away very quickly before she even had the chance to give an excuse. The problem was more finding the right place.
After two hours she got fed up and asked someone where the right place was.
“Oh, just up there.”
It turned out the right place was a little panel on the wall, looking more like a thermostat than anything else. A tiny green screen with squidgy little print on it so fuzzy that nobody could ever read. Why did they make text that small? Ought to be a law.
“This should do it,” said the old old woman. And she hit every button at once.

The resulting sound was indescribable, so instead most people settled for repeating the damages in increasingly incredulous voices. The church itself was mostly a write-off, but the real oomph came from the sonic wave collapsing half the restaurant across the street in the middle of the early lunch rush. The lawsuits were both vigorous and prolific.
By eleven o’clock the next day the toll was still rising. No fatalities, but plenty of juicy injuries and bereavements. Exempted from these were the two chairs used by the old man and the old old woman, which had tipped over backwards but remained otherwise unharmed.
The old man was waiting in his. He smiled in his unpleasant wrinkly manner to see Agnes shuffle up, arm in a sling.
“Broken?” he asked cheerfully.
“Sprained,” she told him. “And it stings something dreadful.”
“I bet! Speaking of, still on for today?”
The old old woman looked upon the church, or where the church had been, or what might have been the most expensive pile of broken rocks she’d ever personally witnessed, and she put all of her venom and hatred into her next words.
“Why, certainly, yes indeed.”
“Wonderful.”
And with those words, noon arrived.
Far away, far away, tiny bells rang. Bing bong bang. Bing dong ding. Dong dong dong dong a ding.
Wait, some of those tiny bells were closer than others, and the old man was pointing now, leering in triumph, his shrivelled finger aimed straight at the little speaker sitting in front of the ruptured remnants of the church’s belfry.
“Brought it in this morning,” he said with relish. “Bad luck to not hear the bells. Wouldn’t that have just been the worst luck? Hah! Ahah! Ahahahah!” He slapped his knee with unnecessary violence and cackled over the sound of crackling cartilage.
The old old woman wished him dead with all the will in the world and he knew this and it made him even jollier.
“Ahhahahaha! What’s with the sour expression, Agnes? Got bats in your belfry? AHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHerk”
“I’m sure I have nothing of the sort, you old toad.”
“eh”
“Oh, are you having one of your little moments again?”
“h”
“Well, waste not want not.”
The old old woman gently leaned across the old man’s twitching body – still spasmodically clutching at his arm – and plucked at his wallet. Humming an old and acerbic folk song, she muttered math to herself in place of lyrics.
“Let’s….hmm. Ten years since last…times three-hundred sixty-five… plus one leap year…or was it two? Hmph.”
She replaced the wallet and sat back in her chair, staring at the church’s rubble with grim determination.
“There’s always tomorrow, of course. Always.”

Transcripts of the International Society of Vertebrate Biology, 2019, Day two, 1:35 PM.
Whalesong, Translated and Itemized, With Extreme Regret. Dr. Hedley-Schmidt.

Hello.
Welcome to this presentation. My name is Louise Patterson, and I’m Dr. Hedley-Schmidt’s head research assistant. What follows are the first fully-accurate transcriptions of nonhuman language. We are not proud of this.
And here’re the clips.

***

Damn I’m Huge (Balaenoptera musculus)
Damn I’m huge!
Look at me! Look at me!
Damn I’m huge! PAY ATTENTION!
Damnit I’m vast! I’m enormous! I’m HUMONGOUS!
Look on my girth ye mortals and despair!

*

I’m Very Sorry There’s Propellers in My Ears (Balaenoptera physalus)
Sorry, sorry, sorry, could you speak up a bit? Just a bit?
I’m trying to pay attention, I promise.
Just a little louder, if you could, if you please.
I need you to raise your voice because there’s propellers in my ears
I’m not trying to complain, just letting you know about the facts
Not to raise a fuss I mean, but it’s really difficult to hear
Can’t even hear myself talk sometimes. Oh no, am I talking now?
I’m really very sorry that there’s propellers in my ears

*

Baby My Dick Misses You (Megaptera novaeangliae)
Oh where are you, where are you, where have you been and gone?
Baby, oh my baby, you know my dick misses you
I harbour only the deepest feelings of romance and love
And you must know that of course
By ‘I’ I mean ‘my genitalia’
Oh baby, my baby

*

Why Is There A Sharp Piece of Metal in My Back? (Balaena mysticetus)
Why is there a sharp piece of metal in my back?
Goddamnit shit ow ow ow that fucking smarts
Was it Iceland? Japan? Why do you people keep doing this shit?
I thought you guys quit, did someone need one more corset?
It can’t be for oil, surely
Jesus, that’s going to leave a mark

*

I’m Deeply Terrified of Dying Alone (Eubalaena spp.)
Oh no oh no oh god no I’m so very lonely aaaaauuuuuugh
Why can’t I rewind time and be very small again, I liked that, some of it, a bit of it, at least
Shit shit shit where did I fuck up aaaargh I’m so stupid my life is awful and it’s all my fault
Oh no no no no no no no no no
Piss

*

Baby Will You Not Consider My Pleas (Megaptera novaeangliae)
Honey won’t you be sympathetic? You’ve left me – and also my penis – hanging
We both yearn for you with the finest and deepest of passions
Was it something I said or failed to say or both? I promise we can make it up to you, together
It might have been all those barnacles on my back, and I apologize but I will not part with them
We are buddies; them, me, and my schlong
All of us entreat you: forgive us, love us, never let us go

*

Stuck In A Net (Eschrichtius robustus)
Ow this thing is jammed on my head
Can’t get it off, ow shit ow
Someone give me a hand here? Sort of having difficulties, and I need to breathe soon
Hello? Anyone?
Assholes

*

I Sure Am Happy! (Orcinus orca)
Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Gonna bite ya gonna bite ya WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
GOT ‘IM!

*

Ice (Delphinapterus leucas)
Ice ice ice ice ice ice ice ice ice ice ice ice
Breathing hole
Ice ice ice ice ice ice ice ice ice ice ice ice
Breathing hole
Ice ice ice ice ice ice ice ice ice ice ice ice
Hey where’d all the ice go?
Back in my day we wouldn’t stand for this crap

*

Baby My Crippling Insecurity Needs Reassurance (Megaptera novaeangliae)
Please please please pay attention to me honey, please pay attention to me
Is it me? I hope it isn’t me
Is it my genitals? Oh god oh god oh god I pray it isn’t my genitals
Baby I can change and I promise that if size is a concern I swear I am above average
What are you holding out for a Right whale or something don’t be so choosy
Oh god baby I didn’t mean it I didn’t mean any of it please validate my existence
Please, please put up with my incessant garbage

***

Thank you all for your time. Dr. Hedley-Schmidt extends her sincere apologies and conveys regret that she ever embarked on this study. If you wish to burn your copy of it there is a small metal trash bin in the parking lot. No questions will be accepted as Dr. Hedley-Schmidt has left early to resume drinking.

Alright, meeting’s on, phones off, quiet down, cut the chatter people, yadda yadda. We ready?

Okay!

Things are going pretty good! We’re at the halfway point of the project, we’re doing fine, doing fine. The world’s first virtual hell is well on its way, and you guys have shown you can definitely take us the rest of the mile.
However, there are a few issues I’d like to bring to your attention. Nothing horrible, just, you know. Issues.

1: Evergreen content design
Telling no lies, I appreciate that we’re working under a somewhat strict set of design protocols without a lot of room to expand – our user experience begins and ends with ‘you are in a bad place and are being tortured.’ Still, I think there’s room for expansion. Procedurally generated limited-time murder pits; extremely painful slaughterhouses that award ten-minute pauses in agony upon completion, etc, etc. Just because we’re programming brimstone doesn’t mean we don’t need to try and keep it fresh, and I want you all to put a little more effort into planning with this in mind.

2: Poor flame optimization
I know that perfection is a goal. It’s a good goal, a damned fine goal, and it’s one we’re all working towards in, uh, ideally. But that urge to tinker has to be directed appropriately, and I’m a little concerned with the amount of leeway that’s been given to the graphics department in their creation of basic assets. Specifically, we now have possibly the most realistic fire effects ever imagined by a human being without using a lighter, and although that’s really impressive I’m concerned with the impact that this has on performance. This hell is meant to be for everyone consigned to it for civic rehabilitation, personal psychological reform, poor job performance, and so on. We can’t presume all its inhabitants will have access to top-of-the-line supercomputers – and I can’t help but notice that even those have a lot of trouble in the burnier places, like Gehenna-B or the deep end of Hades.
In short: we admire your passion for your craft, but we’d like it if you could also show some passion for the rest of your job. Or you won’t have it. Please.

3: Significant overbudgeting in the writing department
Okay, I’m going to drop one of my rules and get specific with names here. Craig, what the flipping burning hell are you doing? We put you in charge of the writing team, and you gave them some rough outlines and shut yourself in your office for six months. When we came back to check on you, you’ve got this damned war-and-peace novel of dialogue for one character, whose entire function we described to you as ‘basic information guide.’
Yeah, yeah, Dante’s Inferno, we get it. But (1) I recall that the writing team agreed this was a pop-accessible virtual hell, not a direct lift – Dantesque, not Dante-proper – (2) you haven’t written anything else on your list at all and you’re STILL NOT DONE and (3) I can’t help but notice this ‘tour guide’ is written almost exactly like the last six characters you were assigned, mostly in that he spends most of his time making long speeches about calling women whores.
Please. Something else. And smaller. Else and smaller.

4: Sloppy machine learning implementation in torturers
If there’s one piece of our virtual hell platform that makes me proudest, it’s the individuated torturer experience. Imagine – not an immense, impersonal hatred, but a specifically personalized and tailored experience for the user, compiled from their own search history and identification, guaranteed and finely-tuned to make them lose all hope for all time.
That’s our greatest goal, our greatest pride, and the feature that’s listed in the largest print on the investor’s handbook. So I hope you can understand why I’m speaking to you with just a hint of disappointment.
First of all, machine learning is of course the future, the way, the holy grail, a beautiful form of AI, the pathway to the singularity, etc, etc. But I’m concerned with our current usage of it. The first time that the software covered the torture pits in dog photos? Hilarious. Good meme fuel for the postproduction media teasers. The second time, after you’d fixed it? Annoying. Third time? Troubling. We’re up to six canid inversions now and I’m a little goddamned vexed. Secondly, that’s not even mentioning the clown problem, which I am now mentioning. I know clowns are frequently associated with horror, but that’s often a statement made, you know, IRONICALLY. Few people are just scared of a guy in clown paint, and the way the software keeps mass producing clown paraphernalia and stamping it on everything degrades the torture experience we’re looking for. It makes us seem cheap and shticky, rather than futuristic and flexible.

5: Physics engine
You guys have got some of it working. We want all of it working all the time forever. This is going to be hell, remember? Immersion is key. We don’t want someone uploading smuggled videos of demons clipping through walls; torturers stoning people and getting murdered with comical rebound shots; or corpses falling over and spontaneously shooting into orbit. One little moment of snickering stupidity and the whole pathos of the user experience is gone.

6: Tighten up Satan design elements
Look, I know you guys are artsy. I think I heard one of you describe something using ‘Goya’ and that’s pretty fancy. But again, this is a virtual hell for the people, and the people get what they want, and they don’t want some sorta weird distorted abstract…thingy as their face of ultimate evil. They want a large red guy, preferably with hooves but without too much other goat stuff. I know you may be disappointed by this, I know you may think of it as beneath you, I know you may want to rail and bitch about the incredible tastelessness and illiteracy of the masses who only want the same thing over and over – mostly lacking in goat stuff – but here’s the thing: they want it, they got it. Think of it not as creative constraints, but creative guidelines. Limitations foster innovations, right?
So yeah. Satan. Not too much goat stuff, okay?

7: Leaks
I know you’re all very proud to be on the team making the world’s first virtual hell, but please, please, please those NDAs you signed are there for a REASON. I don’t care how oblique or coy or playful you think those tweets and posts are; I don’t care how secretive your spouse is; hell, I’d rather you didn’t even tell it to your cats. Because – and I really, really shouldn’t have to say this again – nobody cares about the schmucks who make the world’s SECOND virtual hell. And if you get too loose lipped sinking-shipped on us, that won’t be Topchunk. It’ll be us. And it’ll be your fault.
But no pressure!

Okay, that’s about everything on the list. Good talk everyone, good going, and have a good working weekend. Remember: pull this off, and every single person being tortured for a simulated eternity for the foreseeable future will have you to thank for it.
Go get ‘em!

A star, a sun, a planet, a place, a sandbox with three little nuisances in it. How big a problem they’ll be is up to them.
“I will be president someday,” says the oldest, who has made a sandcastle.
“I’m gonna go to space,” says the middle child, who has tried to make an alien and succeeded in making a gingerbread man.
“I want to grow flowers,” says the youngest, who has left the sandbox and is playing with a dandelion.
“Dope,” says the oldest.
“Chump,” agrees the middle child. They throw a little sand at the youngest and uproot her flower for kicks and then go back to their work.
Carefully, slowly, gently, she replants it. Then she pats it once on the head.
“You are dandelions,” she told them. “You’re weeds, but the kind I love.”

School was out. The grass was green. The children were explaining where their grades had been.
“Who cares what my grades are?” the eldest child told their mother. “You donated their gym. Fuck ‘em, they’ll graduate me with a recommendation and like it. Besides, what world leader has ever been grilled on their high school records? Nothing worth knowing ever came from other people anyways.”
“Look,” said the middle child, “what kind of astronaut needs biology anyways? It’s not real science. And chemistry is hard. Physics is awesome but I think there’s too much math – I’m really more of an insight guy. Flashes of pure brilliance. Like, for example, I had this idea… what if instead of becoming an astronaut I just buy NASA and tell them to make me a spaceship?”
The youngest child took her admonishment (and grudging praise for her biology marks) in silence, then wandered outside to her corner of the vast lawn.
“You are buttercups,” she told them. “You are my favourites.”

April dawned. With it came ritual.
“April fools’!” shouted the eldest child. “I moved out yesterday when you weren’t looking! Also I’m dropping out of college so I can spend more time schmoozing with my classmates. Don’t worry, they’ll still give me a passing grade. And while I’m at it, I haven’t paid last month’s rent. See ya!”
“April fools’!” began the email from the middle child. “I actually failed all my classes two years ago! All my tuition money has been going into developing a really small and pretty piece of personal electronic paraphernalia, or at least buying someone else’s version of it. See ya!”
The youngest child, who had been kicked out of the house three years earlier to teach her self-reliance, was watering the little planter she kept in a corner of her apartment.
“You are tulips,” she told them. “You are wonderful.”

On the last day of June, three things happened.
First of all, the eldest child launched her campaign, ‘vote for me and I will hurt people.’
“I will hurt lots of people,” she announced. “I will hurt them very badly. I will not stop even if they ask me. This is my promise to you, and I also promise that if you vote for me I probably won’t hurt you as much. Yeah!”
Second of all, the middle child’s IPO was FUBAR’d by the IRS but TLDR the free publicity made it A-OK and the SEC ended up doing F-all.
“We don’t actually make things,” he told the interviewer, seated atop a heap of stock options. “We make ideas. We make one idea: science is probably cool, but research is boring and dumb and graphs are hard so we’re going to sell you a little plastic computer constructed by slave labour. That’s it. That’s the future.”
And finally, the youngest child worked day and night and got the local park’s central bed up and blooming ten times larger than it ever had before.
“You are lilies,” she told them. “You smell beautiful.”

On the fifth of May, the eldest child was inaugurated.
“Wow,” she said, staring out across the crowds. “All you fuckers really voted for me, huh? Holy shit!”
On the twenty-ninth of May, the middle child launched his golden parachute and became the richest man in the whole world.
“Never stop believing in yourself,” he said. “That’s the secret. And I guess the future or other people or something.”
And on the thirtieth day of May, the youngest child, with love and tenderness and the care of a mother crocodile breaking her children free from their shells, watered a single flower of heartbreaking beauty.
The flower stood up. It was about fourteen hundred feet tall.
“You are Tropaeolumtitanis titanis, and you will destroy absolutely everything,” she told it.

It did.

People objected, but there wasn’t much they could do about it. And if some mourned for the future of humanity, of the greater good, of so on and so forth, they did so in a kind of abstract way that very specifically avoided any names.

Sleep! It does a body wonders!
Sleep! It’s what your soul requests!
Sleep! It’s owned by purple elephants working in their gardens and I’m right in the middle of helping one plant some bacon
when BANG my alarm goes off right in my ear, in my head, and I’m awake and overdrawn on my account.
Goddamnit. I shouldn’t have hit the extend button. It usually gets weird fast, especially when the commercials start replaying inside my head. The last thing I need when I’m asleep is to dream about Sleep. That’s just recursive.

The day goes by, and it goes by slow. It always does after I overdose. I spent the morning weirdly chipper and hyperactive.
“Hi Julie!”
“hiiiii….”
Halfway through I started getting crabby and twitchy.
“Julie can you take your GODDAMNED MUG OFF MY DESK?”
“….’kay.”
By the evening I’m almost back down to something more slumped and normal, but deeply resentful about it.
“Gbye…”
“…Yep. Fuggoff.”
That’s usually when I go out and buy more. After a full night on Sleep, I’ll do anything to get back to it. Anything.
Except that was the day my wallet ran dry.

I’d known this day would come. One too many nights on one too many Sleep doses. One time too many slamming the extended rest button and going through three extra hours of restless hallucinations that felt like ten minutes.
I’d known it would come. But I’d never stopped moving towards it either.
And, as I grabbed the biggest knife in the kitchen, I realized that I’d also more or less been planning for this. Somehow.

The drug store was manned by a wall-eyed sloth of a creature, half-lidded and sluggish.
“Yeaah?”
“Gimme Ssleep!” I blurted out, brandishing my weaponry in their face. “Gimmeme noww!”
“Jeez,” said the Sleeper, blinking with the speed of a striking glacier. “’Kay. Don’t uh. Don’t….make such a big deal. Sure. Whaddyawannagain?”
I focused.
“Sleep!”
“Diet..?”
“No!”
“Liime?”
“Nuh-uh!”
“…Zero?”
“Fugoff! Sleep! Plain! Now!”
“Sure. Righ’. Righ’ here.”
He opened the drawer, counted out three capsules six times each, gave up, and handed some amount of them to me, who put them in my face.
“Donegonowhere,” I said, waving my arms around with intense intimidation. “I’mmmagetcha.”
“Surrreee,” said the Sleeper.
And bonk, I was out.

I don’t remember precisely how much Sleep I got out of that, but it was enough for me to have no dreams at all. I woke up CRACKLING inside, like a bottle of lightning, and realized three things immediately.
First, I was holding a large spoon, not a knife.
Second, that the Sleeper must have forgotten what I’d done and failed to call the police.
Third, that I would probably rather die than go through another day not feeling like this.
I sat up, rubbed my back, went through three completely unlocked and unguarded doors marked “EMPLOYEES ONLY” and “HIGH SECURITY” and filled up one of my socks with Sleep capsules.
“Where’s the truck come in?” I asked the security guard watching me.
“Uhmmmmm,” he said. It was all he’d said since I’d gently shouldered past him.
“Just point,” I said.
“Uhmmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” he deferred.
But he did point. Sort of. And when the truck came in, so did I, and when the truck rolled out, so did I.
Inside it, staring at the ceiling, I batted aside the driver’s slow-moving inquiries. And I thought. I thought about Sleep.
I thought about enough Sleep to fill the oceans and drown the forests.
I thought about enough Sleep to empty my head and drive away the stuffing inside.
I thought about enough Sleep to have some EVERY. DAMNED. DAY.
Maybe every night, too!
And I got so excited that I took some more Sleep and conked out.

The trip was forty miles and took a mere three days. Would’ve been even shorter if I hadn’t gotten impatient and taken over the wheel, breaking every speed record I’d ever heard of and crossing the last twenty miles in a blistering half-hour.
The Sleep plant was long, dark and cold. It was defined mostly by where it wasn’t. This wouldn’t have disturbed me if I wasn’t so tanked up on Sleep that I could tell what was normal and what wasn’t.
The security was tight here. It took me over three minutes to persuade the front desk I was the CEO, and even then they kept getting suspicious and asking me again every time I got them to open a door for me. They’d been well-trained. Sometimes their eyes even focused.
Still, they got me into the boardroom, no questions asked. I had the keys to the kingdom, and there was only one problem: the boardroom was full of people.
Sixteen chairs. Each occupied by an executive as aged as he was devious, as devious as he was cunning, as cunning as he was clever, and as clever as he was poor.
None of them were very poor.
And none of them were very awake. Sleepyheads, the lot of them. Blissfully napping even at work, in their chairs, in their suits. My god, the decadence of it nearly made me gag.
And then the security chief, who’d been unsettlingly attentive since I opened the door, pointed at the head of the table and said “heeeeeey……..THA’S the. C. The see ee. The oh”
I gently pushed him aside and ran like the dickens.
Lost ‘em all at the first intersection, but god, I kept running just for the novelty of it. I could coordinate BOTH limbs at once while pumping my arms! Pure sorcery!
I understood them, those blackhearted bastards in the boardroom. I understood why they would wallow in their own product like this. I’d do it too.

A bland, watery alarm honked out across the facility grounds some time later. Smelled like dead seals and dim caution.
It woke me up. I hadn’t really needed the nap, but the boardroom had eaten at me, and running wore a body out. Besides, nobody had opened the maintenance closet I found in at least a year.
I took a mop and bucket with me, and every time I saw someone point at me I turned to them and said “janitor” in a very authoritative voice until they went away.
This worked until I got to the production floor, at which point I was stopped by the security chief again.
“You’re no’ janit. or.”
“You caught me. I’m the infiltrator.”
“Ahhh!”
“April fools.”
“Huhhh?”
“I’m actually the CEO. You’re fired.”
“Ahhhh!”
“April fools. Let me in.”
While he was figuring that one out I took his keys and locked him out. He was worryingly competent, and what I was about to do here could do without that sort of thing.

The production floor was six football fields long, five baseball fields wide, taller than six basketball courts stacked up on top of each other, and had a little computer terminal the size of a tennis racket sitting in the middle of it and absolutely nothing else.
Was this really what I wanted to do? Surely I could just leave the room, get rid of the executives (push ‘em out a window or something? Sleeping was a dangerous business), and take the place over. Nap sixteen times a day. Seventeen. Rule the world with a furiously clear head. Take their money, give them paltry handfuls of Sleep. Let everyone else shuffle around half dead and bleary.
My god, imagine the size of the bed I could make on that boardroom table.
I opened the computer, tried ‘password,’ tried ‘123’, tried ‘abc’, tried ‘12345’, then picked it up and put it in the bucket and bashed it with the mop handle until everything was crunchy.
At some part an alarm went off and started making drawn-out ‘yorpp’ noises, but nothing seemed to happen.

I walked outside past snoring people, curled in every corner, drooling at every desk. The highways were parking lots; the offices were nurseries, and by the time I’d gotten back home I was exhausted as hell.
Seven AM. A weird time to end my day. Would there be a normal one again?
Oh well. I’d sleep on it.

The book factory stood on a low hill, though it seemed like it’d rather squat. Or maybe sink. It was one of those buildings that looks like someone’s basement no matter how many stories it has.
It ran all day and it ran all night. It ran for six days of the seven, with a break for exhaustion and to prevent illiteracy outbreaks. Overexposure to mass-market literature can do that if you don’t get some fresh air, and many was the management team member who bitterly resented the damned regulations of ’72 that held them liable if a shift worker came home with ink for eyeballs or a pen stuck in their nose.
It was a big factory. Third-biggest in the state. It produced cheap, reliable hopes and dreams and far more importantly it provided Jobs, that nebulous, capitalized sort of thing that mattered to people’s guts if not their long-term health prospects.
There were sixty people manning the stamping lines, branding and tagging the covers.
A hundred people on the inking crews, mashing the nouns and verbs and adjectives into proper forms.
Two hundred hose-runners, who filled the paper husks with words and sealed them off.
Forty-six fermentation attendants, who adjusted the light and air in the aging room to ensure proper genre fermentation.
One hundred and twenty-eight workers tending the great steel bookshelves where the final products were herded and broken before shipping.
And four and a half C-level executives who got paid.
On the fifth day of the six-day week, a stranger came to the book factory.

“I am here to right wrongs and perform great deeds.”
“Pass.”
“What do you mean?”
“You got a pass?”
“No.”
“Then stay out.”

On the fifth day of the six-day week plus a good few hours, a stranger came again to the book factory with the mutual aid of a small unbarred window and a rock.

“Psst!”
The shift worker looked up. Above them, clinging to the rafters, was a sort of murky thing wrapped in what seemed like a lot of blankets.
“Ah?” she said. This seemed noncommittal enough to be safe.
“Take me to your leader at once!” whispered the lurking thing. “There is little time!”
“Sure.”

The shift worker’s leader was as far beyond her grasp as the galaxy’s core; her leader under him as untouchable as the sun; beneath that, the moon, and so on.
So in the end the shift worker took the mysterious stranger to the foreman of station 10, subteam B, who was her immediate superior. He was long and grey and dead in the eyes and thus his only distinguishing characteristic was his name, Neewmaan, which he had acquired when a vowel line exploded in his face at the age of twenty-two.
He was standing at station 10, subteam B, close enough to another shift worker that he could surreptitiously grab at her ass when she wasn’t looking. This happened a lot, because her attention and both hands needed to be on the line.
“There is little time,” whispered the stranger (who was no longer lurking, just standing around wrapped in his extremely conspicuous and enormous cloak).
“Right,” said Neewmaan. “’Bout two hours left in the shift. Lull’s almost over and we gotta clean a belt before-”
“Not THAT!” said the stranger, whose voice was deep as a spring brook, soft as a bolt of silk, clear as the blue sky. “There are things to be done!” We must free my people and yours from tyranny!”
“Uh? Yeah. Right. Gotta tell ‘em.”
“Yes!” exulted the stranger, who was taller than any mortal man, and spry of limb. “We must rally them from the brink of defeat!”
The stranger’s vision was as keen as a hawk; his ears as sensitive as a mole’s; his mind as piercing and insightful as a big sharp sword through somebody’s liver, but he’d never run a warren like the lower workings of the book factory before. It took many steps and many hands poking and prodding him.
“What’s that?”
“Punctuation tank. They gotta heat it to separate the periods from the commas and semi-colons. Grades by density.”
“What’s THAT?”
“Hard boilers. Need ‘em to temper the private eyes before they get installed.”
“What IS that?”
“King-pins. They install dynastic politics in genre fiction, Iunno.”
“What in the name of the Great Shining Ones happened to that man?”
“That’s Ten-Ten Finger-Finger Eddy-Eddy. He got overwritten on the press line.”
“What’s that awful shrieking sound?”
“The presses. They got to run them hot or the ink gums and the characters get blurry and fat. Bakes ‘em right into the pages before they can slide off.”
And then they reached the great main hall, and the stranger’s questions were all removed because there was no doubt what lay in front of him.

The production line was difficult to conceive of. It was a space that seemed too large to fit inside a building…that was also overstuffed. Smooth steel surfaces covered in microscopic byproduct froth. A million moving arms and legs. And a churning, endless flow of names and places and things and people being ground down, grounded down, onto pages and paper and product.

“HOLD!” called the stranger. Such was the power of his voice that it carried over the great grey grinding machines and the endless drone and every eye – if not every head – turned towards him just a little, to see what was going on.
“Despair no more!” called the stranger, and his hood fell from his shoulders to reveal a beauty almost blinding. “I am Asee’iiime’imbleck’toro’pisc’i’b’t’’q’d’h’j’dzip, last of the line of Twoggles, heir to the Golden Seat, and” then the long grey men of station 10, subteam B picked him up and threw him over the mandated four-foot safety railing, which so surprised Asee’iiime’imbleck’toro’pisc’i’b’t’’q’d’h’j’dzi that he forgot to shout or fight or do anything much on the way down. He made no noise at all, even as the pressers grabbed a limb apiece and he vanished in a titanic fountain of ink and crushing sounds.
“I’ll go report it,” said foreman Neewmaan, who didn’t want to. “Goddamnit, what was that?”
“Four,” said a shift worker.
“Three?” asked another.
“Four,” said a third. “Over-par for the month.”

As a matter of fact it was station 10, subteam B’s FIFTH Reverse-Narnia for the month, four months running. Foreman Neewmaan became shift worker Neewmaan, the presses kept churning, and life went on.
In particular it went on for one shift worker, who’d been leaving a quiet word to her cousin over in the shelving squads every week or so. She had a lot more time to focus on the line now.

Hobbard’s Homecoming
An excellent housewarming gift, also ideal for short reunions after long absences. Warms the cockles of your heart with its charcoal mouthiness, but remains as a soft, heatless glow inside for many hours.
Prepare: on a slow boil, allowing time for the flavour to dissipate. Understeeping this tea is intolerable. Pour gently, as rushing it will cause it to turn sour.
Serve with: something unhealthy, yet lightly so, and comforting, yet deeply so.
Price: quite reasonable.

Old Shop Mix
For business that is also a pleasure all its own. Plain, but straightforward. Calm, yet full of anticipation. Broadens the palate and focuses the mind.
Prepare: very easily – simple, repetitive sifting motions, can be done with one hand and half a mind. Good hot, good cold, perfectly adequate lukewarm. Thrives with neglect.
Serve with: light conversation and heavy work. Especially good with math.
Price: negotiable.

Eld McCaffton’s Exciting Tour
An experience. Or rather, an experiences. Singular, but contains multitudes.
Prepare: using no more than a gram and no less than a dust speck. The body’s antibodies must respond, but not grow over-alarmed.
Serve with: a certain disregard for one’s senses and a substantial amount of free time.
Price: extremely dependent upon local street conditions.

Plain Water
For hydration.
Prepare: by putting it in your mouth, carefully swallowing. Ensure it goes down the right pipe. Maybe splash your face a little too.
Serve with: care.
Price: it’s on the house.

Itchy feet.
Gets you up and stretching and poking things. A must for hikers, runners, tourists, and anyone who wants a little challenge while meditating.
Prepare: stirring constantly and never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever stopping.
Serve with: the spoon still in the mug, rotating furiously.
Price: four no three no five no two just take the damned thing.

Reminiscence
For remembering the old days. The old, old days. Do you ever think of them? Dream of them. I do.
Prepare: with great patience. Do not disturb it while it is steeping. Brood over it a little before sipping.
Serve with: hesitation. Is this the road that must be travelled? Could you not move forward? But no. But no.
Price: perhaps too high. But perhaps worth paying all the same.

Revenge
Die! Die in the name of my parents, swine! Filth, pig, dog-shit, rot-that-walks!
Prepare: under icy atmosphere, slowly warm the kettle as it least suspects it until you have its trust, then put DEADLY POISON inside it and permit it to bubble with the patient, glacial mind of a REPTILE. SMILE unceasingly. Pour colder than HELL ITSELF.
Serve with: my heavy boot CRASHING INTO YOUR RIBS AS YOU VOMIT ON MY FLOOR, DOG!
Price:less.