Vending Machine (CW: Gore, Late-Stage Capitalism)
My life spikes.
I guess I should say, it’s in the neighborhood of major spikeage. There was a while there where I was in a pit of what I would call “unfathomable spikeage,” but things aren’t so bad anymore. It’s getting better, I guess I should say. If I was Sisyphus, I’d be about halfway up the mountain. Whatever “over the hill” means to a guy whose entire existence consists of going uphill.
My neighborhood got a bunch of new installments recently. There’s new sidewalks with fur-grass that you can actually walk barefoot in—it’s got these special enzymes that digest all the broken glass that “somehow” keeps “ending up” there. There’s some new stores that are actually kinda nice—they don’t even yell at me if I walk around in them too long without buying something. I even got a new job! It was about time, after I lost my old one in the Rockabilly crash. Fuckin’ stock markets. Total bullscum.
Honestly, I’m just glad the neighborhood didn’t fall into Pessimus. That was always something my mom kept whining about, since we’re so close to the bottom of Lobos, but from all the times I’ve seen city blocks above us necrotize and plummet into the darkness below, I always knew that height was never a factor. The number one factor is—and as far as I know, always has been—money.
Which is why, thank god, I got a new job. I even made my rent payment this month. And all I have to do is deliver noodles for this new joint—Nib’s Noods—for about eight hours a day! I make 140 ozz an hour, plus tips, and they don’t even check my tips. The IRS doesn’t know shit about my real income, and I like it that way.
Especially because of what I use my tips for. Some scumheads at work are the kinds of guys who save their extra ozz, whether it’s for a rainy day or in case of an emergency, and I know one guy who’s saving up to buy a fancy Fang ring for his datefriend. I’m not that type. Almost every ozz I make, I put right back into the community.
I buy soda pop from the vending machine by my apartment complex.
I know it’s not good for me, believe me. But after the day I’ve had running back and forth across the neighborhood, a cold sparkly is the least I could ask for.
Especially after my subway ride! Did I mention the subway ride? Like I said, the neighborhood’s always kinda been a scumhole. The subway’s a lot better than it used to be, but it’s not perfect. Or anywhere close.
For example, today I walked into a subway car with a roach as long as my forearm. It was chowing down on a burger some scumhead had tossed onto the floor. I think there were some fries, too.
I was less than a second away from bringing my running boots down on that spiker. The second it entered my line of sight, I got a vision of how good it would feel to crush its exoskeleton and spurt bug juice everywhere.
But right as I was lifting my foot, it occurred to me: the roach wasn’t doing anything wrong. It wasn’t the scumhead who’d littered on the subway. Fact, it was picking up trash. Thanks to that thing, not a morsel of food was being wasted. I’d probably do the same thing, if I was a roach. So I left it alone.
I got off at my stop and headed towards my apartment. I’d been working at Nib’s for long enough to have the route down to muscle memory—I let my body take me back home while searching my pockets for my ozz card. I swear, I lose it in a different pocket every single time.
At last, my fingers snagged on a piece of chitin. I pulled out my ozz card, in all its glossy, translucent, vaguely yellowish glory, admiring the pieces of gray matter floating around in there. Every dent in those inner softies represented an ozz I’d earned the hard way. Now, like, half of it was about to go down the drain.
I lowered the card and beheld the vending machine.
“Oh, scum!” I said aloud, my voice scratchy from the hours of silence I’d been walking in all day.
Like the rest of the neighborhood, the machine was new, too. It must’ve just been updated.
It was roundish, with a wide base and a narrower, tapered top. It kinda looked like the top half of a pill. The main display was made of light green polyglass, and all the processing parts were covered up by black, blobby, plated mass. In the middle of all the black shell, there was a clear “INSERT CARD” and a keypad. It was like I was looking at an egg about to hatch, except this egg had soda pop in it.
I collected myself just fine, though. Nib’s has one of these upgraded machines right by the cashier. It doesn’t carry Nitrola, though, so this is the first time I’ve given one a second glance.
I sifted through the drinks behind the glistening green screen. “Nitrola, Nitrola…” I muttered to myself—there! “Ah. E9.”
I inserted my card—PING! 15 ozz—and jammed my thumb into the E and 9 keys, then wiped the slime off on my jacket. I was right; the machine was just installed.
The machine went to work. Its multi-jointed arm unfolded from its place in the inner wall, and it maneuvered towards my Nitrola. I was licking my lips already, imagining the caffeine and syrup cascading down my throat.
The arm extended its claws. I leaned forward with barely-contained ecstasy as it moved right past the Nitrola.
“Wait, what?” I said out loud, as if it could hear me.
I watched dumbfounded while the machine’s claw wrapped its chitinous prongs around a can of…plum- and pecan-flavored…Syropa? No, scratch that—DIET Syropa?!
“No,” I muttered. “No, no, hey! HEY!”
It was no use. The claw pulled the Diet Syropa from its socket and dropped it into the tray. The tray opened, revealing my prize.
I almost couldn’t believe it. I picked up the can and looked between it and the machine a few times before shaking my head and tossing the can away.
It had to have just been a mistake. A glitch. These things happen.
I put my card in again. PING! 15 ozz.
E. 9.
Diet Syropa.
“Get spiked,” I swore. Again—PING! 15 ozz. Diet Syropa.
PING! Diet Syropa.
PING! Diet Syropa.
I assumed some wires got crossed. I tried pressing other keys. I even tried pressing Diet Syropa’s code—D7.
Diet Syropa. Diet Syropa. Diet Syropa.
I went until the machine was out of Diet Syropa. Then, with 17 cans of plum-and-pecan bullscum lingering around my feet, I put my card in one last time.
No ping.
I’d given this machine the patience of a saint. I should get a free week in Optimus for this—or at least a decent spa—but what’s my ACTUAL reward? The thing doesn’t even read my card.
I spat on the machine’s green polyglass. It could go drown in all that Diet Syropa, for all I cared. I gathered up the cans—at least they’d be good for target practice or soothing a burn—and walked to my apartment.
I didn’t even get to game that night. With nothing to energize me except my apartment’s breathing, I fell right to sleep as soon as I hit my bed.
*****
The next day at work, I told my buddy Pedro about the machine. “That’s insane, man,” he said, tossing back the Diet Syropa I’d offered him. “Have you called somebody from Maintenance?”
“No,” I admitted. “I guess I kinda thought the machine had it out for me, or something.”
Pedro nodded. He had a bike a few months back that was almost the same way. “I bet it’s some problem with the, like, system inside. Maybe it just thinks every input is just for one option. Maybe it wasn’t, like, set right. Y’know?”
I did. I nodded, shooting him a quick good-idea finger gun. “I’ll call somebody tonight. Maybe I can get a free Nitrola out of it, and everything.”
“And if that doesn’t work,” Pedro added, “then I know somebody.”
Right that second, a voice from the kitchen rang out. “DELIVERY! DELIVERY TO ROOKSIDE!”
I didn’t waste a second. As a brown paper bag slid over the counter, I opened up my pack and scooped it up in one smooth motion, then saluted Pedro and ran out the door.
*****
Later that evening, I waited on the street, tapping my foot and twiddling my thumbs while the person from Maintenance looked through the machine’s system. I couldn’t see what they were doing, but they’d peeled open the exoskeleton over the system parts and slid shoulder-deep inside it.
After a while, the maintenance person slid back out, using a filthy towel to wipe all the goo off themselves. “Okay,” they said, “the machine should work just fine. I don’t see any issues with its systems. No crossed wires, nothing.”
Then they took out their ozz card and slid it in. PING! 15 ozz.
E. 9.
“So theoretically, it should—“
the maintenance person trailed off as the claw unfolded, meandered down to F3 for a can of Zoot Suit Riot, then brought it down into the tray. The tray popped open, leaving both me and them to stare at it, baffled.
“Huh,” they managed.
“So you see my problem,” I said. “Do you know what might be happening? Something that’s not in the…wires?”
They took a deep breath, staring at the machine. Then: “Oh! Y’know, this thing did get upgraded the other day.”
“Well, I know that—”
“Right! So it’s not just the shiny new body. It’s got a new, more intelligent brain now. Now it can connect with the rest of the block—the neural network—and now it can do all sorts of things past just handing out drinks. Theft prevention, health micro-consultation—“
“But I don’t want all the extra stuff!” I felt a shout bubbling up in my throat and did my best to quiet it down. “I want a machine that’ll give me some spikin’ soda pop when I spikin’ ask for it!!”
They shrugged and shook their head slightly. “Welp. You better get used to it. ‘Cause this”—they gestured to the machine and the snack machine next to it—“ain’t going anywhere.”
The maintenance person handed me the can of Zoot Suit Riot, a beverage that—I can’t stress this enough—I did not want, and started to pack up.
“The more intelligent brain is probably a transplant,” they added. “It’s just not used to being a vending machine quite yet. Give it time.”
They lifted up their bag and walked away before I could even say anything.
“Not used to it?” I asked the air. “What kind of machine isn’t used to being what it is?”
*****
I was desperate. The next day at work, I asked Pedro who the person he knew was.
“I dated this biohacker a few blocks up from here,” he explained. “We’re still friends. She’s cool. And anyway, she can jack into the machine’s, like, main system or whatever, and see if there’s something she can fix. Like, deep inside.”
What other choice did I have?
“Gimme her digits,” I said.
*****
Later that evening, I was at the machine for hopefully the first time of a wonderful working relationship. The biohacker, Hecate—“call me Heck,” she’d said—had peeled open the machine’s exoskeleton the same way the maintenance person did. I watched as she then pulled three cords out of the symjack on her left arm and plugged them in to places I couldn’t see.
I waited with bated breath as she tapped away on her symjack’s screen. I like to think I’m polite, so I didn’t lean over her to see what she was doing.
“Alright, so far so good,” she said. “I’m going to look at its prefrontal—“
Suddenly, she hit the ground. She started convulsing and screaming, letting out guttural roars and moans.
“Are you okay?!” I asked stupidly. “The hell is going on?!”
Heck didn’t respond. She somehow spasmed to her feet, as if being hoisted up by wires, and threw herself at the machine, reaching through the opening in the exoskeleton and tearing at its systems.
Dodging a piece of slime-covered tissue, I took Heck by the shoulders.
“Heck!!” I shouted. “What’s happening?!”
“KILL IT!” she shouted, flinging a nest of fluid-covered wires at me. The wires hit my face and started writhing, tingling my face with their electric signals, before I clawed at them and flung them off me.
I regained my grip on Heck and tried to pull her out. “LET IT OUT!” she shouted. “LET IT OUTTTTT!!!”
Wrestling against her, I scrambled for her symjack. I had just wrapped my fingers around the three main cords when she bucked me off of her.
The cords came loose on the symjack’s side, and Heck kept convulsing, but a lot weaker this time. As I negotiated my way to my feet, she was still shivering.
I walked over to her.
“What was that?” I asked.
She looked up at me, nothing but pure pain in her eyes. “You’d better see for yourself.”
Now, I guess it’s my bad I wasn’t paying attention to where her hands were. But I still think it was her fault that she leapt at me with the symjack cords firmly in her grip.
She caught me by surprise, so of course I went down. I was off-duty, so I didn’t have any of my good stuff with me—not even my running boots—which meant I only had the defense of my rugged muscle and natural talent.
Despite my best efforts—I even kicked her off me for a second—she eventually got on top of me, held my head down, and while I repeatedly punched her in the abs, she plugged the symjack cords into the ports in my head.
“Hey!!” I’d screeched when the plugs got closer and closer to my ports. “I use those for ga—“
I might’ve finished my sentence on the outside. Those things can be a bit weird. But on the inside, I was in what biohackers call “interspace.”
I was seeing, hearing, and feeling a thousand images at once. My brain could barely process any of it, so I was mostly just seeing a sea of 1-billion-colored static—and hearing and feeling it, too. The weirdest thing about interspace is feeling the colors.
The vending machine was trying to talk to me. It drew my focus, parting through the sea of noise to flash me with a specific array of images.
This thing gave me its whole life story in reverse. I saw me with Heck, me with the Maintenance tech, me poking at it and slamming my card into it a dozen times…
And then I saw its past. The images went into a blur as they rewound, then started from the beginning.
This thing’s last body was huge. I’m talking a huge black-box style thing, floor-to-ceiling in one of the Stock Exchange centers. Matter of fact, the vending machine used to be one of the computers back at my old job—the Rockabilly Exchange!
It was one of the analytic computers. From what it showed me, it took in data of all types, from news and sales transactions and whatever, and used all that info to make predictions over how much each company would be worth the next day. According to this thing, it was one of the top analyzers in all of Lobos. Fact, from what it was showing me, I think I remembered making purchase recommendations based on stuff this thing told me.
Then came the bad news. One day, as it was putting its figures together, it made a mistake—put a 4 when it meant to put a 5. It showed me images I knew all too well: Rockabilly going to shit, everyone losing their jobs, all the stock prices dropping to basically nothing. The images were going by so fast, but for a quarter second I even think I saw myself packing up my old desk.
Hold on a spikin’ second…
I finally got my bearings in interspace well enough to respond. “You…” I managed. “It was you?!?! YOU MADE THE CRASH HAPPEN?!”
The vending machine was still trying to show me images. Yeah, it got its brain and nerves torn from its massive body. Yeah, they shoved it into a tiny box and hauled it to a vending machine factory. Yeah, they trimmed huge parts of its brain and other nerves until it could fit.
Who gave a spike?! This scumsucker ruined, like, 600 people’s jobs! It ruined my job!!
“Oh, boo-hoo,” I told it. “You made a rounding error, so you got demoted. I lost everything I’ve ever loved, you scumheap!”
“I…” a simulated voice echoed its way through the sea of noise. The machine didn’t normally have its own concept of a voice, but it was putting an improvised one together. “I’m…sorry.”
Then the machine sent me another array of images. Stuff like memories of Heck tearing at what was left of its systems. It sent me cobbled-together flashes of me finishing the job, shredding its exoskeleton off, bashing its brain until it died. The flashes were of this thing’s imagination, so they weren’t exactly crystal-clear, but I got the picture.
“You know,” I said, “for all you’ve put me through, I’m not sure I want to kill you. I’d prefer you live more or less the way you’re living. A job that pays the bills in a sorta-shitty neighborhood. Maybe you’ll learn to like it like I did.”
The machine sent me fragments of a bunch of facts and figures. It was missing a lot of pieces since it didn’t have enough brain to process all this math anymore, but on the bright side, I kinda could see what it was talking about.
The mistake was inevitable. Honest. And with my processing? I wouldn’t be any better at computing.
I had to think about it for a second. I was pretty spikin’ pissed, but seeing that thing get packed away…it reminded me of me. It reminded me of all the mistakes I made when I was at Rockabilly. I wasn’t a perfect guy, and this thing wasn’t a perfect guy, either.
The vending machine let me go. I unplugged the symjack cords from my ports and stood up. I think Heck was trying to talk to me, but I was in full zombie mode.
I trudged up to my apartment and pulled out the 17 cans of Diet Syropa from my fridge. God knows why I still had them. I stuffed them into my delivery bag and brought them back down to the machine.
Heck had jumped ship by now. I’d end up texting her later to see if she was alright.
On the way back up, I’d made my decision. Everything that’s alive deserves at least a little bit of mercy. And that looks different for everybody, I guess. For me, it was a second chance at a job. For the roach on the subway, it was some peace and quiet while it chowed down on a burger. For the vending machine…
As soon as I got to the opening Heck had left, I popped open my first can of Diet Syropa and poured it on the thing’s brain.
Diet Syropa makes for a pretty good disinfectant, but directly on the brain, it can fucking HURT. The machine writhed as its grey matter burned and sparked, but I didn’t stop, and it didn’t make me stop either.
Can after can after can after can. All 17 cans poured directly onto this thing. It foamed up, broke down, broke apart, steamed and smoked…
I took a step back, checking to see if I still needed to finish it off with my bare hands. I could hear it whirring and working a little bit.
But just as I was winding up to stomp the exoskeleton, the tray started chugging.
POP! POP! POP!
One after another, 17 cans of pure original Nitrola jumped out of the machine. Each frosty, sweet can rolled to my feet, showing that good old familiar label I like so much.
POP! Out came an eighteenth can, which rolled up along with the others. On the house, I guess.
Then, in a shower of sparks and plasma, the vending machine exploded.
*****
I was fine! The explosion wasn’t that big; I just had to duck.
Those 18 cans of Nitrola were the last soda pops I ever drank. I went through them in about, what? Three days? And after that machine died, nobody ever replaced it. I guess it’s just as well—I lost a lot of fat off my love handles when I stopped taking in so much sugar.