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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. 

A star fell.

It started up high – so high it was just another little white dot in the sky, shimmering from yellow to blue to red back to white again at the fancy of a viewer’s strained eyeballs – and then it came low, and it came low so fast and so furious that it tore the shrieking air in half and came to earth with the power of a very small and intense volcano, sending fountaining earth miles into the sky and shrouding the land in particulate that would linger for days no matter the sweepings and dustings and scrubbings that would be visited upon it all.

It also made Lord Batheley-Tweedlington, Baron of Coopmont and Yorklette-Upon-The-River and a Peerage of the Realm, spit out his pipe into his lap, spoiling his third-favourite Wednesday evening bathrobe. 

“Zounds!” he said.  “What the devil was that by jove?  Why, I say, I should go investigate.  Mrs. Biscuits!  Round up my carriage.”
“The stablehands just went abed,” said Mrs. Biscuits, who was fifty-six years old and looked a hundred and felt six times that some days.  She did not mask the contempt in her voice, as her employer was colourblind to it. 

“Well fire the insolent blighters and get me new ones, toodley pip toot sweet!  We’ve a sight to see!”

***

The sight was a smoulder glass-walled pit some hundred feet deep covered in burning ejecta that smelled like dying rocks and slaughtered dust.  Occasionally it went ‘ping’ and something exploded in a small and sulky manner.

“Astounding, marvelous, miraculous, wondrous, amazing, magical, why, downright providential!” gushed Lord Batheley-Tweedlington, popping his monocle in and out of each eye socket in excitement.  “A real-life fallen meteor, exactly as I’ve heard tale of in the Royal Society papers!  Why, I reckon they’ll come begging hat-in-hand to me to see such a sight, eh?”
“Sounds liable, sir,” agreed the backup coach driver.

“Strip off your uniform and return to the gutter, you verminous skittering wretch,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  “How DARE you speak to me without permission?”

“Sorry, sir.”
“CLUB HIM!”

“It’s just me, sir.  Should I club myself?”
Lord Batheley-Tweedlington ate his own tweed in anger. 

“I say I say I say what what what what what what what what what what’s afoot here, what?” interjected a most gormless voice.

Oh.  The horror.  Lord Batheley-Tweedlington realized, to his mounting loathing, that he had failed to notice the precise location of the fallen star in relation to his lands.  This was just outside No’thuperton (the Lesser), on the Sou’we’st’er’n’ side, which meant it was almost in the Duchy of Bucoolyptus, which meant it was adjourning the lands of…

“Woolthering,” he said coolly.  His worst enemy and second cousin waved cheerily back in reply, one long, thin arm jutting loose from a stagecoach that he realized was slightly nicer than his own. 

“Oh it’s BASIL, old boy old chum old sock old foot old fish old bass, you know it eh what what what?  Lovely to see you oh I do say what’s up have you come along to look at the ol’ thingamabob too?  Beautiful thing, beautiful, just beautiful, pity it landed on my half of the land but tell you what my old crown my old crock my old crumpet my old shoe you can take a piece free of charge not one groat nor ha-crown nor not a farthing nor penny nor ha’-penny upon my word as a gentlemen eh?”

While Lord Batheley-Tweedlington took his deepest breath and began to marshall his defenses against such an onslaught, the crater coughed.

“Pardon?” he asked, reflexively.

“Eh what what?” asked Woolthering, vacantly. 

“Hrrk,” explained the crater, strenuously.

Then the bottom of the buried pit heaved and roiled and disgorged a body into the mild Wednesday night, wreathed in the smell of burning chemicals and hot metal, and subsided its rotting self deeper into the earth. 

***

“Here, hold still you blasted thing!  Woolthering!  Woolthering!  Make the silly blighter hold still, would you – oh, step lively now, come off it, step lively!  How am I meant to get nice measurements with his bloody great numpty head swinging about like this?!”
“I say I say I say now hold on hold up hold on now my old tea and pudding my old china my old bean sprout the lad’s got a fierce hunger on him and you see how he growls when I step too close to his pudding, look at the face he makes, bless him!”
The visitor snarled at them over his eighth bowl of Mrs. Biscuit’s best what-I’ve-got-in-the-pantry soup.  Lord Batheley-Tweedlington was indeed unable to avoid looking at that face he made: it was almost magnetic.  Or at least he supposed it was; the teeth drew the eye so magnificently they seemed to swallow the attention whole.  For the first time in his life he was in the same room as Rufus Hibbleghorst Woolthering III without having his entire mind body and soul bent to contemplating his mortal destruction.  Instead his being was suffused with intoxicating words like CANINES and INCISORS and FANGS and SHARP to a degree that made him feel quite giddy.  Was this terror?  He’d never been terrified before.  What a peculiar emotion; he couldn’t say that he cared for it.  No wonder all the little people seemed so deuced upset to experience it all the time. 

A splash shook him out of his reverie; the visitor had inserted his entire brain-pan into the soup-pot.  Lord Batheley-Tweedlington seized the opportunity and – with a level of care he had hitherto reserved only for his own personage – placed the set of measuring-tongs about its skull and rattled off the numbers whip-smart. 

“Lovely!” cried Woolthering, and he began scribbling away on HIS (Batheley-Tweedlington’s) charts without so much as a by-your-leave or please-and-thank-you, which was NOT cricket at all and – “Done!”

“What?” burst out Lord Batheley-Tweedlington. 

“I say I say I said it’s done, my old trumpet my old coronet my old stocking my old grout!  Always had a head for figures, I did I say I say I say!  Here, take a gander!”

Lord Batheley-Tweedlington snatched the document from his cousin’s hands with ill grace and perused it with his typical fierce intelligence. 

“Upside down, old chap old chum old –”

“Oh DO shut up!” snapped Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  “Says here he’s an……”

“I say I say I say what?  Is it still upside down?”
“SHUT UP!  No, no, no, this is all wrong, you must’ve measured wrong!”
“But you wouldn’t let me touch the instruments, my old fiddle my old faddle!”
“Then you mathed them wrong!”
“I’m a maths expert, me, always am,” said Woolthering.  “I’ve never unmathsed a mathsing.  Mathsers are my bread and butter, I’ve never misundermathstimated a thing!”

“Well you’ve mathsed him as a bloody saint of the highest order, you have!  I’ve been an expert and fully-qualified phrenologist my entire adult life and in all my years I’ve never seen this low a highwayman-quotient; his nose is a roman as Great Caesar’s Ghost himself –”

“More of a snout, really-“

“-and his brow is noble!  High!  True!  Not the slightest trace of furrowing, of sloping, of, of, of COMMON BLOOD!  Why, he’s more anglo-saxon than my Uncle Percivius, and HE perished from exsanguination after chopping his own hand off when a beggar of irish-iberian stock brushed their fingers together while panhandling!”

“I say, he’s the one my mother disowned!  Terrible brother he was she said she did to me what what”
“He disowned her first.”
“He said she was ‘a blight on the blood of her highest and holiest house!’”
“Only when she disobeyed him!”
“He wanted her to marry him, what what what!”
“And she should’ve listened!  Purity, that’s the ticket!”
The visitor hissed through his beyond-roman snout, expelling a few last droplets of Mrs. Biscuit broth, and then curled himself into a small compact ball on his throne, where he began emitting the most aristocratic of snores.
“Well,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington loudly, in the tone of one who is putting an argument behind them BUT NOT BECAUSE THEY WERE LOSING IT, “I suppose it falls on us to civilize this man before he falls prey to the errancy and debauchery of this fallen, polluted, soiled world.  Amongst men such as I”
“-I say, I say, men such as WE-”

“-he may learn how to acquit himself in the manner of a man of his stature.”
“Speaking of which I say old chum are we sure he isn’t a lady?”
“My dear Woolthering,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington in the tones of one speaking to an unusually-thick clot, “this fellow travelled from a far star in a locomotive of fire and metal.  A woman’s bloodflow would collapse under such pressures and her brain-pan would explode from anxiety.  Obviously.”

“Oh no doubt my word my soul my sakes my word no doubt at all yes indeed indeed well then well!”
The visitor twitched and snarled nobly in his sleep, claws extended and retracting askew.

“Obviously yes let’s be about it,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  A few strands of antique French embroidery began to drip gently from between its grasping fingers.  “Urgently.”

***

“No, no, no, you are NOT to pay ANY ATTENTION to that end of the Great Chain of Being, that is where dogs and horses and Irishmen and other useful lower creatures abide, no no no you must look up here!  Here!  Just above-or-below the angels, under God, and….perhaps a LITTLE BIT above Englishmen?  Confound it, LOOK UP HERE damn you- AAAAGH!”
“I say!”
“It BIT me!”

“I say I say I say I saw you, you put your finger in his mouth!”
“That’s no bloody call for him to go and bloody well bite it!”

“I say, language!”
“Go to the blazes you darned harridan!”
“I say!”

The visitor snarled. 

“Now look at what you’ve let him do!  He’s chewed up the Great Chain of Being!   And NOT from the bottom-up as is right and proper!  He’s CHEWED UP GOD THE FATHER THE SON AND THE HOLY SPIRIT!”

“Don’t shout!”

“I WILL SHOUT WHEN I PLEASE AND ulk”

“I say!”

“uh”

“Please do let him go sir, I promise he shall stop shouting!”

“h”

“See, he agrees!”
“-ah.  Ah.  Thank.  You.”
“You’re welcome old friend old chum!”
“Please, Woolthering, I beg of you, in – ah, my god – the name of our many years of bitter, spiteful enmity, do not mention it.  Ever.  To anyone.”

“Lips sealed and solemnly sworn to oath eh what what what what what what what what what what!”

“What,” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington mechanically.  He dabbed at the marks on his neck.  It was the worst he’d had since his dear old father had passed away of the dropsy.  “What.  Do we do now?”
“Well,” said Woolthering thoughtfully, “we might try-”

“Rhetorical!” said Lord Batheley-Tweedlington loudly and a little too quickly.  “Rhetorical!  Come now!  We must correct his notions, and I know just the place.”

***

The Chapel of St. Burleston-Helpmeet-By-The-Starry-Shore-King-Of-Peace-And-Love had served Anglicanism proudly and with distinction since the first days after Henry the Eighth had his little difficulties with the pope, and before that it had been a Catholic shrine, and before that a roman temple, and before THAT some druids had done interesting things in its neck of the woods with knives and mistletoe and a consistent supply of about one and a half galloons of blood in mobile form. 

It had been burning most beautifully for five minutes, which was long enough for the panic to die down and the blame to go around. 

“You did this!” shouted Lord Batheley-Tweedlington. 

“I say!”
“You DID!  You said this was a good idea!”
“I say, I say, you said that!”
“No!  It was my idea but YOU said it was a good one!”
“I say!  I say that I said that it was a bad one!”
“WELL YOU SHOULD’VE SAID LOUDER!”
The visitor growled truculently. 

“Shut it,” snapped Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  “And drop that piece of the vicar!  The poor man only had one leg after waterloo, and now you’ve gone and robbed him of two of his longest and best fingers!” 

The visitor obligingly spat them out, covered in a peculiar secretion that dissolved the flagstones at their feet.

“Right!  Woolthering, you take them.”
“What?”
“What what?”
“What is what I said, what what!”
“What ‘what’ did you mean by saying what?!”

“What!”

“WHAT!”

A star descended from the heavens as smoothly and as softly as a baby’s sleeping smile.  It drifted from bottomless heights to the lowly earth in a single heartbeat and yet never rushed; its mass flattened the smouldering rubble of St. Burleston-Helpmeet-By-The-Starry-Shore-King-Of-Peace-And-Love without a whisper of effort or a creak of protest, and when its passenger disembarked even it seemed to move with grace despite having sixteen legs four faces and an entirely unbelievable number of arms. 

“There you are, my sweet baboo,” it sighed in an entire choir’s whispers. 

The visitor spat out the third finger it had secreted in its cheek pouches and scampered with a bound to the passenger’s skirts, which it pawed at most pleadingly.  It was picked up, and adorned with a crown of writhing appendages and sensors that soothed and fussed over it, and it was loved. 

Then the star swallowed them again and was gone.  A second later, it had never even existed. 

The two men stood there and stared at the empty sky, listened to the creak and crisp of more centuries of pews going up in cinder-spouts. 

“Bit of a pity one didn’t remember to bring his phrenological calipers with us, what what?  I should’ve liked to see her skull circumference.”
“She had a skull?” asked Lord Batheley-Tweedlington, distantly.  And then, “wait, she?  You think that…THAT… was a lady?”
“Why not what?”
Lord Batheley-Tweedlington closed his eyes.  “I’m going home.  I fear I have become ill.”

“Laudanum’ll do the trick, I say!  Swear on it for a dicky stomach!”

“Oh shut it,” snapped Lord Batheley-Tweedlington.  “What do you know about scientific procedure?  If it weren’t for men like me we wouldn’t know anything about these beings from the phlogiston vapours of the luminous ether!”

“What do we know then eh, my old turnip, my old carrot, my old root cellar?”
Lord Batheley-Tweedlington looked to the skies again.  They were darkening and dimming; the smog from London town was rolling in with the winds.  He wished he had his pipe. 

“They clearly aren’t civilized enough to appreciate the power of Victorian scientific thought,” he said stiffly. 

Then he went home and drank half his bar as a medicine cabinet. 

We moved to space.  It seemed like a good idea at the time. 

So we made rockets and launch segments and fuel tanks and engines and we moved ourselves up into space, piece by piece, part by part, spanner by spanner, bolt by bolt, then finally body by body.

And we were in space.  Because space was completely empty, and it was the future. 

***

We moved to space.  It was full of nothing, but that just meant it was full of possibility.

So we made factories and parts and pieces and special tools.  It took forever and ever and ever because every single module and gear and bolt had to be lifted up out of the bottom of a planet’s entire gravity well. 

So we built a space elevator.  This took even more factories and parts and pieces and special tools.  It took forever and ever and ever and ever because it required ultratensile materials that were only theoretically possible in the same way that there was no rule saying your molecules COULDN’T line up just right to let you walk through a wall if you kept trying for the entirety of the universe’s lifespan times infinity, but that was just an insult to our can-do spirit and heroic goals so we tried anyways. 

It fucked up and split in half and in half again and again and again, which was actually really good because it prevented it from whipping around the planet repeatedly and instead flung a lot of it out into space.  The rest slammed violently into the planet hard enough to leave giant holes everywhere and killed a lot of people and destroyed a lot of people’s homes and made life harder for a lot of people. 

Their sacrifices were just and noble.  Because we were going to move to space. 

Cleaning it all up took forever and ever and ever and ever and ever, though. 

***

We moved to space.  It took a lot of work, and we mean a LOT of work, but that just made it heroic. 

There was an obvious problem, in that although there was infinite amounts of space and finite amounts of us, getting any of us into space was still sort of hard.  So we compromised and sent those of us into space to work that were brave and hardy and courageous and also didn’t mind the tiny tiny tiny tiny chance of being decompressed or suffocating or suffering an embolism and also the complete and total certainty of undergoing rapid skeletomuscular degeneration and quickly accumulating life-changing amounts of radiation exposure. 

They were happy to do it.  We HAD selected them for that, after all.  And most of them even stayed happy after they withered up and shriveled up and had bits snap or drop off.  Because they got to move to space, albeit to help other people move to space, and they floated around until they couldn’t anymore and we buried them by launching them at their home planet below and or out into the empty universe as per their request. 

Most of them wanted to be shot into space.  This wasn’t totally surprising. 

***

We moved to space.  At last.

Things started breaking right away, of course.  Maintenance is tricky and tough enough when you can breathe and wear gloves instead of giant insulated mitts attached to rigid full-body casketsuits.  And sometimes you’re tired or you’re bored or you’re hungry or you’re thirsty or a thought crossed your mind at just the right moment and you maybe miss a little something that doesn’t mean anything, so you don’t care and then you do it again and again and maybe someday it’s a BIG something and other days all the little somethings turned into a huge something and someone may or may not or maybe gets sucked out an airlock or maybe suffocates or finds out that the entire tank of #6 Spicy Sou’wester Barbecue Sauce got a leak and they don’t have any more and they maybe start a maybe completely justified riot. 

There are many hardships in space.  Which is like being an adult, which is inevitable, so of course we had to move there.  Where else would we be?

***

We moved to space.  This meant we didn’t have to care about a lot of things.

In places that weren’t space, people were dying and suffering and starving and screaming and so on.  There’s no sound in space so we didn’t have to hear it, and you’re too far away to see anyone or anything.  No countries or borders and no armies and no famines and no people and no forests or mountains and no life and nothing, just a big smeary blue ball. 

We didn’t look out the viewports on that side anyways.  It wasn’t space. 

And we didn’t have many viewports.  They were structural weaknesses.  Additional structural weaknesses. 

It was pretty annoying when the deliveries got more erratic.  And more expensive.  And more and more and more people started complaining about us being in space, asking what the hell we were doing up there.  But they were busy with problems that weren’t in space, so sooner or later they would be distracted or dead due to something that wasn’t about space. 

We’d moved to space.  What the hell did they think it meant?

***

We’d moved to space.  Now we could get to work on the important things. 

So we made stuff, from things we had to haul to space, and we either used it to fix the problems we had in space or we launched it back down to earth and they used it to make things to haul stuff back to space so we could make stuff. 

It would’ve been easier if we had the space elevator but there had been totally unforeseeable problems with that.  So instead we complained about the gravity well.  Bad enough that our skeletons missed the planet so much they kept crumbling into bacon bits; everything that needed to be moved into space was very reluctant about it and kept wanting to dive back down until it was properly heaved shoved pushed and launched on a column of carbonized fire. 

Why was everything so stubborn?  Why did it want to stay where it was, rather than moving to space?  There was so much space in space.  There wasn’t much else, but that was the appeal: imagine, having as much room as you needed to do things and nothing in your way and nothing with you and nothing being you and all around you nothing but nothing but nothing but nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing

nothing.                

***

We moved out of space. 

It was not a decision lightly made, and many of us protested it at the time.  But it wasn’t our call.  Bits and parts and people fell off and seized up and powered down and passed away until there wasn’t much there. 

Just space. 

***

We moved to space.  It seemed like a good idea at the time. 

Turns out the only stuff in space is what you put in it. 

Who knew?

At ten minutes to noon Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, stood on her chanting verandah and murmured the last syllables of a twenty-five minute spell precisely on time. 

“Go,” she said, and with a flick of her fingers the verandah’s voice fell silent and the words echoed and with a fat sucking sound that was almost exactly the opposite of any language she was ripped free from the earth and fell into the sky. 

The sky was a dangerous place to be a human.  The breezes were vicious and the air was harsh and around her she could feel the ill will and tremendous force that was the will of the birds, tugging on her limbs, draining from her heart, adding lead to her bones and gasps to her breath.  Upstart mammal, they hissed into her brain.  Wretched offspring of synapsids, thick-limbed, clumsy-footed, gut-brooding hairy rat.  Know your place below. 

Ar-klazion ignored them, and when that didn’t work anymore she sang to them, a long and mocking song whose simple melodies and blunt noises were offensive to their longminds and crude to their oldest souls, and they reeled away in disgust that overcame their hatred.  She chuckled smugly and banked through a cloud of grudges and seething spite; most of the attitude for dealing with the very old worked across species quite nicely, if not the precise words.  But now her sky was clear and her purpose was sharp and she had work to do.

She had a night to catch. 

***

The night lay far in advance from her, fleeing as it was wont to, and an inexperienced sorcerer or cunningman or witch – flush in their powers and giddy with success – might have hurled themselves pell-mell after it in gleeful haste.  They would scoff at restraint and mock the notion of a challenge greater than that they had already conquered to come here; the defiance of an entire planet’s heavy-handed grasp; the evasion of its ancient and crabbed-taloned rulers; the precisely correct pronunciation of twenty-five minutes of ancient words created by a species that had no actual mouths humans would recognize.  This would be what would get them killed, if not in the next few hours then the next time they did something else significant.  Ambition was a spice; arrogance was a poison. 

So Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, crossed her legs and sat upon an icy scrap of cirrus fibratus, where she began, very intently and very thoroughly, to look at her hands. 

Finger.  Thumb.  Finger.  Finger.  Finger.  Times two. 

She pulled them in and out, tugged on that heartbeat, rolled them back and forth and checked the palms and the knuckles and the tendons and the little scars and the bumps and the hangnails and itchy bits that were part of having a body, and she reached out and gently cupped a handful of ozone and brought it down to her.  It hissed and spat most angrily at being brought low thusly, and she soothed its murmurs with one hand even as her other began to remove its skin before the lowly air could strip it loose. 

Her anvil was her palm; her hammer was her thumb; her tongs were her fingers; her forge was her breath. 

It lay gilded and glowing in her grip, a small knife exactly one inch long and one horizon wide, and she picked it up and swung it and it cut the lesser, lower, rarified air in half with the vicious callousness of an aristocrat overdue for the guillotine.  Where it slashed, the sky bled apart, and where it did, Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, followed. 

***

On the vacuum-path she spun forwards, lungs empty, heart frozen, brain alive with sparkling plans.  Behind her she left a brutish contrail of puzzled oxygen molecules, peeled freshly from both the atmosphere and her ozone-blade and left to quarrel in confusion as oxygen molecules always do.  Far beneath and below rust fell like rain and humans grew light-headed and giddy; cats burst into laughter and dogs wandered in dazes.  A contrail of sparkling, dying metals marked the edges of her passing, and as her speed reached its zenith Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, saw the air begin to dye itself from passionate ocean blue to royal purple bruising. 

She was catching up to the night.  It was arrogant and old and it was used to being the fastest thing in the sky, and she would get very close to it indeed before it bothered to notice her. 

When it did, she knew it.  The moon had been following her for some time now, and when it veered sharply in her direction she was ready.  Bodyguard of the night, wanderer of the late summer skies, it dove at her like a stooping hawk, but it was inelegant in its rush and overconfident in its surprise and she simply banked to one side and let the moon slide by, laughing in disdain as it shaved itself down to a crescent on the sharp edge of her passage.  It gained her some seven high-leagues towards the target before the night even noticed its failure, the eld fool, and still, oh still, oh yet the miserable thing didn’t understand the position it was in.  Stars twinkled in her path and rose in her face to bar her way, but she was ready and carefully cut herself into dimensions that slid between their light like water through a streambed, slipping past the shine and squirming closer, ever closer to that inky black that lay beyond. 

The night was still not alarmed.  Why would it be?  Fail though its guardians may, it was still the earthbound finger of the infinite dark on this world, the touch of the universe running down the spine of the planet to bring it shivering relief from the smothering love of its upstart star-parent. 

It must be remembered, of course, that fingers are very delicate in more than one sense. 

So it was both no surprise that the night itself allowed Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries, to come so close to it without much caring, and that when she subsequently brought out a small potted plant and turned its chlorophyll inside-out, dumping a lifetime’s-worth of sunshine out in a very sharp railroad-spike of pure photons, it was immediately, unceremoniously, and painfully nailed to the sky. 

***

The heavens did not scream. 

The night itself screamed.  It was much bigger and older and softer and more arrogant, and so it reacted as shrilly and angrily as any such person does when pain is visited upon them, especially minor, inconvenient, meaningless pain.  Actual agony would freeze them stiff. 

The heavens did not scream.  But at hearing that, they did cower and shrink away.  And so Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries was alone in the gap where the sky had been, with the immense vastness of the pinned night and a fraying splinter of purest harvested sunlight. 

There was little time to waste.  She brought out her spade and bucket and alit upon the night’s shores, and there she braced herself, and put her hat between her teeth, and bit down so that when her shovel breached the flesh of the night itself the tremendous and all-consuming nauseated pain and roiling horror wouldn’t make her bite off her tongue because she needed that to get back home alive very very much. 

The night was now coherent enough to get over its shock and stop screaming and begin cursing, so Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries stopped up her ears with small scraps of rags and began to hum as loudly and off-kilter as she could, drowning out swearwords and damnable blasphemies with lullabies and nonsense verse and filthy limericks, watering down the infinite with the ultra-finite until it could not wound or touch her.  Her fingers itched with the temptation to reach out and snag a flailing tendril of one of the smaller curses, but no, her self-control won the day.  Some things aren’t meant to be taken, but more common are the things that are up for grabs by anyone but with a nasty tendency to remove the hand that receives them. 

She had a bucket full of something like those now, lighter than air and heavy with portent.  Her arm was buoyed and her soul was weighted, and as she threw aside the dissolving remains of what used to be the idea of her shovel and the little sunlight sliver dissolved and the night began to bloom in hideous wrath all around her, she clicked her tongue three times, coughed, and from memory, yelled a loud and perfect “cock-a-roo-roo!”

And Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries slid vastly, perfectly, endlessly down the slope of above and around and into the small comfortable spaces crowded all around with matter, with ordinary matter, with ordinary things that mattered, and slammed into her chanting verandah with such force that every bone in her body came within a single degree of dislocation. 

She lay there for a few hours trying to work up the energy to scream or cry.  The potted plant comforted her, but greater still was the comfort of the little bucket in her left hand.  It was full of the closest thing anyone on a gravity well can get to the actual universe, and it weighed a stupid amount because weight was a stupid concept to apply to it, like size, like shape, like age. 

“Got you,” she said, a few minutes before dinner. 

Then she screamed for a while until she felt better. 

***

“That’s very nice, dear,” said Hanna, mother of Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries.  She gently turned the bucket in her palms, giving it friendly little pats to soothe its noises.  “But this isn’t what I meant when I asked if you could go get me some nightsoil for my garden.”

“Well what the hell else would you mean?” 

Hanna told her.

“Shitting EUPHEMISMS?!” erupted Ar-klazion the Mighty, the Great, the Doer and Maker of All Things and Breaker of Forbidden Boundaries. 
“Exactly,” said Hanna. 

Twenty-six days, that was how long it took.  Wendell felt that was very reasonable of him.

Twenty-six days since they found the mould in the apartment beneath him (and ONLY that apartment: apparently it had originated from an ambitious fridge slime that had gotten too big for its britches and had made it as far as the microwave before being caught).  Twenty-six days of antiseptics and antibacterial and antimicrobial soaps.  Twenty-six days of feeling like someone had placed a can of ethanol inside one nostril and a bar of soap in the other. 

That was how long it took before Wendell went to see the leprechaun in the building’s basement.

“I’m a brownie,” said the leprechaun. 

“Yeah,” agreed Wendell.  “A leprechaun.”

“I’m closer to a hobgoblin than anything.”
“A leprechaun.”
“Are you even listening to me?”
“I’ll make you a deal, leprechaun,” said Wendell.  “Can you please, please, please, please, PLEASE take away my sense of smell?  Because it’s worse than death having it.”
The leprechaun scratched his nose in perplexity at this.  There was a lot of nose to scratch, both inside and out – it was not long, but it was broad and possessed a staggering depth to it, emotional and physical.  “Look, leprechauns don’t cut deals.  But brownies can, I s’pose.  Stop calling me a leprechaun and I’ll have that nose off you.”
“Not the nose, just the smell.”
“Why do you care?”
“I like my nose.”
The brownie looked at it critically.

“What?”
“Nothing.  Nothing.”
“That wasn’t nothing.”
“It’s a fine nose, I mean.  Just.  I’ve seen better, that’s all.”
“Take the damn smell,” said Wendell.

“Fine,” said the brownie.  And he did.

***

That night Wendell went to bed early and fell into the true sleep of the blissfully exhausted and drifted too deeply for dreams, until the exact moment someone rear-ended someone else on Queen Street and the sirens and the howling and roaring and mangling and screaming grabbed his hindbrain and hurled it back into the universe in blinking terror. 

“Jesus,” he muttered, and rolled over.

Ten minutes later a couple outside had a proposal turn into a breakup. 

Ten minutes after THAT the tow-truck for the rear-ender got rear-ended. 

Ten minutes after THAT the police showed up.

Wendell walked downstairs to the basement and nearly died sixteen times on the way due to forgetting to open his eyes until the third floor. 

“What’s up?” asked the brownie, who was reading an old magazine of dentist’s-office age and stateliness. 

“Can you do ears too?” asked Wendell. 

The brownie’s eyebrows crinkled into highly disgusted shapes. 

“Hearing.  I mean, can you take my hearing?”
“I only do trades,” said the brownie.  “And thank fuck because listen pal, those ears?  Those are fixer-uppers.  You got wax in there or is that tar?”

Wendell pulled off his right slipper and threw it at him, then went to bed and slept through his alarm clock by six hours. 

***

Wendell’s sheets were tacky.  Not as a matter of taste, but as a matter of sensation. 

Sweat, mostly.  Some dust.  And the thread was bare and coarse enough that it trapped them easily. Now that he was getting a solid eight (minimum) a night, he woke irked from it.  And breakfast wasn’t helping.  Breakfast was oatmeal, same as always.  And it tasted like nothing at all, but a little bit worse. Air tasted like nothing.  Oatmeal tasted like lumps. 

“Hey,” said Wendell to the brownie. 

“Hey,” said the brownie. 

“How can I still hear YOU?”

“You’re not,” said the brownie dismissively.  “Don’t overthink it.  Now what the hell’s your problem this time?”
“I hate my breakfast and I hate my fabrics,” said Wendell.

“Want new sheets?  Some recipe ideas?”
“Can you just take my senses of touch and taste?”
The brownie sighed.  “Sure.  Why not.  What’re you offering?”
“I’ll trade you my sense of touch for taking my sense of taste,” said Wendell, who had thought about this very carefully on the way down sixteen flights of stairs. 

The brownie squinted at him.  “Clever.  Very clever.  Too clever.  Don’t try that shit again.”

Breakfast was peaceful then, aside from when Wendell almost bit his tongue off by mistake and only noticed when the spoon came out of his mouth bright red. 

***

The wall to the left side of Wendell’s computer monitor was his worst enemy. 

It was painted teal, but not really.  It was grey, but not quite.  It was almost the colour of a sullen sky, or maybe some sluggish water.  It was rough from the wall’s texture, or maybe that was because it had been applied slapdashedly.  There was a hole that might have been from hanging a picture or from a careless bump with furniture moving.  A spider was living high up on it, unless that was a smear from something. 

Data entry crawled along so slowly, so slowly because of it.  Hours went by in which Wendell had nothing to do but sit and consider that stupid, stupid, stupid wall. 

“Take my sight, please,” he told the brownie. 

“Why don’t I just paint your wall?” the brownie asked. 

“Take it,” said Wendell firmly, “and I’ll be happy.”

“Oh thank FUCK,” said the brownie.  And although Wendell took some two hours to get back to his apartment and could no longer enter data at all, he felt great relief and comfort. 

***

The next day he went down to the basement, which took only one hour but probably almost wasn’t very safe. 

“You’re a ripoff,” he pouted.  “I gave you my sight and we agreed I’d be happy and I’m not!  I’m miserable!”
“That’s because you’ve been avoiding your problems by ignoring them instead of doing anything to fix them,” said the brownie.  “Did you buy ear plugs?  Do your laundry?  Get a poster?  Visit a friend?  Do anything, ever?  TRY something?”
“This is much easier,” said Wendell.

“Beyond the personal moral implications on your character, it’s also pretty rude to the blind and deaf communities.”

“This is all making me even LESS happy,” complained Wendell.  “Fix it!”
The brownie shut his eyes, counted to six on one hand, and opened his eyes again.

“Alright,” he said. “You want me to fix you being unhappy?”
“Yes!”
“And you’re sure about this?”
“Yes!”
“And-”

“We had a deal and I demand you uphold it.”
“Fine,” said the brownie.

***

Wendell’s hospital bed was coarse, his meals rough, his roommate noisy, his neighbours loud, and his walls painted a dreadful vomit—orange. 

But his brain was in a little jar in a basement in a brownie’s burrow, and so he smiled, and was not troubled. 

Barboringgravvixtoner’cha’tirlishmecklestonmorrigor woke up. 

It was a sudden sharp surprise to her.  It only took a few weeks. 

The sudden flood of returning senses was the same rush it always was – pitch blackness resolving at her pupils; tingling air on her hide; distant odours eddying through her sinuses – but it arrived without the usual easy comfort.  She felt groggy.  She felt heavy.  She felt tired.  She felt like she wasn’t done sleeping.

And then, after a discombobulated month or so, her brain realized why. 

“Oh,” she said (aloud: there was no WAY she was coherent enough for thought).  “I’m hungry.”

***

Her fridge was empty.  The deep-cave’s ice was bare and slick, not even a bloodstain remaining.  Pure cold ice, satisfying to crunch and utterly useless save to build up emergency steam in the absence of liquid water. 

Damnit.  Sure she’d hunted before torpor?  The memories were surly and slow to arrive, begrudging with details and short-tempered when prodded: yes, she’d hunted; no, she hadn’t bothered to save leftovers; yes, she’d eaten the whole thing, claws, paws, fur and all.  It had only been a young bear, she’d told herself; it wouldn’t even make for a decent midslumber snack; she’d only be angry with herself if she woke up and all she had was a half-consumed half-grown half a bear ass. 

Well, here she was: half-ass-less and exactly as angry as she was worried about anyways.  Maybe she could go get another one?  Was it winter?  Finding hibernaculums was a pain and any inhabitants she could dig out would be half-withered from their own naps.  It smelt like winter.  Damnit. 

Her wings cramped.  Her forelegs burned with the ache of comfiness turned sour with stiffness.  There was an itch precisely between her hips that no amount of twisting would ever let her scratch. 

“Fuck it,” she spoke, slipping into eldwords in her liminal consciousness, intent writing itself into her brain and settling just above the surface of her soul.  “I’ll just make a salad.”

And lo, it was sworn. 

***

The mountain stream was too fast to freeze.  That, combined with its delicious traces of heavy metals, was part of what had led her to select this cavern complex in the first place.  It was nice to not have to play whack-a-mole to find the least-stagnant patch of water underneath the crust and then worry about trying not to inhale too many turtles when half asleep.  That big snapper had sent her into chronic coughing for the rest of the year. 

Steam built up.  Her heart roared into second gear, her body temperature in a few select places skyrocketed, and she creaked and hissed her way downslope; half-flying, half-pouring herself, letting gravity take the wheel.  She eeled her way down to her favourite mineral field and oh!  Oh!  The gall!  Some horrible little pests had gone and nibbled away at it while she was abed, snipping away at the exposed edges and chewing on all the richest veins!  It was practically swiss cheese by now. 

“Fuck,” she said aloud – again, in eldwords, and so bilious emotion slopped out of her mouth and poured across the ground, eating away the scrap rock and slag like soft dirt.  But wait, but wait, there was still a smell of metal, a hint – a more-than-hint, an intoxicating whiff – of appetite.  She tidied away the leavings of the pests and as she cleared the slope of stacked stones and chewed timbers (sending a few stragglers flying in the process, hideous little tetrapodal bodies flailing and squealing) there was a little exposed nest, and in that nest, wonder of wonders, of all the pleasant surprises, against all she knew and hoped, in spite of everything, was a few dozen pounds of near 24-karat gold. 

“Holy shit,” she blurted out, blighting the ground around her with irrecoverable poison, which it looked to be used to.  “Jackpot!”  Who knew the little four-limbed bastards had it in them?

Hmm. 

She looked downslope.  Yes, there were more down there.  They usually preferred the valleys to her peaks, and she could smell the rising cinders from their half-baked little fires, feel the fuzzy and linty edges of their small dreams. 

So she lurched, slipped, and jumped and landed amongst them. 

***

The big nests were the real prizes.  They’d taken the gold and silver and purified it so beautifully, then frustratingly fashioned it into tiny little flat circular fecal pellets.  She stuffed them into her crop as she sifted through the detritus, then alit on something even nicer: a tiny wooden husk holding something that, but for its sparkle, almost looked like diamonds.  Then she sniffed and licked and bit and felt that crunch and grit and knew they WERE diamonds, only the little pests had nibbled away the edges of the gems to make them sparkle.  Magpies they were.  Still, even reduced they were a nice treat. 

Yes, it was all coming together nicely.  And oh, and oh, what was this that she smelt, that she smelt smelting?  On the edge of town a fire that roared sullen-dark, almost like a very sad and tiny version of her own gut.  She upended it and spilled molten goo across the ground – sad tin, dull iron, but mixed within the slag and the slurry was something that hummed JUST right. 

At last.  Perfect. 

***

The gold lay heaped; topped with silver.  The gems blazed.  And threaded throughout it as dressing and binding, the small tickling buzz of a light undertone of molten radium. 

Barboringgravvixtoner’cha’tirlishmecklestonmorrigor wrapped herself around it three times, coiled tightly as she could, and inhaled the rising fumes from the whole glowing glorious mess in three shuddering breathes. 

Damn, she loved salad. 

And so she went to bed, body aching pleasantly instead of stiffly; stomach full; soul soothed; and she slept there quite content and very happy and ready to awake late in the decade.

Then some little FUCKER rode up to her door on a horse, snuck into her bedroom, and stabbed her side. 

Kenneth was a big, beautiful scorpion – six hundred tons if he was a gram, with a lovely red carapace that made the haemolymph of his opponents splash most attractively against it. Jarleen had ridden him to victory in six races and two grand championships and the noise he made as his mouth foamed and his legs folded under him and his brain shut off was a very small and disappointed ‘thhht,’ more fitting of a distressed dockyard guard-spider than a mighty steed.

“Fuck,” said Jarleen in her trademark manner, which seventeen articles in seventeen periodicals had described as classy-yet-efficient. “Fuck fuck.” Half a league from the finishing line and down a mount with no backups. “Fuck fuck fuck.”  And the trap had been poison, which had needed time to work its way through Kenneth’s system, which had needed to be timed during a pit stop, which meant the race officials were compromised. “FUCK.”
“Why do you swear as you assault that dead beast so?”
Jarleen looked at her hands and looked at what was in them and looked at the stranger (stocky, squinty, strange) and discovered that she was correct, as entirely without planning to she had seized up her goad and begun thwacking Kenneth in what had formerly been the tenderest section of his exoskeleton.

“I’m a half-hour ahead on a sixteen hour race and some scumfuckering bribetaking pissshitting fuckbitchassmotherwhore killed my mount with doped food,” she explained primly. “Now please stay back because I can’t guarantee my aim at the moment.”

“Oh, you need a new ride?” asked the stranger. She scratched aimlessly at the sun—boils on her arm, which were the ripe round red of someone who’d spent too much time on the old hiways where the sun rolled off the rotted metal roofs of the motorcars. “I sell rides.”
“The Southern Eldland Grand Loop is only open to skyscraper-class scorpions,” said Jarleen.

“And hey, that’s what I sell,” said the stranger, offering her scratching hand – still flaked with dead skin under the nails. “My name’s Moth. Let’s talk titanturkey, shall we?”

***

Moth’s Used Scorpions was a scrap of worn cloth serving as both tent and banner stretched between a pair of Eld-age streetlamps. Underneath it was a rock (her chair) a cooler (her lunch and her safe) and a telescope (for spotting clients).

Moth offered Jarleen half her lunch. It had been a long time since her last meal and a random stranger was at this point less likely to poison her than any of the professionals at the pit stops, so Jarleen took the bottle and drank stale fermented grain as she was shown the first scorpion, lurking patiently in the shadowed and empty-eyed bulk of an Eld building that very nearly stood taller than he did.

“This is Billy. Good shape, gently used, young enough to have tons of energy and not so young as to be thin in the carapace. A bit plain in his patterning, but a working jockey’ll care less about that than results, right?”
“The ‘casters don’t shut up about it, but yes.”

Billy rustled gently beneath them, mandibles flexing, and Jarleen sighed. “Close. Very close. But absolutely not. He’s got no right pincher.”
“And he makes good use of his left!”
“Nine times out of ten that’s the side you get passed on in the last league. He’s as useless to me as if he had no legs. Pass.”
“C’mon, you’re in no position to be choosey,” protested Moth.

“Unless you’ve only got the one scorpion, I suspect I am. Who’s next?”

Next was Newman. He brooded low in the shade of a collapsed overpass, the skeletal remains of his meals delicately picked-dry around his den-mouth.

“Two pinchers, see, that’ll do you,” said Moth, accepting her lunch back and shotgunning the dregs of the bottle with a loud crunching sound. “And believe you me, he’s fierce enough with them. Almost got my leg two days ago.”

“I can deal with feisty,” said Jarleen. “Call him out.”
“Pardon?”
“Let’s see his pace.”
Moth sighed and put her fingers to her teeth and shrieked a harsh note that shook the dust from the deadest windows of the Eld buildings, and Newman bestirred and slowly, gently eeled his way loose to investigate.

Jarleen sighed.

“Hey, he still has two pinchers! I told you!”
“You told me. He also has no legs. You didn’t tell me that.”
“He gets around pretty good for someone with no legs, I’d like to see you do any better.”
“I wouldn’t do worse. And I wouldn’t win this race. Do you have any others?”

Moth shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m a bit light on stock.”
“Anything. Anything at all.”
“Alright, alright.” Moth shrugged once more – a great heave of flexion from shoulder to wrist – and pulled her hand from her pocket.

“That’s a beetle.”
“So it is.”
“That is NOT a scorpion.”
“You said anything at all, what the hell more do you want?”
“A scorpion!” screamed Jarleen. “An honest to god skyscraper-class scorpion that can run a race and defend itself and beyond that I don’t care if it’s on the verge of death or a barely-hatched skitterling with wobbly legs! Hell, at this point I don’t care if all you’ve got is a female – I’d take her so long as she had the restraint to not eat me or the officials until the race is over!”

Moth drew her palm across her brow, smearing fresh dust on old grease. “Alright, alright, alright. Fine. I didn’t want to do this, but fine. I’ve got a personal favourite, see. His name is Tyler and he’s been with me through thick and thin and helped capture half my stock. But you’re in a hurry, and you’re in need, and you know what? The old boy deserves one last moment of glory.”

“We’ll see,” said Jarleen.

***

Tyler stood twenty-two meters at the apex.

Tyler’s pinchers were meticulously honed to razors.

Tyler’s tail was the pleasantly-plump sheen you got when a scorpion was flush with venom.

Tyler’s carapace was a lovely thick black without even so much as flecks or mottles of light – no wonder Moth had caught others with him; on a moonless night, he would be invisible despite all his majesty.

Tyler was also stone dead.

“He was happy as a clam an hour ago,” said Moth in tears. “Ate his cow like a good boy and everything. Oh Tyler! You were old, but I thought we’d have more time together! Oh Tyler! Why?! Anyways that’s the lot, who’ll it be?”
Jarleen swallowed the primal words at the back of her throat. “What?”
“Who’ll you take?”
“Between them all, you have one barely-functioning scorpion.”

“So why not just ride ‘em in turns?” said Moth in that infuriating tone of voice that dared suggest she thought she was being very reasonable.

“One mount per racer,” said Jarleen, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth with perfect care. “Just one at a time. Wait. Wait wait wait.”
“Yeah?”

“Hold on a moment.”
“Yeah?”
“Have you fed your stock today besides Tyler?”
“Yeah?”
“FUCK-“
“No wait no I mean no, sorry. Was just fixing to when you showed up and I got distracted.”

Jarleen stared at Tyler’s big dead body.

“I’ll take all three of them.”

“Which three?”
“The SCORPIONS, YOU-” and then Jarleen thought about it. “All of them. All four of them. Give me that beetle this second; I need to chew on something.”

***

“A beautiful beast,” said the ‘caster into his microphone. “Lovely black carapace on him, quite glorious. And a real bruiser – look at the strain on his skin from all that packed-in muscle and mass; god, he must be about fit to shed soon! You said you found him at a roadside used-scorpion shop?”
“Yes,” said Jarleen in her trademark manner, which seventeen articles in seventeen periodicals had described as classy-yet-efficient and which she now found herself wishing was more focused on pure bullshitting.

“Quite a lucky find. I wasn’t aware there were any along the Southern Eldland Loop!”
“There aren’t any more,” said Jarleen. “It was a closing-out sale. Just barely made it for exchanging the cost of my old mount.”

“You know,” said the ‘caster thoughtfully into the long, smooth silence, “I’ve never seen a three-pinchered scorpion before.”
“He’s an exotic,” said Jarleeen. “Common in his species.”
“What species?”
“Western Mojave Turrduken.”
The ‘caster waited for an explanation. 

“So,” he said at last, “can we expect to see more of…”

“Tylerbillyman.”
“…Tylerbillyman?”
“Absolutely not.  They- HE – is.  Are.  Very tired.   Elderly and a bit overfed.  HE deserves retirement.”

“Sad to see a dark horse like that leave, but it only adds to the mystique I suppose.  You know, he did the work of three mounts out there today.”
“Yes,” said Jarleen.  And she left, before she admitted anything else.