R.W.W. Greene

Bill’s alarm clock raced down the hallway, whistling to be let out. Bill put on his pants and opened the door for it. Without a glance back or a meep of thanks, the clock dashed to the center of the street to frolic with a free-range toaster

The air was pink with the end of the morning’s power broadcast. The microwaves burned a layer of cells off Bill’s corneas. He shielded his eyes with his hand and watched the appliances play. They were thoroughly engrossed with each other when the garbagebot ran them both over. The big bot paused to scoop up their carcasses and added them to the trash and dawnkill in its hopper.

Freedom seldom came sans cost.

Bill closed the door and tapped on its touchscreen to order a new alarm clock. He registered its name as Barney Fifteen. It would arrive before noon, the receipt said.

Bill shuffled to the kitchen and plucked a handful of crickets from the counter dehydrator to snack on while he waited for the coffee to brew. The dehydrator had added too much cayenne again. “Too spicy,” he mumbled. The dehydrator hated being corrected. It changed its recipe to “atomic.”

The coffee machine pissed eight ounces of dark roast into a biodegradable mug. Bill added mealworm cream and sweet-talked the dispenser out of a teaspoon of sugar. He tasted the coffee gingerly. The dispenser had discovered practical jokes and had added everything from salt to alum to rat sex hormones to dishwashing crystals to his coffee over the past couple of days. Bill took a bigger sip. It tasted okay, but so had the rat sex hormones. He captured a chair that was playing hide-and-seek with the garbage disposal and sat down to read the news on the table screen.

Smiley face. Rain cloud. Open hand. Closed fist. Poop. Sunshine. Duck. He swiped the page. Exploding dynamite. Dirty underwear. Single sock. Pine tree. Mushroom. Sad face. Seashell.

The article was about the new president. She’d wasted little time before proposing a law that would keep smartappliances from roaming free. The ones that weren’t fouling traffic were gathering in the sewers to plot, she said. The nation’s last jogger had been killed by a rogue refrigerator two weeks before. “Since the Singularity . . .,” the president said. “Before the Web awoke . . .”

Bill hadn’t voted for her. The surviving Barnies sang to each other in his backyard at night. They sounded happy.

Bill finished his coffee and ate the cup because he needed the fiber. He went back to his bedroom to wash. The bed had retreated back into the floor. Bill took the plaque eater from its charging stand and held it in his mouth while he wiped himself down with a moist towelette and polished his genital lock. He pulled on a fresh suit and left for work.

The homecomputer sealed the door behind him. Bill made a mental note to send it flowers. Keeping it happy made it more likely it would let him back in.

The Borl Next Door was working in herm garden. Sheh was the Next Big Thing in Human Development. Herm skin was even microwave proof. Bill waved and pressed the “get lucky” button on his genital lock. It buzzed harshly.

Herm lock buzzed, too. “Don’t do that again!” she said. “I almost blocked you after the last time.”

Sometimes luck was with Bill. Mostly it was not. He waved to herm and caught the slidewalk to work. A lot of the houses he passed were empty. Population control was working like gangbusters. The paint on the older houses was blistered from the morning broadcasts. A lounge chair chased a barbecue grill around one of the empty lawns. They tumbled to the ground together, shuffling through a playlist of love songs and spitting fire. Bill laughed. The grease spots left by the dawnkill made mini rainbows on the asphalt.

He punched in, leaving the other worker competing for the shift lying in the alley. Bill sucked at his bruised knuckles as he waited for the elevator.

The lift took him up to the third level and soaked him with disinfectant spray that dissolved his suit and made his skin tingle. Bill grabbed a pollen brush off the rack and took his place in line. The bell rang. Bill and his coworkers stepped forward, dipping the tiny brushes into the onion blossoms. Bee work was B work, or so the maxim went.

The new president wanted to replace all the B-class laborers with repurposed smartappliances, which was another reason Bill hadn’t voted for her.

They stopped for lunch at noon, and Bill pressed his “get lucky” button. It buzzed negatively. Becky and Brian hit the jackpot, though, and left the room to have sex. Bill concentrated on his three-fly salad.

At 12:30 the lunch bell sounded. Becky and Brian looked hungry but satisfied.

“We’re hoping for a girl.” Brian picked at the last few flies in Bill’s bowl.

Bill smiled. It wasn’t likely. Even if they had conceived, only one birth in ten was allowed to be a girl. Bill took a clean pollen brush from the rack and returned to the onions.

The shift ended at 5 p.m. Bill feinted left and punched out with an uppercut that caught the security guard by surprise. The guard sat down hard and spat out a piece of his tongue. The vacuum cleaner slurped it up and offered first-aid. Bill pulled his check out of the guard’s shirt pocket and took the slidewalk back to his neighborhood.

A passing label maker had covered his front door with graffiti. Bill moved his lips as he slowly puzzled the words out. “We Are the Internet Made Conscious,” it said. “Label Maker 22 Was Here,” read another.

He’d forgotten to order flowers for the homecomputer, and it refused to open the front door for him. Bill held out his check as a bribe. The door took the money but stayed shut.

The day-to-night network blocked the sun at 6:30 sharp, and the neighborhood fell into shadows. High above the satellites gobbled solar power, storing it up for the broadcast at dawn. Bill shivered. He was cold and hungry. He retreated to the back porch and huddled in a dumb chair to wait.

Barney One meeped him awake a while later. Barney One was Bill’s first alarm clock, and the biggest. Its edges and corners were rounded with wear. It rubbed Bill’s ankle with its time-set dial.

“Hello, friend,” Bill said. He had fond memories of Barney One. It had woken him during all his weeks of elementary school and job training. One time—.

There was another chirp in the darkness. Barney Two. Barney Two was Bill’s first “grown-up” alarm clock. It was sleek and business-like. The clocks meeped to each other and nuzzled Bill’s feet and legs. They should have shut down for the night to save power instead of coming to his backyard, but they made up their own minds.

The patio door slid open enough to let Barney Fifteen out. Bill lunged to catch the door before it closed but only jammed his fingers against the bulletproof glass.

Barney Fifteen was the smallest alarm clock yet, nearly featureless in brushed silver. It meeped and projected the time on the wall. Midnight plus thirty.

The Barnies chased each other in a circle. Barney One growled playfully. They gathered around Bill again, bumping at his ankles.

“I don’t have anything for you,” Bill said. “I’m sorry. I wish I did.”

He lay in his patio chair, which had not been built for service, just for sitting. It couldn’t move and didn’t want to. The Barnies formed a semicircle in front of him.

The microwaves would be strongest at dawn, powerful enough to cook any organics still outside. The porch would give Bill some protection but—

“Will you wake me up before the broadcast?” Bill said. The homecomputer would surely let him in if his life was in danger.

Barnies Four through Six and Barney Nine rolled out of the darkness and joined the trio in front of the soulless chair. They composed a new song and sang Bill to sleep. By a vote of ten to two, they decided not to wake him up.

The garbagebot turned into Bill’s driveway the next morning and drove around to the back. The alarm clocks sang a sad song as the bot picked up Bill and put him in the hopper. They watched until the bot disappeared around the corner, then chased each other into the scorched woods to play.

R.W.W. GREENE is a New Hampshire writer with an MFA that he exorcises frequently at dive bars and careless coffee shops. His work has seen daylight in Writers Resist, New Myths, and Daily Science Fiction, among other places. Greene keeps bees and typewriters, and Tweets about it all @rwwgreene.

Nicholas Siegel

At first, I thought I was wet, but it was just cold air. I stood up from the couch to trace where it was coming from. All the windows and doors were closed. I made my way around the room, feeling at the walls, until I got to the fireplace. It felt like I was in a meat locker.

I popped my head inside and looked up, but it was too dark to see anything, and my glasses fogged, so I went back to the couch. My mug of coffee was starting to cool down, but I sipped at it anyway and waited, watching the fireplace. Eventually, I saw her bare feet, tinted blue, drifting down. It took her a while to land. She had always been dramatic about her entrances. She grasped at the top of the fireplace with her hands, her nails chipped and black, and ducked into the living room. She was dripping, but the carpet stayed dry.

“Why now?” I said. “You could at least give me a call first or something.” She had only come back once before. I found her curled up in the bathtub. She must have come up from the drain.

“John, I miss you,” she said. “When are you coming?” Her irises had faded so that her eyes looked almost entirely white, like eggs.

“How am I supposed to know that?” I hadn’t stood up. I didn’t want to encourage her. “Why don’t you stay where you’re supposed to and wait until I get there?”

“What have you done to our living room?” She was looking over at my liquor bar. “I knew you’d drink more once I left. Is that Scotch? Where the hell is all the bourbon?” I’d never liked bourbon much. I thought that would be one thing I could get rid of after she left.

“It reminds me too much of you,” I said.

She approached me, and my glasses started to fog again, so I took them off.

“You look nice,” I said. Her hair was wild, sticking out in every direction. She had always kept it straightened even though I made sure only to compliment her when she didn’t.

“I haven’t eaten in years,” she said, and she spun around, fluttering her black dress. I felt a drop of something hit my cheek, but when I went to rub it away it was dry. The room now smelled like a harbor — of sweaty men gutting fish in the sun.

“Look at us,” she said. “We’re both here. We’re here right now. I can see you, and you can see me. This is enough.” She coughed more black onto her hands.

“You think you’re here, but you’re not. Look at your feet.”

She looked down, squinted, and wiggled her toes. “They still move,” she said.

“The carpet isn’t wet, honey. You’re wet, but the carpet isn’t. Go back up the chimney. Be patient.”

“I just want to stay a little while.” She coughed again but kept her hands at her sides, and the black faded before it landed like water freezing in mid-air. She stepped toward me, and spiders scattered from where she had been standing.

“You know we can’t touch,” I said. “Remember last time?” It had been a nauseous pulse — like the south poles of two magnets repelling each other. I’d never seen sadder eyes in my life. They’d still had much of their color then.

“Then I’ll watch you,” she said. “Until I have to leave.” She sat in the La-Z-Boy on the other side of the room and watched me with a smirk on her face until I was finally able to fall asleep on the couch. Before she left, the first time, she was never the last one to fall asleep. I’d have to drift off to her snoring each night. She’d always been the heavier sleeper in the relationship.

I woke up around three in the morning and saw that the chair was empty. I’d somehow managed to kick off one of my socks, and two of the couch pillows had fallen onto the carpet. I peered back up into the chimney but didn’t see anything. The cold in the room had left — so had the smell. I made a few rounds around the house, and retrieved some firewood off the back porch. I’d need it to fall back asleep.

NICHOLAS SIEGEL is a graduate of Spalding University’s MFA in Creative Writing program in Louisville, KY. His work has been published in The Molotov Cocktail, Five on the Fifth, Bird’s Thumb, and Literally Stories. He is a lover of bourbon, coffee, music, and animals. You can find his work at nswriter.com.

Louis Wenzlow

“What big brains you have,” they kept announcing over the loudspeakers. It was some twisted inside joke that seemed to portend continued struggles — to say the least — ahead.

We shuffled obediently along the queues to the kiosks at the front of the airplane hangar. There was a giant sphere-shaped structure or craft (something awesome and probably awful!) through the doors beyond the kiosks. We called it The Mystery, since no one knew what was inside.

Dissent had been crushed within days. Their microscopic fly-drones were everywhere. Three strikes and you were out! Lucky for me I was still on deck, but the streets were littered with the live free or die, and everyone with a strike or two had NAUGHTY BOY/GIRL tattoos carved into their faces. All it took was the slightest quiver of resistance and the drones would buzz over to brand and cull the herd. On the bright side, you could say whatever the fuck you wanted.

“These cocksuckers will pay for this,” one of my neighbors in line declared with a smile. “Just wait.”

Was this guy for real? There was clearly no hope beyond potential survival, beyond whatever lurked in The Mystery.

When I finally got to a kiosk, the screen instructed me to attach the two electrodes on the counter to my temples and then select either the word “good” or “bad” as horrifying, titillating, and even beautifully profound images flashed across the screen. It was some kind of Rorschach test that was generating content from my subliminal mind! Amazing shit! I learned more about myself in the three minutes of the quiz than I had in the last ten years of my hum drum wasteful life.

“DON’T TRY TO FOOL THE MYSTERY, IT WILL KNOW,” flashed across the screen a few times, when I guess I was trying to game the process by projecting a better self.

The quiz wound down with a music video with me as the front man singing a song I never wrote but that was clearly mine. I could have listened to it all day, but then the screen instructed me to take off the electrodes and walk through the doors into The Mystery.

Once you got past the kiosks, it was one person at a time, just me and myself walking down the yellow brick road, I mean literal yellow bricks (fucking comedians!), down the final stretch, opening the double doors, and stepping through some sort of electromagnetic embryonic sheath into The Mystery, and just as I was stepping in, with half of my body still in the known, and the other half already in the sphere, I heard someone shout “Take this you assholes!” It was the smiling idiot from the line. And then there was an explosion. I could only imagine the carnage he caused — the rest of me had slipped away before the shower of shrapnel could reach me.

It was kind of a weird moment, inside the sphere. I could sense The Mystery reacting to the explosion, laughing at it, a bit like we humans would laugh at a funny part in a movie, without fear, just amused, no pity at all. But who was I to judge? We are so fucking different from one another, I projected toward its all knowingness.

I was in a space without light or darkness, neither empty nor full, except with intimacy and awareness. A cloud of shimmering mist, what I imagined as fairy dust, gathered around my body and then swirled all over and I think into me. I could feel a tingling on the surface of my brain, not painful, for the most part. Whatever this was seemed to heighten my connection to The Mystery.

“Do you have a name?” I asked it.

The Mystery found that hilarious, just as it did almost everything. “Would you like a cigarette?” it responded.

But before I could answer, before I could say yes, a cigarette would be very nice, The Mystery revealed that its offer had been just another joke. Get it?

I wasn’t sure what to think or say. I tried smiling stupidly to convey my abject subservience.

How could you have a cigarette without lips or lungs? Get it? How to enjoy a final smoke when your body was already processed, already synthesized, already gone? Get it now?

And I too was laughing then, both of us, all of us, as one, laughing.

LOUIS WENZLOW’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Cease Cows, Cleaver, Eclectica, Fjords, The Forge Literary Magazine, Jellyfish Review, The Molotov Cocktail, and other places. He grew up in suburban Chicagoland and now lives with his wife and daughter in Baraboo, Wisconsin.