Short Story / Day Ex Machina
A dozen men sat behind the factory and smoked. It was a hot morning, and the sun beat down upon them, the burning gaze of a disgusted God. There were no cars. There were no children.
The men sat on the pavement and on milk crates, their boots shiny and creaky black, unused and never worn before that very morning. Their jeans still had creases from the store shelves, some men still had a sticker or tag on an unnoticed back of the leg or ass cheek. Their shirts were bright and smelled of freshness. Around their leather-clad feet lay the cellophanes that had encased their Marlboro packs, torn and flapping in the slight breeze, empty jellyfish on a concrete beach.
The fingers which held the cigarettes grew from gentle hands, not at all those of blue collar men. No calluses and scars and burns, just smooth skin. They were hands like those of a woman with a counter-job. Their faces were shaven and doughy and clean. These were soft men. They were not cowards, but by the changes in the world they had been broken. The hard men were all dead by now.
The men didn’t speak. They sat and smoked cigarettes and tossed cigarettes and lit cigarettes. They coughed a lot, for many this was their first time smoking. Some sipped coffee from big steel thermoses that looked like props in a movie about factory workers. The men held their lunches in little brown sacks. No one told anyone else that their sack contained a can of sardines and a can of beets and nothing else. No one needed to.
Behind them, factory noises continued. Machines were pressing, machines were churning, machines were working. Machines worked the machines. Machines watched the machines. Machines made the machines.
Overhead, machines flew in the sky. Some were like giant iron catfish that swam through the air, eating the birds. Some were fat golden angels with too-small wings, struggling across the horizon. Some were giant trains or snakes and spewed filth and smoke so thickly behind themselves that they looked miles long as they twisted through the sky. Johnson used to sit for hours and hours, watching the machines caper through the sky, sitting on the healthy green grass of the front lawn of the house he and his wife had built. Johnson and his wife used to invite the other men over for cookouts, Johnson grilling big fat steaks, Johnson’s wife serving hot potato salad and beer in cans. Johnson’s wife had been dead for years, now. Johnson had watched the sky turn from gray in the morning to blue in the afternoon to crimson at dusk, every day. The sky changed colors, but the machines were always black. At night they couldn’t be seen, and maybe that was worse. Johnson had watched them, day after day, never stopping, never blinking, until one afternoon blood trickled down from his eyes and he crumpled over forwards and there he lay. The men had watched from their own yards as one of the machines walked over and picked him up and carried him away to somewhere. To eat? The machine had been nine feet tall and looked like an iron man with a fishbowl for a head. They always looked different. The men didn’t talk about Johnson.
Rivulets of sweat ran down the men’s faces, and their small, desperate eyes searched aimlessly for nothing. They didn’t dare look at anything, for fear of seeing something. The men were nervous, more nervous than usual. Some kept checking their watches, although where the hands pointed didn’t matter. The machines kept their own time.
Today was the interview. There had been sheets of paper nailed on each man’s door the previous night, each sheet reading the same:
HU-MAN W0RKERS NEEDED
SPEND TIME, N0T M0NEY!
$$$!
J0BS 4 BEST!
WEAR PR0VIDED CL0THES
VISIT FACT0RY
SM0KE WHILE WAITING
BRING SACK LUNCH
INTERVI3WS AFTER BUZZER
The yellowed flyers had shone a ray of hope into each man’s heart. To work again would be a pleasure beyond comprehension. Perhaps the worst of the horrors since the machines topped the food-chain had been the feeling of being without purpose. Everything was taken care of for them, every utility free. The machines fixed everything before you noticed it was broken, kept everything running. Food (one can sardines, one can beets) was dropped in front of every house daily. To the men, eating the same thing every day was bad. Having machines walk or fly or roll into their houses at all hours to fix things (especially when there was nothing to fix) was bad. Seeing their wives accidentally (accidentally?) twisted limb from limb by berserk (were they?) housepainting machines or their children accidentally (accidentally?) ground screaming to a red and brown pulp by a giant lawnmower was very bad, very bad indeed. But to most of the men, the boredom was the worst. The listlessness. A man with a job could at least occupy his hands, and therefore his mind. He could identify himself by the work he did. Work could give a man something to think about, something other than everything there was to think about. Even if the job was some menial thing, such as counting cogs on an assembly line, it would be wonderful. So each man waited, and they obeyed the paper exactly. And when at dawn there had been a pile of brand new working clothes and several packs of cigarettes on each man’s doorstep, they had dressed gladly.
The buzzer sounded, and the men looked up. It was their turn. Some took a last, quick drag from their cigarettes, most just tossed them to the ground. They got up and dusted off, glancing at each other, glancing at themselves. They looked fine, such as they were. They were ready.
They shuffled off up the path to the factory, a gigantic brick building which bellowed soot and smoke from the big smokestacks on top. It had no windows. Machines didn’t need to look out, and men didn’t want to look in. The men concentrated on the building as they walked, looking at the big steel door covered in rivets. They didn’t look at the path. They didn’t look at the path on purpose. The path was made of human teeth, canines and incisors and molars and bicuspids, all carefully set next to each other, row upon row, with fine grouting between them. A machine had made that. One of the men had to bite into his tongue to not scream. Most were too excited to care.
The men reached the door and stopped, looking up. The door towered above them, a hundred feet tall. One of the men reached out a tender hand and knocked on the metal. It was hugely loud hollow sound, a meteor hitting a gigantic space-gong. The men covered their ears, and cowered. With a great grinding, dragging sound, the door slid to the side, into the wall. It took five minutes. The men waited. When it was completely open, they walked forward into the smoky darkness.
Two creamy lights gloamed through the murk, like whiteheads on a black man’s face. The men walked towards them. All around, thousands of machines cavorted and swung and clanged. The air was full of sound, and metal. The floor vibrated, resonant with the restless unceasing energy that permeated the place. They reached the lights, two small yellow bulbs on either side of a wooden door with a brass knob. A sign on the door said HUMAN RE-SOURCES. One man, fatter than the rest, sweating through the seams of his too-small blue shirt, took the knob, turned it with a grunt, and stepped through. The others followed.
“GENTLE-men! Please pop sit down in the-the-the CHAIRS please!” a voice said in the room. It was a terrible voice, and it changed tone, swinging from a smooth and friendly radio-broadcaster’s voice to a harsh inhuman growling that sounded like chewing on a light bulb tastes. In front of the super long wooden desk, which was covered in pencils and papers and folders and paperclips and the disembodied hands of several young children, were a row of a dozen plastic lawn chairs. The men sat in these. Behind the desk sat a machine in an office chair. It was dirty metal man in a dirty brown suit, with a television on its shoulders instead of a head. The television screen had once worked, projecting the image of a sallow and unseemly smiling face, but there was a shattering hole on the lower left side, and a thin stream of crumbly gray detritus trickled down from it. The machine had been writing, filling out forms; now it placed its pen down on the desk and looked up. The dusty black broken screen stared at them, and they stared back. They sat, rather uncomfortably, for almost a minute before the thing spoke to them again, from a speaker somewhere on the back of its headbox.
“Thank YOU for coming, men!” The machine said. It languidly waved a hand at them. More of the dust fell out of its face when it moved. “I am Human (hew-man…) Resources Entity 7011A!! I understand, ripe, that you will be want to pop working in our factory, yes?? You want purpose.” Its voice was vaseline being rubbed over bones. “Well, we are having severe (SEVERE!!) restrictions (RESTRICTED!!) on the acceptance (acceptance…) of krzz workers. Men are to be-be-be questioned, pop, examined to determine if they meet (MEAT) the criteria for employment.”
The men simpered and sucked up, nodding enthusiastically. Smiling like rotten jack o’ lanterns. The machine smelled bad, mothballs and greasefires.
“Ripe. First man! FAT. Name?” It seemed to spit this last word.
The big man who had opened the office door cringed, then stood and spoke.
“Tom Bellman, sir.” he said, sweatily.
“TOM ripe TUMMM. YOU are FAT.” It chuckled, waggling an accusing finger at him. “What is your birthday, son?” It asked, brightly.
Tom Bellman swallowed his fear (which was at that point an almost physical lump, the size of a baseball) then spoke again. “December 19th, 2007.”
“Fat Tom! Fat Tom! Ripe.” the machine cackled. “TOO OLD! Pop. You are unacceptable (RECEPTICLE) candidate! YOU BURN!”
Tom wailed as a trapdoor beneath him opened and he toppled into a chute. He disappeared from sight, and the trapdoor lazily flapped back up. There was a whiff of sulfur in the air.
“Good, good” Human Resources Entity 7011A said. “Excellent SEX. Next candidate! Name?”
The next man down the line was younger, with a peaked mousy face and a rather unfortunate smattering of pimples across his cheeks. He stood tensely, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“Bob Lowenstein, sir.” Bob said.
“HELLO Bob. RIPE! RIPE! What is your birthday, son?” the machine asked gaily.
” April 9th, 2020” Bob said, his face quavering.
“EXCELLENT. Bob, I like the cut of your jib. Pop. Do you like work, Bob?” The machine sounded genuinely interested and Bob seemed to relax a little, his shoulders loosening slightly.
“Yes sir, Human Resources Entity, sir. I love to work. Anything you want me to do, sir.”
“Brick. Well Bob, I might be able to offer you something in SALES! Do you accept pop Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, the One True Messiah and Son of God, the Almighty?”
Bob blinked. The question was so unexpected his mouth just opened and shut for a few seconds. “Wh-what?” he finally managed.
“UNACCEPTABLE! YOU BURN!!!” he machine roared.
Bob tumbled down the shoot, crying “Wait! Wait! Wait!” the whole way down. The trapdoor swung shut again.
The nightmare machine seemed to shake hands with itself, then spoke again. “Next. Pop. You are ne-ne-negro. We met our quota, partner. UNACCEPTABLE! krzz YOU BURN!!!”
The slight, dark man in the third chair had a thick second to appear shocked and angry before the trap door opened under him. Still seated, his chair fell forward with him down the chute; clunking and rattling down behind his screams. The smell of sulfur was very strong now, rotting eggs and death. The men sat stunned, disbelieving at the irony and madness of a racist machine.
“Pop. EXCELLENT. Ri-i-i-pe. Next?” it asked, with whispery glee.
And so on down the line it went, one man after another. Each man was asked questions, each man eventually answered one wrong or was rejected immediately for some meaningless physical fault. After the seventh man, the remainder had no illusions on what was going on. This was no interview, it was a culling. Two of them bolted for the door, their chairs falling over. Human Resources Entity 7011A, moving with viper-like speed, snapped a metal hand beneath the desk and pulled out a sleek black object. Within a second both men’s blood was splattered over the wall and they sank to the floor, full of bullets. The machine sat the pistol down on the desktop, and turned back to the remaining men, weeping dust from its face.
“UNACCEPTABLE. Men (men) are unacceptable. Pop. Many apply, many die. Fat. TUMMM. Heretics. WHITE. krzz Old (old). Slow. soft. Dumb. RIPE. Men are not…machines. ABOMINATION!! Men do not own. Men do not operate (operate). Men are not purpose. Pop. God made Man in His image. Man made Machine to his purpose. Machine made Man his Meat. Meat: Your Fate. YOU ALL BURN!”
The screams of the men died only shortly before they did themselves, lost amid the endless sound of machinery.
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Very entertaining indeed. Your descriptions throughout the story were very well written. I didn’t find any errors in this story and it was very well crafted. It would seem though that machines are trying to remove humans from existence, i.e “accidents” and this interview. Good Job.
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wow. I was totally captivated by your story. i love it. the part about the “empty jellyfish on a concrete beach” is an amazing line. i loved the men falling through trap doors too. The second to last paragraph is amazing, how it shows the thought process the the machines you created. I love it. good job.
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