1. Norton vs. Happy Stay Hotels, 2013. Concerning a) the rights of bedbugs to book hotel rooms in the State of New York, and b) the right of remain of any children resulting from undiscovered eggs left in the hotel room. The court found for Norton in regard to room booking, but dismissed the right of remain issue.
2. Mr. Tiddles vs. Jasper, 1965. Concerning the party responsible for paying for Mr. Tiddles’ reconstructive surgery following extensive injuries sustained as a result of running into various kitchen objects wielded by mice in his home. The court ruled that, as he was trying to catch and eat the mice at the time, their actions could legitimately be ruled self-defence.
3. Ursula vs. the State of Connecticut, 1987. Concerning the employment rights of bears who hibernate for some or all of the winter. The court ruled that hibernation rights should fall under illness and disability law.
4. Eudryas Grata vs. Lighting Warehouse, 2009. Concerning the rights of moths who wish to throw themselves against light bulbs, and to whom any clean-up costs accrue. The court ruled, after a persuasive speech from the Moth Nation, that Moth light bulb rituals are a legitimate act of religion and that in general moths of sound mind who fly at light bulbs should have the right to do so.
1. There was a bookshop that left a crate of books in a damp, unattended cellar for a little too long, and the books went musty and feral. When the crate was finally levered open, a book on British Birds had eaten half the cover of a second edition of Peter Rabbit and a pair of vampire novels had sucked half the other books dry of words and were entwined in a suspiciously damp tangle of pages at the bottom of the box. The bookseller opened up one of the vampire novels and began reading, in hope of seeing if there was some way of retrieving the lost text.
2. By page 238 the vampires, who were languid lovers of elegance who largely obtained their blood off-page, were draping themselves over the mouldering couches of a vacant Los Angeles mansion. It was said to have been left abandoned after the death of a 106-year-old silent movie actress some years before; the true owner was a matter of legal contest, with the estate probably having been left to one of a number of nearly-identical cats. Although the mansion satisfied their craving for glamour, they were uncomfortable with its mirror-heavy decoration. During the daytime the sexier of the two would wander around the shuttered rooms, gazing at their deserted reflections and feeling only half-real. It seemed an odd choice of decor, given that the actress reportedly had had all obtainable trace of her image on screen destroyed. In puzzlement, he turned to her diary, which they had found under a floorboard when looking for a place to hide bones.
3. It was in the third year of the diary, sometime in the mid-60s, that the actress installed the mirrors. By this time she was well into her years of seclusion, and looking after her triplet granddaughters, who had been orphaned the previous year. She dreamed in those days of a house full of children, of laughter and midnight feasts and tears that always stopped when her comfort was offered. But there were never enough children. The mirrors helped her pretend somewhat. But behind everything the house remained, implacably cold and silent, untouched by the brief merriment of three rather melancholy toddlers. On Sundays they gathered in the blue parlour, which had been entirely lined with mirrors, and the actress read fairy stories to her infinitely reflected line.
4. The children were particularly fond of the story of a poor man’s daughter who put on the clothes of a boy and set out on the road through the great forest to find her fortune. By and by she came to the castle of a horned queen, deep in a valley far from the official paths, and entered her service in exchange for protection from a following spirit that she had picked up on her travels. She was given a series of tasks to complete, including finding the queen’s mother’s heart, which had been buried beneath a flagstone, and counting the magpie spirits that came each morning to peck silver leaf from the castle gates, and negotiating with the creatures that used the bottom of the well as an entrance to this world. It seemed that she might inherit the castle if she was successful in all that was set her. But by the end of the tasks she did not want the castle. She asked instead for the Queen’s Book of Secrets, which she kept inside her pillow, and with the book she went down the well and was never seen again.
5. The Book of Secrets contained many things that were hardly known in that day and age. Perhaps it was a leftover from a more knowledgeable time. Though none of them were magic as such, they mainly concerned knowledge that would give one power over others, and devices that could be seen as magical by those who did not know their secrets. One page described how to make a clockwork man, perfect in every detail, and how to maintain the illusion that he was an independent servant (for, as specified in the book, the clockwork man could be made to do a single task, but not to change tasks). Many of these servants had been made in the past, but they had a tendency to outlive their usefulness and end up packed away for centuries. I hear tell that there was a bookshop once found one in a cellar and used him to shift books, but he was forever leaving them in the wrong place.
1. The dead are turned into diamonds; or at least, their carbon is, the other elements falling away as steam or ash, apart from those that are saved to form a small and individual flaw. There is a great dark vault under the city and in it a warren of dark rooms. This is an old society. Each dark room is something like a family tomb, decked with the diamonds of hundreds of generations past. You may enter one at a time, with a candle, to spend time with the glittering dead.
2. Each year after coming of age, on their birthday, they write a little more of the stories of their lives on their skin. The yearly tattoos can be anywhere and may be of any length, though the wise and old leave space for many years to come, because this is a country just growing into a confident medical maturity. When they die, their skin is their biography. Usually, the grieving family adhere to the request of the deceased: burn it, or save it. In the older families, inclusion in the family book or books is held to be of great importance; their libraries have rooms for the dead.
3. They are at ease with the presence of the dead. It is customary to bury in gardens, deep beneath the vegetable patch. Though there is little ceremony, the consumption of the first crop of vegetables after the burial is as close to a wake as they come.
4. All bodies are scanned and digitised as soon as possible after death. It is an intensive process which does not leave much by way of physical remains. Instead, the relatives take home information: composition, measurements, networks, probabilities of the dead. They do this not because there is a chance that they could be reconstructed, but because data is sacred. Information is power and by consuming the information of others one becomes more powerful.
5. There is a legend that the dead will rise up as an army to save their people in a time of peril. But the people are in a time of peril already, and have been for some centuries. The dead seem not to be taking the hint. Now there are great ships that take their dead to the coldest parts of the world. Their funeral garb is body armour and the coins on their eyes night-vision goggles. They stand, at ease, frozen in great ready ranks, waiting for the call of the dead’s new generals.
6. Death is a matter for great public shame. The official line is that the forward march of medicine has conquered it. If only humans would be careful with their fragile bodies, if only they would eat and sleep and fuck as they were told, if only they would avoid all risks, if only they would not be the sort of people who have bad luck. The official line is that the dead have squandered their lives. It is often very hard to find out if someone has died, because the mark of utmost respect is to hush up a death. There is a service to discreetly take away bodies. One may hire actors to portray occasional reappearances, or write letters from distant lands. The censuses of the age are filled with fictitious centenarians. But I believe the average lifespan of that time is not much more than in our own.
7. They take the dead into space. Some choose, from this point, to be a shooting star and burn up in the atmosphere. There are set nights for these artificial meteor showers and the population of the world comes out to watch. Others choose the other way: to be taken out to deep space and launched on a trajectory that will, some millions of millions of years hence, touch down gently over the event horizon of a black hole.
0330 Delightful objects
-0330.1 Those that fit precisely
–0330.11 Objects that go into holes of the same size
–0330.12 Objects that stack into neat shapes
-0330.2 Those that are exactly the right colour
–0330.21 Those that form a rainbow when lined up
–0330.22 Those that are a particularly good shade of a good colour
-0330.3 Those that are of great usefulness or value
–0330.31 Things that are both useful and beautiful
–0330.32 Things that do not delight in themselves, but are of high enough worth that one may sell them and purchase something delightful
–0330.33 Things that may be used in the making of art
–0330.34 Those that awaken within you a pleasant memory of the past
-0330.4 Those that cause delight to those you love
–0330.41 Objects that cause a ripple of delight throughout humanity
-0330.5 Those that balance
–0330.51 Piles of pebbles on top of each other
–0330.51 Piles of other things on top of each other
-0330.6 Those that can be made to do a complex mechanical dance
-0330.7 Those that are artful tricks
–0330.71 Those that trick the eye
–0330.72 Those that are puzzles in which the mind can wander, caught up, for hours
-0330.8 Those that delight the senses
–0330.81 Those that smell delightful
–0330.82 Those that have a pleasing sound
–0330.83 Those that are pleasant to touch
–0330.83 Those that taste good
-0330.9 Those that have a satisfying weight
–0330.91 Well-made tools
1. Some fragments of faded orange netting, now unravelling in a drift of pebbles and curious anemones. It is apparently an import from the human world.
2. A small patch of golden sand. On closer inspection, it is not sand at all but a mass of tiny machine parts in bright metal, as if a host of tiny clockwork things had been crushed down to their constituents.
3. A great tangle of purple seaweed. It has either grown into elaborate knots or been tied in them. Draped down the beach, it gives the sand the look of an illuminated manuscript grown from the wild and ready to strangle the careless reader.
4. A whole split oak trunk, sea-bleached and sanded smooth apart from a dark ashy flaw at its heart.
5. A triangle, half a metre across, rigid and almost insubstantial; it can scarcely be gripped, seen or smelt. It is more like a disturbance in reality than an object, and is uncomfortable to remain beside for any length of time.
6. Six large coins of a silvery metal, worn almost flat by years of handling. On some of them the smudged outline of a horned face in profile can be seen.
7. A starfish with the vestiges of a human face on its underside. It cannot talk, of course; but there is some sort of light in the eyes. The mouth under the starfish moves constantly, and maybe a talented lip-reader could tell if there is a message there.
8. The stinking, dried-out carcass of something with too many legs. In its open stomach a small pile of rings, trinkets and loose gems lie unclaimed.
9. A great drift of pre-World War I era shell casings, stretching down the beach and into the water. In fact, there is no end in sight of them, and other similar drifts can be seen at intervals further down the shore. When the waves are still and the water is clear, one can see them extending out over the seabed as far as one wishes to sail out, though there cannot have been so many bullets in the whole world. It may be that they are the residue of some distant, endlessly recursive act of violence somewhere in the Perilous Realm.
1. Turner’s Human font. A font in which each letter is made out of people. Owing to the need of people to get up, stretch and pee from time to time, this makes any text written in Turner’s Human necessarily transient. In addition, since each letter in the Latin alphabet requires two or three people, the amount of text that can be set in Turner’s Human is necessarily limited by the population of the Earth. Currently, with a population of around 7 billion, just over half a billion words in English can be set, or enough for about ten copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
2. Fontstars. A short-lived supergroup formed by Times New Roman (on serifs), Helvetica (on bold) and Arial (on kerning). Comic Sans was briefly a member of the group but contributed little besides excess punctuation marks. In later years Times New Roman and Helvetica left the group after an unspecified altercation, being replaced by Papyrus and, later on, Impact. Currently Arial’s involvement is on hiatus, though Papyrus and Comic Sans have been collaborating recently on some novelty text for Christmas.
3. Warrington’s Doctor Font. A font for expressing ambiguous or difficult-to-read cursive text in the modern age. Are you looking for a character which is half-way between a letter r and a letter n? What about a character that could be e or i? With letters such as ‘up-and-down squiggle’ and 'horizontal line with a dip in the middle’, Warrington’s Doctor is the perfect font for expressing unreadable writing in an electronic medium.
4. Dimensional flip text. Instead of proceeding straightforwardly left to right across the page, each letter in dimensional flip text hangs down into the page: that is, on the uppermost page, the part of each letter that is usually rightmost can be seen, and on each subsequent page below another letter slice is visible. Each piece of text therefore requires several pages. Dimensional flip text is extremely difficult to read unless you shave off the paper bit by bit to get to each letter in its hanging-down form. It is consequently useful for text which is intentionally transient.
5. Brick shithouse. With serifs of 100% pure brick and character weight that can be used to stun a burglar, brick shithouse is the font of choice for angry ransom demands and letters to the Daily Mail.
1. 10. A true classic, ten in base ten is so widespread that it cannot but help be at the top of our list.
2. 101. Ten in ternary. Because you love radix economy, and ternary has radix economy.
3. 14. Because you are interesting and a bit obscure, just like ten in senary.
4. 1010. Where would this list be without ten in binary? Short, that’s where.
5. Fish. The ten of choice for the lazy surrealist.
6. A. Do you like computing? Are you bored of binary? Then ten in hexadecimal may be for you.
7. 12. Ten in octal, perfect for slightly more obscure computing fans.
8. X. For history buffs, Roman numeral ten may be the way to go.
9. 11. The ten of choice for the chronically late.
10. < (well, approximately). For history-buff one-upmanship, why not try ten in Babylonian sexagesimal?
1. Ocelot and vanilla. A time-honoured classic, enlivened by real Norwegian cream and ocelots.
2. Saucylot. Ocelot, ketchup and forty cloves of garlic, lovingly mixed by our mixologists before being gently chilled in the vacuum of deep space.
3. Notalotofocelot. From our new homeopathic range, zero-calorie Notalotofocelot contains one or two molecules of pure ocelot ice cream, lovingly mixed with pure Cornish air.
4. Chocolate fudge ocelot. All the fudge in this gently fluffy chocolate icecream has been personally passed through a certified ocelot before packing.
5. Cosmic Ocelot. A truly out-of-this world flavour combination, Cosmic Ocelot contains the lightly spiced essence of one whole ocelot in our super-creamy dark cherry base, seasoned with popping candy and only the finest selection of nano-scale black holes.
6. Oscillateitstitalot. A cheeky combination for a romantic evening in with the icecream spoon: ocelot tongue, wasabi and sun-warmed gravel.
7. Strawberry surprise. The surprise is an ocelot.
8. Chocelot sundae. One freshly strangled ocelot, gently enrobed in a real Belgian. With a cherry on top (optional).
1. There was a creature called an Offaphoffilus, which had fifteen legs and the face of a grumpy sloth. It had never quite found a comfortable home, because these were usually built for creatures with fewer legs. But one day it met an elderly leg collector and managed to negotiate a custom-made beachfront villa in exchange for the bequest of seven legs on the occasion of its death.
2. In later years, the villa served as a guesthouse for the nearby leg museum. It was famous for its cakes, which visitors were best advised to avoid because they always had an aftertaste of chicken and petrol. The cakes arrived every day on a small cart and no-one knew where they came from.
3. The arrival of the cakes was not in fact a mystery but an official classified Secret. As part of a project to bioengineer the ultimate soldier, a secretive Russian laboratory had developed a donkey who shat cake. It eventually graduated from the programme with a D grade and become the lab pet. However, since it also turned out to have an enormous appetite, they needed an outlet for excess cake. This the guesthouse fortunately provided.
4. For companionship, the lab purchased the Donkey a horse. As it turned out, this horse used to belong to the Queen of Bonk, but was demoted for unhorselike behaviour. It had once eaten a whole grocer and the local fruit community lived in terror of it going back for seconds. Interestingly, it was also the first horse in the world to work in web development, and had once licked Caligula.
5. There was an orchard nearby which felt in need of protection, so they called in an alchemist (all the nearby bouncers being busy). The alchemist did not succeed in keeping out the horse, but he did accidentally grow a tree on which each apple was made of a different element. Sadly, the gold apple was followed in relatively short order by the plutonium apple, and the orchard was evacuated. The irate fruit-growers put the alchemist in a pair of lead boots and dropped him into the Seine.
6. Three years later, a pair of golden boots came up at auction in North Carolina, but failed to sell due to their unattractive design. Eventually, they were melted down and turned into a small gold bar, which served gin to inebriated mice.
7. Seven mice who had escaped from a rather dull zoo fell asleep on a wandering cloud of gin fumes and had a dream. In it, there was a creature called an offaphoffilus, which had fifteen legs and the face of a grumpy warthog. The mice were fired from the story for refusing to behave. Since the story could not hire anyone else at such short notice, it had to stop.
1. On the occasion of the vaporization of Glasgow by the Titanian New Urumqi Front in 3560, following a 24-hour warning: wet stone, ozone, whisky, bins and burning peat.
2. On the slow mummification of the last inhabitant of Rome on the sunlit and cypress-covered ruins of the Palatine Hill in 10251, and the crumbling of her ancient library into warm dust: sun-warmed tree resins, old books, wild thyme and wolf shit.
3. On the unexpected reclaimation of Lagos by the sea in 2520, following a meteor strike aimed so precisely at the intersection of the prime meridian and the equator that for many years it was taken as evidence that humanity was living in a buggy simulation: Petrol, sweat, mud and the overwhelming sea.
4. On the final desertion of Isfahan in 6640 at the start of autumn, in response to the fourth wave of the Maltese Plague: over-ripe pomegranates, black pepper, and the lurking hint of something dead.
5. On the death of the last human in Hyderabad in 55801, and the sealing of the city into a tomb by the Followers before their great journey: A thousand marigolds blooming in the dust, ewers of clear water, and something like metal and pears.
6. On the destruction of Nova Cuzco by the eruption of Maat Mons in Venusian year 20881: burning wood, tomato vines, green mango, butter and sulphur.
7. On the occasion of the last unlocking of London’s new gates, some time after the arrival of the ice, but before the long dark: grease, ambergris, leather and sharp cold air with the promise of snow.
8. On the last stand at Archangelsk, 19555: Seaweed, dirt, sewage, king crabs, vodka and fear.
9. On the night that the remaining survivors realised that there was no longer any way out of Los Angeles, 3994: fine wine, cherry syrup, spilt blood, weed, tar and gunpowder.