jamieproctor.ca

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.

“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.”