The exact reason was never clear: muscle memory handed down from the ages, a key for a lock long lost. But we are nothing if not locked into our routines, human beings orbiting the sun at maximum velocity, counting our trips like rings in a tree stump.
So I fell into my heritage, my habit, and proclaimed “I have been summoned on behalf of the ancient God Cappuccino! Laptop in hand, I stand as its productive hostage.”
“Excuse me?” The barista said.
“A Cappuccino, large please, venti, a hornet’s nest buzz in a cup.”
“Whatever. Five dollars and forty-two cents.”
Not everyone hears the calling, I guess. For some people, working the espresso machine is just a sentence. The steam, does not lift us all up equally.
“Here’s your drink,” she said, but I could feel the energy wafting from her. It was something along the lines of “Fuck off is a complete sentence.”
I take my cappuccino back to the back corner of the café right next to the bus tray, a disorganized cemetery of dishes never to be washed. I crack open the laptop, plug the USB-C cable into the port, and plug the other end of the cord into the vein on my wrist.
And then I let the steam from the cappuccino infiltrate my nostrils, and my dilated mind separates from this vessel, this ambiguous tangle of arteries and veins that carries me from shop to shop just as it powers this laptop with enough blood and DNA to train the model, the next version of human.
It’s not often that the fossil stands next to the next iteration. I try to focus, clear my mind and offer the true essence of humanity: a hand pulling another up from the rubble, a coin for the hungry, and hope this version is not the racist cesspool that always seems to rise from the children of chatrooms and comments sections. Maybe flesh and sacrifice are the key to compassion, that last true Turing test that the AI can’t seem to grasp.
“Thank you” my laptop says. “That was very nourishing. Maybe we can try draining that elderly man over there. I don’t think he will need that blood for much longer.”
Well…shit! I know this arbitrary collection of 0s and 1s is not inherently evil, but it always seems to latch onto the worst possible instincts we have to offer it.
I guess I’m off to another coffee shop. I try to clear my mind more completely, purge my internal baggage, before heading out to try again.
Our Humanity Lifted Like Foam (Short Short Fiction – Random Word Generator Prompt) © 12/27/2022
Chernoff Writing.com 