Long after the planet Earth had died out, after the sun died and left the solar system as a cold husk slowly swallowed by Andromeda, and in fact far beyond the various near extinctions and subsequent resurgences that characterized the history of humanity throughout the course of its existence, the lost city of Atlanta, deformed and reformed by the whims of a madman before it was stolen, reappeared at the end of time to ruin everything. Those that humanity had eventually become, the descendants of proto-bacterial life originating from a long disintegrated ball of condensed star matter, would, understandably, not be amenable to the idea of no longer existing thanks to a conflicting conglomeration of manufactured monstrosities, abhorrent aberrations, merciless maladepts, repugnant recombinators, and temporal troglodytes. If the interloper’s temerity were not supported by an assortment of formidable, forbidden, forsaken, and otherwise forgotten formulae of power and profanity, the beings living as the cornerstones of reality at the end of time would have utterly obliterated the entire entrant upon their ‘errant ingress’.

Fortunately for the people living there, Atlanta had those protections.

Amidst the literal monsters that hunted and continue to hunt in their new, relocated habitat, amidst the concerningly mortal and fragile citizens of the United States of America, or at least, former citizens, seeing as how the delineation of country no longer existed, now that the entirety of the territory, species, and any discernible trace of resources that may have been associated with that previously extant alliance of barely cordial geographical locations had ceased to exist either a short time ago, if one were to take the perspective of one of those beleaguered humans who had been so very recently stolen, or a very, very long time ago, if one were to take any even slightly more objective viewpoint, and far more closely among the actual horrors of biology that had postulated the course of action to the madman in question before the situation had gone so horribly off the rails, leaving their entire genotype at the mercies of both the vagaries of fate and the unknown terror they had so foolishly invited amongst themselves, a separated compound sat blockily above every head. Ice and stone, run through with metal pylons, sat in the center of the dyson sphere-esque city, separated from the common man by a crackling sphere of energy, meters of dead space, and a general desire to not make the ominous, continuously shifting, occasionally screaming, structure any more of their problem then is passively would be from mere proximity. Within that cancerous mass of entirely utilitarian building blocks, the madman’s monstrosities made their nest, carefully quarantined from the daily life and death of a mostly functional city, lest their nature tip the balance of the scales away from the daily life.

It was from the efforts of these created beings that Atlanta remained mostly intact in the cold depths of space, in a time where the vast reaches of the universe had been emptied of light through a consolidation of matter into a single point, the last thing to ever exist. The final center of existence was the home for the eternally perfect utopia all of creation had spent itself to build, a perfect existence that would remain as a candle in the darkness, a constant reminder to the nothingness outside of itself that there was in fact something. Glowing in the center of crystal spires, the last star sat upon a throne of lenses, the light it produced focused and refracted through a dazzling gleam of precisely maintained structures, bent by domesticated black holes and converted back and forth from various types of energy through piezoelectric crystals, heat expansion pressure generators, and cascade tunnelers, to produces out of the fundamental mathematical quantum soup of quark possibilities more unfettered protons than were consumed in the nuclear fire of basic hydrogen fusion. With infinite time, infinite energy, infinite space, and no limits on possibility, the eternal society spared no expense in its manipulation of the entire history of reality to ensure itself the perfect existence it had enjoyed for so long. It would never stop existing, and it would ensure that by sending tendrils of its influence backward through time, the roots of its being stabilizing events and ensuring that nothing would ever be mutable, that fate was inexorable, that all of history was truly working toward its present with every action, great, small, and horrible.

When the lost city became as such, it had done so in defiance of the grand plan. Upon its disappearance, the grand machinery acting as an omnipotent god to steer reality on its path stretched its tendrils gently to draw matter and energy from carefully cultivated splintered shards of time, pulling vibrancy, life, and the undefinable significance of the past’s existence to fill the void left by Atlanta’s absence. This backfilling of reality did have a minor impact on local history, in a mythological tradition of the disappearance, but the original Atlanteans would have their influence on the timeline replaced through the calculated machinations of the invasive mechanations. As such, the mild fluctuations centered on the lost city were accounted for, and filed as an aberration with no long term consequences.

This would, tragically for the eternals, be a mistake.

Atlanta spun as it floated through the blackness of space, pressing the inhabitants of the city against the stolen ground in facsimile of gravity through the scientific magic of inertia. High above the common citizens' heads, the many cubes formed into a glowing sphere spun as well, but with considerably less speed. Of course, since the momentum of the civilians was consistent, the optical effect was simply that of a spinning orb that lit up the entirety of Atlanta at all times. It made for surprisingly normal days, and far more annoying nights, as the ‘definitely not a sun’ filled approximately a quarter of the purpose of the traditional ball of flaming plasma typically used in that area for timekeeping purposes. For instance, it did nothing to disincentivize the presence of vampires.

At all hours, the previously corralled monsters could now walk freely among the humans, never needing sleep or other rest, beyond their daily meal. Overall, they had become significantly more productive citizens, now that their functionality doubled with no change to their standard upkeep. This change effectively did nothing for the city in its entirety, due to vampire society being insular, an extreme minority, and generally useless. Perhaps in the stolen forest, it would be slightly more dangerous due to a lack of sleeping patterns for the predators lurking within, but even within the minority that vampires found themselves categorized under, those who were more comfortable remaining eternally in the embrace of nature would find themselves set apart into an even smaller sub-minority. Indeed, the well-being of the city proper was almost entirely set upon the shoulders of the ordinary, mortal citizens, and the ghosts bound into the walls.

Through profane rituals harvested from an immortal tome left behind after earth’s sun consumed its charge in the flames of the red giant, destroying the vault it had been trapped within until the end of the planet, and further trapped for billions of years as the red giant’s helium flash, and then further nebula ejection, failed to pry the unholy book from its new prison within a molten carbon core, the souls of Atlanteans throughout the history of the land had been bound into the networks severed from the god machine, turning their purpose from the goals of the eternals to their destruction. Concentrated malevolence flowed through the infrastructural design woven throughout the city by minds beyond the comprehension of a sane human, handily replacing the general malaise that was unceremoniously excised with the removal of all the tendrils connecting the city to the various corporations that no longer had a hold on the minds and lives of the now less beleaguered humans operating in the lost city. While the tormented spirits were enough to replace the hopeless aura the specter of ruthless capitalism was no longer providing to keep the humans in line, they were not an adequate replacement for the supply lines that had been severed through the sudden egress into the depths of space.

That was where the cube came in.

Along with every other function the faux star above the Atlanteans performed, some of the sub-cubes were devoted to the life support systems. As of the initial theft of the city, exactly sixty-four of the cubes were entirely devoted to the production and distribution of consumable materials, whether they be appropriate liquids for those who require drink, edible foods for those who require consumption, or breathable gasses for those who are unable to stay alive in the eventuality of a complete vacuum, as was such a case in the entirety of the space beneath the city streets. Humans, of course, required all of those functions. If there was one useful feature of the vampiric, it was that they, in total, only required the output of one sub-cube for the entirety of their society.

Many people were less than satisfied by the variety provided, but at least it was free.

Those who had been made within the structures, who had never known any sort of existence beyond that of the limited selection provided to them, were utterly oblivious to the discontent of the city proper. Their interactions with greater society were generally limited to the incidental contact that was unavoidable when directed to facilitate repairs or maintenance on the spiritual network binding everything together. While on the job, those busters were specifically not meant to cause trouble in the neighborhood through the incitement of general panic, as was typically the result of their interaction with any living being, for numerous, valid, reasons. Public speaking was somewhat of a deficiency for the gene-spliced infrastructure maintenance team, and so their tasks were carried out under the cover of statistical likelihood of the residents having gone to sleep at a particular moment.

Unfortunately, the permanently bright ball of energy floating above their heads rendered the entire concept of a ‘day and night cycle’ to be unfeasible. With no outward requirement to sleep based on the changes of the world around them, Atlanteans would self-govern their personal circadian rhythm, according to their own inclinations rather than those foisted upon them by the vagaries of a society from which they had been most cleanly severed. Each of the ‘technicians’ were therefore accompanied by their own personal transportation chauffeur, ready at the slightest indication to remove the both of them from the potential incident before the situation would be able to deteriorate to the point that irreparable damage was caused by either the aggrieved party or the worker.

A set of them was working in an abandoned gas station.

Gasoline was already a compressed soup of desecrated corpses before it was imbued into an unholy nightmare system designed to burn the potential out of their history. To add to that, this particular one was a focus of the eternal time control network. As a direct result, gas stations would be extremely volatile liminal spaces where the restless spirits trapped within the materials could manifest themselves, affect the physical world, and potentially murder countless mortal souls and drag them into their amalgamation of suffering to spread the burning pain the world was inflicting upon them at all moments. Every once in a while, someone had to go down and mess with the tubing to get the clumps out and make sure nothing burst.

“Are you absolutely sure you can’t go any faster?” the chauffeur asked nervously, looking around the empty aisles of the convenience store the two of them had bunkered down into. It had the standard assortment of snacks and accessories held to entice weary travelers to consume at exorbitant prices while they waited for passengers to use the facilities or vomit out the snacks purchased at the last gas station convenience store, like jerky, peanuts, and old magazines, but no workers or customers. With the company’s introduction of ‘definitely not electric’ vehicles that ran on something that wasn’t gasoline, but no scientist was able to figure out, primarily due to the best case scenario of someone opening up the hood being that the car immediately explodes, catches on fire, and burns into ash within three seconds, the oil-based infrastructure of Atlanta was rendered redundant. Wooden trams circling the city at tremendous speeds with free passage tended to outperform traditional personal vehicles that were limited by human reaction time, a lack of supply, and the fact they had to dodge the trams going down each street at the speed of sound.

They could go faster, but no one wanted constant sonic booms shattering all the glass.

“No, I can’t go faster,” responded the technician. They were laying down on the checkout counter, scratching off the lottery tickets one at a time. A steadily growing pile of discarded cards lay on the ground behind the register, with a steady stream of silver scrapings covering up the glass casing surrounding the overpriced knives.

“Are you sure?” pressed the chauffeur. “We’re basically out in the open, and there could be a human at any time.”

“Humans don’t spend their time hanging around in the super haunted areas,” dismissed the layabout. “Here’s a secret they don’t want you to know about; these jobs are basically just a relaxing break that we drum up as super dangerous so no one wants to take them.”

Blood began condensing on the inside of the drink coolers, giving all the sodas within a reddish tinge.

“Easy for you to say, the thirty-one series has all the tools to make ghosts a non-issue, an immunity to death, and your emergency switch.”

“You guys massively overestimate the danger posed by humans. Sure, you’re way less durable than we are, but a human can’t even grow back their limbs if they’re torn off. You’d be fine as long as you got away and had a chance to heal, and you can literally teleport.”

Maggots writhed inside the various sushi stacked on the shelves, before the plastic wraps exploded out clouds of black flies, which all flew toward the pair. They died before getting within a meter, falling to the ground and coating it with insect corpses along with the used scratch cards, scrapings, and general gas station floor goo.

“What are you talking about, every human any of us have ever met could annihilate this entire city single-handedly! It’s a wonder that even this small bit of matter still exists.”

“Shockingly, relative to the humans that live in Atlanta and not in the cubes, all of them are, and I quote, ‘terrifying psychopath monsters who do not represent anyone with a functioning sense of empathy’, end quote.”

“I assume whomever you’re quoting is dead.”

“Whaat, why would you ever suspect okay yeah that’s accurate.”

Within the walls and above the ceiling, the various neglected pipes which would carry the water to and fro from the city’s municipal plumbing network shrieked as they all twisted apart, shedding their contents. Neglected stagnant goo flooded downward out of the sprinkler vents, black, viscous liquid joining with the crunchy layer of carapaces surrounding the two verbal contenders. Pooling upward, the gas station quick mart began to flood with a solidified tide of filth.

“There’s a theory postulated in a few of the reference books about the nature of societal evolution, where those who are more adapted for the social structure are the ones who survive and prosper, eventually twisting the existing environment to suit their methods of interaction. Those who conform to those standards manage to survive, and those who attempt to resist are struck down with all possible force. It follows, then, that since the humans in control of everything from a giant death cube in the sky are genocidal maniacs who spend their efforts toward generating the greatest possible amount of suffering, those who manage to survive under that kind of leadership are similarly drawn toward general antipathy and casual violence.”

“That’s just the one guy. Well, and the other one. And the senator. And all the assistants. And maybe the little girl. Regardless, the fact that they’re separated out into a ‘giant death cube’ and a literal underclass means that the social structures have enough distance between them to progress in separate directions. Casual dismemberments aren't nearly as common down here.”

Immediately the one on the counter was dismembered by a glowing claw that erupted from the scratch ticket and tore through the arm holding it like the limb was entirely composed of soft butter.

“Oh there it is,” the technician stated, grabbing the ghostly blue ectoplasm with the still attached arm. Pulling hard, they fell over backward, dragging a skeletal form out from the discarded card. Silver smoke billowed from empty eye sockets as the emaciated entity was torn from its peaceful resting place. A see-through cigarette stood in the hole of its mouth, sourcing the smoke that spewed from every orifice. From the bone shoulders, straps of dingy denim lowered down to a set of overalls, billowed out away from the skin to the width the ghost must have had in life. As it exited entirely from the piece of paper, far too small in every dimension to contain it, the last parts of the ghost to emerge were the dingy tennis shoes, curved nails jutting out the front like so many utahraptor toeclaws jammed into a single spot. The moment they were free, the ghost dug into the glass case, puncturing holes as it pushed into the technician.

Both the ghost and the buster fell off the counter into the viscous ooze slowly flooding the quickie-mart.

For the next minute, the two flailed at each other in a parody of actual wrestling:; a one-armed tiny creature against a beclawed spectral former gravy seal. Sloshing through sludge, each ineffectual blow caused ripples to flow through the spiritual overalls, whereas the similarly ineffective flailing from the ghost left rends in flesh, and within those rends a similar filthy black goo, though with even more thickness holding it in place. Eventually, and somewhat miraculously based on how generally terrible at fighting they were, the technician ended up on top in their life-and-death scuffle.

Barely indenting the overflowingly loose coveralls inward toward the skeletal form it somewhat covered, the tech held one of the suspender straps steady, and the stump of their other arm back as if to punch with the missing limb. Moving it forward, absolutely nothing happened. Blowing a cloud of silver pollution into its opponent’s face, the skeletal face tore open into a grin. Both arms, completely unimpeded by anything whatsoever, reached up to grip one half of a face each, pulled upward, and twisted.

Head turned backward, the technician fell sideways off the ghost’s distinct lack of girth into the black goop. Without exertion of any force on the environment, the spirit ascended to its feet, sliding upward until it was vertically inclined. Now at its full height, it turned to face the chauffeur on the other side of the counter, stepping forward and through the register toward the much smaller individual.

“I know you aren’t dead, turn your head back around!” the chauffeur declared, wading backward through the goop.

Back behind the counter, the body rose up to a seated position. Head turned toward the ghost, the single arm pressed against the ground, lifting the entirety to their feet. Gripping onto the top of the head, the arm remained locked in place as the body turned toward the chauffeur and ghost, twisting the head even further until it completed the three hundred and sixty degree rotation to face the same direction as the feet once again.

“You’re an idiot, you know that?” stated the chauffeur.

Winding back with their remaining arm, the technician lunged forward toward the ghost to punch it in the back of the head. Unfortunately, there was a checkout counter in the way, which they immediately ran into, tripped over, and fell face forward into the disgusting slop coating the gas station floor. Alerted by the disturbance of its spontaneously generated environment, the gas station ghost, startled, grimaced, spun, grinned, and stomped. With that singular motion, the entirety of the technician’s torso caved in, the shredded work boots smashing through skin and bone into the floor below, leaving the impression of black ooze statically hanging around the ectoplasmic leather like an absolutely abhorrent jello. Licorice flavor.

“Quit playing around, you don't need physical contact,” the chauffeur spoiled, nervously looking out the glass swinging door to check if there was a potentially incoming, and far more dangerous, human outside. There was not, thankfully, but that could change at any moment. Every moment this idiot spent playing around with a random ghost was another moment they could be discovered and set upon by a horde of perfectly deadly killing machines.

Not of its own volition, the ghost started floating up into the center of the gas station. Down on the floor, the technician pushed up with their one arm and lifted their face out of the muck.

“Fine, fine. Ruin my fun, why don’t you. No sense for the dramatic at all. I’m sure that I could have dragged this out for at least another five minutes before it realized what was happening,” griped the floor-bound thing.

Pushing up onto their knees, the technician ignored the various ailments of the physical form in favor of frowning at the flailing phantom. Freeing their gaze from the form, the technician wandered over behind the counter once again, and rooted around in the muck. Pulling the severed arm from the sludge, they pressed it against the similarly gooey stump, before letting it fall back into the goop. They sigh for a moment, then look back toward the center of the shop.

“It takes forever to grow those back, and I don’t even get the opportunity to milk this for all it was worth.”

Dripping black goop as they did so, the technician walked straight to the door, and the ghost floated unwillingly after. Unfortunately for their image, the glass door was not among the number which swung both outward and inward with equal abandon, easily entered and exited, but rather the type of door which required a person on the inside to grab the handle and pull, retreating further into the structure from which they wish to escape with all possible haste. Egress-inhibiting doorways were an annoyance, but rarely were they installed with the malicious intent of capitalism, deliberately providing yet another barrier to entry on the topic of removing oneself from whatever situation life had taken and forced the status of being required to attempt to purchase items from a gas station convenience store. Rather, those were typically just the basic incompetence of people who do not think in advance about the ergonomic and general fluid dynamics of a consumer-based structure. Traffic in the overpriced shops being as low as it was, proper mechanical forethought was seldom put in place before the structure was built.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

That, and the fact infrastructure was built decades prior and never had any improvements made during the entire life cycle.

Beyond the struggles with the doorway, struggles with which the intangible spirit was completely inured to, seeing as how it was both being dragged and also able to simply flow through the wall rather than have to deal with the fickle nature of the material reality which the living and the damned tend to find themselves forced to contend with throughout the course of their entire existence, the path outside was completely clear from obstruction. For the ghost that was being flung back and forth at speed, the obstructions were likewise clear of obstruction, until it at last was stopped by the physicality of a gas station pump. With a solid crunch, the intangible was met with the substantive, and neither gave way. Nothing blocked the path from the door to the pump, and the technician strode over calmly. With the single arm left to them, they gripped the spirit around the skeletal neck, and lent the action of slamming the ghostly face into the price per gallon counter a degree of physicality that the standard of just causing the action to happen without any bodily interaction whatsoever simply lacked.

“You were once a man, one addicted to gambling,” the tech stated, continuing to slam the face into the glass of the odometer. “Even when the city was cut off from the lottery commission and any possible benefits you could have gotten from the action were rendered entirely moot and irrelevant, you couldn’t take the withdrawal from your risk-seeking behavior. You never stopped playing the scratch cards, even as time moved on without you, literally. Even in death, you haven’t, ever, stopped.”

With every pause in their rant, the technician punctuated with another crunch against the glass, shaking the numbers within the machinery. Every impact jostled the odometer the slightest bit more, pushing the cost higher. Next to the red, near-rectangular shape, the nozzle of the pump, held by a simple hook as it hung by the metal base, shook regularly as the connectors holding it on the rung had their subtle vibrations reverberated and emphasized by the loose hold the design had on the easy to remove hand-held dispenser.

“It’s a sad story of addiction, and a failure to overcome it. Maybe you didn’t have a support network. Maybe it was some neurological problem that could have been solved with medications. Maybe you were just stupid. I don’t care. Everything that you have ever been, all your choices, have led up to this, singular, moment. Me, mashing, you. What possible importance could your past, and your current remnant spirit left over after your death, have, compared to the combined weight of the entire history of every person who has ever died, including those in your exact circumstance? You are nothing but a single grain of feed for the gristmill, so get in there and be ground to dust.”

After that last slam of face into glass, there was a break. Specifically, it was the skull. As though it were the glass casing of the pump that had broken instead, a spiderweb of cracks split apart the ghost’s face. The next hit spread those cracks further down, and then further, as the technician refused to stop. A stream of black started to flow out from those crack into the gas pump’s nozzle, an oily liquid that jammed itself into the system and forced the numbers on the odometer to rise. From the not-exactly-starting location that the numbers had been shaken into over the course of the smashing, the cents column rotated downward, past zero dollars and zero cents to overflow over into ninety nine dollars and ninety nine cents, and then taken lower.

“Are you done yet?”

The question echoed across the empty lot, not interacting whatsoever with the struggles of the ghost as it tried desperately not to have its vital essences drawn out of itself into some sort of crude oil storage machine, but drawing the attention of the technician, who didn’t really need to be paying very much attention to the processes.

“Getting close. Just need to wait for this to finish rendering, and then we can leave.”

“Good, a human could show up at any moment.”

“You are aware that these ghosts are basically humans that aren't alive anymore, right?”

“There’s a difference between something that’s alive and a thing that isn’t. An enormous cockroach flying toward your face is terrifying. The same roach three seconds later after it’s dead on the floor is just another corpse. Besides, it’s not the physical form of a human that’s terrifying, it’s the things they do. These ghosts are bound by their strict rules and set patterns of behavior, whereas a human could do anything. Plus, their physical forms are terrifying.”

“Fair.”

The black goo ceased its flow from the skull, the ghost fully emptied of vitality, and it began crumbling to bits instead. Starting from the face, the cracked chunks of ectoplasm broke into smaller and smaller pieces, until it too was sucked into the gas pump nozzle as a pale dust. All the way down the overalls, the ghost’s entire body was similarly disintegrated, transmuted through sufficient battery into a funnel of ashy sand.

“Up for pancakes after this?” asked the technician to the chauffeur.

“Those take so much effort to prepare though,” groused the other.

“I know a dude that owes me a favor,” came the reply. “Just need you to provide some transport, and I’ll be able to make a batch.”

“Deal.”

As the shoes of the ghost broke into dust and flowed into the gas pump, the chauffeur grabbed onto the technician. A bright flash of light blasted out throughout the entire parking lot, and then the both of them were gone, leaving a ten thousand dollar winner scratch card floating in the breeze, past the gas pump trying to charge ninety three dollars, and thirty four cents.

***

Two people appeared in a featureless room.

“I know for a fact that you can literally teleport anywhere. Why would you put us here?”

“Quarantine procedures are there for a reason.”

“But pancakes.”

“You think I’m not hungrier than you? Every jump fills me with a pressing need to devour anything that looks even remotely edible.”

“Must make it inconvenient to jump back and forth to the galley for food.”

“The trick is to get a certain someone to hold plenty of extra for the return trip.”

“If we could-”

White foam filled the room suddenly. A couple of extremely large beater blades dropped down from the ceiling into the gunk and started spinning. Just as suddenly as they had begun, the blades stopped and retracted into the ceiling, and a drain opened up in the floor. The foam whirlpooled down, leaving two figured bedraggled in its wake, with nine limbs between them. Absent their forms were any traces of their previous work, the black goop washed off in the spin cycle.

Spitting foam out, the technician stated, “I hate decontamination.”

“Yeah, yeah,” snarked the chauffeur, “time for food.”

Another flash, and they were in a cafeteria. Plates were directly in front of the pair, with silverware in circular basins next to them. Immediately, the chauffeur grabbed a plate, and placed it on a conveyor belt moving along a buffet line of various dishes. As they passed the offerings, they grabbed a serving of potatoes, a whole steak, two piece of bread, another plate, scallops on the potatoes, cheesecake on the second plate, another plate, rice on that new plate, shrimp on the rice, a lobster on the rice, and a poppy seed muffin on the second plate.

“Are you sure you don’t want some of the mac and cheese?” questioned the tech.

“Yeah, that stuff is terrible.”

“Blasphemy.”

With another flash, they were across the room at the various tables set up for the inhabitants to eat upon. Barely any of the tables had anyone sitting in any of the chairs around them. Humans were an extreme minority in the common areas, particularly as those who did exist within the cubes had enough clout to carve out their own domains, from which they could command a vast array of minions to take care of their mundane needs without any requirement of personal effort. As the non-human contingent had no inherent obligation toward consumption, building the infrastructure toward filling the demands of a human troop of the same number as they had started with was massively overspend. Even now, with the vast exponential growth of their number, the food service areas still had yet to be anywhere near taxed.

Barring the occasional celebration.

Through a mouth full of roll, the chauffeur demanded, “So what about those pancakes?”

“Give me a minute, I need to get a call off.”

The tech pulled a chunk of wood out of their pant pocket, flicked it to split it in half, and pressed several of the buttons, connecting to a different copy of the same device, and requested an audience in the cafeteria with whomever was on the other end. Unlike these two, the unfortunate soul on the receiving end of the wood phone call did not have unlimited access to instantaneous teleportation, and was forced to rely instead upon the far less convenient method of transportation known as using their feet to walk from one point in space to another. This took additional time, time enough for the chauffeur to devour their way through the majority of the materials they had looted from the common area. If there were actually participants in this general resource allocation system, the display of gluttony, extrapolated throughout the population, which, again, did not exist, would exemplify the hypothetical tragedy of the commons. Fortunately, such hypothetical situation were only that, and the slippery slope fallacy was named a fallacy for a completely viable reason. Individual action was a negligible factor when it came to overall results of the full societal impact. Systemic factors, such as ‘not requiring caloric intake to continue functioning’, were far more of a weight on the scale than any particular example of extreme engorgement.

“Yo what up, what ya want, I’m your dude, can get hands on anything,” the new arrival said quickly, as they slid into an empty seat and immediately stole a potatoed scallop. “Walnuts, peanuts, grapes, melons, oranges, coconut, gun, whatever.”

“Pancakes,” demanded the chauffeur.

“Cool, check it,” the procurement specialist replied, “nothing up my sleeve.”

They unzipped the sleeves of their suit, removing the arm parts entirely, and handed them to each of the audience members. Each arm started crackling with electricity.

“And oh look over there it’s a distraction!”

While the technician and the chauffeur both looked at the distraction, which was actually just a demonic duck of some sort, the new arrival punched through the fabric of space and time with both hands, pulled a plate of pancakes out of the past, and put them gently on the table. Bleeding black ichor from the nose, they gestured magnanimous toward the freshly buttered offerings.

“Ta-da!”

“Hm,” stated the chauffeur, “where’s the syrup?”

“Oh,” responded the procurement specialist. “Uh, I can get some, but could you get me to the hospital section first?”

***

A teleportation later, the chauffeur and the thief were in medical. They spent a few seconds relaxing, and shortly thereafter the specialist procured a bottle of syrup, along with another bit of ichor from the orifice. One of the medical personnel noticed they were loitering, however, and started moving toward them.

Fortunately, teleportation was faster, and the both of them made it out before they could be confronted with hospital use charges.

***

“Syrup,” declared the chauffeur, transporting it from the container to the pancake. Unlike previous transports, this was a slow, non teleporting form of movement. When tilted, the inertial forces generated by the rapid spinning of the cubes acted much like gravity, slowly pulling the viscous liquid away from the tin can it was originally trapped within. As if it were an inexorable force, the pancake stood immobile before the onrushing tide, morale crushed by its inevitable fate. The deluge followed, encompassing all that the pancakes had wrought, which, admittedly, wasn’t very much. Mostly just themselves, and a bit of the plate.

From the cafeteria entrance, the technician wandered back in. They had regained their other arm, but were now lacking one of their eyes, and everything between that and the other side of the head. Stumbling their way over to the table, they pull out a chair, then miss it entirely when trying to sit in it.

“What happened to you?” asked the procurement specialist.

“Had to turn in a report to the professor. Got through the maze gauntlet fine, but then at the end he shot me in the face for being ‘unethical’. If you can go over the walls, it should be allowed!”

“You should probably take the humans more seriously,” stated the chauffeur through a mouthful of batter. “Any other series would be severely inconvenienced at the least from that kind of thing. Your allowance of the behavior normalizes it, and makes it more likely that someone that isn’t an indestructible monster is going to be on the receiving end of a hole in the head.”

“It’s the professor, those were going to happen to anyone that comes near him anyway. If he wasn’t originally from texas, every person in this city would be wearing fireproof blast suits at all times as a reasonable precaution,” the technician griped.

“Why would you even need to report to him anyway?” the thief asked, casually curious.

“Used to be someone higher up’s job, but then I happened to be nearby and they stuck it on me. To be honest, this all seems like a pyramid scheme,” confided the technician.

“Is this about the food again? It’s metaphorical, you idiot,” chided the chauffeur.

“No, I mean everything. You have the ranks, right? And the ones on the lower rank have to listen to what anyone of a higher rank says, you know? But everyone is made at a certain rank, and the only way to not have to be stuck scrubbing the toilets for the rest of eternity is to build an entire new lower rank that has to listen and do all the work that you don’t want to do,” the tech reasoned.

“That’s called capitalism,” the procurement specialist informed them both.

“There’s no method for upward mobility, I’m just stuck doing these random cleaning jobs or giving reports that others don’t want to be the bearers of for the rest of eternity. None of us age, nothing ever changes, and I don’t particularly want to spend all of my potential on making a new generation that are going to be stuck in this cycle for until they decide they’ve had enough and either perpetuate it or walk directly into the power core,” the tech continued to gripe.

“It’s not going to be eternity, just until eternity dies,” corrected the chauffeur.

“That might as well be the same thing,” argued the tech.

“You have no faith in the higher rank’s planning abilities,” stated the chauffeur.

“Accurate,” the tech responded.

“Yeah, that’s just called capitalism again,” the procurement specialist informed the other two.

All of them paused for a minute. The chauffeur started moving again first, as they had pancakes to eat. Chomping became the background ambiance instead of the silence of an empty dining hall, as at least one of them attempted to think.

“Be right back, gonna grab a pizza and put like twenty scallops on it,” the chauffeur announced, vanishing in a flash of bright light.

“All I’m saying is that it’s functionally impossible for any of this to change anything,” the technician continued, despite the one they were talking to having vanished into the æther.

“You are fully aware that I’ve already heard all of your points multiple times already,” the thief stated.

“Yeah, but I’m getting warmed back up. You completely killed my momentum.”

“And I’ll do it again.”

“You wot m8?”

“Oh, you want to take this outside?”

“I’m the one that doesn’t have to worry about breathing in space.”

“That’s fine, I’ll just use your suit, since you don’t need it.”

“Let’s take this inside!”

“We’re already inside, you complete blowhard.”

The chauffeur appeared in the previously vacated seat, a large cheese pizza with a pile of separately cooked scallops haphazardly dumped upon the cheese in hand, and dropped the load of not fish onto the table. The procurement specialist grabbed one of the mollusk and popped it into their mouth, slicing the meat apart instantly with the serrated knives lining their mouth.

“All I’m saying is that it’s functionally impossible for any of this to change anything,” the technician continued, now that the one they were talking to had returned from vanishing into the æther.

“Really, you’re starting this just as I get back with pizza?” questions the chauffeur. “I’ve got so many better things to do than listen to an unhinged rant. At least fifteen of them are scallops.”

“That just means you’re a captive audience. Thanksgiving dinners are apparently the archetypical family gathering that inevitably turns to hostility due to the most unhinged humans coming together and having an entire group of people that are socially obligated to simply stay in place while they expound upon what they had decided will be their thesis for the year. Since every human on this rock is on the extreme end of the unhinged axis, such that the typical human were a completely sane, unable to be committed to an asylum even if they tried, type of existence, that renders the act of using you as a hostage to my rants in order to build up into a frenzy of maniacal energy a proud part of our culture,” expounded the technician.

“Oh yeah? And what part of our long term strategy to decouple reality from itself and render the entire universe into a continuously fluxing state of chaos is insurmountable?” the hostage bit, hooked into the conversation by the cunning trap of pancakes and their own inability to simply abandon food.

“Every single one,” the tech declared.

Silence fell again, as instead of biting further on that obvious bait, the chauffeur instead folded two opposite ends of the pizza toward the center, and followed up by rolling the entire thing up into a burrito. Unfortunately, the abominable pastry was simply too thick for their mouth to fit around, and rather than being able to devour it in a single elongated motion that would render them unable to even have the potential for response, due to the continuous nature of the devouring, they were forced to simply bite the shell and work their way into the sweet jam and meat contained within. This allowed for a gap in the act of consumption, socially forcing an interaction with the deranged individual that didn’t believe in the idea of destroying reality.

“Fine,” the chauffeur allowed, leaning back in the seat in defeat. There was no opportunity to evade the incoming rant. Social norms had them trapped like a rat. Resignation to their fate could be seen in their slant. The despair was that of one who wishes to simply eat their pancakes in peace, but can’t. Even if they were to break contact immediately, the ability to gain foods not on the basic menu was too convenient. It was an unfortunate development. To leave was to tacitly abandon all of their work and lose their investment. It was too bad that pancakes weren’t universally provided by the government. At least listening wasn’t anything that required active involvement. Despite their overall encroaching surveillance capabilities, most of the humans were generally lax on enforcement. As long as nothing affected actual taskwork, it didn’t matter how much an individual brought up discontentment. A squeaky wheel only got the grease if the result was some sort of inconvenience to the one in command, and that simply wasn’t the case for grousing in the form of the nonbelligerent. “What’s the first impossible thing?”

“In order to even start dealing with this dyson sphere that controls all of reality, we would have to deal with the fact that it generates literal infinite amounts of energy from whatever weird future tech garbage it uses to multiply the output of their hypermassive magnetar and its constant gamma flares. Without that, they can just brute force every possible attack we could make with nothing but their automated defense systems. Those systems use the base states of physics to negate everything that has ever existed retroactively if it was going to come close to being a threat to them, using the same principles they use for ensuring that the timeline remains static and will always lead to their ascendency. Beyond the automated passive reactive defenses, they have their universal backup with which to revert any potential changes to the established order. Even if we somehow managed to completely obliterate their entire society, they would just reboot and revert to a state where they were perfectly unharmed once again. It’s just layer upon layer of impossible tasks, and there’s absolutely no way that any of this leads anywhere productive,” the technician started.

“Hold on there,” the procurement specialist interrupted. “I heard through several contacts of the shark variety that there’s already someone on the inside of the crystal palace. Also something about deadly unicorns, a moat run red with the blood of dragons, and it always having been that way, but really most of that is probably random nonsense that came up after repetition. Anyway, one of your series got sent in all sneaky like, and they’ve been gone dark and uncommunicative since they went in. Something like that, an actual infiltration that both went off without a hitch and has managed to go on without raising any alarms, is a sign that in general, progress is being made, even if it isn’t visible.”

“That’s a wildly optimistic take,” the technician countered, “that if we haven’t heard anything at all that it means everything is currently going in the best possible way. Not only would we need to have vast powers that have been concealed by literally every person in this entire city, but they would need to be perfectly coordinated by the, like, seven different factions and schools of thought that stem from the humans in charge. Every one of them would need to be working perfectly together, a machine of five thousand irregularly shaped parts spinning in harmony to shatter the light and destroy its hold on time forever. Without some sort of central guiding intelligence taking indisputable control over every iota of power we can gather, along with the hidden cards that almost certainly don’t exist, the simplest step is the most impossible one. How can you destroy a system that has literally all of time to draw on to counter your actions? It’s been building since the creation of the universe to make itself indestructible, and we have the sheer hubris to think that we can take it down? With what? A gun?”

“As if we can’t steal things directly out of the past too,” declared the thief. “My entire series was designed with the idea that if they have unlimited resources, then we can too. All the unholy blood magics and dimensional exploitation technology that has us rip ourselves apart to do the same to the fabric of space and time combined with the forty-five’s reversion abilities isn’t just limited to grabbing pancakes. The matter creation cubes may not be the equal to the terminal reality shards, but we have a back door into them thanks to how that one human was so unhinged in the past that they could realize they were in a loop of recycled time, and led our creator to understanding of its nature in just the way to bring the security systems out while they were both inside it. Anything they can do, we can do just as well.”

Having finished their unholy calzone, the chauffeur started their teleportation to get out of there, when they were taken hold of by the technician’s telekinesis.

“Need a lift to P-base,” the tech informed them.

***

Two trips later, the three of them were on a far larger structure. It was one of two, neither planet-sized, specifically because science had declared it so. From here, they had a much better vantage point of literally everything that remained of existence.

“My point,” the technician announced, “is that the issue is one of scale. That tiny dot, the one you can barely see, that represents the entire sum of humanity as we know it. Actually, no, that’s C-base, which is much larger, and not applicable. Over there, far, far smaller, is Atlanta. The giant ball of fire surrounded by glittering crystal that is much farther away and much, much larger than C-base, that’s what we have to contend with. Their power reactor is a lot bigger than ours.”

And then the sun went out.