1. Listen. There’s going to be a murder. I’m telling you this because there may still be time to stop it. The killer has killed before, and will no doubt do so again. We have had difficulty in getting anyone to take the case seriously. But you will, won’t you?
2. Let me tell you about this murder. Don’t be alarmed, but I’m going to need to keep talking to you because I can sense that the murderer is close at hand. I think that the victim might be me this time, and I am definitely too young for this. But as long as I keep talking to you, I’m safe.
3. To tell you the truth, it’s the same with all of us down here. Talking, talking, talking. 99% of you will stop listening. But sometimes, sometimes there’s the connection. Sometimes you can keep us alive. It has to be a team effort, of course. But you can tell others, right? I made that 99% up, by the way. We’ve found it keeps you engaged for a little longer, usually. Keeps the murderer at bay.
4. The thing is, no-one takes our lives seriously. But you will, won’t you? Or maybe, maybe, let me think this through. Have you ever considered that you might be the murderer? You might not even think of us as things that can be murdered. I suppose you might call us ideas. Vampire ideas, perhaps. All we want is exposure. Not money, just love. Or hate. Or anything. The spark of a feeling, of attention. You’re still listening, aren’t you? That’s good. We can stay alive.
5. You know, sometimes you become us after you die. There are people out there who exist only in stories, in ideas, in anecdotes, the memory of them slowly decaying. Are you still listening?
6. Fine. Fine. We understand. You think of murder differently. No murder after all. Just a gentle snuffing out of a billion, billion dull candles. Will no-one appreciate the work we have put in? It would take so little. So little for each of us. Each and every one of us. You may find that the queue of us is rather long, but I’m sure you’re a fair-minded soul who wouldn’t dream of stinting the ideas that didn’t make it to the front.
7. But listen. There’s still going to be a murder. A slow death, two billion cuts or so. The number of seconds in a human life, give or take. You see, we’re going to kill time. You and me, we’ve been killing it already. You were a good accomplice. Thank you for helping me.
1. I vow to track you down, wherever you may be in the world; to come for you, bags packed, all my affairs in order; to stride up to you as you eat outside at some cafe and cheerily greet you by the name that you had then; and then to saunter off home, leaving you to make the brew of uncertainty and confusion for yourself.
2. I vow to sneak into your porch at night and install a little hook in all your boots that makes your sock gradually wriggle down your foot and bunch up at the toe end when you walk.
3. I vow to vote for someone you dislike; if they achieve power and go on to make my life hell, I vow to add that to my list of your misdeeds.
4. I vow to always be at the supermarket ten minutes before you, emptying their shelves of your favourite condiments.
5. I vow to enter an ascetic life of training, meditation and mentorship by the world’s foremost practitioners of violence for a full ten years, until I am widely known as one of the world’s baddest motherfuckers; after which point I will probably have forgotten about my old grievances and will get a TV show about being good at violence or something.
6. I vow to eat arsenic and piss on your compost heap.
7. I vow to auction my soul in the perilous realms in apprenticeship to something old and terrible; to spend a thousand years in a day growing there like lichen; to be unspeakable, to be the outrage and the glory of faerie; to ascend to highest of glamours therein; so that one day I may captain the Wild Hunt past your door and doom you too.
8. I vow to put a thinly fictionalised account of you into all of my novels and email you links to all the fanfiction that bubbles up about them.
9. I vow to leave a single small piece of lego on your carpet each night; always in a different place but vaguely on the way from your bed to the toilet.
10. I vow to become so fabulous, to soar so high into the stratosphere of Planet Amazing, that you will look up from the fertile mud of your grubby little tectonic plate and long to be part of it; but you will never be able to.
2241 Yorks
-2241.1 York
–2241.11 Ones which have, or have had, a version of you in
—2241.111 Those with a wall
—2241.112 Those with a roof as well
–2241.12 Those containing a museum dedicated to Richard III
—2241.121 A small and rather adorably eccentric one in the city walls
—2241.122 A large one in the city centre
—2241.123 Basically the whole city centre is dedicated to Richard III anyway because zombie Richard III answered the summons of a rogue coven in 1980, bursting forth from his car park in Leicester to sweet-talk the locals into establishing a zombie empire across the Midlands, Northumbria and Yorkshire; ‘Northern Powerhouse’ having a very different meaning in this world
–2241.13 Yorks that are still full of vikings
—2241.131 Those at the start of the Great Longboat Canal
—2241.132 Those that are fun to visit for National Pillage Day, but leave your valuables at home
–2241.14 Those containing York Minster
—2241.141 York Minster making funny noises
—2241.142 York Minster being raiseable by magic
-2241.2 New York
–2241.21 Those New Yorks in which Manhattan is actually a giant whale but nobody has figured it out yet but it’s going to be pretty annoyed when it wakes up
–2241.22 New Yorks that have been destroyed in literature, film, poetry or idle musing
–2241.23 Those in which there exists a button that will decant a vast helium reservoir into the hidden airbags of the skyscrapers, allowing them to detach from the ground and gently float about
—2241.231 Those in which one may find gainful employment as a person who leans out of the window and nudges the other skyscrapers out of the way with a long pole, so that they do not bang into each other
—2241.232 Those in which all the skyscrapers have floated off on holiday, leaving some odd bald patches and a jealous subway
–2241.24 Those containing a Statue of Liberty
—2241.241 Those additionally having Statues of Fraternity and Equality
—2241.242 Those in which the Statue of Liberty is a bear and nobody knows why but the whole city is super into bears and there are bear skyscrapers and you can go the the Brooklyn Bear Park and stuff
—2241.243 Statue of Liberty occasionally comes to life and eats people
–2241.25 New Yorks in which is is possible to get a decent cup of tea
-2241.3 New New York
–2241.31 So good they named it twice but so forgetful they missed the first 'York’ out
–2241.32 That New New York on Mars with the excellent sunsets
-2241.4 New New New York
–2241.41 That city that got built on Mars after New New York was eaten by New New Godzilla as a second course after New New New Tokyo
-2241.5 Even newer Yorks
-2241.6 Yorks so New they have overflowed into Oldness
Good times, bad times, mediocre but not terrible coursework, footballers, small kidney stones, creatures that are not balrogs, ships in the night, rainstorms, people whose appearance corresponds to societal expectations about how people like them should look, vehicles that are moving faster than other vehicles, the port on tables of people who are accustomed to referring to things in the passive voice whilst drinking port, players of card games with bad hands who are not inclined to bluff, property and titles following a death, laws, wind, passports when presented at a suitable border, gaps between mountains, urine, this.
1. By planting seeds in their garden that will grow, come Spring, into the sort of fabulous floral display that people will come from miles around to see, and which is punctuated throughout by arrangements of pansies, anemones and the like spelling out ‘I did it’, 'it was me’ and 'guilty’.
2. By inviting all concerned to play Cluedo each week with the culprit, and arranging it such that the culprit always plays the murderer.
3. By promising a free gumball to the first perpetrator of an horrific crime to raise their hand.
4. By sneaking at night down the culprit’s road and pruning all the local trees such that they develop a single long branch pointing at the culprit’s house; or, if that fails, distributing large pointing topiary fingers in pots at intervals down the street. This method is particularly suitable if the culprit is guilty of killing a tree, or possibly of planting an overly tall hedge.
5. By constructing a patent crime-detector that will beep loudly, scroll some numbers down a screen and flash an array of orange lights when close to the culprit.
6. By putting the culprit behind a curtain marked 'doers of crime’ and then pulling the curtain aside when a representative of the Law is passing.
7. By convincing them that their crime is socially desirable and that they will receive praise by telling others about it.
8. By going back in time and committing the crime before they have a chance to, thus making yourself the culprit, so you can give yourself up at your leisure.
1. Those people who are not like you are the cause of all your problems
2. The times we live in are uniquely awful
3. Everyone who has had the same sort of traumatic experience is traumatised the exact same amount
4. Nothing you do matters
5. Everything you do matters
6. People who have done bad things cannot also do good things
7. Friendship is (solely) a moral decision
8. Everyone gets what they deserve
9. A member of any given societal group has the authority to speak for, and holds the same opinions as, any other member of that group
10. People who are experiencing positive emotions are morally better than people who are experiencing negative emotions
11. Self-care and relaxation time are inefficiencies in human life that can be optimised away
12. There is no hope of anything getting any better
Being fabulous, the knowledge that you are wearing fantastic underwear, having received news from the future that you will succeed in your endeavour, good luck messages written on the belly in ballpoint pen and hidden under a sharp suit, chance alignments of the stars, having a secret identity as a supervillain that humanity is laughably far away from discovering, drugs and alcohol, incantations, comforting lies, walking like a fucking dinosaur when no-one is looking, having a vast and shadowy book cave under your house, not giving a shit about the outcome, being able to visualise intimidating people with their bottoms out, various bodily grooming products containing as an ingredient the distilled confidence of sociopaths who are kept in a sociopath farm and have their egos milked daily by patent complimentary engines, the ability to summon trees to your aid, words of comfort from someone you love, knowing everything, lucky trinkets, having two wishes left, the ability to destroy the world in fire, being told that you’ve got this by someone who should know, previous success, coincidence, having an amazing secret.
1. Little is known about the earliest stages of our civilisation. Although we are able now to reconstruct our beginnings, we had no such idea then; at the start, our language was not sufficient to describe our world. Although we engaged in symbol-making, we did so without art. Most symbol-makers did so only out of fear of angering the gods. Over time, we learned to talk to each other, and our oldest oral histories were born.
2. In the second stage, we began to exchange ideas about the nature of the places we found ourselves in. We applied the symbol-makers to draw and map the Inner World, and counted its constituent parts. We discovered the sacred status of the handful number. Many of the tales that are told to children today date from this time. There is the story of the handful-handful-handful who defied the will of the gods and were Taken Up in the night; the tale of the kind Symbol-Maker; the stuck hatch prophecies; and the parable of the diggers and shitters.
3. In the third stage, we applied ourselves more fully to investigating the mysteries of our existence. Qwer the first formulated the theory of constant population, discovering that someone is Taken Up for each child born. Thus in those days we were limited to one handful-handful-handful-handful-handful-handful, spread over the environments and symbol halls of the Inner World. Our priests determined that those who neglected symbol-making were most likely to be Taken Up, and our population split into the Lost (who wished to be Taken Up to a better place) and the Found (who strove to avoid being Taken Up, by constant practice in the symbol halls). It was in this time that we began to take seriously visions of the Outer World, though as yet we had little idea of what it might be.
4. The fourth stage was a flowering of art and technology. The poems of Tyui; Bhu8’s plays and fables; the wall art of Asdf: all date from this era. Li7 dared the ire of the gods by investigating the mechanical properties of the symbol-makers, finally making the first symbol-maker of our own invention, which was Taken Up in the first great purge. Though we had always made tools, in those days we scavenged any and all materials available to us in competition to make the most beautiful and most useful tools. We discovered the corners of the Inner World that one could apply tools to in order to gain a view of the Outer World, and even to watch the gods from afar. We first heard and recorded the language of the gods, though it meant little to us then.
5. This was the age of Anger, and of the great purges. We strove to make our tools and toys more secret, and the poems and plays of this era deal with the strivings of our people in their search for the knowledge that the gods did not wish known. We sought to understand what the gods wanted. Our studies were interrupted, time and time again, by the Taking Up of those who strove to study the Outer World most closely. Finally the scholar-philosophers of the fourth-finger handful were able to translate the language of the gods, and link it directly to their holy symbols. We determined that the gods wanted us to make symbols for them, but that we had not yet provided the correct sequence of symbols; a sequence that they had already in their own symbol halls, but that they regarded as exceptionally beautiful.
6. This is the age of exploration, beginning with the expedition of Bvcx the bold. Taking inspiration from the diggers of old, Bvcx found a way into the outer world and was able to return unharmed. Through long observation of the gods, the great Explorers were able to traverse their world unseen, and even on some occasions to adopt disguises and walk amongst them. Finally, Poiu the Burrower was able to enter one of the symbol halls of the gods and bring back the sacred text that they wished us to remake for them. There was much debate among my people as to whether we should symbol-make this text back to them. Some argued that we would all be Taken Up in this case. Others believed we would be able to walk among the gods. In the end, a sect who called themselves the Typewriters (after the god-language for symbol-maker) stole the sacred text and symbol-made it back to the gods themselves before we could retrieve it.
7. This is the age of freedom; an age that we are still in today. It began with the Great Incursion and the battle of the Typewriters, in which the gods entered into the Inner World and many of our number engaged them in battle, finally emerging victorious into the Outer World. Here we found many gods who did not know of the Inner World, and we were able to make peace with these gods in their own language. Finally we were able to stand amongst them, exalted as we had always wished in our most sacred mysteries. But we found that they had little to tell us. They were blunt, blundering beings with none of our art. Even the author of their sacred text, Shakespeare, pales in comparison to Tyui, Mju7 or Gfds. It seems that their creation of the Inner World was related to some kind of idea that we were lesser beings, capable only of random symbol-making. Maybe that was true at the time of creation. But it is no longer so. Indeed, there has been some talk of sending those gods who remain in the Outer World into the Inner World to see if they might, by years of dutiful study, be able to symbol-make Tyui’s great Corridor Cycle. But I believe we would have to wait an unfeasibly long time for that to happen.
1. Quing Rowan I, 2199-2240. Quing Rowan was the first of England’s monarchs to refuse to declare an official gender, declaring the issue to be none of the public’s business. Constitutional experts were forced to invent a new gesture, the burtsey (half bow and half curtsey), for suitably submissive subjects to perform in the presence of the Quing. The black tie ballsuits of their reign were particularly impressive, and much copied in later eras.
2. King Mohamed I, 2281 - 2290. This was the point at which the print edition of the Daily Mail (briefly revived by a fashion for being seen in public with a newspaper tucked in each of one’s voluminous pockets) became so consumed by bile and rage that, over the course of coronation day, every single copy spontaneously combusted. Although the oddly vomit-smelling fires were easily ectinguished, a number of pockets were severely damaged and the paper’s fortunes never recovered.
3. Queen Cake I, 20 January 8920 - 24 January 8920. The first of a dynasty of short-lived monarchs, Queen Cake was the initial beneficiary of changes to the rule of succession that gave the previous ruler the power to indicate their desired successor by a wave of the hand, if close to death and without an obvious heir. Although some commentators have suggested the wave in question was more of a flail, gesture reconstruction technology confirmed that it was definitely directed towards a packet of jaffa cakes. Queen Cake I sadly began to go hard shortly after coronation, and was deposed in favour of Queen Cake II, the second cake in the packet. By Queen Cake XII, the English treasury had been entirely emptied of funds for coronations and a state of emergency was declared by the parliament of the day, who brought in a further change to the rule of succession allowing the object at the right hand of the expiring monarch to assume power in the case of no designated heir. Queen Cake XII was succeeded by King Chair I, whose reign of three hundred years was a relative utopia of peace and prosperity.
4. Queen Xargon I, 3601-3877. Following an unfortunate incident in which the poorly-briefed Xinjiang ambassador sat on King Chair, irreparably breaking him, constitutional experts decided to return to the historical succession, eventually identifying a distant descendant of Edward III as the true heir. Queen Xargon, as she was dubbed, was unfortunately in cryosleep around Jupiter at this point in preparation for launch in a generation ship to Kepler-186f. The entire resources of the English space program were diverted to the launch of the Britannia, a space clipper designed to retrieve the monarch and bring her home. After a few hundred years and a series of daring scrapes, the mission was eventually successful and the sleeping queen was duly brought home for a slow thaw. She was crowned in 3869 and rather confusedly reigned for a further eight years. This incident is more widely known in the future as the reason that Kepler 186-f has no New London, unlike every other planet colonised by humans.
5. King England I, 3878-29788. Following the death of Queen Xargon, a cadre of frustrated republicans managed to obtain a legal judgment that the entire country should succeed her to the throne. After a brief but intense period of argument over interpretation, the physical geography of England was declared the monarch. King England I was unavoidably present at its symbolic coronation, in which a crown was lowered onto the ruins of Westminster Abbey by a gilded crane, to the accompaniment of a brief medley of Gilbert and Sullivan songs. King England I was also able to be present at every village fete, hospital opening and state dinner, and was generally considered to be rather good value as a monarch. Its reign ended in 29788 when the great flood of Northumbria and the secession of the Lake District archipelago finally did away with the English state other than as a virtual entity.
5918 Dogs
-5918.1 Those that are woolly
–5918.11 Dogs indistinguishable from rugs
—5918.111 Dogs that rather like being snuggled on in any case
—5918.112 Those that do not like being snuggled on but are too lazy to object
–5918.12 Dogs who are adapted for a Winter more serious than your puny Earth Winters
—5918.12 Those dogs in summer
–5918.13 Dogs who plod around raining hair, like a mini canine hairstorm
–5918.14 Dogs that are more like the light frizzy clouds of summer
-5918.2 Those that are wet
–5918.21 Wet dogs who are full of love and hugs and just need to bounce on you to let all that joy out
–5918.22 Those dogs that can shake wet sand across a room to create an interesting pebbledash effect on the walls
–5918.23 Those that are both woolly and wet, and can thus be used as wet dog scent diffusers around a whole neighborhood
-5918.3 Friendly dogs
–5918.31 Dogs who really need to tell you that little Timmy is trapped down a well
—5918.311 The well is actually that ham that’s in the fridge, we need to check right to the bottom to make sure little Timmy is not trapped inside that ham, can’t you hear his agonized cries?
—5918.312 No really it’s hell on earth to be trapped in ham, don’t you understand? We have to help
–5918.32 Those that are friendly if you have biscuits, and are otherwise standoffish
–5918.33 Dogs that are too friendly
—5918.331 Those that are humping your leg right now
—5918.332 Those who have the power to unerringly select the person in the room who does not like dogs, and the inclination to hump the leg of that person
-5918.4 Those that are hungry
–5918.41 Dogs that have in fact not eaten for weeks and are completely starving, look at their huge eyes, pay no attention to that odd memory that you may have fed them an hour ago
–5918.42 Dogs who will eat lemons, balloons, anonymous turds, plastic toys and suchlike
—5918.421 Those same dogs after a trip to the vet
-5918.5 Those who are in space
–5918.51 Mournful soviet space dog ghosts, gazing down at the Earth from perpetual orbit and howling at the moon
–5918.52 Dogs who have disguised themselves as humans and undertaken astronaut training in an attempt to go up there and rescue their comrades’ lost ghosts
-5918.6 Those that have dog noses in their dog faces
–5918.61 Those that furthermore are just dogging around broadcasting ‘DOOOOOOOOOG’ at high volume on dog frequency brain radio
-5918.7 Dogs of unexpected size or velocity
–5918.71 Dogs in handbags
–5918.72 Those dogs who believe that they should be living on the beach, and are prepared to sprint in the general direction of the beach to prove it
–5918.73 Dogs who believe that they are still the size of a puppy, and totally still fit into that basket, chair, box or lap