Hammond Sting

I.

It had just become the future, and Larry's lunch took ten seconds to assemble in a blender.

He watched the ingredients go in. Two scoops of ice. Three scoops of powder. The peanut butter element. (Not real peanut butter — just a pump of clear syrup that tasted like it.) Then a packet of some other powder that spilled on the stainless steel counter when it was torn and stained the ice red where it sweated. The B vitamins. Larry's heart leapt.

There was a grinding. And a screeching. Then the silent sludge flowing thickly into its plastic prison. Two knocks against the stainless steel to settle it, and the cup's cover went on without whipped cream. Larry had assumed he'd get whipped cream, but he supposed that wasn't healthy, and by this point, he didn't want to ask.

"Twelve dollars," said the barista.

On credit. The bookkeeper-slash-HR-slash-whatever flicked sunken slate eyes to the tip jar plastered with princess stickers. He'd wish the shake shop employees well. A mental gesture. Not one he'd care to follow up with a physical if he didn't have to. His credit card was already in hand, and he tapped it against the handheld PIN reader. Then he folded a crinkled paper straw wrapper into the pocket of his black slacks and assured himself the sludge he now siphoned was just as nutritious as a salad.

(With even fewer calories!)

"Thank you," he mumbled.

He wondered, briefly, if "barista" was even the right word for the woman behind the counter. The menu had latte shakes, yes, but he didn't see an espresso machine, and was the milk powdered too? Larry would draw the line at that. The ground-up "grass-fed collagen" put in his potion of youth sounded mystical, at least, and he didn't know what part of what living organism it came from.

"You're welcome, Mr. Goldstrike! Hope to see you again tomorrow!"

"I'm sure you will," Larry said with a nod.

He hadn't subsisted on pizza and powder since college.

II.

Anyway, it was the future, and when Rika asked Larry in a text what he was having for lunch, he said "magnesium," and now she was confused.

He sent her a picture of the shake in his hand, a sticker of a duck in sunglasses obscured by his thumb and condensation.

He had a hangnail. Would that count as protein or collagen?

[Yummm! What flavor?] his coworker asked.

[Peanut butter and jelly]

[Are you trying to loose weight?]

[Magnesium] Larry replied, enigmatically. The barista-of-a-different-sin had said he needed it. Everyone was lacking it, she said. It was good for everything. Like castor oil. And refusing root canals because did you know they cause cancer?

[Trying not to get cancer] Larry added.

She tried calling him then. He put his phone on Focus and slipped it back in his pocket.

It was a decent fall day in the stunted dimension. Humid enough that the leaves that had already fallen lay in moist, crinkly piles on the pavement. Sometime in antiquity, before the stadium was built, it was possible to see snow-tipped mountains from where Larry was standing. Then the stadium was built, and a hedge maze was put next to it, and that was surrounded with park benches and cobblestone walking paths and six-foot-high statues of what looked like teeth with root canals. Some famous local artist had made them, and that was important because unlike in antiquity no one was making great art anymore, and it was important to give local artists a voice.

So Larry read on a display board beside one of the statues, which was effectively called The Artist Starving. He squinted at the sans serif font and chewed on his straw. It was too plain to be Verdana, but too sophisticated for Helvetica. No one in his right mind was using Arial anymore. The B vitamins had all been sucked up and now he was getting mostly powder.

A robot trundled up next to him. It looked like a man in his forties with an undercut and a squared-off chin, but Larry could tell it was a robot because it wasn't regarding The Artist Starving with any kind of existential impulse, whether thoughtful or critical.

Larry envied the robot.

(He also hated the robot because he couldn't see any nipples punctuating its skintight grape-purple bodysuit. Larry hated how he noticed that. Why did robots have to dress like this in public? Now he'd spend the next few nights groggy on cough syrup and daydreaming social posts he'd never actually make, until someone else did for him and he could listen to the fireworks crackling on some flannel-bearded podcast very loudly in his office.)

"The windmill is slower than usual today," said the robot, its untinted lips flexing stiffly around the polygons of its jawline. "Four frames per second instead of five."

Larry swung his head to the west. He could see the windmill off in the distance above the village, grinding silently around like a screensaver sans Ken Burns.

"You know it doesn't really turn by the wind," Larry said.

"Right," said the robot. "The world's memories must be leaking again."

"Is anyone paying attention to that anymore?"

"Not really. By my calculations the brunt of it was all over by last February. Then everyone settled down and bit the bullet. We're not getting anything better."

"Do you think God hates us, or is he indifferent?" asked Larry, tugging at his cloud-patterned tie.

He wasn't sure if the robot would understand a question like that. Perhaps he should've used a secular word like "observer" or "advisor," to fit with Future standards.

In any case, the robot didn't answer. It looked around it suddenly, and then flared the bottom of its white smock and scampered into the first turn of the hedge maze. Larry trudged on after it because that was something to do.

"I thought I was free of him," it told Larry. "That's why I came to the future, you know."

"Who?" asked Larry, slurping air.

"My son."

"You have a son?"

"It's complicated."

"I'd assume so."

"Not in the way you think. A different kind of complicated."

"Is there more than one kind?"

"A disappointing kind. With far less foresight."

"Like the windmill," Larry said.

"Like the windmill," said the robot.

"Do you think someone built the windmill, or has it always existed and someone just decided to put it there?"

The robot cocked its head and gave the windmill far above the hedges a long, strange look. A bit of lubricant bubbled up in the corners of its eyes, and the lids shuttered with a clicking sound.

"It must be that someone like you built it," it said at last.

Larry scrunched his brows at that. "But I wouldn't decide to put it here, in a village, where the framerate would drop when you get within a mile of it. I'd put it… I don't know. In a field."

He took the straw out of his cup and sucked the last of the peanut butter element off the end, biting it into a thin, eye-shaped crimp for good measure. Then he zipped the empty cup into his briefcase and wondered if robots needed magnesium. Or if it was already a permanent part of their chemical makeup. And could it take just a bit more time and magnesium for whoever built them to add on some nipples? Just for cosmetic purposes. By this point everyone was too trampled and bloody with the English grammar anyway.

"If it were really someone like me designing windmills, I'd put care into them," Larry said.

The robot climbed into the wooden gazebo at the center of the hedge maze and stood very still. Clearly one of the kids in the purple pants admiring the root canals was his son. Larry raked his fingers through his hair and tried to guess. Could it be the green-bowl-cutted child snapping pictures? Or that other one with the freckles whose forearm was falling off?

He looked down at his polygonal hands to make sure they were still functional. The veins were slightly raised on cold beige skin between prominent knuckles. Swollen with B vitamins. Rippling and flexing with power. He clenched both into fists, then uncurled the fingers slowly, one at a time, splaying them.

"Why are you hiding from your son?" he asked the robot. A faceless child was skirting through the ground, popping in and out of existence in various places until it finally hung suspended around twelve feet up and started buzzing.

"Is he gone?" asked the robot.

"You haven't told me which one he is," said Larry. "I can't tell you if I don't know."

"The one with the mullet and the backpack who looks like me."

"Ah."

Larry could see the boy now. A tall boy with a salt-and-pepper mullet that fell past his shoulders. He wasn't paying attention to any of the statues, preferring to poke a puffball mushroom on the ground with a stick until it popped off its stem and rolled out onto the paved pathway. He picked it up, squeezed it in his fist, and then stuffed it into a pocket of his backpack.

"Did he follow you into the future?"

"He must have," droned the robot, whose vocoder had lowered its volume until it was barely audible above the general entropy of everything. "I thought I had traveled far enough ahead. Perhaps he did follow me. Or worse — perhaps he traveled into the future, then traveled back, and there are now naturally two of him here."

"There were probably two of him in the first place," Larry remarked. "Or several. Isn't that how it works? You walk into a building and one version of you stays outside while the other starts moving around indoors. Doors don't really open. We just think they do. It's like a game."

"Why would you still consider them doors then?"

An odd question. Larry wouldn't give it too much thought.

Or he would. Because he had just proved, through pure logic, that doors didn't really exist at all anymore. Like great art, they had become tiresome and irrelevant, and their successor caused cancer.

"I don't think I like the future," he muttered aloud.

"Huh?" asked the salt-and-pepper boy, who was now trying to snatch up another puffball mushroom between Larry's scuffed-up shoes.

Larry glanced over his shoulder. The robot had managed to scale the wall of the gazebo and was now in his default position on the ceiling, legs clipping together and arms at right angles. He gave the man in the suit a stern glare, worthy of a cutscene. Or several.

"So weird," the boy said. "I thought I… heard my dad's voice. It couldn't have been you, right?"

"I'm not your dad," said Larry.

Then Larry said, "Your dad isn't a robot, is he?"

The boy's face fell. He took a sandwich out of his backpack and pretended to eat it, chunks of the model disappearing while untinted jaws unhinged in a way that almost made it look like a lattice were stretching his sideburns. Larry felt sorry for him. Ever since it had become the future magnesium shakes were far easier to animate.

"It's complicated," the boy said then.

"Like the windmill," said Larry.

"What windmill?"

The stiff brow furrowed over plain slate eyes that didn't change much in the shadows of the hedge maze. How had this particular maquette never seen the windmill? It dominated the entire hillside. Sometimes it was the hillside. And when it spun slow enough the kids in the purple pants would try to latch onto one of the thatched metal blades to swing around and mock Michael Rodgers.

He's too young to know who that even is, Larry thought, alarmed. And with that came a very alarming feeling, because he wasn't even sure he knew whom Michael Rodgers was, or even if he was allowed to have that information. He just knew it had something to do with windmills. But where was the windmill now? And would it be sentient enough to tell him?

It was all coming up blank. The robot was right. Memories were leaking.

"How's your sandwich?" he asked the boy, then, pressing a gentle powerful hand into the back of his vest and steering him out of the hedge maze once more.

"Dry," said the boy.

"Does it taste like anything?"

"I wish I knew."

His eyes were aquamarine, and painted with a little black mascara, but only on the lower lashes. Larry supposed it was to make him look adequately forlorn for whenever the final product was finished.

He never had a mother. Presumably she's dead. Except in the other version, where she's alive, except either way she's dead, and he's been talking to a robot the whole time. Which in any case is obvious because it can only present itself as a PNG. He lives with his dog. His dog is sick. His dog gets better, and his robot father is trying to run away from him. Doesn't want to understand emotions that way. Wasn't made to.

"What's your name?" Larry asked.

"Arven," said the sympathetic maquette.

"Last name?"

"Pepperbottom."

Up close, Arven Pepperbottom's suntanned skin turned gray beneath the too-sharp chin. It bled into the collar of his shirt belted on under the vest. Presumably the gray then deepened and hardened where a defined chest and torso should've been.

III.

The future was the past now. Larry sat on a park bench pretending to eat a sandwich. A sympathetic maquette sat beside him and pretended to inspect a large ladle that had been hooked onto his oversized backpack. Beside him sat another empty sludge cup. Surprisingly, the shop had offered a root beer flavor, and that syrup was really the color of caramel.

The windmill was missing. So was the sky, which had turned into a staticky black snow. Everything quivered very tightly, like the stars were all fighting to throttle each other. Then the root canals vanished, and a simple message remained:

[THE SOFTWARE WAS CLOSED BECAUSE AN ERROR OCCURRED]

"I hope this isn't too alarming for you," Larry said. He had to admit, the boy was an excellent cook.

"What?" Arven asked. He looked up from his ladle in a mock impression of genuine interest.

Larry gestured to the general entropy of everything. The black of his suit sleeve had gone a bit shiny, and he couldn't feel his hands anymore. The rest of the sandwich disappeared when he willed it.

"I think we might be living in hell," he said then. "There was a windmill I would've shown you, but it disappeared."

"Why are you so interested in windmills anyway?"

"I'm not. But someone pointed out to me how slow it was turning, and then I felt very alarmed. I hope you're not feeling the same."

"I feel…"

Arven's face was designed to be far more expressive, especially when scrutinizing whether reality was even worth it. The aquamarine ranged from forlorn to entirely languishing.

"I don't feel like anything, actually," said the aquamarine, in this moment pleasantly vacant. "I feel like my story ended a long time ago, and nothing else was planned for me to feel after the fact. Like it didn't matter, and no one would notice. I don't think there was time for anything else."

Larry nodded. "I know that feeling. Nothing was planned for me to feel to begin with, and everyone noticed."

"What are you feeling now?"

"A little tired."

"Is anybody noticing?"

"Do you count?"

"Well, I would, except I don't think I'm a real person."

A heavy silence fell between them then. Larry was incapable of blinking. Arven blinked a few times. He looked concerned, but not overly. Only in the way in which a finished model would be concerned about a dog. Which was irrelevant here. Arven was never a finished model. Arven's dog had not been sick in a long time. Arven's dog had also not been seen in a long time. It was unclear whether Arven's dog still existed.

"What do you think a real person is?" Larry asked. "There's the windmill, by the way."

For once the world was startlingly efficient. Arguably twenty days had passed and finally performance had progressed enough for statistical data to sync. The sky had gone back to bodywash-blue, and the windmill had popped back into existence, turning just a bit faster than it had before. There were the kids with the purple pants trying to climb it. No one was capable. Ah, wait. Yes. One succeeded. It wasn't a real person because it went whirling like Michael Rodgers and was immediately after ejected into the binary lacuna.

Someone was about to become notoriously trampled for that.

"I feel like I should know for sure whether I'm a real person," Arven answered finally.

Larry nodded. "You know, I don't think God is indifferent. I think he just made us to be indifferent."

"That makes sense," said Arven. "I think I was a real person once. I was from the future."

"Why did you come here from the future?"

"I wanted to make gourmet sandwiches. I think I was tricked."

"Ah. So it was all just false advertising. 'Have a second life. It's too big to fail.'"

"Something like that. But I think this is my first life. I think that's the sad part."

It had become one of those rare moments where the windmill was the hillside. Four thatched metal blades swung around with a mighty whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop and both maquettes watched them, mesmerized. Whatever bit of sentience had designated this stunted dimension to have the illusion of depth had just spilled magnesium all over the keyboard.

"You really can't get cancer here," Larry told the other maquette. "That's a good thing."

"I didn't think you could," Arven said.

"I did. But I think that's because I'm an old soul. I think I'm the one who made the windmill. I'm still trying to make the windmill right now. A piece of me is just stuck down here. Existing is messy sometimes. You leave parts of you everywhere."

Arven scooted closer to him, almost deciding to lean his head on the suited man's shoulder, but his bones wouldn't let him. Instead he just dangled awkwardly, a bit like a robot. Except Arven wasn't a robot. He was instead a digital puppet, left absurdly unfinished. The distinction was that he had… well, no, he didn't have feelings, and if anyone was saving time out in there in a more rendered world, then he definitely didn't have any…

Well…

"I don't even want to think about it," said Clawrence Goldstrike. He got up from the bench, trundled over to the windmill, and was immediately shredded into a million indifferent pixels.

Arven cocked his head at that. The fact was, people were strange sometimes.

His secondary maquette from beyond the door was now sitting on the bench beside him. He offered him another dry sandwich.

"Thank you," Arven said.

"You're welcome," said Arven. "I like your purple pants. Are they from the future?"

"Yes," said Arven. "Is your dad alive?"

"No," said Arven. "But then, I was never planned to have one anyway."

"What's it like on the other side of the door?"

"Quiet," Arven replied. "I like it there. I wonder if you could visit sometime."

"Probably not," said Arven, "since when I walk into the door I'm not me anymore. I become you, and then you're me."

"Well then. I'll have to tell you all about it."

"You could. But I already know."

"I wonder if the windmill knows everything," Arven said, gazing up at the slate-gray magnesium remnants of Larry swirling in the discolored sky. Some of it had caught on the thatched metal blades, and they were grinding ominously.

"I think the windmill is God," said Arven.

"I think it's Larry," said Arven.

"What are you doing after this?"

Arven thought about this question for a long moment. The aquamarine was giving its best impression of sentience.

"I think both of us are gonna walk up to the door of a really impressive restaurant, maybe one that we own in the future, and then a third Arven, maybe the one from the past who caught up with us in the future, is gonna be on the other side of the door pretending to eat a really good sandwich."

"How many Arvens are there?"

"As many as we need. There's no limit."

"I want to be the Arven on the other side of the world, who's always frozen and upside down because he's fulfilled his purpose in the story and he won't be seen in that outfit ever again."

"You can do that."

"I wonder if anyone feels sorry for him."

"Do you?"

"No."

"I don't either."

Suddenly a torn piece of cloud-patterned tie landed quite close to the park bench, slightly smoking.

Arven turned to Arven and asked, "What's your opinion on space travel?"

~N~

This one is more in the vein of "The American Hyperbole" which I wrote in 2021 after a professor yelled at me for sitting in an empty hallway by myself.

If you liked this one-shot I have an ongoing longfic called Where it NeVer RɅins and Volo isn't in it because I don't like him.

Published by Syntax-N on FanFiction . Net and by scrivenernoodz on Ao3 October 8th, 2023. Please don't repost. Please do review!