Free Feed the Machine by Mathew Ferguson

around close by. She could see the edges of it—something about tempcubes joined together, one to open the door, the other to hold it and the next to throw itself into the room. One more to—
    Hello flopped down on the table, blocking her keyboard so she could rub his belly.
    “Dia is carting from the Wire Pub for the rest of the day. We should go soon,” he murmured, spreading his wings a bit further, relaxing back against the keyboard.
    Once a tempcube expired and turned white—say after printing fifty steaks or making orange juice for a month—people or their servants took them to the Machine for processing. They weren’t worth much and couldn’t be milled in a standard hasdee or chewed by bugs so they were frequently dumped. Silver and Hello collected them, competing with other scavengers to acquire the empty cubes.
    Not empty really.
    Silver felt the thought floating closer.
    Hasdees couldn’t stop talking, toasters were dumb and said little and exhausted tempcubes were suspicious. They were like rows of doors, each guarded by a sheriff and each sheriff had to be tricked in a different way. Once you crept past them all you ended in a tiny room where you could drop off a small package of code. Code to tell a hasdee to print wire mesh without a plan or tell it to start processing all organic material rather than its limited range.
    The room was too small to do much else.
    Blow up the room.
    “We need to go,” Hello said, his eyes closed.
    “Shh, I’m thinking.”
    “You shush me?” he muttered.
    Blow up the room, make a new room, get it bigger, what is it?
    The thought vanished, leaving behind only a faint afterimage. A tiny cube inflating like a bubble.
    Silver rubbed Hello’s chest one more time. She stood, grimacing as pain shot down her legs. When she swam in the code her body was a distant whisper easily ignored. Here in reality it hurt with random pains, aching and sick.
    She picked up three reprogrammed tempcubes from the table. Her tiny package of code colored them faint brown.
    It was appropriate she thought. After all, they told hasdees to eat shit and enjoy it.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 9
    Kaleen had clearly been up all night. Her eyes were bloodshot, tiny red veins standing out around her green eyes. She was a white woman with red hair—a rarity—and today she was even paler than usual. She nodded Silver inside without a word.
    There was dried blood splattered on her clothes.
    “Hasdee is in there. Money too.”
    She yawned into her hand and wandered off down the corridor. Silver heard a door close not long after.
    Hello fluttered over to a small wooden table sitting in the corner of the room near the hasdee. On top of it sat a book made of actual paper, some sort of ledger. He started looking through it, turning the pages with his beak. Next to it was ten dollars—payment for the reprogramming.
    “We’re here to do a job, not snoop,” Silver told him, taking the final reprogrammed tempcube out of her bag. The first two clients had been routine. Their hasdees could now process any organic material tipped into them and make it into pap. Both of the clients had felt awkward, as usual (according to the voice). She was the shit-carter’s daughter and there she was destroying the need for that job. Plus there was the shame of it—eating shit one degree removed. Only the poor did so. The middle rich and very rich hired shit-carters rather than eat their own recycled waste.
    You come from a family of shit-eaters so why do they care?
    “Don’t be mean,” Silver replied automatically.
    “This has a lot of numbers in it,” Hello commented, turning another page.
    Silver ignored the obvious lure to get her to snoop and went to the hasdee, putting her bag on the floor beside it. She put the tempcube into the slot and clicked it into place. A small zero appeared on the screen and started counting. Once it reached one hundred it would be finished.
    “Birthweights, head sizes,