The Cult of the Machine

Salina

Salina cleaned houses for a living. Between her job and domestic labor as a single mother, she worked upwards of fourteen-hour days.

Her son, Omar, had graduated from high school that year. Thanks to a generous scholarship, he was able to attend a good school. He was excelling in his pre-med courses, and hoped to become a doctor and a specialist someday.

Salina's dreams she once had for herself had been subsumed entirely by her hopes for her son. He was her dream now—the American dream, the bilingual boy who translated for her at the doctor's office and with the social worker.

The cultists took her while she was alone in someone else's house. She screamed, tried to run.

Was it border patrol? she thought. ICE?

She knew ICE covered their faces, but they didn't wear those eerily blank white masks.

Salina prayed for mercy, zip-tied in the back of an unmarked van.

When they arrived at the estate and unloaded her from the van, she flinched and wept with each sharp prod from the cultists.

"Por favor," she cried. "Please."

The Machine gorged itself on her organs, unspooling her intestines into its maw like a child sucking up spaghetti. It sated itself on her snapping bones and rubbery cartilage.

When there was nothing left of her, the cultists clapped their hands. "The Machine consumes all."

Tom

"But I'm one of you," Tom said. "I worship the Machine! Just like you!"

He had kidnapped countless others and fed them to the Machine himself. He had lied and murdered and set fire on the cult's behalf. He had pledged his allegiance—his very soul—to the all-consumer at the heart of their world.

But in the end, he was just a grunt. As expendable as the rest. Made of meat like the rest. And the Machine consumes all.

Even as the Machine unsheathed the flesh from his legs and slurped the muscle from his feet and calves, working its hungry way up his legs and back—all the way up to the point of losing consciousness forever—Tom couldn't believe that this would happen to him.

When there was nothing left of him, the cultists clapped their hands. "The Machine consumes all."

Gretchen

Gretchen worked at a family-owned cafe, and spent the majority of her free time on mutual aid projects around her community. She wrote queer punk songs, and performed them at a local venue with her band.

They kidnapped her from the parking lot after a political demonstration.

She fought back. Hard.

She took out an eye with her keys before they disarmed her. She landed a concussive kick with one black straight-laced combat boot square to a cultist's jaw, cracking teeth and knocking him out cold.

They brought her to the estate, never fully subdued, barely grappled, screaming all the way.

"Motherfuckers!"

When the maw of the machine opened before her, she squirmed an arm and a leg free from her captors, and shoved one of the cultists down into the mouth ahead of her.

The machine caught the cultist's hair in the teeth of its gears and scraped his skull clean of its scalp. It consumed him, top-half first, legs wriggling, twitching, blood bursting out his sides.

When there was nothing left of him, the cultists clapped their hands. "The Machine consumes all."

They let Gretchen go.

The cultists watched passively from behind blank, white masks as she escaped the estate. The Machine had been sated. No one tried to stop her from leaving. They collectively knew it was only a matter of time. Her victory was pyrrhic at best, a prolonging of an inevitable fate.

In the end, the Machine consumes all.