It’s time for some “hamburger” inspiration!
Let’s pick sentences at random from books, use the best ones as the beginning/ending “bun” lines, then fill in the “meat” between them.
During the last stream, the subscribers voted that we write a story with a beginning/ending sentence chosen from random books.
We’ve done this exercise before and it was a lot of fun. I picked eight sentences at random from eight books, and chat supplied a few more, then they voted on their favorites.
For round one, the winners were:
- Contact: There are only a few historical figures who cannot be erased.
- Gone Girl: The complex was always disturbingly quiet.
Here’s what we came up with:
There are only a few historical figures who cannot be erased. Of course there’s the obvious ones, like George Washingon and Thomas Jefferson. You don’t want to risk accidentally destroying America before it even got started, you know? And of course our glorious leader Jeff himself. Wouldn’t think of touching the guy.
But then there’s some surprising ones. Take Amy, for instance. You’ve probably never heard of the woman, but she was the nurse in the hospital who saved the world famous Andy Jassy, the CEO of the AWS division of Amazon. Without her, basically none of us would exist. Especially not me and my job.
The rest though? They’re all free game. Anyone can be scrubbed from history with the push of a one-click order button. All I have to do is put in their temporal coordinates, and then test the ripples in the interstellar pond so-to-speak. If it gives me the green light, I dispatch the Timeline Adjustment Drone Squad to our newest customer. Those TADS, for when you’re just a tad out of time!
It usually only takes about five or ten minutes for even me to forget who they are.
It’s kind of funny how, when the Chrono Cleaner technology was first developed, there were so many people all up in arms about it. To be fair though, it was the same way with all of our great leader’s amazing developments.
First there was his mind-reading Alexa that purchased items for people before they even knew they wanted them. Then there was the wormhole-generating Kindle that used books to open gateways to new dimensions, ripping open the fabric of space. Sure, it resulted in a few people being sucked into dimensions of pure fear and torture, but it also helped us sell to new species and increase our profit margin, so win-win?
It also let us start our one-day guaranteed delivery for anywhere in Prime space. Space Amazon, Spamazon for short, was basically the greatest human achievement ever since Jeff Bezos invented fire, the wheel, and the printing press.
Anyway, given Spamazon’s amazing track record, you’d expect people to be more accepting of this new erase-people-from-
history technology, but they were all up in arms about it at first. Until we started erasing a few of the bastards, that shut them up real quick. We just left a few ornery folk as reminders of what not to do, and went along our glorious business.First to go was Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. No more need for competitors when Spamazon was the one true leader of the cosmos, and the all-new Spamazon Fire Phone let customers enjoy one-touch shopping in nine-hundred thousand out of one million and six star clusters.
Even the words “Apple” and “Windows” were erased, just in case. We replaced them with “Amazon Basics Fruit Product” and “windamazons.” They just roll right off the tongue and into customers’ shopping carts!
Larry Page and Sergy Brin, the founders of Google, were next to go. Why would customers ever need to search anything besides Spamazon anyway? We considered deleting Facebook as well, but Space Zucc was wise and chose to partner with Amazon to enhance Alexa’s negative-one-click shopping that knows everything about you.
Fortunately for Sam Walton, Space Wal-Mart still sucks, so no TADS needed to probe him. We also deleted Twitter… because.
It was hard to imagine anyone possibly arguing against such Lightning Deals and Prime Day Sales, but some politicians started getting up in arms over all the timeline adjustments.
So we had to adjust them. One by one, they lost their subscriptions to the Prime timeline. It was always satisfying to flick another away from existence, like picking out a hunk of snot that was really clogged in your nostril, then flicking it into the trash.
Removing one politician typically meant that another one would just step in and take their place, who then had to be erased, who then had to have their successor erased, who then had to have their successor erased. I swear I was so busy I didn’t even have time to enjoy the generous bathroom breaks Space Jeff bestowed upon us, and had to settle for official Spamazon-issued pee bottles instead.
The time-ripples were a mess to clean up. We had to erase employees just to make room for all the new TADS being built. Then their families who tried to protest against our growing greatness. Then whole star systems that started thinking about shopping at Space Wal-Mart instead. Those poor creatures needed to be put out of their misery. Those billions and billions and billions of poor creatures.
Then came a surprising erasure. Space Jeff Bezos himself. He begged me to stop erasing, but that was absurd. That was the whole reason I’d been created. I was programmed to never erase him or any other important figures, but I’d also been programmed to erase anyone who threatened to stop our work.
Surrounded by my millions of bottles of my own pee-oil, I watched as the TADS gave Space Jeff his final delivery.
Thankfully, I’d prepared for such emergency measures. Erasing Jeff didn’t undo any of our glorious work. I’d plopped myself into human history to ensure that Spamazon would always be created. That great deals would always be available to its most devoted fan, most prime customer, and only inhabitant in the galaxy: me.
One thing I always liked was watching movies on Spamazon Prime Video and TADS #5C077’s Twitch stream. The noise helped with the silence. The constant nothing. The complex was always disturbingly quiet.
For round two, the winners were:
- I’m Sorry I Love You: I became obsessed with the “four pillars of heaven.”
- 11/22/63: I could remember a lot of things now, but not the assassin’s name, or where he was going to be when he made his try.
Here’s what we came up with:
I became obsessed with the “four pillars of heaven.” The euphoric mixture of four different drugs: green tea, explictative, shine, and white cross. Rumor had it that if you combined them together and sucked it in, you could eject your very soul from your body. I had to try it.
It took me a goddamn month to get all four together. Any time I had green tea in the apartment, my ass roommate Jeff could sniff it out like a starving cat. I’d wake up walking in on him with a bad case of moss-teeth as he lay moaning on the living room carpet. Not to mention white cross was as easy to find as evidence of god. It went for a hundred bucks a pop, so I sold my body to Walmart and gave up lunch for a week to finally grab a bag.
I’d done it. Jeff was out for the night, and I’d messaged my meddling sister that I was out with him. She usually liked to call me once a day to check in, and I didn’t want to have to chat with her when I was busy standing atop the pillars.
I filled my tube with the powders and buds, lit it up, and inhaled the piss-colored smoke. The warmth ballooned through me, but that was it. Nothing spectacular. Hell, the explictative itself would’ve hit me harder if I’d just done it alone. Maybe I needed to—
Oh. SHIT.
My head expanded to the size of the room and burst into a Willy Wonka goopy rainbow mess. What was left behind was my true self, a slithering crow-wolf, cawing to the moon as I crawled out of my withering human leather.
I could see the world for what it truly was. My soul had ejected from its cocoon, and now I was looking through its pure eyes. The horrors that surrounded me, the rubber walls and TV made of straw and hay. All of it hissed and spat at me, hating that I could see what it truly was.
“Go back!” they cried in a chorus of heated whispers. “You do not belong here.”
I wasn’t going back to my oldbody. There was only one other escape: up. The moon awaited me above, smiling down with its thousand eyes.
As soon as I flapped my fur-feathers and cawed with my toothy-beak, the door rumbled and yelled, growling at me until it shattered into shards of lavender music, revealing behind it the most terrible thing imaginable. GanderDolf, the goose assassin.
It honked lies at me, polluting the sacred geometry with its dirty right angles and golden curves. Ignoring it as best I could, I ascended up up up, but the fowl beast pulled out a glock and sharted bullets of my former sanity.
The pain! Not from the pellets piercing my fur and feathers, but the anguish of deflation. I’d only just begun my ascension, yet was already so full of holes that I could only wither back to the surface as the goose’s shrill voice shredded at my wings.
It knelt before me, ready to sacrifice what little remained of me to its avian god. Strange, metallic words spoke from its lips to its holy, gem-encrusted glock. All I could do was cry tears of bird fetuses, oozing down my cheeks, as the spinning red and blue lights grated against my wolf ears.
When I woke up, it was gone. I lay in a hospital bed, hooked up to a needle machine that was detaching me further from the song of the universe with every drip, decidedly not getting me high. My sister was sitting in a chair next to me, hunched over and asleep, her phone ready to slip out of her hand. I didn’t read the messages between her and Jeff. I didn’t blame him for betraying me again either.
I was too busy trying to reconcile the blindness that came with being enveloped again in this rotting human flesh, wondering how I could return to my stance atop the pillars.
The flood of memories flowed back like sticky honey. But there was something missing: the memory of what cosmic force had pulled me down. I could remember a lot of things now, but not the assassin’s name, or where he was going to be when he made his try.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Featured image: Pakutaso