Tags: Fiction

The Man from S.P.I.M.E.

“Gha,” Greeble threw the gizmo against his desk, “what an anachron! No description, no lifecycle, no bill of materials, not even a website. How can I recycle it if I don’t know what’s in it?”

Amanda picked up the broken gizmo before the desktop healed over it. “Just throw it in the recycler,” she suggested half-heartedly.

“Last time I put unintelligent trash in the recycler it was sick for a week. I thought it was going to die on me.” Greeble patted the recycler next to his desk encouragingly and it purred with gratitude. “No, I’m going to have to do a full spectrographic de-reification, then separate out the constituents with a quantum sieve. As if my phone doesn’t have anything better to do.”

Amanda shook her head in empathy with Greeble’s plight. Neither of them could understand what their ancestors were thinking when they just threw together junk without labelling any of it for lifecycle management. What good was a gizmo if you didn’t know its history, much less what it was made of, how to make more of it, and how to dispose of it. No wonder their world had gone dark. She opened the blender and tossed it in, pressed the button marked “sieve.” Greeble pulled up the iSuperAnalyze app.

“The life of a time machinist is never easy,” Amanda said and turned back to her own phone, which was negotiating with the printer to finalize the specs of the razorcat she was printing. The vorpal grass around their dorm was getting frisky, and the cats loved a good fight. The printer asked for a blood sample so the cat would know her when it was printed. She stuck her finger close enough for it to sip a sample, then let her phone send the print.

“Print a pizza when that’s done?” Greeble inveigled.

“Print your own pizza, I’m overdue at the MothWorks,” Amanda shot back, then pocketed her phone, grabbed her update bag, and ran to catch the morning slide to her job at the Department of Dream Control.