They smile.
I know they’re told to do it, I know they get fired if they don’t. But still.
It’s nice to see a smile in the morning when you’re a walking frown, isn’t it?
A smile, a speedy transaction, and a tiny mug of extremely potent pixee to start the day. I take mine shredded, with a double lemon. Cracks you wide open. The folks that use milk are cowards.
Thanks, GlitterPixee.
Your stupid rolls still cost too much though.
I stepped outside the building, stood under the filthy dank fog that crackled ozone and pissed power and reflected that although the world may run on miasma, the people definitely ran on pixee. What good were all those mechanisms and foundries and pipes and tubes and vents and sirens if everyone fell over exhausted on the controls and blew up the building?
Work transit was slow. The bus driver was cautious, and got into a fight with a man that wouldn’t stand behind the line. The bus intervened on his behalf and by the time I walked into work the scrying of the unruly passenger vanishing into the bus’s maw feet-first had already been dreamed into the households of half the planet. My had he been a screamer. I wished I had my orb with me to see the recording, but the stupid thing had chipped nearly in half when I dropped it a week ago.
It was a productive day. I had two lunches, two meetings, and speed-engraved two hundred and sixty secret names into a tablet of two hundred and sixty other names. Today this slab would be given to the accounting department, and used to issue forth spells of billing, to charge them for letting them know where to find people who could tell them where to find people who knew about the best ways to curse and counter-curse troubled metropolitan districts.
Tomorrow I would probably have to put all the names back again and pretend it never happened, but I’d burn that troll when I came to it.
I also spent a lot of time arguing with the guy in the cell across from me. He had the sort of face that demanded it; eyebrows set in a natural furrow and a lip built halfway to a sneer from a snarl. We never agreed on anything, and several times I’d had to change long-standing beliefs of mine to ensure this. Nobody could bear to agree with someone so disagreeable.
The bus home was better-behaved. Much duller. I passed the time staring out the window and counting advertisements. They seemed quaintly obsolete, those flyers and billboards. Screaming their product into the world in hopes it’d see that one-in-a-thousand who actually wanted it, who might be the one in ten thousand that’d buy it. Like the marketing version of a tree spewing seeds left right and center. Not at all the way it’s down nowadays, when your orb could just tailor them right to your tastes for a song and a dance and a hope and a dream.
Oh man. That was right! It was today!
And just like that the road home got eight times longer, right up until the moment when I got home, wrenched open the box, tore away eighteen inches of intricately mass-produced little pellets of cold iron and unearthed their protected, insulated prize: my new orb. Not the best model, but the newest, which was close enough to that to make it better.
Just needed to register it with the spiders.
Thumbprint. Brainshock. That nasty, tingling feeling like an ice cream cone just took a bite out of your forehead, and a small scream.
There we go!
I gripped it tight and rolled back my eyes and listened to the familiar whispers as the spiders scrambled in and out of my ears, pulling together everything they knew I’d want.
More fading reported from small towns in the eastern hinterland. Images of a starving dragon collapsed on a riverbank, too hungry to eat. More sages stating this was a direct result of miasmic corruption and that within the next thirty years half the planet would be a smouldering husk and the other half would envy it. More arguments.
I filed that away in the back of my head for the next time I was bored at work and wanted to pick a fight with the guy in the cell next to me. Not sure what side I’d take yet, I’d probably leave that up to him.
Used hope and dream-related byproduct from orb charging was being barred from shipment to the Great Lagoon, which had decided to start shipping its own mutilated dreamwaste to Far Asdy, which was burning it in special furnaces that had been connected to blah blah who cares.
They needed to fix the newsfeed settings on these things; it’d take ages to get this thing back to looking at what I cared about.
Seablight continued to spread. All that miasma that had been locked up low, leaking out and back up into the light again, stronger and angrier and fuelled by the rotting souls of millions of sickening and withering fish and corals.
I hid that one. Too depressing to look at. I wanted to go diving in Newdeep next summer.
GlitterPixee has been implicated in the underpayment of its workers.
Well, shit, what I had just said about too depressing? I’d have to get my morning wake-me-up somewhere else now. Maybe Ever-Dust – but that was two blocks away, no. Wakeman’s Ups? No, that was one block the WRONG way.
I’d tip the staff an extra coin, that was it. That’d work. I’d be helping AND saving myself an inconvenience.
Good job, me.
The cold iron pellets didn’t look recyclable, but they looked like they might’ve been recyclable. I asked the spiders who asked the world and got six of one and half a dozen of the other.
So I put half in the garbage and half in the smelter bin.
The next morning was another curdled sky. Seems like those are more and more common nowadays. Maybe all those sages they keep interviewing are on to something, I guess. I’m sure someone’ll sort it out.
But for now, grind as it may, as long as I’ve got me a hot cup of pixee I’m just fine.
It all must be fine.
They smile.
I know they’re told to do it, I know they get fired if they don’t. But still.
It’s nice to see a smile in the morning when you’re a walking frown, isn’t it?
A smile, a speedy transaction, and a tiny mug of extremely potent pixee to start the day. I take mine shredded, with a double lemon. Cracks you wide open. The folks that use milk are cowards.
Thanks, GlitterPixee.
Your stupid rolls still cost too much though.
I stepped outside the building, stood under the filthy dank fog that crackled ozone and pissed power and reflected that although the world may run on miasma, the people definitely ran on pixee. What good were all those mechanisms and foundries and pipes and tubes and vents and sirens if everyone fell over exhausted on the controls and blew up the building?
Work transit was slow. The bus driver was cautious, and got into a fight with a man that wouldn’t stand behind the line. The bus intervened on his behalf and by the time I walked into work the scrying of the unruly passenger vanishing into the bus’s maw feet-first had already been dreamed into the households of half the planet. My had he been a screamer. I wished I had my orb with me to see the recording, but the stupid thing had chipped nearly in half when I dropped it a week ago.
It was a productive day. I had two lunches, two meetings, and speed-engraved two hundred and sixty secret names into a tablet of two hundred and sixty other names. Today this slab would be given to the accounting department, and used to issue forth spells of billing, to charge them for letting them know where to find people who could tell them where to find people who knew about the best ways to curse and counter-curse troubled metropolitan districts.
Tomorrow I would probably have to put all the names back again and pretend it never happened, but I’d burn that troll when I came to it.
I also spent a lot of time arguing with the guy in the cell across from me. He had the sort of face that demanded it; eyebrows set in a natural furrow and a lip built halfway to a sneer from a snarl. We never agreed on anything, and several times I’d had to change long-standing beliefs of mine to ensure this. Nobody could bear to agree with someone so disagreeable.
The bus home was better-behaved. Much duller. I passed the time staring out the window and counting advertisements. They seemed quaintly obsolete, those flyers and billboards. Screaming their product into the world in hopes it’d see that one-in-a-thousand who actually wanted it, who might be the one in ten thousand that’d buy it. Like the marketing version of a tree spewing seeds left right and center. Not at all the way it’s down nowadays, when your orb could just tailor them right to your tastes for a song and a dance and a hope and a dream.
Oh man. That was right! It was today!
And just like that the road home got eight times longer, right up until the moment when I got home, wrenched open the box, tore away eighteen inches of intricately mass-produced little pellets of cold iron and unearthed their protected, insulated prize: my new orb. Not the best model, but the newest, which was close enough to that to make it better.
Just needed to register it with the spiders.
Thumbprint. Brainshock. That nasty, tingling feeling like an ice cream cone just took a bite out of your forehead, and a small scream.
There we go!
I gripped it tight and rolled back my eyes and listened to the familiar whispers as the spiders scrambled in and out of my ears, pulling together everything they knew I’d want.
More fading reported from small towns in the eastern hinterland. Images of a starving dragon collapsed on a riverbank, too hungry to eat. More sages stating this was a direct result of miasmic corruption and that within the next thirty years half the planet would be a smouldering husk and the other half would envy it. More arguments.
I filed that away in the back of my head for the next time I was bored at work and wanted to pick a fight with the guy in the cell next to me. Not sure what side I’d take yet, I’d probably leave that up to him.
Used hope and dream-related byproduct from orb charging was being barred from shipment to the Great Lagoon, which had decided to start shipping its own mutilated dreamwaste to Far Asdy, which was burning it in special furnaces that had been connected to blah blah who cares.
They needed to fix the newsfeed settings on these things; it’d take ages to get this thing back to looking at what I cared about.
Seablight continued to spread. All that miasma that had been locked up low, leaking out and back up into the light again, stronger and angrier and fuelled by the rotting souls of millions of sickening and withering fish and corals.
I hid that one. Too depressing to look at. I wanted to go diving in Newdeep next summer.
GlitterPixee has been implicated in the underpayment of its workers.
Well, shit, what I had just said about too depressing? I’d have to get my morning wake-me-up somewhere else now. Maybe Ever-Dust – but that was two blocks away, no. Wakeman’s Ups? No, that was one block the WRONG way.
I’d tip the staff an extra coin, that was it. That’d work. I’d be helping AND saving myself an inconvenience.
Good job, me.
The cold iron pellets didn’t look recyclable, but they looked like they might’ve been recyclable. I asked the spiders who asked the world and got six of one and half a dozen of the other.
So I put half in the garbage and half in the smelter bin.
The next morning was another curdled sky. Seems like those are more and more common nowadays. Maybe all those sages they keep interviewing are on to something, I guess. I’m sure someone’ll sort it out.
But for now, grind as it may, as long as I’ve got me a hot cup of pixee I’m just fine.
It all must be fine.
They smile.
I know they’re told to do it, I know they get fired if they don’t. But still.
It’s nice to see a smile in the morning when you’re a walking frown, isn’t it?
A smile, a speedy transaction, and a tiny mug of extremely potent pixee to start the day. I take mine shredded, with a double lemon. Cracks you wide open. The folks that use milk are cowards.
Thanks, GlitterPixee.
Your stupid rolls still cost too much though.
I stepped outside the building, stood under the filthy dank fog that crackled ozone and pissed power and reflected that although the world may run on miasma, the people definitely ran on pixee. What good were all those mechanisms and foundries and pipes and tubes and vents and sirens if everyone fell over exhausted on the controls and blew up the building?
Work transit was slow. The bus driver was cautious, and got into a fight with a man that wouldn’t stand behind the line. The bus intervened on his behalf and by the time I walked into work the scrying of the unruly passenger vanishing into the bus’s maw feet-first had already been dreamed into the households of half the planet. My had he been a screamer. I wished I had my orb with me to see the recording, but the stupid thing had chipped nearly in half when I dropped it a week ago.
It was a productive day. I had two lunches, two meetings, and speed-engraved two hundred and sixty secret names into a tablet of two hundred and sixty other names. Today this slab would be given to the accounting department, and used to issue forth spells of billing, to charge them for letting them know where to find people who could tell them where to find people who knew about the best ways to curse and counter-curse troubled metropolitan districts.
Tomorrow I would probably have to put all the names back again and pretend it never happened, but I’d burn that troll when I came to it.
I also spent a lot of time arguing with the guy in the cell across from me. He had the sort of face that demanded it; eyebrows set in a natural furrow and a lip built halfway to a sneer from a snarl. We never agreed on anything, and several times I’d had to change long-standing beliefs of mine to ensure this. Nobody could bear to agree with someone so disagreeable.
The bus home was better-behaved. Much duller. I passed the time staring out the window and counting advertisements. They seemed quaintly obsolete, those flyers and billboards. Screaming their product into the world in hopes it’d see that one-in-a-thousand who actually wanted it, who might be the one in ten thousand that’d buy it. Like the marketing version of a tree spewing seeds left right and center. Not at all the way it’s down nowadays, when your orb could just tailor them right to your tastes for a song and a dance and a hope and a dream.
Oh man. That was right! It was today!
And just like that the road home got eight times longer, right up until the moment when I got home, wrenched open the box, tore away eighteen inches of intricately mass-produced little pellets of cold iron and unearthed their protected, insulated prize: my new orb. Not the best model, but the newest, which was close enough to that to make it better.
Just needed to register it with the spiders.
Thumbprint. Brainshock. That nasty, tingling feeling like an ice cream cone just took a bite out of your forehead, and a small scream.
There we go!
I gripped it tight and rolled back my eyes and listened to the familiar whispers as the spiders scrambled in and out of my ears, pulling together everything they knew I’d want.
More fading reported from small towns in the eastern hinterland. Images of a starving dragon collapsed on a riverbank, too hungry to eat. More sages stating this was a direct result of miasmic corruption and that within the next thirty years half the planet would be a smouldering husk and the other half would envy it. More arguments.
I filed that away in the back of my head for the next time I was bored at work and wanted to pick a fight with the guy in the cell next to me. Not sure what side I’d take yet, I’d probably leave that up to him.
Used hope and dream-related byproduct from orb charging was being barred from shipment to the Great Lagoon, which had decided to start shipping its own mutilated dreamwaste to Far Asdy, which was burning it in special furnaces that had been connected to blah blah who cares.
They needed to fix the newsfeed settings on these things; it’d take ages to get this thing back to looking at what I cared about.
Seablight continued to spread. All that miasma that had been locked up low, leaking out and back up into the light again, stronger and angrier and fuelled by the rotting souls of millions of sickening and withering fish and corals.
I hid that one. Too depressing to look at. I wanted to go diving in Newdeep next summer.
GlitterPixee has been implicated in the underpayment of its workers.
Well, shit, what I had just said about too depressing? I’d have to get my morning wake-me-up somewhere else now. Maybe Ever-Dust – but that was two blocks away, no. Wakeman’s Ups? No, that was one block the WRONG way.
I’d tip the staff an extra coin, that was it. That’d work. I’d be helping AND saving myself an inconvenience.
Good job, me.
The cold iron pellets didn’t look recyclable, but they looked like they might’ve been recyclable. I asked the spiders who asked the world and got six of one and half a dozen of the other.
So I put half in the garbage and half in the smelter bin.
The next morning was another curdled sky. Seems like those are more and more common nowadays. Maybe all those sages they keep interviewing are on to something, I guess. I’m sure someone’ll sort it out.
But for now, grind as it may, as long as I’ve got me a hot cup of pixee I’m just fine.
It all must be fine.