“Incredible!” I yelled over a cacophony of clicks and primal screams coming from the endless rows below.
“Two-hundred-thousand monkeys and as many keyboards.”
“Where did you find so many?”
“They are androids, I’m not a monster. As they keep typing, their artificial brain is stimulated with sensations similar to eating or sexual gratification.”
He pointed to a 16-digit counter rapidly increasing. “It’s working, the pages keep coming…”
A contraption lowered on a typist and raised a screaming primate, surprisingly lifelike.
“What’s happening?”
“Occasionally, they just stop writing.”
“What? Even artificial monkeys get writer’s block? What do you do?”
A panel opened, showing a massive jungle-gym filled with apes, and I was peppered by synthetic poop.
“I let them be monkeys for a while…”
Marco Cultrera was born in Rome, Italy, and lives in Ottawa, Canada. After a start as a theoretical physicist, he built a two-decade long career as a videogame writer, creative director and game designer, punctuated by a bout as stay-at-home dad of three daughters and, more recently, four cats.
If you like the stories we’re publishing, subscribe today. We do Stupefying Stories out of pure love for genre fiction, but in publishing as in tennis, love means nothing. To keep Stupefying Stories going at this level we need to raise at least $500 USD monthly, and rather than doing so with pledge breaks or crowd-funding campaigns, we’d rather have subscribers. If just 100 people commit to just $5 monthly, we can keep going at this level indefinitely. If we raise more, we will pay our authors more.
If you really liked this story, tell your friends about it! Remember, likes and hearts are nice, but shares and retweets boost the signal!
Oh poop!
ReplyDelete