Free Where Futures End by Parker Peevyhouse

“Fries are fattening,” he explains when I give him a look. “Which mold you need?”
    â€œOprah.”
    â€œEyes Shining With Empowerment?”
    â€œThe other one, Other One.” I chuckle at my joke.
    â€œWhy do you call me that? You never call Jeffrey Mr. One to his face.” He uses a clicky pen to separate the cheese fries from those that have already been de-cheesed. He’s the only one who still uses pens to write down orders instead of tapping pictures on a Flavor Foam app. “Why can’t I at least be Mr. Two?”
    â€œYou don’t really want to be that closely associated with Mr. One.”
    He stops sorting cheese fries to use his pen to whisk hair back over his bald spot. “What if I told you the walk-in freezer is on the fritz again and the ice-cream nuggets are in mortal peril? Then can I be Mr. Two?”
    I pause. I could indeed use a good handful of half-meltedice-cream nuggets. And Mr. One would never miss them. We’re not allowed to serve them to customers because even frozen solid they make the Flavor Foam Heads melt, which ruins the customer experience. We’re also not allowed to throw them out because company policy dictates that any food thrown out before the expiration date be donated to a local nonprofit, but it also dictates that we not donate high-caloric food to people of insufficient means because, as Mr. One says, “That’s the way to a slow genocide, a genocide of the lower class.”
    â€œBetter hurry,” chimes in my coworker Lola. “I already sold off two boxes of those ice-cream nuggets at a premium to table seven.”
    â€œUh, you’re not really supposed to do that,” the Other One says, pointing his pen at her.
    â€œ
Uh,
too late.” Lola rolls her eyes.
    Lola’s what you’d call enterprising. She spends her entire shift orchestrating complicated lovers’ quarrels with customers for the sake of Flavor Foam’s cameras. Then she goes home and spends all her free time orchestrating complicated lovers’ quarrels with her friends for whatever cameras might be mounted in shop windows or soda machines or her dining room ceiling fan. You’d think she’d be making enough in ad revenue now to quit working at Flavor Foam, but her ratings are all over the place. I think people sense that all those shrill fights with brooding boys are staged.
    Right now she’s using her e-frame to search the tables of college boys, looking for ones on scholarship who might bewilling to do desperate things for a cut of ad revenue.
    â€œDarn, full ride,” she mutters. “That hardly helps me.”
    She gives up to watch a feed of a guy trying to convince his girlfriend he’s not cheating on her. “What girl would actually be attracted to me?” he says. “I mean besides you?” The feed is coming from one of our own cameras.
    â€œLola, they’re right there at table twelve,” I say. “Why are you watching them on your e-frame?”
    The big screen over our heads switches to the same feed she’s watching. Now all of our customers can watch the guy ask the girls at the next table if they’re attracted to him. “Like, would you ever ask me to take off my shirt or anything like that?” he asks. His girlfriend plunges his e-frame into a Flavor Foam Head. Some bot picks up on the fact that the ratings are soaring and plants an American Eagle Outfitters logo in the corner of the screen.
    â€œLove ’em and leave ’em to keep the ratings high,” I mumble as I pour myself a pilfered soda, “to keep the ad revenue coming in, right?”
    â€œAdd a Cake Batter flavor gel into that Coke,” Lola tells me. “Sweeten it up. Your bitterness is poisoning the air for the rest of us.”
    I take a swig of soda and eye the mold dispenser. I’m in a bit of a self-pitying mood. “Other One, give me Lover Boy With Big Plans To