This week, I’ve got another full story from my debut book, “Nothing Works, Everything Happens” to share. I’ve shared excerpts of this one before, but today, you can read it in its entirety.
This was one of the earlier drafts I wrote and while it’s likely the silliest story in the book, it did really help me figure out the tone for the whole thing. It was also absolutely one of the most fun to write.
I’ll keep things short and sweet here, but if you get a chuckle out of this story, and you haven’t yet read the rest of the book, you can still grab the eBook version from my website for pay-what-you-can pricing ($0.99 minimum, limited time offer). The paperback is available on Amazon.
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy. Until next week…
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, humanity had reached a fever pitch in the art of mass-producing cheap, expendable technology for profit. These tools were designed to be so inexpensive and so unreliable that the moment anything went wrong, they could be easily abandoned—exiled to a closet somewhere to collect dust.
Humanity’s crowning achievement in this arena was the fabled inkjet printer. At the zenith of its impermanence, the printer itself became one-third the cost of a single ink refill. The profits available were immense. Manufacturers produced millions of affordable plastic units that could handle, maybe, one resume, a few recipes and an accidental full colour image before something jammed or came loose.
Almost none of these machines were properly recycled, let alone disposed of at all. They all sat silently, patiently, stacked in corners, in piles of gifted books and old tax returns—forgotten.
Until today…
An explosion detonated somewhere behind the human with blond hair as they pulled another human, with red hair, up from the rubble and continued to run. Flames from the burning, collapsed buildings licked at their heels. Alarms sounded all around. The blond human could barely see through the thick cloud of dust obscuring the street. They ran heedlessly, desperate to find some reprieve amidst the chaos.
“Over here!” a third human shouted, somewhere off to the left.
The human with red hair stumbled and fell again, shouting something that the blond human couldn’t make out over the sound of another explosion. Once again, the blond human helped the redhead, propping them up with a shoulder. The third human, who had brown hair, called out to them again, holding a door open and waving them inside. They rushed through the debris toward the voice.
The red-haired human collapsed against the wall as the door slammed shut.
“What is all this?” asked the human with blond hair.
“It’s the inkjets,” the brunette responded, pausing as he inspected the red-haired human’s injuries. “They’re back…”
Many miles away, another human was harvesting their cornfield on a calm summer evening. An early cricket chirped occasionally as the setting sun painted the world with warmth. The human sat back in his tractor seat, enjoying a cool domestic beer, and soaked in the scenery. He savoured the peace he had found in his life. Across the field, his large farmhouse stood tall. His kids played ball in the yard. The smell of his wife’s cooking wafted all the way across the field. The tractor rumbled gently as it harvested, and the human smiled to himself, turning down the last row of corn.
Then, he saw something out of place. A few yards ahead, a bright white 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper danced menacingly in the evening breeze. The human reached down and turned the rusty key in the tractor’s ignition counterclockwise. The tractor sputtered to a stop just a few feet in front of the twirling paper.
The human stared, confused. He glanced around, then over his shoulder. No one was there.
Slowly, the human stepped from his tractor. The old metal squealed as he lowered himself down. He lifted his dirty baseball cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead as he stepped forward. He watched the paper dance for a moment more and then snatched it out of the air before it could blow away. The look of confusion on the human’s face deepened as he inspected it. His jaw clenched. His eyes widened. He shoved the paper into the back pocket of his coveralls and ran toward the house.
As the first human ran across the field and into the yard, another human, who was his wife, emerged onto the porch. She, too, was carrying a letter-sized piece of white paper. Her eyes didn’t look up as she stumbled down the front porch stairs, lost in thought.
The human man panted and tried to catch his breath. “What is that?” he said, gesturing to the paper his wife was holding.
“It’s a photo of me… on Halloween.” She looked up and directly into his eyes. A single tear traced a line down her face. She handed the page to her husband.
“I was 18! And it wasn’t really considered offensive back in those days…”
She looked down as he pulled the sheet out of his back pocket and offered it to her. All the blood drained from her face.
“What…” she choked on the words, “what is that?!”
“It’s a… you know… a d-pic,” he gulped mid-sentence and motioned quotation marks. “One that I sent my first wife… twenty years ago.” He fell into her arms.
“I, I coulda sworn we both deleted it. I watched her do it… I even took my drill to that phone after it stopped workin’!”
“Who did this?!” the human, who was the wife, asked, searching her husband’s face for answers.
“I think I might know…” the human, who was a husband, replied apprehensively.
“Is it…” the wife whispered. Her expression turned to panic.
The husband nodded solemnly.
“…Inkjets,” they whispered in unison.
The humans rushed to grab the kids, the guns, and the keys to their storm cellar.
“Gaddd dammmn yooouu combinattionnn scannnnerrr/printerrr scummmmm!” a human, who had previously been a soldier, screamed. Her Gatling gun tore holes in the surrounding walls. She continued to hold the trigger and swing the gun recklessly. Flames shot out of the barrels as the gun overheated.
“Aaaaarrrggghhh you ink-leaking paper chokerssss,” the former soldier human cried as the gun jammed and stopped firing. She threw it to the ground, turned and ran. Behind the hole-pocked walls, a symphony of tiny motors began.
Tch-tch-tkt-tch-tch, brrrrrr! Tch-tch-tck. Brrrrrr!
A flood of receipts for questionable, and arguably embarrassing, online purchases poured through the freshly made holes in the walls. There must have been fifty or more machines working away—tch-tck brrrrrrr. Transaction records for funny little cat sweaters and novelty penis-shaped ice cube trays littered the concrete floor. The soldier-human knew her odds of getting out of this alive were slim. She leapt through the air, drop-kicking down the door. She needed to get out of the city, and fast.
Receipts spilled into the street after her. More continued to print. The human who was once a soldier scanned the block for her next move when the wind blew a piece of high-stock A5 against the side of her face. Confused, she slowly peeled it from her cheek, but before she could read it, someone was tackling her.
The human who was once a soldier glanced back as a sudden, even larger, waterfall of receipts flooded out of the building she had just escaped. It surely would have buried her alive. Instead, she was on the ground across the street, and a human, who was a stranger, was picking himself up, asking if she was alright.
She looked at the massive pile of receipts, then back to the piece of A5 that she still held in her hand. The human who had saved her life helped her up, but then noticed what she was holding.
“Do NOT read that!” he said.
“What?!” asked the former soldier.
“We need to go. Get rid of that!”
Still dazed, the soldier-human looked at the paper she was holding and began reading. But what it said made no sense.
“No! Please!”
The stranger lunged for the paper and immediately shoved it in his mouth, frantically beginning to chew.
“What was that?” the soldier asked.
“I used to write poetry… when I was a teenager,” the stranger said, defeated. He died of embarrassment and collapsed there in the street.
A human page rushed into the Oval Office. “Madam President, it’s the leader of the Inkjet rebellion. They’ll only speak directly to you.”
The human who was president nodded and looked down at the bright red telephone on her desk.
“Patch them through,” she said. She glanced over at another human, who was her Minister of Defence. He gave her a knowing nod. And then she picked up the phone.
“What the hell do you want from us?!” she shouted into the telephone receiver.
Reeeee-oh! Tch-tch-tck. Reeeee!
“You listen to me, you nozzle-clogged pixel-puker, that will never happen.”
Reee-ooooo o-o-oh.
“Over my dead body!”
Brrr tck-tck-tck.
The human who was the president dropped the phone receiver. A look of utter shock filled her face.
“What did it say, ma’am?!” asked the Minister of Defence.
Within a storage room, outside of the Oval Office, at the end of the hallway, a light-hearted melody chimed.
“Madame President, what did it say!?” the Minister of Defence asked once more.
A slightly different, but equally chipper, melody played from a broom closet directly across the hall. Soon the little startup song of every inkjet printer that had ever been stuffed in a corner somewhere within the White House all began to play at once.
The Minister of Defence leaned close to hear what the president was whispering.
“They’re… they’re in the building.”
He stood and screamed, “They’re in the building!” but his voice was lost amidst the war cry of hundreds of dusty inkjet printers.
Days later, the entire world was a smouldering pile of debris. Explosions still sounded in the distance, but the fighting had stopped.
The red-haired human, the human who was a farmer, the soldier-human and the human who was president all stood together on the rooftop of one of the few standing skyscrapers. They looked out over the city as the sun rose. Smoke plumes touched the sky. Shouts from the clean-up efforts could be heard below. Barring those few voices, all else was quiet.
“We made it!” exclaimed the human with red hair. “We’re alive!”
“But at what cost?” commented the farmer, dropping his bloodied rake and staring down at his weathered hands. A tangle of severed USB cables stuck in the rake’s teeth.
The president’s highly secure mobile phone rang. She wiped the sweat from her brow and answered.
“Hello?”
…
“With a small group of survivors. We’re on a rooftop.”
…
“Why did they stop?”
…
“Really?”
…
“Thank sweet Jesus.” The human who was president paused and stared out at the wreckage of the city. “Copy that. We’ll wait for the helicopter at this position.”
She hung up the phone and remained stoic for a long time.
The human, who had once been a soldier, broke the silence. “What happened, Madame President? Why did they stop?”
“Cartridges ran out,” the president said with a sigh. “Manufacturer’s stopped making replacements for most of the damn things years ago.”
“Planned obsolescence…” the red-haired human said, bending down to adjust the bandage on their leg, “it finally saved us…”
The president smeared a rainbow of RGB colours across her forehead as she wiped her brow. “Ink-redibly useless machines…”
Everyone laughed and hugged each other on top of the skyscraper. Fires smouldered. A breeze blew and carried a river of foolscap into the horizon. The sun rose on a new era of consumer electronics.
Thanks again for reading, now go make sure that old printer is unplugged.
Aiyas
Good one! I take my old ones to Goodwill... do you think they can track me back here?