Planet Retail

  'Syllabus after bloody syllabus!' the professor bellowed, his countenance rife with steam. He paused.
  'Never again! You vermin toil night after night, glued to your devil boxes, and I sit here like an oblivious wretch!'
To his observation, the room was an empty field. Students penned their notes of course, but not a single mind was locked. Brains stuffed with filth. Not a single breath was muttered. 'You fucking idiots!' he spat.


  There was great emotion in his failed conveyance, but not a cell of reason could be forged from the sheep. The board was littered with arcane symbols. Angled and obscure they were, not unlike the broken harmony of Jen's lithe form. And she carried it so well.


 Locked in that god-forsaken room for eons and solar systems, forced into rituals and drilling plans lodged deeply without reason. Damned again and again.


  'That night was so joyous.' she said, her voice marked with jubilation. 'The enemies were burning and not even the priestess could restore warmth to my broken self!' she made a joke of it. He had no idea what she was talking about. The room spun away with a twinkle and a shine. She made no secret of making herself known while in his presence, and it was brilliant, really. She led as they walked down the bow-cable suspension staircase, where each step was a block of perforated steel.


  And later on that day, they were going to visit Planet Retail, a place where salesmen went to die. Not only that, but it was a mega-complex covering vast sections of nullified land. People were born there, and spent most of their life within a branded sarcophagus whose income generating advertisements spun round and round. And it was expanding, day after day, sucking the life out of every nearby organic. But that was the way of things. One acre at a time.