Tevun-Krus #62 - Best of 2018

Wattpad Is Dead - @MadMikeMarsbergen - Anti-Hero SF

Wattpad Is Dead

An Anti-Hero SF story by MadMikeMarsbergen

PART ONE: OLD DAYS

1

The underground laboratory hummed with that half-dead kind of lighting, with the pasty faces of greasy, pockmarked nerds in lab coats. And it even hummed, as hard as it was to believe, with life.

Traversing the elaborate complex of tunnels by rote memory, carrying a fresh printout from DAD, was @Hammond420—rail-thin, so square he'd never even caught a whiff of some second-hand from a stranger off the street, had the quirky tendency to shake his elbow like a chicken wing when he laughed. The sheet in his hand was worth more money than he was. Well, not really. Not as it was. But when he finished with it, it would be. If he wore glasses he would have pushed them up his nose right then.

He entered the room for no real reason referred to as The Womb, lifted the lid on a chamber with his free hand. He set DAD's latest SEED sheet down on a table within and closed the chamber. Now to the buttons... Buttons, buttons, so many buttons. The machine had eleven keypads—ten in rather obvious places, the remaining one somewhere you wouldn't think to look—and each keypad had anywhere from three to one hundred and fifty-three buttons, each button varying in shape, size, colour, taste and of course smell, and finally their ability to electrocute or burn you or harm you in any other way possible, be it physically, mentally, spiritually, metaphorically, or even bureaucratically.

After a minute or so of deduction, he pushed a big pink button to boot up MOM, praying he wouldn't be violently circumcised on the spot. Pushing the button was always the hardest part—after all, it was all a matter of finding the right button, and each MOM had a different preference.

2

The man had terrible skin, and he hid it under a heavy trench coat, with a wide-brimmed hat angled low over his face. Despite that—or maybe because of it, all that effort to hide it and all—little more than a cursory glance was needed to tell the obvious: This dude had some nasty, rank-as-fuck, pustule-glittered, foul-smelling, eternally oozing skin. And it was crinkly and generally fucking disgusting.

He walked with speed, long legs pumping him along like he had somewhere to be and he needed to be there twenty minutes ago. The tunnel system just didn't seem to end. Was he lost? Maybe. But probably not. The design of it followed some twisted mathematical code, where the end sum was the always-funny "69." Strange scriptomagik, no doubt hashed out on his old laptop, which had been infiltrated by some bug years prior that allowed it to alter the actual fabric of reality.

Yeah, that funky thang had been capable of some massive feats back in its heyday, like making his long-time girlfriend (and now wife) suddenly "into" the idea of adding another girl into the mix, or sending a dictator to a tropical island full of annoying B-list actors still living in the past. But after the latter event took place it sort of lost its mojo—it had no more oomph, no balls. So he'd tossed it. Took a shit on it, too, for fun. The monkey coders at Wattpad HQ must've dug it out from their sewer lines and blew off all the greasy shit and toilet paper and chicken-wing bones, then put it back in the workforce. Now all it could do was write a confusing but ultimately pointless tunnel system beneath the place he wanted to be.