Today’s prompt: “What would you buy from the SkyMall catalog? Why?”
Oh, the things you could get on an airplane, back when SkyMall was still a thing! You could order a set of stairs for your dog. A beginner’s saxophone kit. A spatula with a flashlight on it, so you can barbecue in the dark. But you know what you can’t get on this plane, right now? A fucking parachute.
Today’s prompt: “Find a short story you haven’t yet read. Read the first two-thirds. Then pick up the story where it leaves off, and write its end.” [I have chosen a story called “Monsters from the Deep” by David Malki from the anthology This Is How You Die, edited by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo and David Malki. It is the sequel to Machine of Death, an anthology of short stories predicated on the premise, first outlined here: What if there was a machine that, if you gave it a sample of your blood, could accurately (and sometimes ironically) predict how you die? Everything up until the three horizontal lines comes from the original story (single horizontal lines indicates a section break in the original story). The parts of the original story reproduced here have been modified to make it gender neutral and remove the viewpoint character’s name. More notes afterward.]
Your first clue that something was off was that the buttons were spongy. They looked like regular hard plastic vending machine buttons, and the printing on the letters and numbers was sharp, but they were weirdly mushy to the touch. Pressing B4 to get a Snickers bar had felt like pressing two overripe grapes about to burst with pulp.
Still, the silver coil inside the machine rotated. Your candy bar dropped into the tray. When you touched the clear plastic flap, you made an involuntary gasping motion that sent a spasm up your arms and pulled you two steps backward. The flap was like raw chicken skin, clammy and rubbery.
You stared at the candy machine, your Snickers bar three feet away but separated from you by an impenetrable barrier of wrongness.
The door to the pilots’ lounge opened. Footsteps mushed the carpet. The aroma of coffee reached your nose as Fox stepped up next to you.
He stared at the vending machine with you. The only sound was the low drone of the television across the room. Some documentary on whales.
“What are we looking at,” Fox finally whispered.
“I don’t know,” you whispered back.
“Then why are we whispering,” he whispered.
“Because it’s weird,” you whispered.
“Did it take your money?” he whispered, slightly louder, as if he was going to try to ramp you back up to normal speaking volume in tiny increments.
“Yes,” you said. “And it dropped a Snickers bar.”
Fox leaned forward and saw the Snickers bar, sitting perfectly calmly in the tray at the bottom of the machine.
“Do you need help getting it?” he whispered.
“Yes please,” you said, and took a step back.
Fox looked at you for the first time. You were serious. You didn’t look at him, your eyes still fixed on the plastic flap that had felt like chicken skin. It didn’t … look strange.
Fox turned, found a counter to set his coffee on, and set his cap next to it. He bent down and reached through the flap – which moved with a satisfying thunk the way plastic flaps are supposed to – and retrieved the Snickers bar. The flap bounced shut with a kachung that rang through the room.
Fox handed you the Snickers bar and patted you on the shoulder. “Let me know if you need anything else,” he whispered, retrieving his coffee and cap. Without another word, he disappeared through the door to the flight-planning room.
The Snickers sat cool and shiny in your hand, its plastic wrapper feeling just as it should. You grabbed a corner to pull it open, and tore – too thickly, perhaps? It seemed more like cloth than a candy wrapper. Were there fibers hanging loose where the wrapper parted? You mustered the courage to look closer. No, there weren’t. It looked just like a candy wrapper. The chocolate looked fine. It smelled all right.
You took a nibble. It tasted basically like a Snickers. A little chalky maybe, but identifiably a Snickers.
“Get ahold of yourself,” you told yourself, taking a deep breath and heading for the flight-planning room. One step before the doorknob you stopped. Your cap was back on the counter. You turned back, grabbed the cap, and caught another glimpse of the vending machine in your peripheral vision.
Did it – did it look the same as it just had? Was that a Kit Kat in there? Why hadn’t you seen that before? You’d have rather had a Kit Kat.
You shook your head, turned, and went into the planning room, taking a big bite of the Snickers. You really needed to get more sleep. Your mind was playing tricks on you. As soon as you finished this flight, you’d tell Fox you wanted to –
You stopped chewing. There was a piece of paper in your mouth.
Carefully, you fished for it. Like a ticker-tape machine, you drew the narrow paper between your lips.
Stained with chocolate and saliva, it was your death prediction: BREAST CANCER. It had been inside the Snickers bar.
Fox looked over at you right as you started screaming.
The conference table was covered in shards of candy.
First, Fox had wanted to call the vending machine company, but the number on the front was scratched and illegible. He’d asked the receptionists, but none of them knew anything about it. He’d even threatened to break the damn thing, but the Plexiglas proved too strong. So finally, he’d called up Trish (the poor girl hadn’t been due back at the airport for another hour) and sent her to a bank to get singles. Then she and Fox spent thirty minutes buying every single thing in the machine.
There had been no more Snickers in it – but no empty coils, either. Yet you swore you hadn’t bought the last one.
Now Trish and Fox were using plastic butter knives to dissect every candy bar and pack of gum, looking for anything strange. The only thing out of the ordinary was that some of the items seemed to be Canadian versions, with labels in both English and French. Fox insisted on cataloging everything anyway, flipping his kneeboard notebook to the back and filling pages with his tiny handwriting. You hid in the planning room the entire time.
It was an hour before Fox knocked gently on the door, entering without waiting to be acknowledged. He held the notebook in his hand and studied it rather than looking at you. You were balanced on a spinny chair, knees drawn up to your chin, just staring through the window at the runway outside.
“We didn’t find anyhting else,” he finally said.
Your voice was a croak. “Do you remember last time we were here? It was last month. I remember because Tower gave us the ILS to three-five, which was weird. There was some kind of storm and the wind was all backward. Plus it was raining, and it was bumpy as hell.” You looked around the room without resting your eyes on anything in particular. “Then we came in here, and the first thing we saw was a yellow box. I thought it was ironic – worst landing of my career and then we come in to find a death predictor.”
“I remember,” he said.
“Why would there be a death predictor in a pilots’ lounge? That’s the last place you want one. I made a joke to the receptionist. Same girl that’s out there now,” you said. “She didn’t remember it being installed. Now there’s a candy machine and she doesn’t remember it being installed. She’s never seen anybody come to fill it. She didn’t even know it was in here.”
“I’ve never seen a candy machine be installed,” said Fox. “I figured you just planted some Skittles and they grew.”
“You should be all over this,” you said, looking up at him for the first time. “Creepy Snickers bar is right up your alley. Latest wrinkle in the global conspiracy.”
“I promise you, I am incredibly intrigued.”
You buried your forehead in your knees. “I’m like the death-prediction Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” said your muffled voice. “Willy Wonka wants me to come visit so he can expose my chest to plutonium.”
Fox checked his watch, then looked back out into the lounge room. “I’m gonna help Trish clean up the evidence so we can start preflight. Want me to save you any?”
“Mash it up and form it into a crab,” came the voice from your knees. “Let me know when it’s ready so I can come rub my chest in it and die.”
Half an hour later you were high above the ocean, Boss-Man asleep back in the cabin with three or four martinis in him, giving you and Fox nothing to do but stare at the featureless blue and talk. The Citation was on autopilot, like a train riding a ruler-straight rail for two thousand miles, and Fox had his laptop open. Long flights were his office hours.
Fox was always analyzing, categorizing, and tracking trends in death predictions. Of course, it was the spectacular and gory predictions that captured headlines and the public’s imagination – a blog post about an old lady who’d drawn ICE PICK IN EYE got more clicks than a dozen somber pieces on LUPUS – but Fox, with nothing to do on these hauls but pore over statistics and think, believed there was more to it. In conversations high above continents and oceans, in pilots’ lounges and hotel bars around the world, he had convinced you that gory and dramatic death predictions had actually risen in the past eleven years.
It was tough to track, of course, because there was no unified database of predictions; medical privacy laws saw to that. Predictions were often available posthumously when death certificates were filed (Fox had a paid subscription to a nationwide public-records database), but the records for the more dramatic deaths were often sealed as part of court proceedings, as it was rare for someone to die of SHOTGUN TO BUTTOCKS without there being a prosecution somewhere along the line. And while teens sometimes enjoyed crowing about their fresh-drawn AIR-TO-AIR MISSILE or MONSTERS FROM THE DEEP on Facebook, very few made IMPALED BY BRATWURST public.
Yet there were, Fox insisted, just as many of the latter as the former – that is to say, too many. More than PNEUMONIA or DIABETES or SEPSIS anymore.
Before the yellow boxes appeared, the most common cause of death (according to CDC records) was heart disease, followed closely by cancer, then stroke, then chrnonic lower respiratory disease. All normal, often age-related deaths that pointed to a general level of nonviolence among the public. Accidental and violent deaths of every type, eleven years ago, made up only twenty percent of all deaths reported.
Last year, as best as Fox could determine, accidental deaths were up to fifty-one percent. The average life expectancy in the first world was approaching levels not seen since colonial days.
A waypoint beeped on the GPS. Fox switched his gaze from his laptop screen to the horizon with a weary sigh. Something was clearly wrong. But was the problem with society? Were the predictors’ existence causing people to lash out in more volatile and violent ways?
Or were the yellow boxes assigning deaths to people deliberately?
That was impossible, of course – the yellow boxes simply printed out what was going to happen anyway. But in the years he’d been looking at this data, every day it creeped him out a little bit more. The line for violent Class F predictions just kept … trending … upward.
And most strange of all: the increase in Class Fs didn’t correlate inversely with the age of the subject, as might be expected – it didn’t seem that children were being born into an increasingly violent world.
The increase in Class F predictions issued was simply linear over time. Controlling for the age of the subject changed nothing. The only factor with any correlation at all was the date the subject was tested.
It was as if the yellow boxes were growing more and more cruel.
In the copilot’s seat, you stretched. You clicked through a few different views on the GPS, then checked your watch. You unstrapped your seat belt, and Fox knew you were heading back to the galley. He closed the lid on the laptop and touched the control yoke, officially taking command of the airplane.
But you didn’t stand right away, just kept staring at the big blue deck outside, a hand on your stomach, lost in thought or discomfort or something you didn’t want to share.
“I think I’m gonna have it framed,” you finally said. “Chocolate stains and all.”
“Put it in a shadow box,” said Fox.
“Yeah. Right on my mantel,” you said. “‘The Last Snickers Bar I Ever Ate.’”
A bigger story hit the news over the next week or so. Blogs had it first, then TV a few days later.
The predictors were all gone.
Everybody just assumed that their local yellow box got carted out of their local pharmacy or office building or Costco for some unknown reason and didn’t give it much thought.
But it seemed that they were gone. From everywhere.
“The bubble of the prediction market has finally burst,” someone said on talk radio as you drove to the airport. “An economically unsustainable product from the start, the company has simply gone bankrupt.”
Someone else on the program disagreed. “There’s been no filings. No public records.”
“Well, of course not! Your business goes under, you want to do it as quietly as possible!”
A third voice. “Who owns the yellow boxes, anyway? Is it a private company?”
Dead air. Then everybody talked at once, embarrassed by the silence.
But nobody knew where they had come from. The yellow boxes had just appeared, silently and subtly, in places where people congregated. Most folks had ignored them, then looked quizzically at them, then perhaps had heard a news story or read an article about them. Slowly, as more and more folks stepped into a yellow box to get their prediction, people overheard the term “yellow box” more and more.
And then it was just a thing that existed, like a bus stop. You knew what it was because you saw it every day. If you ever wanted it, it was there. You didn’t give it any more thought than that. Surely someone had installed it, just as surely someone had put the sign up for the bus stop. But who cared who that was?
Fox had looked into it once but hadn’t found anything. Presumably the FDA had been involved, or the CDC, or somebody, because of the blood and the needles and so on. But nobody at those agencies could – or would – answer some random pilot’s silly questions. There were no phone numbers, no manufacturer’s plates on the yellow boxes themselves. The only text at all, on any of them, was a neat placard with directions for use.
And now, all at once, they were gone. In the places they had been were soda machines, DVD rental kiosks, phone booths, mailboxes. Nobody remembered seeing them installed, either.
Your next flight was a week later. You dropped Boss-Man into Burbank and had ten hours to kill before the ride home. A loaner car got you into Glendale and you ate Cuban in the shadow of Griffith Park. It was a restaurant that used to be a gas station. An old-timey jukebox watched everybody from a corner.
You kept your sunglasses on, even inside. The sunlight was giving you a massive headache. Fox flipped to a new page in his notebook as black beans cooled on his rice. Trish was vibrating in her restrained way, clearly eager to say something but reluctant to volunteer or interrupt. Fox began, as always, by listing their unanswered questions.
“Number one: where did the yellow boxes go?”
You looked at your food but only moved it around on your plate. “We didn’t appreciate their horribly destructive contribution to society. They got all huffy and left humanity in peace to go terrorize some other species. Squirrels everywhere are waking up to tiny yellow boxes in their oak trees.”
Fox wrote Got huffy and moved to oak trees in his notebook. “Sounds plausible. We can check a park when we finish eating. Does anyone think they might have gotten confiscated by the goverment?” He wrote Gov’t cover-up.
“Why?” you asked. “What does the government know that we don’t? We know as much about them as anybody. You do, anyway.”
“Yeah, and it’s freaking me out.” Fox could sense Trish’s vibrating begin to enter a spectrum that threatened to spill all their drinks, so he turned to her. “Trish, what do you think?”
Trish’s eyes were nervous bugs behind her glasses. She wiped her mouth, fumbled with her purse, and eventually produced some photocopied graphs. “I was thinking about the Class F predictions.”
You would have smiled if you didn’t feel like roadkill. The girl had joined up to be a flight attendant and Fox had turned her into a first-rate crackpot within a year. It was beautiful.
Trish pointed to a graph showing the rising trend in Class Fs – a diagram you were all well familiar with. The right end of the line was a steep future projection that made all of you a little nauseous. Class Fs were growing, and fast.
To the graph, Trish had added three new lines, shallower and crossing, and had hand-labeled them F1, F2 and F3.
“Class F predictions are typically sudden and violent, right?” She flipped a page and read from a list. “LIGHTNING STRIKES AIRCRAFT. SHOCK AND AWE. SHOVEL TO THE NOSE.”
Nobody responded. You all knew this as well as she did.
“But if the predictions are growing more violent – which they are – because people themselves are becoming more violent – which we don’t know for sure,” she said, “then LIGHTNING STRIKES AIRCRAFT shouldn’t count in that analysis. Unless Zeus is growing more violent along with the rest of us.”
Fox sat back in his chair. You slowly leaned in to examine the graph more closely. Even the waiter, attending to your water glasses, snuck a peek to see what everyone was so interested in. The noise in the restaurant suddenly seemed very loud.
“I made subclasses for the F predictions we have records for,” Trish went on. “F1 are circumstantial deaths. LIGHTNING STRIKES AIRCRAFT, SLIPS ON PUDDLE OF OWN VOMIT, and so on. F2 are inderterminate, like SHOCK AND AWE. This is still the biggest group by volume. And F3 are – “
“Deaths caused deliberately,” Fox finished.
Trish nodded. “This is SHOVEL TO THE NOSE, ICE PICK IN THE EYE, that kind of thing.”
You all looked at the hand-drawn lines on the graph. F2 stayed pretty level for the most part. The indeterminate deaths didn’t tell you anything interesting.
F1 had a hump at the beginning, and then it dropped off. The circumstantial deaths were slowing down. Nature and clumsiness were fading away as dangers.
F3 started rather small and quickly climbed at a startling rate.
“So people are going to start killing more and more people,” you said.
“Something,” said Fox, “is going to start killing more and more people.”
You were due out of Burbank at ten p.m., so after lunch, the three of you holed up at a hotel to catch a nap. But you had a hard time sleeping. You tossed and turned in the overly air-conditioned room, full of fluffy, stifling pillows and drapes that didn’t quite keep out the light. Late-night flights were the worst because the day before was always a shambles. Same-day ins-and-outs were worse yet. But Boss-Man had a business to run, and you were on duty. You counted yourself lucky to have the gig.
You couldn’t get comfortable, with what felt like a knot in your stomach no matter which way you lay. It wasn’t indigestion, it wasn’t bathroom pain, it wasn’t nausea – it was a sharp, piercing weight, like you had a stone in your insides that was too heavy for your guts to keep contained. You stood, and you stretched, and you bent over and crouched and drank water, but nothing seemed to budge it. It had an insistent sort of sideways gravity that didn’t match the world’s. When you lay, it prompted you to roll over. When you stood, it pulled you off balance. When you sat down, it wanted you to tumble onto the floor.
Finally you pulled your shoes on and lurched, tipping and clutching the doorframe, into the hallway. You didn’t know where you were going, but your room had suddenly become thick, its air a blanket that smothered you. You passed the elevators without looking. You were only barely aware of your feet shuffling past each other with increasing speed and insistence.
When you opened your sweat-slicked eyes, you found yourself pressed against the ice machine. It was warm, in a way an ice machine probably shouldn’t be. You watched your hand reach out and feel its big round button. To the ice machine’s right stood a bright, colorful soda machine.
None of the sodas were anything you had heard of before. All the logos appeared to be in Japanese.
You pressed the ice machine button, and Skittles came pouring out of its spout with a loud chattering sound.
You turned to look behind you and saw an old woman just coming out of a room with a rolling suitcase, slowly lifting a hand to her mouth as she took in you and the ice machine and the Skittles. The old woman’s eyes looked like she was watching a horrible animal give birth.
For your part, you only vaguely comprehended the presence of the other person. Your vision had narrowed to a foggy oval, and the stone in your belly was pressing, hard, against the ice machine.
Then, slowly at first, but with growing intensity, the Skittles on the ground began to chitter like tiny scarab beetles. They slowly vibrated across the carpet in groups of colors, the yellow ones joining with the legs of the ice machine, merging with the metal in a way that seemed impossible. The red ones turned the other way and disappeared under the soda machine.
The rest flowed underneath the old woman’s suitcase, like cockroaches fleeing the light. The old woman looked down slowly, not sure exactly what she had just seen.
The suitcase began to roll toward the old woman’s foot. The Skittles underneath it were lifting it, like ants carrying a branch. The old woman’s hand came off the handle. She took a step back.
The stone in your belly was a spike now, pressing and dragging itself into the ice machine. The surface of the ice machine began to bunch in your hands, becoming soft like raw steak, hot and wet and yielding.
A tiny wisp of smoke. The suitcase was beginning to smolder. You smelled the burning but didn’t care.
The old woman screamed. Your eyes snapped open to a burst of brilliant white heat like an oven door had been opened. The suitcase was burning like a torch. The old woman’s hair was on fire. She batted at it slowly, like a fat wheezing dog trying to catch a race car. You tried to reach out, to help the woman, but the warm wetness of the ice machine held you, kept tugging at you, inviting you, asking you to come inside it. To join it.
And why not? The human race was feeble, a delicate, gullible species, easy to fool, easy to hurt, easy to kill. You hated the human race with a sudden blazing fury hotter than the burning suitcase. Better to sink into the ice machine. The ice machine? No, just a form. Just a construct. It wasn’t a real ice machine any more than a puppet is a real animal.
How nice it would be to see the human race destroyed – !
A door slammed open down the hall. A blur of motion. A pillow began to hit the old woman. The woman crumpled. The smell of smoke was everywhere. Someone was stomping the suitcase. A familiar voice called your name, then cried out, “What’s happening?” Pained, desperate. Fox, putting out the suitcase. A beeping near the ceiling. Water pouring down. Cool rain, cool on your skin.
His rough hands pulled you away from the ice machine. But the stone in your belly was caught – being ripped away from it was like tearing off a scab. You fell clumsily into Fox’s hands. A black mass clung to the side of the ice machine like a rough, lumpy scar. A tiny shape that might have been a chewed-up shard of peanut was still visible in the mass, before sinking smoothly into the side of the ice machine. Your stomach felt warm, but the sideways weight was gone. You weren’t heavy anymore. You felt like a doll in Fox’s hands.
Fox! Real, human Fox had saved you! Your hatred for humanity began to fade away like a dream. You had hated humanity so much! But why had you thought that? Had you thought that?
You, Fox and Trish gathered in Trish’s room. Fox’s normally neat printing had devolved into something closer to a scrawl as he’d filled several pages in his notebook within the last half hour.
“Okay,” he said. “We have more clues. And more questions.”
“Yeah,” you said. “Like, what the hell is this thing? And why’s it fixated on me?”
“Is it fixated on you?” Trish asked, her normal reticence jettisoned by the recent crisis. You gave her a meaningful, do-not-demean-my-experience look. “I mean, obviously it’s fixated on you, but is it only on you? Are there other people in other countries who are getting sucked into vending machines? Are there other people who are one Whatchamacallit away from genocide?”
“Let’s hope not,” Fox said. “Let’s think about what we know. We had a candy machine and an ice machine. And you said the soda machine looked weird, too.” He tapped his pen on the edge of his notebook. “The yellow boxes were all replaced with things like candy machines and soda machines and Redboxes. You were drawn to the ice machine by something in your stomach. And you think it was a piece of the Snickers bar?”
“I don’t know,” you said.
“Well, it’s at least as plausible as the squirrels,” he said, jotting into his notebook.
“Do you think it’s all gone now?” Trish asked. “The Snickers bar, I mean. Are you feeling all right?”
“I don’t know. It was a pretty slow build over the last few days from headache to full-on vertigo and mild body horror. It could be all gone, or it could just start building up again.”
“When we get back home, maybe you should take some time to go to a clinic,” Fox suggested. “Get an X-ray, see if there’s any foreign objects in there.”
You snort. “I suppose I should get a mammogram while I’m at it?”
“In all seriousness?” Fox says. “Wouldn’t hurt.”
The X-rays were uneventful, from what you could tell. They hadn’t been thoroughly inspected by a doctor yet, but at least the technicians weren’t shouting “Oh my god, I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Fox and Trish were in the waiting room. Boss-Man had an opening in his schedule this afternoon, and you could tell by Fox’s expression that he wouldn’t be able to contain himself if he didn’t have the X-ray results as soon as humanly possible. Trish was practically humming with nervous energy.
A nurse led you through the corridors of the outpatient clinic from the room with the X-ray equipment to the room with the mammogram. There was a snack machine in one hallway. You pressed your back up against the opposite wall and scooted your way past it, staying as far away from it as physically possible. The nurse looks at you warily, but you don’t care what she thinks.
The nurse introduces you to the mammogram technician, who starts explaining the process to you. “We’ll need you to disrobe from the waist up,” she says. “Then we’ll place your breast tissue between these two plates. The plates are going to compress a bit to flatten the tissue so we can get a better picture.”
You tune out. The lights are so bright in here. Sure, it’s a clinic, but does it have to be so bright?
“The whole procedure is very safe – typically you’re getting about half a millisievert of radiation….”
Now there’s a pang in your stomach, and you feel dizzy. “Something’s wrong,” you try to say. “I don’t think we should do this right now,” you try to say. “I need some air,” you try to say. But you can’t seem to say anything right now.
“All right, ready to get started?” the technician asks. Your head nods heavily, dumbly, and your feet slide toward the mammogram machine of their own accord. The technician doesn’t seem to notice your discomfort. She’s too busy fiddling with the machine.
“Do you know when we got the new machines?” she asks the nurse.
“A week or two ago, I think,” the nurse replies.
The plates that clamp around your breast tissue are as clammy and spongy as two hand-formed hamburger patties. You slump against the machine and feel a familiar hatred course through you. Stupid humans so foolish so useless how lovely to watch them all die how lovely to choke their silly lives out….
“Hey! Hey, are you okay?” the technician says as your body presses into the mammogram machine. She pushes a button on the control panel, then pushes it again, harder. “It’s not stopping!”
The control panel falls off the suddenly precarious mammogram machine, and Red Vines spurt out of the machine’s innards. The technician steps backward as pink and white animal cookies march down the vines and begin to congregate on the floor in the middle of the room.
“What in the world…” the nurse begins.
The technician recovers herself and dashes toward you. She tries to pry the plates apart, and with a grunt, you’re released. “Come on,” she says, let’s get you out of h–”
Your hand shoots upward with unaccustomed strength and squeezes her windpipe.
The nurse shrieks and runs toward you, trying to pull the technician away from you, but you just backhand her to the floor. You keep squeezing until the technician is dead.
The nurse gets to the waiting room only a few moments before you do. “Run!” she screams at the assembled patients in the waiting room, but it’s too late. Your preternaturally strong, mechanical hands begin ripping through flesh and bone, through children waiting with Dum-Dums in their mouths as their parents are interrupted from making follow-up appointments, through a pregnant woman here for an ultrasound.
Fox and Trish look at each other, a sad understanding in their eyes. “I guess now was the time,” Fox said, as he unfolded a thin strip of paper from his pocket. A strip of paper with your name on it in all caps.
BREAST CANCER only took you indirectly. First, the machines used your body to wreak carnage on about half of North America. Then, they walked you off a cliff. Perhaps CLIFF would have been more accurate. Even BREAST CANCER DIAGNOSTICS would have been more appropriate. But anyone who thought the machines played fair was kidding themselves.
[I decided not to change the death “BREAST CANCER” in the book. Men can get breast cancer, too. And they can get mammograms, as well.]
Today’s prompt: “After the above prompt [yesterday’s prompt], try this: ‘She is lying. This is what she wants most in the world.’”
You had just noticed some adorable bear cubs up a tree and were taking some pictures when you hear an unearthly sound coming from behind you and turn to see a she-bear. Idiot. Of course the mother would be nearby.
You might get out of this if you just get away from the cubs in time. You bolt off to the left, but the mother follows you.
There is an unsettling gleam in the eye of the she-bear as she charges toward you. An uncanny valley gleam. A gleam almost like an LED.
She isn’t relenting in her pursuit of you, and she’s gaining. You see a long, sturdy, sharp stick on the forest floor, and you grab for it. Maybe you can scare her off with it, or if you land a hit with it, maybe you’ll dissuade her from following you, and go back to her cubs. Or maybe she’ll just get that much angrier. But you don’t have a lot of good options.
The bear is nearly upon you. You swing the stick at her head, grazing her eye.
Sparks shoot from the eye. And the scratch you made on her face, rather than drawing blood, merely scrapes the faux fur away from the metal exoskeleton of the bear-shaped robot.
ROBO-BEAR IS PROGRAMMED FOR CARNAGE. ROBO-BEAR CARES NAUGHT FOR FAMILIAL RELATIONSHIPS. ROBO-BEAR WANTS ONLY CARNAGE. THIS IS WHAT SHE WANTS MOST IN THE WORLD.
Today’s prompt: “Start a story with: ‘This is what she wants most in the world.’”
This is what she wants most in the world: to see her family thrive. To see her cubs grow, to teach them to fish, to show them where the best berries are. When they were born, she licked them clean and nursed them. She coaxed them to climb trees. She would do anything for them.
And you? You’re standing right between her and them.
Today’s prompt: “Irresistible temptation”
The decadent-looking, poison-laced slice of chocolate cake.
The cliff’s edge, imbued with adrenaline.
The cultists’ library, shelf upon shelf of occult knowledge opened before you, blinding you to the guard approaching you with a dagger.
The booby-trapped vault of treasure gleaming in the setting sun.
The attractive Dream Witch Yidhra, devouring you to learn how to take on your appearance.
The Nancy Reagans of the world were wrong. Even the anti-drugs will kill you.
Today’s prompt: “That person your mother always warned you about”
“I don’t like you hanging around with that Jeffrey Dahmer guy,” your mom always said.
Today’s prompt: “Your favorite wine”
The Bordeaux from Château Margaux has an elegant mouthfeel, with tanned leather and spice on the nose, balanced tannins and notes of pepper. The glass of it you just finished also had a fatal dose of strychnine.