Plugs

Jason Erik Lundberg‘s fiction is forthcoming from Subterranean Magazine and Polyphony 7.

Trent Walters, poetry editor at A&A, has a chapbook, Learning the Ropes, from Morpo Press.

Susannah Mandel’s short story “The Monkey and the Butterfly” is in Shimmer #11. She also has poems in the current issues of Sybil’s Garage, Goblin Fruit, and Peter Parasol.

Luc Reid writes about the psychology of habits at The Willpower Engine. His new eBook is Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories.

The Big Un-Sale

by Jason Fischer

The Big Un-Sale

Every New Year’s Eve, we watch the crowds converging on the old shopping centres. Last year the Committee decided it was now 2031 AD, and all the clean-burning hydrogen engines were un-sold. So the car parks are filled with fume-spewing internal combustion engines, and that’s progress for you.

New Year’s Eve is our most shameful day. The day when each store becomes an un-store, and the voting public takes illegal tech back from whence it came. And we as a people are accepting the decisions of the Committee as a fait accompli!

Our organisation has been monitoring the Committee’s Annual List, and each Boxing Day we’ve noticed an alarming trend. While the first Un-Sale was a measured subtraction of one calendar year, sometimes the powers that be have been deducting three or even five years from our current Technology Standard. While it’s admirable that developing nations have been benefiting from our deductions, we ask when it’s all going to stop.

Are you going to be one of the mindless horde that trudges to the Collection Point, list in hand? Every person that takes the Committee’s buy-back money is a collaborator, and our great culture is being sold off, one year at a time. When the day comes, will you cheerfully hand back your MyVisor, or happily give up the cancer-inducing mobile telephony that you’ve only just gotten used to again?

It’s simply ridiculous, and we cannot go back to plasma televisions, nor the telegraph.

In particular, we the people object to the inclusion of the following items on this year’s Annual List:
• FleshSlaves, models Beta and Gamma
• Neurolink cyber interface, all models
• All vehicles fitted with the Perfecto bio-diesel system.
• MilliGro brand custom algae farms

Signed,

Concerned Citizens for Tech Protection.

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