Someone in the audience screamed. Marvin Monzo looked up from the screen to see who it was. With half the people in the room pale, hands clapped over mouths, it could have been anyone. It wasn’t his fault——or the Mechanism’s——if they didn’t like the answers to their questions.
So what if farm animals thought we ought to eat more of them? They didn’t hold our carnivorous urges against us at all——not even factory farming. Pigs and cattle admired the scale and efficiency; even up to their last bloody seconds in the abattoir, they were impressed with our ruthless ambition. Unexpected, yes, but did it warrant public screeching? And he’d long suspected frankenchickens actually reveled in their curves. Turned out they often reflected on how they must taste. They dreamt of bright futures as nuggets. Given the chance, they’d devour us too, albeit without dipping sauce…
More shrieking: “Turn it off!”
Media people, he thought. Journalism had existed once. Its death paved the way to his billions. Now there was nobody left to ask the hard questions. Still, he missed it some days. Before him was an auditorium full of cotton-soft influencer girls and podcast boys. Their interests lay mainly in their breast enhancements and blue balls. In fact, the very extinction of substance had inspired him to develop his device. The world needed ways of getting the truth back. Time to change focus then. Next question.
Seagulls all had murderous intentions, the Mechanism revealed. Some even had dark fantasies about buffets of human infants and eyeballs. And dogs liked us less than they let us believe. Those smiles were performative. Tails only wagged for snacktime and walkies. After all, they’d trained us to pick up their shit… Two people stood, snatched up their bags and laptop cases, and walked out. A third followed, then a fourth. Marvin smiled inside where no one could see. He’d power the Mechanism down in a moment. It took time, five or ten minutes depending on the complexity of the questions people put to it. He’d explained the intricacy of its algorithms at the start of his presentation. The phone-scrolling only stopped when the real demonstration started. He asked it about the environment.
Forests craved chainsaws. Glaciers existed to melt. Bees were on their way out. The world wanted to burn.
That’s when the sobbing started. His presentation at the Pentagon had gone much the same way. A choked-up four-star general interrupted the spiel and asked how he could possibly have invented something like this, how he felt being a conduit for evil.
Marvin had shrugged. “I don’t question my inspo,” he said, choosing the short form of the word to be irritating. He preferred to think of himself as a harbinger of truth. It didn’t bother him that nobody liked a Cassandra. Doom is profitable.
“How do we know any of this is true?” someone asked in a trembling voice. “I mean, how do we know this isn’t just some AI hallucination bullshit?”
Marvin looked down at the screen before answering. Stroked the keyboard as if it might purr and want scritches. Cats would eat the soft parts of our bodies first. They didn’t care who knew. Dogs at least valued discretion.
“A very good question,” he said. Should he remind this young woman he’d gone over that at the beginning? No, maybe not. “Everything has an energy field. There’s a form of ESP called psychometry, the ability to ‘read’ objects.” He returned his hands to the keyboard after making the air quotes. Gently scratched it between rows of keys. “Now, we know claims of having ESP are mostly bullshit. But I started to wonder, what if there’s truth in it?”
He went through the rest of the spiel by rote: building a detection device sensitive enough to find the secret frequencies, then another device——the Mechanism——to interpret them. The details about rare earth metals and obscure alloys would put the audience to sleep, so he left that part out this time. Instead, another question:
Yes, people in retirement homes longed to murder their carers and their children before going out themselves in bloody orgies of sex and stabbing in the recreation rooms of their facilities or sometimes the cafeterias if it was pizza night. Snacks first; then they’d snuff themselves and everyone else in sight. They’d use crochet hooks and knitting needles and plastic sporks if they had to. That was the secret appeal of the golden years, not endless rounds of golf and a condo in Florida.
“I’m just trying to make the world a better place,” Marvin said to break the ensuing silence. “Thank you so much for coming.”
Within a year of its unveiling, the Mechanism had brought on a rethink of faith. The oblivionists (who refused a capital O on the grounds that elevating their beliefs in any way would be heretical) assembled to spread the dark gospel of undoing. The undoingness, they called it. They claimed heaven had shut down because its strict immigration policies kept everyone out, and hell had been rendered irrelevant because earth was much worse. The oblivionists had come up with these tenets on their own. The Mechanism, for all its capabilities, had never once detected any sign of the hereafter, up nor down.
You can always throw away things made of plastic, it revealed. Everything made of petroleum longs to sleep once again as dark murk in the earth.
Inspired by these tidings, the oblivionists gathered and staged mass public burials: toys, kitchenware, small appliances, bigger appliances, their pets, their children, themselves. Unconvinced of the sweetness of passing into nonexistence, the little ones tended to kick and scream. Marvin found the videos of parents tying their kids’ hands and feet and taping their mouths shut before tossing them into pits hard to watch not because of the events themselves but because the picture quality tended to be grainy. Unsteady hands, filthy camera lenses. His eyes grew tired from squinting.
Opposition formed and held out as long as it could. The Anti-Mechanismists eschewed neither capital letters nor litigation in capitals. Convinced Marvin was a murderous, fraudulent demagogue and his Mechanism just an AI hiding behind a supply-closet MacGuffin, they tried to sue him out of existence. The oblivionists unexpectedly organized, fought back, and won in court. It was an assault on their faith, they argued——not just illegal but immoral to attack their closely held beliefs.
“You’re burying children alive!” spluttered the Anti-Mechanismists’ prosecutor.
Murmurs in court, but not roars. Marvin, seated in the back, had already noticed the drab brown and grey clothes about half the people in attendance were wearing——the wool of a dirty flock. As the testimonies continued and the chamber warmed, he also began to suspect he might be in the minority that still took showers.
In the end, the oblivionists won on a technicality. Caught up in the righteousness of protest, the Anti-Mechanismists had cut enough corners in their filings that the omissions added up. The forces of oblivion took the dismissal as a victory.
That very night, the news blazed with images of school buses and an assortment of schools and even neighborhoods in some of the southern states set alight.
Celebrating, the oblivionists announced a new motto: The nothingness is everything that is. With fire as the new accelerant of choice, whole cities soon burned.
Now that landfills around the world had been enhanced with industrial meat grinders the faithful could dive into, factions sprang up and competed to perform moral purity. An offshoot of the oblivionists named themselves the void runners. Their mass lemming stampedes off clifftops drew tens of thousands. They stained the White Cliffs of Dover and the Seven Sisters red. Authorities sympathetic to the cause stopped collecting the bodies piling up along the Jurassic Coast. Too many got too waterlogged to burn. Besides, it felt more correct to let the sea wash them away. Videos of ecstatic runners going airborne flooded social media. “No wings!” became the rallying cry of a dwindling generation.
Then there were the Euphagists, whose pathway to the abject divine entailed consuming their own bodies and, in time, other people’s. The pioneers choked down their own shit before moving on to ingredients better suited for air fryers and Instant Pots. A toe here, a finger there, a chunk of calf, a buttock, a bicep, a toddler, a neighbor… by the time the first cookbooks saw print, most potential readers had long since eaten and excreted large parts of themselves and the people around them.
Months had passed since the Mechanism’s last pronouncement, that borders must be redrawn to optimize war. The deepest peace could be found in cratered cities. Angels might or might not exist but their closest proxies drove tanks and fired missiles.
Countries with long names and small populations soon came into being and went up in smoke. Like journalists, pop stars no longer existed in the traditional sense; self-taught singer-songwriters chased virality on apps with heart-rending anthems to the sacrament of bubbling black glass. Like the Euphagists’ cookbooks, maps became obsolete months before they saw print.
Marvin’s mansion-sized bunker in Patagonia sheltered him from toxins, radiation, and most excesses of dogma. Since it was too big for him to manage on his own, half a dozen staff lived on the premises, available 24/7 for cooking, housekeeping, and anything else he might need. In the first months, they rotated in and out every two weeks; as time went by, suitable replacements became harder to find. He knew there were rumors in towns and cities nearby. He knew he frightened people. It didn’t matter. The dark face that smiled inside of him was the same mask everyone else wore, or so he told himself. Besides, he could pay.
A year passed. Staff came and went. Some stayed longer than others. He knew none of their names and didn’t care. The Mechanism had been silent for months. Frantic to get it working again, he’d long since quit checking the news and barely even looked at the people who brought him lunch and sucked his dick. The world was still out there, or maybe it wasn’t. Stranger after stranger drifted through and, in the fullness of time, the ineffable gave way to the inevitable.
They never caught the person who shot Marvin in the face.
Life soon went back to absolutely normal.
Marshall Moore is an American author, academic, and recovering publisher who now lives on the south coast of England near Brighton. He is the author of a number of books, the most recent of which is an essay collection titled Sunset House (Rebel Satori Press, 2024). His short fiction and essays have been published in The Southern Review, X-R-A-Y, Eclectica, Pithead Chapel, Trampset, BULL, Litro, and many other fine places. His favorite revenge story is one that he wrote: his second novel An Ideal for Living. For more information or to catch up with him online, please visit linktr.ee/marshallsmoore.
