The Porcelain Throne

The Transvestite Army lies dead in my living room, strewn from floor to ceiling in a tangle of torn limbs and leather straps, fetish-fur and nano-lingerie, wetwired to each wearer's erotic fantasies.

The only fantasy I'm wired to right now is the one where I manage to escape this crime scene.

But as the insectoid buzz of DBKL's Israeli-manufactured Security Drones vibrate through the walls of my apartment, psychic hardware injecting a cocktail of depression, anxiety, insomnia, hypochondria, catatonia and schizophrenia straight into the souls of all 23 million inhabitants of the Greater Pandan Indah Metropolitan Spire, I gaze at the mini-Holocaust in my living room and think: A living room full of dead Pondans. How inappropriate. How un-Shariah compliant. Despite all the progress we've achieved, this is still a Muslim country, I remind myself. Even if we do buy our weapons from the Jews.

Then, I hear It. Coming from the bathroom, it gurgles, just as overfed cats purr in lazy contentment after a meal. I can tell it's happy with itself, this creature whose sole purpose was to dispose of my bodily waste, but ended up doing more than I'd ever bargained for.

I think I'd better start at the beginning.

***

The day I met The Porcelain Throne was the day Maya, my former Toilet, had committed suicide. I had downloaded another wet-dream the night before, Volume 2 of the 'Konek King' series (the one where the dreamer is transformed into a living, breathing, gigantic penis - a colossal, cloud-piercing, sky-scraping tower of meat, both feared and worshipped by women across the galaxy). But the dream evaporated as soon as I woke to the smell of my own shit.

Retching and cursing, I stepped out of Nora, my Bed, into a knee-high sea of piss and floating turds, covering my entire apartment floor. If I looked hard enough, I could even see last night's dinner floating somewhere in there.

The Spicy McBelacan McValue Meal.

Then came the screams.

All my appliances were either having a nervous breakdown, or halfway there already. Erra, my Wardrobe Cabinet was sobbing while attempting to climb the walls. Fasha, my howling Dishwasher, was shooting the home-appliance equivalent of heroin up its legs, manufactured by Yana, my kicking and screaming Food Generator-

I can't think of anything more humiliating than an apartment full of crazy appliances.

By the time the Spire Manager arrived with his troop of maintenance drones, shoveling some fecal matter here, soaking up some urine there, I was livid.

"Your appliances are on drugs," he said, fingering bright red pubic hair sticking out of his shorts, apparently the trend among hipsters these days. "Want me to call Pusat Serenti?"

"Just tell me what happened," I blurted out (I was sure it was the Spire's fault).

He gave me a look that said I was a bad owner, that I was the one to blame. At least I don't dye my pubic hair, jackass. Probably crawling with parasites, anyway.

Pubic Hair/Spire Manager pointed to the bathroom. Where Maya once stood was a gaping hole just plugged by one of the Manager's drones, previously the source of the filthy flood. Most of her was pasted in a mess of nano-alloy and dead circuitry across the bathroom wall. I could make out the remnants of the cistern, the toilet bowl, the smart-sensors that sensed the flow of my urine and selected the best music to go with it. Or I could play games controlled by the colour and consistency of my feces (Battleship 5 and Color My Rainbow 3 were favourite choices).