Tevun-Krus #35 - Best of '16

My Name Is @Zayn - A Short Story by @MadMikeMarsbergen

1

You don't know me.

"Alert, alert," my human servant announced. "You now have 199,094 new followers, Zayn, bringing you to five hundred trillion followers. Have a wonderful day of world-renowned fame." My human closed their eyes, curled up into a ball on the floor and went back to sleep.

Okay, so you probably do know me. My name is Zayn, and I'm a pretty popular dude in the Wattpad Republic. I got really, really famous after I wrote a song called "Butterflies Don't Taste Like Butter (They Taste Like Flies)," and then got even more famous when I put out "When It Snows It Blows." Both of those songs later ended up on my debut album, "Simply Zayn." Man, that was a great record. Won a lot of awards, too—like Best Debut Album, even before it was finished or even released; to be fair, my maker is a high-ranking employee at Wattpad, so you might say there was a bit of rigging going on. But who's complaining?

What you don't know about me is that I'm a robot. And I haven't gotten my nuts cranked in, oh... well, never. That's right. I'm a virgin robot. Go ahead. Laugh.

Feel better now?

Anyway, one would think a super-popular guy like me—who, by the way, is actually pretty hot, if I'm allowed to say that about myself—wouldn't have a problem getting the chrome sucked off his trailer hitch, but you'd be surprised. Every time I think I've found the girl to make me a man, she ends up being just another gold digger.

Case in point: The last girl I hoped would be the one to jolt my bolt ended up using me to make her gay brother jealous. Do you have any idea how many dinners and expensive gifts I bought her? I actually went broke for a day or so, until I collected my next four-billion-dollar royalty cheque.

Sitting in my chair, making sure my battery was fully charged, I let out a sigh as I stared out the window. WattCity was swarming with people that morning. Maybe one of those girls out there... Maybe they would be the one.

2

I got out of the elevator and bumped into Troye Boningman, my manager. He's a loud-talking human and the only thing more flamboyant than his sexuality is his sense of fashion. His preferred outfit is no shirt—so he can flaunt his matching nipple and bellybutton piercings, always connected by a faux-gold chain—and see-through black yoga pants, so he can flop around his larger-than-natural organ. His dyed-silver hair is permanently in curlers, because he thinks it makes him look different. He wears a silver bracelet around his wrist, which he swears gives him special powers, and also those giant glasses that weren't cool in the '80s but for some reason are cool now.

"Zoyn, baby! Fancy seeing you here, mate!"

For some reason, he thinks my name is Zoyn. "It's Zayn. And, hi, Troye."

"Zoyn, babe, listen! I was running the numbers, and you're gonna need to write another hit single sometime within the next three minutes!"

"Zayn. And that's impossible, Troye, even for me."

Troye threw back his head and laughed. "You're off your rocker, Zoyn! That's what I love about you, babe! Listen, I'll get the Losers into the studio and you jog over there, come up with something genius, let them record the instrumentation and away you go!"