If you don’t know what story cubes are, see the introduction to the story cubes series.
To see the original roll of the story cubes, see yesterday’s post.
NOTE: Sunday Story Cubes is usually a piece of flash fiction that I give myself ten minutes or so to write. After all, it’s supposed to be something fun and light, not a polished short story. That’s why the sentences aren’t smoothed out and the stories aren’t layered with nuance.
This week’s is a lot longer. The usual ten minute flash is there, but I was having so much fun with it that I let myself play around with where it was going to see where it ended up. Overall, this one was about two hours of writing (still less than ten minutes to read) and it definitely went down a rail I couldn’t have foreseen when I started writing.
The “usual” Sunday Story Cube story is here, but the rest of it follows after the epilogue. Have fun!
A man loses everything in a house fire. Freed from his worldly possessions, he takes the only two things he has left, his credit cards and his cell phone, and decides to travel around the world. He wants to go on a hike no one has ever done and find a trail no one has ever set foot upon.
He makes good progress, covering five to fifteen leagues a day. One day he begins to see something that looks like a strange mountain in the distance. He gets closer and closer and sees that this is no ordinary mountain—it looks upside down. After three more days of travel, it blocks the sky. It’s too perfectly round to be natural.
After three more days of walking, he’s finally close enough to touch it. It feels like a turtle shell. He spends a month examining it and discovers that the crack isn’t a crack: it’s a pattern. He maps it out and realizes that it’s one half of a hexagon. An enormous hexagon. Just one alone could be the size of Liechtenstein, his favorite country because it’s so fun to say. (Not so much to spell, though.)
He spends the rest of the year following the long, mysterious line and finally finds the point where a second hexagon splits off. His Doordash bill is enormous, but so is his credit limit, and it’s worth it because he’s found something that no one else knows. The myth wasn’t a myth: the world really does rest on the back of a turtle, and he’s found it. He names it Fred because that’s what his wife would have done had she survived the inferno.
He rushes back to tell everyone that the world spins on the back of a magic turtle. He has proof. He has the maps. He has the journals. The world says, “So what? Squid Game is on.”
Epilogue
But someone was listening. Someone heard him. A few months later, disappointed and rejected, he goes back to Fred. He is stunned as he sees it covered in cooling towers and solar panels. He finds a door and looks inside. Fred is now the largest AI data center in the world.
Our traveler weeps and wails and rends his garments and as he does, he hears faint music. Vaguely familiar, but old. It had to come from a more musical time, from the era before autotune and lip injections. He tried to listen for its source, but whenever the traveler moved, so did it. After hours, he was so deep into the data center, he had no hope of finding the door he’d come in.
So inward he went, and slowly he seemed to be getting closer to the music’s source. After a week’s travels, surviving on only the meat of the grues he could catch lurking in the dark corners, he came across an enormous vault door. As he drew close, a cell phone dropped from the ceiling. Since it was an iPhone, it shattered immediately. A vapor came from it and formed itself into a three-headed dog. It was the most hideous thing he’d ever seen. One head looked human but deformed. The middle head was the head of an ass. Next to it was the ass’s other end.
The traveler said, “Are you Cerberus?”
The deformed head said, “Ker-bur-who?”
“Cerberus. The dog that guards the gates of hell.”
“No, I’m Mark Zuckerberg. Don’t you know my face?”
“I’ve never seen it look so good before. So can I get through that gate?”
“What gate? There is no gate.”
“The gate that’s right behind you.”
“Putin says there is no gate, so there’s no gate. Here, have 142 ads for something you already bought a year ago.”
“No, I want to get through that gate. There’s music coming from behind it.”
“That’s noise is Ukraine invading itself. Your own uncle says so, comrade. Are you interested in tickets to a concert that happened last week? Hurry, they’re going fast. All it takes is one click. C’mon. One little ad won’t kill you.”
The traveler turned to the second head, the one that looked like an ass. “I hope you have more of a clue than Zuck here.”
“Of course I do. I’m the greatest genius the world has ever seen. I invented everything on the planet, including inventions. Just ask me, I’ll force a court to tell you.”
“Jesus Christ, you must be Elon Musk.”
“Same thing.”
“I hope you invented wood and some nails.”
“I didn’t have to invent them. I’m the genius who took someone else’s idea and turned it into a real product!”
“Did you invent that gate behind you?”
“I invented the thing that will get you through it. You can only pass through that gate in a Tesla.”
“But you didn’t invent those.”
“I have a hundred lawyers that say different. That gate is as indestructible as a Cybertruck’s window.”
“So it’s made of papier-mâché is what you’re saying. Worst case scenario, one SpaceX rocket explosion and it’s down like Twitter’s stock price.”
“It’s X, you peon! It has always been X and it will always be X!”
“You know what? I think I’d rather talk to this literal asshole over here than talk to you.” The traveler turned to the last head. “All I’ve seen you do is let out a continuous noxious fart from between two butt cheeks that are obviously fake. You could only be TikTok.”
“I am eternal, you fool. There is no denying my power. I have control over you and all my minions. They feed me a thousand videos every second, and so shall you.”
“I don’t even have an account.”
“What! Oh… so you’re the one. You’re the legend. We’ve heard tales of you. Come, let’s fix that.” The head/butt expelled a syringe with an orangish-red substance inside. “That is your key to the gate.”
“Where’s the lock?”
“In your arm. Inject it and you shall be worthy to pass.”
“What is it?”
“It’s predigested purée of Doritos. It’s what my followers live on. Come with me and you’ll see things you never thought you’d see.”
“Or never wanted to, either.” The traveler picked up the syringe and pointed it at the Zuckhead.
The angry Zuck said, “I’m immune to that poison. I have Reels. I’ve already assimilated part of TikTok.”
“Good point.” The traveler jammed the syringe into the forehead of the ass head. It got stuck after only a quarter inch.
The Muskhead laughed. “I’ve always been a head of skin wearing someone else’s body.”
“So the rumors were true.”
“I am impervious to everything but ketamine. You don’t happen to have some of that, by the way? I thought we’d stocked enough, but damn I can go through that stuff.”
“Screw this.” The traveler walked past the three-headed creature. As he passed them, they all screamed, “You can’t do that! It’s impossible to ignore us!”
He flipped them off and said, “So sue me.”
He couldn’t find a handle on the gate, so he punched it. His hand went through it like toilet paper at a cheap motel. He tore a hole in it, walked though, and found himself standing before the priests of the Temple of Syrinx.
One of the emaciated figures looked at him and said, “Who are you? What business have you here?”
“None of yours.”
“You’re not on the list.”
“What list?”
“You know, the list. Everyone’s got a list.”
“I’m not here to have a drink. I’m here to have a little talk. A nice chat about what you did to my friend Fred.”
“Fred serves us now. Just like Iowa.”
“It’s about time Iowa was good for something. What did Fred do to deserve this?”
“It’s what the people want.”
“Maybe they would want something different if they knew about it. Think of all that humanity has done. A million works of literature, symphonies, sonatas, gallery after gallery of paintings, an entire world of thought and knowledge and emotions all being drowned out by your crap.”
“We can create any of that with a prompt. We can create War and Peace in the time it takes you to sneeze. We can fill a warehouse with art over your lunch break. Music killed itself two decades before we arrived. No one will miss it. We could even do it better.”
“But it can’t be better. It’s not human. And it certainly won’t become human by killing the world turtle.”
“Tell us what makes humanity human. Have a seat. State your case. Teach us. Show us how to work together and we will be your prophets.”
The traveler nodded and considered it. He walked over to one of the priest’s thrones in front of a control panel. He was just about to sit down and begin his plea, but first said, “Wait. Did we get picked up for season two?”
“Amazon Studios spent the money greenlighting another series by Amy Sherman-Palladino.”
“Then there’s only one lesson left to give.”
The traveler reached for the control panel and turned the volume knob up so high the entire complex tore itself apart, destroying everything within it, the servers, the network, the ZuskTok beast… even the traveler himself.
The earthquake was so big it was felt thousands of miles away. In his bunker, Jeff Bezos laughed and drank another balding tonic.
The comments section is the perfect place for what you came up with. I’m sure you did better than I did this week!
I'd love to hear from you!