dreamstate writing 15 June 2017

A female companion and I went into a towering house of glass to play her favorite game. Its top two floors had metal siding on them but the stories below them, where her game was located, had glass walls. We slid along glass-bottomed and rainbow-walled sky ramps in time to the game’s music while I struggled to read along with the conversations transcribed onto a LCD screen tethered to our face. My companion then flipped on her back and cranked the game’s speed up so fast that everything on the screen went blurry. I shot off the track and fell past many loops of sky ramp before hitting the forcefield at the bottom of the gaming chamber, which looked like an onyx expanse of outer space but was really a big, bouncy net.
 
While my companion was racing along the sky ramps, I explored an area below the central chamber that was walled off with tall glass panels. Various computers and screens were set up there, with different games loaded onto them. Into the area’s far wall, this one made of drywall, was built a control booth in which two men sat monitoring screens. They glanced at me when I came in but didn’t say anything as I walked around looking at the other games on offer. One of them featured a black-haired woman clad in black leather who was fighting hordes of football-sized scrabbling aliens with a complex and heavy-looking pistol in each hand. Finding little of interest, I went outside.
 
It was daytime and I was standing on a slope of grass. Behind me was the towering house of glass. To my left across a flat, fenced-in field the size of a football pitch was a sinkhole that had recently opened into a low hill, a circle of reddish-orange soil full of large rocks. In front of me, but on the other side of the chainlink fence, was a building bisected by an old carriage run, a portal from which a group of screaming schoolchildren came running. One child, a girl wearing a puffy jacket and scarf of dark colors, ran over to the sinkhole and started kicking at snowdrifts that had accumulated there. I saw then that both the field and the slope were covered with what looked like a thin layer of frost, or ice. At that point I realized that some of the children had made it as far as where I was standing, and that one boy had in fact grabbed my right leg and was yanking it toward him. Surprised and shocked, I kicked, sending him flying. I watched him hit the slope, bounce, and come to rest in a clump of arms and legs. He was groaning and complaining but not seriously injured.
 
He kept talking but I started to back away from him, rounding the towering house of glass until it was between me and the frost-covered slope. Looking up I discovered that most of the glass was gone and that the sky ramps had rusted badly, their rainbow walls and glass bottoms gone. At that point I entered a door at the bottom of the tower to my right. I found myself in the darkened basement of the tower and immediately started to climb a central flight of stairs. The walls and stairs seem to have been recently painted white, and bags of white rags or clothing littered every step and platform, with only a small area cleared through them. I reached a higher storey and went through the white door. Inside, I started hitting buttons on what looked like waiting elevators but what turned out to be the light-switches for a row of gleaming walk-in showers set deep into the darkened walls. I was heading for the next flight of stairs when I awoke.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑麥

cyber nanny debuts

Are you struggling to keep your shitty fucking kids off your back? Do you ever worry that they're not watching enough television? Have your growled threats stopped working on them, and have they stopped caring if you threaten them with bodily harm? If so, then come on down to Jebb Foarman's Big Store of Crap for Absentee and Shitty Parents, located out by that one rusting tractor right before you get to the Hermndsville Road bridge on route 946 South. We've just received a shipping container full of like-new HGDXR-77 cyber nannies (fresh off-the-boat from far Chineee), and we're sure we've got one just for you.

Your very own cyber nanny will curse at them regularly, bemoaning the fact that they were ever even born in the first place. She'll drink seventeen light beers and pass out, so you don't have to (at least not at home). She comes factory-equipped with two whole feet of thick rubber tubing bolted to her left paw-mandible, for those daily senseless beatings. Also standard are nine separate LCD screens set in at angles and locations scientifically proven to sap your rotten spawn of the will to excel at life and coated with a waterproofing glaze that also helps to maximum the brain-numbing effects of prolonged exposure to hyper-slick, kid-oriented content. Is that not enough? Add screens to your heart's content (available for purchase at our store) using only a glue-gun, a steady hand, and a pair of crimping shears. Program your HGDXR-77's screens to all display the same show, or switch on her Wi-Fi transceiver and pipe programming in from the magical content-mills in distant Hollywood, tethering your child to yet another squawking box and training her to be a lifelong consumer. (Who needs creativity or critical thinking, anyway, when everything today is so damn easy?)

Is that still not enough? Buy and install a Mobile Maelstrom Sugary Liquid Dispenser (MSRP $79.99), which will squirt a quart of high-fructose-corn-syrup-containing juice analog into your tyke's suck-hole every hour on the hour, for up to three days. Plus, each HGDXR-77 unit comes with a simple remote control you can use to override her semi-autonomous programming and have her give that one little shit an extra wallop or ride over that other useless turd's leg with her hard rubber tank-treads. Or, download the new Cyber-Nanny app (starting at only $47.99) and really get into some bad parenting by recording drunken rants for her to play back at random, by using her many built-in cameras to violate the tattered shreds of your progeny's personal privacy, or by activating her pneumatic breeching tool to finally get your stubborn son out of the fucking downstairs closet where he's been hiding from his just desserts like a scared little bitch. Yup, my fellow shitty parents, this new model will be sure to help you mold yet another promising generation into belly-fat-gaining, expensive-tablet-phone-buying, false-economy-loving pieces of shit, just like you. So come on down to Jebb's, and pick up a cyber nanny of your own, today. (The first fifteen customers to mention this article get a free Layzee Lumpfish® tote-bag. In-house financing is available for life-weary, debt-loving wage slaves.)

© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)