1. The Flesh Pot, 2080. Taking advantage of the widespread uptake of vat meat, the Flesh Pot specialised in providing diners with very small, very expensive steaks made from the genetic material of the celebrity of their choice. The Flesh Pot was very careful to be scrupulously above board. All celebrities on the menu endorsed the restaurant and had personally donated their DNA to the on-site vat farm in South London. As a result, their selection was a little peculiar and tended towards the C-list. However, there was always rumoured to be a basement to the building, accessible via a fold-out mirror in the building’s excessively plush toilets, where somewhat less ethical meals were served: for example, the flesh of non-affiliated personalities (bin raids for genetic seeding material being a well-publicised hazard of fame in the near future) as well as experimental organ and other scaffold-based meats. An article in the New Sun in 2082 claimed that an infiltrating reporter had been served a faithful replica of a horse’s penis made from the genetic material of a well-known singer, and that the offered menu included the option to consume the hearts of one’s enemies, given a few strands of hair and a couple of months’ lead time. As a result, the Flesh Pot was shut down in 2085, though many years later its core concept spawned a chain of neo-Venusian fast food restaurants.
2. Light.1, 2088. Light.1 did not serve food; rather, patrons ‘dined’ on light, air, smells and sounds harvested from across the world. From 2091 water was also occasionally served with meals, although many purists felt that this was going against the original concept. Light.1 was initially branded as an art concept restaurant. However, it soon found its three windowless dining rooms were frequently underoccupied. By 2095 the restaurant, which was kept in operation by the ready flow of some billionaire’s art-wank money, had primarily rebranded itself as a weight loss enterprise. Although the main restaurant closed in 2100, the concept was kept alive by a travelling Light.1 roadshow offering non-dining experiences in some of the world’s deeper caves.
3. The Cauldron, 2109. The main dining room of the cauldron was built around an enormous pot, set bubbling in 2109 and kept boiling for the entire lifetime of the restaurant. Two rows of seats (the restaurant’s entire capacity) surrounded the pot. After initially being seeded with an unknown set of ingredients, the pot was entirely stocked with ingredients provided by the restaurant’s patrons, who were allowed to taste a spoonful of the current stew when making their (exclusive, in-person only) booking. The restaurant had no chef and only a skeleton staff. Its stews were frequently peculiar-tasting, but oddly popular; perhaps because patrons felt they were contributing something to some kind of notable crowdsourcing event thing. The existence of the Cauldron was probably prompted by the 2100’s fashion for boiling all foodstuffs to unrecognisability, following the unfortunate advent of Salmonella X in 2102.
0120 Round things
-0120.1 That are extremely pleasing
–0120.11 Holes that are perfectly round
–0120.12 A full moon in a completely dark night sky
–0120.15 Marbles that are all one colour
-0120.2 That are not where they should be
–0120.21 Round clods of dirt indoors
—0120.211 Dirt of suspicious origin, possibly related to a strange cat in the house
–0120.22 Full stops in the middle of sentences
-0120.3 That are amusing or fun
–0120.31 Balls
—0120.311 Ball pool balls
—0120.312 Footballs
—0120.318 Giant balls of rubber bands, string, wool or other substance, used as tourist attractions
–0120.33 The dots on the bottom of exclamation marks
-0120.4 Of which there are many
–0120.41 Small round items used for packing
–0120.42 Food that is round
—0120.422 Food that is pretentiously round
—-0120.4222 Food that is intended to resemble the planets of the solar system
—0120.423 Food that is boringly round
—0120.424 Food that exists in four physical dimensions but whose projection into our three-dimensional universe is spherical
—0120.445 Meatballs
—0120.446 Dough balls
–0120.44 Woodlice that have rolled themselves up on the lifting of a stone
–0120.45 Wet spots on the ground at the start of a rainstorm
-0120.5 Things that are thought to be round, but no-one can be sure
-0120.6 Things that are or resemble eyes
–0120.62 The eyes of cartoon characters
—0120.622 The little dots of light in the eyes of cartoon characters
-0120.9 Other things that are round
1. The clouds that lie in layers upon layers between you and the sun on those November days that feel like perpetual twilight.
2. Dark clouds on the horizon that splinter into starling murmurations when observed more closely.
3. Clouds that creep up behind you, so that you think it is a fine day until you feel the first taps of rain on your back.
4. Clouds that rain on only one side of the street.
5. Simulated clouds made up of a large amount of pillow stuffing, to be rolled in and jumped on on cold mornings.
6. Clouds that are distant explosions.
7. Brown clouds presaging snow.
8. Tiny fluffy clouds whose shape cannot quite be resolved into amusing resemblances.
9. Clouds that fall to earth and sit wetly outside your window all day.
10. Ones that are actually marshmallows.
11. Contrails across cold winter skies like cracks in the sky’s ice dome.
12. Clouds that are hardly there at all.
Thingies, chachachoogoos, bobbits, thingumwatsits, westworps, crappium dioxide, doodahs, nappitywitchas, blackbird babs, naraloos, blop, stuff bits, big dust, detritus, lost elephants, snorgums, watchumbangas, gadingas, bin fugitives, bumbarras, sivdongs, house bibblers, manifestations, megaquarks, thicketywatchas, gorp ongs, crumbly possessionum, mixed media hail, skakoogahs, level zero items, plorp, itomium, norgits, ultragrorp, aggregations of the absurd, refined stuffium, rattlers, glorbals, rampaging thing colonies, blurpblurp, smingonka, stuff.
1. The Western Thnorbilla. A bird of highly distinctive appearance that has developed a symbiotic relationship with humans. The Western Thnorbilla is covered with stiff, spiky white feathers that resemble spines - indeed, bird experts have speculated that further evolution in that general direction would lead to a kind of bird-porcupine thing. When in camouflage mode, the Thnorbilla extends and locks together its long legs so that they resemble a handle, the whole bird thereby somewhat resembling a toilet brush. The Thnorbilla then infiltrates a human house. If it finds a toilet brush of suitable design, it drags it to a local bin and tosses it. Then it occupies the vacant brush holder, drinking from the toilet and venturing into the kitchen at night to raid the fridge. As most Thnorbilla hosts are unaware of their visitors, it is difficult to get an estimate of population. However, recent high-resolution footage of the bird’s brush-chucking antics is thought to have been obtained and is scheduled for a future BBC bird documentary with David Attenborough. Scientists thereby hope that more people may be inspired to check for Thnorbillas so a proper census of this unusual species can be obtained.
2. The Giant Splapbird. This bird, thought to be one of the largest that has ever lived, is surprisingly hard to spot. The Giant Splapbird roosts on tiled roofs, where it has evolved a sophisticated camouflage; each feather resembles a roof tile, and its large round beak can be easily mistaken for a chimney pot. Provided it chooses the right roofs, and provided people rarely look up, the Giant Splapbird can evade detection for a lifetime. We are unsure what it eats and do not wish to find out.
3. Cadden’s Warbler. Can you hear a noise, right now, that sounds a little like a dripping tap? Just on the edge of hearing? Are you sure? Listen really carefully. You think that might be it? Annoying, isn’t it. That’s the Cadden’s Warbler. You probably have two to three hundred living in the pipes and drains of your house and they will. not. shut. up. Should you be unfortunate enough to have an infestation so severe that you actually start to see them flying around, you may note that they are small grey birds about the size of bees. Due to their habitat, they are continually a bit damp and dirty and you may want to discourage them from perching on things. A really dense swarm of Cadden’s Warblers looks a bit like the sort of static that one used to see on old-timey televisions and might be a good reason to leave the country.
1. As a child he always wanted to eat a whole cake. But it was never allowed. He planned the supreme act of rebellion: a cake a metre on a side, cooked in a kiln, filled with chocolate AND cream AND custard. He vowed to eat the whole thing in one go. He failed. And in addition felt quite unwell. And in addition a wandering cat inspector took a photo of him lying in the cake’s huge remains and posted it on Twitter, where it became a meme in a way that continually popped up and shamed him throughout his life. After that point, he knew his anxiety was justified, and that the worst would always find a way to happen; and he never tried very hard at anything again.
2. Instead of sending Henry the fifth tennis balls, the French sent cake. All was forgiven. It was great cake and Agincourt never happened. In the alternate future thus spawned, humanity was 99.7% wiped out by a virulent plague in 1870 when a precursor of the ebola virus and the common cold met and fell in love in some stray cream during the annual Anglo-French cake festival. The remaining 0.3% lived brutal and pointless existences in regions of the world that were not able to sustain creameries.
3. She made a point of bringing her perfectionism to everything she did. When it was time to organise a hen night, she knew exactly what was needed; a huge hollow cake with a buff gentleman ready to leap out of it and swing his thong. The cake needed to be convincing. She made it herself. There were no cracks or hinges or anything uncakelike visible. In fact, it was superb. Any remaining imperfections were covered over on the night with a layer of marzipan. When the time came, the excited bride-to be cut into the cake to a gust of stale, exhausted air and revealed the pallid, lifeless leg of the hidden gentleman, who had suffocated.
4. As a marketing stunt, they decided to make a whole planet out of cake. It was the largest-scale replicator use to date and the ad team was very excited. A number of major scientists had been lured on board with the promise of limitless Battenburg. A spot between Mars and the asteroid belt had been identified, and the initial replicator array was scheduled to launch in three days. The next day, the rocket fell over and accidentally set off the replicator array in Baikonur instead. Rather than using chemically-uninteresting asteroids as fuel, the replicators used planet Earth. Within four days the entire planet was made of cake and nearly all sentient life had died.
1. There was once a giant who lived in a tower by the sea. Life was not easy for giants in those days and she had lived alone a long, long time. One morning she woke from a vivid dream, full of whisperings and fumblings and gasping cries, to find the roof of the tower had split in the night, and the room full of wet birds fighting and jostling at the windows and shitting on the bed. It seemed she had been taking her pleasure to the gulls’ clumsy wingtips and to the suggestively susurrating sea. In frustration, she took off her clitoris and rolled up all its tendrils until all that was left was a smooth, round pebble. She went out to the beach, where a light drizzle was falling, put it down among the million other clay-coloured pebbles on the sea-wet foreshore and stepped away; and when she was certain that it was not findable again, she went back to the tower, pulled a tarpaulin from the cupboard, and went back to sleep under it.
2. I do not know what became of the pebble or the giant, but fifteen years later only the tower’s ruined stump and the rumour of what had happened remained. There were three lovers who had heard the rumour, and they travelled to the beach and made a bonfire in the ruins. That night, when they had drunk a good amount of whisky, they took three pebbles from the beach and gave them to each other as a pledge of love (for they had also been reading about the love-gifts of Adelie penguins).
3. In later years, the lovers were forced by circumstance to live on different continents. They wrote each other thyme-scented letters and spent larger proportions of their hours flying and moping than they would have believed ideal. One of the thyme-scented letters was lost in the post, causing a minor romantic bust-up. They did not know it, but the lost letter had slipped out from a broken crate at the airport and was blown by a force 10 gale over the wet, flat fields all the way to the sea, where it sank and was used as an unusual-smelling breeding site by starfish.
4. An old man gathered the baby starfish up and sold them in a round fishbowl to a woman who collected stars. In her dark and glittering house, the starfish grew and grew, eventually ending up in a black-painted tank that had once been a bath. Once a year, on the longest night, the woman would wheel her chair into the bathroom and sing songs to the starfish about how their life would be when they returned to the stars (for she seemed to be under the impression that that was where they were from).
5. There was a widow who lived in the same town, and every day on the way to work she went past the house of the woman who loved stars and peered through its shrouded windows. She thought that she was in love with the star-woman (though this was debatable, as they had not even met). She thought that she would like to keep the star-woman in her house and feed her glittering broths. She thought sometimes that she would like to rescue the star-woman from her house after a fire and tend to her wounds and comfort her gasping pain; and sometimes she thought of causing the gasping pain in the first place. But the star-woman did not take lovers. So the widow instead drew a picture that represented in her feelings in perfect and pure and unchallengeable geometry, and she felt much happier once she had managed to abstract them from the messy and unsuccessful human level. Then she had the picture tattooed on her back.
6. The picture was published in a magazine and became famous. Indeed, the widow soon found herself not short of would-be lovers wishing to touch it, and even entertained a brief but disastrous tryst with the star-woman herself, who was a great reader of magazines. After her death, some of her younger lovers sneaked into the funeral home and stole the tattoo, which they had made into the cover of a fat book of blank paper. It seemed that some curse hovered over the book, or something of that sort, for no-one could ever bring themselves to write in it. Eventually a rumour arose that it was already written in, if only one could find the way to reveal the words, and a community of esoteric scholars grew up around it.
7. The scholars met every year by the sea; they did not have the book itself (only a few had ever seen it) and so, in an effort to understand it, they took it in turns to draw the book’s cover on their own skin. And sometimes this was done in great seriousness in well-lit lecture halls; and sometimes this was done beside bonfires on the beach at night, with the air thick with pot-smoke and the pebbles sticky with kicked-over margaritas. And had the mystery they were investigating existed, I think the second set of methods would have come closer to understanding it.
8. One year, without knowing it, they met on the giant’s beach; but by then the tower was long gone and only the clay-coloured pebbles remained.
1. The Hitler Society. Composed of 20th- and later-century adventurers who have successfully travelled back in time to kill Hitler, the Hitler Society has open meetings in Wellington, New Zealand five days before the turn of the 22nd, 23rd, 24th and 25th centuries for members to compare their experiences and to commiserate. To meet in the current timeline, of course, members of the society must subsequently have had their work undone, either by themselves or others. This may be variously in horror at the alternative future they spawned, due to a change in beliefs about the morality of meddling in the past, accidentally, or by the intervention of time-travelling neo-nazis. Rumour has it that there are a number of alternative Hitler Societies in timelines where Hitler has remained killed, and several of the Society’s members have experimented with killing Hitler in different time periods in the hope of accessing these timelines, returning after each instance to discuss with their earlier selves the merits of each approach. Although one would expect a coherent narrative about successful methods to arise from the eventual non-appearance of these members, this has so far regrettably not been the case.
2. The Time Travel Dinner and Dance Club. Unlike most of the other societies, this club is not particularly concerned with great historical events. Rather, they enjoy the companionship of other time travellers for its own sake. Members maintain a list of times and places where particularly good ingredients for fine dining are to be had and the musical fashions are to the taste of the majority; the agreement of at least twelve members is necessary for a Meeting to be called in each time and place. At the meeting, members discreetly engage local chefs and musical practitioners to provide a nice, non-challenging dinner and a short, usually rather sedate, dance, held in whatever the equivalent of a local church hall is in that time period.
3. The Long Way Society of Time Travellers. This society consists of people who have discovered at least one of the seven secrets of time travel, but have chosen not to exercise their time travelling abilities. Meetings of the Long Way Society are thus only attended by people for whom the meeting falls within their natural lifespan, and typically consist of a mixture of the lucky and the extremely long-lived. In 1980, a meeting of the Society in New York was mistaken for a coach tour of elderly Floridians and had a surprisingly humorous adventure. We mention this because, should you happen to attend a meeting after this date, you will likely run into two or three elderly members who will not shut up about the incident.
4. The Johanssonists. The main criterion for membership of the Johanssonist society is to have used time travel to perform some kind of prank at a major historical event, evidence of which must not have found its way into official histories. For example, the society’s five founder members have variously: made fart noises during the election of Pope Martin V; briefly done a silly walk behind Richard III at the battle of Bosworth Field; attended the suicide of the Chongzen Emperor in a clown mask; put a small amount of laxative in Winston Churchill’s tea at an unspecified point during the Second World War; and distributed banana skins on the ground in Sao Paulo before the Brazilian Day of Anger. The Johanssonists have only one historical meeting point, thought to be on the ocean liner Elizabeth III shortly prior to her scrapping in 2110, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Applicants to the society are only allowed to materialise on deck and must give their application story within five minutes; unsuccessful applicants face being abducted and dropped off in central Greenland at a random point in history.
5. The Big Bangers. This society consists of those who have travelled backward in time to see the Big Bang. As it turns out, Zhang & Porter’s New Inflation Theory means that one can only travel backward to the publicly accessible times close to the Big Bang (i.e. times in which a human spacecraft can exist with reasonable shielding precautions). Forward travel at this time point is subject to the familiar one second per second speed limit. The Big Bangers are thus a rather isolated society and typically team up only for the companionship of starving to death together in remarkably unpicturesque surroundings. Most set off prior to the time of Zhang and Porter, although occasional kindly-minded souls have later travelled to join the Big Bangers with food and medical convoy ships.
6. The Earth Observation Society. This consists of time travelling alien beings who have a particular interest in humans. These interests are thought to range wildly, from the purely academic to the purely culinary; a surprisingly large contingent are thought to be in the human hormone trade. No details of their meetings are made available to humans, but it is believed they are typically held in near Earth orbit with optional visits to the planet’s surface for those who are able to tolerate the atmospheric conditions. Rumour has it that a Sagittarian Phage ate most of the society after an acrimonious meeting in 18870, leading to a period of highly complex timelines.
7. Prof. Wang’s Atemporal Cat Fancy. The members of Prof. Wang’s society do not have formal meetings but frequently encounter each other. Membership criteria are very loose and members often only find that the Society exists after they have begun to carry out Societally-appropriate activities. The Society specialises in picking out particularly interesting historical cats and travelling to pet them. The largest gathering of members is thought to be on the 18th of October 2015, when at least seven members independently travelled to Antarctica to pet Mrs. Chippy, the carpenter’s cat aboard Shackleton’s Endurance, the night before she was shot following the abandonment of the ship. Other targeted cats include Muezza, Christoper Smart’s cat Jeoffrey, and CC, the first cloned cat.
9080 Trains
-9080.1 Diesel
-9080.2 Electric
–9080.25 Toy trains
-9080.3 Steam
–9080.12 Quaint ye-olde steam trains
—9080.122 Used primarily to visit Santas with dodgy beards
–9080.13 Actual working steam trains in places that still do that kind of thing
-9080.4 Nuclear-powered
–9080.42 Runs through secret tunnels between bunkers in the event of a global emergency
–9080.44 Train will explode when passing through $city unless stopped by action hero
-9080.5 Solar-powered
–9080.52 For which inclement weather is a valid excuse for service cancellation
–9080.55 Still running when there is nothing left on the Earth’s surface but rails and dirt and sunlight
-9080.6 Other tangible power source
–9080.61 Powered by LNG
–9080.62 Powered by any old burnable junk that can be stuffed in the furnace
–9080.64 Handcarts
–9080.65 Powered by people putting their legs through holes in the carriages and running really fast
–9080.66 Not powered but can at a pinch be pushed by another train
–9080.67 Trains that are on boats
-9080.7 Powered by magic
–9080.71 But still looks like quaint ye-olde steam train
-9080.8 Powered by thought
–9080.81 Space train pods on the magic woo quantum rails of the Future
–9080.88 Trains of thought
-9080.9 Trains of paranormal origin
–9080.91 Ghost underground trains
—9080.912 Of a mysterious silver colour
—9080.913 Crammed to the gills with deceased commuters
—9080.914 Still used by live commuters, who have not noticed
–9080.92 Zombie trains
—9080.921 Trains whose parts will rise up from junkyards all over the world when the zombie train apocalypse comes
Sanderson’s Surprise Organ
Devised for the jaded, sensation-seeking musical palates of the twenty-second century, Sanderson’s Surprise Organ resembles a standard, if over-ornate, pipe organ in nearly all respects. The organist is never informed beforehand if it is Sanderson’s instrument they are to play; its location is kept a closely-guarded secret and audiences are secretively prearranged. Charlotte Sanderson (later Dame Charlotte), the organ’s manufacturer, was a well-known sadist and Bach enthusiast. As well as the organ’s more usual features, she included a number of hidden functions, including: a hidden hammer which pops out and hits the organist on the knee; a pipe delivering a blast of cold water to the genital region; a retractable seat; a fire ant dispenser; and a compartment which can swing open to release a small and excitable dog. There exist a number of so-called ‘Sanderson scores’ wherein a second performer can operate the extra features from a safe distance at given points in the piece, to the amusement and delight of the audience. The rare organists who have survived a bout with Sanderson’s Organ to finish the piece originally started have won considerable fame and fortune, and are known collectively as the Sanderson Club. Their annual dinner, held at the floating gardens in New York, is a major press event.
The New Earth Victorian Choir
Founded on the Venusian colony New Earth in 3830, the Victorian Choir consisted entirely of clones of Queen Victoria. This unusual situation came about after it was discovered that the colony’s vat birth centre director, having obtained a lock of Victoria’s hair and certain dreams and obsessions, had seeded the entirety of three years’ female clone stock with Victoria’s genes. The colony took the unusual step of supplying musical therapy to the little Victorias en masse, whereupon it turned out that they shared a fondness for singing in public. In later years, they formed a choir which was one of the foremost proponents of neo-Venusian soft punk, and undertook a solar system-wide tour which included the first live performance in Tokyo since the Great Sinking.
457XB Junker
For a small extra fee, prospectors seeking to scrap a solar-class or smaller size spaceship in the late 6700s can crash it into the geoengineered asteroid 457XB Junker, which lies in the second asteroid belt of HD 189733 A. The resulting sounds (consisting of various explosions as well as the highly resonant response of the asteroid’s surface) are beamed out into space via a powerful systemwide livelink and can be picked up by all sentient beings in the vicinity. Fans of the asteroid’s output usually make the tour out to listen and watch simultaneously in one of several nearby hotel space stations. Interestingly, in 6755 one of these space stations itself crashed into 457XB Junker, permanently damaging the surface but producing (according to aficionados of that sort of thing) the most amazing sound in the history of the Universe.
The Subliminal Noise Ensemble
The subliminal noise ensemble is a long-term project attributable to certain members of the global illuminati, needing (as it does) unparallelled access to global advertising and content creation and sophisticated location projection software to pull off. The first performance (unknown to the participants) was scheduled for January 21st, 2440. For some three hundred years before that point, the ensemble’s secretive directors had been placing subliminal hints in various media sources aimed at the participants and their ancestors, with the aim of bringing together exactly the right people at the right time. In the last few years before the performance, the focus switched from ancestry and location to speech and sounds, with the aim of planting phrases, noises and exclamations of various sorts in the minds of the ensemble. On the day itself, the members of the ensemble fund themselves unconsciously drawn to central Almaty, where for thirty minutes, quite unaware, they made a series of utterances exquisitely timed and tuned to each other, which (to the audience of thirty listeners) represented the sublime culmination of centuries of work. Then they went home, with a vague sense that something important had happened, though they could not quite say what, and lived the rest of their lives under only the normal sort of subliminal influences. After this time, it is believed that the work of the subliminal noise ensemble continued with a focus on further performances, but with greater secrecy (perhaps due to a wider focus or more sophisticated methods?).