jamieproctor.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Dream clean thoughts. 

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

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

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

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

But nobody listened.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Once upon a time there was a single, lonely old wolf.  He’d been born without sisters or brothers and he had resigned to the fact that he would now die without them, and though this acceptance didn’t make him happy it did give him a sort of terrible sobriety with which he lived his days in restraint and emptiness, if not tranquility. 

Then one day, as the wolf lay in the woods alone, he heard a curious noise.  A grunting, grubbing, rooting, chuffing sort of noise.  He wondered if it might be a deer turned ill or injured, but then the smell came and oh no, how it made him SNEEZE.  Sharp and sordid and nasty. 

So he followed his nose out of the woods and into the meadows and there he found a vigorously trampled swathe of land, where the plants had been grubbed through and shredded and the ground-nesting birds and snakes and small animals had been devoured indiscriminately. 

And in the center of it was a massive, grunting, hairy monster with hot breath and a curly tail.

“Little thing, little thing, who are you?” asked the wolf of it.

“Feral hog,” snorted the feral hog.  “Go away.  I’m making a home here.  Go away.”
The wolf was a little bit hungry and a little lot-more annoyed at the rudeness of this feral hog, so instead he charged the pig, which stood its ground until the last minute and then fled, squealing and huffing and puffing until its legs ran sore tired and the wolf – though old and shaky – was still fresh enough, and brought it down and killed it and ate until he felt nearly sick. 

“How peculiar,” said the wolf.  “Maybe if there’d been more of us, this would be a good meal.  But it’s a bit much for me.”
Then he went to his favourite stream on the far side of the meadow, but the hog had been there too.  The mud had been churned into the water and the crayfish devoured and the frogs trampled or eaten or fled. 

The wolf drank some muddy water, which churned most oddly with the hog meat in his gut.  Then he slunk away back to the woods, slowly and surely, if not steadily. 

***

When the wolf passed through the young growth into the deeper forest where his den was dug he smelt it again: that serrated, silver-edged, smell.  Surreptitious in its pungent rot, yet unmaskable. 

“I’m full already,” he told himself, “so there is no need to investigate.” 

But the closer he came to home the stronger it grew, and at last he came to his den under the roots of an elderly oak and found it occupied.  A second giant hairy grunting monster had torn up his home’s front door and its ceiling and was eagerly tearing loose the wood from the soil and gulping it down. 

“Feral hog, feral hog, what are you doing?” asked the wolf

“Rooting and grubbing,” grunted the feral hog.  “Go away.  This is my home now, and I use it as I please.  Go away.”
The wolf wasn’t hungry at all, but he had lived in that shallow scrape of a den alone since his aunt died, and to have both it and himself disrespected in that way was too much for him.  So he leapt at the pig, full-bellied and groggy as he was, and though it squealed and turned and fought and huffed and puffed it was in a small space of its own making and died there, cradled in the torn roots of the oak tree it had killed.  Its thick blood clotted the earth with stinking sourness.

“If I had a family,” said the wolf, “this would be a fine meal for all of us, and we would dig a new home in no time.  But it’s too much for me.”

He burrowed a bit around the corpse to see if it could be shifted, but the hog proved even more obstinate as dead weight than living swine.  He wore himself out and came out covered in pig blood, sneezing hopelessly at the rankness and necessitating a second trip to the muddied stream. 

The wolf came back home once more in the twilight to see what could be done, and the answer was nothing.  He searched the woods for other places to dig, to scrape, to shelter and sleep by if only for an evening, and found that the hog had been busy before it had visited him.  The new growth had been devoured or trampled; the old growth had been uprooted and torn. 

He sniffed at the trees, and they said nothing in return.  Several were dead and didn’t know it, in the peculiar manner of root-crippled trees or familyless wolves. 

Then he walked away from the woods, head-hung and hard-done-by, if not hungry.

***

The woods vanished and then there weren’t any more. 

It was very confusing for the wolf.  The harsh asphalt paths were frequent, yes, but there were still trees between them and fields around those trees and shrubs around those fields, but none of them were woods and most of them weren’t meadows and the shrubs appeared to be being kept in line by constant-yet-curiously-restrained grazing rather than being strangled to death of sunlight by trees like the woods intended. 

Also, there were small wolves with odd fur and silly voices.  They had no manners.  Some of them stared, some barked, some whimpered, one that surprised him while he was sleeping under a hedge simply urinated all over itself and then laid down, ears-flat, until he turned his back to it.  They were like big puppies. 

Annoying as they were, they were still more pleasant company than the rest of the things around.  Metal boxes that farted their way down the asphalt with burnt juice squeezing out of their asses; giant piles of dead wood gnawed and grasped and heaved into position until even a beaver would’ve been embarrassed; huge empty unmeadows of the same plant positioned in the same way to its neighbours times ten thousand with only a few nervous rats and some reckless crows for company. 

“You’re really not where you should be,” the crows told him.  “And don’t eat the rats: if one of them’s eaten something it shouldn’t and you swallowed it then it’s lights out for you too, get it?”
“Yes,” the wolf lied.  His aunt had told him never to let birds see if you were confused. 

And then, one particularly fitful night, he woke up already-winded from his dreams, legs twitching and teeth bared. 

There was a stink in the air.

***

It was a vast building, coated with red-baked blocks of dead burned clay on the outside and metal on the inside and stench to a truly astonishing degree around it and within it and of it.  A shimmering lake stretched outside its doors, filled with no water and a truly literally breathtaking amount of hogshit.  The wolf’s nose gave up within half a mile of the place, and he found himself hoping it was for good.  Each breath felt like inhaling pondscum. 

And inside that giant hollow shell of a building, surrounded by their reeking moat, snorted and squealed and grunted one dozen, one hundred, one thousand hogs, more than a thousand hogs.  Hairy and grunting and rooting and shredding and popping out more and more hogs.  Resigned and dead-eyed bipedal apes wandered around and checked boxes indicating that there were more hogs than there were yesterday, and there would be more tomorrow, and so on and forever.  The hogs lay in cages and were pinned in place and nursed and squealed and grew and grew and grew and grew fat and grew cunning and looked through bars at the world outside and grew out to reach it. 

The wolf considered all of this.

“If I had a family,” he remarked, “there still wouldn’t be enough of us to make a difference.  And I would feel very guilty about this.  So I suppose it’s alright.”

Then he walked into the building, quick and quiet, if not quite keen. 

***

 The Great Jiggsville Swine Plague was not the first incident of hogs hunting humans.  It was not the hundred or even hundred thousandth occurrence of domestic pigs escaping into the wild.  It WAS the first occasion on which an entire commercial pork plant released its stock into the surrounding landscape within a few dozen miles of a suburban center; the first occasion on which the pigs stampeded towards human dwellings rather than the woods; and to this day remains the only mass jailbreak caused by a nonhuman. 

The security footage was heavily damaged in the escape, so exactly how a wolf got its hands on the gate controls is unknown.  How it managed to steer several thousand panicking, confused pigs is also unknown.  Witnesses agreed it looked pretty old and beat-up, which didn’t help matters.

“I think it was sick,” said one of the few surviving plant foremen.  “It was wheezing the whole time, really huffing and puffing.”

They never did find a body, but with thousands of pigs running rampant that was pretty normal.  There were bigger problems, like all those homes being invaded by feral pigs. 

Awful.  Just awful.  The poor property values, all gone down.